The Tank Museum
Published 3 Feb 2023In this episode of Tank Chats Reloaded, David Willey revisits the iconic Little Willie, the world’s first tank. David delves into the historical significance of this revolutionary invention, and we also get an exclusive look inside what’s left of Little Willie.
(more…)
May 16, 2023
See inside Little Willie | The Tank Museum
Comments Off on See inside Little Willie | The Tank Museum
QotD: Ah-nuld
Look at all the remakes — not reboots — of Schwarzenegger films since the turn of the century. They have to lard on all kinds of extraneous bullshit to disguise the fact that they’re recycled Arnold movies. There have been upteen Predator movies, for instance … that all focus on the alien (but it’s the humans — specifically, Arnold — who’s the real predator. Dude. Mind … blown). I can’t be the only one who noticed that Liam Neeson’s Taken franchise is just Commando with a different accent … can I? Or that the Bourne Identity films look an awful lot like Total Recall, minus Mars and the three boobs? Then look at all the actual attempted reboots: Conan the Barbarian. Total Recall itself. And the whatever-you-call-thems that are both remakes and reboots of Schwarzenegger movies, where Schwarzenegger is still in them but isn’t the star: the latest Terminator movies, for instance, not to mention also-rans like The Expendables franchise.
The reason you can’t make an “Arnold movie” without Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man, in a starring role isn’t because he’s such an indispensable thespian. It’s because Schwarzenegger doesn’t have an ironic bone in his body. Even when he’s doing comedy (and I think we can all admit, now that he’s in his 70s and effectively long retired, that he could be quite funny), he’s deadly serious. No matter how ludicrous the situation, he’s always 100% in it. No scriptwriter in the 1980s ever felt it necessary to explain how this enormous Austrian bodybuilder ended up being a colonel in the US Special Forces, or a small-town sheriff in Bumfuck, Idaho, or a New York cop, or a CIA agent, or whatever else. He just went with it, and because he did, we did.
In other words, buying a ticket to a Schwarzenegger flick was — like attending a rasslin’ show — an agreement to step outside of ourselves for two hours. We know The Undertaker isn’t a vampire (or whatever), just like we know there’s no possible sequence of events that ever could’ve happened in the real world that would end with an Austrian bodybuilder as a mattress salesman in Minneapolis. So why bother trying to “explain” it? We all agreed, when we bought the ticket, to put “the real world” aside and enter another. In this world, the spectacle’s world, there are vampires who can body slam and bodybuilders who save the world from Satan.
Those are the givens. It doesn’t matter how ludicrous they are, so long as you don’t break your own rules.
Severian, “Rasslin'”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-07-26.
Comments Off on QotD: Ah-nuld
May 15, 2023
Paul Wells – “Unworkable and swiftly-disavowed tinpot dictatorship is, statistically, one of the least damaging forms of tinpot dictatorship”
Paul Wells follows up last week’s rather disturbing report that the Liberal Party’s big gathering in Ottawa extruded a resolution to get “The Government” to work toward forcing journalists (and those peasant bloggers like Paul Wells) to only publish things that the sources informing it could be “traced” by that same authority:
Last Friday I wrote about a policy resolution at the big Liberal Party of Canada national convention that was, in my opinion, bad. This was the resolution that would have the party “request the government explore options” to “hold on-line information sources accountable” by requiring that they “limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced”.
How do you limit publication to traceable sources? I have to assume you clear the sources. “This resolution has no meaning,” wrote I, “unless it means I would be required to clear my posts through the federal government, before publication, so the ‘traceability’ of my sources could be verified.”
Some people disagreed, but I had a hard time getting them to describe what it could mean if it wasn’t what I thought. I was careful to note that party conventions aren’t binding on governments. Commenters sympathetic to the Trudeau government latched onto all the this-might-mean-nothing language, the stuff about “request” and “explore options.” At their convention, a tiny minority of registered Liberal delegates attended a “policy workshop” at which nothing was debated. Amid considerable confusion about where these resolutions were in the party’s own process — Althia Raj covered it on Twitter; go look if you like — this resolution became party policy with no discussion at all. That was on Saturday.
