Quotulatiousness

May 9, 2023

How to destroy an industry with one simple trick

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia on the precipitous rise and calamitous decline of the clickbait journalism model:

I was going to call this story the “tragedy of American journalism”. But when you dig into the details, it’s more a farce.

Let’s start with act one of this comedy. I could almost begin anywhere, but I picked an especially ridiculous case study — just wait until you learn the reason why.

Did that catch your attention?

It was supposed to. And I learned that from a now (mostly) forgotten website called Upworthy.

Almost exactly 10 years ago, Upworthy was “the fastest growing media site of all time”, according to Fast Company. They had turned news into a science. Upworthy was the future of journalism.

“Upworthy is known for its use of data to drive growth, testing up to 16 different headlines for a single story,” enthused that bright-eyed reporter for Fast Company. The end result was headlines so irresistible, millions of people clicked on them.

Here are some examples:

You get the idea. The headline is in two parts — and it’s just a come-on. You have no idea what the article is about until you click on the link.

That was the whole point. But just wait until you learn the problem with this.

Facebook and other social media sites eventually discovered that people clicked on these links, but didn’t spent much time with the Upworthy articles — and rarely gave them likes and shares.

The stories just weren’t very good — and certainly not as interesting as the headlines. So the algorithms started to punish clickbait articles of this sort.

The Upworthy empire collapsed as quickly as it had risen.

In retrospect, the problem with this gimmicky strategy is obvious. If you trick people into clicking on garbage, your metrics are impressive for a few months. But eventually people can smell the garbage without even clicking on it.

There’s also a deeper reason for this collapse — which I’ll get to in a moment. And it helps us understand the current problems with journalism. But first we need to look at a couple more case studies.

The Republicans’ moment in the sun rain

Filed under: Britain — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I joked on Coronation Day that the only people not trying to have a good experience there were the British republicans, but they did get a bit more attention due to their proximity to the Royal Procession than they normally manage:

I mentioned before that it was a happy crowd, with high spirits. The crowd didn’t strike me as remarkable, which is to say, there wasn’t anything particularly notable about it. It was mixed. You’d find every age group and colour there, as well as a smattering of obvious tourists. Lots of people had little Union Jacks they would wave or tuck into the brims of hats or under backpack straps. Some wore full-sized flags as capes. A few young men, who’d obviously been drinking either since early that morning or perhaps the night before, were there in cheap royalty costumes — robes and plastic crowns. The way they were going, I had doubts they’d last much longer. One in particular seemed a bit wobbly on his feet.

One young woman with them had somehow attached a frisbee to her head, in delightfully mockery of the absurd hats women seem to love wearing to royal events. It made me laugh. So begins and ends The Line‘s coronation-related hat commentary.

One of a collection of photos from Kim du Toit’s post-coronation post showing many (perhaps most) of the Republican protestors along the parade route.
https://www.kimdutoit.com/2023/05/08/monday-funnies-post-coronation-edition/

Quite near to the front of the viewing area, just off to the left of Nelson’s Column, was a group of a few dozen republican protesters. I have to remind my North American readers — I don’t mean U.S. Republicans, the of-late MAGA-infused husk of the once Grand Old Party. These are British republicans, an arguably even more baffling breed: these are the people that want Britain to be a republic. They too were a mixed group, but as I wandered over to join them, I did note something interesting. I had expected them to be younger and more ethnically diverse than the rest of the crowd. They weren’t. I don’t know if I’d go as far as saying that they were less diverse, but my sense was that, at least in terms of the age of the crowd of protesters, maybe they were a touch older than the rest? In any case, it would have been a near-run thing, but that was one of the only things that really jumped out at me about the protest. My assumption that they’d be younger, more diverse, more obviously progressive was wrong. If they’d dropped their yellow flags and banners and quit their chanting of “NOT MY KING!”, they’d have blended in with the rest.

It started to rain around this time. It’s England, of course it was raining. I’d come prepared with a rain jacket so wasn’t deterred, but the rain did have one admittedly lousy impact. Umbrellas. I’d been gradually able to work my way up quite close to the front of the crowd — I’d stuck close to the republicans and it seems that many people tried to give them a wide berth, and I’d been able to shuffle my way gradually forward. Nelson’s Column was to the right, behind me. To my right and front was Admiralty Arch. And off in the distance, but not too far, was Westminster Abbey itself. It was a pretty perfect place to view the procession.

But for the umbrellas. Once they opened up, all one could see was umbrellas.

And that’s how it stayed, to be honest. Troops began to march past in perfect ranks. Bands struck up patriotic songs. The crowd cheered and more than a few sang. One loud female voice — a surprisingly lovely one — struck up The Star Spangled Banner — which was either some kind of deliberate prank or just a very historically confused soul getting caught up in the moment. I heard the clopping of hooves and the crowd went absolutely wild, and suddenly, thousands of arms shot up into the air holding smartphones, every person present seeking a better angle for their videos. The arms and the umbrellas made it virtually impossible to see a damn thing. (See this video by a New York Times team: they must have been standing within 50 feet of where I was, a bit off to my left. You’ll see what I mean.)

That was from Matt Gurney’s sleep-deprived view of the procession from The Line (that’s not editorializing on my part — he hadn’t slept on the plane from Toronto and got to London at 7am on Coronation Day). In what seemed like a useful break in the public celebrations, he snuck away to get some sustenance and be out of the rain for a bit. When he returned it was lowlight time for the Republicans:

After I’d polished off the pint, I headed back out, back to the square, and that’s where things got interesting. I figured I’d get back to my former spot near the chanting republicans, and did so, no problem. But I noticed there suddenly seemed to be an awful lot of cops around … all heading that way. As in: right toward me, and the chanting people I was standing near. Oops. I left, working my way around the crowd, heading back the way I came from my hotel, and found myself actually facing a rank of advancing cops. Oops again. One had a badge that said inspector, and I walked right up and told him I was a Canadian journalist just watching things. He grinned at me and said, “Alright, mate, come this way,” and had a security guard walk me through the police. I thus ended up missing what has proven to be a controversial event and perhaps the only unhappy moment I know of during the coronation, at least in my area: a bunch of the chanting republicans were arrested just moments after I got out of dodge, and then large metal screen barriers were thrown up, closing off the square due to, apparently, overcrowding. People could leave but no one new could enter.

