World War Two
Published 7 Jan 2023That’s what the headlines say as the Red Army continues its advance in Ukraine. There are also plans afoot for a northern offensive to end the siege of Leningrad. There are also plans afoot for an Allied amphibious attack in Italy at Anzio. Both of these are set to go off within a couple weeks, so January promises to be full of active conflict.
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January 8, 2023
“Russians 27 miles from Poland!” – Ep 228 – January 7, 1944
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January 6, 2023
The Church of England’s latest attempt to become “relevant”
In Spiked, Gareth Roberts discusses the announcement of Reverend Bingo Allison of themself’s “non-binary” status as the first openly genderqueer individual ordained as a priest in the established church:
Rev. Bingo Allison selfie supplied to the Liverpool Echo.
Many have pinned the beginning of the “Great Awokening” – the transition of the venomous cocktail of extremely niche Tumblr culture and naff identity politics into the mainstream – to 2013. As we move into this 10th anniversary year of raving teenage internet nonsense being taken seriously in the real world by grown adults, perhaps we need a spiritual guide to lead us in our celebrations?
Step forward the Rev Bingo Allison, vicar of a church in a Liverpool suburb, and apparently both “nonbinary” and “genderqueer”. (We do not learn from Bingo’s New Year’s Day interview in the Liverpool Echo if Bingo is actually his – sorry, Them’s – real name-o.)
As ever, working out what the terms nonbinary and genderqueer actually mean is like knitting butter. In the case of the Rev Bingo, it seems from what he says and from the pictorial evidence in the Echo that this has something to do with wearing very, very badly applied cosmetics and regaling anybody silly enough to listen with cut-and-paste boilerplate, like “the history of biblical interpretation is littered with the opinions of rich, white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical men” – basically, ChatGPT with eyeshadow applied à la Black+Decker.
I’ve recently been wondering why so many men with a lady soul are so bad at the application of make-up – both the Rev Bingo and cyclist Emily Bridges seem to have particular difficulty with eyeliner. Applying cosmetics well is not that difficult. In my brief teenage flirtation with the crossover point between New Romantic and Goth, I mastered the art while travelling into London on the very bumpy stretch of the Metropolitan Line between Moor Park and Harrow-on-the-Hill. (It was fatal to even attempt androgyny while still in Hertfordshire, particularly if the end result just made you look like a very camp Herman Munster.) I’m beginning to realise that the wonky slap is an essential part of the non-illusion, of the passive-aggressive, male status display that is at work. It is saying: “I’m not even going to try and you still have to kneel to me.”
“Jesus loves sparkly eyeshadow”, Bingo told his Insta followers recently. I have news for the Rev. Us lads can wear sparkly eyeshadow too with no effect on our bodies or souls. It does not change your sex. It just makes you a man wearing sparkly eyeshadow, like the Sweet doing “Block Buster” on Top of the Pops – although in Bingo’s case there is, owing to a very binary dose of male-pattern baldness, a more marked resemblance to Brian Eno in his Roxy Music days, with a hint of Max Wall in there, too.
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This is the most interesting roof in London
Tom Scott
Published 5 Sep 2022The @Royal Albert Hall is 150 years old; the roof is 600 tonnes of glass and steel. And it turns out that there’s a terrifying technicians’ trampoline, acoustic-dampening mushrooms, and a complete lack of connections.
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January 5, 2023
The injustices inherent in “asymmetrical multiculturalism”
Ed West traces the start of “asymmetrical multiculturalism” to a 1916 article in The Atlantic by Greenwich Village intellectual Randolph Bourne and traces the damage that resulted from widespread adoption of the policy:
“Asymmetrical multiculturalism” was first coined by demographer Eric Kaufmann in his 2004 book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, and later developed in his more recent Whiteshift, in a chapter charting Bourne’s circle, the “first recognisably modern left-liberal open borders movement”.