On Tuesday, Justin Trudeau went before reporters and said no Liberal government would ever implement this Liberal policy. Other cabinet ministers followed suit, and one MP who didn’t benefit from the counsel of the Monday-morning issues-management call had a rougher time executing the U-turn.
Look, I think the amount of self-inflicted ballistic damage to the government’s own foot here is minor. Unworkable and swiftly-disavowed tinpot dictatorship is, statistically, one of the least damaging forms of tinpot dictatorship.
But I want to let everyone in on a secret of my journalism, and indeed of most journalism: Criticism of politicians is often advice to politicians. I actually don’t spend a lot of time hoping governments and opposition parties will keep pursuing self-destructive and country-destructive choices indefinitely. I always hope a bit of mockery, especially pre-emptive mockery, will help inform their choices. If it stings when Wells writes it, it might sting worse when everyone is saying it.
Ministers of the Crown who didn’t need to wait for the Monday-morning issues-management meeting to tell them what to think could have spent the weekend thinking for themselves. They might even have invited their own staffs, riding executives, and Liberals at large to think for themselves. A dozen or so hardy souls, out of 3,500 registered delegates, might then have showed up to the policy workshop willing to debate.
“Uh, Paragraph Two looks hinky. How would a government enforce that?”
“Well, it doesn’t apply to reputable journalists.”
“Great, thanks. Remind me who decides who’s reputable? Any thought on who’ll be making those calls once we’re no longer in government?”
Maybe somebody would have added a friendly amendment. “For greater clarity, nothing in this paragraph impinges …”
I can even imagine a cabinet minister showing up for those floor debates and influencing the party’s direction single-handed. I’ve seen it happen in other parties. But I had Liberal friends over the weekend explain to me that no such thing ever happens. Fine, it’s your funeral. Basically we’re watching a party choose between two different models of public-policy deliberation:
OPTION 1: Smart people think and talk.
OPTION 2: Everybody in the party defends rickety thinking until it blows up in their faces.
I’m not kidding when I tell you most people in political communications would defend Option 2. We’re living in a time that values message over thinking. But folks can’t say I didn’t warn them.
Comments Off on Paul Wells – “Unworkable and swiftly-disavowed tinpot dictatorship is, statistically, one of the least damaging forms of tinpot dictatorship”
Would Canadian voters welcome a new “actually centrist” political party?
Tasha Kheiriddin on the possibility of yet another political party contesting that mythical centrist voting bloc in Canadian elections:
By now, you have probably heard of Centre Ice Canadians. The group was co-founded a year ago by former two-time Conservative leadership candidate Rick Peterson. It made its debut as Centre Ice Conservatives, during the Conservative leadership process, holding a policy conference in Edmonton, followed by similar events in Halifax and Toronto. It published numerous op-eds and got the Canada Pension Plan to disinvest from funds profiting from slave labour in China. It positioned itself as a home for the politically homeless, chiefly Red Tories and Blue Liberals, who felt that neither of their parties were listening to their ideas.
Last week, Centre Ice announced that it would explore the possibility of registering as a political party. It did this following both an external opinion survey of 2000 Canadians, which found that 32% of those polled would likely consider voting for a centrist party in the next election, and a callout to its roughly 2000 supporters, which saw most respondents approve of the concept.
A working group headed by Peterson and New Brunswick MLA Dominic Cardy is now investigating the idea, including a draft constitution, fundraising and a new name, until September 20, at which point Centre Ice will formally decide whether it goes down that road. Observers posit that it could “disrupt the political system”, evoking memories of the Reform Party which did the same thing thirty years ago.
[…]
There’s another saying which management seems to have overlooked: “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”. Leaders traditionally neutralized their opponents by keeping them busy and giving them reason to be loyal. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney made a place for former rival Joe Clark; Stephen Harper brought Peter MacKay into cabinet. In the Liberal camp, Jean Chretien had Paul Martin helm the Finance Portfolio; Trudeau gave Marc Garneau Transport and then Foreign Affairs.
That type of thing hasn’t happened in the current scorched earth climate. Animated by Twitter, where we’ve all said things we regret, it has instead produced a toxic purity test that excommunicates anyone who challenges the party line or criticizes the leader. Only the worthy are allowed in the tent.
