Quotulatiousness

September 20, 2023

Christian views on men and women

Filed under: Books, Greece, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The most recent book review from Mr. and Mrs. Psmith discusses Brian Patrick Mitchell’s Origen’s Revenge: The Greek and Hebrew Roots of Christian Thinking on Male and Female:

The following is an email exchange between the Psmiths, edited slightly for clarity.

John: You know dear, we’ve been writing this book review Substack for eight months now, ever since that crazy New Year’s resolution of ours, but we still haven’t done “the gender one”. And I feel like we have a real competitive advantage at this, since both sides of the unbridgeable epistemic chasm between the sexes are represented here. So let’s settle some of the eternal questions: Can men and women be friends? Who got the worse deal out of the curse in the Garden of Eden? And what’s up with your abysmal grip strength anyway?

I was perplexed by these and other questions, but then I picked up this book on the theology of gender, and it all got a lot clearer. The author is Deacon Brian Patrick Mitchell, an Eastern Orthodox clergyman and retired military officer. In a previous life, Mitchell testified before the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces and then followed that up with a book called Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster, so he’s been interested in the differences between men and women for a while.

People have been observing for centuries that Christianity can be a little bit schizophrenic on the subject of gender relations. From the earliest days of the Apostolic era, there are two strains in evidence within Christianity: one which shores up the gender divisions common to most agricultural societies, and another which radically transcends them. Oftentimes both strains are visible within a single person! Thus you have the Apostle Paul on the one hand saying in his letter to the Ephesians:

    Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. (Ephesians 5:22-24)

But then in Galatians:

    There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

For as long as Christianity has existed, there have been people emphasizing one of these tendencies as the “true” Christian message on gender while attempting to minimize the other. Sometimes these arguments are interesting and sometimes they bring out something important (I’m a fan of Sarah Ruden’s Paul Among the People on the one side, and of Toby Sumpter’s fiery homilies on the other), but I think in both cases they’re falling into the error of trying to simplify something that is actually complicated. There’s a certain kind of person who can’t handle inconsistency, and that kind of person is going to have trouble with Christianity, because to a finite being the products of an infinite mind will sometimes appear inconsistent. Does Christianity want women to be subject to men, or does it want men and women to transcend their natures? The answer is very clearly both.

Mitchell’s book is compelling because it doesn’t try to minimize or hide one of these tendencies, but acknowledges up front that they’re both there and both have to be struggled with. It then advances the novel (as far as I know) argument that these two tendencies with regard to gender relations actually reflect the two major ethnic and cultural influences on the early Church: Hebrew and Greek.

The ancient Hebrew attitudes towards male and female are apparent from the beginning of the Bible: God creates Eve from out of Adam’s rib, and she is called Woman because she was taken out from Man. Thus the woman is subordinated to the man, yet fundamentally made of the same stuff as him. God calls the division of humanity into men and women good, He blesses families and helps barren women conceive, He commands His people to be fruitful and to multiply, and He promises Abraham that his seed shall be numbered as the stars of heaven. The entire Old Testament is a story of families, sometimes dysfunctional families, but families nonetheless, as opposed to lone men roaming the earth as in the Iliad or Bronze Age Mindset. Male headship is assumed, but it’s also assumed that men are fundamentally incomplete without something that only women can give them: a home, a future, and the thing that makes both, children.

So in Mitchell’s telling, the Hebrew legacy is responsible for the more “trad” side of early Christianity. What about the Greeks? Well we already discussed in our joint review of Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient City how ancient Greek society was basically the world of gangster rap: honor, boasting, violence, women as trophies, women as a way of keeping score, women torn wailing from the arms of their parents or husbands and forced into marriage or concubinage or outright slavery. You will be shocked to learn that this culture did not hold a high opinion of women, procreation, or the marital union. Greek philosophy is a massively complicated and diverse beast, but there’s a strong tendency within it to associate women with physicality, nature, and brute matter, and to disdain all of these things in favor of rationality, spirit, and the intellect (all coded as male).