Kaufmann wrote how asymmetrical multiculturalism “may be precisely dated” to the article where Bourne, “a member of the left-wing modernist Young Intellectuals of Greenwich Village and an avatar of the new bohemian youth culture,” declared “that immigrants should retain their ethnicity while Anglo-Saxons should forsake their uptight heritage for cosmopolitanism.”
Kaufmann suggested that: “Bourne’s desire to see the majority slough off its poisoned heritage while minorities retained theirs blossomed into an ideology that slowly grew in popularity. From the Lost Generation in the 1920s to the Beats in the ’50s, ostensibly ‘exotic’ immigrants and black jazz were held up as expressive and liberating contrasts to a puritanical, square WASPdom. So began the dehumanizing de-culturation of the ethnic majority that has culminated in the sentiment behind, among other things, the viral hashtag #cancelwhitepeople.”
The hope, as John Dewey said of his New England congregationalist denomination around the same time as Bourne, was that America’s Anglo-Saxon core population would “universalise itself out of existence” while leading the world towards universal civilisation.
These ideas certainly didn’t remain in New England or even the United States, as Britain has certainly seen just how destructive they can be recently:
Late last year I wrote about the tragedy of Telford, a town in the English midlands where huge numbers of young girls had been sexually abused. Telford, along with Rotherham in South Yorkshire, had become synonymous with this form of sexual abuse, mostly committed by men of Kashmiri origin against girls who were poor, white and English.
This is the subject of an upcoming GB News documentary by journalist Charlie Peters, and it is quite clear, from all the various reports, that grooming had been allowed to carry on in part because of the different ways the system treats different groups.
Had the races of the perpetrators and victims been reversed, this tragedy would almost certainly be the subject of countless documentaries, plays, films and even official days of commemoration. But it wouldn’t have come to that, because the authorities would have intervened earlier, and more journalists would have been on the case.
Sex crime is perhaps the most explosive source of conflict between communities, and most recently the 2005 Lozells riots began over such a rumour. It is understandable why journalists and reporters were nervous about this subject; less forgivable is the way that, away from the public eye, those in charge signal how gravely they view what happened.
Until Peters revealed the story, Labour had planned to make the former head of Rotherham council its candidate for Rother Valley; this week Peters revealed that one of the councillors named in a report into the town’s failures to deal with the grooming gangs scandal has gone onto become a senior Diversity & Inclusion Manager working for the NHS. Presumably the people who hired Mahroof Hussain knew about his previous job, and still felt that it was appropriate to have him in a “diversity and inclusion” position. Again, were things different, would a Mr Smith whose council had been condemned for its handling of the gang rape of Asian girls have landed that job? The whole thing seems as morbidly comic as Rotherham becoming Children’s Capital of Culture.
Such a clear inconsistency can only exist because of socially-enforced taboos and norms which have developed over race. In Whiteshift, Kaufmann cited sociologist Kai Erikson’s description of norms as the “accumulation of decisions made by the community over a long time” and that “each time the community censures some act of deviance … it sharpens the authority of the violated norm and re-establishes the boundaries of the group”. Every time an individual is punished for violating the anti-racism norm, it strengthens society’s taboo around the subject, to the point where it begins to overwhelm other moral imperatives.
Then there is regalisation, the name for the process “in which adherents of an ideology use moralistic politics to entrench new social norms and punish deviance”, in Kaufmann’s words. This has proved incredibly effective; after paedophilia or sexual abuse, racism is perhaps the most damaging allegation that can be made.
Few people wish to be accused of deviance, which perhaps explains why Peters’s story has received so little coverage in the press this week. Again, were the roles reversed, it’s not wild speculation to suggest that it would feature on the Today programme, seen as clear evidence of racism at the heart of Britain. When the Telford story broke, it did not even feature on the BBC’s Shropshire home page.
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January 3, 2023
1943 in Numbers – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 1 Jan 2023This war is massive. Our chronological coverage helps give us an understanding of it, but sometimes statistics help us understand the bigger picture.
