Quotulatiousness

September 22, 2022

Waking – or shaking – NATO’s freeloaders (like Canada)

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Europe, France, Germany, Italy, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CDR Salamander has a proposal to encourage cheapskate freeloaders like Justin Trudeau’s Canada (although it didn’t start with him … Canada has been freeloading militarily since the early 1970s) to take on more like a fair share of NATO’s needs:

So, what did you wake up to?

    President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday ordered Russia’s first mobilisation since World War Two and backed a plan to annex swathes of Ukraine, warning the West he was not bluffing when he said he’d be ready to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia.

    In the biggest escalation of the Ukraine war since Moscow’s Feb. 24 invasion, Putin explicitly raised the spectre of a nuclear conflict, approved a plan to annex a chunk of Ukraine the size of Hungary, and called up 300,000 reservists.

This should not be a shock to anyone. If it is, perhaps you should consider investing your time in cat-blogging.

It should bring to the front that NATO can no longer allow unserious nations to play like they are anything but security free-riders. They need to contribute their fair share or pay some consequence. Alliances have benefits and responsibilities. You should not have one without the other.

While percentage of GDP is an imperfect measure of contribution, it is better than all the other ones. It is as simple benchmark of national effort.

As these are the best numbers we have, let’s look at 2021 and then forward.

It is amazing that after all Russia has shown Western Europe — both of its nature and the nature of modern warfare — that so many of our NATO allies continue to slow walk defense spending, doing the very minimum to be a full and fair partner in the alliance.

Russian victory — however they define it — or Russian defeat — however Ukraine defines it — will not change the geography or nature of Russia. She is not going anywhere.

So, what’s to be done to encourage nations like Canada to put up or shut up? This might help:

“Out years” are where dragons live, so anyone not on guide-slope to 2%+ by the end of 2023 – when one way or another the Russo-Ukrainian War should be over – will find someway to not get there in a wave of excuses and bluffing.

We should call their bluff.

As such, and this is generous, we need to finally pursue PLAN SALAMANDER for NATO “Flags-to-Post” that I first proposed almost six years ago.

    In NATO, General and Flag Officer billets are distributed amongst nations in a rather complicated way, but this formula is controlled by NATO – and as such – can be changed.

    Entering argument: take the present formula for “fair distribution” and multiply by .75 any nation that spends 1.5% to 1.99% GDP on defense. Multiply by .5 any nation that spends between 1.25% to 1.499%. Multiply by .25 1.0% to 1.240%. If you fall below 1%, you get nothing and your OF5 (Col./Capt) billets are halved.

    1.25x for 2.01%-2.25%. 1.5X for 2.26%-2.75%; 1.75x for 2.76% -3.0%. 2x for +3.01%.

The math gets funky when a lot of people get over 2%, but we can refine it later. Doesn’t cost a penny and will unquestionably get the attention of those nations. Trust me on this. By January 1st, 2024 no more excuses. A small and symbolic punishment, but a good start that may be all that is needed. This is not the second half of the 20th Century any more.

September 21, 2022

The Medieval Saint Diet

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 20 Sep 2022
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Radom’s Vis 35: Poland’s Excellent Automatic Pistol

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 9 Feb 2016

In the 1920s Poland began looking for a new standard military pistol, and tested a variety of compact .380s. The representative from FN brought along an early iteration of the High Power (along with their other entry) even though it was much too large and heavy to meet the Polish requirements. After a couple iterations of testing, it became clear to the Polish Ordnance officers that the High Power was a much more effective service pistol than the compact guns they had been instructed to look for.

Lo and behold, the ultimate choice was a domestic design based largely on the High Power (a direct deal with FN was not an option after Poland’s relationship with FN had suffered through problems with the wz.28 version of the BAR). Toss in a delay to redesign the early decocking mechanism to satisfy the Cavalry (who didn’t realize that the decocker wasn’t actually meant to be used, but rather to just add another claim to the patent), and by 1935 the pistol was finished and formally adopted.

The Vis 35 is one of the best automatic pistols of WWII in terms of both handling and quality. In total 46,000 were made pre-war for Poland’s military, and German occupation forces built another 300,000+ during the war.
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September 20, 2022

Hannah Arendt in postwar Germany

Filed under: Books, Germany, History, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Roger Berkowitz discusses what Hannah Arendt found when talking to Germans after the Second World War, which she characterized as their collective “escape from reality”:

In 1949, when Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) went to Germany as part of the New York-based Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, she was struck by the way the Germans showed an “at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened”. This “escape from reality”, as Arendt named it, meant that the reality of the Holocaust and the death factories was spoken of as a hypothetical. And when the truth of the Holocaust was admitted, it was diminished: “The Germans did only what others are capable of doing”.

