Quotulatiousness

May 6, 2023

Face-palm-worthy Coronations of the past

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m sure almost everyone — except the tiny number of Republicans in England — hopes for a smooth and spectacular Coronation for His Majesty King Charles III, there are plenty of examples of past Coronations that were anything but:

The Imperial State Crown, worn by the British monarch in the royal procession following the Coronation and at the opening of Parliament.
Wikimedia Commons.

Whereas so many traditions are 19th-century inventions, as any student of history knows, the coronation of Britain’s monarch is a rare example of a truly ancient custom, dating to the 10th century in its structure and with origins stretching back further, to the Romans and even Hebrews. As Tom Holland said on yesterday’s The Rest is History, it is like going to a zoo and seeing a woolly mammoth.

It is a sacred moment when the sovereign becomes God’s anointed, an almost unique state ceremony in a secular world. The custom originates with the late Roman emperors, associated with Constantine the Great and certainly established by the mid-fifth century in Constantinople. In the West, and following the fall of that half of the empire, barbarian leaders were eager to imitate imperial styles (a bit like today). Germanic and Celtic tribes had ceremonies for new leaders in which particular swords were displayed, a feature of later rites, but as they developed the practice of kingship, so their rituals began to imitate the Roman form.

[…]

Athelstan, the first king of England, had been crowned in 925 at Kingston, a spot where seven kings of England had been enthroned. Perhaps the most notorious was Edwig, a 16-year-old whose proto-rock star qualities were not appreciated at the time of his coronation in 955. Indeed he failed to turn up, and when Bishop Dunstan marched to the king’s nearby quarters to drag him along, he found the teenager in bed with a “strumpet” and the strumpet’s mother.

However, Edwig died four years later, and Dunstan was elevated to Canterbury, became a saint and, through chronicles recorded by churchmen, got his version of history.

This reign might seem impossibly distant and obscure, yet it was under Edwig’s brother Edgar that the current coronation format was established. Edgar was a powerful king, and the last of the Anglo-Saxon rulers to live a happily Viking-free existence. His coronation on 11 May 973 was an illustration of his strength, and also his aspirations. Held at Bath, most likely because of its association with Rome, it involved a bishop placing the crown on the king’s head, in the Carolingian style, and would become the template for the ceremony for his direct descendent Charles III.

But not all coronations would run so smoothly. After Edgar’s death his elder son Edward was killed in possibly nefarious circumstances, and his stepmother placed her son Ethelred on the throne. Ethelred’s reign was plagued by disaster, and it was later said in the chronicles — the medieval equivalent of “and then the whole bus clapped” Twitter tales — that Bishop Dunstan lambasted the boy-king for “the sin of your shameful mother and the sin of the men who shared in her wicked plot” and that it “shall not be blotted out except by the shedding of much blood of your miserable subjects”.

This would have been merely awkward, whereas many coronations ended in riot or bloodshed. The most notorious incident in English history occurred on Christmas Day 1066: Duke William got off to a bad start PR-wise when his nervous Norman guards mistook cheers for booing and began attacking the crowd, before setting fire to buildings.

[…]

Perhaps the most scandalous coronation took place at the newly completed St Paul’s Cathedral in February 1308. The young queen, Isabella, was the 12-year-old daughter of France’s King Philippe Le Bel, and had inherited her father’s good looks, with thick blonde hair and large blue, unblinking eyes. Her husband, Edward II, was a somewhat boneheaded man of 24 years whose idea of entertainment was watching court fools fall off tables.

It was a fairy tale coronation for the young girl, apart from a plaster wall collapsing, bringing down the high altar and killing a member of the audience, and the fact that her husband was gay and spent the afternoon fondling his lover Piers Gaveston, while ignoring her. Isabella’s two uncles, who had made the trip from France, were furious at the behaviour of their new English in-law, though perhaps not surprised.

