Quotulatiousness

June 30, 2020

The Mycenaeans – The Real Civilization who fought the Trojan War

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Epimetheus
Published 2 Nov 2018

The true ancient civilization behind the Trojan war (The Iliad and Odyssey – the Greek and Trojan heroes Agamemnon, Hector, and Achilles), the Mycenaeans. The history of how they interacted with the Bronze Age world including the Egyptians and the Hittites. From the early days with the Minoans to the Trojan War and the Sea Peoples. Rediscover this lost civilization.

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In the final analysis, there is only one taxpayer – you

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell comes out in favour of some form of negative income tax for Canada:

Cartoon that appeared with Michael K. Spencer’s article “Is Universal Basic Income really a solution?” at https://medium.com/@Michael_Spencer/is-universal-basic-income-really-a-solution-c0d6d95f100e

My first and, I believe, the most important thing to understand about taxes is: there is only one taxpayer; it is you and me and individuals like us. Corporations do not pay taxes ~ they pass every single penny of the taxes assessed to them on to us, their customers. You and I and your and my family and friends pay 100% of all corporate taxes.

A tax on income is a tax on savings which is, in turn, a tax on investment which means it is a tax on jobs.

Flate rate taxes are unfair to the poor, but progressive income taxes, while fairer, take money away from investment in jobs.

Consumption taxes (sales taxes and the HST/GST) are, to some extent, voluntary: consume less and you pay less in taxes. Where consumption is not discretionary ~ say on food ~ the tax system may be used to make consumption taxes at least somewhat progressive.

Corporate taxes ~ ALL corporate taxes ~ are just consumption taxes that are collected in an inefficient and expensive manner. It would be much, much better tax policy to raise the federal GST by 1 or 2 points and cancel ALL corporate taxes. Having a zero federal corporate tax rate would make Canada a much, much more attractive place in which to do business; companies would want to open plants and offices here ~ meaning more, new, good jobs for Canadians.

Income taxes have far too many exceptions and exemptions and deductions and so on. Federal income taxes should be clear and simple and the Canada Revenue Agency should be able to automatically provide a tax bill to about 98% of Canadians. That may mean a thorough (and time-consuming and politically unpopular) overhaul of the complete tax system.

David Irving – Can you trust ANYTHING he wrote?

Filed under: Books, Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TIK
Published 29 Jun 2020

Can you trust ANYTHING that David Irving wrote? In 1996, David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel (in the “Irving vs Penguin Books Ltd” trial) because Deborah Lipstadt had said Irving was a Holocaust Denier. Historian Richard Evans was called upon as an expert witness, and he examined Irving’s works for two years, discovering many major factual errors in David Irving’s works. Richard Evans came to the conclusion that Irving cannot even be classed as a “historian”, and says “not one sentence” in any of his speeches or written works can be trusted. Richard Evan’s Telling Lies About Hitler presents a solid case against David Irving that casts serious doubt about every “historical” text that Irving wrote, and this video presents 3 examples from Evan’s brilliant book (this video is not a sponsored video, I genuinely think Evan’s book is brilliant and you should get yourself a copy) that really should make you question the opinions of those who still promote Irving’s works.

Holocaust deniers may continue to deny that the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” took place, but in actively distorting the evidence, they undermine their own cause. The term “distorian” describes their “writers” better than the term “historian”.

And, in case it isn’t blatantly obvious, I’m NOT a Fascist, NOT a Nazi, NOT a Marxist, and am NOT promoting said evil ideologies. This video is for educational and historical purposes, so that we may learn from the past and prevent it from repeating.

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πŸ“š BIBLIOGRAPHY / SOURCES πŸ“š

Evans, R. In Defence of History. Granta Books, Kindle.
Evans, R. Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial. Verso, 2002.
Irving, D. Hitler’s War:1939-1942. PAPERMAC 1983.
Irving, D. Hitler’s War:1942-1945 PAPERMAC 1983.
Lipstadt, D. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory Penguin Books, 2016.
Rees, L. The Holocaust: A New History. Penguin Books, 2017.
Seidel, G. The Holocaust Denial: Antisemitism, Racism, & the New Right. Beyond the Pale Collective, 1986.
Shermer, M. & Grobman, A. Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? University of California Press, 2009.
Steinbacher, S. Auschwitz: A History. Penguin Books, 2005.

