Quotulatiousness

May 18, 2021

In future, if you’re on TV, do not use your hands or fingers under any circumstances … OK?

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

… as a Jeopardy contestant has recently discovered, there is no hand gesture that is free from the slightest hint of an emanation of a penumbra of white supremacy:

And then they came for the integers. The small social universe surrounding the syndicated game show Jeopardy has been boiling over for the past month because of a hand gesture made by a contestant, Kelly Donahue, at the outset of the April 27 episode. Donahue, returning to the show as a three-time winner, held up three fingers in a gesture of triumph and tapped his chest with them. He had done something similar on earlier episodes, flashing a “one” after his first win and a “two” after his second.

Needless to say, he had to be immediately chastised. A small number of conspiracy theorists felt his use of three fingers to represent three of something “resembled very closely a gesture that has been co-opted by white power groups, alt right groups and an anti-government group that calls itself the Three Percenters.”

That quote is taken from an indignant open letter signed by almost 600 members of a private Facebook group for former Jeopardy contestants, in which the signers demanded to know why Donahue’s heinous Nazi code, “whether intentional or not,” hadn’t been cut from the show before broadcast.

[…]

Smith’s column doesn’t actually get around to answering the question, although with a little legwork he was able to establish that the Facebook group had actually approached the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish grandparent of all anti-hate monitoring groups, for advice. The ADL told the addled ex-contestants, “Uh, it looks to us like the guy’s just making a three,” which led some in the internet cocoon to conclude they were being “gaslit.” Smith also talked to members of the Facebook group who knew that their fellow contestants were talking twaddle and fomenting harassment of an innocent man, but who were afraid to contradict the leaders of a witch hunt, lest the purifying fire be kindled beneath their own tootsies.

Smith does identify a crucial point in what is otherwise a workaday tale of cancel culture run mad. Former Jeopardy contestants, every last three-o-phobic one of them, are people selected specifically for high intelligence and wide knowledge. This didn’t make the signers of the letter any less obtuse, or any more resistant to a complicated conspiracy theory. It was their knowledge of disaggregated facts that made them susceptible in the first place.

SMLE MkI***: The Updated Early Lee Enfields (and Irish Examples!)

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Feb 2021

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When the British adopted a new high-velocity spitzer bullet for the .303 cartridge, they had to update their rifles to use it. Specifically, the sights had to be recalibrated for the flatter trajectory of the new MkVII ammunition. In addition, the sight picture was changed from a barleycorn front and V-notch rear to the more precise square front post and rear U-notch.

These rifles are quite scarce, but several thousand were brought into the US in the early 1960s as surplus from Ireland. These Irish examples all had new serial numbers applied when the were sent to Ireland by the British in the 1920s, and they are in two different batches (one in MkI*** configuration, and one with the MkIII rear sight). We will take a look at both patterns today as well, so you can see the difference between the much more available Irish type and the pure British version.

Contact:
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QotD: The imaginary problem of having “too much” choice

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the early 20th century critics attacked product variety as being wasteful — a sign that markets were less efficient than central planning. Hence, the Chinese wore Mao suits, Americans got uniformly round automobile headlights and British authorities “rationalized” furniture designs.

A famous scene in the film Moscow on the Hudson has Robin Williams as a Soviet immigrant collapsing at the sight of an American coffee aisle, circa 1984. Imagine what would happen in Starbucks.

A free economy multiplies variety, the better to serve buyers with different tastes and different needs and to give people the chance to experience different goods at different times. Arguing that this plenitude is inefficient went out decades ago. The problem with markets, the detractors now say, is that all these choices make us unhappy.

Virginia Postrel, “I’m Pro-Choice”, Forbes, 2005-03-28.

May 17, 2021

Christopher Hitchens – On EconTalk discussing George Orwell [2009]

Filed under: Asia, Books, Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

CaNANDian
Published 25 Sep 2012

Christopher Hitchens talked with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about George Orwell. Drawing on his book Why Orwell Matters, Hitchens talked about Orwell’s opposition to imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism, his moral courage, and his devotion to language. Along the way, Hitchens made the case for why Orwell matters.

Download audio: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009…

An older BBC dramatization on the slave trade that seems to have gone down the memory hole

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin wondered why the BBC hadn’t gotten around to showing a 1970s historical series through the year-and-more of the pandemic lockdowns. He doesn’t mention the name of the series, and an unusually unhelpful BBC site search didn’t turn up a name but IMDB suggests it was 1975 and the series was called The Fight Against Slavery:

Fifty years ago, the BBC screened a dramatised documentary series about the fight to abolish the slave trade. Even a year of the virus limiting new series, at a time of great BBC eagerness to talk about racism, has not made them screen it again.