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For the King’s coronation, amp up the pageantry and pomp
In The Critic, Thomas Brian makes the case against a quiet, restrained coronation for King Charles III:
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Coronation portrait, June 1953, London, England.
Photographed by Cecil Beaton, Public Domain image via Library and Archives Canada reference number DAPDCAP82719.
As surely as the sun rises, the Sisyphean hacks take up their pens. The occasion is the State Opening of Parliament, or some such ceremony, and the audacity of it angers them. A golden throne, polished boots, diamond-encrusted crowns and scarlet cloth. Is it not, they jointly wonder, a bit childish? A bad look? I mean, in 21st century Britain, should we not be more like a grown up country, where all of this procession and pomp and prayer business is left behind? A bit like Germany?
Of course not. Year after year such questions are raised, and year after year, God willing, we shall ignore them. Had you raised this subject with me until this year, I would not be so optimistic. Our country rarely expresses much appreciation for the rich and dignified pageantry that still surrounds so much of our daily life. Yet the unfortunate events of September brought on such an expression of grief, such a wide-eyed fascination and enthusiasm for the ancient rituals of mourning and accession, that I have more faith in Britain knowing and valuing its common heritage. Valued it should be. In an ever more fractious age, what can be more unifying than the binding power of these ceremonies? As we proclaim a new king, we are reminded that the defining feature of “Britishness” is not race or birth, but fealty. Subjects need not have jus soli.
The debunkers denounce such precious things as childish. Even if it were, what shame would it be? The instincts of the child continue to move us with love and wonder. In a letter to the Times last month, a judge described a visit he made to a school where, when he shed the gown and wig, no pupil would believe he was really a judge. In few places is this power of the higher and mystical seen more vividly than in the courtroom. In fact, almost all countries understand this — even grown-up Germany.
When posing as normal people, officials lose their power to move and inspire — whether they wish to inspire trust, or hope, or virtue. States will fail if they are not taken seriously by their subjects. States will not be taken seriously if they do not take themselves seriously. How can we expect any degree of good government, any degree of duty, any degree of seriousness from someone who has so little respect for the service of his country that he thinks its business should be carried out with such casualness that not even a child could be awed into understanding?
For all the virtues of the child, and for all we preserve those adoring childish instincts, it is not we who are childish. That honour goes to the debunker. Perhaps “adolescent” is a better word. These are men who ignore the clear and ready power of the tried and true, the proven, in favour of wordy essays and papers which promise snake oil solutions to the problem of government. What is more a mark of youth than fervour for novel, abstract ideas? What more of a mark of age is love of the proven and experienced? Nothing is more proven, more experienced than the British constitution, with all its pageantry and paraphernalia.
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January 2, 2023
An in-depth look at the Type 26 frigate design
Navy Lookout
Published 31 Dec 2022The Type 26 frigates being built for the Royal Navy [and Royal Canadian and Royal Australian navies] are specialist submarine hunters but with a range of other capabilities. This video provides a primer on the overall warship design, its weapons, sensors and decoys.
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January 1, 2023
The days when just graduating high school was a significant life achievement
At Founding Questions, Severian responds to a reader comment about educational achivement before WW2 (when the US economy was almost the last one standing among major industrialized nations, and high school graduates finally passed 50% of the population):
Proposed coat of arms for Founding Questions by “urbando”.
The Latin motto translates to “We are so irrevocably fucked”.
In the “Friday Questions” post yesterday, toastedposts asks:
I’ve been reading some more old random things (bits of philosophy and history in no particular order with no particular program.) I’m again struck by the impression that people from around 1700 to 1920 or so were noticeably smarter than people before or since. It’s something that seems obtrusive when I read the sort of things they write. Compared to the sullen stupidity and fanatacism of the communists and fellow pseudo-intellectual travellers, compared to the childish level of the propaganda with which people were manipulated post 50s and pre modern, it is striking …
I wonder why the idiocracy? Did all these supergeniuses get killed preferentially in world wars and communist enslavement afterwards? Did something about our culture change disastrously, and can it be reversed? What was in their water, and can I have some?
