An incompetent king doesn’t invalidate the very notion of monarchy, as monarchs are men and men are fallible. A bad, mad king (or a minor child) would surely find himself sidelined, or suffering an unfortunate hunting accident, or in extreme cases deposed, but the process of replacing X with Y on the throne didn’t invalidate monarchy per se. Deposing a king for incompetence was a very dangerous maneuver for lots of reasons, but it could be, and was, recast as a kind of “mandate of heaven” thing. Though they of course didn’t say that, the notion wasn’t a particularly tough sell in the age of Avignon and Antipopes.
But notice the implied question here: Sold to whom?
That’s where the idea of “information velocity” comes in. Exaggerating only a little for effect: Most subjects of most monarchs in the Medieval period had only the vaguest idea of who the king even was. Yeah, sure, theoretically you know that your lord’s lord’s lord owes homage to some guy called “Edward II” – that whole “feudal pyramid” thing – but as to who he might be, who cares? You’ll never lay eyes on the guy, except maybe as a face on a coin … and when will you ever even see one of those? So when you finally hear, weeks or months or years after the fact, that “Richard II” has been deposed, well … vive le roi, I guess. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, and meanwhile life goes on the same as it ever did.
Information velocity out to the sticks, in other words, was very low. By the time you find out what the great and the good are up to, it’s already over. And, of course, the reverse – so long as the taxes come in on time, on the rare occasions they’re levied (imagine that!), the king doesn’t much care what his vassal’s vassals’ vassals’ vassals are up to.
Severian, “Inertia and Incompetence”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-25.
September 26, 2023
QotD: Bad kings, mad kings, and bad, mad kings
September 25, 2023
Something, something “sins of the fathers”, something, something Elon Musk
Chris Bray provides an example of how “mainstream psychosis” has become the new normal, at least among academics and our so-called “elites”:
My argument is not “the news media lies”, or “there’s a lot of misleading discourse”. My argument is that whole overlapping layers of high-status America — in academia, in media, and in politics — are psychotic, fully detached from reality and living in their own bizarre mental construction of a fake world. I don’t mean this figuratively, or as colorful hyperbole. I mean that the top layers of our most important institutions are actually, literally populated by people who are insane, who have cultivated a complete mental descent through the looking glass.
So: Jill Lepore.
Lepore is as high-status as it’s possible to be. She holds an endowed chair at Harvard, she has a Bancroft, and she’s been on the masthead at the New Yorker for almost two decades. She has about as much institutional validation as an academic historian can get. And she just published an essay that wouldn’t be out of place in foot-high crayon letters on the wall of a mental institution.
“What happened to antisemitic rants before social media”, is the actual subhed. You see, before Twitter, people who said that Jews were bad were very marginal, and no one ever listened to them. At the risk of giving away too much personal information, I’m writing this in a bar, and the bartender is giving me some fairly aggressive side-eye over the burst of nervous laughter that I just dropped. Musk’s grandfather was named J.N. Haldeman, and he wrote a lot about how much he didn’t like Jews, and here’s what Lepore has to say about that:
But Haldeman’s legacy casts light on what social media does: the reason that most people don’t know about Musk’s grandfather’s political writings is that in his lifetime social media did not exist, and the writings of people like him were not, therefore, amplified by it. Indeed, they were very unlikely to circulate widely, and are now quite rare.
Jill Lepore has a PhD in history, and she thinks that antisemitic speech was quite rare before social media. Here’s a link to a non-paywalled version of the essay, and I encourage you to go read it. Otherwise you’re going to struggle to believe me. See for yourself, and then come back and I’ll talk about it.
How, if you want to argue that negative statements about Jews had little reach before social media, do you explain … Jewish history? Why didn’t they have time for the bread to rise, Jill? Before Twitter, screeds against Jews “were very unlikely to circulate widely,” except for, I don’t know, Mein Kampf? We dip the parsley in the salt water to remember the bitter tears of our ancestors, who never faced any antisemitism because it was very marginal and never allowed to circulate widely.
