We are now trying to impress the professor and get an A. So we can’t just write about what’s happening at the surface level — we must identify the Deep Inner Meaning (DIM) that others don’t see.
Those bozos think that Moby Dick is a novel about a great white whale. But we know there’s a Deep Inner Meaning to the book — that whale is actually a stand-in for the author’s annoying mother-in-law. Or maybe it’s a surrogate for the President of the United States. Or a displaced sex object.
Let your imagination run free. It really doesn’t matter which you choose. It just can’t be anything obvious. And then you need to talk a good game, and not pay too much attention to facts and plausibility.
And who said you don’t learn useful job skills as an English major?
If you spread the B.S. thick enough, and never let on that you even sniff the stench, you have better than even odds of getting a top grade. It helps, by the way, if you show up in class dressed in something unseemly and having omitted several steps in your morning grooming routine — which are seen as signs of incipient genius in the School of Humanities.
Ted Gioia, “The 4 Types of College papers for English Majors”, The Honest Broker, 2023-02-27.
June 4, 2023
QotD: The four types of college papers for English Majors – 3. The DIM
June 3, 2023
What are you going to believe? The official Narrative™ or your lyin’ eyes?
Jeff Goldstein rounds up just a few incidents that gained media notoriety for their racist overtones, only to be quietly dropped and ignored once the truth came out:
A screenshot from a video showing Nick Sandmann confronted by activist Nathan Phillips at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, 18 January, 2019.
Wikimedia Commons.
Covington Catholic High School’s Nick Sandmann never tried to stare down a phony Native American activist. Smugly or otherwise. And we all should have known it.
Morgan Bettinger never threatened to run over BLM protesters, nor did she make any of the supposedly racist remarks Zyahna Bryant claimed she did. Bryant — a “social justice” activist and Marxian race hustler — can perhaps be trusted to review a new Applebee’s dessert pie, but on all other subjects, the wise move would be to adopt a skeptical pose when engaging with her, if not simply dismiss out of hand anything spilling from her mouth save maybe a tasty fruit filling.
Michael Brown never said “hands up, don’t shoot!” Jacob Blake is not a hero or a civil rights icon — nor should be George Floyd or Trayvon Martin.
Christian Cooper did indeed threaten to take Amy Cooper’s dog. Justin Neely was a crazed homeless man and career criminal who absolutely threatened people on a subway train. Daniel Penny has never been a white supremacist.
Time and time again, the left creates its own mythology, then repeats it until the rest of us just kind of accept it as at least somewhat fairly described. And that’s a fatal mistake, both intellectually and practically.
Physician’s assistant Sarah Comrie, six-months pregnant and coming off of a twelve hour shift in Bellevue Hospital’s neonatal ward, never approached a group of five black teenagers, all of them males, and tried to steal a bike they’d rented — though the mental image of five black teenagers pressed ridiculously together groin to ass on a rented bike peddling down a New York City street on their way to, what? — church? A Hamilton matinée? — I have to admit amuses me enormously.
Similarly, the five male teens who laid claim to the bike never acted “admirably,” as yet another race hustler attempted to frame the interaction; in fact, during the 90-second viral video clip, the men can be seen and heard hectoring the pregnant woman, taunting her, cursing at her, putting hands on her several times, and intentionally creating a “Karen” narrative in real time. Nevertheless, we’re told that if we believe our own eyes — and identify thuggish behavior as belonging to those who act thuggishly, and with what it appears is thuggish relish — then what we’re doing is “using thug as a synonym for the n-word”.
— And yet, the person making that claim is naturally the one who is interested in drawing that connection — in a rhetorical maneuver that has become so trite and boring that I wish I could stop pointing it out: the gambit is meant to forestall any pushback on the preferred and implied racial narrative the grifters are hoping to shape and add to their civic mythologies, while also and simultaneously deterring people from honestly assessing what they’ve witnessed — however out of context and fraught that may be — for fear of being labeled “racist” and publicly scapegoated as a symbol for venal “whiteness” that is now central to the leftist’s “anti-racism” and CRT projects.
