TimeGhost History
Published 14 Jul 2021The winter of 1924 sees the death of not only Vladimir Lenin but also the Ottoman Caliphate. However, it also sees something fresh and completely unique enter the American mainstream. George Gershwin has given the Jazz Age a soundtrack.
(more…)
July 15, 2021
Goodbye Lenin, Hello Jazz! | B2W:ZEITGEIST! I E.22 Winter 1924
Comments Off on Goodbye Lenin, Hello Jazz! | B2W:ZEITGEIST! I E.22 Winter 1924
Out: “War is the health of the state”, In: “Pandemic restrictions are the health of the nanny state”
British MP Andrew Lewer on the inability (and determined unwillingness) of western governments at all levels to back away from all the restrictions they’ve been able to impose on their citizens since the start of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:
The list goes on. By the government’s own calculations it [banning advertising for “junk food” on TV] will reduce children’s diets by a meagre five calories a day – the equivalent of a third of a cherry tomato. And watch out for those Government figures. Pardon the pun, but given that they add weight to the arguments of those opposing their intrusiveness into our lives, would anyone be amazed if new and revised figures emerged during the course of detailed legislation? But even if the impact of these proposals was amplified by “the science”, it would still come at too high a cost to individual freedom and liberty.
And this is just the thin end of the wedge. For a moment back in winter, it looked like we had woken up and smelt the full English breakfast. It was reported that the advertisement ban would be discarded, which allowed the free market minded to hope, especially given the disbanding of Public Health England, that this might signal pushback against nanny state intrusion. Alas, no.
The appetite for ill-conceived, unworkable ideas is growing: we have plans to force pubs to disclose the number of calories in every drink they serve, just as they begin to fill their tills after months of lockdown. Plans to end deals like “buy one get one free” on foods high in fat, sugar and salt – a regressive measure that will hit the poorest consumers hardest while doing nothing to reduce our waistlines. Plans for further legislation around nutritional labelling – adding cost, probably not adding clarity.
We left the EU in part as a reaction to over-regulation. I remember well during my time as an MEP how skewed towards large corporations the regulatory regime could be in Brussels. If, having taken the difficult and painful decision to leave the bloc, we fail to roll back the overreach then people will start to ask what the last four years was all about. If freedoms regained are never applied, then what was the point? The food laws will diminish freedoms in everyday life, not just those of the important, but more esoteric and common room kind, that our political elites from time to time do remember to respect.
Comments Off on Out: “War is the health of the state”, In: “Pandemic restrictions are the health of the nanny state”
History Summarized: The Golden Age of Piracy
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 4 May 2015Blue’s back, and this time he’s hoisting the black flag and preparing to board. It’s okay: he’s got a letter of marque.
Comments Off on History Summarized: The Golden Age of Piracy
QotD: Macaulay’s prescription for ruling India
In 1835 Thomas Macaulay had argued in his famous essay Minute on Education that “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”
Macaulay was arguing that British Government should spend money on educating those it found under its rule. So it came to be as Britain ruled over the most heavily-populated and most valued part of its empire for another century.
Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister who led India to independence from Britain, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at the Inner Temple, and was closely connected to the Fabian Society. Nehru’s rival, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, studied law at the Lincoln’s Inn, and was strongly influenced by English utilitarianism and French positivism. Nehru was an agnostic who requested a secular burial (this was denied him), while Jinnah was a gin-drinker whose religious attachments were more a matter of identity than belief.
Nehru and Jinnah led India and Pakistan to independence as the brown-skinned Westerners Thomas Macaulay had envisioned a century earlier. South Asian in appearance and pedigree, the leaders of these two nations nevertheless personified a fundamental truth about the Western orientation of the new Asian states. Pakistan was aligned with the United States, while socialist India was nominally non-aligned but clearly tilted toward the Soviet bloc. Though the populace of these nations were mostly illiterate, poor and detached from the cosmopolitan currents of the world, their elites were integrated among the English-speaking peoples. Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, attended Somerville College, Oxford. His grandson, Rahul Gandhi, whose mother is Italian, studied at Harvard and Trinity College.
Razib Khan, “Why the West lost India’s culture wars”, UnHerd, 2021-04-13.
Comments Off on QotD: Macaulay’s prescription for ruling India
July 14, 2021
Jewish Luftwaffe Officers, Allied POW’s, and Vichy Islands near Canada – WW2 – OOTF 023
World War Two
Published 13 Jul 2021How did Germans with Jewish heritage still serve in the Luftwaffe? And what happened to the Allied POW’s from the German invasions of France and Belgium? And what the hell happened with those tiny Vichy islands near Canada? We answer all of this in today’s Out of the Foxholes.
