Quotulatiousness

May 29, 2025

Now that a Royal Marine general is head of the Royal Navy, is he the “First Land Lord”?

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

Sir Humphrey on the appointment of Royal Marine General Sir Gwyn Jenkins as the top flag officer of the Royal Navy — the first RM general officer to hold this position:

Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins in Lympstone, 2022.
Photo credit – LPhot Barry Swainsbury – https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/-/media/royal-navy-responsive/images/news/new/221128-new-commandant-general-royal-marines-appointed/2.jpg, OGL 3, Link

General Sir Gwyn Jenkins has taken over as the professional head of the Royal Navy, the first Royal Marine to occupy the role of “First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff”. This is a move which is to be warmly welcomed, although the General will have many challenges ahead of him during his tenure.

While most have welcomed the move, there has been some mild hysteria on social media at the idea of a General heading the Royal Navy – what madness is this? The argument seems to be that apparently because Royal Marines haven’t commanded ships, they are somehow not able to lead the Royal Navy. Such an argument is fatuous nonsense.

The RN is a surprisingly tribal organisation of roughly 30,000 people, with its regular personnel broadly divided into four fighting arms – the Surface Fleet, the Submarine Service, the Fleet Air Arm and the Royal Marines. The surface fleet is the closest to being a “generalist” branch, although in its own way it is intensely tribal with different branches, organisations and structures. The Submariners and the FAA are unsurprisingly a bit of a closed shop, due to their missions, role and locations – it is not quite a “private navy”, but it would be rare for many personnel to serve at both Faslane supporting submarines and then to Culdrose or Yeovilton supporting aircraft. It is better to think of these fighting arms as smaller versions of the RN, each with its own culture, ethos and experience, and very different ways of bringing the fight to the enemy.

There have been First Sea Lords from the Surface Fleet, Submarine Service and FAA – no one has questioned the ability of an admiral who may have spent large parts of their career within a tribal part of the Service to lead all of it appropriately. Yet some seem to think that the General is somehow unable to do this due to his Royal Marines past. This makes very little sense – surely if this were true, how could any 1SL lead the Royal Marines effectively given they have, to the authors knowledge, never held a green beret?

The role of the 1st Sea Lord is not to stride the bridge in battle and fight wars against the enemy. He (and hopefully soon She) is the professional head of a complex organisation, employing tens of thousands of service personnel, reservists, civil servants and contractors on every continent. There are Royal Navy personnel based around the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and from the depths of the ocean to the skies far above. This role is about leadership, delivering the Government of the day’s desired defence policy outcomes, setting strategic direction for the Service and ensuring that it can deliver on its responsibilities.

The role of 1SL is part CEO, part diplomat, part public engagement and orator, and part politician. They need to be able to set a vision but accept their ability to deliver it is limited due to the time taken for naval procurement – while HMS VENTURER was rolled out of the yard today (27 May) some 10 years after the Type 31 was conceived, there have been no less than five permanent 1SL incumbents in this time. The post holder is also ultimately responsible for the delivery of operations, including the Deterrent, to the Prime Minister, and in providing advice to No10 on naval military matters.

The King of Canada

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

In the National Post, Colby Cosh tweaks the berries of the tiny number of dedicated Canadian republicans:

King Charles III and Queen Camilla, official portrait by Millie Pilkington.

The Post and other Canadian organs have been full of conscious praise for our unusual absentee monarchy lately, what with the King being in the capital to give the throne speech in person. But Canadian republicans must be hoping that our people will instinctively reject the spectacle, and at least see the genuine need for that blessing without which no sovereign state can hope to be taken seriously — a president.

There are rumblings about behind-the-scenes diplomatic tensions between Canada and the United Kingdom over the royal visit, rumblings which the Sunday Times (of London) put in print this weekend. The crux of the story is that Canada and the U.K. are not quite using the same playbook in dealing with the volatile and cutthroat Trump administration.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government is applying lots of soft-soap, using Trump’s fondness for the British monarchy and its highly ornamented nature as a means of getting special treatment in trade negotiations. Meanwhile, Canada and its government hope to use the presence in Canada of Canada’s King as a subtle way of asserting independence, determination and strength as we bear the economic blows of Trumpian whim.