[…]

One of the most disastrous coronations occurred during the Hundred Years’ War. Inspired by Joan of Arc, in 1429 the French had beaten the English at the Battle at Patay, after which their leader Charles VII entered Reims and was crowned at the spot where the kings of France had been enthroned for almost a thousand years. In response, on 26 December 1431 the English had their candidate, the 10-year-old Henry VI, crowned King of France at Notre-Dame in Paris, where one road was turned into a river of wine filled with mermaids, and Christmas plays were performed on an outdoor stage.

Unfortunately, the coronation was a complete mess. The entire service was in English, the weather was freezing, the event rushed, too packed, filled with pickpockets, and worst of all the English made such bad food that even the sick and destitute at the Hotel-Dieu complained they had never tasted anything so vile.

Coronation Weekend

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

Jago Hazzard
Published 5 May 2023

For us train nerds, “Coronation” means something very different.

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The federal Liberals want even more control over the internet

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Paul Wells notes that a policy proposal at the Liberal conference this week indicates just how much the Liberal Party of Canada wants to control free expression on the internet:

Here on the 2023 Liberal convention’s “Open Policy Process” page are links to “Top 20 Resolutions” and “Fast-Tracked Resolutions”. The latter go straight to the plenary floor, the former go through a smaller preliminary debate and, if they pass, then on to the plenary. These things move fast because, in most cases, Liberals are paying only listless attention to the discussions. Policy is for New Democrats. Well, I mean, it used to be.

But sometimes words have meaning, so this morning I’m passing on one of the Top 20 Resolutions, from pages 12 and 13 of that book. This one comes to us from the British Columbia wing of the party.

It’s in two screenshots simply because it spreads across two pages. This is the entire resolution.

BC Liberals want “on-line information services” held “accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms” by “the Government”. The Government would, in turn, “limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced”.

This resolution has no meaning 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. I don’t suppose this clearance process would take too much more time than getting a passport or a response to an access-to-information request. Probably only a few months, at first. Per article.

After publication, “the Government” would hold me accountable for the veracity of my material, presumably through some new mechanism beyond existing libel law.

I’m not sure what “the Government” — I’m tickled by the way it’s capitalized, like Big Brother — would have made of this post, in which I quote an unnamed senior government official who was parked in front of reporters by “the Government” on the condition that he or she or they not be named. But by the plain meaning of this resolution, I would not have to wonder for long because that post would have been passed or cleared by the Government’s censors before publication, and I’m out of recourse if that process simply took longer than I might like.

History Summarized: Chicago’s Tribune Tower

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

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 20 Jan 2023

It’s not a Dome, but it’s still pretty darn good.
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QotD: The luxury beliefs of the leisure class

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

Thorstein Veblen’s famous “leisure class” has evolved into the “luxury belief class”. Veblen, an economist and sociologist, made his observations about social class in the late nineteenth century. He compiled his observations in his classic work, The Theory of the Leisure Class. A key idea is that because we can’t be certain of the financial standing of other people, a good way to size up their means is to see whether they can afford to waste money on goods and leisure. This explains why status symbols are so often difficult to obtain and costly to purchase. These include goods such as delicate and restrictive clothing, like tuxedos and evening gowns, or expensive and time-consuming hobbies like golf or beagling. Such goods and leisurely activities could only be purchased or performed by those who did not live the life of a manual laborer and could spend time learning something with no practical utility. Veblen even goes so far as to say, “The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master’s ability to pay.” For Veblen, butlers are status symbols, too.

[…]

Veblen proposed that the wealthy flaunt status symbols not because they are useful, but because they are so pricey or wasteful that only the wealthy can afford them. A couple of winters ago it was common to see students at Yale and Harvard wearing Canada Goose jackets. Is it necessary to spend $900 to stay warm in New England? No. But kids weren’t spending their parents’ money just for the warmth. They were spending the equivalent of the typical American’s weekly income ($865) for the logo. Likewise, are students spending $250,000 at prestigious universities for the education? Maybe. But they are also spending it for the logo.