The FULL list of all my sources: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/…

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ABOUT TIK πŸ“

History isn’t as boring as some people think, and my goal is to get people talking about it. I also want to dispel the myths and distortions that ruin our perception of the past by asking a simple question – “But is this really the case?” I have a 2:1 Degree in History and a passion for early 20th Century conflicts (mainly WW2). I’m therefore approaching this like I would an academic essay. Lots of sources, quotes, references and so on. Only the truth will do.

This video is discussing events or concepts that are academic, educational and historical in nature. This video is for informational purposes and was created so we may better understand the past and learn from the mistakes others have made.

“It all counts for nothing, because the Conservatives themselves are useless”

Most Canadians, reading that headline, will assume that Sean Gabb is talking about the Conservative Party of Canada (and he’d be 100% correct in that case), but he’s actually talking about Britain’s equally useless equivalent under Boris Johnson:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

According to The Daily Mail, Madeline Odent is the Curator of the Royston Museum in Hertfordshire. This museum is funded by Royston Council. In the past few days, Mrs Odent has taken to Twitter, giving expert advice on how to use household chemicals to cause irreparable harm to statues she dislikes.

It is, she says, “extremely difficult” to remove the chemicals once they have been applied. She adds that “it can be done, but the chemical needed is super carcinogenic, so it rarely is.” Again, she says: “We haven’t found a way to restore artefacts that this happens to.” Her last reported tweet features a picture of Winton Churchill’s defaced statue in Parliament Square, and says: “Stay tuned for our next edition, where we’ll be talking about marble memorials of racists.”

The newspaper and various people are calling for the woman to be sacked. It is, I allow, surprising for someone to hold a job that involves conserving the past, and then to advise an insurrectionary mob on how to destroy the past. This being said, and assuming the story is substantially true, Mrs Odent is less to be blamed for giving her advice than those who employed her as an expert on conservation and its opposite.

We have had a Conservative Government since 2010. We have had a Conservative Government with a working majority since 2015. For the past six months, we have had a Conservative Government with a crushing majority. It all counts for nothing, because the Conservatives themselves are useless.

Political power is not purely, nor mainly, a matter of being able to make laws. It is far more a matter of choosing reliable servants. Before 1997, we could suppose, within reason, that these servants were politically neutral. They often had their own agenda. They could use their status as experts to influence, and sometimes to frustrate, laws and policies with which they disagreed. But there were not self-consciously an order of people devoted to a transformative revolution. The Blair Government broke with convention by stuffing the public sector with its own creatures, loyal only to itself. This is to be deplored. On the other hand, the Blair Government did have a mandate for sweeping change, and it is reasonable that it should have given preference to employing those who could be trusted to further both the letter and spirit of this mandate. The Conservatives have had enough time to make the public sector into at least an obedient servant of those the people keep electing. Instead of this, they have spent this time employing and promoting people whom Tony Blair would have sacked on the spot as malicious lunatics.

“The Squadrons Are Coming” – HMS Ark Royal aviation operations

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

Aircraft Games Movies
Published 1 Jul 2010

In the Western Approaches, Ark Royal welcomes her air group back aboard, with the occasional hairy approach for newly qualified aviators.

This appears to be footage from episode 3 of Sailor, a BBC television series from 1976 about life aboard HMS Ark Royal.

The Wikipedia entry for HMS Ark Royal (R09) begins:

HMS Ark Royal (R09) was an Audacious-class aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy and, when she was decommissioned in 1979, was the Royal Navy’s last remaining conventional catapult and arrested-landing aircraft carrier. She was the first aircraft carrier to be equipped with angled flight deck at its commissioning; her sister ship, HMS Eagle, was the Royal Navy’s first angle-decked aircraft carrier after modification in 1954. Ark Royal was the only non-United States vessel to operate the McDonnell Douglas Phantom at sea.

[…]

While Ark Royal‘s career spanned 24 years from the time of her commissioning (her name was a household word), she spent as much time in refit; repair and reserve and modernisation as in commissioned service (12 years). It required a lot of effort from her engineers to keep her serviceable between yard periods. Ark Royal had been poorly preserved during its lengthy construction from 1942 to 1955, and much of its machinery was obsolete by its completion, including its dated DC electrics, supplemented later by some AC systems, resulting in a ship which experienced regular defects and mechanical failure. Eagle was a more reliable and well-built ship, and spent far more time at sea than her sister. The scrapping of Ark Royal in 1980, two years after Eagle, marked the end of conventional fixed-wing aircraft operations aboard Royal Navy carriers. She had borne so many innovations, yet her replacement was not equipped with any of these. There was some discussion about preserving her as a museum ship, and some private funds were raised; the MOD would not sanction these efforts.