Our readers are probably thinking, “Hang on a minute, I thought the Hebrews were the patriarchal ones, do you mean to say that the hyper-masculine and hyper-misogynistic culture was the one that decided maleness and femaleness didn’t matter?” Well yes I do, and it’s pretty easy to see why if one hasn’t been totally brainwashed by modernity, but maybe it’ll be more convincing if a woman explains it to them.

Jane: Well, I think you gave a pretty accurate description of actually-existing ancient Greek culture, but we have to remember that the Church Fathers weren’t classicists poring through the corpus trying to accurately characterize the past. Rather, they were men of late antiquity, mostly educated in a “Great Books” canon heavy on the classical philosophy — and the worldview of philosophers is often quite different from the general norms and presuppositions of their society as a whole. (Not that modern — by which I mean post-1600 — classicists have always recognized this; E.R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational is considered a seminal work of classical scholarship precisely because it undercuts a long tradition of taking the philosophers as representative of their culture rather than in conflict with it.)1 So the direct influence on early Christians wasn’t the world Fustel de Coulanges describes (which covers roughly the Greek Dark Ages through the Archaic period), but the texts of the period that came after, as interpreted by an even later era. It’s a bit like looking at our contemporary small-l liberals, who draw heavily on a tradition that rose out of Enlightenment philosophy, which in turn was an outgrowth of and/or reaction to the medieval and early modern worlds: they’re not not connected to all that, but Boethius is not going to be the most helpful context for reading Rorty. You should probably look at Locke instead.

“Future Edward Gibbons’ [will] have no problem piecing together precisely how our society went down the toilet”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Andrew MacDougall finds something good to say about social media:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Say what you will about social media, but one unalloyed good is the future Edward Gibbons’ of this parish are going to have no problem piecing together precisely how our society went down the toilet.

Future historians will not only know what happened as we cratered, but, thanks to our ubiquitous digital sketch pads, they will have all of the horrific micro detail. They will know how many times we circled the bowl, what we were saying about circling the bowl as we were circling it and which streaks we were or weren’t arguing about as we went down. Social media is an infinite canvas home to a limitless number of voices and — while we might not be richer for it in the present — our future societal homicide detectives will be forever grateful that we left so many stains to analyze.

For example, when historians consider — as they surely will — whether the moment Canada truly began to crumble was when a WestJet cabin crew allowed Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre to grab the conch and address a planeload of (mostly) Conservative Party of Canada delegates on his way back from a successful party convention, we will have a panoply of voices to consult. From all walks of life and social stations, too. What, for example, did a famous singer like Jann Arden have to say about the whole episode?

Well, thanks to our good friend ex-Twitter we don’t have to guess; we know. And what Arden said was: “Hey @WestJet you and I will not be doing business ever again. This is so ridiculously disappointing.”

In life, I try my best not to be insensitive, but imagine having so little going on that this is considered a good use of your time? Imagine possessing such a delicate constitution that you would rather chain yourself [to] the be-vomited reclining seats of Air Canada than ever fly WestJet again. When you live in Calgary. And what has to be going on to then quote-tweet a bunch of nasty replies and joust with a network of digital cretins, as Arden went on to do. Dozens of them. Who stirs the sewage and then pins the best turds to their page?

As someone who has spent (far) too much time wasting time on platforms like ex-Twitter, I feel I speak from experience. I’ve picked a fair few fights I didn’t need to pick. Both with randoms, and rock stars. I have fed the trolls and I have done performative tweeting. And you know what I’ve learned? The only people who win are our algorithmic overlords. People like Arden are the modern-day Olds-and-Milner lab mice hammering the dopamine reward button — look at me get likes and retweets! — until they (metaphorically) die.