This is not to say that elite colleges don’t educate their students, or that Canada Goose jackets don’t keep their wearers warm. But top universities are also crucial for inculcation into the luxury belief class. Take vocabulary. Your typical working-class American could not tell you what “heteronormative” or “cisgender” means. But if you visit Harvard, you’ll find plenty of rich 19-year-olds who will eagerly explain them to you. When someone uses the phrase “cultural appropriation”, what they are really saying is “I was educated at a top college”. Consider the Veblen quote, “Refined tastes, manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and expense, and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are taken up with work.” Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.

The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate evidence of the believer’s social class and education. Only academics educated at elite institutions could have conjured up a coherent and reasonable-sounding argument for why parents should not be allowed to raise their kids, and that we should hold baby lotteries instead. Then there are, of course, certain beliefs. When an affluent person advocates for drug legalization, or defunding the police, or open borders, or loose sexual norms, or white privilege, they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you, “I am a member of the upper class”.

Affluent people promote open borders or the decriminalization of drugs because it advances their social standing, and because they know that the adoption of those policies will cost them less than others. The logic is akin to conspicuous consumption. If you have $50 and I have $5, you can burn $10 and I can’t. In this example, you, as a member of the upper class, have wealth, social connections, and other advantageous attributes, and I don’t. So you are in a better position to afford open borders or drug experimentation than me.

Or take polyamory. I recently had a revealing conversation with a student at an elite university. He said that when he sets his Tinder radius to 5 miles, about half of the women, mostly other students, said they were “polyamorous” in their bios. Then, when he extended the radius to 15 miles to include the rest of the city and its outskirts, about half of the women were single mothers. The costs created by the luxury beliefs of the former are bore by the latter. Polyamory is the latest expression of sexual freedom championed by the affluent. They are in a better position to manage the complications of novel relationship arrangements. And even if it fails, they have more financial capability, social capital, and time to recover if they fail. The less fortunate suffer the damage of the beliefs of the upper class.

Rob Henderson, “Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class – An Update”, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter, 2023-01-29.

May 5, 2023

JunkScientific American

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Stephen Knight calls out the woke editors of once-proud publication Scientific American for their anti-scientific support of the gender warriors:

A dangerous strain of utopian thinking has taken hold of the “progressive” left. Many now share the delusion that if we pretend certain falsehoods are true, then various forms of oppression and bigotry will magically disappear. Worse still, the proponents of these falsehoods demand their unequivocal affirmation from the rest of us.

Today’s leftists rightly insist on the importance of scientific truth when it comes to questions like climate change, vaccine safety and evolution. But they will discard scientific facts the moment they become inconvenient to their own worldview. Nowhere is this hypocrisy more pronounced than on the issue of gender, where transgender ideology has almost entirely supplanted scientific truth among the left. More alarming still is the fact that many scientists and scientific institutions, which really should know better, are colluding in this deception.

The latest scientific institution to promote gender pseudoscience is the once-venerable Scientific American magazine, which this week published an article headlined “Here’s why human sex is not binary”.

Make no mistake, sex in human beings really is binary and immutable. There are few things more emphatically true in our scientific understanding of the world than the human sex binary. Human beings cannot change their sex – we are either male or female, as determined by which type of gametes our biology is organised to produce (sperm or eggs). These are observable, testable scientific facts. And this objective truth matters in very real and consequential ways – to our society, to law, to healthcare and to the safety of women and children.

Trans ideologues claim that the categories of male and female are on a “spectrum”, or that they represent nothing more than a subjective feeling. These ideas have already had disastrous consequences for society. It is thanks to these ideas that male rapists have been placed in women’s prisons in the UK. It is why, just this weekend, a biological man won an elite women’s cycling race in America – finishing 89 seconds ahead of the closest female competitor and netting $35,350 in prize money. We would simply recognise this as “cheating” were it not for the hold that gender ideology has over our institutions – and for the opprobrium that is visited on anyone who dissents.

