Quotulatiousness

July 7, 2024

More on the British general election results

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

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter has some further thoughts on the Sunak implosion on the 4th of July:

Sir Keir Starmer speaking to the media outside Number 10 Downing Street, 5 July, 2024.
Picture by Kirsty O’Connor/ No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.

The Conservative wipeout was disappointingly not the annihilation that early polls predicted. The Tories were successful in scaring a critical mass of boomers in a last minute get-out-the-vote effort. At the same time, I suspect that some incidents late in the election that were used to paint Reform as raving Nazis were successful in driving down the Reform vote. One such incident involved a marginal Reform candidate caught on microphone being extraordinarily vulgar, who later turned out to be an actor that specialized in playing precisely the sort of character he was portraying for the media, which is of course all rather suspicious.

As a result, Reform only got 4 seats. This was less than the 13 that were predicted by the BBC based on exit polling, which prediction was revised to the 4 that Reform in fact won partway through counting, as the models’ Bayesian priors were updated accordingly, no doubt. That said, among those 4 seats is Nigel Farage, who is now a sitting member of Parliament.

That Parliament is now, in all likelihood, in the hands of the weakest massive majority government in its history, and if that’s not true (British history in its entirety being rather extensive), certainly close to it.

Keir Starmer’s Labour has 412 seats of Parliament’s total 650, giving it an unassailable majority. This is not because of a sudden surge in their popularity: their share of the popular vote didn’t budge, from around a third of the population. Turnout was moreover unenthusiastic, about 59% of the population I think, which while not as wince-inducing as the nearly 50% participation that the BBC was claiming throughout most of the counting period, is still nothing to write home about. The total number of people who voted for Labour decreased by 600,000. Labour cannot claim any sort of popular mandate, and they know it.

Not that Labour — or any western political party elected under these circumstances — could be expected to take it into consideration. From their point of view, all that matters is the seats in the House of Commons, and they’ve got them in spades.

Reform and the Lib Dems were not the only beneficiaries of the Conservative collapse. This can be seen immediately in the crazy quilt of the electoral map, which despite Labour’s two-thirds majority, is planted with the flags of all sorts of weird political tribes.

My favourite part is Northern Ireland, where Sinn Fein held its 7 seats (making it the fifth-largest party after the SNP), and the rest of it is split up in an impenetrable jumble of splinter parties vaguely associated with different reasons for remaining part of the UK and/or the EU. Wales has been painted bright green by Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales, who doubled their presence in parliament to 4. This is the same number of seats as Reform got, despite Plaid Cymru having gotten just under 200,000 votes, as compared to Reform’s 4.1 million, yet another perversity of first-past-the-post.

To everyone’s disappointment, first-past-the-post did not deliver a seat into the hands of the Monster Raving Loony Party, who received only 5,814 votes, a dismal 0.02% of the total 28.4 million votes cast. I do not know what kind of person votes for the Monster Raving Loony Party, but I bet they are absolutely fascinating. They should consider moving to one of Britain’s remote underpopulated islands, the Orkneys perhaps, where they might just be able to take over a seat. Having a strong, concentrated regional presence seems to be the best way to get members into Parliament in a first-past-the-post system, and having a sitting member for the Monster Raving Loonies would be even funnier than having Nigel in there.

First-past-the-post gets a lot of hate, and I’ve been ripping on it here, but it actually seems well-suited to an island which is shared by a bunch of squabbling ancient tribes. While it tends to produce majorities quite easily due to the winner-take-all nature of the contest within each riding, this also allows areas with strong regional identities to assert a disproportionate presence in parliament, despite getting a measly percentage of the vote. Not that that especially matters, given the aforementioned tendency for the system to hand out crushing jackpot majorities to the dominant players, as it has indeed done once again.

With the sole exception of Reform, there has not been any wave of enthusiasm for any of the parties in parliament. Large numbers of voters simply stayed home, whether tuning it all out or punishing their home parties while failing to see anything they wanted to vote for. It is as though the tide has gone out, exposing the sand and rocks of the sea shore. Whether this is a regular tide, which will gently slosh back in again in time, or a tsunami, remains to be seen. Certainly it feels that the water has receded very far indeed, exposing more of the seafloor’s surface than one normally sees. Say, is that Doggerland over there?

Electrolux Charlton: Washing Machine Company Converts Bolt Action to Semiauto

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published Mar 25, 2024

The Charlton was a conversion of a bolt action Lee rifle into a light machine gun, designed by New Zealander Phillip Charlton. Some 1500 were made in New Zealand, but a bit later it appears that there was an effort to also produce the gun in Australia. The Electrolux company (the same one that makes washing machines and other home appliances today) made a few prototypes.

The Electrolux version is different from the original in a couple ways. While the basic conversion mechanism is the same, the Electrolux is more refined, with a shorter gas system and a fairly clean action cover over the working parts. It is also semiautomatic only, intended to be a shoulder-fired rifle where the original was made for the LMG role. Electrolux also used standard No1 MkIII rifles as its base, where the originals were made from a variety of mostly worn out Lee Metfords and Long Lees.

The Electrolux contract was cancelled in June 1944, and only a few prototypes were made. This example is in the British Royal Armouries collection, to whom I am grateful for the access and the trust to take it apart for you!