That applies equally to the Liberals, who draw lines in the sand for their faithful on all manner of issues from abortion to gun control to internet regulation. Which is why the Centre Ice movement isn’t just about the Conservatives. Many of the people signing up on the organization’s website aren’t members of any party, but they would like to be. But they don’t like the climate of fear in either of the main parties.
They want to be able to express an opinion without being trolled. They want a place that eschews groupthink for group discussion. Whether such a party can exist in today’s politics, or whether it could make any headway in an election, is an open question.
What isn’t in question is that both federal parties have become polarized to their respective ends of the political spectrum: wokeism and populism. That is more unusual for the Liberals than for the Tories – the Liberals were traditionally the party of the centre, derided as the “mushy middle” for their ability to morph into whatever voters wanted at the time, as well as conflating their brand with the image of Canada (tolerant, multicultural, bilingual) in a way the Conservatives did not manage to do.
Comments Off on Would Canadian voters welcome a new “actually centrist” political party?
“Donald Trump is, as a performer, in a class of his own. From the second the show began, he was in command: withering, funny, sharp, powerful.”
I didn’t watch the CNN broadcast that Andrew Sullivan is reluctantly praising here — he still hates and fears Donald Trump, but he has to acknowledge the man’s abilities:
The reason so many are freaking out about CNN’s astonishing ad for the Trump re-election campaign this week is that he was on tip-top form. Donald Trump is, as a performer, in a class of his own. From the second the show began, he was in command: withering, funny, sharp, powerful. He may be one of the most effective and pathological demagogues I’ve ever encountered: capable of lying with staggering sincerity, of making up stories with panache: shameless, and indefatigable.
Now think of Joe Biden, peace be upon him. He can barely get a sentence out without a mumble, a slur, or a confused expression. He seems frail and distant. In a direct contrast between the two old men, there will surely be some voters — and maybe many — who simply back the man who seems capable of doing the job vigorously for four more years. There hasn’t been this kind of contrast since Clinton-Dole (and Dole in 1996 was sharp AF) and Reagan-Mondale (it took Reagan’s debate genius to destroy the concern). Trump, in stark contrast, bulldozed the host Kaitlan Collins, who was far more in charge of facts and details than Biden will ever be.
Shamelessness has a huge appeal. It’s why we can’t see a production of Richard III without at some points egging on the child-murderer. And I confess that watching the deposition conducted by Robbie Kaplan, he got me. When Trump says to Kaplan, after dismissing Carroll as “not his type”, “You would not be my choice of mine either, to be honest with you. I hope you’re not insulted”, I LOLed. It was disgusting — but how could you not laugh at the effrontery?
At one point in the CNN show, Trump took the performance up a notch — sympathizing with E Jean Carroll’s husband:
He was a newscaster, very nice man. She called him an ape, happens to be African-American. Called him an ape — the judge wouldn’t allow us to put that in. Her dog or her cat was named “Vagina”, the judge wouldn’t allow to put that in.
Sorry, but the way he delivered the word “vagina” was worthy of a good stand-up. And the affect — the lone ranger telling the truth while prissy elites tut-tut — channels a vast swathe of the public mood.
The issues are also turning Trump’s way. As Title 42 expires today, a huge influx of fraudulent “asylum” seekers is on the verge of overwhelming what border we have left — some with court dates as far away as 2027. Virtually none will be deported ever. A Marine veteran has been charged with manslaughter after manhandling an out-of-control black man on the subway: a trial that’s catnip for the right. People have vague memories of a pre-Covid economic boom and associate it with Trump. Ukraine will be an increasing headache for Biden, as horrible decisions loom at some point if Ukraine can’t win full liberation of their country.
Biden is tethered to Kamala Harris, who will be seen by many as a possible president by default if Biden kicks the bucket in a few years. And she is an even worse politician and manager than Hillary Clinton. The MSM has spent the last few months attempting to destroy the only viable alternative to Trump, DeSantis, because they’ve actually convinced themselves of a looming “Biden blowout“.
I say the emergency is still here; that Trump is more likely than not returning to the White House as of now; and the interlude of these few precious years when this monster wasn’t daily assaulting our constitution, sanity, and our sense of decency is over.
