World War Two
Published 5 Apr 2022Few things of the Second World War are more intimidating than the iconic German bunker. Made out of reinforced concrete with a thickness of up to 3.5 meters, these casemates and pillboxes were incredibly tough to destroy. Built to withstand shells and bombs, they provided shelter to troops and civilians alike. But there were also some even larger super-structures. From giant U-Boat shelters and fearsome Flak-Towers, to the ultimate Führerbunker, the Germans perfected the art of bunker building.
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April 6, 2022
How To Build a Nazi Fortress – WW2 Special
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Proposed new Canadian censorship rules will ███████ the ████████ unless we ████ ██
In The Line, Josh Dehaas waves off accusations against Trudeau while also highlighting just how censorious his governments proposed internet bill can be to freedom of expression online:
Comparisons of our prime minister to a dictator are self-evidently ridiculous. But the Russian example is still a case study in the harms of governments having too much power over the flow of information and ideas in a society. Trudeau is no dictator but he does helm a government in which overreach is becoming a frequent and habitual complaint. And one such area in which this government’s more illiberal tendencies are beginning to show is in the realm of media regulation. Despite pushback from groups like the Canadian Constitution Foundation and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Trudeau government seems determined to press ahead with laws to control what you read, write, watch and hear online.
The Liberals have long promised three bills aimed at countering three ostensible problems with online speech. The first bill aims to correct the problem of too few people choosing CanCon, by manipulating what you watch and listen to on platforms like Netflix and Spotify. The second bill would address the problem of advertisers ditching legacy newspapers for Facebook and Google. (Apparently the $600 million bailout was not enough.) The third bill, aimed at so-called “online harms”, would try to prevent people from saying hateful things to each other on social media.
This “online harms” bill is the scariest. Recently rebranded as the “online safety” bill, it’s apparently getting an overhaul from an expert panel and will be re-tabled in a few months. Let’s hope it never comes back. A version tabled last year, Bill C-36, would have created a tribunal wherein people found guilty of “online hate speech” could have been forced to pay up to $20,000 to their accusers, plus up to $50,000 in fines. In some cases, the accusers would be allowed to remain anonymous. Unlike the rarely used hate speech provisions in the Criminal Code, the tribunal would have only needed to find that the speech was hateful on a balance of probabilities, as opposed to the higher standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.
Even more ominously, C-36 would have allowed judges presented with “reasonable grounds” that a person might commit “an offence motivated by bias, prejudice or hate” in the future to threaten the would-be hater with up to 12 months in prison.
I don’t deny that hate speech can lead to harm. But do we really want government and judges deciding what crosses the line? One person’s hateful tweet is another person’s harsh but valuable contribution. Think J.K. Rowling. Think Dave Chapelle. Or think of the University of Toronto student who wrote recently that it was hateful for a professor to show an unflattering cartoon about Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a man whose theocracy executes people for being gay.
Proponents of the bill will tell you that it only applies to the most extreme forms of vilification, but at the end of the day it means government-appointees deciding who gets to say what in an environment that financially incentivizes the aggrieved. People will self-censor even more than they already do.
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Where To Start With Terry Pratchett (And The Debt That I Owe Him)
Mark Stay
Published 6 Nov 2020New to Terry Pratchett? Which book should you read first? I’ve been reading Terry’s books for over 30 years and will give you a quick guided tour of the best places to start with Terry and the Discworld. I also acknowledge the influence of Terry’s writing on my own work and my new book The Crow Folk.
Discover my Witches of Woodville series here: https://witchesofwoodville.com/#bookshop
My blog is here: https://markstaywrites.com
I’m co-presenter of the Bestseller Experiment podcast: https://bestsellerexperiment.com/podc…
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QotD: Haruspicy and Augury in Roman religious observances
Perhaps the most important form of divination in Rome was haruspicy (which spell-check insists is not a word, but is). Performed by a haruspex, haruspicy was the art of determining the will of the gods by examining the entrails of animals – particularly sacrificed animals and most commonly (but not exclusively) the liver. The most common thing haruspicy might tell you is if the sacrifice was accepted: a malformed or otherwise ill-omened liver might indicate that the ritual had failed and that the god had refused the sacrifice.
Remember that the do ut des system is essentially one of bargaining with the gods, and the god you are bargaining with always has the option of simply refusing the bargain. This might mean some failure in the mechanics of the ritual (necessitating it be performed again), or that the god had been offended in some way, but it might also mean something more. A lot of sacrificial rituals were done at the outset of important tasks – before battles, political events, etc. What the god might be telling you then with a failed sacrifice is “DO NOT PROCEED”.
The practitioner is given a bit of wiggle room on how to interrupt a failed sacrifice in this way: it might mean “don’t attack at all”, but it might also mean “don’t attack now”. Roman generals, ready to attack, might repeat the same ritual over and over again, like a runner at the start of a race waiting for the “go” signal.
But more information was potentially available, because the exact nature of the liver and its quality might signal more things. In Rome, it was understood that the very best knowledge in this regard came from the Etruscans (an example of how antiquity lends credibility to ritual – Etruscan religion was old even to the Romans, and thus had acquired a strong reputation). The reading of a liver could be complex: we find “liver models” from both Italy and the Near East with guidance on how to interpret different parts of the liver of a sacrificed animal. This could be fairly specific: famously, it was haruspex who warned Caesar about the danger of the Ides of March (Seut. Caes. 81.2).
Another key system for divining the will of the gods in Rome was augury, the reading of the flights of birds (mostly, there are actually other categories of auspicia); doing so is called taking the auspices, and the men who do so are the augurs. Augurs were particularly important in political matters, taking the auspices for elections and the like. Unfavorable auspices could invalidate even a consular election: the gods get a vote too.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part III: Polling the Gods”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-08.
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