Quotulatiousness

March 4, 2023

Persistent fantasies about lost Ice Age civilizations

Filed under: Environment, History, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

When I was a teen, there seemed to be a lot of pop-sci books on the racks at our local variety store pushing various notions about “highly advanced” but lost civilizations, often attributing things like UFO sightings to these imagined prehistoric groups and tying various conspiracy theories back to them. At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander argues against today’s fans of such unlikely scenarios:

You can separate these kinds of claims into three categories:

  1. Civilizations about as advanced as the people who built Stonehenge
  2. Civilizations about as advanced as Pharaonic Egypt
  3. Civilizations about as advanced as 1700s Great Britain

The debate is confused by people doing a bad job clarifying which of these categories they’re proposing, or not being aware that the other categories exist.

2 and 3 aren’t straw men. Robert Schoch says the Sphinx was built in 9700 BC, which I think qualifies as 2. Graham Hancock suggests “ancient sea kings” drew the Piri Reis map which seems to depict Antarctica; anyone who can explore Antarctica must be at least close to 1700s-British level.

I think there’s weak evidence against level 1 civilizations, and strong evidence against level 2 or 3 civilizations.

Argument 1: Where Are The Sites?

Supporters of ice age civilizations argue that sea level rose 120 meters as the Ice Age glaciers melted, flooding low-lying coasts and destroying any evidence of coastal civilizations.

Areas likely above water during the Ice Age are in orange-brown (source)

What would happen to the ancient civilizations we know about if sea level rose an additional 120m? We would lose Babylon, Rome, and most of Egypt. But:

  • The Acropolis of Athens is 150m above sea level, and would be preserved for future archaeologists. Sparta (200m) and Thebes (250m) would also be fine.
  • The Hittite capital of Hattusa is almost 1,000m above sea level and would be totally unaffected.
  • The two biggest cities in Assyria, Ashur and Nineveh, would both make it.
  • Zhengzhou, the capital of the Shang in ancient Chinese, would survive.
  • Mohenjo-Daro would sink, but Harappa would be fine.
  • Basically nobody in Elam/Medea/Persia would even notice.
  • The top 80m of the Great Pyramid would rise above the waterline, forming a little island. The part of the Pyramid above the water would still be taller than the entire Leaning Tower of Pisa. It would be pretty hard to miss!

So a 120m sea level rise wouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of our crop of ancient civilizations, and shouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of a previous crop, unless they had a very different geographic distribution than ours.

Thompson SMG Cases: Police, FBI, and Secret Service

Filed under: Government, History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Nov 2022

The Auto Ordnance company made a couple of different types of cases for the Thompson SMG, and today we are going to look at two of the most common and one exceptionally cool type. The two most typically found are the Police and FBI cases. Both of these hold the gun along with the detached stock, one drum, and four box magazines. The Police type has the drum and box mags separated for balance and was lined with purple velvet; the FBI case was generally blue velvet and had all the magazines on the left (making it balance poorly).

The other case we have today is one fabricated by the Secret Service for one of its protective details. This is a flat-lying wooden case, which holds the gun, stock, and four box magazines — no drums for the Service.
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March 3, 2023

African Opinion in the War, Minor Axis Partners, and Foreign Ships in the British Navy – OOTF 30

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 2 Mar 2023

How did the British manage their multinational Merchant Navy who are the non-American operators of Liberty ships? How did Kenyans, South Africans, and others from Britain’s Sub-Saharan empire view the war? And what is going on in Slovakia and Hungary right now? Find out in this episode of Out of the Foxholes.
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Miles Davis – “So What” (Official Video)

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Miles Davis
Published 19 Oct 2010

Official music video for “So What” by Miles Davis
Listen to Miles Davis: https://MilesDavis.lnk.to/listenYD

[Come for Miles Davis, stay for the John Coltrane solo]
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March 2, 2023

Anti-Tank Chats #6 | The Panzerfaust | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published 4 Nov 2022