It gets better, though, because Haldeman was born in Minnesota, then raised in Canada, and then moved to South Africa two years after the formal implementation of apartheid. He wrote white supremacist tracts in apartheid South Africa, and Lepore maintains that the reach of his racist literature was sharply limited by the absence of social media. See, it was very rare to be able to read racist views in apartheid South Africa.
Girardoni Air Gun (original 1780 example)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Jun 2014The Girardoni (also spelled Girandoni) air rifle was a very advanced design adopted in 1780 by the Austrian Army. While the standard arm of the day was a single-shot flintlock, the Girardoni offered a massive firepower advantage to the men who carried it. The guns (designed by Bartholomäus Girardoni, of Vienna) had a magazine capacity of 22 round balls, which could all be fired within 60 seconds. The balls were .46 caliber, weighing approximately 153 grains, and were propelled at 400-450 feet per second. They were rumored to be silent, but actually had a loud report (although quieter than gunpowder firearms). One of these rifles was carried by the Lewis & Clark expedition into the American West.
The Austrian Army used them for a relatively short time — they were taken out of service by Imperial order in 1788, and issued back to Tyrolian sniper units only in 1792. The reasons for their replacement were more logistical than the result of any actual shortcoming with Girardoni’s design. The problem was that they required special training to use (compared to a normal firearm), required specially trained and equipped gunsmiths to repair and maintain, and difficulty maintaining them in combat conditions. Dr. Robert Beeman has written an outstanding illustrated article on Austrian airguns in general and the Girardoni in particular, which I highly recommend for anyone interested in more detail on these fascinating weapons:
http://www.beemans.net/Austrian%20air…
However, I am privileged to be able to share with you this video of an original 1780 Girardoni put together by Luke Haag for presentation at the 2014 AFTE conference in Seattle. Mr. Haag does a great job explaining the operation of the gun, its capabilities and accessories.
QotD: The economics of American slavery
Economists have been thinking about such issues for half a century. You wouldn’t know it from the King Cottoners. They assert, for example, that a slave was “cheap labor”. Mistaken again. After all, slaves ate, and they didn’t produce until they grew up. Stanley Engerman and the late Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel confirmed in 1974 what economic common sense would suggest: that productivity was incorporated into the market price of a slave. It’s how any capital market works. If you bought a slave, you faced the cost of alternative uses of the capital. No supernormal profits accrued from the purchase. Slave labor was not a free lunch. The wealth was not piled up.
The King Cotton school has been devastated recently in detail by two economic historians, Alan Olmstead of the University of California at Davis and Paul Rhode of the University of Michigan. They point out, for example, that the influential and leftish economist Thomas Piketty grossly exaggerated the share of slaves in U.S. wealth, yet Edward Baptist uses Piketty’s estimates to put slavery at the center of the country’s economic history. Olmstead and Rhode note, too, from their research on the cotton economy that the price of slaves increased from 1820 to 1860 not because of institutional change (more whippings) or the demand for cotton, but because of an astonishing rise in the productivity of the cotton plant, achieved by selective breeding. Ingenuity, not capital accumulation or exploitation, made cotton a little king.
Slavery was of course appalling, a plain theft of labor. The war to end it was righteous altogether — though had the South been coldly rational, the ending could have been achieved as in the British Empire in 1833 or Brazil in 1888 without 600,000 deaths. But prosperity did not depend on slavery. The United States and the United Kingdom and the rest would have become just as rich without the 250 years of unrequited toil. They have remained rich, observe, even after the peculiar institution was abolished, because their riches did not depend on its sinfulness.
Dierdre McCloskey, “Slavery Did Not Make America Rich: Ingenuity, not capital accumulation or exploitation, made cotton a little king”, Reason, 2017-07-19.
September 24, 2023
Operation Market Garden Begins – WW2 – Week 265 – September 23, 1944
World War Two
Published 23 Sep 2023Monty’s Operation(s) Market Garden, to drop men deep in the German rear in the Netherlands and secure a series of bridges, begins this week, but has serious trouble. In Italy the Allies take Rimini and San Marino, but over in the south seas in Peleliu the Americans have serious problems with Japanese resistance. Finland and the USSR sign an armistice, and in Estonia the Soviets take Tallinn, and there are Soviet plans being made to enter Yugoslavia.
