Quotulatiousness

August 14, 2021

Infantry Weapons at Guadalcanal – WW2 Special

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Update: The folks at the World War Two channel have taken down this video due to technical errors in the script. Here’s their explanation.

World War Two
21 hours ago
Video on Infantry Arms at Guadalcanal retracted. Indy explains why:

Hi everyone. Indy here. As most of you know, I do the research and writing for all of the regular weekly episodes here. I host many of the specials as well, though I do not do the research for most of them- occasionally so, if it’s something that’s really in my field of expertise, like geopolitics, strategy, personal stories, communications, and international relations. The research for the other specials is done by a variety of specialists in their fields or historians, so we can maintain the quality you’ve come to expect from us. I understand, though, that many of you have serious issues with the research for the Guadalcanal infantry special. Our apologies for that- the research was done by an historian, a PhD [student], actually, and we also ensured it was double fact-checked, but obviously some serious mistakes slipped through. Live and learn. I will say that I think it is important that you continue to tell us when you take issue with something we present, since we strive to make the most complete and accurate documentary series possible, so although some of them are hard to read we appreciate such feedback from our community.

And this is from the researcher who worked on the script:

Marlon Londoño
18 hours ago
Hey guys! This is Marlon, the PhD student in question who helped with the researching and writing of the episode. Just to give a little background, I’m a volunteer researcher who helps with the channel over the summer while I’m not teaching/researching/taking coursework. I’m a military historian and my main academic focus is on social and cultural military history (i.e. what people’s wartime experiences were like and why. I’m especially interested in how people justify wartime violence and oftentimes the types of weapons they use play a role in that mental process, so that’s the context in which I usually think about weapons on the battlefield).

I’m sorry that I let a lot of you down with the mistakes about the Garand and Arisaka, among others. To be honest, I was surprised to learn they were myths. But I certainly know now, and I don’t think I’ll be forgetting any time soon 😅 One thing that I firmly believe as a researcher and educator is that nobody has a monopoly on the truth, least of all me. I tell that to my students on the first day of class each semester. I certainly don’t presume that the degree I’m pursuing makes me infallible or instantly qualified for anything. And this was a classic example of just how wrong I can be sometimes!

For what it’s worth, I love war history just as much as anyone else in the community, and I’m sorry that my research wasn’t as rigorous as it might otherwise have been. I hope you all might be willing to give any future episodes of mine a second chance, and of course I’m all ears for any mistakes that you want to point out!

English wholesalers, Dutch retailers and the expansion of foreign trade by European sailors

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the changing nature of English foreign trade as possibly one of the main drivers of the unprecedented growth of London from 1550-1650, and how both English and Dutch sailors differed from most of the rest of Europe:

An English merchant ship of the late 16th to early 17th century: this is a replica of the Susan Constant at the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia. The original ship was built sometime before 1607 and rented by the Virginia Company of London to transport the original settlers to Jamestown.
Photo by Nicholas Russon, March 2004.

I am fairly convinced that this transformation was sparked by the changing nature of England’s trade, with its merchants taking near-total control of it themselves, whereas once they had relied on foreign merchants to bring many of their imports to them. And thanks to their adoption of celestial navigation techniques from the Iberians and Italians — learning to read the stars, to find their latitude at sea — the English gained the ability to discover new routes, noting details down for others to come back again and again and create more permanent new trades. In merchants’ parlance of the time, the English increasingly went in search of “the well head” — to buy things at source, where they were cheapest.

This sounds like the common-sense thing to do. But it was surprisingly rare. Very few countries’ merchants attempted to take advantage of such opportunities for arbitrage — to buy where things were cheapest and sell them where they were most expensive. Even the English themselves, despite their newfound search for well heads, rarely exploited arbitrage opportunities to the full. Although they bought at source, they tended, at first, to sell the goods they’d acquired back in London, to serve English consumers rather than taking them to wherever the goods would sell for the highest prices. This was instead the strategy of the Dutch, whose trading techniques were by 1600 said to surpass all others. Indeed, the Dutch were also some of the only merchants who discriminated on prices within markers, “not shaming to retail any commodity by small parts and parcels”, as one English merchant complained, charging a multitude of buyers according to what they thought they could get from them — something that “both English merchants and Italians disdain to do in any country whatsoever.” It was seemingly considered beneath them.

I’m not wholly clear why the English only sold wholesale when they knew that price discrimination was a Dutch advantage. It seems, at first, to be irrational. But I suspect it had something to do with the wider difficulties of trading abroad. For the English and Dutch were quite unusual in Europe in the early seventeenth century for being among the only merchants willing to risk sailing to shores where their own rulers held no sway.