Kids, obesity, and the woke agenda
Elizabeth Nickson isn’t a fan of the “healthy at any size” mantra, especially when it comes to kids:
If I were a kid today I’d be out scouting the neighborhood for a home school or church to take me in as long and teach me latin and math and give me a reading list as long as I didn’t have to have someone’s jiggly bits pushed in my face or be shown diagrams of sexual positions, and asked ceaselessly about my food intake, my BMI measured (25 states mandate this) and no doubt entirely invasive questions about my family and father and weird uncles and so on. It would be like living in a perpetual inquisition, danger everywhere, with no privacy in any area of one’s life, with every sentence and expression evaluated on whether I am being a good member of the inclusive collective and will step aside so someone less privileged can have a chance.
But I am not nine and therefore spared all that, but God in heaven I feel sorry for them. Schools have stepped up to take the place of the at-home mother who had a relationship with her kids strong enough so that their emotional needs were being met and they didn’t have to stuff food down their throats for a relief from the ceaseless pressure to conform, and severe emotional loneliness from the absence of a family system.
Instead of your mind, the dominant focus seems to be your body, and at the most vulnerable time in your life. I know they think they are raising good little socialist citizens, who are acutely aware of the struggles of the less fortunate, but add in the bullying of Middle School and little wonder 49% of kids are overweight or obese, and the rest stuffing their feelings 24/7. Great for the food pushers, sucks for the medical system.
Virginia Sole-Smith who is the anointed high priestess of Fat Positivity Culture, has been pushing fat is AOK and in fact, possibly superior to thin-ness, which she never fails to excoriate, for the New York Times, Slate and Science and various other high-end publications for 20 years. Her latest book Fat Talk, which sits on the NYTimes bestseller list is about raising fat children, or not fat children, it’s kind of confusing. Ok, to be fat, but not obese, but you can’t put obese kids on a diet because that will make them fatter, and besides everyone is criticizing them and that has to stop.
Every leftie cliché is brought out of the barn and groomed within an inch of its life. White privilege, thin white privileged women, BIPOC exclusion, thin privilege in sport, entertainment, business, and so on, a system systematically prejudiced against fat people.
Basically, however, Sole-Smith is staking her ground and that is that “small fat”, which is how she defines herself, is normal and we should adjust our eyes to see pudgy tummies as “something to aim for” – as she states in her last chapter called “How to Have The Fat Talk”. We have to start “reclaiming (sic) fatness as a perfectly good way to have a body”.
“Rather than having a culture of transparency, we have a culture of secrecy”
In The Line, Philippe Lagassé writes about Canada’s remarkably non-transparent approach to classified information and the very limited ability of our elected representatives to see anything the government chooses to deem “a secret”:
Institutions are tough to change, Canadian institutions especially. But change is possible. Gradual change can happen when we reinterpret existing rules or add new ones on top of old ones that are deeply entrenched. In other cases, a crisis happens that leads to rapid and significant change. These crises either destroy old ways of doing things, or they open a window of opportunity to shake things up. Revelations of Chinese interference in Canadian elections, and David Johnston’s first report on the matter, have opened one of these windows when it comes to Parliament and classified information.
Two sets of Canadian parliamentarians have access to classified information: Privy Councillors (though usually only those currently serving as ministers of the Crown), and those who sit on the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP). In both cases, they have access to classified information in an executive capacity, not their parliamentary capacity. Put differently, they have access to this information by virtue of an executive office they hold in addition to their parliamentary one. Parliament doesn’t have a body that has access to classified information, nor do parliamentarians have access to that information unless they hold an executive office.
Keeping classified information squarely within the executive, or in limited cases within the judiciary, reflects deep-seated Canadian pathologies. As our pathetic Access to Information system highlights, the Canadian government over-classifies things or deems too many of them subject to cabinet confidence. Rather than having a culture of transparency, we have a culture of secrecy. This secrecy culture exists for a number of reasons. Public servants don’t want their ministers to be embarrassed. Information is power within the bureaucracy and giving it out easily diminishes its value. Risk aversion is rewarded and admitting failure is frowned upon. We can’t disclose anything that might rub an ally the wrong way. The list goes on.