How the feds could lower grocery prices without browbeating CEOs

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Food, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jesse Kline has some advice for Prime Minister Jagmeet Singh Justin Trudeau on things his government could easily do to lower retail prices Canadians face on their trips to the grocery store:

What exactly the grocery executives are supposed to do to bring down prices that are largely out of their control is anyone’s guess. Do they decrease their profit margins even further, thereby driving independent retailers out of business and shedding jobs by increasing their reliance on automation? Do they stop selling high-priced name-brand products, thus decreasing their average prices while driving up profits through the sale of house-brand products?

If the government were serious about working with grocers, rather than casting them as villains in a piece of performative policy theatre, here are a number of policies the supermarket CEOs should propose that would have a meaningful effect on food prices throughout the country.

End supply management
Why do Canadians pay an average of $2.81 for a litre of milk — among the highest in the world — when our neighbours to the south can fill their cereal bowls for half the cost? Because a government-mandated cartel controls the production of dairy products in this country, while the state limits foreign competition through exorbitantly high tariffs on imports.

The same, of course, is true of our egg and poultry industries. Altogether, it’s estimated that supply managements adds between $426 and $697 a year to the average Canadian household’s grocery bill. It’s not a direct cause of inflation, but it’s a policy that, if done away with, could save Canadians up to $700 a year in fairly short order.

Yet not only have politicians been unwilling to address it, they have been fighting some of our closest trading partners to ensure that foreign food products don’t enter the Canadian market and drive down prices. Ditching supply management would be a no-brainer, if anyone in Ottawa was willing to use their brain.

Reduce regulations
The best way to decrease prices in any market is to foster competition. As the Competition Bureau noted in a report released in June, “Canada’s grocery industry is concentrated” and “tough to break into”. Worse still, “In recent years, industry concentration has increased”.

So why don’t more foreign discount grocery chains set up shop here? Perhaps it’s because they know our national policy encourages Canadian-owned oligopolies. While grocery retailers don’t face the same foreign-ownership restrictions as airlines or telecoms, the products they sell are heavily regulated, which acts as a barrier to bringing in cheaper goods from other countries.

Although it wasn’t the primary reason for the lack of foreign competition, the Competition Bureau did note that, “Laws requiring bilingual labels on packaged foods can be a difficult additional cost for international grocers to take on”.

Other ways the federal government could help Canadians afford their grocery bills include:

  • Jail thieves
  • Stop port strikes
  • Don’t tax beer
  • Axe the carbon tax

Don’t hold your breath for any of these ideas to be taken up by Trudeau’s Liberals.

Wire Guided Tank Killer | Swingfire | Anti-Tank Chats

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

The Tank Museum
Published 2 Jun 2023

In this video, Chris Copson looks at the Swingfire, a Cold War period anti-tank guided weapons system. This powerful and hard-hitting missile was mounted on vehicles including Striker, Ferret, and FV 432. With a range of up to 4km, it had the significant advantage that it would outrange tank guns and could be fired remotely by the controller, enabling the launch vehicle to remain in cover.
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QotD: The structure of an American university

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

We need to start by outlining the structure of the university and all of its employees. Universities are very big. Even many small liberal arts colleges will have several hundred (if not many hundreds) of employees and large state universities have thousands; UNC-Chapel Hill has 19,743 undergraduates and 12,961 total staff members, for instance. I should note that while there are many small liberal arts colleges (SLACs) in the USA, the enormous size of large, public R1s1 means that collectively they make up more than half of the US university system by both faculty and students, so this is a case in which the big schools have become typical because they are so big to swamp everything else. That said, smaller institutions matter and what I am going to say here should apply broadly; I will note where conditions differ for different kinds of institutions.

So let’s start dividing all of those employees down so we know what we’re dealing with. We can start by splitting the university into faculty and staff (with student-workers as a third group we’ll not discuss this week); faculty teach and do research whereas staff are all of the supporting administrators and workers that make the university function. We’re not going to talk much about staff, but briefly we can divide them quickly into four big groups: leadership (chancellors, deans, and assistant deans of various kinds; of old these used to be professors pulled into leadership temporarily but these days these are professional managers),2 department staff (who work within academic departments handling the scheduling, paperwork and other essential support services), university staff (who staff the university-wide bureaucracies like the registrar or bursar) and finally what I’ll call – somewhat imprecisely – facilities staff (a wide category covering all of the folks who do a lot of the physical work that keeps a university running; repair, grounds-keeping, janitorial tasks, running dining areas, etc. etc.). All of these people are important, but this week’s post isn’t about them; I break them up here so that when I do mention them, you understand who I mean.

