Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 30 Oct 2020It’s a Halloween special AND a miscellaneous myth! Who could ask for more? Today let’s dive into a very spooktacular folkloric motif and get real in the spirit of the season!
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October 31, 2022
Halloween Special: The Wild Hunt
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October 30, 2022
Andrew Sullivan on the rise of Rishi Sunak (or was it “Rashid Sanook”?)
In the free-to-cheapskates excerpt from his Weekly Dish newsletter, Andrew Sullivan contemplates the differences between how Barack Obama was seen as a historical figure to the US media and yet that same media can’t manage to see how Prime Minister Sunak is “the British Obama”:
Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.
In his inimitable way, Joe Biden this week celebrated the rather remarkable fact the the new Conservative prime minister in Britain is the grandson of Indian immigrants:
As recently as today, we’ve gotten news that Rashid Sanook is now the prime minister. As my brother would say, “Go figure.” And the Conservative party! … Pretty astounding. A groundbreaking milestone. And it matters! It matters!
He got the name wrong, but he’s Joe Biden. He gets names wrong. But unlike many on the left, especially the woke left, and perhaps because he is old enough to remember the after-effects of colonialism, Biden could bring himself to see what a staggering moment it is. It really is. It has gotten a bit obscured in the incredible mess of recent Tory politics. But staring us in the face is a historic shift.
It’s an Obama moment, after a fashion.
[…]
No, Sunak didn’t run an inspirational campaign like Obama. He’s not an orator even close in skill, he hasn’t won an election in his own right, and he didn’t come out of the blue. But he’s even younger than Obama when he took office — just 42, five years younger than Obama when he became president, and, unlike Obama, a slip of a thing and only 5’7″. And, for understandable reasons, Sunak seems much less worried about the cultural and political aspects of breaking the race barrier than Obama was.
Sunak is, for example, an openly practicing and proud Hindu. He lit Diwali lights around 11 Downing Street and took his oath on the Bhagavad Gita. That’s not someone running from his heritage. And he is also a Brexiteer from conviction, and, unlike Truss, a fiscal conservative who’s a realist about what can and can’t be done in a period of extraordinary economic stress for Brits and massive post-Covid debt.
All of this suggests something too many liberals have forgotten. These countries of alleged “white supremacy” have less racism than almost anywhere else in the world. It is hard to imagine a non-white president of France or Germany or Italy — let alone China or Russia or anywhere in Central Europe. It is hard to think of another empire that was deliberately unwound by its architects, and who then, within two generations, installed the grandson of former colonial subjects to its most powerful office. And Obama, of course, was twice elected with more heartland white support than Hillary Clinton.
Sunak has, moreover, been selected by the Tory party — that bastion of alleged bigotry that has already had three female prime ministers in its history, and now also a non-white man, James Cleverly, as foreign secretary, and a woman of Indian ancestry, Suella Braverman, as home secretary. Three of the top four ministers of state in Sunak’s cabinet are non-white. The new chairman of the Conservative party is Nadhim Zahawi. I’m telling you this because the US MSM — who are usually obsessed with racial representation in every single mundane situation — suddenly aren’t that interested, when some of their woke priors are rattled.
This is true of the broader American left. A faction obsessed with racial “equity” cannot take a moment to observe a historical moment of extraordinary proportions. Some, like Trevor Noah, have even completely invented a racist “backlash” against Sunak that simply hasn’t happened, apart from one call on one radio call-in show. (I was on BBC Radio this morning talking to an interviewer who was simply baffled by the projection.)
Noah has the excuse of being a comedian. But the New York Times‘ coverage has been almost as ludicrously slanted as its usual coverage of post-Brexit Britain, and it quickly ran two op-eds by British leftists trashing Sunak. Every story that refers to his ethnicity always slams his class “privilege” — i.e. that his parents were middle-class children of immigrants. This morning, the paper ran another hit-piece on Sunak’s wealth. The only benefit of his Indian ancestry appears to be that he will help the Indian diaspora in Britain itself. The incredible arc of imperial history finally coming full circle? Barely a mention.
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Fresh German Armor in the USSR! – WW2 – 218 – October 29, 1943
World War Two
Published 29 Oct 2022Erich von Manstein finally gets the reserve armor he’s been begging Hitler for, so he can carry out his counteroffensive in Ukraine. The Soviets are still on the move themselves though. In Italy, though, the Allies are moving at a crawl since the Germans have mined and booby trapped everything. There’s also new action in the Solomons and a celebration in Japan.