After some silly and irrelevant trivia about the biology of lizards and fish (humans are neither fish nor lizards), the Scientific American article concludes by claiming that anyone who upholds the human sex binary is “trying to restrict who counts as a full human in society”. This single claim inadvertently reveals a great deal about what is wrong with the trans movement. Unable to refute the truth of the human sex binary, gender ideologues resort to demonising those who notice it as having ulterior, sinister motives.

This isn’t the first time Scientific American has lent its (now waning) credibility to gender nonsense. Back in 2018, it published an article titled “Sex redefined: the idea of two sexes is overly simplistic”. To this day, this piece is gleefully shared around by gender activists, emboldened by this apparent vindication of their ideology from a credible, scientific publication. However, the author of the piece has since clarified that reality actually is as simplistic as humans having only “two sexes”.

Canada’s new internet rules have become law. What now?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 4 May 2023

Bill C-11 has passed. But there’s still time.
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The kinder, gentler US Naval War College

Filed under: Education, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander on a recent symposium at the U.S. Naval War College, showing just how much the American military has adapted itself to the Current Year:

Let’s take a look around the planet with a maritime national security lens, shall we?

  • The largest land war in Europe since WWII is raging on the north shore of the Black Sea.
  • The People’s Republic of China surpassed the United States of America as the world’s largest navy.
  • The Iranians are hijacking oil tankers willy-nilly.
  • The Western economy relies on undersea cables & pipelines we have allowed to go undefended and are now the subject of attention by mal-actors on the world stage.
  • The Navy is experiencing readiness and recruiting problems not seen since the 1970s.

There’s my top-5 off the top of my head this AM, yours may differ.

It sure seems to differ in Newport.

So, in the last week of April there was a 2-day symposium at the U.S. Naval War College, an opportune time to examine the most critically important challenges in 2023 — hopefully from a maritime perspective — wouldn’t you think?

Any conference, especially a 2-day affair with both on and off campus event locations, sure cost a lot of money and even more stacked manhours to plan, attend, participate, and manage.

We sure want to make sure the juice is worth the squeeze, right?

If you’re a regular here, you know where this is going. I warned everyone about this back in 2017. If you’re a new reader not fully up to speed on the broader portfolio we manage here at CDRSalamander, well, take a red pill and a seat.

Our war colleges are not what you think they are.

With each passing year there is less focus on war, and more on college. At the Naval War College, just getting additional time, money, faculty, and leadership focus on the “naval” portion has become a challenge with all the other ancillary agendas trying to keep pace with the cool kids cross-town at Salve Regina University.

Here’s a perfect example.

    The Naval War College (NWC) will host its 9th annual Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Symposium, 26-28 April 2023, in Newport, Rhode Island. This year’s theme is “Women, Peace, and Security in a Fragile World: Perspectives on Warfighting, Crisis Management, and Post-Conflict Transitions“.

Well, let’s go in with an open mind. Perhaps there’s something here. Hope isn’t a plan, but when the Party demands things of you, hope is often all you have.

If you voluntarily attended (I am reliably told that Party cadre informed the proles that attendance was required for staff, at least online), what kind of panel discussions would you be able to listen to? Let’s browse over the agenda.

In totally unrelated news, Brent Ramsey updates the odds on who will be promoted to be the US Navy’s next Chief of Naval Operations:

Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Vice-Chief of Naval Operations, US Navy.

Last September, the Navy promoted and installed a new Vice Chief of Naval Operations. Then Vice Admiral Lisa Franchetti got her 4th star and was appointed to the second-highest position in the Navy. Now after a scant seven months, the betting line going around D.C. is that she will likely be the next CNO based on the identity politics track record of President Biden. When President Biden had an opportunity to appoint to the Supreme Court, before assessing anyone’s qualifications, he announced that a black woman would get that seat, and he followed up on that promise. Would an identity-based selection for the Navy’s top leader be in the best interest of the Navy and the Nation? No, the nation needs and deserves the very best warrior to lead the Navy into our threatened future.