Above all, though, Canadian government encourages the strange notion that our secrets are super-super-secret. What do I mean by that? When you look at our allies, Canadian is an outlier in terms of what we disclose and to whom we disclose it. Canadian officials have convinced themselves that they are applying a well-established set of norms around classified and sensitive information, when in fact we’re an outlier. This is particularly notable with it comes to sharing national security information with Parliament.
In the United Kingdom, there’s a statutory committee of Parliament that has access to classified information, called the Intelligence and Security Committee. Since the United Kingdom’s Public Accounts Committee is also expected to oversee all the government’s spending, the chair of that committee has had access to classified information as well to review secret agency budgets. Australia has a similar committee, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Security and Intelligence. This is a very active and important body. It allows Australia to regularly update its national security legislation to meet new threats and to ensure that the powers conferred on the executive are not abused. New Zealand has a parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, too. The Kiwi committee is a bit of an odd duck, since it’s chaired by the prime minister and has the leader of the official opposition as a member. Given that New Zealand is probably one of the most zealous countries when it comes to government transparency, though, it isn’t too surprising. They release stuff that would lead the Privy Council Office to have a collective head explosion if we did the same.
Why Was Normandy Selected For D-Day?
Real Engineering
Published 28 Mar 2020In the debut episode of the Logistics of D-Day we explore the logic and planning that resulted in Normandy being chosen as the location for the largest amphibious invasion in the history of human kind.
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QotD: The four types of college papers for English Majors – 2. The TWIT (They Were Idiots Then)
We know that unfailingly, for the simple reason that they didn’t think like us. They were stupid and stodgy and superstitious and held all sorts of irritating views.
And it’s true. You can take absolutely any book from a hundred years ago, and find infractions on almost every page. The past is a different country, where everybody is a knucklehead.
Here’s how to write a TWIT: You take a yellow marker and highlight every time somebody in the book makes a blunder, according to our current rules of decorum this week. Trust me, you won’t even have to read the whole book. Within a chapter or two, your book will have more yellow highlights than Nicki Minaj’s hairdo.
Now you’re ready to roll.
You write up the infractions like it’s a district attorney’s indictment. But here’s the key — you must give it some fancy name. You can’t just call a twit a twit in your TWIT paper; you have to refer to your harangue as a critique or an exegesis or a deconstruction, starting with the title — which should be something like “A Critique of Phallogocentrism in Henry James’s Turn of the Screw“.
Once you get the hang of this, it’s as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. There’s just one problem — everyone else in the class is also writing TWIT papers. It’s the most popular thing on campus since the invention of the senior admin job. So you only get a B on these. Or maybe B+ if you throw in a few French words (for example, inserting différance whenever you’d normally say difference).
Ted Gioia, “The 4 Types of College papers for English Majors”, The Honest Broker, 2023-02-27.
June 2, 2023
A potential sign of resistance?
Severian on the odd phenomena of people who’ve begun to discover they didn’t need to accept the ever-more-woke products of the entertainment industry and, more recently, major retailers and brewers:
Bud Light’s latest brand ambassador, Dylan Mulvaney
The Third Law of SJW — “SJWs always double down” — is really going to get tested with these things [woke reboots/remakes of popular TV shows, movies, etc.], but we need to hope they keep the faith. We want them to double, triple, quadruple down. The material basis of Clown World is the assumption that people simply can’t live without iCrap. As I noted, lots of people did indeed seem to enjoy the Covid lockdowns, and they weren’t all aspiring Laptop Class leftoids, either. Lots of moms found out that they rather enjoyed spending time with their kids, rather than putting in an extra twenty hours a week down at the law firm. Lots of suburban dads found a new sense of accomplishment doing little projects around the house.
