Quotulatiousness

March 25, 2020

Armchair History: The Borgia

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 30 Jun 2015

CONTENT DISCLAIMER: This video no longer meets my standards of quality for historical research and presentation. I made this one in the days long past, when the question of “How do I make an entertaining and historically interesting video” was answered by “IDK, memes I guess?”. This video in particular was an experiment with a shorter format, and is by no means definitive history. Take the video above with a grain of salt and enjoy the jokes.

In what could be a landmark in terms of progress, Overly Sarcastic Productions has decided to start making SHORT videos as well as rather long ones.

The Borgias were one messed up family, I tell you what.

QotD: The broken feedback mechanism that brought down the chain bookstores

Filed under: Books, Business, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the push-model of book sales. Long before there was an Amazon, chain bookstores had cozy deals with publishers that sent most indie bookstores (now beloved in effigy by the left) out of business.

And then the left dominated publishing establishment had a brilliant idea. For decades they’d been trying to forecast failure and success, and failings. Books they pushed out the wazzoo (A river in Sundon’tshine) died on the vine when bookstores refused to stock them because the owners had read them. The books they had designated as to be ignored caught someone’s fancy, and suddenly were all over.

This was inefficient. It caused way too much printing that never got distributed, and much last minute rushed reprinting. (Even leaving aside how often people chose to read the WRONG things, something that started to matter more and more in the last two decades.)

So they came up with the push model. It was, from a certain perspective, brilliant.

That perspective is the one where the real world doesn’t really exist, so you don’t need to hear from it.

Because the managers of the big corporate bookstores ALSO didn’t read, they took instruction beautifully. So the publishers could say “you’ll take 100 of x and 2 of y” and they DID.

For a little while it worked beautifully, in the sense that there were no surprise bestsellers, (and publishing houses hated those. I know someone who unexpectedly sold out her print run in a week. The publishing house took the book out of print. No, seriously.) and the books that got seen and talked about were picked by the publisher. (BTW this wasn’t even always or primarily political. Sure, that existed too sometimes, but mostly it was the crazy fads that publishing convinced itself of. For instance, sometime in the mid two thousands they convinced themselves no one wanted historical mysteries — they weren’t selling, true, probably because they were on NO shelves — but everyone wanted “chick-lit mysteries” that had covers with lots of shoes and dresses and whose plots were “Sex in the City with murder.” I remember trying to find something to read, giving up and going to the used bookstore (then a hundred miles away in Denver) for my mystery fix.)

Of course, they sold less. In fact, as time went on and people got out of the habit of going to the bookstore, because there was never anything they could find to read. I mean, I remember being chased from Science Fiction to Mystery to finally History, to at last the sort of “utility” book you find in the discount bins you know “a chart of history” type of thing just to find something to buy on our bookstore night.

Then we gave up.

Eventually the broken feedback mechanism gave us the demise of Borders — and B & N is not feeling so good itself — and a yawning, desperate chasm in customers’ need for books that meant the way was wide open for Indie and Amazon. Even the early badly proofed indie books were like a breath of fresh air because for the first time I could read outside the trends being pushed.

Sarah Hoyt, “Breaking the Gears”, According to Hoyt, 2018-01-03.

March 24, 2020

Thompson 1921: The Original Chicago Typewriter

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Oct 2018

https://www.forgottenweapons.com/thom…

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The first prototype Thompsons submachine guns (and it was Thompson who coined that term, by the way) were produced in 1919 and dubbed the “Annihilators”. The gun was intended to be a military weapon to equip American soldiers in World War One, but by the time the gun was developed the war had ended. Still, Thompson and his Auto-Ordnance company contracted with Colt to manufacture 15,000 of the guns. These were the Model of 1921, and they were marketed to both the US military and as many European armies as Thompson and his salesmen could reach. They found few takers in the climate of the early 1920s, however, and sales were slow.