My sense, as I walked away, was that there was no reason to arrest anyone. (And as I said, this is proving controversial.) I hadn’t seen anything getting out of hand. There had been some chanting and counter-chanting and even some heckling back and forth, but it had all seemed in good enough spirits. Even some of the boos sent at the republicans — two young men with flags had been hamming it up in the main crowd, apart from the main blob of republicans — had seemed in good humour. I don’t know what the police saw or knew. But I couldn’t tell you why they’d moved then and not before, or later. As for overcrowding, I don’t think so. The square really wasn’t all that full. It seemed less full at that moment than it had been when the procession had passed on the way to the abbey. But the barriers seemed to go up quickly, everywhere. Literally everywhere.

And though I was glad to have avoided getting caught up in the Cops vs. Chanting Republicans, I was now on the wrong side of the barriers.

In The Critic, Kittie Helmick recounts finding herself in the vicinity of the “NOT MY KING!” group:

“You seem to find this whole thing rather amusing,” snapped a short angry man with a Not My King sign, about half an hour into the Republic protest against the coronation of King Charles III. I must admit I did. Kettled into a small enclave just off Trafalgar Square, an angry swell of old school socialists, Twitter anarchists, Lib Dem mums, eccentric vicars, boomer hippies, blue haired students and Covid conspiracists had somehow found themselves part of the coronation spectacle. Before the bells of St Martin in the Fields, the full shouty brunt of British republicanism was aimed at a bewildered stream of Chinese tourists and young families out for a day in London.

The survival of the British monarchy is one of the great wonders of modern history. Spending the morning of the coronation with Republic, it began to seem less mysterious. Despite everything in recent years, the Monarchy is still liked more than most of our institutions and probably every one of our elected politicians. No one gathered there could really explain why. The arguments were articulated in between the shouty chanting: things about “modern Democracy” and a “family of Lizards”, none of which quite landed the blow as the day unfolded around us.

Somewhere beyond the crowds, towards Westminster Abbey, an ageing, eccentric dandyish farmer, who secretly wants to be King of Transylvania, was being anointed in holy oil and crowned by an Archbishop wearing hearing aids in a seven hundred year old chair vandalised by 18th century schoolboys. All the while this ceremony was being fawned over across the world by everyone from Kay Burley to one of the world’s most remote tribes. None of it made sense, and that is precisely the point.

Earlier that morning, the CEO of Republic Graham Smith, a man not even the protestors could name, achieved the greatest success of his kind since Cromwell, by being arrested at the hands of the jobsworth Met. For a brief moment, a shiver of excitement spread through the protest. Whilst the country was entranced by a fugue of sombre ritual and Zadok the Priest, Republic were experiencing their own desired reality unfold on the streets of London. Here was a police state enforcing the will of a “politically illiterate” nation brainwashed by bunting and tabloid journalism. The mask was finally off. The incoherent gaggle of shouty slogans and reddit thread arguments made sense. The fight was here and now.

Except that was all a fantasy too. As stupid as the arrests were, nothing could disguise the fact this was a fringe event for a movement that just can’t seem to take off — a Coronation curio to gawp at. “They’re a bunch of wronguns, aren’t they?” said one bored steward to me as we watched a man larping Les Miserables as he chanted Not My King at a trio of giggling Chinese students. The deeper I dug into the many arguments and protestations offered as an alternative to the “fairytale” of monarchy, the more the core transgressive energy of British republicanism revealed itself. It is itself strangely twee and fantastical. Rid us of the Royals, and everything will become better. Gone will be the “psychological baggage” of Britain’s past holding us back. Democracy will triumph. The crown jewels will be sold off and spent on food banks. The plebs will not worship hereditary blood, but NHS rainbows. Britain will become less racist, elitist and classist. The left might even win an election. We could have a poet president like Ireland, a Lineker or a Stormzy shaking hands with the American president.

Apparently, we are all misunderstanding the Trudeau masterplan

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

All the smoke about Canada not having a national identity is there to hide Justin Trudeau continuing his father’s masterplan to DESTROY QUEBEC:

“Quebec caught in a trap. French forced into decline. Its political influence doomed. 12 million residents in Montreal. Quebec with 5 million. Ottawa’s grand plan explained. Justin is smarter than we think. They want to assimilate us all. All this, without any debate. Two catastrophic scenarios.”

Forget King Charles III’s coronation or the Liberal Party Convention. If you woke up Saturday morning in Quebec, this was the apocalyptic front page that graced your browser, courtesy of the Journal de Montreal:

The Journal‘s cri-de-coeur was in response to the federal government’s increase in the annual immigration level to 500,000 people. This increase, designed to boost the population of Canada to 100 million by the end of the century, would marginalize Quebec’s influence within Canada. It is estimated that Quebec’s overall share of the Canadian population would fall from 25 to 10%, while francophone Quebecers would be in the minority within their own province for the first time in 500 years.

This would displace Quebec from the center of power in Canada. Its official language, French, would be relegated to the same status as all languages and cultures other than English. Instead of being one of Canada’s two official languages, French would merely be one of many, and Quebec, no longer a nation, but a province like any other.

But wait: Journal authors further suggest that this was the grand plan of Prime Ministers Justin and Pierre Elliott Trudeau all along. In a very colorful column, “How the Trudeaus Drowned Quebec“, columnist Richard Martineau even compares the current PM to the protagonist of an infamous Stephen King novel:

“For Justin, Canada is not a country.
It is a hotel, an Airbnb.
And Quebec is just one of the many rooms in this vast real estate complex.
Room 237, here. Like the one in the movie The Shining.
Come, drop your bags and settle in! All we ask is that you pay your taxes.

It’s true that Trudeau Sr. paved the way for the reduction of Quebec’s power in Canada, but it didn’t start with his 1981 Charter of Rights, as the Journal claims. It actually began a decade earlier, in 1971, with the creation of Canada’s Official Multiculturalism Policy. The policy enshrined the idea that linguistic and cultural minorities in Canada should be encouraged to preserve their heritage, and allocated federal funding to help them do so.

Official multiculturalism was both a vote-getter for the Liberals and a means of diffusing the English-French “two solitudes” paradigm that was threatening to tear the country apart. At the time, Canada had just lived through the October Crisis of 1970, which had seen Trudeau invoke the War Measures Act in response to terrorist acts by the Front de Liberation du Quebec. Official multiculturalism was seen as a way to boost the federalist cause by aligning the interest of linguistic and cultural minorities within Quebec with those of the federal government.

