Quotulatiousness

May 3, 2018

“[T]hose who cry ‘cultural appropriation’ are merely whingers with too much time on their hands”

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

Naomi Firsht rightly calls cultural appropriation “the ultimate first world problem”:

If ever there was an entirely invented problem, it is ‘cultural appropriation’. No one had even heard of it five years ago. Now it pops up in news stories on an almost weekly basis.

Mansfield College at Oxford University cancelled a cannabis-themed party a few weeks ago because some students feared it could lead to cultural appropriation. It seems some were concerned that the team organising the event drew on the music and culture of the Caribbean in its invitation.

That anyone could care so much as to complain about an event that encouraged students to ‘Get creative with puns’ for fancy-dress ideas – ‘Ganjalf’, ‘The Grim Reefer’ and ‘Ganja Claus’ were among the suggestions – is just sad.

The people most likely to denounce others for their “cultural appropriation” are also the ones most likely to suffer at the sight (or thought) of anyone having fun. They’re modern-day Puritans with tattoos, piercings, and multi-coloured hair.

Let’s be honest, those who cry ‘cultural appropriation’ are merely whingers with too much time on their hands. Not only is this a non-problem, it is also an inherently First World, middle-class problem. Just take a look at Teen Vogue’s article on this year’s Coachella – the annual music and arts festival held in California.

Writer Dillon Johnson complains about ‘appropriative fashion’ at the festival, including bindis, box braids and warbonnets. ‘It’s never okay to wear someone’s culture as a costume, especially not for the sake of getting double taps’, writes Johnson, before generously offering to ‘inform and educate those that are willing to learn’.

Considering a ticket to this year’s Coachella cost a minimum of $429 (and that’s before you’ve paid for accommodation, travel and food), it’s unlikey the festival-goers’ fashion choices will be of much importance to most people.

One of the greatest things about culture is its unifying power. One group borrowing cultural aspects of another is a sign of a diverse society that is proud and admiring of its many influences. As an Ashkenazi (of Eastern Europe descent) Jew, I take immense pleasure in hearing Yiddish words (the language of my grandparents and great-grandparents) being used so liberally in the US. You’d be hard pressed to find a New Yorker who doesn’t know words like schmuck, bubbe and chutzpah. And the liberal littering of Yiddish phrases in Hollywood films always makes me smile. It breathes new life into an old language.

The rage against cultural appropriation sucks the fun out of culture, and, even worse, encourages a new kind of segregation. We should encourage cultural sharing – it enriches our society. Only a schmuck would think otherwise.

Total War History: The Theodosian Walls

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

Invicta
Published on 9 Jan 2015

Amongst the most formidable structures ever built by the Romans would be the massive triple layered walls of Constantinople. Today we dive into the details of this super structure!

May 1, 2018

The Finnish Jägers In World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR On The Road

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 30 Apr 2018

Visit the Museum: http://hohenlockstedt-museum.de/

During World War 1 Finnish volunteers were trained in Northern Germany. The 27th Jäger Battalion is an important part of Finnish history and we explored their beginnings in Hohenlockstedt or Lockstedter Lager as it was called in 1915.

Shooting a Suppressed Sten Gun

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 19 Mar 2018

Sold for $7,475 (transferrable).

During World War Two, the British spent several years developing a silenced version of the Sten gun for special operations commandos and for dropping to mainland European resistance units. This is a recreation of one of the experimental types, based on a MkII Sten with the receiver lengthened into an integral suppressor. So – how does it shoot?

QotD: The work of Epicurus

Filed under: Books, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

According to Diogenes Laertius, Epicurus himself was the most prolific of all the main ancient philosophers. His total original writings filled 300 papyrus rolls. If we take one papyrus roll as containing the equivalent of 30 printed octavo pages, his collected works would fill 30 modern volumes. His longest single work, On Nature, filled 37 papyrus rolls, which makes it about as long as Das Kapital.

To these original writings, we must add the various writings of his followers, both during his life and during the following six centuries or so. These also were substantial. Taken together, they must easily have filled a library.

Moreover, unlike its main rivals, Epicureanism was a proselytising philosophy. There were no hidden teachings — no mysteries too complex for the written word. There was no need for long preparatory studies in logic and mathematics and rhetoric before the meaning of the Master could become plain. No one was too old or too young to embrace the truths taught by Epicurus. He accepted slaves and even women to the courses he ran in the Garden. He wrote in the plainest Greek consistent with precise expression of his doctrines. He discouraged his followers from poetry and rhetoric.

For those able or inclined to study his doctrines in full, there were the many volumes of On Nature. For those not so able or inclined, there was a still substantial abridgement, and then a shorter summary. For the less attentive or the uneducated, there were collections of very brief sayings — whole arguments compressed into statements that could be memorised and repeated.