This is the first in a 5-part series about the development of the Thompson, concluding with a trip to the range to fire three different patterns side by side…

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QotD: “Desacralizing the State”

Filed under: Government, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Winston Churchill famously proclaimed democracy to be the least-worst government. Alas, quotability is not the same thing as wisdom. Worst at what, Sir Winston?

Speaking of quotable-yet-loony folks, Aristotle defined Man as “the political animal,” and as such had an answer to our question: The State’s purpose, Aristotle said, is to promote virtue.

Let’s leave the contentious topic of “virtue” aside, and step back to the definition of “Man.” Man isn’t a political animal. Man is a purpose-finding animal, an explaining animal. We simply can’t resist the siren song of teleology. We all live under some kind of State; therefore, we assume that “The State” must have a purpose. It’s in our DNA; we can’t do otherwise, but … we might be wrong. Perhaps “self-organization into some kind of government” is just one of Humanity’s givens, like “sexual dimorphism*” or “requires oxygen.” Maybe “government” just IS.

A dangerous thought, that. If it’s true, it desacralizes the State — the worship of which, I think we all agree, has driven all the major political events in the West since at least 1789. Historian Herbert Butterfield called the 20th century’s great mass movements “giant organized forms of self-righteousness,” but he could’ve taken that a step further — “popular” government of any sort invariably becomes a giant organized form of self-righteousness. People being people — that is, teleology-addled monkeys — it can’t be any other way. The State, since it exists, must exist to do something. What better something to do than to promote virtue?

So we’re back to Aristotle. But it looks like Aristotle stole a base. As a rule, people aren’t virtuous. Why else would they need the State to promote virtue? And yet, the State is made up of nothing but people. Aristotle also said that a cause can’t give something to an effect that it, the cause, doesn’t already have. So how, then, can the State — which, like Soylent Green, is made of people — itself make people virtuous?

See what I mean about this teleology stuff? The mind rebels. The State is a human thing. Humans made it, and every human act, we’re hardwired to believe, has a purpose behind it. That hardwiring may lead us into incoherence in under three steps, but so far as I know, I’m the only guy in the history of Political Science ever to suggest that government just … kinda … IS. That it evolved with us, and thus all our airy-fairy noodling about Divine Right and We the People and the Vanguard of the Proletariat and whatnot are just foolish blather about what’s basically still a monkey troop.

[…]

All this would be just philosophy-wank, better suited to a dorm room bull session after a few bong rips, if not for the fact that “desacralizing the State” has to be the #1 project of any viable Dissident movement. The State, as a human production, has only such “goals” as we give it … and, being made up of nothing but humans, is going to be as good at achieving those goals as we humans generally are at achieving any of our goals …

Severian, “The Least-Worst Government?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-12-21.

March 23, 2020

Naval strategy versus naval tactics in the Battle of the Atlantic

Ted Campbell outlines how the Battle of the Atlantic was fought between the Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy (and the Royal Canadian Navy and, eventually, the United States Navy) in World War 2:

U-2513 in US Navy control off Key West, Florida – 30 October 1946

… there is a rather thick, and quite blurry line between naval strategy and naval tactics. One Army.ca member used the Battle of the Atlantic to distinguish between two doctrines:

  • Sea control ~ which was practised by the 2nd World War allies ~ mostly British Admirals Percy Noble and Max Horton in Britain and Canadian Rear Admiral Leonard Murray in St John’s and Halifax; and
  • Sea denial ~ which was practised by German Admiral Karl Dönitz.

The difference between the two tactical doctrines was very clear. The strategic aims were equally clear:

  • Admiral Dönitz wanted to knock Britain out of the war ~ something that he (and Churchill) understood could be done by starving Britain into submission by preventing food, fuel and ammunition from reaching Britain from North America. (We can be eternally grateful that Adolph Hitler did not share Dönitz’ strategic vision and listened, instead, to lesser men and his own, inept, instincts); and
  • Prime Minister Churchill, who really did say that “the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril“, who wanted to keep Britain fighting, at the very least resisting, until the Americans could, finally, be persuaded to come to the rescue.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill greets Canadian PM William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1941.
Photo from Library and Archives Canada (reference number C-047565) via Wikimedia Commons.

