Quotulatiousness

November 12, 2021

The Weird And Only Naval Battle of The Franco-Prussian War

Filed under: Americas, France, Germany, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Real Time History
Published 11 Nov 2021

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While the fighting on land continued during the Franco-Prussian War in November 1870, the bizarre and only naval battle of the war took place off the coast of Cuba when the German Meteor and the French Bouvet met in the port of Havana.

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» LITERATURE
Arand, Tobias: 1870/71. Die Geschichte des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges erzählt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018

Arand, Tobias: “Rogerowski oder Rasumofsky? Überlegungen zur nationalen ‘Meistererzählung’ in Fontanes Kriegsgefangen”, in: Fontane-Blätter 105 (2018), p. 61-86

Bauer, Gerhard u.a. (Hrsg.): Krieg – Macht – Nation. Wie das deutsche Kaiserreich entstand. Ausstellungskatalog Dresden Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr. Dresden 2020

Bigelow, John: France and the Confederate Navy 1862-1868. New York, 1888

Farret, “Étude sur les combats livrés sur mer de 1860 à 1880”, Revue Maritime et Coloniale, t. 70, no d’édition,‎ 1881, p. 519-522

Gouttman, Alain: La grande défaite 1870-1871. Paris 2015

Pölking, Hermann and Linn Sackarnd: Der Bruderkrieg. Deutsche und Franzosen 1870/71. Freiburg 2020

Radecke, Gabriele/Rauh, Robert: Fontanes Kriegsgefangenschaft. Wie der Dichter in Frankreich dem Tod entging. Berlin 2020

Tümmler, Holger: Großer Atlas des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges 1870/71. Wolfenbüttel 2010

» SOURCES
Fontane, Theodor: Kriegsgefangen. Erlebtes 1870. Neuausgabe Berlin 2020

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

Kürschner, Joseph (Hrsg.). Der große Krieg in Zeitberichten. Leipzig 1895

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

Roux, Georges: La Guerre de 1870. Paris 1966

Stenzel, Alfred: “Flotte und Küste”, in: Krieg und Sieg 1870-71. Ein Gedenkbuch, hrsg. v. Julius von Plugk-Harttung. Berlin 1895. S. 584-611

“The Naval Duel Near Havana,” Otago Witness, Issue 996, 31 December 1870, p. 11.

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»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Cathérine Pfauth, Prof. Dr. Tobias Arand, Jesse Alexander
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Maps: Battlefield Design
Research by: Cathérine Pfauth, Prof. Dr. Tobias Arand
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Contains licensed material by getty images
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One Pretendian’s “cultural Munchausen syndrome”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Thursday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh updates us on the story of Carrie Bourassa, who had effortlessly surfed to high profile, well-remunerated positions at the University of Saskatchewan and with the federal government largely on the basis of her claimed First Nations background:

Carrie Bourassa with media.
Lead photo in Geoff Leo’s article for the CBC – https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/carrie-bourassa-indigenous

Newspapers have a slightly nasty characteristic: it’s easy for them to get pre-emptively mad when institutions are a little slow to do the right thing, and it’s also easy for them to forget to give credit when those institutions get around to it.

So let’s acknowledge that the federal government and the University of Saskatchewan are dealing — as best they can, almost certainly — with their shared Carrie Bourassa problem.

Two weeks ago, CBC News investigative reporter Geoff Leo published an astonishing tour de force. His feature article established, beyond almost any doubt, that Bourassa, a high-profile Indigenous scholar who told and published countless stories of racist treatment and childhood adversity, is actually a fabulist from a wealthy white family. The Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health soon put Bourassa, its scientific director, on unpaid leave. The U of S suspended her with pay, probably having no better immediate alternative.

[…]

Since Prof. Bourassa was put on ice in her lucrative Aboriginal-health jobs, Indigenous folk have been labouring to explain in the press what was wrong with her concoction and aggressive peddling of a fake Métis upbringing on the mean streets of Regina. Drew Hayden Taylor’s Globe and Mail op-ed about Bourassa’s “cultural Munchausen syndrome” is instructive and funny, but we hope it is all right to tell Aboriginal-Canadians that no white settler with a lick of sense would consider Bourassa’s tapestry of falsehoods to be harmless “fibs”. This may be a self-serving observation, but her confabulations about her personal history wouldn’t be consistent with the standards of a newspaper, let alone those of a university.