Historian Stuart Wheeler is back with another anti-tank chat. In this episode, he is looking at the development and use of the legendary panzerfaust.
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March 1, 2023

School Lunch from the Great Depression

Filed under: Food, France, Germany, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 28 Feb 2023
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Mauser WW1 Flyer’s Rifle: the Flieger Selbstlader Karabiner 1916

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 1 Nov 2022

Paul Mauser dedicated much of his life to the development of a practical semiauto military rifle, and did manage to have a design that was used in combat by Germany in World War One. It began with the model 06/08, a short-recoil, flap-locked design made in both rifle and pistol form. The short recoil idea was disliked by the military for a shoulder rifle, and so Mauser redesigned it to be inertially locked with a fixed barrel. This was sold in small numbers as a sporting rifle, and tested by the military a few years before the war. Once war began, Mauser once again submitted the design for use in an infantry configuration, but the system was too delicate for infantry combat. A second pattern was made for use by fliers, and this was accepted and used in service for that brief period between the introduction of military aviation and the adoption of aerial machine guns.

Designated the FSK-16 (FliegerSelbstladeKarabiner 1916), it was used primarily by balloon and Zeppelin crews. With a large magazine and self-loading action, it was much better for use in aircraft than the typical bolt action infantry rifles — and there was no mud to get into the action while airborne.
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QotD: What do we mean by “the humanities”?

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

First, just to define my terms, what are the humanities? Broadly, they are the disciplines that study human society (that is, that are concerned with humanity): language study, literature, philosophy, history, art history, archaeology, anthropology, and so on. It is necessarily a bit of a fuzzy set. But what I think defines the humanities more than subject matter is method; the humanities study things which (we argue) cannot be subjected to the rigors of the scientific method or strictly mathematical approaches. You cannot perform a controlled trial in beauty, mathematical certainty in history is almost always impossible, and there is no way to know much stress a society can bear except to see it fail. Some things cannot be reduced to numbers, at least not by the powers of the technology-aided human mind.

By way of example, that methodological difference is why there’s a division between political science and history, despite the two disciplines historically being concerned with many of the same subjects and the same questions (to the point that Thucydides is sometimes produced as the founder of both): they use different methods. History is a humanities discipline through and through, whereas political science attempts to hybridize humanities and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) approaches; that’s not to say historians never use statistical approaches (I do, actually, quite a lot) but that there are very real differences in methodology. As you might imagine, that difference leads to some competition and conflict between the disciplines as to whose methodology best answers those key questions or equips students to think about them. Given that I have a doctorate in history and self-identify as a historian, you will have no trouble guessing which side of this I come down on, although that might be a bit self-interested on my part.

So if the STEM fields are, at some level, fundamentally about numbers, the humanities are fundamentally about language. The universe may be made of numbers, but the human mind and human societies are constructed out of language. Unlike computers, we do not think in numbers, but in words and consequently, the study of humans as thinking creatures is mostly about those words (yes, yes, I see you there, economics and psychology; there are edge cases, of course). Our laws are written in words because our thoughts form in our heads as words; we naturally reason with words and we even feel with words. Humans are linguistic creations in a mathematical universe; consequently, while the study of the universe is mediated through math, the study of humans and human minds is fundamentally linguistic in nature.

Thus, the humanities.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Practical Case on Why We Need the Humanities”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-03.