Get used to it; and strap yourselves in.
Comments Off on “Donald Trump is, as a performer, in a class of his own. From the second the show began, he was in command: withering, funny, sharp, powerful.”
Every Detail of Grand Central Terminal Explained | Architectural Digest
Architectural Digest
Published 6 Jun 2018Historian and author Anthony W. Robins and journalist Sam Roberts of the New York Times guide Architectural Digest through every detail of Grand Central Terminal. Our narrators walk us through the legendary structure from the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Foyer through Vanderbilt Hall to the main concourse (and the famous four-faced clock). From there, we learn more about the underground walkways, whispering gallery, Oyster Bar restaurant, Campbell Apartment, Pershing Square, and more.
(more…)
Comments Off on Every Detail of Grand Central Terminal Explained | Architectural Digest
QotD: How military history shapes cultures and societies
Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian lies beneath this marker
having perished in wheat-bearing Gela
Of his well-known prowess, the grove of Marathon can speak
And long-haired Mede knows it well.If a scholar wants to understand Aeschylus or his plays, don’t they also need to understand this side of his experience too? I know quite a number of scholars who ended up coming to military history this way, looking to answer questions that were not narrowly military, but which ended up touching on war and conflict. For that kind of research – for our potential scholar of Aeschylus – it is important that there be specialists working to understand war and conflict in the period. Of course this is particularly true in understanding historical politics and political narratives, given that most pre-modern states were primarily engines for the raising of revenues for the waging of war (with religious expenditures typically being the only ones comparable in scale).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Military History?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-11-13.
Comments Off on QotD: How military history shapes cultures and societies
May 14, 2023
Garbage data informs the Canadian government’s approach to gun control issues
In The Line, Tim Thurley points out the (totally expected) bias of the data being considered by the federal government:
A selection of weapons (mostly restricted or prohibited in the hands of most Canadians) displayed by Toronto police after confiscation.
Screencap from a CTV News report in 2018.
The Mass Casualty Commission’s firearm recommendations were, rightly, overlooked in the initial phase after the report’s release. They have become relevant these past weeks as gun control groups, the NDP, the Bloc, and the Liberals used them to advocate for sweeping changes to Bill C-21, the government’s controversial gun-control proposals. The Liberals have thus far declined to adopt the MCC’s recommendations, at least in whole, and that’s encouraging. Our lawmakers should be careful. The Mass Casualty Commission’s concluding recommendations on guns and homicide share a problem common to any data analysis. If you use the wrong data, you get a bad output.
Or, to be blunt: garbage in, garbage out.
R. Blake Brown, a professor who contributed a commissioned report to the MCC, suggested that the MCC got all the best research together and simply found the arguments made by gun control groups to be more convincing.
He’s wrong. While the MCC could have been a completely neutral panel objectively weighing the evidence before it, the nakedly selective choice of data inputs and slanted interpretation meant that no unbiased outcome was possible. Indeed, the MCC inputs seem heavily weighed to advance a pro-control agenda, and do so in such an obvious way that the resulting flaws should be immediately clear to those with even a passing knowledge of the study of firearms and firearm homicide.
[…]
Dr. Caillin Langmann is a well-known name in Canadian firearms research, and by far the most prolific author using rigorous statistical methods to examine the effects of gun control on Canadian firearm mortality. No serious analysis of Canadian firearm mortality is possible without his work, and yet his work does not appear on its own and is not cited in the Negin Report. Indeed, his and other critical research does not seem to have informed the final Commission report or recommendations at all.
I asked Dr. Langmann about his exclusion. He told me he offered to appear to present his research but the Commission declined.
It may not be a coincidence that the exclusion of Langmann and other researchers without explicit gun-control agendas was due to the fact — the fact — that the Canadian and comparable research substantively contradicts the Negin Report and the MCC recommendations on firearms. An examination of already-implemented Canadian gun laws including various factors such as prohibition of “paramilitary style” rifles and magazine capacity restrictions all found no impact on mass shootings or mass homicide overall in Canada or on associated fatalities. Instead, mass homicide by both firearm and non-firearm causes gradually declined on its own. The lack of association between gun control and decreased mortality is replicated multiple times in Canadian research.