About a year ago, the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation gave Bourassa an award (not her first) and published a capsule summary of her career. If you read it, you will notice how she was, from time to time, offered career advancement out of the blue by Indigenous supporters who had been taken in by her stories. Even a white grad student living on ramen in a basement apartment might be a little ticked about this. The University of Saskatchewan’s original claim that Prof. Bourassa hadn’t benefited from claiming Aboriginal ancestry is pathetic hokum: Bourassa tellingly accused her own sister of “looking for … a way to make some money” by accepting Indigenous scholarship funds during her PhD studies.

And it probably occurred to the USask brass sometime between the two press releases that an investigative reporter like Leo, in taking on a topic, always looks a couple articles ahead. Bourassa, for example, claims to have suffered from tuberculosis in her late 20s — a useful credential, unfortunately, for someone studying the field of Indigenous health. It’s useful because the disease has been nearly eliminated among non-Indigenous Canadians: the incidence rate for First Nations is 40 times higher, and the cases tend to be concentrated in remote northern Indigenous communities. Even if we overlook Bourassa’s propensity for creative autobiography … well, if she contracted TB, she was certainly very unlucky.

Armored Vehicles of Operation Torch Pt. 1, by the Chieftain

Filed under: Africa, Germany, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 11 Nov 2021

Chieftain returns to the North African theatre to talk us through the armored fighting vehicles in action around the time of Operation Torch. This episode is part one of two with Chieftain covering the German and Italian vehicles. Here, Chieftain looks at everything from the fearsome Tiger to the nemesis of LRDG: the Sahariana.
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More on the populist success of Hungary’s Victor Orbán

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Scott Alexander looked at a couple of recent biographies of Hungarian politician Victor Orban (linked here). He got some quite interesting responses from his readers, including a long Twitter thread from Lyman Stone, which he’s converted into plain text for ease of reading:

I won’t make you read it all in tweet format. He continues:

1) Dictatorship and democracy. The arguments about Orban cheating in elections might be totally true. I dunno. But that’s sort of irrelevant. Neutral opinion polls nobody disputes show he would have gotten 2/3 under almost any system.

His crude poll share was about 60% before the 2010 election, but given the threshold effects, he’d likely have ended up at a supermajority under almost any system. And as @slatestarcodex [says], a lot of the initiatives that the EU most despises under Orban are initiatives that *everyone agrees* have supermajority public support among Hungarian voters.

Moreover, I agree with @slatestarcodex that if public opinion turned in Hungary, Orban would probably turn on a dime too. The dude loves power. But that should inform our read of what’s going on in Hungary. *Hungarians wanted* a right-nationalist authoritarian leader, *and so they voted for one*, and the electorate has *wanted* recurrent intensifications of that regime. So is it a dictatorship? Or is it a democracy?

This gets at the problem with “democracy” as a concept. Hungary is undeniably Democratic: there is widespread public support for the regime, which is selected by elections, the results of which are a decent approximation of trustworthy and neutral opinion polls. But I think it’s still possibly reasonable to call Orban a dictator. He wields enormous *personal* power, there are few checks on his power, and he uses power to create a *personal* clique of supporters to perpetuate that power and enfeeble the competition.

But this is the point: Democracy and dictatorship aren’t opposites. In fact, they are natural companions! So much so that before the 20th century, “democracy” was often used *literally as a synonym* for “authoritarian and demagogic rule”! Orban is a great example of why the word “democracy” came into ill repute in the past: because it was widely understood that “the people” (often pejoratively “the mob”) will often vote for a strongman to stomp his boot on the face of disliked others. That’s not so much a disagreement with @slatestarcodex as just a comment where I think the modern western liberal mindset obscures understanding the phenomenon of populist leadership.