My video on the standard production Charlton:
https://forgottenweapons.vhx.tv/video…
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July 6, 2024

Canada, NATO’s most egregious freeloader

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Eugene Lang and Vincent Rigby explain why our NATO allies are less and less willing to listen to Canadian virtue-signalling and posturing when we continue to refuse to live up to our commitments on the Canadian Armed Forces and contributing our full share toward NATO operations:

Next week’s NATO Summit in Washington marks the 75th anniversary of the trans-Atlantic Alliance. Yet despite being one of the original 12 founding members, Canada’s credibility within the alliance will be at an all-time low.

There is no question Canada has a proud history with NATO. Canadian statesmen — including Lester B. Pearson, Louis St. Laurent, Hume Wrong and Escott Reid — were architects of the alliance in the late 1940s, and helped author Article Two of the North Atlantic Treaty calling for political and economic collaboration among member-states, the so-called “Canadian Article”.

Over the decades, the Canadian military has made significant contributions to NATO missions in western Europe, the Balkans and Afghanistan. But that was then and this is now, and two years ago, Michel Miraillet, France’s ambassador to Canada, put things bluntly: “You are riding a first-class carriage with a third-class ticket. If you want to remain in the first-class seat, you need to train and expand (the military) and to go somewhere.”

Sentiments like these have been fuelled by Canada’s stubborn refusal to meet NATO’s defence spending target of two per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) — a commitment Ottawa has signed onto twice in the past ten years but is far from achieving. Last year, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg expressed frustration over this recalcitrance: “Canada has not conveyed a precise date but I expect (it) to deliver on the pledge to invest two per cent of GDP on defence, because this is a promise we all made”.

Stoltenberg’s comments evidently had little impact in Ottawa. While Canada’s recent Defence Policy Update (DPU) placed greater emphasis on the Arctic (NATO’s northern flank) and promised new defence investments, its pledge to increase defence spending to 1.76 per cent of GDP by 2030 fell well short of the NATO target. Canada, currently spending 1.37 per cent of its GDP on defence, remains among only a handful of NATO members which have failed to reach the two per cent threshold and have no plan to do so.

The Defence Policy Update’s silence on this issue did not go unnoticed among allies. Criticism of Canada’s NATO posture reached new heights last month when 23 U.S. senators wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, stating “we are concerned and profoundly disappointed that Canada’s most recent projection indicated that it will not reach its two percent commitment this decade”. Canadians can be forgiven for failing to recall the last time nearly a quarter of the U.S. Senate wrote to the Canadian government on anything.

It’s well known that Justin Trudeau has no time for military issues, but it’s surprising that he hasn’t done a few things that wouldn’t increase the actual spending on the CAF, but would be “bookkeeping” changes that would shift some existing government spending into the military category, like militarizing the Canadian Coast Guard. (That is, moving the CCG from the Fisheries and Oceans portfolio into the National Defence portfolio, not actually putting armaments on CCG vessels. Something similar could be done with the RCMP, switching it from Public Safety to National Defence with no other funding or operational changes.) That Trudeau hasn’t chosen to make even these symbolic changes shows that he actively opposes fulfilling the commitment his government has made twice in the last ten years for reasons of his own.

Labour’s “landslide”

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

I put the scare quotes around the word “landslide” because Labour’s eye-popping total of seats in Parliament was won on a remarkably narrow share of the actual votes cast in the British general election on Thursday (less than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party won in 2019). Fratricide on the right allowed a lot of Labour candidates to squeak in the win as the combined Tory/Reform votes would have been more than enough to top Labour.

Labour has won a landslide and the largest swing in British history without even increasing its vote share in England, and winning perhaps only 35% nationally. Its only significant gains in proportional terms were in Scotland, largely at the expense of the SNP, who have suffered catastrophic losses, meaning they are only 1 seat ahead of Sinn Fein, now the largest party in Northern Ireland — who are in turn 3 seats ahead of Reform, the third largest party in Britain by vote.

But these Reform MPs are — as I write — outnumbered by the five pro-Gaza independents, who won seats in Yorkshire, Lancashire, the Midlands and London in reaction to Keir Starmer’s position on Israel. Labour are down an average of 18 points in seats where the Muslim population is 20%, and in seats where that figure is above 25%, they are down 23 percentage points. While Labour lost a huge share of the Muslim vote, what is more worrying is the atmosphere in which this has taken place.

In Birmingham Yardley Jess Phillips held on by 700 votes, and in a remarkably unpleasant – I might even say upsetting, although I’ve only had three hours’ sleep — count she lamented that “This election has been the worst election I have ever stood in”, as she was booed.

“I understand that a strong woman standing up to you is met with such reticence”, she told her antagonists, and described how opponents had filmed a Labour activist in the streets and slashed her tyres, while another was screamed at by a man. She told how Jo Cox’s family had wanted to come and campaign but she couldn’t let them endure it. “Can you throw them out?” she asked the authorities of her hecklers.

There were similar scenes in Birmingham Ladywood as Shabana Mahmood was heckled as she gave her speech, the returning officer pleading with the supporters of independent Ahkmed Yakoob to stop.

Yakoob was described by the Sunday Times‘s Will Lloyd as “the one man in Britain who embodies the way our politics have changed”. He described “a 36-year-old defence solicitor who wears black Prada trainers, a glittering diamond watch, tinted gold-framed sunglasses and Gareth Southgate-like waistcoats. He has 195,000 followers on TikTok, a platform he understands more intuitively than 99 per cent of the politicians in this country. He speaks in clipped, brutal epigrams that sound like they are only ever a few” and “The word ‘genocide’ is never far from his mouth with ‘For Gaza’ printed on his leaflets.”

