Quotulatiousness

March 19, 2020

Stalin’s Paranoid Military Purges – The Great Terror | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1938 Part 4 of 4

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

TimeGhost History
Published 18 Mar 2020

In 1938, Stalin has his military leadership purged, and has thousands of his comrades killed or locked up. The reasons as to why he did it are still open for debate.

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Joram Appel
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations by:
– Daniel Weiss

Sources:
From the Noun Project:
– Saluting Veteran by Eric Lamar Pearine
– Russian_soldier_1553396 (Edited) by Wonmo Kang
– Prison by FORMGUT
– Law_585610 by Delwar Hossain
Photos from Color by Klimbim

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Split Decision” – Rannar Sillard
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Watchman” – Yi Nantiro
– “Disciples of Sun Tzu” – Christian Andersen
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “Death And Glory 1” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Dark Beginning” – Johan Hynynen
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “The Charleston 3” – Håkan Eriksson

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
1 day ago
This episode was hard to write, mainly because of the ambiguity that this topic is still clouded in today. There are no conclusive answers as to why Stalin did what he did, and why he stopped doing what he was doing in 1938. This episode features some of the explanations of the purges and the Great Terror. This certainly is a remarkable piece of Soviet History, and one that would dramatically influence the performance of the Red Army in 1939 and beyond. Those who followed our World War Two series know that already in December ’39, the direct consequences of the purges in ’37 and ’38 are gigantic. I would also like to note here that we would like the comment section to stick to factual debate.
cheers, Joram

Second Crusade | 3 Minute History

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

Jabzy
Published 14 May 2015

Thanks for the 5,000 subs

QotD: Everybody knows the good guys lost the war

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

There is a Leonard Cohen song that came out in the nineties. I want to say early nineties, but for much of that decade I had small children, so it all runs together. Also, I’m uncaffeinated and late and too lazy to look.

Anyway, the song is called “Everybody knows” and it’s a marvel of double-meaning.

What the song says explicitly is a bunch of stuff people like my brother — look, European, left — believed at the time. Stuff like “Everybody knows the war is over/everybody knows the good guys lost.”

Bizarrely, before they went into hysterical denial of communism being the regime in the USSR and starting to call those seeking to re-establish it “right wingers” the left kept insisting the good guys had lost the cold war. Apparently we just look richer and more concerned for the right of the individual, but the evil Kapitalism of Amerika (it’s much more scary written with a K) kills more people than the Gulag and destroys everyone’s soul in the process. We’re just sneaky about it. So sneaky, in fact, that we don’t need to prevent people from leaving, we need to prevent people from coming here. That’s how sneaky we are.

Stop laughing. There’s a good chance your college student believes this. There’s also a good chance your college student is stupid enough to buy Bernie’s line that bread lines are preferable to our over abundance of food, because at least “everyone is equal.” Someone should ask comrade Bernie about the State stores for very important functionaries that crop up everywhere that has tried the communist slimming diet (It is to die for) and which has goods comparable with what the low middle class in America can afford, sprinkled with a few gold geegaws which is the communists idea of classy.

Sarah Hoyt, “Everybody Knows”, According to Hoyt, 2019-12-11.

March 18, 2020

How Does It Work: Roller Delayed Blowback

Filed under: Germany, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Mar 2020

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Roller delayed blowback originated in the Mauser company R&D department when engineers were attempting to design a roller-locked version of the G43 rifle. They found that when the bolt bounced in automatic fire, the system would sometimes work without being fully locked. With some refinement, this became the roller delayed system, and would have been used in the StG-45 rifle if the war had gone longer. After the war, the system was applied to prototype French arms, then to the Spanish CETME program which eventually became the German G3 rifle. The system would see use primarily as the basis of a whole family of arms from Heckler & Koch, although it has been used in a few other places.

Mechanically, the system uses an angled “locking” wedge to put a mechanical disadvantage on a pair of rollers that must retract into the bolt head before it can move rearward. The combination of the wedge angle and the mass of the bolt carrier assembly are carefully calculated to delay the action from opening until pressure is reduced to a safe level. These systems do typically open faster than locked actions, though, and generally require the use of chamber fluting to ensure reliable extraction.