In other words, people found out that not only could they just “make do”, they actually kinda enjoyed “making do”. Lots of them went right back to their old ways the minute they could, of course, but not all of them … and now, #Woke Capital is basically doing the job for us. They’re daring us to not go to the movies, the same way Fox News is daring us to cut the cord entirely (they figure that hey, we get $x a month from the cable subscription fee regardless of whether anyone watches or not, so why not give in to our natural inclinations and become MSNBC Lite?).
They’re daring us to cut the cord, throw the Pocket Moloch in the nearest lake, and get what we need from local sources — including entertainment. And who knows what might happen if we start actually talking to our neighbors? If, as with the lockdowns, the guy who lives down the street ceases to be “the dude with the green Honda” and becomes Bob, a real person?
Challenge accepted, motherfuckers.
“Montgomery was a military talent; Slim was a military genius”
Dr. Robert Lyman is a known fan of Field Marshal Slim (as am I, for the record), not only for his brilliant military achievements, but also as a writer:
Field Marshal Sir William Slim (1891-1970), during his time as GOC XIVth Army.
Portrait by No. 9 Army Film & Photographic Unit via Wikimedia Commons.
How many British generals have been able to write as well as they could fight? Strangely perhaps, quite a few. Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver (Dilemmas of the Desert War, The Seven Ages of the British Army), General Sir David Fraser (And We Shall Shock Them), General Sir John Hackett (The Third World War) and Major General John Strawson (Beggars in Red) are four outstanding soldier-writers that spring immediately to mind. Even Monty wrote his memoirs. And in our own day I’ve read plenty of competent books from a slew of men who’ve reached the top of the profession of arms. The work of some, like that of General Sir Richard Sherriff (2017: War with Russia), Major General Mungo Melvin (Manstein) and Brigadier Allan Mallinson (Too Important for the Generals et al), could be described as outstanding. Julian Thompson and Richard Dannatt also fit this bill. But by far and away the best of Britain’s soldier-writers in the last century was also probably the greatest soldier – and field commander – of them all: Bill Slim. He was, more properly, Field Marshal William J. Slim KG, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, GBE, DSO, MC, KStJ, the onetime General Officer Commanding the famous 14th Army – the so-called Forgotten Army – of Burma fame. He was, in this author’s view, the greatest British general of the last war (to avoid further debate, let’s just agree that Monty failed as a coalition commander, whereas Slim excelled). Slim’s ability as a general is perfectly summed up by the historian Frank McLynn:
Slim’s encirclement of the Japanese on the Irrawaddy deserves to rank with the great military achievements of all time – Alexander at Gaugamela in 331 BC, Hannibal at Cannae (216 BC), Julius Caesar at Alesia (58 BC), the Mongol general Subudei at Mohi (1241) or Napoleon at Austerlitz (1805). The often made – but actually ludicrous – comparison between Montgomery and Slim is relevant here … there is no Montgomery equivalent of the Irrawaddy campaign … Montgomery was a military talent; Slim was a military genius.1
Some hint of Bill Slim’s fluency with the written word to complement his ability as a soldier came with the publication of Defeat into Victory in 1956, his superb retelling of the Burma story. Apart from its remarkable tale – the humiliation of British Arms in 1942 eventually overturned by a triumphant (and largely Indian) army in 1945 (87% of Slim’s army was Indian) – the quality of the writing was astonishing. Its author, a man who would be appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1949 (following Monty), the first Sepoy General ever to do so, and by Attlee no less, could clearly wield a pen every bit as he could destroy Japanese armies in battle (a feat he achieved twice, first in 1944 and again in 1945). When the book was first published it was an instant publishing sensation with the first edition of 20,000 selling out immediately. The Field recorded: “Of all the world’s greatest records of war and military adventure, this story must surely take its place among the greatest. It is told with a wealth of human understanding, a gift of vivid description, and a revelation of the indomitable spirit of the fighting man that can seldom have been equalled – let alone surpassed – in military history.” The London Evening Standard was as effusive in its praise: “He has written the best general’s book of World War II. Nobody who reads his account of the war, meticulously honest yet deeply moving, will doubt that here is a soldier of stature and a man among men.” The author John Masters, who served in the 14th Army, wrote in the New York Times on 19 November 1961 that it was “a dramatic story with one principal character and several hundred subordinate characters”, arguing that Slim was “an expert soldier and an expert writer”. The book remains a best seller today.