The larger impact, however, was to enshrine multiculturalism outside Quebec, where most minorities settled, and where garnering favour with different cultural communities became standard operating procedure, particularly for the federal Liberal party. Immigration thus became a politically untouchable issue, except in Quebec, where the protection of the French language continued to take precedence over concerns for minority rights.

Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 03 Thomas Jefferson

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Nebulous Media
Published 6 Dec 2022

Jean Yarbrough joins Douglas Murray on this episode to discuss Thomas Jefferson’s life and legacy. They talk about the Declaration of Independence, his presidency, and the various controversies that have surrounded him. Should Thomas Jefferson stay cancelled?
(more…)

QotD: Changing German Panzer tactics in 1943

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Quotations, Russia, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Report of the Commanding General of the 17th Armored Division, 24 April, 1943

The following report, though obviously written in haste with little regard for elegance of expression, gives a good view of the changes in tank tactics which took place on the Eastern Front. This translation was made from a typed copy of the original and thus bears no signature. Nonetheless, there is good reason to believe that the author was the famous Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, who commanded the 17th Armored Division at this time.

1. The tank tactics which led to the great successes of the years 1939, 1940, and 1941 must now be considered obsolete. Even if it were possible today to breakthrough an antitank front by means of the massive employment of concentrated waves of tanks, we would not be able to make use of these methods, which would once more lead to considerable losses, because of our [tank] production situation. These methods, often employed in rapid succession, would lead to such a quick reduction in tank strength that the character of an armored division would be fundamentally altered. This would lead to difficulties for the higher leadership.

The change in tank tactics is logical. The beginning successes of the weapon, the shock effect of which rested upon the technical achievement and overwhelming invincibility of the attacker, found at last its end in the development of appropriate defenses. From the point of view of production, the building of tanks could not keep pace with the building of antitank weapons. Apparently, a thousand antitank rifles, or dozens of antitank guns, can roll off the production lines for every tank.

The following are drawn from these insights.

2. The new tank tactics, which have already gained inevitable acceptance in the divisions, are outlined below.

The tank group no longer forms the nucleus of the armored division, about which other weapons are grouped as auxiliaries. The tank is a new arm acting in concert with and equal to the old arms. In cooperation with other weapons, it retains its power, even though its numbers are far below those called for by tables of organization.

Its meaning as a new arm is a function of the fact that it combines in itself a goodly portion of the two elements important to the attack: fire and maneuver. It derives these qualities from the fact that it is invulnerable, or less vulnerable, because of its armor.

Because the tank arm combines in itself firepower and mobility to a greater degree than other arms, it is the appropriate weapon for forming the main effort [Schwerpunkt].

The combat of the armored division is characterized by the fact that it is a mobile unit in all its parts and, as a result, the division commander is in a position, in the course of a battle, to chose and form a main effort [Schwerpunkt]. This principle excludes an irrevocable commitment of the tank group before an attack. Rigid employment within the framework of an already established battle plan is replaced by division commander himself holding [the tank group] in readiness and the flexibly employing it in the course of fighting against the required, or known to be appropriate, position.

The battle will begin with the infantry attack. The infantry attack provides the required foundation for the strength of the antitank front, for its length and depth. If the antitank front is known, then the tank attack can be ordered according to the classical principles for leading mobile units against the flanks or, if possible the rear, of an enemy defensive position. This attack should only be carried out exclusively by tanks when they can gain complete surprise. If surprise cannot be gained, then in this flank attack fire superiority must be fought for through the employment of artillery and, for the time being and to a certain extent the fire of the tanks themselves, until the enemy antitank front can be shaken or at least split up. If surprise can be gained, then a break-in against the flank of an antitank front can succeed without preparatory fire.

The attack against an enemy antitank front by means of a successful move against its flanks and rear cannot be carried out by tanks alone. It requires the support of artillery. In our experience, however, tank attacks carried out against the flanks and rear have outrun the artillery groups in direct support. Shifting fires by means of forward observers alone is not enough to ensure the shooting up of defensive fronts. What is needed here is thus the self-propelled batteries, which in the same manner as tanks themselves can quickly change their firing positions and thus attain the same mobility as the tank groups.

3. Now that these principles of the new tactics have been laid out, their use in practice will be explained.

a. The use of tanks as the first attack wave against a strongly fortified, deeply organized defensive position leads always to great losses and is thus false.

b. The use of tanks against deeply organized antitank positions is possible with the stipulation that it be commanded by an all-arms leader in close cooperation with other weapons after the formation of a main effort on the spot and that the further prosecution of the battle be steered by the same all-arms leader.

c. The employment of tanks leads to the greatest success when, sent into action and controlled by the all-arms leader, when they are used to strike the enemy in the flank, soon after the latter has begun an attack and before his antitank weapons have established firm antitank positions. Also in this last case, the attack must, with a view to direction and timing, be ordered by the all-arms leader on the spot. (With this last method the weak forces of the worn out 17th Armored Division annihilated one enemy division at Kuteinikowskaja on the 5th of January 1943 and another at Talowaja on the 27th of January, 1943.)

4. These new tactics are based upon the cooperation of the three main arms (infantry, tanks, and artillery) during the entire course of a battle. This cooperation can only be assured when the leader, that is to say, in all cases where the mass of the division is employed, the division commander himself, controls the cooperation of the arms on the spot throughout the entire battle. If, under the press of circumstance, as generally was the case during the battles between the Don and the Volga, widely separated battle groups [Kampfgruppen] of infantry, tanks and artillery had to be formed, it is essential that each of these battle groups be commanded by an all-arms leader, who is neither the commander of the tank element nor the infantry element of the battlegroup.

The all-arms leader’s means of command is the 10-watt radio built into a tank. With this equipment the leader is connected with the tank leaders as well as the leader of the infantry group, who, in case the proper radios are lacking, is provided with a tank. The all-arms commander is also in contact, by means of his armored personnel carrier, with battlegroups not forming part of the main effort and with his first general staff officer (Ia) working far to the rear.

The leader of the artillery group locates himself, according to the ordinary rules of command and control, with the all-arms leader. He is able, as was explained above, to give effective support only as the leader of an artillery group made up of self-propelled batteries. If he does not have access to some of these, there is always the danger the leader of the tank group would find his mobility limited by being bound to the less mobile towed artillery supporting him.

