As we were told for years, if Brexit happened there were going to be dire consequences to the British economy, and here’s the latest one:
Employers are complaining that without badly paid immigrant labour they’ll just not be able to get the staff. The answer to which is that they’d better start paying higher wages then, eh?
[…]
The analysis here stems from something Marx got right. It’s competition among capitalists for scarce labour which pushes wages up. If there’s a vast reserve army of the unemployed then anyone needing more straining backs just tosses a crust to those in that army and gets as many limbs and torsos to exploit as desired. But if all are already employed then any desire for extra labour requires tempting it away from current employer and occupation to the new. That means a better job offer. Some mixture of conditions, enjoyment of the job, cash and so on that makes up a more attractive package.
The combination of cheap flights and free movement of labour has meant that the reserve army lives in Wroclaw and Debrecen. It’s also been near unlimited – compared to the size of the UK economy – these past couple of decades.
The absence of free movement – what is being complained about here – will mean that to gain the desired labour those employers are going to have to offer higher wages, higher compensation rather, to those not ordinarily resident or stemming from central Europe.
[…]
But back to the basic complaint here. These employers are complaining that Brexit will mean they’ve got to raise the wages they pay. To which the correct response is “Ah, Diddums”.
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1982, on a group of islands far, far away from Great Britain. After the military junta of Argentinian Army General Leopoldo Galtieri had publicly declared that the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) were rightfully part of Argentinian territory, an invasion force succeeded in wrestling control away from their British owners. However Great Britain would not simply stand by and give the Falklands up. Instead a British task-force would make its way down to the Falklands, in an attempt to take back control of the islands by force. What followed was an undeclared war of 10 weeks, where British carriers and commandos fought against the entrenched Argentinian ground-forces for the ownership of the islands.
Watch more videos on the Sabaton YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Sabaton?…
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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory
If you were hovering above Earth looking to be born randomly into any time period in human history, you’d pick now if you had any brains. And if you could pick a place, you’d pick a Western liberal democracy, and probably the United States of America (though as much as it pains me to say it, you wouldn’t be crazy to pick Canada or the U.K. or Holland). Sure, if you could pick being rich, white, and male — and didn’t really care too much about the plight of others — you might take the 1950s. But even then, your choices for food, entertainment, etc. would be terribly curtailed compared to today. If you chose to be a billionaire in 1917, you could still die from a minor infection, and good Thai food would be entirely unknown to you. You’d certainly never enjoy watching a Star Wars movie on an IMAX screen in air conditioning. In other words, while your homes would be bigger and cooler if you were a billionaire in 1917, a typical orthodontist in Peoria in 2017 is in many respects much richer than a billionaire a century earlier.
Still, that’s not the deal on offer. You have to buy an incarnation lottery ticket, and the results would be random.
I’m not big on dividing people up by abstract categories, and I certainly don’t mean them to be pejorative. But as a historical matter, being born poor, gay, black, Jewish, ugly, weird, handicapped, etc. today may certainly come with some problems or challenges, but on the whole those traits are less of a shackle or barrier than at any time in the past. The only trait where I think it might be a closer call is dumbness. All other things being equal, a not-terribly-intelligent person with a good work ethic and some decent values might have had more opportunities before machines replaced strong backs. But even here, I can think of lots of exceptions.
The Nazi economy appears to do well during the 1930s. But this is largely myth, as the German economy under Hitler is based on a self destructive, ideologically or selfishly fuelled irrationality driven by conquest and criminal practice.
Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Document This 1” – Peter Sandberg
– “March Of The Brave 10” – Rannar Sillard – Test
– “Ominous” – Philip Ayers
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Disciples of Sun Tzu” – Christian Andersen
– “Guilty Shadows 4” – Andreas Jamsheree
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Death And Glory 1” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Easy Target” – Rannar Sillard
– “Split Decision” – Rannar Sillard
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “The Charleston 3” – Håkan Eriksson
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
Spartacus Olsson
1 day ago
From an intellectual viewpoint, this is perhaps the most challenging episode I have written in this series. First of all it’s hard to make economic policy interesting, even when it’s about the Nazis. It tends to get, well … grey. Second of all it’s not that easy to simplify things without completely losing the essence of what was going on. Third of all, I’m fighting an uphill battle against a post truth, political talking point based on … let’s just call it less than ingenious purposes.