Nearly all of these works have vanished. Of what Epicurus himself wrote, we have three complete letters and a list of brief sayings known as the Principal Doctrines. Of other Epicurean writings, we have the Vatican Sayings, which is another collection of brief statements, some by Epicurus. We have a biography of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius, which summarises his main doctrines and also contains the only extant whole works already mentioned. We have more of the brief statements and a partial summary of the whole system inscribed at the expense of another Diogenes on a wall in Oenanda, a city in what is now northern Turkey.

Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.

April 30, 2018

Russian Civil War and Russian Wars I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1919 Part 2 of 4

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

TimeGhost History
Published on 29 Apr 2018

On what was only recently the Eastern Front of World War One there is no end to war. Russia is at war with itself while it tries to reconquer the former territories of the Russian Empire. These new countries are also at war with themselves and each other, while they fight the Bolshevik Russian armies invading their young borders. Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Romania, wherever you look in Eastern Europe there is war, more war… endless war.

Join the TimeGhost Army at https://timeghost.tv
or on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by Spartacus Olsson and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

The Ferdinand: What Not To Do When Building a Tank

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

Potential History
Published on 11 Mar 2018

A brief history of the VK 45.01 (P), or the Porsche Tiger, and the disaster it later became.

April 29, 2018

Tank Crew Training – More German Tank Prototypes I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Technology, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 28 Apr 2018

Chair of Wisdom Time!

Pipe Dreams: What Happened To Hovertrains?

Filed under: France, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Mustard
Published on 8 Apr 2018

In 1974, a French train sets a speed record, exceeding 250 miles per hour. But this train is unlike any other before it. Instead of rolling on wheels, it hovers on a cushion of air. In the 1970’s hovertrains were seriously being considered the solution to slow, antiquated railways, which increasingly had to compete with new superhighways and even intercity air travel.

Without the rolling resistance of train wheels, hovertrains promised greater efficiency and much higher speeds. By feeding high pressure air through lifting pads, hovertrains float on a cushion of air much like a hovercraft.

One of the most widely known hovertrain prototypes was called the Aerotrain. Lead engineer Jean Bertin and his team in France, designed several versions, including one that could carry 80 passengers. The i80HV was powered by a turbofan sourced from an airliner, producing over twelve thousand pounds of thrust. At the front, a 400 horse power gas-turbine supplied high-pressure air to hover the twenty loaded train a quarter of an inch off its guideway. The British and Americans also experimented with hovertrain technology, incorporating the linear induction motor for improved efficiency. British research led to the development of the RTV-31 Tracked Hovercraft, and the American’s developed several prototypes, culminating in the development of the Urban Tracked Air Cushion Vehicle (UTACV).

But like their counterpart the Maglev, Hovertrains failed to revolutionize rail. Hovertrains, Maglevs, or any other innovative alternative to rail has to compete with nearly a million miles of rail line already in existence. With stations and infrastructure built-out in nearly every city in the world. The limitations of conventional railways were overcome not a single innovative leap forward, but by incremental improvements. Existing rail networks were modernized with sections of track that could handle higher speeds. New signaling technologies were developed along with more advanced wheelsets.

April 28, 2018

How A Man Shall Be Armed: 14th Century

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

Royal Armouries
Published on 20 Feb 2017

Discover how the introduction of plate armour changed the way knights of the 14th Century armed themselves for battle.

April 27, 2018

The First Tank-on-Tank Battle in History – The Zeebrugge Raid I THE GREAT WAR Week 196

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 26 Apr 2018

At Villers-Bretonneux, German and British tanks clash marking the first tank-on-tank battle in history. In the same week, the most successful flying ace of World War 1 is shot down over France: Manfred von Richthofen dies after scoring 80 victories. Meanwhile, the British Navy attempts to eliminate the German U-Boat threat with a daring raid on Zeebrugge and Ostende.

April 26, 2018

Britain drops down a league table that really matters, for a change

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

Mick Hume on the parlous state of press freedoms in Britain:

Britain prides itself on being an historic home of freedom and the free press. So how come we are languishing in 40th place in the international press-freedom table?

Imagine the crowds singing an updated version of Rule Britannia at the Last Night of the Proms, about how Britain ‘shall flourish great and free / The dread and envy of them all / Except for the 39 freer nations, obvs’.

According to the 2018 World Press Freedom Index, published on Wednesday by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the UK is now ‘one of the worst-ranked countries in Western Europe in terms of respect for press freedom’.

Its 40th place puts the UK one ahead of Burkina Faso and two clear of Taiwan, and suggests that journalists working in Britain have less freedom to hold the powerful to account than those in such liberal states as South Africa, Chile or Lithuania.

British observers are far more likely to bemoan how far we have fallen down the world rankings in football, another field we claim to have invented. Unlike the glorious irrelevance of football, however, freedom of the press really is a matter of life and death for a democratic society.

The UK’s 40th place is unchanged from 2017. But that is 18 lower than its ranking in the first Index, published in 2002 – and 12 places down on six years ago, before the publication of the Leveson report.