The following year Slim also published an anthology of speeches and lectures, loosely based on the theme of leadership, called Courage and Other Broadcasts. Then in 1959 he published his second book, Unofficial History, which bears out in full Masters’ description of Slim as a superb writer. It was a deeply personal, honest though light hearted account of events during his service. It received widespread acclaim. The author John Connell described it as “for the most part uproarious fun. If Bill Slim hadn’t been a first-rate soldier, what a short story writer he might have made.” For its part, The National Review wrote: “One of the most significant aspects of Field Marshal Slim’s book is the affectionate respect he shows when he writes about British and Indian soldiers. He finds plenty to amuse him too. I doubt whether a kindlier or truer description of the contemporary soldier has been given anywhere than in Unofficial History … It is one of the most delightful and amusing books about modern campaigning I have ever read.”
1. The General Wondered Why https://amzn.eu/d/45gHfOH
The idiocy of trying to portray political systems on a single spectrum
Lawrence W. Reed explains why trying to illustrate the similarities and differences of political systems using only a single axis conceals more than it reveals, especially for students:
In classes on Government and Political Science, with few exceptions, students in both high school and college are taught that the so-called “political spectrum” (or “political/economic” spectrum) looks like this: Communism and Socialism reside on the Left, Capitalism and Fascism dwell on the Right. Various mixtures of those things lie somewhere in between:
This is not only false and misleading, it is also idiocy. Toss it into the trash bin and demand a refund from the teacher who presented it as fact, or as any kind of insightful educational tool.
At the very least, a spectrum that looks like that should raise some tough questions. Why should socialists and fascists be depicted as virtual opposites when they share so much in common — from their fundamental, intellectual principles to their methods of implementation? If a political spectrum is supposed to illustrate a range of relationships between the individual and the State, or the very size and scope of the State, then why are systems of Big State/Small Individuals present at both ends of it?
On any other topic, the two ends of a spectrum would depict opposites.
[…]
My contention is that if Communism, Socialism, Fascism and Capitalism all appear on the same range line, it is terribly misleading and utterly useless to place the first two on the left and the second two on the right. The placement that makes the most sense is this one:
The perspective represented in this sketch immediately arouses dispute because its implications are quite different from what students are typically taught. The inevitable objections include these three:
1. Communism and fascism cannot be close together because communists and fascists fought each other bitterly. Hitler attacked Stalin, for example!
This objection is equivalent to claiming, “Al Capone and Bugs Moran hated and fought each other so they can’t both be considered gangsters”. Or, “Since Argentina and Brazil compete so fiercely in football, both teams cannot be composed of footballers”.
Both communism and fascism demonstrate in actual practice an extremely low regard for the lives and rights of their subject peoples. Why should anyone expect their practitioners to be nice to each other, especially when they are rivals for territory and influence on the world stage?
We should remember that Hitler and Stalin were allies before they were enemies. They secretly agreed to carve up Poland in August 1939, leading directly to World War II. The fact that Hitler turned on Stalin two years later is nothing more than proof of the proverb, “There’s no honor among thieves”. Thieves are still thieves even if they steal from each other.
2. Under communism as Karl Marx defined it, government “withers away”. So it cannot be aligned closely with socialism because socialism involves lots of government.
Marx’s conception of communism is worse than purely hypothetical. It is sheer lunacy. The idea that the absolutist despots of the all-powerful “proletarian dictatorship” would one day simply walk away from power has no precedent to point to and no logic behind it. Even as a prophecy, it strains credulity to the breaking point.