Labour hung on in Ladywood, a historic constituency in England’s second city where in 1924 Neville Chamberlain very narrowly beat a rising star of the Labour Party called Oswald Mosley.

Gaza independents also narrowly lost Birmingham Hodge Hill by just 1000 votes, and Ilford North, the constituency of Wes Streeting by just 528 votes.

While the media focus was largely engaged in catching out the musing of some of Reform’s less intellectually capable candidates, this other populist revolt has been carried out in an atmosphere of anger and intimidation perhaps not seen in English elections since the days of Rotten Boroughs.

There was police intervention in Oldham last month, Naz Shah MP was abused as a “dirty, dirty Zionist … paid by Friends of Israel”.

Fellow Canadian observer Damian Penny refuses to apologize for his headline “The Sunak Sets over the British Empire” (and I don’t blame him in the slightest):

Canadian readers, stop me if you’ve heard this before: an historically unpopular center-right Tory government heads into an election under a hapless leader running a catastrophically poor campaign and finds that even its traditional support is being badly eroded by an upstart right-wing populist party called Reform.

What happened in Britain on July 4 (weirdly symbolic, that) is not exactly what we experienced in Canada in 1993 – the Tories suffered the worst election result in their history, but they’re left with 119 more seats than the venerable Progressive Conservative party under Twitter-troll-in-waiting Kim Campbell, and at least the outgoing PM managed to hold on to his own seat — but it’s kind of nice to see the Mother Country adopting our traditions for once.

Honestly, 121 seats for Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party is much better than I’d expected at the start of this campaign. And had it not been for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, they might have managed a much less embarrassing defeat, because this kind of thing happened many times over last night:

Not everyone who voted Reform defected from the Conservatives – had Farage’s protest party not been on the ballot, many of its supporters would have stayed home or cast their votes for fringe parties and independent candidates — but it might have made the difference between a bad night for the Tories and the worst election in the Tories’ history.

Reform won four seats outright – less than a hyperbolic exit poll predicted, but four more than most observers expected at the start of the campaign. They can’t really affect much at the national level, especially with Keir Starmer’s Labour Party holding an absolutely massive majority of seats in Parliament, but they will make things very difficult for the Conservatives.

Helen Dale summarized the British general election result in a modified Gary Larson image:

Andrew Doyle points at the disproportional share of the vote won by Nigel Farage’s new Reform UK party compared to the tiny number of seats as a condemnation of the first-past-the-post system (also used here in Canada):

Keir Starmer surely cannot believe his luck. He has achieved a landslide victory by doing very little. He received fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, and yet has ended up with a whopping 412 seats in parliament. The rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has split the right-wing vote and ushered the Conservatives along to their worst ever election result, plunging them to even greater depths than the disastrous election of 1906 under Arthur Balfour.

This was very much a Conservative loss rather than a Labour victory. There is no great enthusiasm for Starmer, and his majority is an indictment of the “First Past The Post” system which, as I have argued previously, should be abandoned in favour of Proportional Representation. It is unsurprising that upon his victory in Clacton-on-Sea, one of Farage’s first public statements has been a commitment to campaign for electoral reform. His party received over 4 million votes and has returned only 5 seats. So that’s 1% of the seats for 14% of the votes. Compare that with the Liberal Democrats, who have 11% of the seats for only 12% of the votes. Most of us will see that there is a problem here, irrespective of our political affiliations.

Worse still, Labour’s victory will empower the culture warriors, those identity-obsessed activists who have accrued so much power already in our major institutions. While the Tory party claimed to be fighting a “war on woke”, all the while enabling the ideology of Critical Social Justice to flourish, leading Labour politicians have cheered on the culture warriors while pretending that they were nothing more than a right-wing fantasy. We have seen some pushback over the past two years in regards to the worst excesses of this movement, but all of this may soon be undone. Now that the identitarians have their political wing in power, we should expect a few years of regression.

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill thinks the real lesson to be learned from this election is that populism is here to stay:

To see the true quake, you need to look beyond Labour’s mirage-like landslide. As is now becoming clear, Labour has not been swept to power on anything like a wave of public enthusiasm. On the contrary, it won its 412 seats on the second lowest electoral turnout since 1885, and more as a result of people’s exhaustion with the Tories than their love for Sir Keir. No, it is those who refused to vote Labour who have brilliantly unsettled British politics. It is those who took a punt on Nigel Farage’s Reform party who have planted a bomb in the political landscape that will not be easily defused.

For me, the most fascinating stat of the election is the share of the vote received by Labour and the Tories. Labour won around 34 per cent of vote, the Tories around 24 per cent. Let’s leave to one side what a lame landslide it is if only 34 per cent of the people who could be bothered to vote put an X in your box. More striking is the fact that the combined vote share of Labour and the Tories, the parties that have dominated British politics for a century, was 58 per cent. That is staggeringly – and, if you will allow me, hilariously – low.

To put it in historical context: at the last General Election, in 2019, their combined vote share was 75.8 per cent. In 2017 it was even higher: 82.4 per cent. In the elections of the 2000s it hovered around 70 per cent. Why has it now dropped to less than 60 per cent, giving rise to the possibility that in the next few years the two parties that have run this country for decades might see their combined vote drop to less than half of all votes cast? Largely, because of Reform. And a few independents, too. Reform’s vote share is around 14 per cent, enough to shatter the Labour / Tory duopoly and to unravel the two big parties’ arrogant belief that they and they alone have a right to rule.