Admiral Franchetti is a journalism graduate of Northwestern University NROTC, a non-STEM degree which itself is unusual, as the Navy strongly favors STEM degrees for officers. She has a Master’s Degree in organizational management from the University of Phoenix, an online university. Her biography does not mention any war college credential. In contrast, her predecessor Admiral William Lescher had multiple commands in combat zones, was a test pilot, had multiple advanced degrees in naval technical fields and his commands won multiple combat zone merit awards. To naval professionals, for someone to have been promoted to the Navy’s highest rank and second highest position based on a NROTC commissioning source with a liberal arts degree, an online masters, no war college or combat zone credentials, would be considered inconceivable. Perhaps her success is based on a particularly spectacular service record?

Admiral Franchetti’s career path reveals sea tours on a tender, oiler, and three destroyers including command of the USS Ross (DDG-71) and command of a destroyer squadron. Her biography does not mention any of her commands received awards while she was in command.

I’m not a betting man, but if I was, I think I’d be putting down a few jellybeans on Admiral Franchetti’s next posting …

Alligator Creek: America Learns to Fight the Japanese

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Jan 2023

The Battle of Alligator Creek (aka Battle of the Tenaru) was a formative moment in the American World War Two psyche. After making an unopposed landing on Guadalcanal and taking its mostly-completed airfield at minimal cost, the US Marines had to defend their permitter on the night of August 21st, 1942.

Colonel Kiyonoa Ichiki was sent from the Japanese base at Truk with about 900 tough veteran soldiers to push the Marines off the airfield. These men had originally been slated to assault Midway Island, but the Japanese naval defeat there forced a change in plans. Ichiki was overconfident, and more concerned about retaking the islands of Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo across the straights, where Japan’s main base in the area had also been captured by Marine Raiders. Marching up the coastline towards Henderson Field, Ichiki’s men hit the thin single strand of Marine barbed wire about about 1:30am on the morning of there 21st. An intense firefight erupted, with the well dug-in Marine positions opening up with .30 caliber and .50 caliber machine guns, small arms, and 37mm canister rounds.

The fighting continued after daybreak, with Ichiki’s men digging in on the east bank of Alligator Creek. The Marines launched a two prong counterattack, with one force crossing the Creek inland and advancing down the east bank while a second group, including several Stuart light tanks, advanced across the sandbar. These two groups linked up in the early afternoon of the 21st, almost completely annihilating the Ichiki Detachment.

This was the first real land combat between American and Japanese forces in which American soldiers were able to report back on their experience. It was here that the US military as an institution learned that the Japanese would die rather than surrender, and this engagement set the American expectations for the rest of the Pacific campaign.
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QotD: Professional development activities

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Education, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

All this para-work, this ceaseless diversionary activity, is designed, or at least destined, to prevent people from carrying on their real work. By doing so, of course, it creates employment, or at least the necessity to pay people salaries: for, overall, many man-days are lost to it. And it creates pseudo-entrepreneurial opportunities for so-called consultants (often ex-employees of the organisations whose staff they now offer to train in such skills as assertiveness). It is, in effect, an exercise in Keynesian demand-management, but unlike the kind of public works that Keynes envisaged as a stimulus to a flagging economy, it leaves the country with nothing of enduring value, unless a bureaucrat with a flat-screened television and a new conservatory be called something of enduring value.

Needless to add, ceaseless “personal and professional development” is perfectly compatible with the most abysmal incompetence. Indeed, such incompetence is welcome, for it creates ever more demand for the personal and professional development that is supposedly the means to overcome it. This is what I believe is known as a positive feedback loop.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Workshops and why you must avoid them”, The Social Affairs Unit, 2009-11-18.

May 4, 2023

Despite all the evidence, Canada’s official motto doesn’t translate as “we broke it”

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

In The Line, Justin Ling adds more to the towering pile of evidence that “Canada is broken”:

If The Line has an editorial position, it is probably thus: Everything is broken.