Faculty are divided as well into two large groups: tenure track and non-tenure track. Tenure-track jobs are what most people are familiar with, at least in a vague way. The tenure track was supposed to be (and pre-aughts, was) the “standard” career path for an academic at a university. That’s the system everyone knows, if they know a system. But another system was made.3 And that brings us to non-tenure track positions, both permanent and temporary, full-time and (fake) part-time (which are often actually full time), which will consume most of this post. We’re going to break these up primarily between full-time non-tenured or teaching track positions and notionally “part time” or adjunct appointments, but there are a few other types thrown in there. Crucially, this other system makes up the majority of university teachers, around 67% and rising.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Academic Ranks Explained Or What On Earth Is an Adjunct?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-04-28.

    1. R1 is a term from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which classifies colleges and universities by the degrees they grant and how research oriented they are. An “R1” classification indicates the highest level of research focus; nearly all of the large flagship state schools are R1 institutions.

    2. Whose stewardship of their universities is somehow almost uniformly worse than what was accomplished by amateur professors who’d rather not have been asked.

    3. Please read with the voice of Cate Blanchett intoning, “but another ring was made”.

September 19, 2023

The end of the Western Roman Empire

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

Theophilus Chilton updates a review from several years ago with a few minor changes:

British archaeologist and historian Bryan Ward-Perkin’s excellent 2005 work The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization is a text that is designed to be a corrective for the type of bad academic trends that seem to entrench themselves in even the most innocuous of subjects. In this case, Ward-Perkins, along with fellow Oxfordian Peter Heather in his book The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, sets out to fix a glaring error which has come to dominate much of the scholarly study of the 4th and 5th centuries in the western Empire for the past few decades.

This error is the view that the western Empire did not actually “fall”. Instead, so say many latter-day historical revisionists, what happened between the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378 AD and the abdication of Romulus Augustulus, the last western Emperor, in 476 was more of an accident, an unintended consequence of a few boisterous but well-meaning neighbors getting a bit out of hand. Challenged is the very notion that the Germanic tribes (who cannot be termed “barbarians” any longer) actually “invaded”. Certainly, these immigrants did not cause harm to the western Empire — for the western empire wasn’t actually “destroyed”, but merely “transitioned” seamlessly into the era we term the Middle Ages. Ward-Perkins cites one American scholar who goes so far as to term the resettlement of Germans onto land that formerly belonged to Italians, Hispanians, Britons, and Gallo-Romans as taking place “in a natural, organic, and generally eirenic manner”. Certainly, it is gauche among many modern academics in this field to maintain that violent barbarian invasions forcibly ended high civilization and reduced the living standards in these regions to those found a thousand years before during the Iron Age.

Ward-Perkins points out the “whys” of this historical revision. Much of it simply has to do with political correctness (which he names as such) — the notion that we cannot really say that one culture is “higher” or “better” than others. Hence, when the one replaces the other, we cannot speculate as to how this replacement made things worse for all involved. In a similar vein, many continental scholars appear to be uncomfortable with the implications that the story of mass barbarian migrations and subsequent destruction and decivilization has in the ongoing discussion about the European Union’s own immigration policy — a discussion in which many of these same academics fall on the left side of the aisle.