Guess what? It is also replicated in a detailed statistical analysis of Australian data not mentioned by the Negin Report.
The core research inputs to the Mass Casualty Commission were commissioned from parties with well-established and acknowledged positions on firearms. Written by literal gun control advocates without substantial input from other sources, the contrary research is either ignored or not treated with due academic respect. This damages the credibility of the Commission findings, giving the perception that they were gathering conclusions in search of evidence.
Again, it must be made clear that this wouldn’t have been a problem if the MCC had treated the Negin Report as just one part of the firearm policy research puzzle. It was their failure to do so and the consequent lack of neutrality, lack of engagement with solid research, and complete disregard for engagement with different academic perspectives despite obvious relevant expertise, that taints the Mass Casualty Commission firearm recommendations and severely limits any useful policy conclusions we can gather from their report.
Comments Off on Garbage data informs the Canadian government’s approach to gun control issues
Victory at Sevastopol! – WW2 – Week 246 – May 13, 1944
World War Two
Published 13 May 2023The Soviets push the Axis out of the Crimea this week once and for all. In Italy, the Allies launch a major offensive, and the French make a breakthrough there by week’s end. In China, the Japanese are aiming at Luoyang, but in India at Kohima they’re slowly being pushed back.
(more…)
Comments Off on Victory at Sevastopol! – WW2 – Week 246 – May 13, 1944
The life of the publishing world, fifty years ago
I point out things that prove that the past is a foreign country often enough that I have a blog tag for that purpose. When I first entered the work force, the conditions Ken Whyte describes for employees and managers at a publishing company weren’t all that uncommon (although they were already edging toward the endangered species list):
Fifty years ago, when Richard Charkin […] began his career in the book trade, telephones were wired to desktops and editors (male) wrote their letters and memos in longhand, turning them over to women in the typing pool who knocked them out on carbon paper because the publishing world was slow to photocopiers.
Employees smoked at their desks and drank at lunch. Men wore suits and ties and hats; women long skirts. Living wages were paid and even mid-level jobs came with a car. It was not uncommon for people to spend their whole careers at a single company.
Charkin started at Pergamon Press, an Oxford-based scientific publisher. It held an annual Miss Pergamon contest, essentially a beauty pageant for female employees. The winner received a titled sash, cloak, crown, and the opportunity to greet VIP visitors at company events. Pergamon was considered a progressive company for its time. Needless to say, this was before the dawn of the HR department. Also before marketing and IT departments, but publishers did have guilds, members of which met to discuss business at the pub.
In the mid-1970s, Charkin moved from Pergamon to Oxford University Press, which had traditions of its own. For instance, fortnightly editorial conferences were held at 11 a.m. on Tuesdays (but not in summer when everyone was off on extended vacations). Editors attended in robes and sat around an enormous table. In front of them were inkwells filled with fresh ink.
Charkin worked out of OUP’s Ely House offices in Mayfair. Tea ladies pushed trolleys down the corridors once in the morning and again in the afternoon, dispensing drinks and biscuits. There were three dining rooms on the premises: “one in the basement for all staff, which provided hearty and generously subsidized fare, while on the second floor there was an officers’ dining room, reserved for editors and middle managers, where meals were prepared by a fine chef and the drinks were free. At the very top of the building was the publisher’s dining room, which was exclusively for the use of the head of the London office … and his guests. The food here was sourced from Jackson’s of Piccadilly and the wine list was excellent, with the cellar being overseen by a senior manager at OUP whose job involved spending at least a month in France every year researching and ordering directly from vignerons.”
Class distinctions were rigid enough that two sets of bike racks were required, one for editors, the other for printers. There were a lot of printers: OUP still manufactured its own books and made its own paper, that very thin but indestructible variety once common in Bibles.
You’ll be shocked to learn that Oxford University Press, in operation since 1478, was in deep financial trouble by the 1980s.
In Toronto, this sort of thing was common in the bigger, long-established firms like banks, insurance companies, and even the major grocery chains (the Dominion head office facilities were reportedly top-notch in their day). I imagine it was even more the case in places like New York and Chicago.