The Germans, at times, simply denied the facts of what had happened. One woman told Arendt that the “Russians had begun the war with an attack on Danzig”. What Arendt encountered was a “kind of gentleman’s agreement by which everyone has a right to his ignorance under the pretext that everyone has a right to his opinion”. The underlying assumption for such a right is the “tacit assumption that opinions really do not matter”. Opinions are just that, mere opinions. And facts, once they are reduced to opinions, also don’t matter. Taken together, this led to a “flight from reality”.

The focus of Arendt’s lifelong engagement with the human flight from reality was her encounter with ideologies, specifically Nazism and Bolshevism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism and other texts (especially her essay, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism“), Arendt defines an ideology as a system that seeks to explain “all the mysteries of life and the world” according to one idea. Nazism is an ideology that blames economic disaster, political loss, and the evils of modernity on the Jews — inhuman flotsam who must be exterminated to allow a master race to flourish. Bolshevism, on the other hand, “pretends that all history is a struggle of classes, that the proletariat is bound by eternal laws to win this struggle, that a classless society will then come about, and that the state, finally, will wither away”. The bourgeoisie are not simply class traitors, they are a dying class, and killing them only supports a law of history. As ideologies, both Nazism and Bolshevism insist on explaining the events of the world according to theories “without further concurrence with actual experience”. The result, Arendt argues, is that such ideologies bring about an “arrogant emancipation from reality”.

Because an ideology “looks upon all factuality as fabricated”, it “no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood”. As reality recedes, ideologies organize society to transform their ideas into living reality. If antisemitism as an ideology says that all Jews are beggars without passports, the fact of wealthy and established Jews must be eliminated. If Bolshevism says that the bourgeoisie are corrupt, they must admit their corruption or be killed. The realization of such ideological realities can be accomplished, of course, through terror.

But even before a totalitarian movement takes power and mobilizes the secret police in the machinery of terror, ideological movements can employ propaganda to deny and nullify facts, or change them. The Nazis, she writes, “did not so much believe in the truth of racism as desire to change the world into a race reality”. Similarly, the Bolshevist ideology that classes were dying was not something real, but something that had to be made real. The purges and terror that Stalin unleashed were supposed to “establish a classless society” by exterminating all social groups that might develop into classes. In both instances, the purpose of the ideology was to transform a mere opinion — race consciousness or class consciousness — into the “the lived content of reality”.

The point, as Arendt concludes, is that “ideological consistency reducing everything to one all-dominating factor is always in conflict with the inconsistency of the world, on the one hand, and the unpredictability of human actions, on the other”. What ideology demands is that man — an unpredictable and spontaneous being — cease to exist as such, that all humans be subjected to laws of development that follow ideological truth. That is why the turn from an unreliable reality to coherent fantasy requires an absolute elimination of human spontaneity and freedom.

The Byzantine Empire: Part 4 – Justinian, The Hand of God

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 1 Jan 2022

Between 330 AD and 1453, Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was the capital of the Roman Empire, otherwise known as the Later Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mediaeval Roman Empire, or The Byzantine Empire. For most of this time, it was the largest and richest city in Christendom. The territories of which it was the central capital enjoyed better protections of life, liberty and property, and a higher standard of living, than any other Christian territory, and usually compared favourably with the neighbouring and rival Islamic empires.

The purpose of this course is to give an overview of Byzantine history, from the refoundation of the City by Constantine the Great to its final capture by the Turks.

Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the history of Byzantium. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.
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QotD: Why purple was such a rare colour in the flags of the pre-industrial era

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Today, we are used to the effectively infinite range of colors offered by synthetic dyes, but for pre-modern dye-workers, they were largely restricted to colors that could be produced from locally available or imported dyestuffs. If you wanted a given color of fabric, you needed to be able to find something in the natural world which, when broken down could give you a chemical pigment that you could transfer to your fabric in a durable way. That put real limits on the colors which could be dyed and the availability of those colors. Some colors simply couldn’t be produced this way – a good example were golden or metallic colors. If something in a dress was to be truly golden (and not merely yellow), the only way to do that prior to synthetic dyes and paints was to use actual gold, weaving small strands of ultra-thin gold wire into the cloth or embroidering designs with it. Needless to say, that was something only done by the very wealthy. Alternately, if the dye for a given hue or color came from something rare or foreign or difficult to process (for instance, in all three cases, Tyrian or royal purple, which came from the murex sea snails – if you have ever wondered why no country has purple as a national color this is why, before synthetic dyes, coloring your flags and uniforms purple would have been bonkers expensive), then it was going to be expensive and rare and there just wasn’t much you could do about that.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-04-02.

