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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📚 BIBLIOGRAPHY / SOURCES 📚

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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A big thank you to my Patreon, Craig Heinrich, for asking today’s question!

Do you want to ask a question? Please consider supporting me on either Patreon or SubscribeStar and help make more videos like this possible. For $5 or more you can ask questions which I will answer in future Q&A videos. Thank you to my current Patrons! You’re AWESOME! https://www.patreon.com/TIKhistory or https://www.subscribestar.com/tikhistory
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ABOUT TIK 📝

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”

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

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.

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