The speedy turnaround of the Reform revolt was extraordinary. It was only a few weeks ago that Farage ditched his plans to go to America to assist the Trump campaign and instead decided to become leader of Reform. He has now been elected MP for Clacton. Reform has won four seats in total. What’s shocking is that the Liberal Democrats won 71 seats despite getting fewer votes than Reform. The Lib Dems got around 12 per cent of the vote, to Reform’s 14 per cent. That the democratically less popular party of the two will wield far greater power in the Commons is a testament to how busted our first-past-the-post electoral system is. This is unsustainable. It is outright undemocratic.

And yet, even without the parliamentary representation their vote share deserves, Reform has struck a blow for democracy. Their voters, in thinking for themselves and rejecting both the Labour and Tory variety of technocracy, have forcefully created a new opening in political life. They have burst a few of the buckles on the political straitjacket that is our two-party system. The last time this happened was with Farage’s UK Independence Party, in the 2015 General Election, when it won 12.6 per cent of the vote, reducing the Tory / Labour vote share to 67.3 per cent. But where UKIP was mostly a one-issue party, dedicated to getting Britain out of the EU, Reform has broader policy goals. The millions of working-class people who voted for it are saying something very clear indeed: “We want something different”.

“Western media resembles … the consumer landscape of the Soviet bloc. We find the same product on offer everywhere in all leading publications”

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

eugyppius invites us to contemplate the “awesome, terrifying power of the press”, and not for its useful role in keeping us proles informed about the goings-on of our governments and the doings of the great and the good, but its utterly cynical co-ordinated manipulation of “the narrative”:

“Newseum newspaper headlines” by m01229 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Take a moment to contemplate the awesome and terrifying power of the press.

Since 2020, the United States have had a geriatric president who suffers from serious mental deficits. The media discounted this awkward state of affairs as a conspiracy theory or as Trumpist propaganda for years, substantially blunting the political impact of Biden’s dementia. Then, after the president’s terrible debate performance on 27 June, the press made Biden’s incapacity the centre of their coverage, finally welcoming this fact into official regime-sanctioned reality and bringing Biden’s candidacy into crisis. All of this happened within just hours. As I write this, Biden has no more than even odds of securing his party’s nomination, and the press are working overtime to rehabilitate Kamala Harris. Journalists who spent years quietly mocking the vice president for her abrasive personality and her bizarre speaking gaffes are now making the latter a cornerstone of her candidacy. Are you coconutpilled, dear reader?

The Biden Affair is nothing new. So overwhelming is the influence of the press over our politics, that many have described liberal democracies as media-steered regimes, wherein politicians adopt positions and enact policies calculated above all to secure favourable coverage from journalists.

As I mentioned the other day, a healthy media would provide a range of opinions wider than our current spectrum of centre-left/left/hard-left/totally woke. That they do not, despite that spectrum not covering the majority of beliefs among the general public, shows just how monolithic and partisan the surviving mainstream media outlets have become.

Imagine, for a moment, that you wanted to found your own periodical. Maybe you hope to run a weekly magazine or a daily newspaper, maybe you have ambitions of amassing an enormous audience of millions, or maybe you’re content to collect primarily regional readers. Whatever the details, you want to cover national politics in some way. The most rational approach – before you even rent office space or begin to hire staff – would be to study what existing publications are saying and what they’re reporting on, and plan to offer something different. Unless you provide content that your readers can’t get anywhere else, after all, you’ll have trouble convincing anyone to read you.

You’d think, therefore, that the media landscape would be a richly differentiated thing – especially when it comes to big, national stories. Variation like this is present everywhere else in the consumer economy. There are a near-infinite variety of headphones, energy drinks, shoes and coffee makers. Newspapers should be just as varied in their coverage, focus and analysis as all of these other things.

But of course, it is the opposite. Western media resembles much more the consumer landscape of the Soviet bloc. We find the same product on offer everywhere in all leading publications. As in the communist East, variety is confined to a kind of black market – that is to say an array of blogs, social media accounts and alternative (mostly online) publications that you’re not supposed to read and that the official discourse wholly ignores. This anomaly is easy enough to see if you spend multiple hours every day reading news stories. The average consumer of political reporting, however, has a much more casual and sporadic relationship to press discourse, and he’s apt to think that the convergence is entirely natural. The New York Times, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Le Monde report the very same things in the very same way at the very same time, often under extremely similar headlines, because they’re just reporting on the way the world is.

In hard authoritarian regimes, like National Socialist Germany, regime propaganda was an open, blunt instrument. Everybody who read the Völkischer Beobachter knew very well that the paper propagated the official Nazi Party line. The soft authoritarianism of the liberal West, in contrast, manages the information and opinions available to the public in a much more effective manner, namely by pretending not to. Millions of people open their newspapers every day in the belief that they contain accurate accounts of the goings-on in the world, and they form their beliefs and political preferences within this highly convincing illusion.

The distributed propaganda network maintained by our establishment press is very expensive. Especially the opportunity costs are very high. In a healthy, uncoordinated media environment, it would be impossible for somebody like me to make a living blogging about the insanity of German politics. I’d have very stiff competition from a multitude of professional, well-funded journalists who would be fighting at every moment to take my readers away from me by writing the kinds of things I do, only more effectively, more frequently and with fewer typographical errors. Of course I am a very small player in the broader ecosystem of alternative media; the audience for this content is hundreds of millions strong. It consists of all those people who have been written off by the establishment press, as the necessary price of exercising narrative control.