September 19, 2022

Albania – Hitler’s Latest Ally? – WAH 078 – September 18, 1943

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Greece, History, Italy, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 18 Sep 2022

The German Nazi Genocide of the Jews surpasses four million deaths, while the Soviet Union and US step up oppression against some their own citizens.
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“… the Royal Family has always seemed less like a business enterprise than a giant open-air prison”

Filed under: Britain, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

The editors at The Line have a rather unusual view of the monarchy, or perhaps more accurately, of the Royal Family itself:

The Royal Family at Buckingham Palace for the Trooping of the Colour, 30 June, 2015.
Photo by Robert Payne via Wikimedia Commons.

We have a soft spot for the monarchy, here at The Line. We believe that as an organizing principle of our system of government, the Crown provides a decent balance between effectiveness and accountability. And while the idea of our head of state residing in a foreign country seems perverse, as a practical matter the physical distancing of the sovereign in London, and the institutional distancing via the Governor General, helps Canada sidestep what would otherwise be yet another occasion for national recrimination.

So, call it two cheers for the monarchy.

That the Queen was a model of duty, decorum and discretion throughout her long reign is undeniable, and there’s not much to add on that front that hasn’t been spread over square miles of newsprint over the past week. By the same token, she and her husband raised a rather problematic set of boys, of whom the best (Edward) that can be said is that he’s a nullity. But again, there’s been more written on this than one could safely consume in a lifetime.

But we’d like to say a few things about the Royal Family itself. The Royals have long described themselves not as a family, but as The Firm — a corporate entity and business enterprise that has extensive land holdings. It pokes its fingers in countless pies, and employs an army of secretaries and assistants and advisers and servants. It has been described as an enormous, bureaucratically organized machine that dictates and determines the lives of its members.

Yet to us, the Royal Family has always seemed less like a business enterprise than a giant open-air prison. A well-funded and nicely appointed prison to be sure, but a prison nonetheless.

What’s the difference between a complicated overbearing bureaucracy and a jail? Where does the line between compliance end and incarceration begin? It can be hard to say, but the key difference can be found in whether or not you have the right of exit. As Harry put it in his infamous interview with Oprah Winfrey: “My father and my brother, they are trapped. They don’t get to leave.”

But beyond that, it is found in how you treat those who try to change things, or more importantly, those who try to escape. Diana tried to change things, and got destroyed for her efforts. Her second son has attempted an escape, and he’s paying an enormous price.

Diana was no saint obviously, and Harry is a dim fellow who married poorly and has not always exercised the best judgment. But who could, under the circumstances? How could any human be reasonably expected to behave properly, to act normally, to judge wisely, given the insane combination of internal pressure, public expectation and media scrutiny that is a non-negotiable part of the royal package? A panopticon is no less carceral for being well-funded.

With the accession of Charles to the throne as King Charles III, there have been a number of articles published running through the main plot points of his life, with a great deal of focus on his romantic life, his marriage to Diana, and ultimately his reunion with the great love of his life, Camilla. What is remarkable is to read about the number of women he proposed to, prior to Diana, who saw the monarchy for what it was, and turned him down. It’s a testament to how much Camilla must really love the old fart that she prefers a life imprisoned with him than free without.

City Minutes: Crusader States

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, Middle East, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 13 May 2022

Crusading is one thing, but holding your new kingdoms is a much trickier business. See how the many Christian states of “Outremer” rolled with the punches to evolve in form and function over multiple centuries.
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September 18, 2022

Forget #GamerGate already, here’s #NAFO!

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

At Samizdata, Perry de Havilland briefly recaps the story of #gamergate and the incomprehension of the “official” gaming press and PR departments of gaming companies that their actions to ridicule and shutdown the “racist/sexist/homophobe” #gamergate activists not only failed but drew more attention to the #gamergate issue, and compares it to a new instance of the same phenomenon:

Fast forward to 2022 and behold #NAFO: the North Atlantic Fellas Organisation.