Comments Off on The life of the publishing world, fifty years ago
Arming God’s Battalions: a Papal States Rolling Block
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Feb 2023The Remington Rolling Block was a very popular rifle in the 1860s and 1870s, and probably would have been a better choice than the Trapdoor Springfield for the US military. But among the nations that did adopt is were the Papal States. While Vatican City is a tiny sovereign enclave today in Rome, in the 1800s the Pope directly controlled a much larger area, roughly the size of Switzerland early in the 1800s.
Three different models of Rolling Block were adopted by the Papal States in the effort to rebuild their military after a serious defeat in 1860 — rifles, carbines, and musketoons — the latter being what we have today. All three were made by the Nagant Brothers in Liege and can be identified by the Papal crest (the crossed keys of St Peter) on the top of the barrel. Westley Richards in the UK also produced 5,000 rolling block rifles, but these had serious quality problems.
The Nagant Brothers rifles began to arrive in the fall of 1868. They saw service for only a few years, as the departure of French forces in the fall of 1870 (to take part in the Franco-Prussian War) allowed the Italian Army to seize Vatican City without much difficulty. A few survived in the hands of the Pope’s personal guard, but most of these rolling blocks were taken into Italian Army service. They would serve until being replaced by Vetterli rifles, and were eventually sent to Ethiopia as military aid to Emperor Menelik II in the 1880s.
(more…)
Comments Off on Arming God’s Battalions: a Papal States Rolling Block
QotD: The original tabloid journalist
The son of a Congregationalist preacher, Stead grew up in a strict religious household in Northumberland, in a home where theatre was “the Devil’s chapel” and novels “the Devil’s Bible”. Taught to read by his father, the newsman’s nonconformism would inform his campaigns after he moved from the Northern Echo to the Gazette in London.
Stead was most of all famous for the first great newspaper investigation, in 1885, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon“, on the scandal of child prostitution. Stead had bought a girl called Eliza for £5, on the premise that she was to be taken to a brothel on the continent, using quite dubious methods that got him sent to jail for three months.
Despite this, the story succeeded – a national scandal which led to a change in the law, the age of consent raised from 13 to 16. The idea of English girls being trafficked into sex outraged and horrified the public, Stead’s story imprinted itself deeply into the public psyche, to the extent of influencing George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion — thus, Eliza Doolittle.
On the continent it helped to inspire a genre of vaguely pornographic literature about the sexual perversion rife in England, a fantasy that belied the fact that late Victorian London was not a nest of vice, relatively speaking. Most measures of squalor and child abuse had declined in the 19th century and a teenage girl by the end of the century was relatively safe, compared to a predecessor in almost any era; public moral outrage offered protection, even if it could be unforgiving for those same girls who transgressed.
Stead would become the most famous journalist of the era, so renowned that in 1912 he was invited to New York by the US President to attend a conference — and so booked a ticket on a famously unsinkable new liner. He was last seen helping women and children trying to get on to lifeboats, and, true to the chapel ethos of his parents, gave away his lifejacket. He was among the 1,500 who lost their lives on the Titanic.
Ed West, “Our Modern Babylon”, Wrong Side of History, 2023-02-11.
Comments Off on QotD: The original tabloid journalist
May 13, 2023
What was the First Modern War?
Real Time History
Published 12 May 2023The question about the first modern war has caused lively debates among historians and YouTube comment sections alike. In this video we take a look at a few candidates and some arguments why they are or aren’t modern wars.
(more…)
Comments Off on What was the First Modern War?
The original cargo cults
Theophilus Chilton on the origins of the term “cargo cult” and how it mirrors the thinking of so many progressives about “white privilege”:
Ceremonial cross of John Frum cargo cult, Tanna island, New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), 1967.
Photo by Tim Ross via Wikimedia Commons.
Many of us are familiar with the metaphor of the “cargo cult”. The term itself was coined by the famous physicist Richard Feynman (who, ironically, didn’t actually use the term the way he had described it) in a speech he gave about transparency and integrity in science. Briefly, the phenomenon of the cargo cult was observed in the South Pacific during World War II. Pacific Islanders would observe the Americans building runways and control towers, and soon after airplanes full of supplies would land and disgorge their contents of goodies. The islanders would build their own bamboo mockups – runways, towers, even bamboo headsets for the “controllers” – expecting that planes full of food and medicines would come to them as well. Of course, none ever did.