– I see one reason why they have not: the series displayed sleazy white slave traders and abusive white slave owners prominently, but it also showed white people eager to end the slave trade and (much worse) black people eager to continue it. It included the king of Dahomey’s threat: “if you do not allow me to sell you my slaves, their fate will be a great deal worse” (a very brief scene of the Dahomey murder spectacle lent meaning to his remark). After abolition was voted, it showed a white slave trader assuring the Dahomans, as a drug dealer might his suppliers, “It is one thing for parliament to pass a law …”, hinting at the Royal Navy’s long and hard campaign to enforce it.

– Only recently did I spot another reason why they would not want to show it again – the scene in which a corrupt old white slave trader warns his young colleague that “it’s more than your life’s worth” to doubt the ability of their slave-selling hosts to count very accurately the quantity of trade goods being handed over in exchange, and to assess their quality knowledgeably. The traders well knew that Africans counted two plus two as four, just as they did. Any trader who imagined that black ability to add diverged enough from white to enable an attempt to short-change them had learned otherwise long before the 1780s.

– The southern Confederacy thought the same. Until its death throes, it forbade enlisting a southern black as a Confederate soldier because, as one Confederate senator put it, “If blacks can make good soldiers then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” (Perhaps also because even southern white Democrats realised that southern black desire to fight against blacks being freed was likely to be a very minority taste.) But there was one exception. Every regiment had its regimental band, which played to set the pace at the start and end of marches, used trumpets to signal commands in battle – and fought when other duties did not supervene. From its start to its end, Confederate law said any black could enlist as bandsman, with the same pay and perquisites as a white – a very rare example of formal legal equality. (Playing music requires the ability to count time. For the woke, “dismantling the legacy of the Confederacy” apparently includes dismantling its realisation – shared by the Victorian composer Dvorak – that blacks often excelled in music so much as to overcome prejudice against black ability. Today, it’s “racist” to value instrumental skill.)

“Politically correct” has meant “actually wrong” ever since the first commissar explained to the first party comrade that it was neither socialist nor prudent to notice a factual error in the party line. “Structurally racist” is PC’s modern companion. No longer are the woke content merely to imply (“mathematics is racist”, “punctuality is racist”, “politeness is racist”) that blacks can’t count, can’t tell the time and can only behave crudely. They’re starting to say it in words of fewer syllables.

If I’d scrolled down to the comments, I’d have discovered that Natalie Solent had also dug up the name of the series:

Natalie Solent (Essex)
May 10, 2021 at 4:30 pm
Outstanding post, Niall. Was the BBC series you mentioned “The Fight Against Slavery“, written and narrated by Evan Jones? I have not seen it – given that I was ten or eleven in 1975 my parents probably thought I was too young too see it.

However someone called “InternetPilgrim” has put up three videos of the series on YouTube. There is a link to Part I here, Part II here and Part III here, so I will try to remedy that lack soon.

History Summarized: Africa

Filed under: Africa, Environment, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 7 Jul 2017

THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY: https://youtu.be/D9Ihs241zeg​

It’s been brought to my attention that I made two mistakes: 1) Yes, I disappear at 18:26​. Not sure how that happened. 2) At 12:25​ I use a map of Africa that with some weird borders. That’s my bad. But if you look at a legit map of Africa, you’ll see the same straight lines in the places that I marked them.
(Remember: making mistakes is ok, so long as we learn from them)

The Epic of Mwindo sure was cool, huh? This video is here to show you all about the lovely continent that it came from: Africa! And BOY are there a lot of misconceptions about it.

This video was produced with assistance from the Boston University Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.

PATREON: www.patreon.com/user?u=4664797

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QotD: Orpheus and Eurydice

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Greek myths […] could not tell us of the conquest of Death by Love, because they could not know it yet; but they did know what it was not. They — the Greeks with their legends — were not just pessimistic. They were heroic pessimists.

Orpheus descends into Hades to retrieve his bride, Eurydice. In the account we read in Virgil’s Georgics, the point of the tale is already slightly smoothed, blunted. Orpheus has made the mistake of looking back on her countenance, when he is almost home. He has emerged in the sun, but she is still in the shadows. As he looks back, she recedes, disappears; she is now lost forever. In modern “education” we used to weep for the tragedy. He almost succeeded. It is a tragedy, strictly in the Roman pagan sense.

But it was a tragedy in the Greek sense, first. If we go instead to Plato, and listen to the aristocratic Phaedrus in the Symposium, we learn that Orpheus was thoroughly in the wrong, in his attempt to retrieve Eurydice. He was bound to be punished. His mistake was not a technicality. His living descent into Hades was a challenge not only to the gods, but to nature, and to the truth of things. His love for Eurydice, so affecting in his mournful dirges — moving everyone to tears — was not true love. A coward, he would not die for it.