And who are “the fellas”? A large and growing online pack of attack dogs countering, dare I say smothering, official Russian troll factory output, as well as other pro-Kremlin talking heads online. And their mascots are daft cartoon dogs (variations of a Shiba Inu to be precise). If journalistic collusion was a constant target of #GamerGate, the Russian troll farms are the modern analogy to that, constantly targeted and smothered by NAFO posting either pro-Ukrainian counter-narratives or just ridiculing or flagging up pro-Russian ones.

Many people, particularly those operating within institutions, don’t understand #NAFO for same reason PR departments of various video games companies & press outlets didn’t (and still don’t) understand #GamerGate.

Is #NAFO engaged in “information warfare”? Absolutely. They even get a shout out from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. But they are not managed out of an office in Langley, Virginia nor by some adjunct of the Ukrainian intelligence services. #NAFO is a hashtag, a phenomena, it isn’t “run” by anyone, because it doesn’t need to be. Like GamerGate, NAFO is a confluence of the motivated willing in every timezone on the planet.

And just as GamerGate had a single original trigger, which was then largely forgotten as the “movement” grew and started attacking larger more juicy prey, NAFO started as a fund raising effort for the Georgian Legion (a now battalion sized unit of about 600 within the Ukrainian army made up mostly of Georgian volunteers). At blinding speed, NAFO rapidly morphed into a wider distributed online effort supporting Ukraine in the “information space”.

Jailbreak! Mussolini on the Loose Again! – WW2 – 212 – September 17, 1943

Filed under: Australia, Europe, Germany, Greece, History, Italy, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 17 Sep 2022
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“King Eeyore”

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte recounts some of the anti-Carolean gossip from the early years of King Charles:

My library of royalist literature is thin, but I did find Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers on the shelf. Published last spring, it chronicles the recent history of the House of Windsor and while it treats the whole cast of characters — Elizabeth, Philip, Margaret, Charles, Anne, Andrew, Edward, William, Kate, Harry, Meghan — much is revealed about the new king.

Charles, writes Brown, the former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor, was never a happy fellow. She calls him “Prince Eeyore”. He “felt bruised by his childhood and miserable school days, misunderstood by his domineering father, and deprived of an emotional connection with his mother”. Among the “brutalities” he endured in his youth: his schoolmates at Gordonstoun beat him with pillow because he snored.

Although an indifferent student, he attended Cambridge where he read anthropology and archaeology. In 1969, a year before graduating, his mother crowned him Prince of Wales. He spent his early twenties in the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy, distinguishing himself in the latter service by lowering an anchor without noticing on his chart the presence of a telecommunications cable linking Ireland and Britain. “It was snagged,” writes Brown, “and the two divers send down to dislodge it nearly drowned.” Charles earned a “stern rebuke”.

Having done his military duty, he devoted himself to polo, windsurfing, and test-driving prospective wives. Charles’s royal status made him an obvious catch, writes Brown, who judges that his “Dumbo ears were offset by his excellent tailoring and debonair polo prowess.”

Finding a wife proved difficult, not least because of his affinity for married women. At one point he was sleeping with both Camilla Parker Bowles, wife of Andrew Parker Bowles, and Dale “Kanga” Harper, wife of his buddy, Lord Tyron. “In the mid-seventies,” says Brown, “both married women were on call for the Prince while their husbands looked the other way.”

That’s not exactly true. Both men seemed pleased to lay down their wives for their country, as the joke went at the time. Charles was godfather to Tom Parker Bowles, son of Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles, and also to a middle child of the Tyron’s who, naturally, was named Charles.

What Camilla and Kanga had in common were game personalities and maternal instincts that accommodated the Prince’s “sentimentality and tantrums, and needs to be soothed and amused”.

It wasn’t until 1981, at the age of 32, that the Prince of Wales made his choice of a bride. It was famously awful for all concerned. He married twenty-year-old Diana Spencer who bore him an heir, William, in 1982, and a spare, Harry, in 1984. Brown reports that Charles behaved properly in the marriage until the birth of Harry who, to his disappointment, was not a girl. “Oh God,” he said, “it’s a boy … and he’s even got red hair.”

He was back with Camilla in no time. Diana ratted him out to the author Andrew Morton in 1992 and Charles unwittingly confirmed his infidelity the next year in a notorious telephone conversation with Camilla in which he said that he wanted to “live inside your trousers or something”. You know the rest.