Among the forces that conspire to keep legacy media on-message is their aforementioned collaboration with the political establishment. This collaboration includes a tacit understanding that leading politicians and bureaucrats will only provide interviews and information to regime-adjacent journalists, granting them an effective monopoly on political news.

Why Germany Lost the Battle of Verdun

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Great War
Published Mar 8, 2024

The Battle of Verdun represents the worst of trench warfare and the suffering of the soldiers in the minds of millions – and for many, the cruel futility of the First World War. But why did Germany decide to attack Verdun in the first place and why didn’t they stop after their initial attack failed?
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QotD: The Roman Republic at war … many wars … many simultaneous wars

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

With the end of the Third Samnite War in 290 and the Pyrrhic War in 275, Rome’s dominance of Italy and the alliance system it constructed was effectively complete. This was terribly important because the century that would follow, stretching from the start of the First Punic War in 264 to the end of the Third Macedonian War in 168 (one could argue perhaps even to the fall of Numantia in 133) put the Roman military system and the alliance that underpinned it to a long series of sore tests. This isn’t the place for a detailed recounting of the wars of this period, but in brief, Rome would fight major wars with three of the four other Mediterranean great powers: Carthage (264-241, 218-201, 149-146), Antigonid Macedon (214-205, 200-196, 172-168, 150-148) and the Seleucid Empire (192-188), while at the same time engaged in a long series of often quite serious wars against non-state peoples in Cisalpine Gaul (modern north Italy) and Spain, among others. It was a century of iron and blood that tested the Roman system to the breaking point.

It certainly cannot be said of this period that the Romans always won the battles (though they won more than their fair share, they also lost some very major ones quite badly) or that they always had the best generals (though, again, they tended to fare better than average in this department). Things did not always go their way; whole armies were lost in disastrous battles, whole fleets dashed apart in storms. Rome came very close at points to defeat; in 242, the Roman treasury was bankrupt and their last fleet financed privately for lack of funds (Plb. 1.59.6-7). During the Second Punic War, at one point the Roman censors checked the census records of every Roman citizen liable for conscription and found only 2,000 men of prime military age (out of perhaps 200,000 or so; Taylor (2020), 27-41 has a discussion of the various reconstructions of Roman census figures here) who hadn’t served in just the previous four years (Liv. 24.18.8-9). In essence the Romans had drafted everyone who could be drafted (and the 2,000 remainders were stripped of citizenship on the almost certainly correct assumption that the only way to not have been drafted in those four years but also not have a recorded exemption was intentional draft-dodging).

And the military demands made on Roman armies and resources were exceptional. Roman forces operated as far east as Anatolia and as far west as Spain at the same time. Livy, who records the disposition of Roman forces on a year-for-year basis during much of this period (we are uncommonly well informed about the back half of the period because those books of Livy mostly survive), presents some truly preposterous Roman dispositions. Brunt (Italian Manpower (1971), 422) figures that the Romans must have had something like 225,000 men under arms (Romans and socii) each year between 214 and 212, immediately following a series of three crushing defeats in which the Romans probably lost close to 80,000 men. I want to put that figure in perspective for a moment: Alexander the Great invaded the entire Persian Empire with an army of 43,000 infantry and 5,500 cavalry. The Romans, having lost close to Alexander’s entire invasion force twice over, immediately raised more than four times as many men and kept fighting.

These armies were split between a bewildering array of fronts (e.g. Liv 24.10 or 25.3): multiple armies in southern Italy (against Hannibal and rebellious socii now supporting him), northern Italy (against the Cisalpine Gauls, who also backed Hannibal) and Sicily (where Syracuse threatened revolt) and Spain (a Carthaginian possession) and Illyria (fighting the Antigonids) and with fleets active in both the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Sea supporting those operations. And of course a force defending Rome itself because did I mention Hannibal was in Italy?

If you will pardon me embellishing a Babylon 5 quote, “Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts.” And apparently, only the Romans would then win that war anyway.

(I should note that, for those interested in reading up on this, the state-of-the-art account of Rome’s ability to marshal these truly incredible amounts of resources and especially men is the aforementioned, M. Taylor, Soldiers & Silver (2020), which presents the consensus position of scholars better than anything else out there. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that my own book project takes aim at this consensus and hopes to overturn parts of it, but seeing as how my book isn’t done, for now Taylor holds the field (also it’s a good book which is why I recommended it)).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-25.

July 5, 2024

History Summarized: The Greek Age of Cities

Filed under: Government, Greece, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published Mar 15, 2024

Ancient Greece created a social ecosystem of numerous independent cities to cater to my tastes specifically.