Obviously that’s the idea that the Nazis were Socialists. And perhaps that is not so far fetched when you think of the name of their party, the way they framed their anti-semitic rhetoric in a way that it would sound friendly to the working class, and their absolute disregard for telling the truth about anything, and everything. But although we have painstakingly showed you the facts, I am painfully aware that it won’t make a difference to stop the nonsense out there and in here — some pundits will religiously stick to their ideas, because if they don’t, they might have to face that some of the ideas they have are mutual with the people they so desperately want to distance themselves from. The same happened with the far left between the 1930s and 1970s, when they tried with cramped desperation to frame Stalinism as a right wing, Fascist movement — Red Fascism was the term — obviously as much nonsense as the alt-right idea that Naziism is Socialism.
And is it important? Well yes and no — the dumbos will probably get worn out at some point, it’s after all quite challenging to look for ways to distort the record over, and over again. I don’t really care if the extremists try to push their mutual garbage in each other’s lap — as a supporter of democracy and humanism, I have no regard for either end. I do however have an incredible amount of respect for conservatives, liberals, and progressives who are equally dedicated to democracy and human rights — and there is where it matters.
When the far left tries to frame Stalinism as right wing, and the far-right tries to frame Naziism is left-wing, they are trying to co-opt a position of less extremism. It’s an invasive attempt for Communists and (real) Socialists to just look like regular Progressives, and Fascists and Nazis to just look like regular Conservatives. And that my friends is dangerous, to all of us, regardless of our nationality, creed, political affiliation, or opinion — because it is specifically our individual rights and democracy that is at stake in this game. That’s what they want to take away, or in some places stop from developing.
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Anton Howes explains something that I’d wondered about in the latest edition of his Age of Invention newsletter:
Route of John Cabot’s 1497 voyage on the Matthew of Bristol posited by Jones and Condon: Evan T. Jones and Margaret M. Condon, Cabot and Bristol’s Age of Discovery: The Bristol Discovery Voyages 1480-1508 (University of Bristol, Nov. 2016), fig. 8, p. 43. Wikimedia Commons.
… in 1550 the English were still struggling with latitude. Their inability to find it, unlike their Spanish and Portuguese rivals, was one of the main things holding them back from voyages of exploration.
The replica of John Cabot’s ship Matthew in Bristol harbour, adjacent to the SS Great Britain. Photo by Chris McKenna via Wikimedia Commons.
The traditional method of navigation for English pilots was to simply learn the age-old routes. They were trained through repetition and accrued experience, learning to recognise particular landmarks and using a lead and line – just a thin rope weighted with some lead – to determine their location from the depth of the water. Cover the lead with something sticky, and you might bring up some sediment from the sea floor to double-check: a pilot would learn the kinds of sand and pebbles from to expect from different areas. And when they travelled out to sea, away from the coastline, they used a basic system of dead reckoning, taking their compass bearings from a known location, estimating their speed, and keeping in a particular direction for long enough. Or at least hoping to. They might keep track of their progress on a wooden traverse table, inserting pegs to indicate how far they had sailed, but it was ultimately a matter of rough estimation. Should they make any mistake — in terms of their speed, heading, or point of departure — they might easily get lost. But it was still a matter of trying to follow an already-known route. And English mariners of the 1550s did not even know that many routes.
For a voyage of exploration, by contrast, landmarks and sediment from the sea floor would be seen for the first time rather than recalled. By definition, there was no route to follow. So to launch their own voyages of discovery, the English needed to learn a new skill. They needed to look to the heavens.
Celestial navigation — measuring the altitude of heavenly bodies and then using geometry to determine one’s latitude on the earth’s surface — was by the 1550s already hundreds of years old. It had primarily been used to cross the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East — seas of sand, in which there might also be no landmarks from which to take bearings — and to navigate the Indian Ocean. Thus, while pilots in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean stuck to dead reckoning and soundings, Islamic navigators had for centuries used quadrants and astrolabes to take their bearings at sea. By the mid-fifteenth century, these instruments and techniques had found their way to Europe, where they were put to use especially by Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian explorers, along with additional instruments such as the cross-staff.
