World War Two
Published 30 Jan 2022The Battle of Stalingrad is nearing its end. Strong contingents of the 21st and 62nd Soviet Armies broke through the German defensive lines west of Stalingrad and were now pushing deep into the city. Despite the “Kessel” being split into several parts, the Axis soldiers are still resisting fiercely, fighting street by street, house by house. Yet it is a desperate last stand. Overwhelmed and undersupplied, many Generals push for surrender. But only their commander, the freshly promoted “Field-Marshal” Paulus, has the authority to do so.
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January 31, 2022
Stalingrad: Endgame – WW2 – 179b – January 31, 1943
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“Over the span of human history, yelling at someone to ‘Calm down!’ has a failure rate of 100 per cent”
A few days ago, Matt Gurney reported on the trucker convoy just as the first vehicles began to arrive in Ottawa (and the Prime Minister announced he’d been exposed to someone with the Wuhan Coronavirus and would go into isolation).
Posted to Twitter by @KatherineZupan https://twitter.com/KatherineZupan/status/1486164240364814337/photo/1
I don’t remember who said this; I’d give proper credit if I could. But I do remember it made me laugh, largely because it was true. Over the span of human history, yelling at someone to “Calm down!” has a failure rate of 100 per cent.
Two years into this pandemic, Canadians are angry and frustrated and anxious. Much of this is driven by the stress of COVID, but not all of it. There are good reasons to be angry. There are also bad reasons to be angry and right now people from both categories are streaming into our nation’s capital.
As I write this, it is Friday morning. The first protesters have begun to arrive in the capital for a large protest. It’s been described as a trucker convoy, though initial reports suggest many people are arriving in their normal, everyday vehicles. There’s no reliable estimate yet of its size, but while it doesn’t seem to be tracking toward the tens of thousands of vehicles some of its boosters had claimed, it’s clearly large enough. Hundreds of vehicles? Low thousands? We’ll find out. However many there are, though, the people inside them are angry, and they want to be heard.
[…]
I’m a realist. There will always be a fringe — a fringe on both sides of the spectrum. The right-wing fringe, which is the concern today, is fired up and self-sustaining. It’s global in scope and has detached itself so thoroughly from the mainstream that traditional outreach tools like education via media and societal institutions won’t work — the media and the institutions are among the preferred targets of the fringe. You’re not going to talk these guys down by citing the Toronto Star, or, indeed, The Line. The movement can sustain itself on social networks with all the misinfo it can create indefinitely. We’re stuck with it. But if we want to keep it a fringe, we need to isolate it and wall it off by keeping our moderate institutions strong and competent.
And we’re not doing that, are we? The greatest bulwark against expansion of the fringes is a confident, functional centre, and as we often recount here at The Line, Canadian institutions (and many others more generally across the Western world) are in a bit of a state, aren’t they?
We have a military that can’t fight. A federal government that can’t procure pistols for the army or pay its own employees. The best and brightest public health leaders we’ve got told us that the risk to Canada from COVID-19 was low, until it wasn’t, and then they thoroughly botched the response. Inflation is heating up, food insecurity is rising, you can’t buy a house anywhere near one of our major cities unless your parents can spot you the first million bucks, and in much of the country, the schools haven’t functioned properly in two years. Hell, here in Toronto, it took the city 10 days — ten! — to clear the snow from the streets after a recent blizzard.
Canada is increasingly, as Lauren Dobson-Hughes wrote so aptly here, not fit for purpose. All of us know that things can be better and need to be better, and it’s not happening. And we all know why — our political class, as a whole, isn’t up to it. It’s either beyond their ability or simply not of interest. The elected officials and their would-be successors are too often content to dunk on their opponents and wage meme wars while the problems we face get worse and more obvious and the partisan divide ever-more entrenched. Some of the challenges are hard, but not all of them are as hard as we make them. And so what we’re left with is anger, a churning rage that is constantly searching for a new outlet or grievance. Again, is it any surprise that both the Conservatives and the Liberals are opposed by more than 70 per cent of the electorate?
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The Ram | Canada’s Most Successful Failure
Red Wrench Films
Published 4 Dec 2020A Canadian Franken-tank that pre-dated the M4 Sherman, the Ram would be an icon of Canada’s industry in the early war years. Ultimately a failure as a battle tank, variants of the vehicle would see combat in Normandy and beyond, as the Kangaroo APC which revolutionised mechanised warfare in 1944 and 1945.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated, I’m always trying to improve.
Any suggestions for the next video? Leave it down in the comments or message me. 🙂
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Please note that the footage I can find on these vehicles is scarce and sometimes the video will not match properly or will perhaps be slightly inaccurate.
Sources:
https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2/ca…
https://www.dday-overlord.com/en/mate…
https://www.friends-amis.org/index.ph…
http://panzerserra.blogspot.com/2015/…Intuit256 by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…
Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-…
Artist: http://incompetech.com/
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QotD: Weird attempts to violate the Efficient Markets Hypothesis
There’s a lot more to this book, but it all seems to be pointing at the same central, hard-to-describe idea. Something like “All progress comes from violations of the efficient market hypothesis, so you had better believe these are possible, and you had better get good at finding them.”
The book begins and ends with a celebration of contrarianism. Contrarians are the only people who will ever be able to violate the EMH. Not every weird thing nobody else is doing will earn you a billion dollars, but every billion-dollar plan has to involve a weird thing nobody else is doing.
Unfortunately, “attempt to find violations of the EMH” is not a weird thing nobody else is doing. Half of Silicon Valley has read Zero To One by now. Weirdness is anti-inductive. If everyone else knows weirdness wins, good luck being weirder than everyone else.
Thiel describes how his venture capital firm would auto-reject anyone who came in wearing a suit. He explains this was a cultural indicator: MBAs wear suits, techies dress casually, and the best tech companies are built by techies coming out of tech culture. This all seems reasonable enough.
But I have heard other people take this strategy too far. They say suit-wearers are boring conformist people who think they have to look good; T-shirt-wearers are bold contrarians who expect to be judged by their ideas alone. Obviously this doesn’t work. Obviously as soon as this gets out – and it must have gotten out, I’ve never been within a mile of the tech industry and even I know it – every conformist putting image over substance starts wearing a t-shirt and jeans.
When everybody is already trying to be weird, who wins?
Part of the answer is must be that being weird is a skill like any other skill. Or rather, it’s very easy to go to an interview with Peter Thiel wearing a clown suit, and it will certainly make you stand out. But will it be “contrarian”? Or will it just be random? Anyone can conceive of the idea of wearing a clown suit; it doesn’t demonstrate anything out of the ordinary except perhaps unusual courage. The real difficulty is to be interestingly contrarian and, if possible, correct.
(I wrote that paragraph, and then I remembered that I know one person high up in Peter Thiel’s organization, and he dresses like a pirate during random non-pirate-related social situations. I always assumed he didn’t do this in front of Peter Thiel, but I just realized I have no evidence for that. If this advice lands you a job at Thiel Capital, please remember me after you’ve made your first million.)
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Zero to One”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-01-31.
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