(more…)
Comments Off on Jewish Luftwaffe Officers, Allied POW’s, and Vichy Islands near Canada – WW2 – OOTF 023
Instead of economics, how about “humanomics”?
In City Journal, Allison Schrager reviews Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science by Deirdre McCloskey:
I thoroughly enjoyed Deirdre McCloskey’s Bettering Humanomics, but I may be a glutton for feelings of intellectual inadequacy. Truth be told, I only understood about 60 percent of the book. It contains countless references to great works of the humanities, economics, and the history of economic thought. A casual reader cannot possibly be familiar with a fraction of them, even within his own field. But McCloskey expects you to know them.
At first this book frustrated and confused me. Then I suspected this reaction was by design. I am, after all, an economist myself: I have dedicated my life to learning my craft and benefited from many years of training at great institutions from important thinkers. But reading Humanomics, I became fully aware of how little I know. I now believe that becoming a fully formed economist requires that I stop watching trash TV in my free time and read the Theory of Moral Sentiments instead. McCloskey pulls no punches, whether on her intellectual opponents or on the reader. Here is one example, where she defends herself from a critic, philosopher Gerald Gaus:
Aside from these textual matters, I must say I find myself repelled by Gaus’s vision of people as cynical conformists: “we are such deeply social normative creatures, in the sense that we are so attuned to the normative expectations of others, that we can achieve a stable rule-based system of cooperation even when many are not enthusiastic about the moral attitudes and virtues that the rules express.” I invite him to reread Thucydides’s dialogue between the Athenian diplomats and the Melians, and repent.
McCloskey argues that economics would be better if we listened to people — in controlled experiments, chat rooms, meetings, surveys, and at the Rotary. We need to absorb the lessons from art and culture (perhaps trash TV has value, after all). She does not believe that economists need to ditch math and data, but our overreliance on these tools encourages us to view people as abstractions and leads us astray. Such tendencies also help explain the rise of behaviorism, which assumes that humans are flawed creatures who must be nudged by a wise bureaucrat into better choices; recent flirtations with industrial policy; and the belief that, if we just get our government and laws right, growth will follow.
We must consider how individuals see and experience the world around them, and we must recognize that humans are malleable in ways that we don’t account for. For example, McCloskey estimates a quarter of all income comes from “Sweet Talk” — not lies or trickery, but the ability to be persuasive and compelling, a crucial aspect of sales and advertising. It influences how we perceive the world and can be an important part of motivation.
We economists have lost our appreciation for the humanities, and that means that we underestimate the importance of human dignity. This is no small oversight. McCloskey spends about a third of her book arguing that understanding the humanity of the northwestern European population can explain why it industrialized first. Other countries around the world had wealth, strong institutions, and well-trained mathematicians and engineers (perhaps better ones), but industrialization happened in Britain first because it treated its people with dignity and empowered them with both rhetoric and knowledge.
Comments Off on Instead of economics, how about “humanomics”?
Tank Chats #115 | A34 Comet | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 8 Jan 2021Join The Tank Museum’s Historian David Fletcher has he discusses the A34 Comet, widely regarded as the best tank Britain produced during the Second World War.
Support the work of The Tank Museum on Patreon: ► https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum
Visit The Tank Museum SHOP & become a Friend: ► tankmuseumshop.orgTwitter: ► https://twitter.com/TankMuseum
Instagram: ► https://www.instagram.com/tankmuseum/
#tankmuseum #tanks
Comments Off on Tank Chats #115 | A34 Comet | The Tank Museum
QotD: The unlikely hermaphrodites in The Left Hand of Darkness
Let me start by saying that I LIKED the book. Loved it even. Mostly because it was different and it made me think. (Like other books of the time, it didn’t age well, mostly on language, but also structure, which I guess was innovative and daring at the time, but strikes me as “too early seventies” for words. Now this might be JUST ME but there’s a whole batch of books — one Heinlein — I can’t stand to re-read. I came of age in the seventies and eventually grew to loathe that false-craft feel of art at that time. No one else is forced to agree with me.)
But part of what made me think — because my relaxing reads are books on evolution and animals and their biology and behavior (guys, I read Konrad Lorenz for fun) is that the left (and at the time anyone with even vague intellectual pretensions was at the very least soft left, because the zeitgeist was) was very funny about humans.