QotD: Ideologies and belief systems

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

It’s really not a good thing because it manifests itself not only in individual psychopathologies, but also in social psychopathologies. That’s this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, and I really do think of them as crippled religions. That’s the right way to think about them. They’re like religion that’s missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along. It provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it’s warped and twisted and demented and bent, and it’s a parasite on something underlying that’s rich and true. That’s how it looks to me, anyways. I think it’s very important that we sort out this problem. I think that there isn’t anything more important that needs to be done than that. I’ve thought that for a long, long time, probably since the early ’80s when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health. You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems. Why the hell do they care, exactly? What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100 percent correct?

People get unbelievable upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak, and it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why. There’s a fundamental truth that they’re standing on. It’s like they’re on a raft in the middle of the ocean. You’re starting to pull out the logs, and they’re afraid they’re going to fall in and drown. Drown in what? What are the logs protecting them from? Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system? These are not obvious things. I’ve been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time. […]

Nietzsche’s idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values. He understood that we had bodies and that we had motivations and emotions. He was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time. He knew that our capacity to think wasn’t some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology, constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body. He understood that. But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values. He talked about the person who created their own values as the overman, or the superman. That was one part of the Nietzschean philosophy that the Nazis took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology. We know what happened with that. That didn’t seem to turn out very well, that’s for sure.

Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God” {transcript], jordanbpeterson.com, 2018-03-12.

June 29, 2020

The End of the Line

Filed under: Cancon, History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

NFB
Published 2 Sep 2015

This documentary short offers a nostalgic look at the steam locomotive as it passes from reality to history. In its heyday, the big smoke-belching steam engine seemed immortal. Now, powerful and efficient diesels are pushing the old coal-burning locomotives to the sidelines, and the lonely echo of their whistles may soon be a thing of the past.

Directed by Terence Macartney-Filgate – 1959.

Today on NeoNaziHuntingExpeditions, we track down Neo Nazi Bronies

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Daniel Friedman examines the claims made in a recent Atlantic investigation into Nazis in the My Little Pony community (that is, adult fans of the show, not little girls … I think):

Image found by searching for “Neo Nazi Bronies”, listed URL – http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014960111

The evidence of this Nazi problem in the My Little Pony fandom is that, on a My Little Pony imageboard called Derpibooru, over 900 images were tagged as “racist,” and images mocking Black Lives Matter were upvoted by users while images supporting the movement were downvoted, even as the site’s administrators made a statement of support for the protests. After much controversy, the imageboard banned uploading images “created for no reason other than to incite controversy” and removed the 926 images tagged “racism” or “racist.” This move was extremely controversial within the Derpibooru community, many members of which oppose any moderation.

Atlantic reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany suggests that the strong free-speech norms of the Derpibooru boards stem from its origins on 4Chan, which Tiffany describes as “the largest den of chaos and toxic beliefs available on the Internet.” She describes the Brony community as being divided between those who “genuinely enjoy My Little Pony and the wholesome escapism it provides” and trolls who think it is “edgy and provocative to be an adult obsessed with cartoon ponies.” This frames the Derpibooru imageboard as a place where innocent cartoon fans are unknowingly subjected to subversive, racist memes and images that may send people down a rabbit hole of far-right content.

However, claims that a significant portion of the Brony community are Nazis, or that a significant amount of the content on Brony imageboards is right-wing propaganda or racist memes has to be put in the proper context. First of all, the 926 images tagged “racist” exist on a board that hosts over two million images. If you order all the site’s various tags by how many images fall within their categories, there are 12 full pages of other, more popular tags you have to scroll through to find the “racism” tag. One thousand two hundred and seventy-five images are tagged “politics” and include images both supporting and opposing Black Lives Matter. Discussion of these issues is a tiny fraction of one percent of the content on the My Little Pony imageboard.

By contrast, 315,867 images on the Derpibooru forum are tagged as sexually explicit, a further 127,414 images are tagged as sexually suggestive and 105,521 images are tagged as containing “questionable” sexual content. The truth is that Derpibooru’s lax moderation norms and anti-censorship culture don’t exist to protect objectionable political content; this imageboard is unmoderated because it is an enormous repository of fan-made My Little Pony pornography.