And — wait for it — the crazy part is, THOSE TWO KINGS ARE THE SAME EXACT DUDE. WHAAAT?

To a republican, this seems like a mystery concocted to obfuscate a logical weakness in the system. No doubt they see it just the same way an atheist looks at the centuries of early Christian debate over the Holy Trinity. It’s not exactly as though the U.K. and Canada are at war, or as though there is any overt disharmony between the two states. But the monarchists have to concede at least this much: when mutually sovereign countries have a shared head of state, you do in fact end up with the exotic possibility that George XIV of Canada might one day, in theory, have to issue a declaration of war on George XIV of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This is baked into the improvised post-Imperial ontology of our government and of Britain’s.

This is why Canadian monarchists are so fussy about the independent constitutional footing on which the Canadian Crown rests. We do this, implicitly insisting that our system of government was reinvented in 1931, while at the same time arguing that the advantages of monarchy include antiquity, historical continuity and the preservation of a special bond between Commonwealth realms. Perhaps we are sneaky imperialist (or racist) hypocrites. Perhaps we just feel that those advantages are legitimate and important, and that the Statute of Westminster is an optimum compromise that preserves them while guaranteeing our sovereign freedom of action in the interplay of governments.

“Kollidge Inglish Majors kan so reed gud!”

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

On Substack, Kitten provides a sample of the many, many, many, many reactions to an earlier viral piece called College English majors can’t read:

I think it’s safe to say that “lack of funding” isn’t the problem

Well, that was a wild ride. As of the time of this writing, College English majors can’t read has 120,000 views and 535 comments. Comments and restacks are still rolling in but not at the furious pace they were in the few days after publication. It went viral on twitter, with my tweet announcing the article getting 768 retweets and 1.5M views, with thousands of comments spread across various quote tweets. It was shared to Reddit in several different threads, many of which themselves spawned hundreds of comments. It went viral on Hacker News. It was shared on Vox Day. It was published on Revolver News. Hundreds of people linked it in their Instagram and Facebook posts. A bunch of people shared it on Slack or Microsoft Teams. And most endearing of all, thousands of people forwarded the newsletter around by email like an AOL chain letter from your grandma (Fwd:Fwd:Re:Fwd: You won’t BELIEVE what they are teaching in college now!!!!)

[…]

The people have spoken, and they speak in a single clear voice: they want to hear about how dumb college kids are. They want to bathe in delicious schadenfreude. They want all the embarrassing and gory details about how Suzie in Kansas couldn’t figure out what a megalosaurus is, how heavily she breathed during the 16 seconds she tapped Google searches into her phone before giving up. And their bloodlust will be slaked one way or another.

[…]

The title is inaccurate, college kids can read fine

I got this comment a bunch of different times, and I think that one particular guy made the same comment at least four different times that I saw, in different places. Basically, this nitpicking goes: these kids can read just fine, they just have trouble understanding and interpreting hard texts, and this means the title is sensational and not literally true. This is a fair point, and I deeply treasure our nation’s strategic reserve of turbospergs ready to call out technical inaccuracies wherever they rear their ugly heads. I should note for the turbospergs reading this that “rearing their ugly heads” is figurative language, article titles do not have bodies and do not move, you have me dead to rights on that one.

But most readers were quick to chide the spergs that this is an article about different levels of functional literacy, and that “read” can have different connotations depending on the context. Obviously we’re talking about more than just sounding out the words on the page in this case. And also, College English majors can’t read is just a much better title than the long but more technically accurate one you would have me write instead.

The study is bad and you can’t believe its results

A lot of people made this comment in one form or another, for a variety of reasons. If you want to read a detailed takedown, I suggest this long post by Holly MathNerd. She has a lot of different objections about the methodology and how the results generalize to the population of college kids. It’s worth reading and taking seriously if you’re the scientific minded type, she knows what she’s talking about.