I’ve seen this myself. You go look at any random letter collection from the 18th or 19th century, and even their “How’s it going? The weather is nice here”-type letters are just smarter …
Or maybe not. I hate to sound like one of those “Education Theory” numbnuts here, but it’s hard to separate what you might call “native intelligence” from “rigorous schooling”. Since we’ve all been on the Internet within the last 30 years, we’ve seen that “This was a fifth grade math test in 1905” thing. Here’s an example published in The Guardian, the paper that all the very Smartest people these days read. I’ll just stick with math and history:
Arithmetic
1. Multiply 642035 by 24506
2. Subtract 3.25741 from 3.3; multiply 28.436 by 8.245; divide 0.86655 by 26.5
3. Simplify 183/4 minus 22/3 divided by 11/5 minus 31/2 multiplied by 4/7
English history
1. What kings of England began to reign in the years 871, 1135, 1216, 1377, 1422, 1509, 1625, 1685, 1727, 1830?
2. Give some account of Egbert, William II, Richard III, Robert Blake, Lord Nelson.
3. State what you know of Henry II’s quarrel with Becket, the taking of Calais by Edward III, the attempt to make Lady Jane Grey queen, the trial of the Seven bishops, the Gordon riots.
I’d have trouble with some of those. Isn’t Robert Blake an actor?
That said, those questions aren’t particularly hard. Muti-digit multiplication is more time-consuming than anything else; it’d look like a Christmas tree, spread across the page. The fact that I can’t do them now (without a refresher course) doesn’t mean I couldn’t do them then. I was taught the process; I’m just rusty. Same thing with English history. The Lady Jane Grey thing … ummm, something something Reformation? But if I’d recently taken a course on it, I’d be much more up on it.
But then again, I was able to grok the process in the first place. “Universal” education is very new, and on balance I’d have to say it’s a negative. A high school diploma was a real achievement almost within living memory. This here table says that high school graduation rates didn’t top 50% until 1940, and didn’t clear 60% until 1950. It used to be a trope in the “rags to riches” story that “So-and-So only had a fifth-grade education”, but in that world, 5th grade was plenty. Even now, 5th graders kinda sorta have the Three Rs. (Adding the fourth R, of course — that would be “Rainbow”, or maybe “rump rangering” — but still).
So the entrance exam for “King Edward’s School” — the example in the Graun article — in 1898 would be the equivalent of a very tough college entrance exam today (and note that the referenced school is very pricey and very, very elite, even now).
This is not to say that people back then weren’t smarter. They sure seem to be, and I’ve written many times that the not-elite but certainly very respectable school that awarded me a PhD in the early 21st century wouldn’t have admitted me as an undergrad as late as 1960, if not 1970. I’m just noting some context — in 1898, 5th graders were already something of an intellectual elite, and their day-to-day education reflected that.
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Canadians Take Little Stalingrad – WW2 – 227 – December 31, 1943
World War Two
Published 31 Dec 20221943 reaches its end with no end in sight for the war. In Italy, the Canadians take Ortona after bloody close fighting, the US Marines advance on New Britain, and a new Soviet offensive makes huge gains in the USSR. This isn’t enough for the Allies, though, who have a big shake up in their European Command to help prepare for future attacks.
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December 30, 2022
Stalin Deports An Entire Ethnicity – War Against Humanity 093
World War Two
Published 29 Dec 2022The last week of 1943 is a busy one. Stalin deports the Kalmyk minority from Kalmykia, the escapees from Fort IX get away, and the US President moves to found the post-war UN.
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The continued relevance of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”
In Quillette, George Case praises Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (which was one of the first essays that convinced me that Orwell was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century), and shows how it still has relevance today:
George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential essays ever written. First published in Britain’s Horizon in 1946, it has since been widely anthologized and is always included in any collection of the writer’s essential nonfiction. In the decades since its appearance, the article has been quoted by many commentators who invoke Orwell’s literary and moral stature in support of its continued relevance. But perhaps the language of today’s politics warrants some fresh criticisms that even the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm could not have conceived.