Yet, all of this revisionism is bosh and bunkum, as Ward-Perkins so thoroughly points out. He does this by bringing to the table a perspective that many other academics in this field of study don’t have — that of a field archaeologist who is used to digging in the dirt, finding artifacts, drawing logical conclusions from the empirical evidence, and then using that evidence to decide “what really happened”, rather than just literary sources and speculative theories. Indeed, as the author shows, across the period of the Germanic invasions, the standard of living all across Roman western Europe declined, in many cases quite precipitously, from what it had been in the 3rd century. The quality and number of manufactured goods declined. Evidence for the large-scale integrative trade network that bound the western Empire together and with the rest of the Roman world disappears. In its place we find that trade goods travelled much smaller distances to their buyers — evidence for the breakdown of the commercial world of the West. Indeed, the economic activity of the West disappeared to the point that the volume of trade in western Europe would not be matched again until the 17th century. Evidence for the decline of food production suggests that populations fell all across the region. Ward-Perkins’ discussion of the decline in the size of cattle is enlightening evidence that the degeneration of the region was not merely economic. Economic prosperity, the access of the common citizen to a high standard of living with a wide range of creature comforts, disappeared during this period.

The author, however, is not negligent in pointing out the literary and documentary evidence for the horrors of the barbarian invasions that so many contemporary scholars seem to ignore. Indeed, the picture painted by the sum total of these evidences is one of harrowing destruction caused by aggressive, ruthless invaders seeking to help themselves to more than just a piece of the Roman pie. Despite the recent scholarly reconsiderations, the Germans, instead of settling on the land given to them by various Emperors and becoming good Romans, ended up taking more and more until there was nothing left to take. As Ward-Perkins puts it,

    Some of the recent literature on the Germanic settlements reads like an account of a tea party at the Roman vicarage. A shy newcomer to the village, who is a useful prospect for the cricket team, is invited in. There is a brief moment of awkwardness, while the host finds an empty chair and pours a fresh cup of tea; but the conversation, and village life, soon flow on. The accommodation that was reached between invaders and invaded in the fifth- and sixth- century West was very much more difficult, and more interesting, than this. The new arrival had not been invited, and he brought with him a large family; they ignored the bread and butter, and headed straight for the cake stand. Invader and invaded did eventually settle down together, and did adjust to each other’s ways — but the process of mutual accommodation was painful for the natives, was to take a very long time, and, as we shall see …left the vicarage in very poor shape. (pp. 82-83)

Professor Bret Devereaux discussed the long fifth century on his blog last year:

… it is not the case that the Roman Empire in the west was swept over by some destructive military tide. Instead the process here is one in which the parts of the western Roman Empire steadily fragment apart as central control weakens: the empire isn’t destroy[ed] from outside, but comes apart from within. While many of the key actors in that are the “barbarian” foederati generals and kings, many are Romans and indeed […] there were Romans on both sides of those fissures. Guy Halsall, in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West (2007) makes this point, that the western Empire is taken apart by actors within the empire, who are largely committed to the empire, acting to enhance their own position within a system the end of which they could not imagine.

It is perhaps too much to suggest the Roman Empire merely drifted apart peacefully – there was quite a bit of violence here and actors in the old Roman “center” clearly recognized that something was coming apart and made violent efforts to put it back together (as Halsall notes, “The West did not drift hopelessly towards its inevitable fate. It went down kicking, gouging and screaming”) – but it tore apart from the inside rather than being violently overrun from the outside by wholly alien forces.

For some reason, ordinary Londoners don’t seem to appreciate Mayor Khan’s ULEZ initiatives

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s hard to believe that anyone could possibly want to avoid London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) expansion beyond the initial areas of the city, but a quick search of Twit-, er, I mean “X” shows evidence of what Justin Trudeau might characterize as a “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views”:

Weird, isn’t it. All those “decommissioned” cameras. And people physically blocking access to workers:

London has put up with a lot over the centuries, but Mayor Khan’s ULEZ somehow seems to have awakened the resistance in a major way:

Brian Peckford republished this article from Yudi Sherman on the pushback against London’s ULEZ expansion:

London taxpayers are damaging the city’s surveillance vans in an escalating feud between Mayor Sadiq Khan and the city’s residents.