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“The Economist is the most over-rated publication in the English language”
I started reading The Economist when I was in college, and became a subscriber for nearly 20 years. Over the last few years, the tone of the articles shifted away from classical liberal toward communitarian or even full-blown socialist cheerleading, so I sadly ended my subscription and haven’t picked up a copy in at least 15 years. According to Ken Whyte in the SHuSH newsletter, things haven’t improved since I stopped paying attention:
The Economist recently said that book publishing in today’s economy resembles book publishing during the Second World War when “paper imports collapsed” and “publishers printed only sure-fire hits”.
The Economist is the most over-rated publication in the English language, especially by itself. I give it marks for its broad range of interests, ability to cover a lot of ground in relatively tight articles, and occasionally solid reporting, but if you’re going to boast incessantly about how smart you are …
… you’d better back it up. The Economist seldom does. It tends to glib, obvious, and sloppy. Most of its articles are written by anonymous b-level freelancers whose best stuff goes to outlets that afford bylines. Their work is edited to a stultifying homogeneity by a haughty grad student with a Financial Times subscription. Or so it reads.
This piece — “Books are Physically Changing Because of Inflation” — is a case in point. Paper imports to the UK were reduced during WW2 but they did not collapse. The problem for the book trade was rationing. The government restricted publishers to 60 percent of their pre-war paper volumes (later falling to 35 percent) and itself used far more tonnage for propaganda than the book industry normally required. Manpower shortages were another factor limiting the production of new titles.
Nor is it true that publishers released “only sure-fire hits”. While much of their paper allotment went to keeping hot-selling books in stock, many bets were placed on new titles and most of them paid. It was wartime and leisure activities were limited. “British publishers found that they could sell virtually any title,” writes Zoe Thomson in The Journal of Publishing Culture.
The article isn’t all bad. It reports that British book publishers are paying 70% more for paper than they were a year ago: “Supplies are erratic as well as expensive: paper mills have taken to switching off on days when electricity is too pricey. The card used in hardback covers has at times been all but unobtainable.”
To cope with the price increases, publishers are printing smaller books on cheaper paper and jamming more words onto the page. Writers are being asked to write shorter and are being held to their word limits.
That reflects the current state of the industry. It’s hardly news, though. SHuSH readers are probably sick of hearing me on rising paper and printing costs, and I’ve just been following what others have written. The cost of printing has more or less doubled since before COVID. Many smaller publishers are already releasing fewer and slimmer titles. If we are headed into a recession, the trend will continue.
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Jatimatic: Finland’s Least Successful PDW
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Jun 2022The Jatimatic was a stockless PDW designed by Jari Timari, who co-owned Tampereen Asepaja Oy, a firearms company in Tampere Finland. The firm was founded in the early 1920s, making .22 biathlon rifles, sporterizing military surplus, and other gunsmithing work. In the late 70s he got the idea for a compact 9mm PDW with some unique climb-reducing features, and in 1980 it was introduced as the Jatimatic (JAli TImari). Only about 400 were made, as it was not adopted or purchased in large quantities by anyone (although it was tested by many, including the Finnish Border Guards).
The Jatimatic was made without a stock, instead using a shooting sling for stabilization. It used standard Swedish K magazines, and has a distinctly off-angle appearance. This was done to counteract muzzle climb, as the line of the barrel points directly back into the shooter’s hand. It also has an interesting safety built into the folding front grip – if the grip is closed, the bolt is locked in place.
Production ended in the late 1980s after “permit irregularities” and a robbery of a bunch of Jatimatics from the company premises. The rights to the design were sold to a new company called Golden Gun in 1994, and they attempted to reintroduce it as the GG-95 with a few improvements, but it was a rather complete flop. Its best achievement was getting into several major movies, including Cobra and Red Dawn.
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QotD: Thatcher’s legacy
… it was not the Labour Party’s tribunes of the masses who evicted her but the duplicitous scheming twerps of her own cabinet, who rose up against her in an act of matricide from which the Tory Party has yet to recover. In the preferred euphemism of the American press, Mrs Thatcher was a “divisive” figure, but that hardly does her justice. She was “divided” not only from the opposition party but from most of her own, and from almost the entire British establishment, including the publicly funded arts panjandrums who ran the likes of the National Theatre and cheerfully commissioned one anti-Thatcher diatribe after another at taxpayer expense. And she was profoundly “divided” from millions and millions of the British people, perhaps a majority.