“Politics and the English Language” addressed the jargon, double-talk, and what we would now call “spin” that had already distorted the discourse of the mid-20th century. “In our time,” Orwell argued, “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. … Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Those are the sentences most cited whenever a modern leader or talking head hides behind terms like “restructuring” (for layoffs), “visiting a site” (for bombing), or “alternative facts” (for falsehoods). In his essay, Orwell also cut through the careless, mechanical prose of academics and journalists who fall back on clichés — “all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally”.
These objections still hold up almost 80 years later, but historic changes in taste and technology mean that they apply to a new set of unexamined truisms and slogans regularly invoked less in oratory or print than through televised soundbites, online memes, and social media: the errors of reason and rhetoric identified in “Politics and the English Language” can be seen in familiar examples of empty platitudes, stretched metaphors, and meaningless cant which few who post, share, like, and retweet have seriously parsed. Consider how the following lexicon from 2023 is distinguished by the same question-begging, humbug, and sheer cloudy vagueness exposed by George Orwell in 1946.
[…]
Climate, [mis- and dis-]information, popular knowledge, genocide, land claims, sexual assault, and racism are all serious topics, but politicizing them with hyperbole turns them into trite catchphrases. The language cited here is largely employed as a stylistic template by the outlets who relay it — in the same way that individual publications will adhere to uniform guidelines of punctuation and capitalization, so too must they now follow directives to always write rape culture, stolen land, misinformation, or climate emergency in place of anything more neutral or accurate. Sometimes, as with cultural genocide or systemic racism, the purpose appears to be in how the diction of a few extra syllables imparts gravity to the premise being conveyed, as if a gigantic whale is a bigger animal than a whale, or a horrific murder is a worse crime than a murder.
Elsewhere, the words strive to alter the parameters of an issue so that its actual or perceived significance is amplified a little longer. “Drunk driving” will always be a danger if the legal limits of motorists’ alcohol levels are periodically lowered; likewise, relations between the sexes and a chaotic range of public opinion will always be problematic if they can be recast as rape culture, hate, or disinformation. This lingo typifies the parroted lines and reflexive responses of political communication in the 21st century.
In “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell’s concluding lesson was not just that parroted lines and reflexive responses were aesthetically bad, or that they revealed professional incompetence in whoever crafted them, but that they served to suppress thinking. “The invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases … can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain”, he wrote. He is still right: glib, shallow expression reflects, and will only perpetuate, glib, shallow thought, achieving no more than to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
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December 29, 2022
Anti-Tank Chats #5 | PIAT | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 26 Aug 2022Bring up the PIAT! Join Stuart Wheeler as he takes a look at the iconic WW2 British anti-tank weapon — the PIAT. With thanks to @The Armourer’s Bench and @History in Firearms
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December 28, 2022
Useful Beer Reviews: Newcastle Brown Ale
Jago Hazzard
Published 12 Jun 2019Today, an old favourite – Newcastle Brown Ale.
DISCLAIMER: Contains rambling that may bear no resemblance to reality.
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December 27, 2022
Smoking Bishop from A Christmas Carol
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 10 Dec 2021
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December 26, 2022
How to Make Christmas Gin Punch – The Victorian Way
English Heritage
Published 7 Dec 2016Mr Lincoln, the butler, is very busy with Christmas preparations, so Mrs Crocombe is making some Christmas gin punch for the servants in the kitchens of Audley End House.
INGREDIENTS
250g Brown Sugar
7 lemons
750ml Gin
750ml Ginger Wine
250g Honey
A Pinch of Cloves
1 tsp Cinnamon
1 tsp Nutmeg
Hot WaterMETHOD
In a large bowl, add the sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, lemons, honey, gin and ginger wine. Add some hot water to your taste and give everything a good stir. You can then decant your punch into a decorative bowl and serve.
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