The Atlantic article fails to place the 926 racist images in the context of the larger scope of the two million images hosted by the Derpibooru board, because less than one-quarter of one percent of the site’s content is of a political nature. And the Atlantic article avoids mentioning the half-million pornographic images the site hosts, because doing so reveals that the community’s widespread opposition to content moderation on their imageboard is about protecting sexually explicit content rather than creating a space for hateful politics to flourish, and it further reveals that the Bronies are 500 times more interested in having sex with My Little Pony characters than they are in spreading racist pony memes.

The article creates an impression that the alt-Right is using seemingly-innocent cartoon fandoms as a Trojan horse to conceal and spread a sinister ideology, but the truth is that the only thing these guys are interested in hiding inside a horse is their dicks.

Creating a JAPANESE Inspired PICNIC BENCH from Scratch | The Picnic Bench Project – Part #3

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

Matt Estlea
Published 28 Jun 2020

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Lets go make a mess.

The Canadian Armed Forces Primary Reserve

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell looks at the state of the reserves, specifically the Army Reserve:

For those interested, and every thinking Canadian should have some, albeit limited interest in the subject, there is an interesting thread over on Army.ca which deals with the problems (there are a lot of them) in making Canada’s reserve Army (the militia if you’re old enough) into an effective force.

I’m going to go with what I think is the majority opinion and say that our Army reserve, in particular, is ineffective. That does not mean that it does not do yeoman service: Canada’s tiny regular Army could not have conducted sustained combat operations in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2014 unless thousands and thousands of reserve force soldiers had stepped up. They were mostly young men, many looking for some combination of a full-time job, some adventure, a faster route into the regular Army, or even a sort of “gap year” experience, but some, like Canada’s current Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, were middle-aged senior officers when they took a year off from their civilian careers to serve. Today, as I write many reserve force soldiers are serving in a new sort of front-line: long term care facilities that have been ravaged by the COVID-19 virus. The one problem that Canada does NOT have in its Army (regular or reserve) is the quality of the people who serve ~ they are, by and large, amongst the best soldiers in the world and, equally, especially the reservists, Canada’s finest citizens.

But too many people seem to be content with the notion that reserve Army is doing enough by providing a pool of individuals to fill up or augment regular Army units in an emergency. If that’s all the country wants, if that’s the level of capability for which we are willing to settle, then I think we, as a nation, do not deserve the service of the men and women in our reserve Army units.

Operation Gunnerside: The Mission to Stop Germany’s Atomic Bomb

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

Historigraph
Published 21 Mar 2020

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Sources:

Richard Petrow, The Bitter Years

David Greentree, Heroes of Telemark: Sabotaging Hitler’s Atomic Bomb

Clips:

1948 film Kampen om tungtvannet

Clips from contemporary documentary; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3jSW…

Music:

“Crypto” by Kevin MacLeod
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“Rynos Theme”, Incompetech https://incompetech.com

“Hitman” by Kevin MacLeod
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QotD: Gandhi’s religious views

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

I am sure that almost everyone who sees the movie Gandhi is aware that, from a religious point of view, the Mahatma was something called a “Hindu” β€” but I do not think one in a thousand has the dimmest notion of the fundamental beliefs of the Hindu religion. The simplest example is Gandhi’s use of the word “God,” which, for members of the great Western religions β€” Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all interrelated β€” means a personal god, a godhead. But when Gandhi said “God” in speaking English, he was merely translating from Gujarati or Hindi, and from the Hindu culture. Gandhi, in fact, simply did not believe in a personal God, and wrote in so many words, “God is not a person … but a force; the undefinable mysterious Power that pervades everything; a living Power that is Love …” And Gandhi’s very favorite definition of God, repeated many thousands of times, was, “God is Truth,” which reduces God to some kind of abstract principle.