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740

What is really driving the Wuhan Coronavirus panic

Filed under: China, Europe, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

… besides the wall-to-wall hysteria in the mainstream media, I mean. Severian discusses the insights of “perverted old cokehead” Sigmund Freud on anxiety and its effects, then segues to our current, shared, plight:

Photographic portrait of Sigmund Freud, signed by the sitter (“Prof. Sigmund Freud”) by Max Halberstadt (c. 1921)
Wikimedia Commons

Everyone who has thought about it for five minutes knows that something’s not right. […] As y’all have noted, actual hard information on the coronavirus is hard to come by. Is it fully air-transmissible? What are the infection rates? Hell, what are the death totals? And speaking of the death totals, even if you trust China’s figures (which no reasonable person can possibly do), they seem … low. Like, really low. I actually trust Italy’s government to deliver some vague approximation of the truth, and even there, where they’re in full-blown freakout mode, it seems to kill off old folks with compromised immune systems and lung problems at a fractionally higher rate than your garden-variety flu.

So, you know … it’s the flu. Not great by any means, and more infectious (possibly) than some other flus in our recent past, but for all that just the flu. The ongoing sky-is-falling global freakout has next to nothing to do with the actual bug. We live in a deeply anxious age, and that anxiety has to discharge somehow. It’s global hysteria — classic hysteria, Freudian hysteria, an excess of stress that must be discharged by “converting” it into behavior.

The people who are freaking out about it aren’t worried about dying from it. No, really, they’re not. Nor should they be — no reasonably healthy person under age 70 has any reason to be worried about that. Instead, what they’re worried about is powerlessness. We’ve all long suspected that we’re ruled by idiots and grifters. We’ve all long sensed that our “leaders” hold us in deep contempt. And we’ve long known that none of our problems are worth anything to the global pirate capitalist class. The only reason those bastards care if we all drop dead from the plague is that they can’t sell enough iCrap to each other to keep the company stock price up.

We know this. But we can’t say it, and we can’t act on it, because doing so goes against our self-image. Our media, our education system, our “culture” (such as it is) has spent the last half-century telling us what special and unique snowflakes we all are, even as it’s forcing us into ever-greater conformity. We’ve broken all the taboos, transgressed all the boundaries, liberated all the oppressed. If there ever were to be such a thing as “social justice,” then truly we’ve achieved it, here in this best of all possible worlds where you can lose your job for not addressing your co-worker as a wingless golden-skinned dragonkin and 6’2″ dudes with beards down to their collarbones can go wee-wee in the little girls’ room …

… and yet. And yet. And yet feminists (just to stick with a theme), despite running everything for the last 30 years, still can’t get that lousy 25 cent raise. Seven out of every five college girls are sexually assaulted the minute they step on campus, despite boys being as rare as sasquatches on most campuses (and despite the ever-growing clamor for free college for everyone). You’re free to — hell, you’re practically required to — make up your own pronouns, but you’re not allowed to ask just how a degree in “gender studies” could be worth even one dollar in student loan debt, let alone one hundred thousand dollars. We keep agitating for change, keep voting for it, keep tweeting about it … and nothing happens.

That profound sense of powerlessness is exactly, and I do mean exactly, what screwed up Anna O. She hated her father for not allowing her any personal agency. In her heart of hearts she wanted him dead. And yet she knew herself to be a loving daughter, so that overwhelming sense of relief — indeed, of joy — she felt when he kicked the bucket sent her around the bend.

When You Run Out of Stuff to Hoard – Rationing 1940 – On the Homefront 001

Filed under: Britain, China, Europe, Food, Germany, History, India, Japan, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 17 Mar 2020

In this first episode of On the Homefront, Anna tells you about division of labour, food production and rationing in the early years of the war.

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Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tv

Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Hosted by: Anna Deinhard
Written by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Sources:
IWM A 1699, A 7812, A 19891, D 6773, A 11856, A 11857, D 10565, D 9366, D 15530, D 10465, D 20087, D 20079, D 7958, D 2373, D 14667, D 7966
Taking blood pressure (SC 191775), National Museum of Health and Medicine https://www.flickr.com/photos/medical…
Picture of Elsie Widdowson and Robert McCance with their staff, courtesy of British Nutrition Foundation
Pie Chart by Ates Evren Aydinel from the Noun Project
Pie Diagram Half by Trevor Dsouza from the Noun Project
Farm by Symbolon from the Noun Project
Meat by chiccabubble from the Noun Project
Fish by Vectors Market from the Noun Project
butter by Nick Bluth from the Noun Project
potatoes by Vectors Point from the Noun Project
Vegetable by Eucalyp from the Noun Project
Poop by Jordan Díaz Andrés from the Noun Project
shelf by Zach Bogart from the Noun Project
Tea box by Tomas Knopp from the Noun Project
Jam by Vichanon Chaimsuk from the Noun Project
Biscuits by John Burraco from the Noun Project
Cheese by Erin Agnoli from the Noun Project
eggs by Oleksandr Panasovskyi from the Noun Project
butter by Imogen Oh from the Noun Project
can by Anniken & Andreas from the Noun Project

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Gavin Luke – “Seasons of Change”
Johan Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”
Anthony Earls – “The Songs We Sing”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Farell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Howard Harper-Barnes – “Prescient”
Howard Harper-Barnes – “London”
Philip Ayers – “Under the Dome”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
57 minutes ago (edited)
This is the first episode of On the Homefront. For those of you who haven’t watched our trailer or have seen the Between Two Wars episode on the Home Revolution, let me introduce you to Anna. She will be telling us all about the homefronts and the people on them in these monthly sub-series. Now, we know that this episode might seem to be playing on the Corona related hoarding that is going on, but this was already produced before any of that made the news. In any case, as many of you are sitting in your own homefronts, I hope this episode offers some relief and perspective. If you like it, do make sure to Join the TimeGhost Army to keep us running! You can do so at https://timeghost.tv or patreon.com/timeghosthistory
Cheers, Joram

SMLE Rifle Grenade Launcher

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Feb 2017

While rifle-launched grenades date back hundreds of years, they first came into widespread use during World War One, on all sides of the conflict. The first years of the war saw the use of rod grenades, but their downsides (mediocre accuracy, bulkiness, and a propensity to damage rifle bores) led to the British adopting a 2.5” cup grenade discharger in late 1917. This new launcher used slightly modified Mills bomb hand grenades, and could launch them with significant accuracy from 80 to 200 yards. They would become a staple of WWI combined arms infantry tactics, and be used clear through WW2 until replaced by the 22mm NATO style spigot grenades.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

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If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

March 17, 2020

When the state renounces enforcing the law, there are two alternatives

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

Yesterday, David Thompson linked to a post by Natalie Solent about how the police in London failed to do anything about a blatant theft at a Boots pharmacy because it was considered a “civil matter”. The accused thief was prosecuted privately by the parent corporation, which is apparently the first time this has happened in England. As Natalie says, this is the “nice” option when the government fails to enforce the law of the land — or enforces it only sporadically and unevenly.

In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, Eric Oppen provides an example from the US in the post-Civil War era that shows the other option for private law enforcement:

Many of the victims of the kind of small-time crime committed by vagrants and the “homeless” are, themselves, far from rich. Repeated thefts can drive a small, struggling business under, and loss of, for example, a bicycle can represent a catastrophic blow to a poor person’s finances. This doesn’t address the sense of violation felt by those victimized by crime.

The original San Francisco Committees of Vigilance formed because the “forces of law and order” either were not doing their jobs, or were actively in league with the very criminals they were supposed to be suppressing. Many police were incompetent or lazy, while others were often corrupt on a scale that would shock Boss Hogg.

Do-it-yourself justice was far from uncommon in nineteenth-century America, including in the “civilized” East. In upstate New York, after decades of unpunished crime, the Loomis family gang received an epic comeuppance in 1865. Fifteen years earlier, their outraged neighbors had tried staging a raid on the Loomis farm, but uncertainty about who owned the stolen goods they found prevented any Loomis from being convicted. In 1865, many of their neighbors were returned Civil War combat veterans. They had become inured to violence, and they were tired of the Loomis’ thefts, arsons and intimidation. They killed George “Wash” Loomis, the leader of the gang, nearly lynched one of his brothers, and burned down the family’s home. After that, the Loomis family’s power was broken and their reign of crime was pretty much over.

These things happened because there was no other way to deal with these situations. Law enforcement, in those days, was primitive, especially outside of the major cities. Large corporations often had their own private police simply because of this fact.