They often opened their books on humans by gesticulating broadly at imaginary religious fanatics and rubbing said fanatics’ noses in the fact that “we are animals. No, we’re really animals.” And then proceeded to go a little bananas, sometimes in supposed non-fiction, like Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape, which assured us only humans killed their own species, or something equally ridiculous (I read it at around 14 or 15, I just remember his thesis that humans were uniquely vile made me snort-giggle at the time. Because, you know, you can sustain that if you’re religious, and say humans should aspire to the divine image, but if we’re really just animals, there is NO vile. We do what instinct and nature tell us, no judgement, right?)
But mostly this dysfunction showed in science fiction, particularly at the time. “We’re just animals. If we just changed/removed/tweaked x y z we’d be communitarian, sharing, no war animals.”
The way hermaphrodites behave in TLHOD made me snort/giggle too for various reasons, the first being that hermaphrodite species on Earth (granted mostly very small) have some of the most violent mating behaviors in the world. Makes sense since at least in live-bearing, or for that matter those who care for eggs, species, the cost falls on the one who carries young or sits on eggs. The other one just goes off, whistling his merry way and lives to mate another day. So in a species where either of the couple can bear, there would be a “war” (There are several books on war of the sexes in various species, which has led to things like praying mantises and duck penises.) to determine who bears. And yes, she did get right that in an intelligent species, value would have to be put on children-of-the-body or no one would want to do it. (Or most children would be conceived by rape. Which to be fair, is most hermaphrodite species on Earth.)
What she got wrong, related to that, is then having the kids raised in some sort of hippie dippie commune.
In fact, the whole setup makes perfect sense as a professional woman’s fantasy. “I want to have kids, but someone else raises them, and it will be the perfect communitarian family and no one will think it’s bad if I’m not there, or take no more interest in them than in any of the family kids.”
In point of fact, from evolutionary POV, an hermaphrodite species would have a hell of an attachment to their own biological “of the body” kids, for the simple reason that otherwise, being intelligent and able to circumvent instinct, no one would have kids “of the body” and those born of rape would be abandoned to die. World’s shortest species/race/breed.
Yes, I’m sure that some human (and these were supposed to be modified humans) tribes have done the communitarian child raising, but it’s not the norm, it’s not usually as communitarian as it looks and … oh, heck, even extended family raising the kids, which it sort of is, is nowhere nearly what US leftists think it is. There’s squabbles, politics, and the mothers very much care and “pull” for their own kid.
Anyway, it amused me because it was nowhere near the only. There was this trend back then for hermaphrodite modified humans that somehow made them more cooperative/better at not warring, etc, which I found absolutely mind bogglingly bizarre and made me wonder why people thought injecting the fierce young-protecting instinct of the female into a species at large would make it more sharing and caring, not the other way around. (And lord, study any society with multiple concubines and wives. Women protect THEIR children, there is no sisterhood or love all babies, when yours is in the mix. Some of the most horrific tales of mankind are the vengeance wrought by a woman on rival women AND THEIR BABIES.)
Sarah A. Hoyt, “Remaking People”, According to Hoyt, 2018-11-19.
July 13, 2021
Is the PRC really a paper dragon?
Sarah Hoyt is tired of finding posts on MeWe that fluff up the ChiComs as a way of “conservatives” scoring points against “progressives” in the US political context:
“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong Thought”, 1969.
A poster from the Cultural Revolution, featuring an image of Chairman Mao, published by the government of the People’s Republic of China.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
What bilge? Oh, memes extolling the Chinese in relation to us. And all conservatives pick this crap up and echo it, because it happens to “side rail” against things they hate (and which it’s valid to hate.)
But the memes are crap. The aggrandizing of the Chinese bastards is crap. They’re either outright lies or laughable lies. And the memes, somehow, never hit the Chinese where it hurts: the fact their economy is so f*cked most of their people live like Medieval peasants; the fact their army of little emperors cried when they went up against India; the fact that they are having trouble feeding their own population; the crumbling empty cities they think are “investments”; their population collapse; Xi’s pretensions to world leadership; their slave camps. Which you know, tells you exactly where the meme factory is and who is propagating it.
The problem being when conservatives seize the memes and distribute, they are actively collaborating in the aggrandizing of China and putting down the US. They are also convincing the Chinese their victory over us will be easy. (This is good and bad, but if you have friends and relatives in large cities, think about the chances of it ending up with one of those catching a nuke because the idiots get cocky, okay?)
Chinese are masters of propaganda and psychological warfare, while Americans are so bad at it that it hurts. If you loved 2020 keep collaborating with the enemy.