Nevertheless, she won. In Britain in the Seventies, everything that could be nationalized had been nationalized, into a phalanx of lumpen government monopolies all flying the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Airways, British Rail … The government owned every industry — or, if you prefer, “the British people” owned every industry. And, as a consequence, the unions owned the British people. The top income-tax rate was 83 per cent, and on investment income 98 per cent. No electorally viable politician now thinks the government should run airlines and car plants, and that workers should live their entire lives in government housing. But what seems obviously ridiculous to all in 2013 was the bipartisan consensus four decades ago, and it required extraordinary political will for one woman to drag her own party, then the nation, and subsequently much of the rest of the world back from the cliff edge.
Thatcherite denationalization was the first thing Eastern Europe did after throwing off its Communist shackles — although the fact that recovering Soviet client states found such a natural twelve-step program at Westminster testifies to how far gone Britain was. She was the most consequential woman on the world stage since Catherine the Great, and the United Kingdom’s most important peacetime prime minister. In 1979, Britain was not at war, but as much as in 1940 faced an existential threat.
Mark Steyn, “The Uncowardly Lioness”, SteynOnline.com, 2019-05-05.
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October 29, 2022
Witches, beware! It’s the Malleus Maleficarum!
It’s the season for ghosts, goblins, and — of course — witches, so Scott Alexander decided to review that famous book for witch-hunters, the Malleus Maleficarum:
Did you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum? You can go into a bookstore and say “I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that’s a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels”. They will sell it to you and you can read it.
I recommend the Montague Summers translation. Not because it’s good (it isn’t), but because it’s by an slightly crazy 1920s deacon every bit as paranoid as his subject matter. He argues in his Translator’s Introduction that witches are real, and that a return to the wisdom of the Malleus is our only hope of standing against them:
Although it may not be generally recognized, upon a close investigation it seems plain that the witches were a vast political movement, an organized society which was anti-social and anarchical, a world-wide plot against civilization. Naturally, although the Masters were often individuals of high rank and deep learning, that rank and file of the society, that is to say, those who for the most part fell into the hands of justice, were recruited from the least educated classes, the ignorant and the poor. As one might suppose, many of the branches or covens in remoter districts knew nothing and perhaps could have understood nothing of the enormous system. Nevertheless, as small cogs in a very small [sic] wheel, it might be, they were carrying on the work and actively helping to spread the infection.
And is this “world-wide plot against civilization” in the room with us right now? In the most 1920s argument ever, Summers concludes that this conspiracy against civilization has survived to the modern day and rebranded as Bolshevism.
Paging Arthur Miller…You can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum. So, why haven’t you? Might the witches’ spiritual successors be desperate to delegitimize the only thing they’re truly afraid of — the vibrant, time-tested witch hunting expertise of the Catholic Church? Summers writes:
It is safe to say that the book is to-day scarcely known save by name. It has become a legend. Writer after writer, who had never turned the pages, felt himself at liberty to heap ridicule and abuse upon this venerable volume … He did not know very clearly what he meant, and the humbug trusted that nobody would stop to inquire. For the most part his confidence was respected; his word was taken.
We must approach this great work — admirable in spite of its trifling blemishes — with open minds and grave intent; if we duly consider the world of confusion, of Bolshevism, of anarchy and licentiousness all around to-day, it should be an easy task for us to picture the difficulties, the hideous dangers with which Henry Kramer and James Sprenger were called to combat and to cope … As for myself, I do not hesitate to record my judgement … the Malleus Maleficarum is one of the most pregnant and most interesting books I know in the library of its kind.
Big if true.
I myself read the Malleus in search of a different type of wisdom. We think of witch hunts as a byword for irrationality, joking about strategies like “if she floats, she’s a witch; if she drowns, we’ll exonerate the corpse”. But this sort of snide superiority to the past has led us wrong before. We used to make fun of phlogiston, of “dormitive potencies”, of geocentric theory. All these are indeed false, but more sober historians have explained why each made sense at the time, replacing our caricatures of absurd irrationality with a picture of smart people genuinely trying their best in epistemically treacherous situations. Were the witch-hunters as bad as everyone says? Or are they in line for a similar exoneration?
