Quotulatiousness

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.

Sweden’s free speech problem

Filed under: Europe, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Hugo Brundin explains why the social unrest Sweden is experiencing over immigration issues today is made much worse by restrictions on free speech:

Few in Sweden have escaped the circus of its migration politics. During the migration crisis of 2015, we had the somewhat dubious claim to fame of receiving record-breaking numbers of asylum-seekers. A year later, in Spring 2016, the ruling Social Democrats closed the borders. For a while, calling attention to problems in Sweden’s immigrant-dominated suburbs would have you branded an alarmist or a racist. Then in January 2018, the Swedish PM Stefan Löfven said he would consider using the military to curb gang violence in those same suburbs (a comment he later retracted). More recently, the Social Democrats have proposed a ban on all religious schools, clearly aimed at those of the Muslim faith. No party in the Swedish parliament supported such a ban a couple of years ago.

Those concerned with immigration have held Sweden up as a warning of the consequences of open-door migration. But the deeper problem in Sweden is one of public discourse, debate and freedom of speech. You see, Sweden has a consensus culture. The Overton Window is so notoriously narrow that it has been termed the ‘opinion corridor’. And when you’re hurtling down the corridor, unable to see what is around the next corner, much less the one after that, you never know where its twists and turns will take you. Opinions that would have had you vilified a few years ago are now part of the political mainstream, and frankly this can feel downright creepy. Sweden should not be a warning of how not to handle migration – it should be a warning of how not to handle public discussion.

Proposals such as the one to ban religious schools, a deeply intolerant and authoritarian idea, are exactly the sort of thing you get when public opinion changes on a dime, when conflicts have not been properly hashed out in public debate. It used to be said that open-door migration would save the economy and welfare state (rather than put strain on them) and that talk of cultural differences between the Middle East and Sweden was just racist myth-making. Yet now, Islamism is the issue du jour, and the political class is desperate to signal that it is doing something about it, with little thought paid to civil liberties.

“Brilliant” plans to win WWII: How France planned to win the war?

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

Eastory
Published on 12 May 2017

In these series we will examine several “brilliant” plans to win World War II and see why they failed. This video shows how France planned to win the upcoming confrontation with Germany and how it all went wrong.

April 23, 2018

Yggdrasil – Nine Worlds of the Norse – Extra Mythology

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

Extra Credits
Published on 20 Apr 2018

Sponsored by God of War! http://bit.ly/2FBqVPH

Everything, from the giants’ home of Jotunheim, to the primeval Vanaheim, to the mortal realm of Midgard, is connected by the tree named Yggdrasil, life to all nine worlds of Norse peoples.

Finland’s basic income plan coming to an end

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

Karin Olli-Nilsson on the Finnish government’s decision to move away from further basic income experimentation:

Since the beginning of last year, 2000 Finns are getting money from the government each month – and they are not expected to do anything in return. The participants, aged 25–58, are all unemployed, and were selected at random by Kela, Finland’s social-security institution.

Instead of unemployment benefits, the participants now receive €560, or $690, per month, tax free. Should they find a job during the two-year trial, they still get to keep the money.

While the project is praised internationally for being at the cutting edge of social welfare, back in Finland, decision makers are quietly pulling the brakes, making a U-turn that is taking the project in a whole new direction.

”Right now, the government is making changes that are taking the system further away from a basic income,” Kela researcher Miska Simanainen told the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet.

The initial plan was for the experiment to be expanded in early 2018 to include workers as well as non-workers early in 2018, but that did not happen – to the disappointment of researchers at Kela. Without workers in the project, researchers are unable to study whether basic income would allow people to make new career moves, or enter training or education.

[…]

No official results of Finland’s basic income experiment will be published until 2019, after the pilot has come to an end.

Tank Chats #28 Char B-1 Bis | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published on 3 Nov 2016

A French heavy tank from 1940.

In its day the Char B was regarded as one of the most powerful tanks in the world, yet still had many features which harked back to the First World War. The Char B was issued to tank battalions in armoured divisions and saw extensive combat in the summer of 1940.

Of the 365 Char B-1 bis built, large numbers were captured intact by the Germans in France in 1940. Those tanks that survived were later incorporated into the German Army and modified in various ways.

http://www.tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1951-40

April 22, 2018

Hunting – Dreyfuss Affair – Equipment Modifications I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

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

The Great War
Published on 21 Apr 2018

Chair of Wisdom Time!

April 21, 2018

History Buffs: Rome Season One

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

History Buffs
Published on 18 Aug 2017

Rome is a British-American-Italian historical drama television series created by John Milius, William J. MacDonald, and Bruno Heller. The show’s two seasons were broadcast on HBO, BBC Two, and RaiDue between 2005 and 2007. They were later released on DVD and Blu-ray. Rome is set in the 1st century BC, during Ancient Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire.

The series features a sprawling cast of characters, many of whom are based on real figures from historical records, but the lead protagonists are ultimately two soldiers named Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, who find their lives intertwined with key historical events. Rome was a ratings success for HBO and the BBC. The series received much media attention from the start, and was honored with numerous awards and nominations in its two-series run. The series was filmed in various locations, but most notably in the Cinecittà studios in Italy.