The place of the leader in combat is far forward, so that he can easily see the tank combat and, on the basis of these observations, can steer the course of the battle. He is sufficiently separated from the forward wave of tanks that he does not get involved in the tank-versus-tank and tank-versus-antitank battles, for this combat will focus his attention on the tanks fighting in the forward lines, to the point where tactical decisions which derive from the cooperation of all arms, can no longer be made.

The place of the leader can, however, rarely be chosen outside of the zone of enemy artillery fire. He can nevertheless remain mobile, thanks to the peculiar virtues of his means of command, namely voice radio. In the course of an attack in progress, he should be far enough forward to allow contact with the infantry group. Through it he can exert the leadership of a combined arms combat.
an armored personnel carrier used as a mobile command post in Russia in 1941

From his location the leader should be in a position to himself assemble, according to the development of the situation and the requirements of the cooperation of arms, discrete tank groups.

Cooperation between discrete tank groups and infantry groups is possible if the all-arms leader remains in voice radio contact with the tank group in question. The attachment of tank groups to infantry groups is, as a matter of principle, always to be avoided. The infantry is not in a position to ensure the cooperation of infantry, heavy infantry weapons, and artillery as well as tanks because it is fully occupied with the conduct of the combat of other weapons. On this basis, the attachment of tanks to infantry divisions, which cannot be trained in the cooperation of the three arms, is, as a matter of principle, to be avoided.

The requirement to achieve success by the cooperation of all three arms does not exclude the concentration of all tanks in a single attack. This is still to be striven for. The concentration of tank power in the main effort [Schwerpunkt] will, however, not to striven for through systematic employment on the basis of an established plan, but rather in the course of the battle through the assembling of certain tank groups, in short, through the flexible combat leadership and formation of the main effort [Schwerpunkt] in the course of the battle through the all-arms leader himself.

This battle method, which aims at the close cooperation of the three main arms, cannot function without the formation of a special infantry group mounted in armored personnel carriers. Because it is essentially different, this group does not belong with the wheeled-vehicle mounted infantry of the division. They form, rather, an integrated part of the tank group. They can be attached to the later or will be employed according to the decision of the all-arms leader in accordance with the same principles that apply to the employment of tank waves.

The armored personnel carrier group of the infantry which is attached to the tank group corresponds closely to the self-propelled artillery. Both are special branches of their main arm, which work within the tank group itself and without which the cooperation of the tank group with the mass of the truck-mounted infantry and the towed artillery would not be possible.

5. The following deductions for the construction of tanks can be drawn from the aforementioned portrayal of the tactics and command techniques of the armored division. Because the race between tanks and anti-tank defenses can only be won by even heavier types and thus can not be guaranteed, the focus of effort [Schwerpunkt] in construction must be towards mobility and firepower.

The cooperation of arms can never be so close that artillery-infantry attacks alone can prepare an antitank front so that the tank attack can break through it in a rapid rollover. Instead, tanks must be an a position to use long-range fire to put anti-tank fronts out of action or at least so suppress them so as to make possible the further prosecution of the attack. They are only in a position to do this when they possess weapons of such a caliber that they can win superiority over immobile antitank weapons by means of fire and mobility.

According to this line of reasoning, great things can be expected from the creation of self-propelled artillery batteries. As unarmored fire units with greater range than tanks themselves they are in a position to attain that fire superiority which is necessary to gain the upper hand against the antitank defense.

During this winter’s fighting the best results were gained from assault gun battalions which, because of their great mobility and firepower, were employed and led in the same way as tanks. From the point of view of mobility, they outdid the tanks. Self- propelled guns were likewise successfully employed according to the same principles, to augment tank and assault gun groups, particularly by fire.

In contrast, the Tiger tanks, which were supposed to have fulfilled all three requirements, namely firepower, mobility, and heavy armor, were less successful, for their mobility was not sufficient for the elastic battle leadership outlined above. (In this experience it is important to take into account that the units sent fresh into battle were not at the height of their powers, especially where the use of radio was concerned. The impression of their lack of mobility, especially in rolling country with hard-frozen ground, however, would have been the same, even if the training of the personnel had been completed.)

These lessons of the more and more similar tactics of tanks, assault guns, and self-propelled artillery, which in more or less ad hoc arrangements establish the principle of fast-moving heavy firepower, causes one to wish that these weapons could be organized under a single leader with the goal of combining under him standardized training and well-schooled cooperation. This commander is the commander of the division’s tank group, that is to say, all more or less armored weapons mounted on tracked vehicles that are used for the fire battle. He must also have attached as an essential part an infantry group mounted in armored personnel carriers which should be made available according to a ratio of at least one infantry company for each three tank companies of whatever type.

The self-propelled artillery battalion should not be made an organic part of the tank group because of artillery training and the proposed design that will allow the guns to be dismounted. It should remain an organic part of the artillery regiment and be as- signed, on a case by case basis, to the commander of the tank group.

Unsigned report, probably authored by Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, who commanded 17th Panzer Division at that time, via Bruce Gudmundsson’s Tactical Notebook, 2023-02-06.

May 8, 2023

Gordon Lightfoot, RIP

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn on perhaps the best-known song of the late Gordon Lightfoot:

Edmund Fitzgerald, 1971
Detail of a photo from Wikimedia Commons

In November 1975 Lightfoot chanced to be reading Newsweek‘s account of the sinking of a Great Lakes freighter in Canadian waters. He’s a slow and painstaking author, which is one reason he’s given up songwriting – because it takes too much time away from his grandkids. But that day forty-three years ago the story literally struck a chord, and he found himself scribbling away, very quickly:

    The legend lives on From the Chippewa on down
    Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee
    The lake, it is said Never gives up her dead
    When the skies of November turn gloomy …

“Gitche gumee” is Ojibwe for “great sea” – ie, Lake Superior – as you’ll know if you’ve read your Longfellow, which I’m not sure anyone does these days. Evidently Hiawatha was on the curriculum back east across Lake Huron in young Gordy’s Orillia schoolhouse. The Gitche Gumee reference may be why, when I first heard “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, I assumed its subject had sunk long before the song was written. In fact, it sank on November 10th 1975 — just a few days before Lightfoot wrote the number. When she’d launched in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes, and, when she passed through the Soo Locks between Lakes Superior and Huron, her size always drew a crowd and her captain was always happy to entertain them with a running commentary over the loudspeakers about her history and many voyages. For seventeen years she ferried taconite ore from Minnesota to the iron works of Detroit, Toledo and the other Great Lakes ports … until one November evening of severe winds and 35-feet waves […]