This newsletter, of course, comes at the idea more earnestly than, say, the leader of the Conservative party. When my friend Matt Gurney advances that proposition, it is a lament. When Pierre Poilievre does: It’s wishful thinking.

While citizens of this country can’t always agree on what, exactly, is busted in our country, or why, or who is responsible — we can all agree, I hope, that things in this country could use a tune-up, at the very least. Canadians, after all, are imbued with a cloying optimism. An insufferable belief that things can be fixed. It’s a good thing.

Lucky for us, we have plenty of words written about how to fix much of what ails us. Because we, as a country, have a compulsive need to inquire about those problems. Our national pastime isn’t hockey, it’s the royal commission.

And we’ve got a government in office that loves to study the nature of the problem. There’s good work, these days, for the special rapporteurs and retired judges amongst us. And if you’re a Canadian that loves a good public consultation, you must be run ragged.

Yet we also have a government in office that has a pathological inability to take advice. And this problem may help explain why it feels like we’re sliding backwards.

[…]

When the government tapped an expert panel to study the use of solitary confinement in Canada’s prisons — literally torture — Correctional Services Canada blocked them from doing their job, and the public safety minister ignored their cries for help and then let their contracts lapse. Thanks to some scrutiny, the government renewed the study, then ignored it when the numbers showed they were still torturing people. Oops!

The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians — a body Trudeau created — warned in 2019 that Ottawa wasn’t taking foreign interference seriously, particularly when it came to China. “In short, government responses were piecemeal, responding to specific instances of foreign interference but leaving unaddressed the many other areas where Canadian institutions and fundamental rights and freedoms continue to be undermined by hostile states.” Prescient!

One of the most absurd examples is the sexual misconduct crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces. When Trudeau came into office in 2015, he had an external review on his desk from Marie Deschamps. One good external review deserves another, so the Liberals ordered one from Louise Arbour in 2022. What she found was harrowing: “We have been here before. Little seems to change.” Not only had the government failed to implement the Deschamps report, it was still failing to live up to the recommendations from the 1997 Somalia Inquiry. Fuck!

[…]

At the very centre of this tootsie-pop is, surprise, elitism. This Liberal government, armed with its paper-thin mandate, is convinced that they — and only they — are the verifiers of good ideas. And we should be grateful for whatever decision they deign to make.

If they farm out an idea to the public service, and the idea doesn’t come back in the form they envisioned, no matter: Send out the McKinsey signal. For just a few million dollars, their crack team of subject matter non-experts can prepare a PowerPoint presentation laying out the exact policy the political staff wanted in the first place.

The Liberals take a similar approach to consulting with the unwashed masses. When the government consulted the public on their plan to police “online harms,” they published a “what we heard” report that was broadly supportive of their plan.

Can we see the submissions? Journalists and academics asked. No. Came the reply.

Fierce fighting on Gallipoli … before WW1

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Bruce Gudmundsson outlines the operations of Ottoman Empire forces defending “Turkey in Europe” against Greek and Bulgarian invasion (in alliance with Serbia and Montenegro) in 1913:

In the English speaking world, the name Gallipoli invariably evokes memories of the great events of 1915 and 1916. A location of such strategic importance, however, rarely serves as the site of a single battles. Two years before the landings of the British, Indian, Australian, and New Zealand troops on the south-west portion of the the peninsula (and the concurrent French landings on the nearby mainland of Asia Minor near the ruins of the ancient city of Troy), Ottoman soldiers defended the Dardanelles against the forces of the Balkan League.

By the end of January of 1913, the combined efforts of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria had driven Ottoman forces from most of “Turkey in Europe”. Indeed, the only intact Ottoman formations on European soil were those trapped in the fortress of Adrianople, those holding the fortified line just west of Constantinople, and those that had recently arrived at Gallipoli.

Soon after arriving, the Ottoman forces on Gallipoli began to build a belt of field fortifications across the narrowest part of the peninsula, a line some five kilometers (three miles) west of the the town of Bolayir. At the same time, they occupied outposts some twenty kilometers east of the line, at the place where the peninsula connected to the mainland.