The Hanseatic merchants of the North Sea and Baltic, who had once been dominant in London, had been stripped of their privileges there and displaced by the English, later confining themselves largely to the Baltic. German mercantile efforts were otherwise generally concentrated inland. And French merchants were apparently under-capitalised, or so the English suspected, because “gentlemen do not meddle with traffic, because they think such traffic ignoble and base”. French merchants did occasionally sail down the Atlantic coast to Spain, and into the Mediterranean to trade with Italy and the Ottoman Empire, but overall they were content to have third parties to come to them — there was always the attraction to foreign merchants of being able to buy French wines, salt, linens, and grain.

As for the once-great Italians, they had apparently been impoverished by the Portuguese discovery of a direct route around Africa to the Indian Ocean, and perhaps by the depredations of various Mediterranean predators too — Algerian corsairs, Ottoman galleys, and the like. Although their rulers could themselves be merchants — the Grand Duke of Tuscany, a Medici, was considered the greatest merchant of them all — by this stage the Italians only rarely ventured far abroad themselves, except over land. Indeed, the English considered them impious for not risking the seas, accusing them of blasphemy for not trusting their lives and livelihoods to God. Whereas the Venetian merchant-nobility had once been required to spend time aboard ship, English commentators by 1600 noticed that their mariners were now overwhelmingly Greek. “Their customs have decayed, their ships rotted and their mariners, the pride of their commonwealth all become poltrones” — that is, loafers or idlers — “and the worst accounted in all those seas”. A Tuscan exploration of the coast of South America in 1608, to look into founding a colony in what is now French Guiana, had to be captained and piloted by Englishmen. What reputation the Italians maintained was as financiers and money-exchangers — perhaps because the Genoese were the only merchants permitted to take the vast quantities of New World silver out of Spain.

Great Moments in Unintended Consequences (Vol. 3)

ReasonTV
Published 7 May 2021

Good intentions, bad results.

——————
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reason​

Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
—————-

Window Wealth
The Year: 1696
The Problem: Britain needs money.

The Solution: Tax windows! A residence’s number of windows increases with relative wealth and is easily observed and verified from afar. A perfect revenue generator is born!

Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

To avoid higher taxes, houses were built with fewer windows, and existing windows were bricked up. Tenements were charged as single dwellings, putting them in a higher tax bracket, which then led to rising rents or windowless apartments. The lack of ventilation and sunlight led to greater disease prevalence, stunted growth, and one rather irate Charles Dickens.

It took more than 150 years for politicians to see the error of their ways — perhaps because their view was blocked by bricks.

Loonie Ladies
The Year: 1992
The Problem: Nude dancing is degrading to women and ruining the moral fabric of Alberta, Canada.

The Solution: Establish a one-meter buffer zone between patrons and dancers.

Sounds like total buzzkill! With puritanical intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

It turns out that dancers earn most of their money in the form of tips, and dollar bills don’t fly through the air very well. Thus, the measure designed to protect dancers from degrading treatment resulted in “the loonie toss” — a creepy ritual where naked women are pelted with Canadian one-dollar coins, which are known as loonies.

Way to make the ladies feel special, Alberta.

Gallant Grocers
The Year: 2021
The Problem: Local bureaucrats need to look like they care.

The Solution: Mandate that grocery stores provide “hero pay” to their workers.

Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

Besides the fact that these ordinances may preempt federal labor and equal protection laws, a 28 percent pay raise for employees can be catastrophic to grocery stores that traditionally operate on razor-thin margins. As a result, many underperforming stores closed, resulting in a “hero pay” of sudden unemployment.

Don’t spend it all in one place!

Written and produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg; narrated by Austin Bragg

QotD: Modern parenting

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

I took an informal poll of parents I know. At what age or stage of development can Mom or Dad go ahead and sit down, reasonably assured their little darlings will survive a solo whirl on the jungle gym? Instead of a hard-and-fast answer, what I got was the sense that we hover for numerous and complicated reasons. We fear school buses, babysitters, and sometimes even Grandma and Grandpa, who may not know any better than to let the baby cry a little on her way to sleep. We’re scared adversity will scar our kids or, conversely, that they’ll be bored — a condition that, left untreated, might turn them into school shooters.

But we also fear their independence. We’re up there in the climber because we can’t afford to miss a minute of face time, you see. We believe our physical presence is the linchpin to the children’s emotional well-being and, although we never say so out loud, we want it that way — because it’s central to our well-being. We’re scared the kids will grow up to resent the fact that Mommy works, or — the biggest golem on the list — they just plain won’t like us. And in an age of high divorce rates and transient communities, kids who don’t like us suggest the possibility that we might really end up alone.

Beth Hawkins, “Safe Child Syndrome: Protecting kids to death”, City Pages, Volume 26 – Issue 1267 (posted to the old blog, 2005-04-01).

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