Austria’s Take on the Uzi: Steyr MPi-69

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 May 2022
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September 17, 2022

A royal assault on free speech | The spiked podcast

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

spiked
Published 16 Sep 2022

Tom, Fraser and Ella discuss the clampdown on republican protesters. Plus: the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the madness of Mermaids.
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In the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Europe’s cold winter looms ahead

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Sullivan allows his views on the fighting in Ukraine to be a bit more optimistic after Ukrainian gains in the most recent counter-attacks on Russian-held territory around Kharkiv:

Approximate front-line positions just before the Ukrainian counter-attack east of Kharkiv in early September 2022. The MOD appears to have stopped posting these daily map updates sometime in the last month or so (this is the most recent as of Friday afternoon).

As we were going to press last week — I still don’t know a better web-era phrase for that process — Ukraine mounted its long-awaited initiative to break the military stalemate that had set in after Russia’s initial defeat in attempting a full-scale invasion. The Kharkiv advance was far more successful than anyone seems to have expected, including the Ukrainians. You’ve seen the maps of regained territory, but the psychological impact is surely more profound. Russian morale is in the toilet — and if it seems a bit premature to say that Ukraine will soon “win” the war, it’s harder and harder to see how Russia doesn’t lose it. By any measure, this is a wonderful development — made possible by Ukrainian courage and Western arms.

Does this change my gloomy assessment of Putin’s economic war on Europe, which will gain momentum as the winter drags on? Yes and no. Yes, it will help shore up nervous European governments who can now point to Ukraine’s success to justify the coming energy-driven recession. No, it will not make that recession any less intense or destabilizing. It may make it worse, as Putin lashes out.

More to the point, the Kharkiv euphoria will not last forever. September is not next February. Russia still has plenty of ammunition to throw Ukraine’s way (even if it has to scrounge some from North Korea); it is still occupying close to a fifth of the country; still enjoying record oil revenues; has yet to fully mobilize for a war; and still has China and much of the developing world in (very tepid) acquiescence. Putin is very much at bay. But he is not finished.

Europe’s scramble to prevent mass suffering this winter is made up of beefing up reserves (now 84 percent full, ahead of schedule), energy rationing, government pledges to cut gas and electricity use, nationalization of gas companies, and billions in aid to consumers and industry, with some of the money recouped by windfall taxes on energy suppliers. The record recently is cause for optimism:

    The Swedish energy company Vattenfall AB said industrial demand for gas in France, the U.K., the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy is down about 15% annually.

But the use of gas by households is trivial in the summer in Europe compared with the winter — and subsidizing the cost doesn’t help conservation. Russia will now cut off all gas — which could send an economy like Italy’s to contract more than 5 percent in one year. There really is no way out of imminent, deep economic distress across the continent. Even countries with minimal dependence on Russia, like Britain, are locked into an energy market with soaring costs.

That will, in turn, strengthen some of the populist-right parties — see Italy and Sweden. The good news is that the new right in Sweden backs NATO, and Italy’s post-liberal darling, Georgia Meloni, who once stanned Putin, “now calls [him] an anti-Western aggressor and said she would ‘totally’ continue to send offensive arms to Ukraine”. The growing evidence of the Russian army’s war crimes — another mass grave was just discovered in Izyum — makes appeasement ever more morally repellent.

So what will Putin do now? That is the question. His military is incapable of recapturing lost territory anytime soon; he is desperate for allies; and mobilizing the entire country carries huge political risks. It’s striking to me that in a new piece, Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian right’s guru, is both apoplectic about the war’s direction and yet still rules out mass conscription:

    Mobilization is inevitable. War affects everyone and everything, but mobilization does not mean forcibly sending conscripts to the front, this can be avoided, for example, by forming a fully-fledged volunteer movement, with the necessary benefits and state support. We must focus on veterans and special support for the Novorossian warriors.

This is weak sauce — especially given Dugin’s view that the West is bent on “a war of annihilation against us — the third world war”. It’s that scenario that could lead to a real and potentially catastrophic escalation — which may be why the German Chancellor remains leery of sending more tanks to Ukraine. The danger is a desperate Putin doing something, well, desperate.

I have no particular insight into intra-Russian arguments over mobilization, but there seems to be zero point (other than for propaganda … and that cuts both ways) to instituting a “Great Patriotic War”-style mass conscription drive at this point. The Russian army could absolutely be boosted to vast numbers through conscription. Vast numbers of untrained, unwilling young people with little military training and no particular passion to save the Rodina this time, despite constant regime callbacks to desperate struggle against Hitler in 1941-45. Pushing under- or untrained troops into battle against a Ukrainian army equipped with relatively modern western weaponry would be little more than deliberate slaughter and I can’t believe even Putin would be that reckless.

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