The general situation in (and around) the Gallipoli Peninsula, 31 January 1913.

On 4 February 1913, the Bulgarians attacked. On the first day of this attack, they drove in the Ottoman outposts. On the second day, they broke through a hastily erected line of resistance, thereby convincing the Ottoman forces in front of them to evacuate Bolayir. However, rather than taking the town, or otherwise attempting to exploit their victory, they withdrew to positions some ten kilometers (six miles) east of the Ottoman earthworks.

While the Ottoman land forces returned to the earthworks along the neck of the Peninsula, ships of the Ottoman Navy operating in the Sea of Marmora located, and began to bombard, the Bulgarian forces near the coast. This caused the Bulgarians to move inland, where they took up, and improved, new positions on the rear slopes of nearby hills.

On 9 February, the Ottomans launched a double attack. While the main body of the Ottoman garrison of Gallipoli advanced overland, a smaller force, supported by the fire of Ottoman warships, landed on the far side of the Bulgarian position. Notwithstanding the advantages, both numerical and geometric, enjoyed by the Ottoman attackers, this pincer action failed to destroy the Bulgarian force. Indeed, in the course of two failed attacks, the Ottomans suffered some ten thousand casualties.

Though the Ottoman maneuver failed to dislodge the Bulgarians from their trenches, the two-sided attack convinced the Bulgarian commander to seek ground that was, at once, both easier to defend against terrestrial attack and less vulnerable to naval gunfire. He found this on the east bank of a river, thirteen kilometers (eight miles) northeast of Bolayir and ten kilometers (six miles) north of the place where the Ottoman landing had taken place.

British civil servants apparently need to have training on BDSM theory and practice

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Malcolm Clark outlines the proposal to be discussed at a civil service union conference next month:

“Cologne BDSM 07” by CSD2006 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .

For years, the LGBT lobby has wreaked havoc across the UK’s civil service. It has helped to turn the machinery of government into a crèche for the kind of people who can’t remember what pronouns they’re using that day. But this may have just been a taster of what’s to come. Kink, it seems, is the new frontier in identity politics. Get ready to meet the “BDSM” lobby.

Next month, at its annual conference, the biggest civil-service union, PCS, will discuss a motion calling on Whitehall to set up a network for staff who are into bondage, domination and sado-masochism (BDSM). I suppose there’s one thing to be said for this daft idea. The more time these jobsworths spend slapping each other around, the less time they’ll have to humiliate and torment members of the taxpaying public.

There are a few obvious problems with this proposed BDSM staff network. For one, its advocates have called for workplace training courses about BDSM. No, I’m not making this up. The suggested courses would explain that “mutual informed consent … is needed before erotic activity is carried out”. This is a statement of the obvious to most of us. Who says entry standards for the civil service are slipping?

You may have assumed that the priority of our civil service should be carrying out the business of government, rather than BDSM advocacy. Perhaps it should be getting on top of the fact that only three per cent of hospital trusts in England hit cancer waiting-time targets in 2022? Or the fact that 360,000 people had to wait more than 10 weeks for their passport last year?

One strange thing about this demand for training courses for kink-meisters is that it flies in the face of other recent staff demands. Across Whitehall, as in private industry, advocacy groups have long insisted that Britain’s workplaces have developed a toxic culture that does not respect sexual boundaries. Reams of new guidelines have been drawn up in response. Many of these guidelines consider asking questions about someone’s sex life to be, in itself, a form of sexual harassment. Yet now we could soon have staff networks based solely around people’s private sex lives. And what would a meeting of sexual fetishists discuss if not their sex lives? The weather?

Even twenty years ago, it was a common witticism to refer to workplace meetings as “beatings”, but this is a long way past a casual joke (that yes, is probably risky to make in most modern workplaces, as someone is bound to find offence).

While looking for an appropriate image to accompany this post, I was quickly reminded why most search engines now offer varying levels of “safe” viewing.