That said, human tragedy alone does not make for singable material. The last contact from the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was with another ship, the SS Arthur M Anderson. Yet “The Wreck of the Arthur M Anderson” would have been a far less evocative title. Arthur Marvin Anderson was on the board of US Steel, as Edmund Fitzgerald was on the board of Northwestern Mutual. But there is something pleasingly archaic about the latter name: in fact, as I think of it, I believe the last Edmund I met was one of Gordon Lightfoot’s fellow Canadian singers — the late operetta baritone Edmund Hockridge. Pair “Edmund” to “Fitzgerald”, and you have something redolent of Sir Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson, of shipwrecks off Cornwall or the Hebrides. Perhaps that’s why “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” either sounds like an old Scots-Irish folk tune or, alternatively, actually is one. For any IRA members reading this, Bobby Sands, the hunger striker who starved himself to death in a British gaol, wrote in his cell a song called “Back Home in Derry”, about Irish prison deportees en route to Australia and set to a tune remarkably like “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, which it seems unlikely he ever heard.

I see some musicologists claim the tune is in Dorian mode, although it sounds Mixolydian to me (like “The Wexford Carol”). Whichever it is, there is a perfect union between the emphatic melody, the crash of the waves, the antediluvian moniker of Northwestern Mutual’s chairman, and even the obvious filler phrases, so typical of ancient folk songs:

    The lake, it is said
    Never gives up her dead

— which returns far more effectively in the final verse:

    Superior, they said
    Never gives up her dead

— as if Gitchee Gumee is some vast ravening beast. Go back to Orillia, to Fourth Grade in 1947, and the parents listening to Mr and Mrs Lightfoot’s little boy sing “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” as if a bit of synthetic shamrock from an old Tin Pan Alleyman were a genuine Irish lullaby from the mists of Emerald Isle antiquity. That’s the genius of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”: It was born sounding as if it’s a hundred years old. And its agelessness is all the more amazing when you consider that it’s essentially an act of journalism, an adaptation of a news report about something that happened a few days earlier – just the facts, ma’am, with minimal artistic license:

    In a musty old hall
    In Detroit they prayed
    In the maritime sailors’ cathedral …

“Maritime sailors” is surely a redundancy, and it’s not a cathedral but the “Mariners’ Church”, which doesn’t quite go the distance syllable-wise. And a parishioner wrote to Lightfoot to say the church isn’t in the least bit “musty”, so these days he finds alternative adjectives.

But that’s all details. The power of the song lies in its storytelling. It immortalized the fate of the freighter not just for the families of the dead, “the wives and the sons and the daughters”, but for everyone, and it made the Edmund Fitzgerald the Titanic of the Great Lakes – except that the Titanic never inspired any song like this. The mournful toll of the lakes in the penultimate stanza is Gordon Lightfoot at his very best:

    Lake Huron rolls Superior sings
    In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
    Old Michigan steams Like a young man’s dreams
    The islands and bays are for sportsmen
    And farther below Lake Ontario
    Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
    And the iron boats go As the mariners all know
    With the gales of November remembered …

The gales of November howl and the waves rise up and devour the ship. And then the gales subside and the placid surface betrays no trace of twenty-nine men, taken deep into the rooms of an ice-water mansion and never to be found.

Grrrrrrl Power is the only acceptable mode for new female characters, it seems

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Janice Fiamengo on the strictly monotone representation of female characters in recent years:

The trend to make female movie characters tough and abrasive has been proceeding for some time. We can all predict that the new partner in the police procedural, let’s say a petite black woman whose entrance surprises (and thus reveals the bigotry of) the white man she’ll be working with, will turn out to be the biggest badass on the force. She’ll almost certainly save her partner’s life — and unearth a crime-solving detail he’d overlooked — before the first episode is over. At the same time, viewers will be treated to her sneering refusal of the partner’s banter, her steely gaze, and her fearless embrace of outrider status. She’s a woman with wise-cracking disdain for men as a group who takes quick revenge for even the smallest hint of sexism, benevolent or otherwise, from her fellow officers. And she quickly earns not only their respect but also their unwilling awe.

Whether police officers, first responders, detectives, firefighters, FBI — or, for that matter, nurses, ER doctors, politicians, or lawyers — the message is clear: these women are at least as capable and fearsome as any man: tough-minded, smart as a whip, and street-wise. Even in this era of agitation about the trans peril to women’s sports, the fictional females are as physically strong and combat-ready as any male, their fists and kicks aimed with staggering accuracy. Even tiny Lucy Tara on NCIS Hawai’i comes to the rescue of her far-larger male colleagues in impressive physical struggles with suspects.

But physical characteristics, the notable fearlessness and strength, are to some extent less striking than the women’s personalities and demeanor. An entire character transformation has been taking place, as traditionally feminine characteristics have been decisively minimized and masculine bravura brought to the fore. These women are, seemingly without effort, brusque, foul-mouthed, and contemptuous, particularly of male authority — and we’re to love them for it. They’re often beautiful, but they never try to be. With hair pulled back and aggressive booted stride, they are independent, uninterested in male approval, and largely indifferent to men as romantic partners, unless they are shown pursuing their occasionally voracious sexual needs, at which times their approach is direct and unsentimental. After an evening of bronco-riding athleticism, they wake up in a tousled bed with a slight grimace and duck out of the lover’s offer of breakfast. They’re not interested in commitment or any continued intimacy. A call comes in on their cell phone, they pull on their clothes nonchalantly, and walk out of the man’s life. They’ve already forgotten him as they prepare to conquer evil once again.

A popular new Netflix series, The Diplomat, takes these now-standard elements to the next level, profiling an ambitious, sexy, oft-frowning, brilliant, and explosively hot-tempered woman, Kate Wyler, who engages in uncontrolled physical and verbal abuse of her husband without remorse or narrative comeuppance. Though one might expect that a portrait of reckless physical violence by one spouse against another would be evidence at least of a serious character flaw — if not criminality (as it certainly would be if the male spouse were delivering the blows) — it is not at all clear in this case that the character’s actions deserve any condemnation. Her violence is simply the most extreme manifestation of her (rather admirable and plucky) unconventionality in breaking the rules of propriety in order to save the liberal world order.