Hades has presented him with a wraith, in Eurydice’s outward form. Inevitably, this illusion would dissolve in the sunlight. And the fate of Orpheus was now set — the fate of an eloquent softie, who loves an imaginary woman — a woman he had created from the start. He will die at the hands of the real ones he rejected. He will be torn apart by the Maenads, as by wild beasts. His lyre will be destroyed. This is the fate of our shallow romantic star; the pretty boy whose lyre and whose voice had once been an enchantment.

Boethius deals with that backward gaze, in the Consolations of Philosophy. We who seek to lead into the light of the upper day — we triumphalist philosophers — are bound to look back into the Tartarean cave. And when we do, the clarity of our “vision” will be obscured; then ruined, totally. To guide we must be guided; or all will be lost.

David Warren, “A backward glance”, Essays in Idleness, 2021-02-09.

May 16, 2021

Joseph Stalin Jumps the Gun – 142 – May 16, 1942

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, India, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 15 May 2021

The Soviets pre-empt a German offensive with one of their own in the south of the Eastern Front, but that’s not the only fighting. The skies over Malta and the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence are full of action. Meanwhile, two races against time — and the Japanese — come to an end in India.
(more…)

Gambling machines have come a long way from the “one-armed bandit” days

Filed under: Books, Business, Gaming, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This is another reader book review for Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten, looking at Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll. I’m incredibly risk-averse, so I’ve never even set foot in a casino, but from this review I do not regret my aversion one tiny little bit:

“Hiking the Las Vegas casinos” by davduf is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

    Sometimes employees at Netflix think, “Oh my god, we’re competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon” … [W]e actually compete with sleep.

    Reed Hastings

Randomness is addictive, in rats. B. F. Skinner learned that when he created his eponymous rat boxes. The boxes had levers that, when pressed, dispensed food pellets. Rats in boxes where one press resulted in one pellet pressed the lever when hungry. But rats in boxes where one press randomly resulted in no, one, or many pellets, became addicted to pressing the lever. That mammalian attraction to randomness lies at the heart of all gambling.

But machine gambling is not like other kinds of gambling. The book overflows with metaphors straining to describe how machine gambling is the supercharged version of table games like poker, blackjack, and roulette. Machine gambling is deforestation ruining the rainforest of diverse table games. Machines are invasive kudzu outcompeting and killing the native table games. Machine gambling is the crack cocaine to table games’ cocaine.

In about two decades, machine gambling went from being a side attraction to keep wives busy while their husbands played table games to the source of 85% of casino profits. You know how shopping malls have benches for husbands to sit on while their wives shop in stores? Imagine that those benches became the mall. (If you’re reading this in 2025, shopping malls were, uh, a collection of permanent pop-up stores under the same roof.)

The first time I went to Vegas, I knew a few tricks casinos would use to encourage me to gamble too much. I knew the hotel rooms were purposefully cheap, to entice me to visit Vegas. I knew casinos would have neither windows nor clocks, to help me lose my sense of time. I knew they would be full of bright lights and loud sounds, to overstimulate me. I knew nothing. Those tricks are old hat, as quaint as doilies. Machine gambling is a brave new world.

Machine gambling comes in the form of many games, but one example is enough to illustrate the pattern, so let’s discuss slot machines. Slot machines are games with reels with a variety of symbols on them, like cherries, diamonds, or the number 7. (Fun fact: fruit symbols were initially used on slot machines during the prohibition era to disguise them as gum vending machines.) The game is simple. The player spins the reels. If they land to show symbols in a row, the player wins. Because of their simplicity, these machines are favored by new gamblers and tourists.

Back when Moore’s Law was just Moore’s Prediction, slot machines were mechanical devices. The player would pull on a mechanical lever, which caused reels to spin. The reels would eventually slow down and then stop. The symbols in the middle of the screen when the reels stopped dictated whether the player won or lost.

Now, slot machines are digital. The lever, the reels, the symbols — they are all ones and zeros untethered from reality. This gives machine designers a terrifying amount of flexibility. They can optimize the game to maximize its addictivity.

Bayonets

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

Lindybeige
Published 26 Feb 2011

A weapon can be very effective even if it never actually kills anyone.

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QotD: Emmanuel Goldstein’s Theory and Practice of Oligarchal Collectivism as applied in Afghanistan

Filed under: Asia, Books, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Orwell/Goldstein’s “main point” is the permanent emergency and the advantages that gives the state. The Afghan war can never end because it has no war aims, which means the conditions of victory and defeat are unknown and unknowable, and can never be met. Why America chooses to wage war that way is a question for another day, but there are certainly economic elements at play: Many people have grown rich on an outmoded model of national strength that puts carrier groups in every pond around the globe — the “Floating Fortresses” of Orwell’s vision — while China takes over the planet unencumbered by such things.

Mark Steyn, “Essential Structure and Irreconcilable Aims”, Steyn Online, 2021-01-31.