April 20, 2018

Knocking Out The Hejaz Railway I THE GREAT WAR Week 195

Filed under: Germany, History, Middle East, Military, Railways, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 19 Apr 2018

While the Germans are still advancing in Flanders (Operation Georgette), the other fronts are not always quiet. In Palestine, the British forces and the Arab Revolt are taking the initiative again. T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and the Arab Revolt are attacking the vital Hejaz Railway, a major transport factor for the Ottoman Empire.

Great Blunders of WWII: The Pilot Who Bombed London 3

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

Anthony Coleman
Published on 4 Nov 2016

From the History Channel DVD series Great Blunders of WWII

April 19, 2018

“Blitzkrieg” – What most people get Wrong – Myth vs “Reality”

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

Military History Visualized
Published on 18 Aug 2017

“Blitzkrieg” is probably the most wrongly used word when it comes to Military History. Its buzzword effect is widely known. The question is what was “Blitzkrieg” actually and is it used “correctly” at all? Additionally, the question if “Blitzkrieg” was something unique to the Wehrmacht will be answered?

Military History Visualized provides a series of short narrative and visual presentations like documentaries based on academic literature or sometimes primary sources. Videos are intended as introduction to military history, but also contain a lot of details for history buffs. Since the aim is to keep the episodes short and comprehensive some details are often cut.

» SOURCES «

Citino, Robert M.: The German Way of War

Hughes, Daniel J.: “Blitzkrieg”, in: Brassey’s Encyclopedia of Land Forces and Warfare, p. 155-162

Ong, Weichong: “Blitzkrieg: Revolution or Evolution?”, in: RUSI December 2017 – Vol. 152 No. 6, p. 82-87

Harris, J.P.: “The Myth of Blitzkrieg”, in War in History 1995 2 (3), p. 335-352

Frieser, Karl-Heinz: The Blitzkrieg Legend

Frieser, Karl-Heinz: “The war in the West, 1939-1940: an unplanned Blitzkrieg”. In: Cambridge History of the Second World War, Volume I: p. 287-314

QotD: The Epicurean view of the soul

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

The purpose of the 37 volumes of his On Nature is to free us from the fear of death and therefore from the control of priests and from the internal fears of the religion that Plato and his followers had in mind. Epicurus says:

    …[W]e must recognise generally that the soul is a corporeal thing, composed of fine particles, dispersed all over the frame….

    …[T]he rest of the frame, whether the whole of it survives or only a part, no longer has sensation, when once those atoms have departed…. Moreover, once the whole frame is broken up, the soul is scattered and has no longer the same powers as before, nor the same notions; hence it does not possess sentience either.

The atoms that comprise the soul are immortal. They are passed on from being to being like the torch in one of the Athenian races. But the larger structure of atoms that is the soul of any one individual is itself mortal. Once we are dead, our atoms are recycled. Since there is nothing but atoms moving in the void, we as individuals are annihilated. After death, there is nothing; and because of that, death is nothing. Epicurus says:

    Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensations is nothing to us.

After two thousand years of Christian spiritual hegemony, this may seem to many of us a gloomy doctrine. For Epicurus and his followers, however, it was a removal of the greatest barrier to happiness as they conceived it. That barrier was fear of endless punishment for the alleged sin of seeking their own happiness in life.

It may be, Lucretius says, that beating down religion is impious and the entry to a life of crime. Much rather, it is religion which has brought forth criminal and impious deeds. He lived before the most notable acts of religious mania. But he was poet enough to know the psychology of enthusiasm. In Book One of his poem, he produces one of the most striking of all denunciations of religion. He describes how, at the beginning of the Trojan War, the priests tell Agamemnon that a good passage across the Aegean required the sacrifice of his daughter. So a young girl was dragged to the altar for her throat to be cut by her own father.

    Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum he concludes — “Such are the evils to which religion leads”

He says later, in Book Three:

    Some wear out their lives for the sake of a statue or a name. Religion and its resulting fear of death can induce one man to violate honour, another to break the bonds of friendship, and to overthrow all natural feeling. It has induced men to betray their country or their parents for the sake of avoiding hellfire. For just as children tremble and fear all in the darkness, so we in the light of day often fear what is no more real. This terror must be dispersed, not by rays of sunshine nor by the bright shafts of daylight, but by the sight and understanding of nature.

It is Epicurus, he says, who brought us into this light of understanding. Do not fear the priests. Do not fear death. Pay no attention to dreams or omens. These latter have a natural explanation. The former have neither a divine nature nor a prophetic power, but they are the result of images that impact on us.

Follow the ethical teachings of Epicurus, and be happy.

None of this means, by the way, that Epicurus and his followers were atheists. They did accept the existence of gods, and were willing outwardly to conform to whatever cults were established. They only denied that the gods were immaterial, and that the gods had any interest in human affairs. Confronted with evidence for any supernatural event, they were content with insisting on a natural cause, whether or not they were able to think of one that convinced.

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

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