Last month Khan peppered the city with ultra-low emission zones (ULEZs), areas in London accessible only to low-emission vehicles. Cars that do not meet the city’s environmental standards are charged £12.50 ($16) for entering the ULEZ. Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras positioned around the zones read license plates and check them against the vehicles’ make and model in real time. If a vehicle does not meet the environmental threshold, the fine is levied against the car owner. Failure to pay can lead to fines as high as £258 ($331).

The ULEZ climate mandate has drawn heavy protests from residents, including hunger strikes and refusal to pay fines. Taxpayers have also taken to disabling the ANPR surveillance cameras which Transport for London (TfL), the city’s transportation department, said will be used both for climate and law enforcement.

In response, the city deployed mobile surveillance vans mounted with ANPR cameras across London in the hopes of evading attacks, but the vans are being targeted as well. Some have been spotted covered in graffiti with their tires slashed, while others have been completely covered in tarp, reports the Daily Mail.

The activists are said to belong to a group calling itself the Blade Runners and have promised not to rest until every ULEZ camera is removed or destroyed “no matter what”. The group is being widely cheered by its compatriots, including media personality and political commentator Katie Hopkins. Over 4,000 people have joined a Facebook group to report ULEZ van sightings.

Between April 1st and August 31st, police recorded 351 incidents of destruction to ULEZ cameras and 159 removals, reports Sky News, an average of over 100 a month. Of those incidents, 171 reportedly occurred since August 17th alone, just before the ULEZ mandate officially expanded to include all outer London boroughs. Two individuals have been arrested in connection with the incidents, one of whom was charged.
One reported Blade Runner said, “In terms of damage it’s way more than what [London Mayor Saidq Khan and TfL] have stated.”

Jeremy Clarkson’s The Greatest Raid of All

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

North One
Published 4 May 2020

Due to copyright restrictions, some music and scenes have been altered or removed in this upload. You can find the original unaltered documentary here: The Story Of The …

Jeremy Clarkson tells the story of the audacious commando raid on the German occupied dry dock at St Nazaire in France on March 28th 1942. Made for the BBC in 2007 by North One.
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QotD: Logical consistency isn’t their jam

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The same people who last week were screeching about the government having concentration camps now want me to give my AR15s to that same government.

The same people who last month were hyperventilating about the government slaughtering black people now expect me to surrender my guns to that same government.

The same people who last year were setting stuff on fire and yipping about the government rounding up the gays and Muslims for liquidation now think it’s a good idea for me to just hand over my rifles to that same government.

You chuckleheads need to make up your damned minds.

Lawdog, “You know what I find …”, The Lawdog Files, 2019-08-07.

September 18, 2023

Learning lessons from the plight of the British army in 1940

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lessons from history are only occasionally learned easily … they’re more likely brought to our attention by the Gods of the Copybook Headings after we’ve suffered some awful setback. As the latin tag would have it, Si vis pacem, para bellum: if you want peace, be prepared for war. Most western democracies refuse to believe this is true, and one of the easiest things for peacetime democratic governments to do is to short-fund the military and use the “savings” for more politically popular things that will help them get re-elected. The Canadian government has been a shining example of this since the late 1960s, with no end in sight.

A recent book on the British army, tracing its decline from the end of the First World War to the defeat in the Battle of France in 1940 shows just how quickly a world-beating army can be reduced to second-best in its next conflict. Richard Dannatt & Robert Lyman, the authors of Victory: the British Army 1918-1940 to Defeat, had an article in the Sunday Mail, illustrating the parallels between the army in their book and the British army today:

WHEN IT comes to national defence, never take your eye off the ball. That is a lesson we can and must learn from history. Because the disturbing fact is that this country did just that in the 1920s and 1930s in the aftermath of the First World War and the result very nearly cost us our freedom as Hitler’s forces threatened our shores.

Britain won the war in 1918 but then shamefully lost the peace as our army was allowed to atrophy.

It is often forgotten how professional the British Army had become by 1918, to pull off a stunning battlefield victory over the Germans in northern France in the final Hundred Days of the war.