February 28, 2023

The strange Steam Locomotive that was built like a Diesel – SR Leader Class

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Train of Thought
Published 4 Nov 2022

In today’s video, we take a look at the Southern Railway “Leader” locomotive that was built like a diesel, powered by steam and had a lot pros and cons.
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February 27, 2023

Luftwaffe Defeated in One Week?! – War Against Humanity 099

Filed under: Britain, China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 26 Feb 2023

Allied and German Air Forces fight fierce battles over Europe with civilians caught in the crossfire, while Joseph Stalin and Lavrenti Beria deport two entire ethnicities of half a million in just one week.
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“From nine or so I could memorise all the dates of the kings and queens of England … all of which proved hugely useful when it came to impressing the opposite sex in my teens”

Filed under: Britain, Education, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The preview portion of an Ed West article on how history should be taught as black comedy rather than a morality tale:

I love history; it is my greatest passion. If I didn’t have to worry about money I’d go and live in a former Templar castle in the Languedoc and spend my afternoons reading 19th-century French historians (pretending to read in the original for my Instagram account, obviously, but actually using a translation).

From a very young age I was obsessed with the subject. The first history tale I remember being engrossed by was the story of Ethelred the Unready and Edward the Martyr. I suppose I felt some sort of nominative solidarity with Edward, the rightful king murdered by a wicked stepmother who then put her own son Ethelred on the throne — and who turned out to be the worst combination of both useless and backstabbing.

Of course, I later learned that the story was more complicated; Edward may not have been murdered, and Ethelred was dealt a very difficult hand. But as a child it sent my mind away to a far off place in a similar way that King Arthur first captured the imagination of many others. Like them, I was first attracted to history via the medieval world, with its kings, castles and sword fights, and its colourful jousts where fair maidens watched heroic knights beat the crap out of each other (although the early medieval had almost none of those things, but again, don’t let that ruin the fun).

There was obviously a very nerdy aspect to this. From nine or so I could memorise all the dates of the kings and queens of England (although I got a bit vague when it got as far as the Edwys and Edwigs), all of which proved hugely useful when it came to impressing the opposite sex in my teens.

Dates are not the most important thing, but for a certain type of mind they make it easier to connect everything. If I learned of an insane pope who liked to torture his cardinals or “Wenzel the Drunkard“, the German king fond of throwing enemies off bridges, I could put it in context that this was the time of Richard II, and it is easier to place. If I’m now reading about Chinese emperors or what was happening in the Umayyad caliphate, where the connection with England would be slim or non-existent, my understanding of English dates still makes it easier to understand.

I loved the fantasy and the expanded sense of imagination, but as I got older, I came to better appreciate the most beautiful thing about history, that it’s all one great black comedy, filled with petty emotions and motivations, and the psychodrama and human absurdity is not some side issue, but the whole point.

Yet the subject is never really taught like that, and perhaps can’t be; and the national history curriculum when I was at school seemed structured in such a way as to suck all the life out of it. It’s not just the incoherence or emphasis; everyone complains about what is taught at school, and no one will ever be satisfied. But worse was the way the subject was almost designed to make it as boring as possible. An area of study was introduced, and then almost immediately we were asked to evaluate the primary and secondary sources; the aim was to invite scepticism, but most teens and pre-teens simply drift off at this point.

Just tell us the story — we can deconstruct it later. Personally, I feel that history shouldn’t be primarily an analysis of how hegemonic power structures orchestrate public relations; it shouldn’t be a morality tale about good and evil; it shouldn’t be a means to make society more inclusive; it should be fun, and when done correctly, it’s the most fun subject in the world.

I’ve heard a lot of other folks’ complaints about how history was taught when they were in school, and it generally aligns with my own experience. The overall plan seemed to be to actively avoid anything that might interest the students (battles, treachery, romance, excitement in general) and instead concentrate on treaty negotiations, lists of dates, and any other dry-as-dust ways to fill the lecture time. As anyone can tell by the subjects I tend to include here on the blog, I’m a big history nerd, but I actively hated the topic in school even as I was reading history for myself outside of school hours.

Ed also recommends the brilliant podcast series The Rest is History with Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland (now also available on YouTube, which is where I started listening to it a few weeks back). I’d read several books by each of them, so it was quite a treat to discover they were co-operating on a history podcast that more than met my expectations.