The “social contract” is supposed to read something like “renounce personally avenging your wrongs, and society will do it for you.” But what can one do, when society is visibly abrogating the contract? Take it to court?

Vigilantism is not unknown even in Canada.

“Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park” by August Rode is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Tank Chats #64 Leopard 1 | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published 11 Jan 2019

The Leopard 1 Main Battle Tank was built on Germany’s lessons from the Second World War. It entered service in 1965 and has since been exported worldwide.

Tank Museum Curator David Willey talks through this Cold War vehicle.

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QotD: The luck of the Irish

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

Making dark comments about the likelihood of an unhappy outcome is the way we Irish Catholics deal with anxiety, dread, and uncertainty. It’s our special pact with God: If we expect the worst, obsess about it, worry about it, drink about it, indulge in black humor, and honestly convince ourselves that something awful is going to happen, then God will step in and prevent said awful thing from happening just to mess with our heads. But you have to sincerely expect the worst, not just go through the motions. It’s when you expect good things to happen or keep happening — when you presume upon God — that bad things happen. Remember what happened when the Irish presumed upon all those potatoes?

Dan Savage, “Welcome Black”, AndrewSullivan.com, 2005-08-08.

March 15, 2020

Nigerians Chasing Italians Like Cheetahs Hunt a Bull – WW2 – 081 – March 14, 1941

Filed under: Africa, Europe, Germany, Greece, History, Italy, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 14 Mar 2020

An Italian offensive into Greece is prepared, just as the Germans are preparing to also attack Greece via Bulgaria. Meanwhile, a daring and spectacular dash is made by the Nigerian army.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tv

Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
– Daniel Weiss
– History Colorizer M.B – https://www.facebook.com/mohamedbayou…

Sources:
– Bundesarchiv
– boat sound by bockelsound from freesound.org

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Those damned unintended consequences

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sarah Hoyt on the differences between intention and the real world:

Unintended consequences are the bane of social engineers. They are why the “Scientific” and centralized method of governance never worked and will never work. (Sorry, guys, it just won’t.)

Part of it is because humans are contrary. Part of is because humans are chaotic. And part of it is because like weather systems, societies are so complex it’s almost impossible to figure out what a push in any given place will cause to happen in another place.

This is why price controls are the craziest of idiocies. They don’t work in the way they’re intended, but oh, they work in practically all the ways they’re not. So, take price controls on rent. All they really do is create a market in which housing is scarce, landlords don’t maintain their property AND the only people who can afford to live in cities that have rent control are the very wealthy.

BUT Sarah, you say, aren’t rent controls supposed to make them affordable. Yeah. All that and the good intentions will allow you to go skating in hell on the fourth of July weekend.

Let’s be real, okay? I saw rent control up close and personal in Portugal. Rents were controlled and landlords were penalized for “not keeping the property up”.

In Portugal at the time, and here too, most of the time from what I’ve seen, the administration of property might be some management company, but that’s not who OWNS the damn thing. The owners are usually people who bought the property so it would support them in old age/lean times.

To begin with, you’re removing these people’s ability to make money off their legitimately owned property. And no, they’re not the plutocrats bernie bros imagine. These are often people just making it by.

Second, people are going to get the money some other way, because the alternative is dying. And people don’t want to die or be destitute. So they’re going to find the money. I have no idea what it is in NYC, etc, but in Portugal? it was “key buying.” Sure, you can rent the house for the controlled price, but you have to make a huge payment upfront to “buy the key.” From what I remember this was on the order of a small house down payment. And if you couldn’t do that, you were stuck getting married and living with your parents. And if you say “greedy landlords” — well, see the other thing you could do was leave the lease in your will. So the landlord didn’t know if they’d ever get control of their property back, and they needed to live off this for x years (estimated length of life.) So, that was an unintended consequence. The kind that keeps surfacing in rent-controlled cities in the US.

The same applies to attempts to “help” the homeless. Part of this, as part of all attempts to “fix” poverty is that the people doing it, usually the result of generations of middle class parents and strives assume the homeless and the poor are people like them.

To an extent, they’re correct. The homeless and the poor are PEOPLE. But culture makes a difference, and culture is often based on class and place of upbringing. And the majority of humanity, judging by the world, might be made to strive but are not natural strivers. Without incentive, most of humanity sits back, relaxes and takes what it’s given.