Canada’s Prime Minister Mackenzie King did have a grand strategy of his own. It was to do as much as possible while operating with the lowest possible risk of casualties ~ the conscription crisis of 1917 was, always, uppermost in his mind and he was, therefore, terrified of casualties. He mightily approved of the Navy doing a HUGE share in the Battle of the Atlantic ~ especially by building ships in Canadian yards and escorting convoys which he hoped would be a low-risk affair.

Churchill’s grand strategy was based on Britain surviving … there was, I believe, a “worst case” scenario in which the British Isles were occupied and the King and his government went to Canada or even India. But that has always seemed to me to be a sort of fantasy. The United Kingdom, without the British Isles, made no sense.

    (While I believe that Rudolph Hess was, as they say, a few fries short of a happy meal, I think that he and several people in Germany believed that it might be possible to negotiate a peace with Britain which many felt was a necessary precursor to a successful campaign against Russia. The Battle of Britain (die Luftschlacht um England, September 1940 to June 1941) was, clearly, not going in Germany’s favour. Late in 1940, the Nazi high command had been forced to send a German Army formation to Libya to prevent a complete rout of the Italians. Malta still held out, meaning that Britain had air cover throughout the Mediterranean. In short, Britain was not going to go down unless it could be starved into submission ~ and in the spring of 1941, the Battle of the Atlantic was going in Germany’s favour. There was, in other words, some reason for Germans to believe that an armistice might be possible ~ freeing up all of Germany’s power to be used against the USSR.)

    (But things were changing for the Allies, too. At just about the same time as Hess was flying to Scotland, then Commodore Leonard Murray of the Royal Canadian Navy, who had been in England on other duties, had met with and persuaded Admiral Sir Percy Noble, who liked Murray and had been his commander in earlier years, that a new convoy escort force should be established in Newfoundland and that it should be a largely Canadian force (with British, Dutch, Norwegian and Polish ships under command, too) and that it should be commanded by a Canadian officer. Admiral Noble insisted, to Canada, that Murray, who he liked, personally, and who had written, extensively, on convoy operations in the 1920s and ’30s, must be that commander. The establishment of the Newfoundland Escort Force, which would be more appropriately renamed the Mid Ocean Escort Force in 1942, was a key decision at the much-debated operational level of war which put an expert tactician (Murray) in command of a major force and allowed him (and Noble) to move closer to achieving Churchill’s strategic aim. The Battle of the Atlantic was not won in 1941, but it seemed to Churchill, Noble and Murray that they were a lot less likely to lose it, even without the Americans.)

Diagram of the early Flower-class corvettes, via Lt. Mike Dunbar (https://visualfix.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/dreadful-wale-4/)

Anyway, the boundaries of strategy vs. the operational art vs. tactics were as thick and blurry in 1941 as they are today. The decision, taken in 1939, for example, to build little corvettes in the many British and Canadian yards that could not build a real warship was, in retrospect, a key strategic choice, but it was, at the time, totally materialist: just a commonsense, engineer solution to an operational problem ~ lack of ships. Ditto for the eventual decision, which had to be made by Churchill, himself, to reassign some of the big, long-range, Lancaster heavy bombers to Coastal Command. It was, once again, with the benefit of hindsight, a key strategic move, but at the time it would likely have seemed, to Capt(N) Hugues Canuel, the author of that Canadian Naval Review essay, to be materialistic, more concerned with how to use the resources available than with deciding what is needed.

I agree with Capt(N) Canuel that, by and large, Canadians have left strategic and even operational level thinking to first, the British and more recently the American admirals ~ Rear Admiral Murray being known, in the 1930s and early 1940s as a notable exception.

Making The Drawer Runners | The Cabinet Project #5 | Free Online Woodworking School

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Matt Estlea
Published 19 Mar 2020

In this video, I show you how to create the drawer runners that will be fitted into the bottom of the cabinet. These are constructed using tiny mortice and tenon joints and is also a great introduction into the world of wood movement.