QotD: Sigmund Freud’s insights

Filed under: Health, History, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Sigmund Freud was a perverted old cokehead, but he had some useful insights. One of them is that anxiety works like a spring (my paraphrase). You need a spring to have a certain tension in order to work, but if you compress it too tightly, it breaks. Anxiety that can’t be discharged (his term) in healthy, socially beneficial ways instead gets discharged in unhealthy, neurotic ways.

That’s what happened with Anna O., history’s most famous psychiatric patient. She had a very turbulent love/hate relationship with her father, as tightly wound girls do. When he became deathly ill on a family vacation, the unresolvable tension caused a whole host of physical symptoms, including hysterical paralysis. Pioneering psychologist Josef Breuer “talked her through” it, finally resolving the emotional conflict and “curing” the patient.

All this would’ve been interesting, but largely irrelevant, were it not for World War I. The world at large didn’t care about the problems of overprivileged Jewish girls, but they did care about their soldiers suddenly going crazy in the trenches. Once military doctors finally ruled out a physical cause, they were left with Freudian explanations: A soldier can’t stop fighting, because he’s an honorable, dutiful soldier. Yet that soldier must stop fighting. The only honorable way out is a wound. If the enemy doesn’t wound him, then, his subconscious will. Hence the bizarre “conversion disorders” — hysterical blindness, paralysis, mutism, etc. — characteristic of “shell shock.”

But a funny thing happened. While everyone now acknowledged the real power of the subconscious mind, we sort of … forgot … about it. Psychology, particularly psychotherapy, went back to being a ghetto Jewish preoccupation. Bored, over-privileged housewives might go to a shrink to talk through their “issues”, but as for the rest of us, well, if we weren’t going into combat anytime soon, why bother? Outside of a few crusty old reactionaries (like yours truly) making fun of SJWs, when was the last time you heard the word “neurotic”?

But that’s the thing: either the subconscious is real, or it isn’t. When we say “neurotic” (the few of us who still do), we usually mean people like Anna O. — rich, cosseted, politically active human toothaches who try to force the entire world into the all-encompassing drama of their Daddy Issues (see also: Virginia Woolf). But that’s not how Freud meant it. According to him, we’re all neurotic to some degree or another, because that’s just how anxiety works.

We all have strong emotional impulses that run counter our self-image. Hence the entire panoply of pop-Freudianism: The preacher who constantly rails against homosexuality from the pulpit is secretly gay (“projection”). The strict, controlling, everything-in-its-place type is a sadist (“anal-retentive”). The player who can’t settle down with any woman is actually trying to find a Mommy figure (“Oedipus complex”). And, of course, the — ahem — daddy of them all, the crippling Daddy Issues that make feminists such fun.

But that’s just the thing: Either anxiety works that way or it doesn’t. Just because we don’t see a specific syndrome in ourselves doesn’t mean we don’t have a whole bunch of anxiety we need to discharge. Just because it’s subclinical, in other words, doesn’t mean it’s not real, or unimportant. See for example the legions of keyboard commandos who show up in the comments of any blog with more than fourteen readers. Yeah, sure, it’s possible that those guys all got kicked out of SEAL Team 6 for being too badass … but it’s probably classic identification. They’re deeply uneasy about the world and their place in it, so they construct themselves an identity as the Rambo of Evergreen Terrace.

Severian, “High Anxiety”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-03-16.

February 26, 2023

The role of Vice President of the United States is, constitutionally, pretty lightweight

Filed under: Government, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

For most Americans, the Vice President is seen not only as potentially the next President but also as a fairly significant official in the administration, yet this isn’t the way the job was envisioned by the Founding Fathers, as Glenn Reynolds explains:

Vice President Mike Pence (2017-2020) and Vice President Kamala Harris (2021-)

Mike Pence is arguing that the Vice President is a legislative, not an executive, officer. Mike Luttig has a piece in the NYT calling that crazy. (Link is to Josh Blackman’s blog post on same. Luttig’s piece is here, but it’s paywalled.)