Communism in the sketch above appears where it does because in actual practice, it is just a little more radical than the worst socialism. It is the difference between the murderous, totalitarian Khmer Rouge of Cambodia and, say, the socialism of Castro’s Cuba.
3. Communism and Fascism are radically different because in focus, one is internationalist and the other is nationalist (as in Hitler’s “national socialism”).
Big deal. Again, chocolate and vanilla are two different flavors of ice cream, but they’re both ice cream. Was it any consolation to the French or the Norwegians or the Poles that Hitler was a national socialist instead of an international socialist? Did it make any difference to the Ethiopians that Mussolini was an Italian nationalist instead of a Soviet internationalist?
Endless confusion persists in political analysis because of the false dichotomy the conventional spectrum (Sketch 1) suggests. People are taught to think that fascists Mussolini and Hitler were polar opposites of communists Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. In fact, however, they were all peas in the same collectivist pod. They all claimed to be socialists. They all sought to concentrate power in the State and to glorify the State. They all stomped on individuals who wanted nothing more than to pursue their own ambitions in peaceful commerce. They all denigrated private property, either by outright seizure or regulating it to serve the purposes of the State.
Germany Adopts the PPSh in 9mm: the MP-41(r)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Feb 2023During World War Two, both German and Russian soldiers often thought that the other side’s weapons were better than their own. In particular, both sides often preferred their opponents’ SMGs. In late 1941, a group of German officers formally requested that Germany simply copy and produce the PPSh-41. This led to the HWA formally studying the question of PPSh-41 vs MP-40 … and they found that the German gun was better, but the Russian magazine was better.
Naturally, as a result of this finding, the German military chose to convert captured Russian PPSh-41s to use MP-40 magazines. The conversion used standard MP40 magazines, and required magazine well adapters and new 9mm barrels. Some 10,000 such conversions were made in total. Some used cast magwell adapters and some were stamped, and the barrels were made from standard MP40 barrels turned down to fit PPSh trunnions.
The standard 7.62mm PPSh-41 in German service was designated MP-717(r), while the ones changed to 9x19mm like this were designated MP-41(r). Many thanks to Limex for giving me access to film this one for you!
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QotD: The four types of college papers for English Majors – 1. The Reliable C&C
Then you list 5 ways they are similar and 5 ways they are different. Voilá — you’ve written a college paper!
Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen are both writers who share the same language: English. But Hemingway is an American who liked bullfighting and drinking martinis. Jane Austen is English and never fought a bull. She probably drank tea, because the martini wasn’t invented until 1863, some 47 years after her death …
You can write this stuff in your sleep, provided you dream about Wikipedia entries. But be forewarned: the reliable C&C probably only gets you a reliable C grade.
Ted Gioia, “The 4 Types of College papers for English Majors”, The Honest Broker, 2023-02-27.
June 1, 2023
Recent discoveries in ancient DNA
The Psmiths, John and Jane, decided to jointly review a book by David Reich called Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. This is Jane’s first contribution to an extended email thread between the Psmiths:
The problem with history is that there just isn’t enough of it. We’ve been around for, what, fifty thousand years? Conservatively.1 And we’ve barely written things down for a tenth of that. Archaeological excavation can take you a little farther back, but as the archaeologists always like to remind us, pots are not people. If you get lucky with a society that made things out of durable materials in a cold and/or dry environment (or you get very lucky with anaerobic preservation of organic materials, like in ice or bogs), maybe you can trace a material culture’s expansion and contraction across time and space. But that won’t tell you whether it’s a function of people moving and taking their stuff with them, or people’s neighbors going “ooh, using string to make patterns on your pots, that’s cool” and copying it. It certainly doesn’t tell you what their descendants were doing several thousand years later, potentially in an entirely different place and probably using an entirely different suite of technologies. Trying to understand what happened in the human past based on the historical and archaeological records is like walking into a room where a bomb has gone off and trying to reconstruct the locations of all the objects before the explosion. You can get some idea, but it’s all very broad strokes. And actually it’s worse than that, because it wasn’t just one explosion, it was lots, and we wouldn’t even know how many if we didn’t have a way of winding the clock back. But these days we do, and it’s ancient DNA.