It had been a long time coming after years of static trench warfare and no decisive breakthrough, just massive loss of life in the blood baths at Ypres, Verdun, the Somme and Passchendaele.

But finally, at the Battle of Amiens, British commanders — often wrongly caricatured as dunderheads and “donkeys” leading lions – demonstrated that they were able to understand and master the intricacies of the modern battlefield. With their sophisticated co-ordination of all elements of combat power — infantry, artillery, air power, armour — the stalemate was broken.

Modern war-fighting skills, technology and methods — learned at great cost in lives over the previous three-and-a-half years — secured victory for the British Army and its allies in 1918 as the Germans admitted defeat and sued for peace.

And yet little more than 20 years later, the boot was on the other foot as the next generation of German soldiers poured into France and defeated the Allies in a lightning campaign that ended with British troops fleeing from the beaches of Dunkirk.

How had victory in 1918 turned so quickly to defeat and humiliation in 1940?

The answer is that it had become the deliberate policy of successive British governments to downgrade the Army — a lesson we must learn today, with a new Defence Secretary who knows little about the brief.

Spending on defence was dramatically slashed amid an ill-thought-through assumption that there would not be another major war within ten years and so.

So far as the then government was concerned, the “war to end all wars” (as the Great War was dubbed) had done its job. There was no need to consider or plan for a future one, whether in policy, financial or practical terms. Everything was an issue of money as budgets were decided by Treasury civil servants with no military advice.

The principal reason why the Army was so unprepared for war in 1939 was that the British government, through faulty defence planning and financing in the previous two decades, made it so.

It turns out that buying up the rights to old rock songs wasn’t a good investment after all

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia enjoys a little bit of schadenfreude here because he was highly skeptical of the investments in the first place, although the geriatric rockers who “sold out” seem to have generally made out like bandits this time around:

Back in 2021, investors spent more than $5 billion buying the rights to old songs. Never before in history had musicians over the age of 75 received such big paydays.

I watched in amazement as artists who would never sell out actually sold out. And they made this the sale of a lifetime, like a WalMart in El Paso on Black Friday.

Bob Dylan sold out his entire song catalog ($400 million — ka-ching!). Paul Simon sold out ($250 million). Neil Young sold out ($150 million). Stevie Nicks sold out ($100 million). Dozens of others sold out.

As a result, rock songs have now entered their Madison Avenue stage of life.

Twisted Sister once sang “We’re Not Gonna Take It”. But even they took it — a very large payout, to be specific. A few months ago, the song showed up in a commercial for Discover Card.

Bob Dylan’s song “Shelter from the Storm” got turned into a theme for Airbnb. Neil Young’s “Old Man” was rejuvenated as a marketing jingle for the NFL (touting old man quarterback Tom Brady).

Fans mocked this move. Even Neil Young, now officially a grumpy old man himself, expressed irritation at the move. After all, the head of the Hipgnosis, the leading song investment fund, had promised that the rock star’s “Heart of Gold” would never get turned into “Burger of Gold”.

That hasn’t happened (yet). But where do you draw the line?

I was skeptical of these song buyouts from the start — but not just as a curmudgeonly purist. My view was much simpler. I didn’t think old songs were a good investment. […] But even I didn’t anticipate how badly these deals would turn out.

The more songs Hipgnosis bought, the more its share price dropped. The stock is currently down almost 40% from where it was at the start of 2021.

Things have gotten so bad, that the company is now selling songs.

On Thursday, Hipgnosis announced a plan to sell almost a half billion dollars of its song portfolio. They need to do this to pay down debt. That’s an ominous sign, because the songs Hipgnosis bought were supposed to generate lots of cash. Why can’t they handle their debt load with that cash flow?

But there was even worse news. Hipgnosis admitted that they sold these songs at 17.5% below their estimated “fair market value”. This added to the already widespread suspicion that current claims of song value are inflated.