If not, listen up:
Yeah, sure, the fact that the usurpers of our governmental institutions are making our armed forces participate in inclusivity and CRT training, and prioritizing bullshit SJW goals over preparedness IS a problem. But that doesn’t mean we’re not still the best fighting force in the world. Sure, it’s damning with faint praise, but comparing us to China and saying they’re “prepared for war” and “will win” is bullshit. You know it’s bullshit, I know it’s bullshit. It’s bullshit so rank I can smell it through the internet.
The Chinese have Little Emperors — single descendants of multiple families — who are no more prepared to risk themselves in war than I’m prepared to fly unassisted. Their army is bullshit.Why is it bullshit? Because they don’t have a fighting force. The only fighting strength they ever had was the ability to submerge any enemy in a wave of people. But they can’t. Because the communists destroyed that too.
Their weapons are bullshit. I’d like independent confirmation of their “achievements in space”. Why? Because, well, the USSR achievement in space was a) what they could steal from us b) flimsy and c) mostly trumped up. In the sense that they only publicized their wins, while it might be one in ten that succeeded.
Look, by definition an authoritarian regime sucks at tech. I’m not saying anything about “capabilities of the people” (duh) but seriously? If you can’t report failed experiments, failed assemblies or builds that need to be improved, you’re going to have crappy tech. And you can’t report any of that, because in a centralized authoritarian regime you’ll be punished for failure, even if it’s not your fault. And you might get accused of doing it on purpose.
When nothing less than 100% success is allowed, the process is corrupt and the result is excrement. (Look at our “science” right now. No, seriously. We’re sliding that way.)
So, no matter how made you are at what the army and our government is doing, stop echoing Xi’s bullshit. And counter it every time you see it. This is war by other means, or in the ancient Chinese tradition, softening the enemy so they’ll surrender at first attack.
Comments Off on Is the PRC really a paper dragon?
Japanese Armour Doctrine, 1918-1942
The_Chieftain
Published 11 Jul 2021Sources include:
Japanese tanks and armoured Warfare 1932-45, David McCormack
WW2 Japanese Tank Tactics, Gordon Rottmen, Akira Takizawa
Japanese Tanks, Tactics and anti-tank weapons, Donald McLean
Type 89 and Tankette books, Kazunori YoshikawaContinuing on this series of videos supporting the WW2 Channel, I look at what I can find about how the Japanese thought of tanks and their usage, tempered by quite a bit of combat experience.
Improved-Computer-And-Scout Car Fund:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/The_Chieftain
Direct Paypal https://paypal.me/thechieftainshat
Comments Off on Japanese Armour Doctrine, 1918-1942
“Samuel Beckett was one of the twentieth century’s very greatest conmen and his dupes continue to relish being parted from their cash”
In The Critic, J.S. Barnes digs up the bones of Samuel Beckett for a thorough kicking:
Samuel Beckett as a student in 1922.
Wikimedia Commons.
A good conman needs three key attributes to succeed: swagger, plausibility and commitment to the perpetuation of the con. A great conman, meanwhile, needs one additional factor: the discovery and nurturing of victims who are not only willing to be gulled but who come to actively enjoy that sensation.
Samuel Beckett was one of the twentieth century’s very greatest conmen and even now, decades after his death, his dupes continue to relish being parted from their cash.
That he was plausible in his claims is clear from the fact that his plays are still performed all around the world. His swagger may be witnessed in the endless succession of black and white photographs which accompany most editions of his work: the old fraud gazing grimly out at the reader from his home in France, like some weathered statue come dolefully to life, looking as though he is considering the fundamental inequities of existence or, perhaps, rumours of a forthcoming croissant shortage.
As for his commitment to the long con, he had form. In 1930, he gave a lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, about a poet (Jean du Chas) and an artistic movement (Le Concentrisme) which he had entirely invented, both fooling and riling up the dons. He learnt well from this, one suspects, never again to allow the mask to slip.
Following his early, glumly unreadable novels, much indebted to James Joyce, the real foundation of Beckett’s reputation is his 1953 play Waiting for Godot. The set-up is vivid and intriguing: in a rural wasteland sit two ravaged, witty tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, who trade barbs and banter while waiting for the arrival of a third individual who, we soon suspect, will never show up. And then, of course, nothing of any consequence happens.
Two additional characters wander on and off stage. The tramps talk and bicker some more. Godot never puts in an appearance. As one of the characters remarks: “Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.”