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My name is Matt Estlea, I’m a 24 year old Woodworker from Basingstoke in England and my aim is to make your woodworking less s***.

I come from 5 years tuition at Rycotewood Furniture Centre with a further 1 year working as an Artist in Residence at the Sylva Foundation. I now teach City and Guilds Furniture Making at Rycotewood as of September 2018.

If you’re interested in studying at Rycotewood, view their courses here:
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I also had 5 years of experience working at Axminster Tools and Machinery where I helped customers with purchasing tools, demonstrated in stores and events, and gained extensive knowledge about a variety of tools and brands. I discontinued this at the start of 2019 to focus solely on video creation and teaching.

During the week, I film woodworking projects, tutorials, reviews and a viewer favourite ‘Tool Duel’ where I compare two competitive manufacturers tools against one another to find out which is best. I also have a Free Online Woodworking School which you should definitely check out!

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Lets go make a mess.

The world of woke crossword-puzzlers – a place of horrible, unintentional microaggressions

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Thompson takes us on a scary trip to the heart of the woke crossword world:

The world of woke crossword-puzzlers — because that’s a thing that exists — is one in which enthusiasts, via social media, grumble about white men, bemoan the insufficient prominence of “queer or POC colloquialisms,” share “off-colour jokes about hypothetical titles for a Melania Trump memoir,” and fret about the exact ratio of male and female names used as clues. Because a lack of “gender parity” in crossword puzzle clues constitutes one of “the systemic forces that threaten women.”

Crossword puzzles can do that, apparently.

The list of possible crossword-puzzle wrongdoings is, of course, extensive, ever-growing and not entirely straightforward.

Transgressions include clues for ILLEGAL (“One caught by border patrol”); MEN (“Exasperated comment from a feminist”); and HOOD (“Place with homies”).

I’ll give you a moment to steady yourselves, to recover from all that gasping.

A New York Times puzzle triggered agitation with the clue “Pitch to the head, informally,” the solution to which was “beaner.” Given sufficient effort, said word could also, it seems, be construed as a mild and antiquated racial slur, albeit one that had escaped me and which I had to look up. Inevitably, apologies and public prostration ensued, despite both the puzzler-writer and editor confessing their own ignorance and intending no harm. Needless to say, the apology immediately resulted in further hissing and rending of garments by people whose Twitter bios include preferred pronouns and the words liberal and feminist.

Unlike almost every other site on the web, I do encourage you to read the comments at David’s blog … he has a great group of regular commenters (commentators? commentistas? Whatevs…)

Budapest 44: The Storming of Pest (December – January 1945)

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historigraph
Published 21 Dec 2019

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QotD: Men’s blindness toward women

Filed under: Health, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There is a lot of talk about Toxic Masculinity. No one ever talks about Toxic Femininity. Though every woman who is a functional human being knows about it, as does anyone who has ever lived or worked in a predominantly female environment.

So, why does no one talk about it? Well, mostly because the left believes that “designated victims”™ are sacred and must never be called on their own bullshit, no matter how smelly. Hence also the bizarre idea of racial “privilege” that tells you holocaust survivors should be attacked for “white privilege” but the Obama girls raised as the creme de la creme, and never facing a day of privation in their lives don’t have any privilege and are victims.

But there’s also other stuff going into it. To an extent — to the extent that historically for biological reasons men dominated public life — the fact that no one talks about the bad side of female modes of being in society is the result of patriarchy.

Men are ridiculously, idiotically, insanely blinkered about women. They don’t really see women as they see other men, but through rosy glasses as much better than men. The “oh so smart” former president with the depth of a rain puddle in Colorado told us that women are so much better than men and that the world would be better under women. Which means he’s basically a bog standard male who has never given the matter a thought, and is going on what “everybody knows.” (It occurs to me this man, if he’d been born to an ultra conservative Arab family in one of the ultra conservative Muslim countries would also be telling us that women’s hair emits seductive rays. He’s a suit that speaks. Or an empty chair, if you prefer.)

