Real Time History
Published 30 Jul 2022Get CuriosityStream + Watch Rhineland 45 on Nebula: https://curiositystream.com/realtimeh…
The Rhine river was the last major natural obstacle on the Western Front of WW2 in early 1945. The Allied armies needed to cross the symbolic river to enter the heart of Nazi Germany. While General Patton’s 1st Army crossed the river at Remagen first, the actual set-piece battle of the Rhine took place further north and involved the biggest airborne operation in a single day in the entire war.
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August 2, 2022
The Last Battle in the West – How The Allies Crossed The Rhine 1945
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“Is this ok? And this?” – The pitfalls of the “affirmative consent” model
Blake Smith recounts how the affirmative consent model — so beloved of the always-online contingent of GenZ — attempts to codify and regulate the sexual dance:
“Is it okay if I touch you?” Half an hour after I’d started chatting with this guy on Grindr he was in my bedroom, beginning a series of questions meant to lead from touching to any number of other acts. I suppose he expected, or hoped for, an enthusiastic “yes!”, signalling what the orientation-day workshops on college campuses call “affirmative consent”. But it didn’t occur to me to answer with the eagerness of a child agreeing to dessert. Instead I tried, with a soft laugh and what I hoped was a seductive “ok”, to seem as if I needed my reticence knocked out of me.
What I got were more questions. “Is this ok? And this?” Soon I began to wonder: “Is it ok?” I’d thought it was when I’d told him to come over. But it’s one thing to want someone in an unspecified way, quite another to start itemising what it is you actually want from them. With my own desire in doubt, I started to feel the very thing this line of interrogation had been meant to avoid. Instead of making consent as simple as saying “yes”, these questions had plunged me into a deeply unsexy uncertainty.
In reading me his sexual questionnaire, my partner was showing me that he’d internalised the ethic of “consent”, which over the past decade has emerged as the dominant liberal framework for distinguishing between moral and immoral sex. At the core of this ethic is explicitness. The purpose is to make sex — and all of its constituent acts — something one can and should directly say “yes” or “no” to, a contract negotiated between individuals.
This model of consent has been roundly criticised for deflating erotic tension, leading to sometimes-cringeworthy campaigns to insist that “consent is sexy” (“If asking for consent ruins sex you’re what? A rapist who sucks at talking dirty?’, reads one viral Tumblr post). But the deeper problem with this model is that it produces, or rather reveals, exactly what it is meant to avoid, which is the ineradicable ambivalence at the heart of sex. In other words, while we can and should maintain a distinction between consensual and non-consensual acts, there is an important sense in which we are never able to say “yes” to sex. Indeed, enjoying sex seems to involve a certain suspension of our usual relationship to ourselves, one in which we are overtaken not so much by the other person as by sex itself.
The original sexual relation — prior to the one we have with any particular person — is our relation to sex itself. This relation is not consensual but something we experience as a given. We are born, we mature, and at some point in this process we discover that we our prisoners of our sexuality. Sex, after all, makes us uncomfortable. It can conjure feelings of disgust and embarrassment. It can be a distraction, an excruciating deprivation, even a source of catastrophic humiliation. We notice how attractive the “wrong” person is — a boyfriend’s brother, an ex, a colleague, a student — and feel violated by our own urges. Sex with a partner works, when and to the extent that it does, in part by letting us suspend our inhibitions and want things without having to admit to ourselves that we want them.
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M34: The Berthier Converted to the 7.5mm Rimless Cartridge
Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Aug 2017http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
With the end of World War One, it was finally possible for the French military to replace the 8mm Lebel cartridge with a modern rimless cartridge, and they wasted no time in doing so. By 1924 a new round had been adopted, and along with it a new modern light machine gun. Next, the arsenals would start working on converting 8mm rifles to the new cartridge. The first candidate was the Lebel, and in 1927 a conversion was approved and a batch of a few hundred made — but this was a more expensive and time-consuming process than anyone wanted. After some brief trials, it was decided to work on adapting the Berthier instead, and in 1934 a conversion designed from St Etienne was approved as the 1907/15-M34.
This new design used a new 22.5″ barrel (570mm), a Mauser style internal 5-round double stack magazine, and new sights. The receivers and trigger parts were retained from the rifles being converted, along with the nosecaps and barrel bands, but not much else. Still, these conversions were put into production alongside the manufacture of new MAS-36 bolt action rifles. By the time of the German invasion about 63,000 M34 Berthiers had been converted, and were issued to frontline troops. They would fight in the Battle of France, and would also be used by German occupation forces as the Gewehr 241(f).
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QotD: Basic College Girl (aka “Becky”)
What’s the point of being a Metalhead these days? At best, you’ll get a gold sticker and a participation trophy like everyone else. At worst, you’ll get diagnosed with some bullshit “learning disorder” and they’ll zombie you out on powerful prescription psychotropics. The only lesson this teaches is: Come to the attention of the authorities at your peril.
That’s the effect on guys, at any rate. Bad as that is, it’s far worse on girls. Guys establish social hierarchy through conflict; when they can’t compete with each other, they drop out and embrace the Ritalin Zombie lifestyle of video games and onanism. Girls compete through approval-seeking, which, since nowadays nobody’s different from anybody and everyone’s the best at everything, is easily channeled into conspicuous consumption. Hence all the items on that list.
For the Basic College Girl, then, conformism is a virtue. In fact, it’s the highest virtue — the “winner” is the one who does nothing, says nothing, thinks nothing but that which gets upvoted on social media …
… or downvoted on social media, as the case may be. Self-esteem culture has completely bypassed the normal feedback loops. Back in the days of meatspace-only communication, strong signals of disapproval from your peers were, 99 times out of 100, clear indicators that you’re doing it wrong. If the kids are making fun of your personal hygiene, then unless your name really is “Dick Smelley”, you need to take a long hard look at your showering habits. Kids can be horribly cruel, but most of the time they’re not wrong. And yes, bullying can (and often did) go overboard, but generally “stop being such a dork!” is great life advice, and the process of figuring out just what you’re doing that’s so dorky, and how to stop it, is crucial for one’s social development.
Social media changes all that. Anyone who has ever written a blog post — really, anyone who has ever made a substantive comment on a blog post — has had the experience of some drive-by troll shitting on you. As functional adults who grew up in meatspace we recognize this for what it is, and ignore it. But imagine that you hadn’t grown up in meatspace. What if you mistake this for substantive criticism? As it’s not psychologically sustainable to take it that way for long, you do what the Basic College Girl does: You call the commenter a “h8r” and, crucially, you consider having “h8rs” as confirmation that whatever you’re doing is right. After all, they couldn’t “h8” if they weren’t thinking about you.
Thus “approval-seeking”, a.k.a. chick competition, curdles into an attitude where you actively seek out “h8rs” to annoy.
This is where Normals grossly underestimate women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I’m personally terrified of AOC, because she is the embodiment of the Basic College Girl. Basic College Girls can’t be bargained with, they can’t be reasoned with, and the reason for both is: Both “bargaining” and “reasoning” imply that you think she’s doing something wrong, which is “h8”. And since “ur h8in”, that means you’re thinking about her more than she’s thinking about you, which means she’s validated, which means she wins. Which means she’s not only going to keep on doing what she’s doing, but will crank it up past 11, in order get more h8, to attract more h8rz.
This is our future. Since the only way to deal with a Basic College Girl is to say “no” — all the time, to everything, unconditionally — and we as a society have lost the ability to do that, we’re screwed. Get to know your new mistress. Xzhyr name is Becky, and she’s everywhere.
Severian, “The Basic College Girl”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-24.
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