The Malleus is traditionally attributed to 15th century theologians/witch-hunters Henry Kramer and James Sprenger, but most modern scholars think Kramer wrote it alone, then added the more famous Sprenger as a co-author for a sales boost. The book has three parts. Part 1 is basically Summa Theologica, except all the questions are about witches. Part 2 is basically the DSM 5, except every condition is witchcraft. Part 3 is a manual for judges presiding over witch trials. We’ll go over each, then return to this question: why did a whole civilization spend three centuries killing thousands of people over a threat that didn’t exist?
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Your Thoughts on Our D-Day Coverage So Far – WW2 – Reading Comments
Updated with re-uploaded video, 3 Nov 2022. The original video was taken down within a few hours. This is the same video less one short rant that Indy reconsidered and has chosen to omit.
World War Two
Published 28 Oct 2022Indy and Sparty pick out some of the best, most interesting, and even controversial comments by you under our videos. Stay for the PJs.
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The Absinthe Murder
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 28 Jun 2022
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October 28, 2022
The Byzantine Empire: Part 7 – Recovery and Return to Hegemony, 717-1025 AD
seangabb
Published 2 May 2022In this, the seventh video in the series, Sean Gabb explains how, following the disaster of the seventh century, the Byzantine Empire not only survived, but even recovered its old position as hegemonic power in the Eastern Mediterranean. It also supervised a missionary outreach that spread Orthodox Christianity and civilisation to within reach of the Arctic Circle.
Subjects covered:
The legitimacy of the words “Byzantine” and “Byzantium”
The reign of the Empress Irene and its central importance to recovery
The recovery of the West and the Rise of the Franks
Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire
The Conversion of the Russians – St Vladimir or Vladimir the Damned?
The reign of Basil IIBetween 330 AD and 1453, Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was the capital of the Roman Empire, otherwise known as the Later Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mediaeval Roman Empire, or The Byzantine Empire. For most of this time, it was the largest and richest city in Christendom. The territories of which it was the central capital enjoyed better protections of life, liberty and property, and a higher standard of living, than any other Christian territory, and usually compared favourably with the neighbouring and rival Islamic empires.
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History Summarized: Mycenaean Greece & the Bronze Age Collapse
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 24 Jun 2022I’m pronouncing Mycenaean & Mycenae with a hard “K” sound because that’s how it sounds in Greek, and I would not be so impolite as to mispronounce the name of the first Greek-speaking civilization in history. (The name of “Mycenae” can be spelled Μυκῆναι or Μυκήνη, and I’m using the first one: mee-KEE-neh)
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QotD: “Cliodynamics”, aka “megahistory”
Attentive readers will have already sensed that I have issues with these kinds of arguments; indeed, for all of my occasional frustrations with political science literature (much of which is perfectly fine, but it seems a frequent and honestly overall positive dynamic that historians tend to be highly critical of political scientists) I consider “cliodynamics” to generally take the worst parts of data-driven political science methodologies to apotheosis while discarding most of the virtues of data-driven poli-sci work.
As would any good historian, I have a host of nitpicks, but my objection to the idea of “cliodynamics” has to do with the way that it proposes to tear away the context of the historical data. I think it is worth noting at the outset the claim actually being made here because there is often a bit of motte-and-bailey that goes on, where these sorts of megahistories make extremely confident and very expansive claims and then when challenged is to retreat back to much more restricted claims but Turchin in particular is explicit in Secular Cycles (2009) that “a basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems” in the pursuit of discovering “general laws” of history.
Fundamentally, the approach is set on the premise that the solution to the fact that the details of society are both so complex (imagine charting out the daily schedules of every person one earth for even a single day) and typically so poorly attested is to aggregate all of that data to generate general rules which could cover any population over a long enough period. To my mind, there are two major problems here: predictability and evidence. Let’s start with predictability.
And that’s where we get to Isaac Asimov, because this is essentially also how the “psychohistory” of the Foundation series functions (or, for the Star Trek fans, how the predictions in the DS9 episode “Statistical Probabilities“, itself an homage to the Foundation series, function). The explicit analogy offered is that of the laws that govern gasses: while no particular molecule of a gas can modeled with precision, the entire body of gas can be modeled accurately. Statistical probability over a sufficiently large sample means that the individual behaviors of the individual gas molecules combine in the aggregate to form a predictable whole; the randomness of each molecule “comes out in the wash” when combined with the randomness of the rest.2
I should note that Turchin rejects comparisons to Asimov’s psychohistory (but also embraced the comparison back in 2013), but they are broadly embraced by his boosters. Moreover, Turchin’s claim at the end of that blog post that “prediction is overrated” is honestly a bit bizarre given how quick he is when talking with journalists to use his models to make predictions; Turchin has expressed some frustration with the tone of Graeme Wood’s piece on him, but “We are almost guaranteed” is a direct quote that hasn’t yet been removed and I can speak from experience: The Atlantic‘s fact-checking on such things is very vigorous. So I am going to assume those words escaped the barrier of his teeth and also I am going to suggest here that “We are almost guaranteed” is, in fact, a prediction and a fairly confident one at that.