[…]
So for decades, English explorations relied on foreigners who either knew the routes that the English pilots didn’t, or who at least possessed the skill of mathematical, celestial navigation. The Italian explorer John Cabot (Zuan Chabotto), when he sailed to Newfoundland from Bristol in the late 1490s, was able to take latitude readings (he may even have been familiar with the older Islamic navigational practices, as he claimed to have visited Mecca). When Cabot died, the English expeditions that set out from Bristol in 1501-3 relied on Portuguese pilots from the mid-Atlantic islands of the Azores. And John Cabot’s son, Sebastian Cabot, who was involved in a few English expeditions, was so expert in mathematical navigation that he was eventually appointed pilot major for the entire Spanish Empire, making him responsible for the training and licensing of all its pilots — a position he held for three decades. When he led a voyage of exploration on behalf of Spain in 1526-30, a few English merchants became investors so that they could justify sending with him an English mariner, Roger Barlow, to secretly learn the Spanish routes across the Atlantic and have immediate knowledge if an onward route to Asia was discovered (as it turned out, South America got in the way).
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The perk for $100 Patrons is choosing a gun they would like me to find and film, and one such Patron (Mark) expressed a curiosity about US testing and lack of adoption of an MG-42 in .30-06 caliber. So, today we will discuss that (the trials gun was designated the T24) as well as why it took so long for the FN MAG to be developed and adopted.
From the History Channel DVD series Great Blunders of WWII.
This is of interest for many reasons, but particularly because my late father-in-law served in the Royal Navy on the Arctic convoys and spent a full winter in the Soviet Union when his convoy couldn’t return before the ice closed the convoy route.
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Theodore Dalrymple reviews a recent book by Paul Corthorn on Powell’s career and the concerns that animated him:
Enoch Powell in a 1987 portrait by Allan Warren. Wikimedia Commons.
It does not pretend to be a biography, or even an intellectual biography. Rather, it chronicles, scrupulously but somewhat drily, Powell’s varying attitudes toward the main subjects of his political concerns: international relations, economics, immigration, Britain’s relations with Europe, and the status of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. Powell’s wider intellectual interests and religious views are scarcely touched upon, though it is mentioned that he went from being a believer to being (under the influence of Nietzsche) an atheist, to then returning to Christian belief. There is no description of his character in this book, not even by implication, and with this book as a guide, one would not recognise him if one met him. It is not possible to tell whether the author admires or detests his subject. This neutrality creates confidence in the accuracy of his scholarship, but also makes his book less than a pleasurable or exciting read. Perhaps it is the sign of a frivolous mind, but I prefer even histories of ideas to be spiced with a little biography (or, more truthfully, gossip).
The author does, however, offer a unifying interpretation of Powell’s various political concerns, namely that they were all responses to Britain’s precipitous national decline, the steepest part of which occurred in his lifetime, but which is continuing apace to the extent that Britain might even cease to be a nation at all. Powell was born in a great power and died in an enfeebled country with no industrial or military might, with precious little patriotism, and with no sense either of grandeur or collective purpose.
That this decline – relative rather than absolute, except in such fields as the maintenance of law and order — was inevitable given the conjunctures of the age, was evident to Powell (though not at first). This relative decline was already implicit in Disraeli’s dictum that “the Continent [of Europe] will not suffer England to be the workshop of the world.”
Powell’s concerns, then, were how to manage Britain’s decline and how to find it a new place in the world. He had not always been perceptive about the scale of its decline. He clung, for example, to the illusion that the Empire might still count for something even after the Second World War. Thereafter, however, he became a devotee of a kind of Realpolitik, to the extent of wanting a rapprochement or even alliance with the Soviet Union to balance the power of the United States, whose aims he had long distrusted. He discounted ideology, including communism, as a force in international politics, which is odd in a man who was by far the most intellectual and intellectually accomplished of all British politicians of the 20th century, being both a classical scholar and a brilliant linguist. He seemed to think that Soviet ambition was merely that of any large power in the great game. Those countries that fell into its grip knew otherwise.
On economics, Powell was an early devotee of the superiority of the market over state planning at a time when the intellectual tide was running the other way. There was one important subject, however, on which he was a confirmed statist, namely that of health care. He was for a time Minister of Health in the British government, during which he fiercely defended the NHS. He believed that the government had an ethical duty to provide health care for its citizenry, and it never seemed to occur to him that the centralised NHS was not the only possible way of doing so. He was often highly suspicious of international comparison, but it is difficult to see how judgment of the merits of a system could be made without it. It was clear, moreover, that in this, as in other fields, Britain was at best very mediocre. Perhaps Powell was blind to the NHS’s mediocre performance because of the benevolence of its stated intentions (an occupational hazard among intellectuals, even — or perhaps especially — among brilliant ones). At any rate, he never satisfactorily explained why health care should be different from other spheres of service provision in the superiority of private over public organization.