SOURCES & Further Reading:
The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton, 2021
The Greeks: An Illustrated History by Diane Cline, 2016
Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece by Donald Kagan & Gregory F. Viggiano, 2013
“Revolution” & “Tyranny” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney
“Dark Age and Archaic Greece” from The Foundations of Western Civilization by Thomas F. X. Noble
“Dark Age and Archaic Greece” & “The Greek Way of Waging War” & “Greek Language, Literacy, and Writing” from The Greek World: A Study of History and Culture by Robert Garland
I also have a degree in Classical Studies
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July 4, 2024

“Over twenty years ago now, we declared war on terror; a generation later, we are ruled by terror”

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses the prevalence of fear in modern western culture:

Over twenty years ago now, we declared war on terror; a generation later, we are ruled by terror. The public discourse revolves around peoples’ fears, most of them imagined. Many spend their lives petrified at the prospect of normal social interaction. Women are scared that men will rape them, and men are scared that women will rape them in the courts. Both leftists and rightists are terrified that the other, if given free rein, will drag the world into a dark age, though only one of them is right. All of our great public efforts are either to mitigate this future catastrophe or that dire present threat, or they are about furiously not acknowledging some insoluble and therefore inevitable future disaster, while studiously ignoring some entirely soluble ongoing emergency which those who could solve delude themselves they can profit from.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the war on terror ended up making us chronically terrified. That’s the track record for these things. Even back in the 1990s we knew that. The war on poverty generated an obscenely inflated welfare underclass while systematically slowing economic growth, thereby generating poverty twice over. The war on drugs led to a society of drug addicts, in which every fifth person is on at least one kind of pill, and most of the rest are self-medicating in other ways. Instead of weed (legal now, in any case), we have fentanyl and meth. Victory!

When Washington declares war on something, it invariably produces more of it. This seems perverse until you realize that wars on abstractions are simply how managerial bureaucracies extend their bases of power. A war that can never be won is a war with job security. A war that gets worse the longer and harder you fight it is even better, because this generates growth.

Washington’s current wars seem to be on racism, baseline human sexual normalcy, men, and multipolarity; the latter is really just a fancy word for the growing tendency for other countries to not do what Washington tells them to because, in general, they prefer being racist to being erased, they think the butt stuff is weird, they don’t want to be castrated, and since they are not castrated, they are still capable of not liking to be told what to do. Sure enough, all of these wars, whether cultural or geopolitical, are steadily generating the very things that they’re trying to stamp out. Racism stocks have reached prices they haven’t seen in generations, thanks to sustained decade of all-out full sector push by the media, corporate, educational, and public sectors, all doing their part to push that line up, up, up. Meanwhile, the war on multipolarity seems in general to be doing a fantastic job of generating more multipolarity.

The longer Washington wages its cowardly war against Russia, China, Iran, and I guess now North Korea, the more Washington’s standing in the world is reduced. I say “cowardly” of course because the war is not waged openly: formally, no war has been declared by Washington or any of its core NATO allies against any of the obvious belligerents. It’s all done through proxies which Washington pays to train and arm and die on its behalf, funding it all with a money printer whose brrrring has gotten defeaning. Or it’s done through sabotage; let’s not forget Nordstream, which kicked the legs out from under Germany’s, and therefore Europe’s economy, in perhaps the most breathtakingly cynical act of strategic sabotage against a supposed ally that one might imagine. Washington doomed Europe in order to ensure that Europe would stay attached to Washington. The whole world sees what Washington is doing of course, and is frightened lest it happen to them, but also disgusted that it happens at all; the latter emotion is becoming increasingly dominant, however, because Washington is becoming less frightening every day.

Washington could not even coordinate an orderly retreat from Afghanistan; its wunderwaffen have made little impact on the Ukrainian battlefront; even combined with its vassals, it cannot match levels of armament production that come effortlessly to its adversaries; its pier in Gaza fell apart uselessly; its mighty navy has so far been utterly powerless to stop a blockade imposed by some obscure tribe of desert Arabs. Then there’s the big fail, Washington’s attempt to nuke the Russian economy by locking it out of the SWIFT system. The Russian economy is doing fine, in fact better than fine, but SWIFT on the other hand is swiftly becoming irrelevant. The dollar’s global reserve status is on borrowed time, and everyone knows it.

I don’t think anyone’s more terrified right now than Western elites. They know they’ve fumbled the ball, that they’ve lost their footing, and they’re flailing around weightlessly as they try to catch it without faceplanting. None of their plans are really working. None of their usual levers of control are as effective as they used to be; some, such as the media, have almost stopped responding altogether. Their people are turning against them for a dozen different reasons, all of them excellent. Their great economic machine is sluggish, its components grinding together and seizing up. Their enemies abroad are on the march, or mobilizing. It’s all coming for them at once, and they don’t appear to have any idea what to do. You’re seeing that deer in the headlights look a lot now from prime ministers and presidents, and it isn’t always because of dementia. They’re in over their heads. Children, playing a game that became all too real when they weren’t paying attention.

How the First Tanks CONQUERED the Trenches

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published Mar 16, 2024

This is the story of the evolution of the tank during World War One. Notorious for its appalling human cost, the First World War was fought using the latest technology – and the tank was invented to overcome the brutally unique conditions of this conflict.

Arriving at the mid-point of the war, they would be built and used by the British Commonwealth, French and German armies – with the US Army using both British and French designs.

00:00 | Intro
01:17 | The Beginnings of WWI
02:13 | The Solution to Trench Warfare
03:47 | Initial Ideas
05:42 | How to Cross a Trench
08:08 | How Effective was the Tank?
15:40 | Battlefield Upgrades
17:09 | New Designs
24:32 | Conclusion

This video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.