2) Why admire Orban? Here I think @slatestarcodex misses some important stuff, perhaps because his biographies miss it. Yes, Orban was incompetent in the 90s. So were MOST immediate post-Soviet leaders! And while Orban may have been corrupt, you can compare the personal wealth of the Fidesz clique to the cliques that looted Russia or Ukraine and realize that Hungary got a better class of corrupt leaders than much of eastern Europe. Moreover, Hungary actually had competitive elections with changes of power and leaders who *respected* those results! Maybe they were dirty but, like, it happened! This wasn’t universally true!

So why might Hungarians admire a dissident-cum-parliamentarian who competed for their votes and when defeated responded democratically by adapting to try to win the next election? Because … duh?

But it’s not just that. The big factor that’s absent in all these culturalist accounts of Hungarian politics is … the economy. Hungary went from below-average unemployment rate for its region under Orban 1 to way above-average under the socialists to again below-average under Orban 2.

This is extremely important. A part of Orban’s appeal is that, whether by coincidence or art, he has managed to preside over periods where Hungary’s economic performance was better than a lot of its neighbors, and often fairly obviously so. That is, supporting irredentist nationalism in the form of Orban hasn’t imposed costs on Hungarians: they aren’t like facing sanctions or something or enduring deep economic hardship to stand by their dictator. He’s delivered (comparatively) good times!

So when you have a leader who 1) seems marginally-less-corrupt than regional peers, 2) delivers marginally-better-results than regional peers, and 3) adopts policies that are widely popular … that leader will be popular! Duh!

Update: Fixed broken link.

Britain’s Highly Unusual Crescent-Wing Victor Bomber

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

Dark Skies
Published 2 Nov 2021

The V force was a legendary team of bombers built to serve during the post-war crisis. However, they would not carry ordinary bombs, but nuclear weapons.

As World War II ended, the division between the West and the East became a significant threat to world peace, and shortly before the Cold War began, Britain started working on a modern jet bomber force that could rival any other on the planet.

The Handley Page Victor featured a one-of-kind wing, making it the largest aircraft to break the sound barrier up to that point.

As the British mastered the atomic bomb by the mid-1950s with the exceptional V force and the Victor to deliver it, Britain’s stature among the world’s superpowers significantly solidified.

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Join Dark Skies as we explore the world of aviation with cinematic short documentaries featuring the biggest and fastest airplanes ever built, top-secret military projects, and classified missions with hidden untold true stories. Including US, German, and Soviet warplanes, along with aircraft developments that took place during World War I, World War 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Gulf War, and special operations missions in between.

As images and footage of actual events are not always available, Dark Skies sometimes utilizes similar historical images and footage for dramatic effect and soundtracks for emotional impact. We do our best to keep it as visually accurate as possible.

All content on Dark Skies is researched, produced, and presented in historical context for educational purposes. We are history enthusiasts and are not always experts in some areas, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to us with corrections, additional information, or new ideas.

QotD: The looming quantum computing apocalypse

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We’re reaching peak quantum computing hyperbole. According to a dimwit at the Atlantic, quantum computing will end free will. According to another one at Forbes, “the quantum computing apocalypse is immanent.” Rachel Gutman and Schlomo Dolev know about as much about quantum computing as I do about 12th century Talmudic studies, which is to say, absolutely nothing. They, however, think they know smart people who tell them that this is important: they’ve achieved the perfect human informational centipede. This is unquestionably the right time to go short.

Even the national academy of sciences has taken note that there might be a problem here. They put together 13 actual quantum computing experts who poured cold water on all the hype. They wrote a 200 page review article on the topic, pointing out that even with the most optimistic projections, RSA is safe for another couple of decades, and that there are huge gaps on our knowledge of how to build anything usefully quantum computing. And of course, they also pointed out if QC doesn’t start solving some problems which are interesting to … somebody, the funding is very likely to dry up. Ha, ha; yes, I’ll have some pepper on that steak.

Scott Locklin, “Quantum computing as a field is obvious bullshit”, Locklin on Science, 2019-01-15.

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