Like all Hindus, Gandhi also believed in the “Great Oneness,” according to which everything is part of God, meaning not just you and me and everyone else, but every living creature, every dead creature, every plant, the pitcher of milk, the milk in the pitcher, the tumbler into which the milk is poured … After all of which, he could suddenly pop up with a declaration that God is “the Maker, the Law-Giver, a jealous Lord,” phrases he had probably picked up in the Bible and, with Hindu fluidity, felt he could throw in so as to embrace even more of the Great Oneness. So when Gandhi said, “I am a Hindu and a Muslim and a Christian and a Jew,” it was (from a Western standpoint) Hindu double-talk. Hindu holy men, some of them reformers like Gandhi, have actually even “converted” to Islam, then Christianity, or whatever, to worship different “aspects” of the Great Oneness, before reconverting to Hinduism. Now for Christians, fastidious in matters of doctrine, a man who converts to Islam is an apostate (or vice versa), but a Hindu is a Hindu is a Hindu. The better to experience the Great Oneness, many Hindu holy men feel they should be women as well as men, and one quite famous one even claimed he could menstruate (I will spare the reader the details).

In this ecumenical age, it is extremely hard to shake Westerners loose from the notion that the devout of all religions, after all, worship “the one God.” But Gandhi did not worship the one God. He did not worship the God of mercy. He did not worship the God of forgiveness. And this for the simple reason that the concepts of mercy and forgiveness are absent from Hinduism. In Hinduism, men do not pray to God for forgiveness, and a man’s sins are never forgiven β€” indeed, there is no one out there to do the forgiving. In your next life you may be born someone higher up the caste scale, but in this life there is no hope. For Gandhi, a true Hindu, did not believe in man’s immortal soul. He believed with every ounce of his being in karma, a series, perhaps a long series, of reincarnations, and at the end, with great good fortune: mukti, liberation from suffering and the necessity of rebirth, nothingness. Gandhi once wrote to Tolstoy (of all people) that reincarnation explained “reasonably the many mysteries of life.” So if Hindus today still treat an Untouchable as barely human, this is thought to be perfectly right and fitting because of his actions in earlier lives. As can be seen, Hinduism, by its very theology, with its sacred triad of karma, reincarnation, and caste (with caste an absolutely indispensable part of the system) offers the most complacent justification of inhumanity of any of the world’s great religious faiths.

Gandhi, needless to say, was a Hindu reformer, one of many. Until well into his fifties, however, he accepted the caste system in toto as the “natural order of society,” promoting control and discipline and sanctioned by his religion. Later, in bursts of zeal, he favored moderating it in a number of ways. But he stuck by the basic varna system (the four main caste groupings plus the Untouchables) until the end of his days, insisting that a man’s position and occupation should be determined essentially by birth. Gandhi favored milder treatment of Untouchables, renaming them Harijans, “children of God,” but a Harijan was still a Harijan. Perhaps because his frenzies of compassion were so extreme (no, no, he would clean the Harijan’s latrine), Hindu reverence for him as a holy man became immense, but his prescriptions were rarely followed. Industrialization and modernization have introduced new occupations and sizable social and political changes in India, but the caste system has dexterously adapted and remains largely intact today. The Sudras still labor. The sweepers still sweep. Max Weber, in his The Religion of India, after quoting the last line of the Communist Manifesto, suggests somewhat sardonically that low-caste Hindus, too, have “nothing to lose but their chains,” that they, too, have “a world to win” β€” the only problem being that they have to die first and get born again, higher, it is to be hoped, in the immutable system of caste. Hinduism in general, wrote Weber, “is characterized by a dread of the magical evil of innovation.” Its very essence is to guarantee stasis.

In addition to its literally thousands of castes and sub-castes, Hinduism has countless sects, with discordant rites and beliefs. It has no clear ecclesiastical organization and no universal body of doctrine. What I have described above is your standard, no-frills Hindu, of which in many ways Gandhi was an excellent example. With the reader’s permission I will skip over the Upanishads, Vedanta, Yoga, the Puranas, Tantra, Bhakti, the Bhagavad-Gita (which contains theistic elements), Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and the terrible Kali or Durga, to concentrate on those central beliefs that most motivated Gandhi’s behavior as a public figure.

Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.

June 28, 2020

The Peasants Rise Up Against The Bolsheviks – The Russian Civil War(s) 1920 I THE GREAT WAR 1920

Filed under: History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

The Great War
Published 27 Jun 2020

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Freeing peasants and workers from oppression was one of the main messages of the Bolsheviks. The peasants in the countryside were happy to get rid of the landowning class and supported socialist ideas of land reform but once the Bolsheviks turned to “War Communism” to maintain their power against the Whites and other forces, the reluctant support of the peasants dropped — and in 1920 they turned to open revolt.