Sometime between when my grandfather gave me a copy of Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s Genes, Peoples, and Languages for my birthday and when you and I decided to read Reich’s book together, two big things happened: humans got really, really good at sequencing and reading genomes, and Svante Pääbo’s lab in Leipzig got really, really good at extracting DNA from ancient bones. (How they developed their procedures is actually a really interesting story, which Pääbo retells in his book, but Reich — whose lab uses the same techniques on an industrial scale — gives a good, brief summary of how it works.) Together, these two advances unlocked … well, not quite everything about the deep past, but an absolutely enormous amount. Suddenly we can track the people, not just the pots, and the story is more complicated and fascinating than anything we might have expected. I’ve written elsewhere about some of the aDNA discoveries about human evolution (Neanderthal admixture, the Denisovans, etc.), but I’m even more excited about what ancient DNA reveals about our more recent past. Luckily, that’s what Reich spends most of the book on, with discussion of ancient ghost populations who now exist only in admixture and then chapters on the specific population genetic histories of Europe, India, North America, East Asia, and Africa, each of which contains some discoveries that would make (at least the more sensible) archaeologists and historical linguists go “well, duh” and others that are real surprises.
One of the “duh” stories is the final, conclusive identification of the people who brought horses, wagons, and Indo-European languages to Europe with the Yamnaya culture of the Pontic Steppe and their descendants. (David Anthony gives a very good overview of the archaeological case for this in The Wheel, the Horse, and Language, including some very cool experimental archaeology about horse teeth; you have my permission to skim the sections on pots.) My favorite surprising result, though, comes from a little farther north. People usually assume that Native Americans and East Asians share a common ancestor who split from the ancestors of Europeans and Africans before dividing into those two populations, but when Reich’s lab was trying to test the idea they found, to their surprise, that in places where Northern European genomes differ from Africans’, they are closer to Native Americans than to East Asians. Then, using a different set of statistical techniques, they found that Northern European populations were the product of mixture between two groups, one very similar to Sardinians (who are themselves almost-unmixed descendants of the first European farmers) and one that is most similar to Native Americans. They theorized a “ghost” population, which they called the “Ancient North Eurasians”, who had contributed DNA both to the population that would eventually cross the Bering land bridge and to the non-Early European Farmer ancestors of modern Northern Europeans. Several years later, another team sequenced the genome of a boy who died in Siberia 24kya and who was a perfect match for that theorized ghost ANE population.
But we’ve already established that I’m the prehistory nerd in this family; were you as jazzed as I was to read about the discovery of the Ancient North Eurasians?
1. That’s the latest plausible date for the arrival of full “behavioral modernity” in Africa, though our genus goes back about two million years, tool use probably three million, and I think there’s a good case that Homo was meaningfully “us” by 500kya. (That’s “thousand years ago” in “I talk about deep history so much I need an acronym”, fyi.)
Banning Roger Waters would be playing his game
In Spiked, Daniel Ben-Ami explains why we should reject the arguments about banning Roger Waters, formerly the frontman for Pink Floyd, and lately a pretty out-there antisemite:
Screencapture from a YouTube video.
Pressure is mounting to ban Roger Waters from performing in Britain. The former Pink Floyd frontman and veteran anti-Israel activist stands accused of anti-Semitism. But whatever one makes of Waters’s antics, his performances should not be cancelled.
Waters is set to perform his first UK show tonight in Birmingham, with further concerts scheduled for Glasgow, London and Manchester. These are part of his controversial “This Is Not a Drill” tour, which began its European leg a few months ago. The show contains a number of controversial elements, such as Waters dressing up in a Nazi-style uniform and brandishing a gun, while Anne Frank’s name is projected above the stage. In past tours, he has floated an inflatable pig with a Star of David on it above the stage.