BM59: The Italian M14

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 Oct 2017

After World War Two, both the Beretta and Breda companies in Italy began manufacturing M1 Garand rifles. When Italy decided that they wanted a more modern selective-fire, magazine-fed rifle, they chose to adapt the M1 Garand to that end rather than develop a brand new rifle. Two Beretta engineers, Vittorio Valle and Domenico Salza, began work in 1957 on what would become the BM-59. Prototypes were ready in 1959, trials were run in 1960, and by 1962 the new weapon was in Italian military hands.

The BM59 is basically an M1 Garand action and fire control system, but modernized. The caliber was changed to 7.62mm NATO, and the barrel shortened to 19.3 inches. A simple but effective selective fire system was added to the fire control mechanism, and the en bloc clips replaced with a 20-round box magazine (and stripper clip loading guide to match). A folding integral bipod was added to allow the rifle to be used for supporting fire on full auto, and a long muzzle device was added along with a gas cutoff and grenade launching sight to allow the use of NATO standard 22mm rifle grenades.

In this form, the BM59 was a relative quickly developed and quite successful and well-liked rifle. In addition to the Italian military, it was purchased by Argentina, Algeria, Nigeria, and Indonesia. A semiautomatic version was made for the US commercial market and designated the BM62, and a small number of fully automatic BM-59 rifles — like the one in this video — were imported into the US before the 1968 Gun Control Act cut off importation of foreign machine guns.
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QotD: Feelings

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

The desire not to have one’s feelings hurt has been erected into a right, a right increasingly enforceable at law. Of course, not everyone’s feelings are treated with the solicitude that we show to a nice fluffy colorful species of animal that is, regrettably, on the verge of extinction. But there is no doubt that treating people’s feelings with this solicitude tends not only to preserve them but to cause them to flourish and multiply. The more you are preserved from hurt feelings, the more of them you have.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Once More With Feelings”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-05-13.

September 17, 2023

How much mis-, mal-, and dis-information do you encounter on an average day on the internet?

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

I don’t know the answer to that question … although I suspect it’s a pretty big proportion of what you’ll see, especially if you stick to legacy media sites who regularly indulge in cover-up, state propaganda, and outright lies while condemning other media as “conspiracy theorists”. Chris Bray, on the other hand, thinks there are hopeful signs that we’ve passed peak disinformation as the pandemic lockdowns get further behind us:

I’ve been trying to come up with a count: If you consume a typical amount of news media and social media product, how many individual pieces of dishonest, misleading, and calculatedly or ignorantly unreal “information” do you take on board over the course of a typical day?

Walter Kirn’s one-sentence summary of contemporary media is stuck in my head: “This is a world-concealing layer of diversionary and illogical and internally inconsistent noise, under which the world exists somewhere.” How much noise do you have to purge to merely get to zero, not at all informed but not not deeply misinformed? And if you encounter the deep thoughts of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, does the deficit merely double, or is it much worse than that?

Democracy means you must not question or oppose the head of state

I’ve been reading on The Site Formerly Known as Twitter this week that Elon Musk’s refusal to activate the privately owned Starlink network over Crimea is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which now apparently apply to corporate product, and also high treason, for which Elon Musk should be executed. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it’s like the Internet allows strangers to use your brain as a toilet. Although, as the Twitter randos always end up explaining, I just feel this way because I’M PUTIN’S NAZI BUTTBOY.

All day, every day, 24/7/365 — well, maybe with some breaks for sleep, but only if you stop looking at your phone at night — you take on garbage. Your brain is loaded with information barriers, dressed up as information. You read and hear sentences that are designed to prevent understanding.

The Ballad of Chiang and Vinegar Joe – WW2 – Week 264 – September 16, 1944

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

World War Two
Published 16 Sep 2023

The Japanese attacks in Guangxi worry Joe Stilwell enough that he gets FDR to issue an ultimatum to Chiang Kai-Shek, in France the Allied invasion forces that hit the north and south coasts finally link up, the Warsaw Uprising continues, and the US Marines land on Peleliu and Angaur.
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