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Figes, Orlando. A People’s Tragedy. The Russian Revolution (London: The Bodley Head, 2017 [1996]).
Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War (New York: Pegasus Books, 2005).
Smele, Jonathan. The “Russian” Civil Wars 1916-1926 (London: Hurst, 2015).
Sumpf, Alexandre. “Russian Civil War,” in 1914-1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.
Engelstein, Laura. Russia in Flames (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Wolf, Eric R. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper, 1969)

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Maps: Daniel Kogosov (https://www.patreon.com/Zalezsky)
Research by: Jesse Alexander
Fact checking: Florian Wittig

Channel Design: Alexander Clark
Original Logo: David van Stephold

Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2020

Operation Barbarossa – End of the Nazi-Soviet Alliance – WW2 – 096b – June 27 1941

World War Two
Published 27 Jun 2020

Operation Barbarossa kicks off this week with action all along the front as German panzers pierce deep into the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Claude Auchinleck becomes Commander of the Allied forces in the Middle East that capture Damascus.

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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound design: Marek KamiΕ„ski
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)
Map consultants: Rabih Rached and Patrick Adaimy

Colorizations by:
– Adrien Fillon – https://www.instagram.com/adrien.colo…
– Olga Shirnina, a.k.a. Klimbim – https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com/
– Cassowary Colorizations
– Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
– Daniel Weiss
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/

Sources:
– Imperial War Museum: E 3833, TR 841, E 1549, E 5448
– Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0: Bild 146-1990-044-13, Bild_183-B24575, Bild_101I-265-0048A-03, Bild_101I-208-0031-03, Bild_169-0443, Bild_101I-020-1262-35, Bild_101I-020-1272-21, Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-209-0056-06
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
– FDR Presidential Library & Museum

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

“Viking” was the word for “Incel” in the early Middle Ages

Filed under: Books, China, Europe, Health, History, India, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At least, that’s one interpretation offered by Mary Harrington at UnHerd:

Europe According to the Vikings (1000) from Atlas of Prejudice 2 by Yanko Tsvetkov.

Last week, World War 3 nearly started in Ladakh. A dry, high-altitude region of Indian Kashmir on the Himalayan border with China, it’s been the site of escalating tensions and military buildup for some time. On June 15, the first physical confrontation between the Indian and Chinese militaries for 45 years erupted, killing at least 20 Indian and 45 Chinese soldiers.

There are all sorts of geopolitical reasons cited for the escalating tension between the world’s two most populous countries, but there is one more central and timeless problem that is going to drive both countries towards violence and instability β€” women. Or a lack of them.

In his History of the Normans, written circa 1015, Dudo of St Quentin argued that the reason the Vikings went raiding was because they couldn’t find wives, an idea echoed by the Tudor antiquarian William Camden in his 1610 book Britannia. “Wikings”, Camden suggested, were what you got when there weren’t enough women to go round, resulting in an excess of young men hanging around full of machismo but without any prospect of finding a nice girl and settling down. (Viking literally means raider.)

So, whenever these spare males “multiply’d themselves to a burdensom community”, Camden reports that an area would draw lots. Those of the young troublemakers chosen in the lottery would be sent off on a ship to make a nuisance of themselves overseas. Which they did.

In evolutionary biology, the “operational sex ratio” is a term used to count the proportion of males and females in a given species that are seeking a reproductive mate. As soon as the ratio tilts away from 50:50, the sex that’s over-represented will have to compete to secure a mate from among the less-plentiful potential partners of the opposite sex.

Though they wouldn’t have used that phrase, both Dudo of St Quentin and William Camden were both describing this phenomenon in human males. Where potential wives are scarce and the “burdensom community” of spare men multiplies, the result is more violence and crime. One 2019 study showed that where polygyny β€” that is, multiple wives β€” is a social norm for higher-status men, attacks on neighbouring ethnic groups skyrocket. With a few men monopolising eligible women, the rest are forced to seek status and resources by attacking other tribes.

India and China both have an extremely “burdensom community” of spare males. The normal ratio of newborn boys to girls is around 105:100. But as Mara Hvistendahl documents in Unnatural Selection, thanks to prenatal ultrasound and sex-selective abortion the ratio in China is around 118:100, and 108:100 in India. In some regions of India, the ratio rises as high as 150 males to 100 females. Though sex-selective technology is now banned in India, it’s still widespread, and the country now has some 37 million more men than women. Studies estimate that China has around 30 million excess men.

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