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Architect Breaks Down Why All American Diners Look Like That | Architectural Digest
Architectural Digest
Published 1 Jun 2023Today Michael Wyetzner of Michielli + Wyetzner Architects returns to Architectural Digest to explore the design evolution of American diners. A cornerstone of American dining culture, their distinctive style has been emulated around the world making them a popular salute to the USA. Michael provides an expert look into the history behind their design evolution from the 1920s through to the 1960s and explains why all diners came to look like that.
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QotD: The composition of the polis
So what is an oikos? Well that word is about as plastic as polis. Oikos can mean a house (as in a physical building), or it can mean a household (as in the family that dwells in that building) or it can mean all of the property of that household, and indeed Greek writers will use this word to mean all of these things, often in the same context (that is they shift freely between these linked meanings, not seeing them as fully distinct). Now as a “family” we should note that an oikos was rather more extensive than our sense of family (though rather less extensive than the Roman concept of a familia and a lot less extensive than a Roman gens; we’ll come to these in a later series): an oikos consisted of all of the people who lived together in a house, which generally meant the adult citizen male, his wife and dependents and also their enslaved workers. It that family had enslaved workers who did not live with them, they also generally counted as part of the oikos because they were understood as the property of it.
The creation of a polis meant merging all of these things together in a very literal way. In a physical sense the creation of a town core meant literally putting houses together, as a good part of the population might move to live in that town core (with their farms just outside the town in walking distance, remember: most of these poleis are very small). Indeed M.H. Hansen notes in the introductory article on synoikismos in the Inventory that the only “purely political synoecism” – that is, a synoikismos that did not involve actually moving people to form or merge with a new town center but merely politically united existing geographically distinct communities – occurs in myth in Theseus’ supposed creation of the Athenian poleis. That this sort of synoikismos never happens in the historical period (there’s an attempt in Ionia in 547/6 but it never gets off the ground) ought to suggest that it probably didn’t happen with Theseus either.
It is also in a sense the merging of families, as one of the key privileges of citizenship in a polis was the right to marry women of citizen status (that is, the daughters of citizens) and thus have citizen children. And it meant the new citizenry putting their fortunes – in a literal, physical sense of the wealth that enabled them to survive (think farms and farming) – together in common when it came to things like war.
This may all seem fairly straightforward, but I invite you to consider the different implications it has compared to the way we mostly conceive of the population of a country, which we tend to imagine as a collection of individuals; as we’ll see the Greeks did this a bit too, but it wasn’t the first thought they reached for. In the polis, it is the households that have standing, represented by their adult, free citizen male heads, not individuals. The polis protects the households from the world, not the members of the household from each other, with the most obvious and immediate legal implication being the fact that crimes against junior members of the household are often understood as property crimes against the head of the household and actions within the household are simply not the business of the state. Now we shouldn’t over-stretch this: the Greeks were capable of understanding non-free and non-male people as individuals at times, but the political structure of the polis is predicated on units of households.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101: Component Parts”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-10.
September 23, 2023
More on the history field’s “reproducibility crisis”
In the most recent edition of the Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes follows up on his earlier post about the history field’s efforts to track down and debunk fake history:
The concern I expressed in the piece is that the field of history doesn’t self-correct quickly enough. Historical myths and false facts can persist for decades, and even when busted they have a habit of surviving. The response from some historians was that they thought I was exaggerating the problem, at least when it came to scholarly history. I wrote that I had not heard of papers being retracted in history, but was informed of a few such cases, including even a peer-reviewed book being dropped by its publisher.
In 2001/2, University of North Carolina Press decided to stop publishing the 1999 book Designs against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822 when a paper was published showing hundreds of cases where its editor had either omitted or introduced words to the transcript of the trial. The critic also came to very different conclusions about the conspiracy. In this case, the editor did admit to “unrelenting carelessness“, but maintained that his interpretation of the evidence was still correct. Many other historians agreed, thinking the critique had gone too far and thrown “the baby out with the bath water“.