Why British train enthusiasts hate this man – Dr. Beeching’s Railway Axe

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Train of Thought
Published 27 Jan 2023

In today’s video, we take a look at one Doctor Richard Beeching, the man who ripped up a third of Britain’s railways with nothing but a pen and paper.

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QotD: Gesamtkunstwerk

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it occurs to me that movies aren’t the best example of the Current Year’s creative bankruptcy — music is. Somewhere below, I joked that Pink Floyd’s album The Wall was a modern attempt at a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total art work”. Wagner thought opera should be a complete aesthetic experience, that a great opera would have not just great music, but a great story in the libretto, great poetry in the lyrics, great painting in the set design, and so on, all of which would combine to something much greater than the sum of its already-excellent parts.

As I said, that’s awfully heavy for an album whose most famous song asks how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat, but it’s nonetheless an accurate description of what Roger Waters was trying to do with the integrated concept album / movie / stage show. Whether or not he knew he was attempting a Gesamtkunstwerk in the full Wagnerian sense is immaterial, as is the question of whether or not he succeeded. Nor does it matter if The Wall is any good, musically or cinematically or lyrically.* The point is, he gave it one hell of a go … and nobody else has, even though these days it’d be far, far easier.

Consider what a band like Rush in their prime would’ve done with modern technology. I’m not a musician, but I’ve been told by people who are that you can make studio-quality stuff with free apps like Garage Band. Seriously, it’s fucking free. So is YouTube, and even high-quality digital cameras cost next to nothing these days, and even laptops have enough processor power to crank out big league video effects, with off-the-shelf software. I’m guessing (again, I’m no musician, let alone a filmmaker), but I’d wager some pretty good money you could make an actual, no-shit Gesamtkunstwerk — music, movie, the whole schmear — for under $100,000, easy. You think 2112-era Rush wouldn’t have killed it on YouTube?

I take a backseat to no man in my disdain for prog rock, but I have a hard time believing Neal Peart and the Dream Theater guys were the apex of rock’n’roll pretension. I realize I’ve just given the surviving members of Styx an idea, and we should all be thankful Kilroy Was Here was recorded in 1983, not 2013, because that yawning vortex of suck would’ve destroyed all life in the solar system, but I’m sure you see my point.** Why has nobody else tried this? Just to stick with a long-running Rotten Chestnuts theme, “Taylor Swift”, the grrl-power cultural phenomenon, is just begging for the Gesamtkunstwerk treatment. Apparently she’s trying real hard to be the June Carter Cash of the New Millennium™ these days, and hell, even I’d watch it.***

The fact that it hasn’t been attempted, I assert, is the proof that it can’t be done. The culture isn’t there, despite the tools being dirt cheap and pretty much idiot proof. Which says a LOT about the Current Year, none of it good.

    * The obvious comment is that Roger Waters is no Richard Wagner, but that’s fatuous — even if you don’t like Wagner (I don’t, particularly), you have to acknowledge he’s about the closest thing to a universal artistic genius the human race has produced. It’s meaningless to say that Roger Waters isn’t in Wagner’s league, because pretty much nobody is in Wagner’s league. And philistine though I undoubtedly am, I’d much rather listen to The Wall than pretty much any opera — I enjoy the symphonic bits, but opera singing has always sounded like a pack of cats yodeling to me. I’m with the Emperor from Amadeus: “Too many notes.”

    ** If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then please, I’m begging you, do NOT go listen to “Mr. Roboto.” Whatever you do, don’t click that link …

    … you clicked it, didn’t you? And now you’ll be randomly yelling “domo arigato, Mister Roboto!!” for days. You’ll probably get punched more than once for that. Buddy, I tried to warn you.

    *** Anthropological interest only. I know I’m in the distinct minority on this one, but she never turned my crank, even in her “fresh-scrubbed Christian country girl” stage. Too sharp featured, and too obviously mercenary, even back then.

Severian, “More Scattered Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-13.

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