Quotulatiousness

October 1, 2021

This French General Saved Strasbourg From Total Destruction During the Franco-Prussian War 1870

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 30 Sep 2021

The symbolic city of Strasbourg had been besieged since the early stages of the Franco-Prussian War. The German siege troops are ready to breach the walls of the city and take it by storm. To avoid the destruction of the city, French general Uhrich surrenders and chooses, in his view, honor above glory.

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» LITERATURE
Arand, Tobias: Gestorben für “Vaterland” und “Patrie”. Die toten Krieger aus dem Feldzug von 1870/71 auf dem “Alten Friedhof” in Ludwigsburg. Ludwigsburg 2012

Ders.: 1870/71. Der Deutsch-Französische Krieg erzählt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018

Chrastil, Rachel: The Siege of Strasbourg. Cambridge, 2014

» SOURCES
Busch, Moritz: Graf Bismarck und seine Leute vor Paris. Bd. 1. Leipzig 1878

Du Casse, Albert: Journal authentique du Siège de Straßbourg. Paris 1871

Fischbach, Gustave: Le siège et le bombardement de Strasbourg, Paris, 1871

Fontane, Theodor: Der Krieg gegen Frankreich 1870-1871. Bd. 2. Berlin 1874

Kriegsgeschichtliche Abtheilung des Großen Generalstabs (Hrsg.): Der deutsch-französische Krieg 1870-71. II.1. Berlin 1878

Meisner, Heinrich Otto (Hrsg.): Kaiser Friedrich III. Das Kriegstagebuch von 1870/71. Berlin, Leipzig 1926

N.N. Straßbourg. Paris 1874

N.N. (Hrsg.): Theodor Fontane. Kriegsgefangen – Erlebtes 1870. Briefe 1870/71. Berlin (0st) 1984

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Social media proves Derrida correct – “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (“there is nothing outside the text”)

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A look at how social media — especially Twitter — shows that Derrida had a valid point … even if that isn’t the original intent.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004).
Photo from https://bettyrojtman.huji.ac.il/media-gallery/detail/15698/15538 via Wikimedia Commons.

Derrida once said “il n’y a pas de hors-texte“, “there is nothing outside the text”, and since the social damage to words uttered ratio of that phrase must be among the highest in history, it’s worth exploring. Just so we’re clear, I have no idea what Derrida was trying to do with “deconstruction”, outside of the most basic general concept (I often doubt Derrida his own self had any idea what he was trying to do, but that’s irrelevant). But let’s do some “deconstruction” of our own on that phrase, since that has some interesting implications.

If you take it as written — that there is nothing outside the text; that is, that the text exists as a complete unit of meaning, for its own sake — then it seems to argue for a kind of “positivism” in communications. Something like Orwell’s desire to develop “window pane” prose — writing so clear that the author would disappear and only the ideas would come through, unfiltered. Alas, this is a habit of mind that seems impossible to develop. No matter how clear your prose is, “writing” is one of those dialectical relationships so beloved of Marxists and stoned sophomores (lot of overlap between those groups, admittedly). In some vague, yet real and obvious, way, “writing” doesn’t exist apart from “reading”. Sure, sure, you can make marks on a page, but that’s all it is, until someone sits down to read it …

… at which point his personality comes into play, his worldview, his circumstances, his history, to be somewhat pretentious about it. And this will be true even if — in a lot of cases, especially if — you confine your prose to simple statements of fact. For instance, back in the early days of smartphones, I watched a minor miscommunication between a buddy and his girlfriend escalate into something very close to a relationship-ending fight, simply because neither party would stop texting and, you know, actually use the telephone they were texting with. A five minute phone call would’ve straightened it all out, and needless to say a face-to-face chat would’ve solved the “problem” in about ten seconds, but since text messages are devoid of subcommunication and, crucially, context, each party naturally brings his or her own biases to it, and, well … screaming, relationship-ending blowout for the win.

See also: Twitter. Like most people, I gave it a look-see when I first heard about it. I quickly concluded that it wasn’t for me. Not because it was vapid garbage, you understand — Facebook was always vapid garbage, but it had some utility for all that, as Twitter does — but because I just don’t think in discrete chunks the way Twitter requires. I just can’t process the fact that “replies” are their own distinct utterances, devoid of all other context, that can come in at random times. A Twitter “thread” is a mad babble of people shouting past each other; it’s not “communication” in any sense my brain can handle, so I dropped it …

The Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron – Voyage of the Damned

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Drachinifel
Published 13 Mar 2019

The story of a few good men’s struggle, against their own commanders, their own fleet, their own ships and their own men.

Want to support the channel? – https://www.patreon.com/Drachinifel

Want to talk about ships? https://discord.gg/TYu88mt

Music – https://www.youtube.com/c/NCMEpicMusic

QotD: Raising your daughter to be “premium dating fodder”

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

Let’s start with the fact that apparently there are so many women getting “ghosted” (abandoned by men after brief romantic encounters) that they now constitute a demographic cohort big enough to be a presidential voting bloc.

Which is surprising, because for the last twenty years or so, American girls have been raised from birth to be premium dating fodder, primed from the first whiff of puberty to be Available for Sex on Saturday Night. So why are they being ghosted in droves? Abandoned and left to die alone, clutching their pets and Warren for President signs?

You’d think these girls would be experts at snagging a mate. Years of sex ed, birth control pills, and permission to date early and often with no judgement from the grownups should have guaranteed they’d have suitors dangling from their every finger, lines outside the door, dates every night, so many engagement rings shoved under their noses they’d be blinded by the shimmering sight of all those diamonds nestled against black velvet.

What happened?

Parenting: The New Sex Trafficking

Munchausen by proxy is a mental illness in which the mother (it’s almost always the mother) injures or sickens her own child on purpose for attention and sympathy. Grooming is a crime in which an adult nurtures a child over a long period of time to be open to receiving sexual advances.

American parenting is starting to resemble a terrifying combination of both.

How else to explain why girls are being turned out — groomed for extreme antisocial sexual behavior from a young age — not by pimps, but by their parents and teachers?

When it comes to sex ed, I believe in the screenwriting theory known as Chekhov’s gun: if you show a gun in the first act, it must be fired by the third. If you show kids the sex toys (and worse) in the first grade, the sex toys will be used by high school.

Recently, NPR published “What Your Teen Wishes You Knew About Sex Education”. In the article, we meet Electra McGrath-Skrzydlewski, who made a point of telling her fourth-grade daughter Lily, well, everything. “She was very open from the get-go, even before those were things that I needed to know about,” her daughter recounts.

Lily came out as pansexual at age 12.

At an institutional level, we are creating a cursed generation of females expert at every imaginable permutation of sex with an infinite number of partners, while largely shunning the other thing, the main thing, the only thing still emitting any heat in the cold, merciless hearth of contemporary life: the dream of forming a family.

Because the shocking truth is: No one wants to wife a sex expert.

Peachy Keenan, “Big Pimping: How American Parents Turn Their Daughters Out”, The American Mind, 2020-03-05.

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