Father Ted as Ireland’s answer to Fawlty Towers

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Conor Fitzgerald on the tragically short run of the classic Irish comedy Father Ted:

Fondly remembered and occasionally quoted, Father Ted has its place in the broad canon of the British sitcom. But in Ireland, even 25 years since its finale, it has always been so much more. Its status is closer to Fawlty Towers in England or Cheers in the United States: the national sitcom, a piece of light entertainment that nevertheless Says Something Meaningful About Us.

Not only was Father Ted one of the few successful TV representations of Ireland, it was made during Ireland’s version of the Swinging Sixties, our flux decade of the Nineties. The accelerating collapse of the Church and the exposure of longstanding political corruption coincided with the dawn of the Celtic Tiger years, lending peripheral Ireland a sense of self-conscious modernity. It was a unique national turning point, where our 19th-century past seemed to co-exist with our 21st-century future. In reflecting this upheaval, Father Ted has become not just a social historical document, but a portent of where Ireland stands today.

It’s not the sort of thing that national epics are normally made of. The programme is about three Catholic Priests — Fathers Ted Crilly, Dougal McGuire, and Jack Hackett — on Craggy Island, a remote settlement off the west coast of Ireland. All three priests have been exiled to this purgatory by the terrifying Bishop Len Brennan (their misdemeanours are never referred to directly, but Ted often makes oblique reference to the fact that “the funds were only resting in my account”). Most episodes revolve around an absurdist version of Church life, Ted’s schemes to escape the island and their interactions with the island’s townsfolk.

Rarely for domestic Irish TV, it was a sitcom written by Irish people and it was set within a central Irish institution, the Catholic Church. And the dearth of representations of Irish people in entertainment meant it crystallised many Irish archetypes for the first time. Ireland itself hadn’t always been a welcoming place for satirists. Ted star Dermot Morgan knew this well — his major project before Ted had been a political comedy radio show named Scrap Saturday, which upset all the wrong people, and was eventually cancelled amid allegations of political interference.

Unlike Scrap Saturday, Ted never sought to be political or self-consciously “relevant”. But Craggy Island is a capsule of Irish life at this time of major social change — not least for gender relations and the Church. Take one married couple, John and Mary, who own the corner shop on Craggy Island. They contrive to show a winsome, loving front to the priest whenever they encounter him, but turn to violent bickering once his back is turned. At one point, Mary tries to drown John in a bucket of water; at another, Father Ted comes into the shop and finds John has locked Mary in a cupboard. When he leaves, they’re arguing over a shotgun.

This peck-and-scratch marriage is still funny, but in 2023 the laughter it provokes is nervous. It’s a product of an Irish society still processing the reality of divorce, only legalised by a referendum in Ireland in 1995, the same year Ted first aired. Though it was not uncommon at that time for people to separate, the divorce campaign had been ugly and emotional. One billboard for No bore the slogan “Hello divorce, goodbye daddy”. The referendum was passed by the tiny margin of 9,000 votes.

Divorce was only one step in the very gradual withering of religious power in Ireland — far more gradual than the rest of Europe. Remember that abortion was only legalised in Ireland five years ago. When Ted was broadcast, the Church was formally still one of the central pillars of Irish life, but its authority rang hollow. Priests often felt like administrators of a vanished country. And on remote Craggy, Ted, Dougal and Jack mirror this directly. All good sitcoms feature characters who are trapped, but Ted is doubly so: first on his island; and second in an institution people are coming to see as irrelevant. He is still an essential member of the community, more than just a ceremonial functionary for weddings and funerals. But it’s just not clear what the essential thing he does is anymore, beyond being a common reference point that deserves token respect.

Inkunzi Strike 20mm Grenade MG

Filed under: Africa, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Jan 2023

Tony Neophytou developed this for Denel Land Systems, which has completely fallen apart as a company and left it now as his own independent design, with no manufacturer. I filmed this video in 2018, to show the prototype version of the Strike, which has since been improved and further developed. Perhaps some day it can find a manufacturer?
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QotD: The “science” of history

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

That’s how they saw it in the 18th century, of course, and even more so in the 19th, when Science — capital S — really did seem triumphant. It’s hard to overstate just how optimistic the 19th century was. In some ways, the earliest statement of this optimism — and, significantly, its most overwrought warning — was the best: Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. The creation of life itself in the lab! If Science could do that — and there’s a reason Shelley’s rather crappy novel was a massive bestseller, y’all — then it should be child’s play for Science to predict the course of human history …

A moment’s glance at the “science” of history guys like Marx actually produced, though, show the flaw in that line of thought. Here again, Shelley’s novel is instructive. Victor Frankenstein could give his creature life, but it wouldn’t obey him — being alive, it had free will and a mind of its own. So “scientific” history always, in the end, means something like “anthropomorphic History, capital-H”. “Life” obeys certain laws, the way falling objects obey the law of gravity, but just as there’s no such physical object as “gravity”, there’s no such thing as “life”, an abstract notion over and above the behavior of individual living things. I know Aquinas is dead, and we have killed him (to steal a phrase from Nietzsche), but these things only make sense in Thomist terms: Just as “gravity” is mathematical shorthand for the actualization of an object’s potential to fall towards a center of mass, so “life” is just the blanket term for actualization of a living thing’s various potentials. When we say things like “gravity caused the avalanche”, we don’t mean that a living, purposive force decided to pull the rocks down …

… and yet, when you get down to it, “scientific” history always ends up meaning “History — a living, purposive force” — decided to do this or that. We assign a telos to history, in other words, in a way we simply don’t to any other “force” governed by “scientific” “laws”. Sorry for all the quotation marks, but I want to make this as clear as I can. Nobody but a poet would say that Gravity, a living force, longs for all things to return to its bosom, but the authors of “scientific” history all write as if History, a living force, longs for this or that outcome. C.f. Karl Marx and his merry band of murderers getting all lathered up about The Revolution. The words on the page are all about scientific necessity, but the tone is pure hosanna.

Severian, “The Science of History”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2010-09-22.

May 7, 2023

The Line reports on “a Liberal policy convention in Fantasia”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It used to be said that the marketing department in any given organization was where the rubber met the sky (three drink minimum), but the Liberal convention in Barad-dûr-by-the-Rideau now owns that territory:

Once upon a time, Canada was led by a serious man named Pierre Elliot Trudeau. No matter what you think of his tenure as prime minister, there is no question that he took the job, and the country, seriously. Today his offspring, both biological and ideological, prance around the Canadian political landscape, smug and entitled and all the rest of it. But none of them has the foggiest idea of what they are doing with with the power they inherited, or why, or for what purpose.