Written and Hosted 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)
Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation in Time”
Farrell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Wendel Scherer – “Reunion”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Howard Harper-Barnes – “London”
Hakan Eriksson – “The End of The World 2”
Phoenix Tail – “At the Front”
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
Spartacus Olsson
3 days ago
You’d think that the Nazis would know how nationalism works … well, it turns out that when Hitler’s fantasies of race meet the very real nationalism of the old European monarchies, race doesn’t have the trump. Now, in 1940 nationalism isn’t that old, but it’s anchored in old traditions that the monarchies now occupied by the Nazis have managed to reconcile with modernity rather successfully. And here’s an important point: nationalism is often decried as the root of all of these conflicts, and perhaps it is, but in some places it’s also proved to be fertile ground for modern democracy. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learnt somewhere in there, and maybe that’s that in the end it’s not what, but how that makes a difference. What’s particularly interesting, in for instance the Netherlands with the February Strike or in the Germany resistance rings, is that when faced with a common enemy to the nation, patriotism unites people across the political spectrum, well except those obsessed with the idea of race.
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When John Browning licensed his handgun patents, the North American rights were granted to Colt, and the Western European rights to FN in Belgium. Browning provided the patents and patent model guns to the companies, and they were then free to interpret the design however they thought best. In the case of the shrouded-hammer blowback system, the Colt interpretation (the Pocket Hammerless) was a civilian concealed pistol in .32ACP, while the FN interpretation (Model 1903) was a substantially larger gun in 9×20 Browning Long intended for military service.
The locked-breech patent was the same. Colt developed it into the Model 1911 adopted by the US military, and FN built a slightly smaller version in 9.65x23mm intended for European military service. However, while the Colt pistol became tremendously popular, FN’s development was disrupted by World War One, and never completed in its aftermath. Only a couple dozen examples of the Grand Browning, as it was called, were made before the war, and just a few survive today. We will never know how European militaries would have responded to a Browning locked-breech pistol at the time…
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85704
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John Lichfield on the plight of the cheesemakers (get your MPATHG jokes out of the way now):
French cheese seller, offering Villefranche de Rouergue and other artisanal cheeses. Photo by Sybren via Wikimedia Commons.
In his small fromagerie at Saint Point Lac in the Jura, Fabrice Michelin produces authentic, hand-made, raw-milk Mont d’Or cheeses. He is the last person in France to do so — the last in a line of local cheese-makers which goes back for centuries.
“I get up at 5am. I collect the milk myself from the farms in the village. I warm the milk,” Mr Michelin told me. “I scoop it carefully into cylinders. I pay attention to the varying consistency and taste of the curd. It alters subtly with the seasons, depending on the qualities of the grass. I mold the cheeses by hand. Every cheese is a little different.”
Individual, artisanal cheeses? Wonderful.
Not any more, it seems.
“That’s what gets me into trouble these days,” M. Michelin said. “Brussels and Paris say that the cheeses must all be the same. There seem to be new rules every month. How can I carry on if all my cheeses have to be identical?”
Forget the yellow vests. Forget the strikes against pension reform. The real battle for the immortal soul of France is about something far more important — cheese.
The infinite variety of French cheeses — one of the finest achievements of French culture — is gradually being eroded and dumbed down. Only one in ten of the cheeses now consumed in France is made with raw milk or “lait cru” in the authentic manner.
Search where you like in the finest cheese shops in France, you will no longer find a Bleu de Termignon or a Galette des Monts-d’Or. They are among 50 species of French cheese that have vanished, like rare flowers or butterflies, in the last 40 years. Other varieties, like Vacherin d’Abondance and M. Michelin’s hand-made Mont d’Or have been reduced to a single producer.
Many of the best-known French cheeses — Brie or Pont L’Evêque or Camembert — thrive at home and abroad, but they are overwhelmingly made in large factories with pasteurised or sterilised milk. To purists, that is a betrayal of the French tradition of “living cheese”.
Major French AOC cheese designations: the size of the symbol indicates the relative production of that variety. Many smaller cheese varieties not shown. Graphic by FrancoisFC – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3640022
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This video’s subject was chosen by Jack Sargeant, the winner of the DeepArt art competition a couple of weeks ago. The topic is a large one, but I hope I gave it a decent enough shot.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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