Irish War of Independence – Black and Tans vs. IRA Guerrillas I THE GREAT WAR 1920

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

The Great War
Published 14 Mar 2020

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The movement for more Irish self determination had turned into a full out revolutionary movement by 1919. The British Empire was losing control over Ireland and by early 1920 was in a full out guerrilla war against the Irish Republican Army (IRA). To regain control more police forces were recruited with wide ranging authorities – and a lack of actual police training. With their mismatched equipment made from war supplies, they soon got the nickname “Black and Tans”.

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» SOURCES

Bowen, Tom, “The Irish Underground and the War of Independence 1919-21” Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 8, No. 2 (Apr., 1973), pp. 3-23

Hopkinson, Michael, The Irish War of Independence, (Montreal & Kingston : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002)

Leeson, David, The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, 1920-1921, (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2011)

Lowe, W.J., “Who Were the Black-and-Tans”, History Ireland (Autumn 2004)

Townshend, Charles, The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence 1918-1923, (London : Penguin Books, 2013)

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March 14, 2020

“The people who write such things are thinking with their epidermis and genitalia, which is to say they’re not thinking at all”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Matt Johnson remembers the great anti-identitarian writer and speaker, Christopher Hitchens:

Christopher Hitchens speaking at The Amaz!ng Meeting held at the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada on 20 January 2007.
Photo detail by ensceptico via Wikimedia Commons.

Hitchens thought fearlessly. As Martin Amis put it, he liked “the battle, the argument, the smell of cordite.” This is why he told the publisher of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything to organize a book tour that ran through the pulpits of the American South instead of remaining confined to the coasts. It’s why he relished every opportunity to lambaste Bill and Hillary Clinton in front of liberal audiences. It’s why he went after Mother Teresa and Princess Diana. He was an inveterate iconoclast — if there was a bloated reputation to puncture or a cherished dogma to deflate, he saw it as a duty and a pleasure to do so.

It’s no surprise that this oppositional inclination, coupled with blistering rhetorical ability, made Hitchens a deadly debater. After his death in December 2011, countless tributes and articles about Hitchens emphasized what a force he was in the studio and on the debate stage — his erudition and wit, his fluency, his seemingly superhuman memory. Hitchens is unforgettable for all these reasons, but people don’t miss him because he could turn a phrase or win an argument on CNN — they miss him because he thought for himself and refused to apologize for it. He didn’t want to write and speak as the representative of a community: “My own opinion is enough for me,” he told the audience at a debate on free speech in 2007, “and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority.”

“Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban,” Orwell wrote in his original introduction to Animal Farm (which was, ironically, suppressed). He continued: “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.” While there was far more official censorship in Orwell’s time, we’re living through an era of pervasive self-censorship, and as Packer explains, this type of silencing is “more insidious than the state-imposed kind, because it’s a surer way of killing the impulse to think, which requires an unfettered mind.”

[…]

Hitchens detested tribal and parochial feelings of any kind, which is why he was dismayed when he witnessed the emergence of identity as a catalyst for political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens attacked radicals who thought it was “enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic ‘preference,’ to qualify as a revolutionary.” When Hitchens first heard the expression “the personal is political,” he knew “as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was — cliché is arguably forgivable here — very bad news.” As he put it in a 2008 article:

    People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.

It’s easy to imagine what Hitchens would have thought about a recent New York Times headline that declared “The Next President Should Not Be a Man” or a prominent writer and activist who announced that she “will not support white male candidates in the Dem primary.” The people who write such things are thinking with their epidermis and genitalia, which is to say they’re not thinking at all. You don’t have to bother defending candidates’ principles and positions when gender and race are the only relevant variables.

History Summarized: Ethiopia

Filed under: Africa, History, Humour, Italy, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 13 Mar 2020

Ethiopian History gets started early and just keeps on going. From the dawn of humanity itself through the medieval period and into the modern day, the history of the kingdom at the end of the Blue Nile is full of surprises.

SOURCES & Further Reading: Harold Marcus A History of Ethiopia and John Jackson’s Ethiopia and the Origins of Civilization, see also Kenneth Vickery’s lecture “Ethiopia: Outpost of Christianity” and William Cook’s lecture “The Rock-Hewn Churches of Ethiopia” via The Great Courses.

This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/

Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.

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