[…]

For the evening entertainment on Friday, they brought out Jean Chrétien — another fantastically unserious person — to do his usual petit gars de Shawinigan routine. And did the old coot ever deliver, bragging yet again about keeping Canada out of Iraq, jabbing at Pierre Poilievre, and joking that he expects The Globe and Mail to call for a royal commission into Hillary Clinton showing up at the Liberal convention and interfering in Canadian elections.

Oh, our sides. They split. No matter that two days ago was World Press Freedom day. No matter that Friday also happened to be NNA night, where the Globe and Mail won nine awards. This is the Liberal convention after all, where one of the main policy proposals up for debate is a suggestion from the B.C. Liberals to essentially nationalise the news. Why not aim a few kicks at the media. The Liberals are paying for it anyway, aren’t they?

In his speech, Chrétien played to the latest Liberal idée fixe, which is that all of the party’s troubles since 2018 — from SNC Lavalin to WEgate to the egregious handling of Chinese interference — are all due to the clickbait chasing yellow journalists at the failing Globe and Mail.

For those of you who weren’t lucky enough to live through the nineties, Chrétien is the Liberal prime minister who brought you such hits as “what me worry?” about a Quebec referendum on secession; a joke about his PMO ordering the RCMP to pepper spray UBC students protesting his decision to invite a brutal dictator to dinner on their campus; and the Shawinigate and Adscam scandals, both of which are still routinely taught and referenced as case studies in ruling party greaseballery at its most unctuous.

But Liberals be Liberals. As National Post columnist Chris Selley noted: “This is deadly serious shit and this buffoon is playing it for laughs, just like [he] always played deadly serious shit.”

The “deadly serious shit” Selley had in mind is surely the river of scandal coursing through the Liberal Party in Ottawa over Chinese interference in Canadian politics, with tributaries flowing in from riding associations across the country, the Trudeau Foundation in Montreal, and numerous other parts of the Canadian political landscape. On Monday, the Globe and Mail reported on a CSIS analysis from 2021 which alleged that the family of Conservative MP Michael Chong was targeted by China’s security apparatus for unknown sanctions, in response to Chong’s sponsorship of a House of Commons motion calling China’s persecution of the Uighurs a genocide.

On Tuesday an understandably alarmed Chong was given an emergency briefing about the threat by CSIS director David Vigneault, in a meeting arranged by the prime minister.

This isn’t just about Michael Chong. Every member of parliament, every member of the government, should be up in arms over this. The Chinese diplomat in Canada involved, Zhao Wei, should have been sent home immediately, but Melanie Joly is still weighing the pros and cons.

As appalling as the targeting of Chong is in its own right, more scandalous still is the government’s response — equal parts utterly incompetent, unbelievably shady, and shamelessly partisan.

The scandal begins with the fact that Chong himself was never told about the CSIS report. Why is that? On Wednesday, the prime minister claimed it was because the threat identified in the CSIS report wasn’t deemed serious enough by the intelligence agency, so it never circulated outside of the agency. The first Trudeau had heard of this, apparently, was when he read about it in the newspaper.

But on Thursday, Michael Chong told the House of Commons that he’d been told, in a call from Trudeau’s current national security advisor Jody Thomas, that the report had actually made its way to the desk of one of her predecessors. When Trudeau was asked to explain this apparent contradiction on Friday, he said: “In terms of what I shared, I shared the best information I had at the time on Wednesday, both to Mr. Chong and to Canadians.” When asked who had given him this information, Trudeau declined to answer.

Look, we’ve seen this game before, countless times, with this government and this prime minister. Trudeau’s habit of responding to allegations of wrongdoing or incompetence or mismanagement by first denying any knowledge of the issue, then discrediting the source, and finally throwing unidentified third parties under the bus, is a well trod path for this deeply unserious man.

Given the pattern, we’re pretty skeptical of Trudeau’s claim that he’d been given incomplete information. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise us in the slightest if it turns out that he just made the whole thing up.

Total Chaos on the Chinese Front! – WW2 – Week 245 – May 6, 1944

Filed under: Britain, China, France, Germany, History, India, Italy, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 6 May 2023

A command crisis in the Chinese Nationalist Army benefits the Japanese invaders, in Italy, Mark Clark spends his birthday planning new offensives, the Japanese are pushing for Imphal, and the Soviets for Sevastopol — another busy week of the war!
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Africa after colonialism

Filed under: Africa, Books, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Hannes Wessels on the plight of so many African nations once the various colonial powers were off the scene and they were at least formally independent:

If you have a heart in Africa it’s probably not a good idea to read Martin Meredith’s State of Africa because if you do, it will, in all likelihood, break it. In it, he covers, in gory detail, what has happened on the continent in the postcolonial era, and while it’s riveting, it is also deeply disturbing.

[…] “by the end of the 1980s not a single African head of state in three decades had allowed himself to be voted out of office. Of some 150 heads of state who had trodden the African stage, only six had voluntarily relinquished power”?

Or the fact that, in the Congo alone, in 1964, over a million people, virtually all civilians, died in sectarian strife. Nobody knows precisely how many more millions have died in the benighted country since. Or that Mobutu Sese Seko, prior to coming to power, had $6 in his bank account. By 1987 a team of editors and reporters from Fortune magazine disclosed that he was one of the richest men in the world at an estimated $5 billion.

Or the fact that Jean Bedel Bokassa “combined not only extreme greed and personal violence … unsurpassed by any other African leader. His excesses included seventeen wives, a score of mistresses and an official brood of 55 children … [He] also gained a reputation for cannibalism. Political prisoners … were routinely tortured on Bokassa’s orders, their cries clearly audible to nearby residents”. In an effort to compare himself to Napoleon, he declared himself an emperor and spent a large chunk of the national budget on his coronation while his people suffered and starved.