In another case, the 2000 book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture — not peer-reviewed, but which won an academic prize — had its prize revoked when found to contain major errors and potential fabrications. This is perhaps the most extreme case I’ve seen, in that the author ultimately resigned from his professorship at Emory University (that same author believes that if it had happened today, now that we’re more used to the dynamics of the internet, things would have gone differently).
It’s somewhat comforting to learn that retraction in history does occasionally happen. And although I complained that scholars today are rarely as delightfully acerbic as they had been in the 1960s and 70s in openly criticising one another, they can still be very forthright. Take James D. Perry in 2020 in the Journal of Strategy and Politics reviewing Nigel Hamilton’s acclaimed trilogy FDR at War. All three of Perry’s reviews are critical, but that of the second book especially forthright, including a test of the book’s reproducibility:
This work contains numerous examples of poor scholarship. Hamilton repeatedly misrepresents his sources. He fails to quote sources fully, leaving out words that entirely change the meaning of the quoted sentence. He quotes selectively, including sentences from his sources that support his case but ignoring other important sentences that contradict his case. He brackets his own conjectures between quotes from his sources, leaving the false impression that the source supports his conjectures. He invents conversations and emotional reactions for the historical figures in the book. Finally, he fails to provide any source at all for some of his major arguments
Blimey.
But I think there’s still a problem here of scale. It’s hard to tell if these cases are signs that history on the whole is successfully self-correcting quickly, or are stand-out exceptions. I was positively inundated with other messages — many from amateur historical investigators, but also a fair few academic historians — sharing their own examples of mistakes that had snuck past the careful scholars for decades, or of other zombies that refused to stay dead.
QotD: In which we discover why they’re called antimacassars
His accents mild took up the tale:
He said ‘I go my ways,
And when I find a mountain-rill,
I set it in a blaze;
And thence they make a stuff they call
Rowlands’ Macassar-Oil –
Yet twopence-halfpenny is all
They give me for my toil.’Better yet, in Don Juan Lord Byron managed to rhyme it:
In virtue, nothing earthly could surpass her
Save thine ‘incomparable oil’, Macassar!Mark Steyn, “Self-Knitting Antimacassars”, Steyn Online, 2019-08-02.
September 22, 2023
Is the Slovak Uprising Doomed to Fail? – War Against Humanity 115
World War Two
Published 21 Sep 2023Even as they battle an uprising in Slovakia, the Nazis see the opportunity to continue their racial realignment of Europe. The latest victims of this genocidal legacy are Anne Frank and her family, who arrive at Auschwitz. In Britain, the V-1 menace is defeated. But as London breathes a sigh of relief, the Nazis and their allies reduce Warsaw to rubble in a rampage of burning, looting, rape, and murder.
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MAS 49: A Universal Service Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 May 2019As the MAS 44 saw combat service with French Marines in Indochina, some of its shortcomings began to reveal themselves. The rifle was reliable and durable, but it lacked some capabilities, most importantly rifle grenade launching and an optics mounting. After a test series of MAS 44A rifles, a new pattern was adopted as the MAS 49 and put into production in 1951.
A total of about 80,000 MAS 49 rifles were made, and they incorporated a scope mounting dovetail in the left side of the receiver and a grenade launching muzzle device and sight. In addition, the bayonet was left out, as it was no longer seen as necessary. Not all rifles were used with scopes or for launching grenades, but with the universal capability it was simple to adapt any rifle to whatever specialized role was required. Ultimately the MAS 49 would be replaced again in only a few year, by the MAS 49-56 iterative improvement — but that’s a subject for a future video.
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September 21, 2023
Iranian Railways, Red Cross Care Packages, and Tail Gunners – WW2 – OOTF 31
World War Two
Published 20 Sept 2023How did the Allies build and manage an enormous railway supplying the Soviet Union through Iran? How did the Red Cross deliver aid parcels through enemy territory to Allied POWs? And, how effective were the rear gunners in ground attack aircraft like the Stuka and Sturmovik? Find out in this episode of Out of the Foxholes.
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A new paper on the cancellation of the Avro Arrow in 1959
The National Post republished a Canadian Press article about a new research paper by Alan Barnes in the Canadian Military History journal:
In the years after the Second World War, Canada developed its ability to prepare strategic intelligence assessments on defence and foreign policy, the paper notes. It would no longer have to rely entirely on assessments from the United States and Britain.