The Waters row came to a head earlier this month, when local authorities in Frankfurt attempted to ban his concert. The ban was successfully challenged by Waters in court and the concert went ahead, despite protests. Waters is now being investigated by the German police for wearing a Nazi-style uniform on stage at his Berlin gig (the display of Nazi symbols is illegal in Germany, except for educational or artistic purposes). According to Waters, he donned the uniform not to endorse Nazism, but in order to make a “scathing critique” of it.
Jewish community organisations in the UK have condemned Waters, with some calling for him to be censored. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has argued that his concerts are probably better described as political rallies. The National Jewish Assembly has called on the UK government to condemn Waters. The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a volunteer-led charity, has not only launched a petition to stop venues hosting him – it has also written to cinema chains demanding they cancel film screenings of his concerts.
[…]
There are also more practical reasons to challenge these attempts to cancel Waters. The campaign against him, first in Germany and now in Britain, has allowed Waters to present himself as a free-speech martyr. To some, this will lend credence to his dubious claim that he is the victim of shadowy, covert forces determined to silence his advocacy for the oppressed.
Besides, banning displays of anti-Semitism does not make the problem go away. On the contrary, it only encourages anti-Semitism to take on more disguised forms. This often includes the demonisation of Israel or of Zionism, rather than Jews as such. Even those who do genuinely hate Jews will rarely admit to it openly. Instead, they typically use coded language, which is harder to challenge and confront.
By all means, protest outside Waters’s concerts and challenge his outrageous antics. But the attempts to ban his concerts are an affront to freedom. And they will do nothing to help the struggle against anti-Semitism. Roger Waters must have the right to perform.
How to Make a Wall Shelf | Episode 2
Paul Sellers
Published 20 Jan 2023With all the housing dadoes completed and the main body together, we must cut the middle shelf to length and determine the shoulder lines for the stepped part of the stepped housing dado joint.
The practicalities ensure that all of the shoulder lines close up perfectly. The patterns we use are important to a wide range of other projects, so learning them now aids us in establishing patterns of construction.
These joints are used in a wide range of shelving units, ranging from bookshelves to toy storage and many other projects. The unit we build here has three types of commonly used housing dado, and the joints we consider mostly as the bookshelf joints.
That said, it can be used for toy boxes and firewood boxes, but we also use it in drawer making too.
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QotD: “The Puritans were the SJWs of their day”
The Puritans, as English Calvinists were called, wrote difficult prose, but in translation it sounds shockingly modern. The Puritans were the SJWs of their day, obsessed with their own pwecious widdle selves. They didn’t get around to making up xzheyr own pronouns, but they did give themselves self-righteous new names — when Ben Johnson called his caricature Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land Busy he got big laughs, but he wasn’t really joking, they really did stuff like that. To be a Puritan requires two things: An obsessive focus on the tiniest micro-movements of your own soul …
… and an equally obsessive focus on forcing other people to disclose the tiniest micro-movements of their souls. There’s nothing anyone could ever do, so trivial that a Puritan could in good conscience overlook it. Calvin’s Geneva was the closest thing to a police state 16th century technology allowed, and when their turn came, Oliver Cromwell and the boys gave importing it to England the old college try. And, of course, Plymouth Bay Colony started as a Puritan police state …
Ideology, then, removes the distinction between public and private. You can’t simply say you’re a Puritan, you really have to BE one — constantly, perfectly, since there’s nothing that Puritanism doesn’t touch. And the only way to do that, of course, is to do everything in full public view at all times. Calvin did — as Walzer remarks, John Calvin, the man, is almost completely absent from Calvin’s writings. (Unlike Luther, whose idiosyncratic, not to say lunatic, personality comes through in practically every sentence). Calvin achieved that clear windowpane prose Orwell claimed was the mark of a great writer — nothing between audience and subject at all. Calvin would, indeed, take the remark that he’s almost a complete cipher, personally, as a very high compliment.
Severian, “Ideology II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-11-09.