That should give a clue as to the new threats press freedom faces in the UK. Unlike in some other illiberal parts of the world, we are not confronted by old-fashioned government repression and state control of the press. Instead, and especially since the Leveson Inquiry, press freedom in the UK has been threatened by a more underhand assault from allegedly liberal political and cultural elites – backed, to their shame, by the Labour Party leadership and the Corbynite left.

April 25, 2018

Tank vs. Tank: Villers-Bretonneux, April 1918 | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Technology, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Tank Museum
Published on 20 Apr 2018

100 years ago, during the First World War, tank fought tank for the first time in history, at Villers-Bretonneux on 24 April 1918.

It was an engagement that foreshadowed one hundred years of tanks fighting tanks on the battlefield, stories told by The Tank Museum.

Please give generously to help fight Cleese’s Disease

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

James Delingpole is doing everything he can to fight this awful ailment:

Today I am launching an appeal on behalf of a former British comedian called Robert Webb.

Unless you live in the UK you probably won’t have heard of him. But in his day he was very funny – first as part of the double act Mitchell and Webb, later in the even funnier series Peep Show (which really was much better than the travesty of a U.S. remake, honest).

Anyway, sadly, those days of being funny are long behind him. Poor Webb has fallen victim to a disease which has ravaged the global comedic community so cruelly and on such a scale that it could probably provide Tony Kushner with enough material to write another Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

This disease comes in several ugly mutations.

There’s the basic form – Cleese’s Disease – where you started out funny but you haven’t been for years because you now take yourself far too seriously.

There’s Schumer-Degeneres Syndrome, where you probably weren’t that funny to start with but you’re definitely even less funny now that you’ve become obsessed with hating your own white privilege.

There’s Linehan Complex, where your youthful frivolity has mutated into hideous arrogance and bitterness and extreme self-righteousness which leads you to lash out viciously on social media at anyone who doesn’t share your impeccably woke SJW politics.

Robert Webb, poor chap, has managed to contract all three variants of the disease at once.

April 24, 2018

The Windrush scandal in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill discusses the bureaucratic idiocy that lead to thousands of people who’d been living and working in Britain are threatened with loss of jobs, loss of healthcare rights, and even deportation:

The Windrush scandal and its fallout might have exposed the incompetence of Theresa May and her political set. But it has done something far worse to Remainers. It has laid to waste their entire worldview. It has shattered their defining myth: that where they brave few are nice and pro-immigrant, the rest of the country, especially those little-educated inhabitants of ‘Brexitland’, are a seething pit of 1930s-style racism. In the palpable public discomfort with how the Windrush migrants have been treated, we see yet again what a libel this Remainer depiction of Brexit Britain has been.

For nearly two years, the liberal intelligentsia has talked about vast swathes of the electorate as a hateful throng whose prime motor is disgust with foreigners. These people yearn for a time when ‘faces were white’, says Vince Cable. The vote for Brexit was a ‘whitelash’, said Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, which was quite the slur against the one in three ethnic-minority voters who chose Brexit. These mad voters just want ‘less foreign-looking people on their streets’, said Diane Abbott. The police churned out ridiculous hate-crime stats, using entirely subjective criteria to declare there had been an outpouring of violent hate after the referendum, and columnists lapped it up. Brexit Britain was divided between an enlightened elite that doesn’t care about skin colour or national origins and the fever-minded masses who apparently think about little else.

It was a lie, of course, as many of us argued, and as many more should now see in the wake of the Windrush scandal. With every revelation of the Home Office’s mistreatment of Caribbean migrants, public displeasure grows. People can see the grave injustice of treating as criminals people who have been here since the 1940s and 50s and who were given leave to remain by an act of law in 1971. The way these Britons have been thrown out of their jobs or deprived of NHS care or in some cases deported — because rules introduced when Theresa May was home secretary stipulate that all migrants must now have official documentation — has grated with the populace. This was reflected in a poll published by iMix and the Runnymede Trust last week, which found that 60 per cent of Britons, rising to 71 per cent for over-65s, are opposed to what the government has done to the Windrush people. Those same over-65s who for the past two years have been talked about as racist scum by the Remainer chattering classes.

The Remainer elites’ religious conviction that huge parts of Britain are little more than racist-mobs-in-waiting is falling apart, fast. Even before the public concern with the mistreatment of the Windrush generations, there was the survey carried out by Open Europe at the end of last year which challenged the idea that the vote for Brexit was a ‘mandate to pull up the drawbridge’. On the contrary, many Britons still see the value in migration — they simply want some say over it, they want it to be a democratic concern. Open Europe found ‘little evidence’ that this ‘desire to control immigration’ was driven by ‘racism or xenophobia’. Even the EU now accepts Britons are not horrible racists. Its attitudes survey found the proportion of Brits who are ‘very positive’ or ‘fairly positive’ about migrants rose from 43 per cent to 63 per cent over the past four years, which includes the post-Brexit period when we were supposedly taking to the streets to bash a foreigner.

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