Of course it is right evolutionarilly that men should feel that way about women. It keeps the species going. It is also bizarre though, and leaves men curiously defenseless now that women view themselves as an aggrieved class and are trying to take over public life and exclude men.

In fact it leaves as the only defense in society that most women — even the feminists who pretend otherwise — unless completely and extensively broken and indoctrinated know what other women are and therefore will not trust any of them. As they shouldn’t. I can’t imagine a worse hell than what Obama is proposing.

Sarah Hoyt, “Toxic Femininity”, According to Hoyt, 2019-12-18.

March 22, 2020

Culling the Nazi Wolfpacks – Submarines, Spies, China, and Africa – WW2 – 082 – March 21 1941

World War Two
Published 21 Mar 2020

While two more Kriegsmarine U-boat aces go down, the moving parts of the war are getting more complex leaving the intelligence services scrambling to separate fact from fiction — they don’t always get it right.

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“Basically, CBC ended itself. It almost beggars belief”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley notes the abject failure of Canada’s “national broadcaster” to rise to the occasion during the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic:

I scuttled into National Post headquarters Wednesday night to liberate some things from my desk before Postmedia’s meatspace newsrooms officially locked their doors “until further notice.” (I and my housebound colleagues remain at your service in the meantime.) Among my correspondence was a copy of David Taras’ and Christopher Waddell’s new book, The End of the CBC? It argues that Canada’s public broadcaster must rapidly and quite savagely reinvent itself or risk “oblivion.” And it is nothing if not timely reading.

On Wednesday, in a moment history may well note as Mother Corp’s rock bottom, CBC announced it was scuppering all its local television newscasts. Instead it would feed us all Canadians a mixture of national and local news from the same Toronto-based spigot.

Basically, CBC ended itself. It almost beggars belief.

Brodie Fenlon, editor-in-chief of CBC News, took to his blog to explain the decision — but didn’t, really. He talked of “staffing challenges” stemming from employees self-isolating and working from home. “Television is especially resource-intensive, and many jobs are difficult to do at home,” Fenlon wrote. “Our systems are overtaxed.”

[…]

This coronavirus has turned a harsh, bright light on several defects in Canadian society that we’ve been happy enough to ignore. We should be keeping a list of those things, and vowing to address them comprehensively once we’ve beaten COVID-19 back. A full-on top-to-bottom mandate review for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, especially its English TV operations, ought to be on that list — and the status quo must not be an option.

Sargon of Akkad: History’s First Emperor?

Filed under: History, Middle East, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Time
Published 31 Oct 2017

A brief look at Sargon of Akkad, an Akkadian whose conquests of the Sumerian plain have led many scholars to cite him as one of the earliest, if not the earliest emperors in history. Agree? Disagree? Comment below!

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QotD: The notion of Hell

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I know we all follow the theological debates within Catholicism about which saint got in touch with which angel to channel which biblical dead person — don’t they have a show on CNN that goes over each week’s highlights? — but one thing you never do, in Catholicism, Protestantism, or Pentecostal Snake-Handlingism, for that matter, is say there’s no hell.

Because that would be Jewish. The Jews have never cared that much about hell. They grudgingly admit that it’s probably there, but it’s just this place that, after you die, you feel intense shame before God for all the times you yelled at your wife or failed to stuff two dollars into the self-parking kiosk. The Hebrew word for hell is “Gehenna,” which is the name of the garbage dump outside Jerusalem that (a) smelled bad, and (b) was always on fire. I can imagine generations of parents using it as a threat to their unruly children: “If you don’t straighten up right this minute, I’m gonna throw you into the smelly garbage dump with the smoke cloud over it!”

So when the Christians come along, they take Gehenna and run with it. They use the name Gehenna to mean hell, and that’s not just trash burning out there, it’s demons and human souls, and it burns forever because it’s mixed with brimstone, which does indeed smell bad when you burn it. Actually brimstone turns red and burns blue, so if you’ve got brimstone out there, you’ve got a blood red gelatinous mass with a blue flame, or what the great preachers call …

The Lake of Fire.