#tankmuseum #evolution #tank #tanks #ww1 #technology

July 3, 2024

Tanks! – Allied tanks of WW2 – Sabaton History 127

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

Sabaton History
Published Mar 14, 2024

Sabaton has written several songs about tanks — the boys are tank CRAZY! Songs like “Ghost Division” or “Panzerkampf” are about the German panzers and even the Soviet ones, but what about those of the Western Allies? Were they any good? And if so, how did they lose the Battle of France?
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July 2, 2024

Jonathan Kay on real Canadian history

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Education, France, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Canadians have never really been encouraged to learn much about our own history. When I was in school, the history content skewed as far away from anything that might be stirring or exciting as it possibly could (we skipped over all the wars, for example), so that they could emphasize the legislative assemblies, the treaties and conferences, and the mix-and-match bearded and mustachioed “great and the good” of the time. If nothing else, you could catch up on your sleep for an hour. (I exaggerate a bit, but history in the primary grades at least covered the initial discovery and exploration of what would become Canada by French and English fur traders, adventurers, and scoundrels (some were all three). We even got a relatively unbiased (for the time) introduction to some of the First Nations, mostly in Ontario and Quebec.) These days, of course, kids learn that Canada is a genocidal colonialist white supremacist horror show that has no right to exist … hardly the kind of improvement one would hope for.

In the National Post Jonathan Kay suggests the only way to really understand Canadian history is to utterly ignore the politicians (and the bureaucrats) and learn it for yourself:

These guys are important, no question, but you need to go back a long way before them to really understand Canadian history. The nation didn’t burst fully formed from Sir John A.’s forehead, Athena-style.
Libraries and Archives Canada item ID number 3013194.

The surest way to make me treasure something is to take it away. So it was with Canada Day, whose annual appearance I’d once greeted with scarcely more excitement than the Ontario Civic Holiday and Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. Then came 2021, when the high priests of social justice demanded that we cancel Canada’s birthday celebrations, so that we might spend July 1 in morbid contemplation of our original sin. Not being one for rituals of confession and penitence, I instead began to think harder about why I love this country, despite its flaws — even if expressing such sentiments in public was now viewed as hate speech.

“This country was built on genocide”, ran one major-newspaper headline, amid the national meltdown following reports that hundreds of unmarked children’s graves had been found at former residential schools. Calgary dropped its fireworks program on the basis that (among other reasons) such scenes of celebration might hamper “truth and reconciliation”. Justin Trudeau, who’d come into office urging Canadians to “celebrate this amazing place we call home”, now took Canada Day as an occasion to instruct us that “the horrific findings of the remains of hundreds of children at the sites of former residential schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan have rightfully pressed us to reflect on our country’s historical failures”.

The prime minister’s suggestion that children’s corpses were being plucked from the ground en masse turned out to be a reckless falsehood. Even the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc Nation, whose chief once claimed that “the remains of 215 children” had been found in Kamloops, now seems to be acknowledging that her original statements were wrong. While Canada has much to answer for when it comes to the legacy of residential schools, no graves or bodies were found at these locations in 2021. And none have been found since.

[…]

The unfortunate truth about Canada’s 19th-century origin story is that our country’s initial contours were sketched out by a group of middle-aged binge drinkers whose focus was less on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than on the mundane task of diffusing the high capital costs associated with rail construction and defending northern rivers and ports from rampaging Americans and Irishmen. (Yes, Irishmen: Visitors to Charlottetown’s Victoria Park will find a trio of ocean-facing nine-pounder guns that were installed in 1865 to guard against the Fenian Brotherhood, whose troops, many residents feared, were set to invade and conquer the island. But faith and begorrah, I do digress.) In this project, the Fathers of Confederation were successful. But the ensuing separation from Britain was a slow, bureaucratic affair that makes for dull reading (and duller television). I wish it were otherwise, fellow patriots. But alas, these are the facts.

Which is to say that if we’re looking to develop a compelling, historically accurate and, dare I say, inclusive, understanding of Canada’s national story, the story has to begin earlier. Specifically: the early 1600s — two and a half centuries before John A. Macdonald and his fellow Fathers of Confederation were knocking back the giggle juice in Charlottetown Harbour. As you might imagine, this means giving a starring role to Indigenous peoples — though not as the sacred martyrs and magical forest pixies of modern progressive imagination, but rather as the true-to-life diplomats, traders, craftsmen, hunters and soldiers that the first waves of Europeans knew them to be.

[…]

Toronto-born Greg Koabel spent most of his early academic career studying James I’s England (with a particular focus on the 1641 treason trial of the Earl of Strafford). And so, crucially, he approached the history of Canada laterally, through the prism of English and (primarily) French geopolitics. In telling the story of the first sustained European settlements in North America, he pays Indigenous populations the respect of examining them through this same geopolitical lens.

The resulting narrative, told in his brilliant Nations of Canada podcast, is so fascinating that you’ll have to keep reminding yourself he’s talking about Canada. This past week, Koabel hit a major milestone, releasing his 200th episode. And with his permission, I’ve been adapting his long-form audio chronology to written publication at Quillette. So far, we’ve published more than 100,000 words, and Samuel de Champlain hasn’t even left the stage yet.

I’m not much of a podcast listener, aside from The Rest is History and some Minnesota Vikings-specific sports podcasts, but the Quillette serializations of Koabel’s podcast episodes really are excellent and more than repay the effort to read them.

The virtue-signalling Olympics … aka “Glastonbury”

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

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill documents the awesomely awful human beings at the Glastonbury music festival this year (like most years):

“Sign of the times @ Glastonbury Festival” by timparkinson is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Virtue-signalling reached its nadir on Friday night. It was at the Glastonbury music festival. Of course it was. A swaying crowd of the time-rich, turbo-smug thirtysomethings who make up Glasto’s clientele passed around an inflatable dinghy filled with dummies designed to look like migrants crossing the English Channel. As some band you’ve never heard of sang a song about “beautiful immigrants”, the audience hoisted the blow-up boat above their heads and basically crowd-surfed it. What a gauche display of phoney virtue. What an orgy of hollow vanity. Surely it would have been cheaper to rustle up a banner saying, “Aren’t we fucking wonderful?”.