The analytic capability allowed Canada to fully participate in preparing the assessments on the Soviet threat to North America that would underpin joint Canada-U.S. planning for continental defence, Barnes notes.
“The CF-100 Canuck, a jet interceptor developed and manufactured in Canada, was just entering service, but there were already concerns that it might soon be outclassed by newer Soviet bombers operating at higher altitudes and faster speeds.”
In November 1952, the Royal Canadian Air Force called for an aircraft with a speed of Mach 2 and the ability to fly at 50,000 feet. “These demanding specifications contributed to the escalating costs and frequent delays in the CF-105 program.”
The Soviets would soon display a new long-range jet bomber, the Bison, at the 1954 May Day parade in Moscow. At an airshow the following year, a fly-past of 28 Bison seemed to indicate that the bomber had entered serial production, two years earlier than predicted, the paper says. In fact, only 18 prototype aircraft participated in the airshow, flying past several times to give the impression of larger numbers.
Even so, this display, along with the appearance of a new Soviet long-range turboprop bomber, the Tu-95 (dubbed the Bear), raised fears that the Soviet Union would soon outnumber the United States in intercontinental bombers, sparking a “Bomber Gap” controversy that figured prominently in American politics, the paper says.
[…]
A January 1958 assessment, “The Threat to North America, 1958-1967”, by Canada’s Joint Intelligence Committee, a co-ordinating body, ultimately had the greatest impact on decisions related to the Arrow, the paper says.
The assessment laid out clear judgments concerning the imminent transition from crewed bombers to ballistic missiles and described the limited size and capabilities of the Soviet bomber force, Barnes notes.
It observed that the Soviet ballistic missiles which were on the verge of being developed were likely to be markedly superior to the foreseeable defences, and concluded that missiles would progressively replace aircraft as the main threat to North America.
The assessment said this meant there would be little justification for the Soviet Union to increase the number of bombers, or to introduce new ones, after 1960.
“The (Joint Intelligence Committee)’s January 1958 assessment was correct in foreseeing Moscow’s shift from bombers to missiles over the subsequent decade,” Barnes writes.
He points out that following the Sputnik launch, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev came to see missiles as a panacea for a range of defence problems and as a cheaper alternative to conventional weapons. “With the Soviet bomber force now looking irrelevant and obsolete, it was relegated to a secondary position in Soviet military thinking.”
This is York
Jago Hazzard
Published 28 May 2023“Make all the railways come to York!”
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QotD: The Iliad as Bronze Age gangsta rap
What was cool though is I felt like I came away with a much better understanding of Socrates, Plato, and that whole milieu. Much like it’s easy to miss the radicalism of Christianity when you come from a culture steeped in it, it’s easy to miss the radicalism of Socrates if you don’t understand that this is the culture he was reacting against. Granted, the compilation of the Homeric epics took place centuries before the time of classical Athens, but my sense is that in important respects things hadn’t changed all that much. In our society, even people who aren’t professing Christians have been subliminally shaped by a vast set of Christian-inflected moral and epistemic and metaphysical assumptions. Well in the same way, in the Athens of Socrates and of the Academy, the “cultural dark matter” was the world of the Iliad: honor, glory, blinged out bronze armor, tearing hot teenagers from the arms of their lamenting parents, etc.
We have a tendency to think of the Greek philosophers as emblematic of their civilization, when in reality they were one of the most bizarre and unrepresentative things that happened in that society. But Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges is here to tell us it wasn’t just the philosophers! So much of our mental picture of Ancient Greece and Rome is actually a snapshot of one fleeting moment in the histories of those places, arguably a very unrepresentative moment at which everything was in the process of collapsing. It’s like if [POP CULTURE ANALOGY I’M TOO TIRED TO THINK OF]. And actually once you think about it this way, everything makes way more sense. All those weird customs the Greeks and Romans had, all the lares and penates and herms and stuff, those are what these societies were about for hundreds and hundreds of years, and the popular image is just this weird encrustation, this final flowering at the end.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-20.