[…]

At any rate, the reason the Catholic press got their cassocks in a bunch is that, over the past half century or so, a lot of theologians have been saying, “Maybe we got the whole hell thing wrong.” They’ve looked back over the appropriate scriptures and decided that, after you die, you don’t get thrown into the flaming garbage dump, you just vanish from all human history, as though you never existed. There’s no memory or trace of you, you’re erased from the universe.

And this might be what the Pope said he believes. After Eugenio reported their conversation, the Vatican scrambled around and issued statements saying that, no, the Pope didn’t go outside the catechism and they were just chewing the fat and please everybody let’s not get carried away. Yes, Gehenna is real. Yes, the Pope believes in hell. Yes, the Pope is Catholic.

Joe Bob Briggs, “Pope Forgets the Lake of Fire”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-06-21.

March 21, 2020

How To Fit the Half-Blind Dovetails | The Cabinet Project #4 | Free Online Woodworking School

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Matt Estlea
Published 16 Mar 2020

In this video, I show you how to transfer, fit and refine the lapped dovetails to achieve a superior result. These are going to be what holds the cabinet together so it’s important we get it right!

View the full lesson here:
https://mattestlea.com/free-online-wo…

Plans for this project:
https://mattestlea.com/product/cabine…

Buy Pre-Planed Material Packs for this Project Here:
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Ramped Shooting Board Plans:
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Supporting Resources:
How to Transfer the Tails:
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How To Cut the Tails
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How to Refine the Joint:
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How to Cut a Lapped Dovetail:
https://mattestlea.com/tutorials/how-…

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Support what I do by becoming a Patron! This will help fund new tools, equipment and cover my overheads. Meaning I can continue to bring you regular, high quality, free content. Thank you so much for your support! https://www.patreon.com/mattestlea

Don’t want to commit to a monthly direct debit but still want to help out? That’s fine!
You can make a one time donation here: www.mattestlea.com/donate
You can donate us biscuits here: www.mattestlea.com/wishlist
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BUY THE WOODWORKING BIBLE HERE:
www.mattestlea.com/the-woodworkers-manual
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SOCIAL MEDIA
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See what tools I use here: www.mattestlea.com/equipment
My Website: www.mattestlea.com
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My name is Matt Estlea, I’m a 24 year old Woodworker from Basingstoke in England and my aim is to make your woodworking less s***.

I come from 5 years tuition at Rycotewood Furniture Centre with a further 1 year working as an Artist in Residence at the Sylva Foundation. I now teach City and Guilds Furniture Making at Rycotewood as of September 2018.

If you’re interested in studying at Rycotewood, view their courses here:
www.mattestlea.com/rycotewood

I also had 5 years of experience working at Axminster Tools and Machinery where I helped customers with purchasing tools, demonstrated in stores and events, and gained extensive knowledge about a variety of tools and brands. I discontinued this at the start of 2019 to focus solely on video creation and teaching.

During the week, I film woodworking projects, tutorials, reviews and a viewer favourite ‘Tool Duel’ where I compare two competitive manufacturers tools against one another to find out which is best. I also have a Free Online Woodworking School which you should definitely check out!

www.mattestlea.com/school

I like to have a laugh and my videos are quite fast paced BUT you will learn a lot, I assure you.

Lets go make a mess.

Modern Classics Summarized: Stranger In A Strange Land

Filed under: Books, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 20 Mar 2020

This book is:
10% Mike
20% stars
15% concentrated power of mars
5% water
50% cult
and 100% topics that are very adult

This video was requested by our longtime patron Joshua A. Demic!

Can you use the “product of the times” defense if the book was wildly controversial for its time? Asking for a comment section…

Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up. No, seriously. We REALLY MEAN IT.

PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP

MERCH LINKS: https://www.redbubble.com/people/OSPY…

OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
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