Or the fact that Uganda’s Idi Amin, in a bid to crush political opposition, ordered the gruesome deaths of thousands of alleged opponents at the hands of his “death squads”. “The Chief Justice was dragged away from the High Court never to be seen again. The university’s Vice Chancellor disappeared. The bullet-riddled body of an Anglican Archbishop, still in ecclesiastical robes, was dumped at the mortuary of a Kampala hospital. One of Amin’s former wives was found with her limbs dismembered in the boot of a car. Amin was widely believed to perform blood rituals over the bodies of his victims.” He was heard on several occasions boasting about his penchant for eating human flesh.

Or the fact that foreign researcher Robert Klintberg reported on oil-rich Equatorial Guinea as being “a land of fear and devastation no better than a concentration camp — the ‘cottage industry Dachau of Africa’.” Under Macias Nguema, more than half of the population was either killed or fled into exile. Finally deposed by his nephew, Obiang was indicted for the murder of 80,000 people. The plunder continued.

Or that in Nigeria, between 1988 and 1993, an official report estimated $12.2 billion was “diverted” from the fiscus. In 1990, the United Nations concluded that Nigeria had one of the worst records for human deprivation of any country in the developing world.

These are only a smattering of an almost endless litany of entirely avoidable man-made catastrophes that have blighted Africa since the imperial exit. One is left wondering if there is any precedent in history for such calamitous misrule that has led to the early, often violent deaths of millions, and delivered unspeakable misery to hundreds of millions more, which is where we are today.

Having read the book, I’m left pondering the fact that Cecil Rhodes, a colonial colossus, looms large in contemporary history as one of the great villains of the last century, better known for his alleged malfeasance than any of the abovementioned leaders. But as far as I know, Rhodes never stole from anyone and never killed anyone, and he certainly didn’t eat anyone. I know he did use his money and military muscle to stop slavery and intertribal slaughter. And I know he plowed most of his fortune into building roads, railways, educational facilities, and other infrastructure needed to transform a wilderness into a developed country. It looks to me like his generosity of spirit is reflected in the Rhodes scholarships he provided for, aimed at nurturing the talents of a select few from across the racial divides in a bid to make the world he was leaving a better place.

Tank Chats Reloaded | S-Tank | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published 27 Jan 2023

In this episode of Tank Chats Reloaded, we are delighted to be joined by Stefan Karlsson, the director and curator of The Swedish Tank Museum. He shares his remarkable journey with the S-Tank, from his first experience driving it at the age of nine, to his later service in the Swedish Army. Stefan’s passion for the S-Tank is evident, and his story is sure to captivate and inspire.
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QotD: The long-term instability of bison hunting on the Great Plains

Filed under: Americas, Economics, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Unlike in Mongolia, where there were large numbers of wild horses available for capture, it seems that most Native Americans on the Plains were reliant on trade or horse-raiding (that is, stealing horses from their neighbors) to maintain good horse stocks initially. In the southern plains (particularly areas under the Comanches and Kiowas), the warm year-round temperature and relatively infrequent snowfall allowed those tribes to eventually raise large herds of their own horses for hunting and as a trade good. While Mongolian horses know to dig in the snow to get the grass underneath, western horses generally do not do this, meaning that they have to be stall-fed in the winter. Consequently in the northern plains, horses remained a valuable trade good and a frequently object of warfare. In both cases, horses were too valuable to be casually eating all of the time and instead Isenberg notes that guarding horses carefully against theft and raiding was one of the key and most time-demanding tasks of life for those tribes which had them.

So to be clear, the Great Plains Native Americans are not living off of their horses, they are using their horses to live off of the bison. The subsistence system isn’t horse based, but bison-based.

At the same time, as Isenberg (op. cit. 70ff) makes clear that this pure-hunting nomadism still existed in a narrow edge of subsistence. From his description, it is hard not to conclude that the margin or survival was quite a bit narrower than the Eurasian Steppe subsistence system and it is also clear that group-size and population density were quite a bit lower. It’s also not clear that this system was fully sustainable in the long run; Pekka Hämäläinen argues in The Comanche Empire (2008) that Comanche bison hunting was potentially already unsustainable in the very long term by the 1830s. It worked well enough in wet years, but an extended drought (which the Plains are subjected to every so often) could cause catastrophic decline in bison numbers, as seems to have happened the 1840s and 1850s. A sequence of such events might have created a receding wave phenomenon among bison numbers – recovering after each dry spell, but a little less each time. Isenberg (op. cit., 83ff) also hints at this, pointing out that once one factors for things like natural predators, illness and so on, estimates of Native American bison hunting look to come dangerously close to tipping over sustainability, although Isenberg does not offer an opinion as to if they did tip over that line. Remember: complete reliance on bison hunting was new, not a centuries tested form of subsistence – if there was an equilibrium to be reached, it had not yet been reached.

In any event, the arrival of commercial bison hunting along with increasing markets for bison goods drove the entire system into a tailspin much faster than the Plains population would have alone. Bison numbers begin to collapse in the 1860s, wrecking the entire system about a century and a half after it had started. I find myself wondering if, given a longer time frame to experiment and adapt the new horses to the Great Plains if Native American society on the plains would have increasingly resembled the pastoral societies of the Eurasian Steppe, perhaps even domesticating and herding bison (as is now sometimes done!) or other animals. In any event, the westward expansion of the United States did not leave time for that system to emerge.

Consequently, the Native Americans of the plains make a bad match for the Dothraki in a lot of ways. They don’t maintain population density of the necessary scale. Isenberg (op. cit., 59) presents a chart of this, to assess the impact of the 1780s smallpox epidemics, noting that even before the epidemic, most of the Plains Native American groups numbered in the single-digit thousands, with just a couple over 10,000 individuals. The largest, the Sioux at 20,000, far less than what we see on the Eurasian Steppe and also less than the 40,000 warriors – and presumably c. 120-150,000 individuals that implies – that Khal Drogo alone supposedly has [in Game of Thrones]. They haven’t had access to the horse for nearly as long or have access to the vast supply of them or live in a part of the world where there are simply large herds of wild horses available. They haven’t had long-term direct trade access to major settled cities and their market goods (which expresses itself particularly in relatively low access to metal products). It is also clear that the Dothraki Sea lacks large herds of animals for the Dothraki to hunt as the Native Americans could hunt bison; there are the rare large predators like the hrakkar, but that is it. Mostly importantly, the Plains Native American subsistence system was still sharply in flux and may not have been sustainable in the long term, whereas the Dothraki have been living as they do, apparently for many centuries.

Bret Devereaux, “That Dothraki Horde, Part II: Subsistence on the Hoof”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-12-11.

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