There is no progression or change in the characters, no shift in their situation. Any clear-eyed audience member who has gone into the theatre meaning to judge the thing in as objective a fashion as possible will soon find themselves restless, then bored, then on the cusp of feigning some sort of medical emergency simply to get out of the stalls without causing too much of a fuss.
At this, avid Beckettians are no doubt sprawling on their chaise longues, sucking ferociously on a Gauloise and muttering to themselves that this lack of narrative progression, this absence of change, is the very crux of old Sam’s oeuvre. Confronted with the horrors of the twentieth-century, they say, pointlessness and circularity are the only things which make sense. Laughter in the ruins is all that’s left.
Comments Off on “Samuel Beckett was one of the twentieth century’s very greatest conmen and his dupes continue to relish being parted from their cash”
HMCS Bonaventure – Guide 143
Drachinifel
Published 21 Sep 2019Canada’s last carrier is today’s subject for discussion.
Want to support the channel? – https://www.patreon.com/Drachinifel
Want a shirt/mug/hoodie – https://shop.spreadshirt.com/drachini…
Want a medal? – https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/Drachinifel
Want to talk about ships? https://discord.gg/TYu88mt
Want to get some books? www.amazon.co.uk/shop/drachinifel
Drydock Episodes in podcast format – https://soundcloud.com/user-21912004
Comments Off on HMCS Bonaventure – Guide 143
QotD: Girls and witchcraft
Witchcraft fascinated me. When girls reach that liminal time between child and woman, our bodies transform — and, with them, our sense of control. It’s a strange thing to go from being cosseted and encouraged to desired and despised. It feels a little like dark magic — though not the kind one can control. Unless, of course, you are a witch.
Like the magical artifacts Harry Potter is always stumbling upon, witchcraft offers power. It promises a way to re-shape the world to a girl’s advantage, to gain freedom from parents, to toy with boys’ hearts while numbing one’s own. Male magic fantasies tend to be centred around power and combat — with lightning perpetually emanating from wands and fingertips into the chests of adversaries blown backwards. However, the sort of witchcraft that interests me is more subtle, and sometimes passes unseen. (In real life, such powers originate in sex — but it takes time for a girl to learn that.) It’s no coincidence that the world of witchcraft becomes a dark mirror of our society, reflecting the dispositions and paranoias of our times. When times are good, the witch is portrayed as a benign, bubbly figure; when they are not, the witch becomes malevolent and dark, in line with medieval lore.
Jen Gerson, “Sabrina the Woke Witch is a Disgrace to Baphomet”, Quillette, 2018-11-26.
Comments Off on QotD: Girls and witchcraft
July 12, 2021
“The Royal Guard” – Livgardet and the Kalabalik at Bender – Sabaton History 104 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published 10 Jul 2021From the devastated battlefield of Poltava to the long exile in the Ottoman Empire, Livgardet never abandoned their King. Even when King Karl XII found himself surrounded by thousands of foes, the remaining four men of his Royal Guard stood by his side. Pistols raised and sabers drawn, the Swedes fought through smoke and fire in the Kalabalik at Bender, protecting their King’s life with their own.
Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory
Listen to “The Royal Guard” on the album: https://music.sabaton.net/TheRoyalGuard
Watch the Official Music Video of “The Royal Guard” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZN5b…
Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShopHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Brodén, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Community Manager: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Editor: Karolina Dołęga
Sound Editor: Marek Kaminski
Archive: Reuters/Screenocean – https://www.screenocean.comSources:
– Photo of Axel Rose courtesy of andres fernando allain https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
– Nationalmuseum
– Painting of King Charles XII in Turkey courtesy of Allan Egnell https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…All music by: Sabaton
An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.
Comments Off on “The Royal Guard” – Livgardet and the Kalabalik at Bender – Sabaton History 104 [Official]
Shooting the Ishapore MkIII Vickers-Berthier LMG
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Sep 2017http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
The Vickers-Berthier MkIII was adopted by the Indian army in 1933, and served through World War Two and into the 1970s (at least). It is chambered for the standard .303 British cartridge, fires from an open bolt, and uses top-mounted 30-round magazines. I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I had the chance to fire this one — and it turned out the be an excellent experience.
The rate of fire on the Vickers-Berthier is relatively low, and I found it to be an exceptionally stable and controllable gun to fire from its bipod. I don’t know if it’s the unusual muzzle brake design or other factors as well, but the sight picture remains stable and clear in a way that few other LMGs have matched in my experience.
Thanks to Marstar for letting me examine and shoot their Vickers-Berthier!
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
Comments Off on Shooting the Ishapore MkIII Vickers-Berthier LMG