One very large objection that should give you pause: there are multiple layers of potential selection bias taking place. We’re looking at just a couple schools in Kansas at a single point in time, not a nationally representative sample of students. These aren’t exactly top-tier schools, of course they don’t have the best kids! And worse, they recruited study participants the way they always recruit undergrads for this kind of study, by asking for volunteers in class or even by hand-selecting students and encouraging them to join up. This means the researchers weren’t getting a random sample of their students, they were getting the kids who were dumb enough to waste their time on a silly research task. Or even worse: they picked problematic kids on purpose to prove a point.

This is a fair criticism, and I don’t want to minimize it, but I don’t think it ultimately matters much. The reason is that we know how these kids tested on the ACT Reading subtest and how that compares to the national standard.

    The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4

The national average for college students on the ACT Reading subtest is 21.2, so these kids are a bit above average nationally. (20 to 23 is considered a competitive score for admission to most schools, with 24 to 28 being the standard for more selective schools). This is reasonably strong evidence that they are not significantly dumber than typical college students nationwide. Maybe not representative, sure, but certainly not dumber than average.

And despite being competitive for admission according to Educational Testing Service, 22.4 is not a good score!

    According to Educational Testing Service, [students with a score of 22.4] read on a “low-intermediate level”, able to answer only about 60 percent of the questions correctly and usually able only to “infer the main ideas or purpose of straightforward paragraphs in uncomplicated literary narratives”, “locate important details in uncomplicated passages” and “make simple inferences about how details are used in passages”

So maybe these results don’t actually generalize to students nationwide, maybe this wasn’t a fair sample. But if you’re skeptical on the question of generalization, another way to view this study is as an ethnography rather than a quantitative result — the researchers discovered and documented a group of college English majors with truly terrible reading comprehension. Whether or not this result generalizes to college kids everywhere, these particular kids exist. And they can’t read. Personally I think the ethnographic details are what make this study so evocative, and I wish more research took this form. My hunch is nobody would be talking about this at all without these details — distilled down to a raw quantitative result (half of kids score below median on test, news at 11), nobody would care.

Q&A: The Falklands War of 1982

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Jan 2025

Since I spent a couple weeks hiking across the Falklands and then visiting battlefields (and penguins), it seems reasonable to do a Q&A video about the place and the 1982 war there between Argentina and the UK. All the questions were provided by Forgotten Weapons Patrons.

01:38 – How did the FAL perform, seeing as both sides used it?
03:43 – Effectiveness of light and heavy weapons in the war
08:49 – Would the British have been better off Yomping with AR15s, like the SAS used?
10:09 – Is there much local animosity to Argentina today?
12:21 – Local food and adult beverages
15:31 – What do people do for fun on the Falklands?
17:52 – Oldest small arm in service during the war?
20:18 – Military equipment wreckage on the islands
22:06 – Value of full powered rifle round in the FI terrain?
24:31 – Minefields
25:44 – Interaction of weapons with different effective ranges
28:46 – Did Exocet spur development of CIWS?
31:00 – What has been done to defend the islands against another invasion?
33:51 – Issues with an army designed to fight the USSR in Europe deploying to the South Atlantic?
35:30 – Weirdest weapon used in the conflict?
36:29 – Field modifications of small arms and unique kit
38:20 – Were British vehicle at risk of damage there?
39:40 – Engagement ranges
40:23 – Relevancy of bayonet fighting
41:28 – Unique equipment used by the Falkland Islands Defense Force
43:27 – American view of the Falklands War today
44:41 – Which Yomp route did we take?
45:01 – Did we visit Ajax Bay or the cemetery?
46:00 – Reality vs my expectations of the islands
46:57 – How would the war go if it happened today instead of in 1982?
48:25 – Did British soldiers use Argentine FALs?
(more…)

QotD: FDR and Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression

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

November 1932. Hoover has just lost the election, but is a lame duck until March. The European debt crisis flashes up again. Hoover knows how to solve it. But:

    He had already met with congressional leaders and learned, as he had suspected, that they would not change their stance without Roosevelt’s support. Seized with the urgency of the moment, he continued to bombard his opponents with proposals for cooperation toward solutions, going so far as to suggest that Democratic nominees, not Republicans, be sent to Europe to engage in negotiations, all to no avail. Notwithstanding what editorialists called his “personal and moral responsibility” to engage with the outgoing administration, Roosevelt had instructed Democratic leaders in Congress not to let Hoover “tinker” with the debts. He had also let it be known that any solution to the problem would occur on his watch – “Roosevelt holds he and not Hoover will fix debt policy”, read the headlines. Thus ended what the New York Times called Hoover’s magnanimous proposal for “unity and constructive action”, not to mention his 12-year effort to convince America of its obligation and self-interest in fostering European political and financial stability …

    During the debt discussions and to some extent as a result of them, the economy turned south again. Several other factors contributed. Investors were exchanging US dollars for gold as doubt spread about Roosevelt’s intentions to remain on the gold standard. Gold stocks in the Federal Reserve thus declined, threatening the stability of the financial sector … what’s more, the effectiveness of [Hoover’s bank support plan], which had succeeded in stabilizing the banking system, was severely compromised by [Democrats’] insistence on publicizing its loans, as the administration had warned. For these reasons, Hoover would forever blame Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress for spoiling his hard-earned recovery, an argument that has only recently gained currency among economists.

And:

    Alarmed at these threats to recovery, Hoover pushed Democratic congressional leaders and the incoming administration for action. He wanted to cut federal spending, reorganize the executive branch to save money, reestablish the confidentiality of RFC loans, introduce bankruptcy legislation to protect foreclosures, grant new powers to the Federal Reserve, and pass new banking regulation, including measures to protect depositors … He was frustrated at every turn by Democratic leadership taking cues from the President-Elect … On February 5, Congress took the obstructionism a degree further by closing shop with 23 days left in its session.

In mid-February, there is another run on the banks, worse than all the other runs on the banks thus far. Hoover asks Congress to do something – Congress says they will only listen to President-Elect Roosevelt. Hoover writes a letter to Roosevelt begging him to give Congress permission to act, saying it is a national emergency and he has to act right now. Roosevelt refuses to respond to the letter for eleven days, by which time the banks have all failed.

Then, a month later, he stands up before the American people and says they have nothing to fear but fear itself – a line he stole from Hoover – and accepts their adulation as Destined Savior. He keeps this Destined Savior status throughout his administration. In 1939, Roosevelt still had everyone convinced that Hoover was totally discredited by his failure to solve the Great Depression in three years – whereas Roosevelt had failed to solve it for six but that was totally okay and he deserved credit for being a bold leader who tried really hard.

So how come Hoover bears so much of the blame in public consciousness? Whyte points to three factors.

First, Hoover just the bad luck of being in office when an international depression struck. Its beginning wasn’t his fault, its persistence wasn’t his fault, but it happened on his watch and he got blamed.

Second, in 1928 the Democratic National Committee took the unprecedented step of continuing to exist even after a presidential election. It dedicated itself to the sort of PR we now take for granted: critical responses to major speeches, coordinated messaging among Democratic politicians, working alongside friendly media to create a narrative. The Republicans had nothing like it; the RNC forgot to exist for the 1930 midterms, and Hoover was forced to personally coordinate Republican campaigns from his White House office. Although Hoover was good (some would say obsessed) at reacting to specific threats on his personal reputation, the idea of coordinating a media narrative felt too much like the kind of politics he felt was beneath him. So he didn’t try. When the Democrats launched a massive public blitz to get everyone to call homeless encampments “Hoovervilles”, he privately fumed but publicly held his tongue. FDR and the Democrats stayed relentlessly on message and the accusation stuck.

And third, Hoover was dead-set against welfare. However admirable his attempts to reverse the Depression, stabilize banking, etc, he drew the line at a national dole for the Depression’s victims. This was one of FDR’s chief accusations against him, and it was entirely correct. Hoover knew that going down that route would lead pretty much where it led Roosevelt – to a dectupling of the size of government and the abandonment of the Constitutional vision of a small federal government presiding over substantially autonomous states. Herbert Hoover, history’s greatest philanthropist and ender-of-famines, would go down in history as the guy who refused to feed starving people. And they hated him for it.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.

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