May 15, 2021

Baelin’s Route review, a discussion on why Viva La Dirt League’s Baelin’s Route is such a great story

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Writers Block
Published 10 May 2021

In this video we will discuss why Viva La Dirt League’s movie Baelin’s Route is such a masterpiece of story telling.

Viva La Dirt League — Baelin’s Route https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEe-Z…

Adventures in military procurement

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

Back in September, Matt Gurney wrote about the generations-long travesty that is the Canadian government’s procurement system for the Canadian Armed Forces. I missed it at the time, but — this is a shock, I know — it’s still fully accurate and up-to-date, because the government hasn’t done anything to address the blatant failings of the “system”:

Browning High Power 9mm, the standard side-arm of the Canadian army since WW2.

Some history first: during the Second World War, Canada manufactured hundreds of thousands of Browning “Hi-Power” 9mm pistols. The pistols were originally made by Belgian manufacturer FN, but Belgium, of course, was overrun by the Nazis early in the war. The schematics and part diagrams were evacuated before the Germans arrived and the pistol saw service in numerous allied militaries. The Canadian army ended up acquiring 60,000 of them, all built in 1944 and 1945. And here’s where things get bonkers: we’ve never replaced them. Some Canadian military units have used more modern pistols, acquired in smaller batches, but the standard sidearm of the Canadian Armed Forces, today, isn’t just the same kind of pistol we used in the Second World War. It’s literally the same pistols.

Reliability issues with the pistols are a chronic problem. I mean, they’re 75 years old, and they’ve been in use continuously. Our military weapons technicians do what they can, and they’ve been stripping some pistols for spare parts to put into other pistols for decades. But the Hi-Powers are in desperate need of a replacement. They’re a generation overdue for replacement. But in keeping with the finest traditions of Canadian military procurement, we can’t get it done. It’s beyond our ability.

We’ve tried, sort of. At the start of 2017, the military began work on a replacement program that would have procured up to 25,000 new 9mm semi-automatic pistols for the Canadian Armed Forces. The military gave itself 10 years to get this accomplished and budgeted $50 million. It’s hard to overstate how crazy that is. Pistols aren’t complicated. If you have a credit card and a firearms licence, you can walk into a store and buy one. A lot of what the military needs is super complex and custom-made. Pistols are easy. There are factories all over the world that are already producing proven, reliable, affordable designs. Buying new pistols has got to be about the simplest procurement any military is ever going to face. And we still thought we’d need 10 years to do it. A decade.

The amazing thing is, by total fluke, in 2016, the British also decided they needed new pistols. And they also decided they needed 25,000 of them. This is entirely coincidental, but it’s a fantastically convenient coincidence: it’s a rare apples-to-apples comparison of two national procurement systems. And how’d it go?

Well, the Brits selected a type of pistol, purchased 25,000 of them and issued them to their military units by 2018. They wrapped the whole thing up in two years. The total cost was $15,000,000.

In Canada, we set a 10-year goal for the same thing, budgeted more than three times as much … but never got it off the ground. No progress was made.

So now, the military is trying again.

When I was in the militia in the late 1970s, we trained with the Browning, although even then we were told it was slated to be replaced within a few years. After thirty-some years of heavy use, the guns were still going strong, but definitely showing significant signs of wear and were probably already at the point they should have been retired even then.

Machine Gun Terminology Part 2: SMG, PDW, & Machine Pistol

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Jan 2018

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Today we have Part 2 of machine gun terminology — the small caliber guns. Specifically, submachine guns, personal defense weapons, and machine pistols. [Part 1 is here]

Submachine Gun: Pistol caliber, fully automatic, and fitted with a shoulder stock. For example, Thompson, MP40, MAS-38.

Machine pistol: Handgun form factor and fully automatic. For example, Glock 18, Mauser Schnellfeuer, Stechkin.

Automatic Rifle: Shoulder or hip fired, limited magazine capacity, minimal sustained fire capacity. Examples: M1918 BAR, Chauchat.

Personal Defense Weapon: (1) Armor-piercing or (2) holsterable submachine gun, not intended for front line combat. For example, FN P90, H&K MP7, Czech vz.61 Skorpion, Polish PM63 Rak.

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

QotD: Military history

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

Things have changed little today in terms of the exclusive Western monopoly of military history. Six billion people on the planet are more likely to read, hear, or see accounts of the Gulf War (1990) from the American and European vantage points than from the Iraqi. The story of the Vietnam War is largely Western; even the sharpest critics of America’s involvement put little credence in the official communiqués and histories that emanate from communist Vietnam. In the so-called Dark Ages of Europe, more independent histories were still published between A.D. 500 and 1000 than during the entire reigns of the Persian or Ottoman Empire. Whether it is history under Xerxes, the sultan, the Koran, or the Politburo at Hanoi, it is not really history — at least in the Western sense of writing what can offend, embarrass and blaspheme.

Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, 2001.

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