It will surprise not a living soul that the boat was the handiwork of Banksy, every posh twat’s favourite graffiti artist. Banksy has never once seen a moneyed, mostly white audience that he didn’t want to titillate with platitudes about Tory scum and cruel capitalism, so it was only natural he would gravitate towards Glastonbury. He knows it’s rammed with people called Archie and Poppy who lap up his unsubtle stencils about the rat race that is neoliberal society and how dreadfully frightful war can be. So who better to dragoon into his boat stunt than these folk who likewise love advertising to the world how much they care about migrants and stuff?

Let’s leave to one side how unbelievably crude it is for a rich graffitist and Brits who can afford to fork out £355 to listen to crap music for five days to celebrate boat journeys that often end in death. One wonders if any of the audience members who cheered illegal immigration later retired to one of Glasto’s luxury yurts, which contain not only “proper flushing toilets” but also toilet attendants. You can hire one for £5,000, which, ironically, is around the same amount of money dirt-poor migrants are forced to stump up to criminal gangs for a seat on one of their perilous crossings that the righteous of Glasto think it’s a hoot to sanctify.

No, even worse than the sight of the well-off of Worthy Farm using the wretched of the Earth to burnish their moral credentials is the fact that if any Channel-crossing migrant were to rock up to Glastonbury they’d be cuffed and shoved in the back of a paddy wagon faster than you could say “What time’s Dua Lipa on?”. Glastonbury is one of the most fortified zones in Britain. It is surrounded by a fence that is 4.12m high and 7.8km long and which has numerous “unique high-security features”, including an “external roadway to prevent tunnelling”, a “45-degree overhang to prevent climbing” and “zero nuts and bolts to stop the fence being tampered with”. “No borders!”, cry the virtuous of Glasto while surrounded by a border fence that the screws of Alcatraz would have envied.

July 1, 2024

Fifty ways to leave your leader

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

Okay, I exaggerate in the headline … Mitch Heimpel only offers a list of eight factors that matter when it’s time for a political party to take their leader out behind the barn, so to speak:

Caucus revolts have gotten more common in Canadian politics of late.

They’ve always been commonplace in Westminster politics. In recent years, they’ve dethroned three prime ministers in the U.K. They’re almost as common as general elections for removing prime ministers in Australia. They’re a sign of a healthy parliamentary system … sort of. Our system runs on confidence. Prime ministers are supposed to be responsive to pressure from the backbench.

Canada has been something of an exception to this, and not always to our national benefit. Though less so lately. We’ve seen sitting governments in revolt (Jason Kenney in Alberta, 2022) We’ve also seen opposition leaders taken out by frustrated caucus (Erin O’Toole federally in 2022, Patrick Brown as Ontario Progressive Conservative leader, 2018.) The Chrétien-Martin feud was more of a civil war than a revolt.

Still, despite the examples above, these events remain relatively rare in Canada, compared to many of our Westminster peers, because of how centralized power has become in leaders’ offices (especially in the PMO). Our normal, as described in Jeffrey Simpson’s The Friendly Dictatorship, is how our system evolved, not how it was meant to be.

Now, since there are signs (see here and here and here) that at least some Liberals are musing about taking a shot at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it’s perhaps a good time to set some ground rules for caucus revolts. This is what we’ve learned not just from recent Canadian experience, but also from what our British and Australian cousins have learned over the years.

[…]

If things are going so badly that the caucus wants to revolt, you probably do need to make changes. Showing you’re listening, demonstrating accountability at the senior levels and demonstrating change can take the wind out of a caucus revolt before it gets out of hand.

The above are general rules — exceptions can obviously apply. And as noted at the beginning, Canada doesn’t have much experience with these situations. That’s why Australia and the U.K. are so instructive. But things do seem to be changing in Canada, and certainly, things seem to be changing in the Liberal caucus. The above rules are offered free of charge to mutineers and loyalists alike. Good luck!

Letter from Britain / Canadian Soldiers (1945) – British Council Film Collection

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

Charlie Dean Archives
Published Sep 22, 2013

Three Canadian servicemen visiting London discuss the experiences of Britain that they have been writing home to loved ones about.

Trivia:
This film was specifically produced for Canadian audiences, in order to boost the relationship between the two countries, although it did receive distribution in other countries as well.

Letter from Britain and Ulster are the only two films in the British Council Film Collection to feature Northern Ireland. It is also unusual in that it features real servicemen, rather than actors.

The poster seen on the Underground train at 06:00 was part of the government-sponsored “Billy Brown of London Town” series.

Letter from Britain was filmed no earlier than March 1945, as this is when the “Merchant Navy” class steam train Elders Fyffes — seen at 04:40 — was built.

Several ships are seen around Londonderry in Letter from Britain. These include HMCS Glace Bay, HMS Launceston Castle, HMS Loch Katrine, HMCS Penetang, and HMCS Petrolia. By comparing convoy listings, it can be deduced that these scenes were filmed around 15 March, 1945.

The song sung by “Paddy” at 13:05 is entitled “If You Ever Go To Ireland”, written by Art Noel. The song sung by the solider around 14:45 is an Irish ballad called “The Rose of Tralee”. The piece sung in the pub around 15:40 is “My Gal’s a Corker”.
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