Well, as it happens, I had a piece on the topic in the NYT over a decade ago, and I’ve also authored a piece in the Northwestern University Law Review on the topic, and I say he’s not crazy.

Nowadays, we tend to think of Vice Presidents – wrongly – as a sort of junior or co-President, but that’s not actually how it works at all. As I wrote in the Northwestern Law Review piece:

    The Constitution gives the Vice President no executive powers; the Vice President’s only duties are to preside over the Senate and to become President if the serving President dies or leaves office. Traditionally, what staff, office, and perquisites the Vice President enjoyed came via the Senate; it was not until Spiro Agnew mounted a legislative push that the Vice President got his own budget line. The Vice President really is not an executive official. He or she executes no laws — and is not part of the President’s administration the way that other officials are. The Vice President cannot be fired by the President; as an independently elected officeholder, he can be removed only by Congress via impeachment.

In various cases involving the Executive power, the Supreme Court has placed a lot of weight on the question of whether an official can be fired by the President or not.

Continuing:

    Traditionally, Vice Presidents have not done much, which is why the position was famously characterized by Vice President John Nance Garner as “[not] worth a pitcher of warm spit”. That changed when Jimmy Carter gave Fritz Mondale an unusual degree of responsibility, a move replicated in subsequent administrations, particularly under Clinton/Gore and Bush/Cheney.

    The expansion of vice presidential power, however, obscures a key point. Whatever executive power a Vice President exercises is exercised because it is delegated by the President, not because the Vice President posesses any executive power already. The Vesting Clause of Article II vests all the executive power in the President, with no residuum left over for anyone else. Constitutionally speaking, the Vice President is not a junior or co-President, but merely a President-in-waiting, notwithstanding recent political trends otherwise. To the extent the President delegates actual power and does not simply accept recommendations for action, the Vice President is exercising executive authority delegated by the President while being immune to removal from office by the President, unlike everyone else who exercises delegated power. The only recourse for the President is withdrawal of the delegation, with instruction to subordinate officials within the Executive Branch not to listen to the Vice President. However, it seems pretty clear that the President is not allowed to delegate executive power to a legislative official, as that would be a separation of powers violation.

The point of my argument there was to note that, by arguing that Vice President Cheney was not subject to the Freedom of Information Act because he was a legislative official, the White House had raised the question of whether President George W. Bush’s extensive delegation of executive powers to Cheney was unconstitutional. (Hence the title, “Is Dick Cheney Unconstitutional?”)

Tojo Takes Control – Week 235 – February 25, 1944

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Germany, History, India, Italy, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 25 Feb 2023

Now that the Americans have seized the Marshall Islands, they can bypass the Japanese base at Truk. This impels Prime Minister Hideki Tojo to shake up both army and navy command, and he even takes personal control over the Japanese Army. On the Anzio Front, Lucian Truscott replaces John Lucas as Allied Commander. In the field, the Allies win a big victory in Burma, and in Ukraine, the Soviets are still on the move.
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Ortgies Automatic Pistols: Not as Boring as You Think!

Filed under: Business, Germany, History, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Jun 2016

The Ortgies is a pistol whose interesting aspects are often overlooked on the assumption that it is just another identical .32 ACP blowback pistol. Well, it is that — but it is also more.

Mechanically, the Ortgies has a rather unusual grip safety mechanism that is quite different from what we expect to see today. It is also interesting in that the .32 and .380 versions differ only in the easily-interchanged barrel — even the magazines are marked for both calibers.

However, the most interesting part of the Ortgies story (in my opinion) is its production. In less than 5 full years (1919-1923), close to a half million of these guns were made, primarily by an industrial subsidiary of the German government. The guns were in large part a work program, creating export goods which could bring desperately needed hard currency into Germany to counteract the economic devastation of the Versailles treaty.

Have a look at the video and you may come away with a newfound appreciation for the humble Ortgies, like I did!
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