Ultimately, cargo cults rested on a form of magical thinking, on the failure to understand the fundamental reasons for why a phenomenon was taking place. This led to a miscomprehension about how one could obtained the desired benefits. It’s essentially a crude form of philosophical nominalism, where the form and appearance exist without grasping any of the underlying fundamental reality.
This misunderstanding is almost predictable when dealing with a culture that practices some form of primitive polytheism. In most cultures, the ritual — the outward performance of gesture/action/song to petition the gods — must be done exactly the same way as the last time … or the magic doesn’t work. For the islanders whose lives were thrown into utter chaos by the arrival of allied troops on their island, because they could see for themselves that the foreigners’ rituals worked: the food, clothing, trade goods, unfamiliar artifacts just poured on to the island once the ritual airfield was constructed. This is a vastly powerful magic that the islanders would be willing — and were willing — to devote vast efforts to learn for themselves. I quoted Bret Devereaux at length on this point.
In many ways, the current progressive obsession with “white privilege” is essentially the same kind of thinking. For progs and professional PoCs, white “privilege” – access to the benefits of high civilisation obtained through high trust civil society, philosophy, science, technology, and all the rest – is just something that happened, something which white people lucked into without any merit or ability on their part. It could just as easily have happened to anyone else, hence it’s “unfair” that whites get all the benefits of what their ancestors laboured to build.
The cargo cult aspect is essentially what the leftist appropriation of Western history and the invasion of our societies is about – because anyone could have done the West, anyone can keep the West going. White, western Europeans and Anglos aren’t really necessary and since people (like runways and bamboo control towers) seem superficially similar, they can be considered interchangeable so that more pliable replacement populations can be brought in to keep the lights on while yet going along with the globalist program.
The plight of Africa in post-colonial times was discussed here.
Comments Off on The original cargo cults
Arnold Ridley – “Private Charles Godfrey” – a real story from Dad’s Army
The History Chap
Published 1 Feb 2023The story of Arnold Ridley — Private Charles Godfrey — Dad’s Army
After my last video all about Lance Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army I have been inundated by requests for the real story of another character from the classic comedy series: Private Godfrey.
Private Charles Godfrey, played by Arnold Ridley, is an ageing and slightly doddery member of the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard platoon. His comrades are somewhat surprised and concerned when he announces that he was a conscientious objector during the First World War. However, thanks to his sister, the platoon learn his real (well, fictitious as it is a TV comedy show) story. Godfrey was indeed a conscientious objector but like many others he did volunteer to serve his country – just not to kill. Many men who felt likewise, joined the Army Medical Corps. Whilst not fighting they not only served their country and played a valuable role in the war effort but they also put themselves in harm’s way. Many of them became stretcher bearers, going out into no man’s land to fetch the wounded to safety. And many were decorated for their bravery.
William Coltman, became the most decorated NCO in the entire British army during the First World War … and he never fired a shot in anger!I will be telling the story of William Coltman VC in the near future.
Private Charles Godfrey was awarded the Military Medal for bravery during the battle of the Somme.
What makes Godfrey’s character all the more fascinating is that his actor, Arnold Ridley, was no conscientious objector but a volunteer in World War One. he was severly injured at the battle of the Somme in 1916 and discharged the following year.
Indeed, his injuries would influence how he played his character in Dad’s Army.
After the war, Ridley became a play writer. Arnold Ridley penned over 30 pays, the most famous of which was The Ghost Train written in 1923.
At the outbreak of the Second World War he once more volunteered to serve his country. Following the battle of Boulogne in 1940, he was evacuated to Britain, having been injured, once more, he was again given a medical discharge.
For the rest of the war he worked for ENSA – the forces entertainment organisation — and was a member of his local Home Guard. He continued his acting career through the 1940’s and 50’s before landing the role of Private Charles Godfrey in Dads Army in 1968. He was ever-present until the show ended in 1977. By then he was 81 years old.
Arnold Ridley died in 1984 and is buried in Bath Abbey.
(more…)
Comments Off on Arnold Ridley – “Private Charles Godfrey” – a real story from Dad’s Army