The problem with applying something like the ideal gas law – or something like the population dynamics of beetles – to human societies is fundamentally interchangeability. Statistical models like these have to treat individual components (beetles, molecules) the way economists treat commodities: part of a larger group where the group has qualities, but the individuals merely function to increase the group size by 1. Raw metals are a classic example of a commodity used this way: add one ton of copper to five hundred tons of copper and you have 501 tons of copper; all of the copper is functionally interchangeable. But of course any economist worth their pencil-lead will be quick to remind you that not all goods are commodities. One unit of “car” is not the same as the next. We can go further, one unit of “Honda Civic” is not the same as the next. Heck, one unit of 2012 Silver Honda Civic LX with 83,513 miles driven on it is not the same as the next even if they are located in the same town and owned by the same person; they may well have wildly different maintenance and accident histories, for instance, which will impact performance and reliability.
Humans have this Honda Civic problem (that is, they are not commodities) but massively more so. Now of course these theories do not formally posit that all, say, human elites are the same, merely that the differences between humans of a given grouping (social status, ethnic group, what have you) “come out in the wash” at large scales with long time horizons. Except of course they don’t and it isn’t even terribly hard to think of good examples.
1 Yes, I am aware that Gat was consulted for Better Angels and blurbed the book. This doesn’t change my opinion of the two books. my issue is fundamentally evidentiary: War is built on concrete, while Better Angels is built on sand when it comes to the data they propose to use. As we’ll see, that’s a frequent issue.
2 Of course the predictions in the Foundation series are not quite flawlessly perfect. They fail in two cases I can think of: the emergence of a singular exceptional individual with psychic powers (the Mule) and situations in which the subjects of the predictions become aware of them. That said Seldon is able to predict things with preposterous accuracy, such that he is able to set up a series of obstacles for a society he knows they will overcome. The main problem is that these challenges frequently involve conflict or competition with other humans; Seldon is at leisure to assume such conflicts are predictable, which is to say they lack Clausewitzian (drink!) friction. But all conflicts have friction; competition between peers is always unpredictable.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: October 15, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-10-15.
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October 27, 2022
Tamara Keel reviews the new FN High Power pistol
These days, thanks to both financial and legal limitations, there’s no chance I’ll ever own either an original Browning Hi Power or the new FN High Power, but I can still dream about ’em:
Browning High Power 9mm, the standard side-arm of the Canadian army from WW2 until its replacements start to arrive some time in 2023.
Let me state this up front: I’m a proud American. I love baseball and apple pie. If you cut me, I bleed red, white and blue. Whichever Detroit automaker you think is best, I think they are, too. And, therefore, I am a loyal fan of John Moses Browning’s M1911.
But, with that out of the way, it pains me to admit that the 1911 wasn’t Browning’s most important or influential pistol design. The 1911 is largely an American obsession, and when the rest of the world thinks about JMB’s martial handguns, the one that springs to mind is the Fabrique Nationale GP35, better known as the FN Hi Power.
Actually the result of a collaboration between Browning and his successor at FN, the great Dieudonné Saive, the Hi Power is one of the most prolific service pistols ever created, being used by the militaries of half a hundred countries.
Though it had some features that made it cheaper and easier to produce than the M1911, such as the fixed, under-barrel cam that replaced the swinging link on the older design, the Hi Power was still expensive to produce compared to newer designs. Even the change to a simpler external extractor in the 1960s wasn’t enough to keep it competitive, cost-wise, for budget-conscious militaries, and its double-stack, 13-round mag — a revelation in the 1930s — was by now commonplace.
Browning (an FN subsidiary) finally ended production a few years ago, but it turned out that demand for the Hi Power still existed.
EAA began selling a Turkish-made clone recently, and Springfield Armory upped the ante with the SA-35, which offered some minor tweaks to the original design.
Early this year, though, FN America went nuclear on the Hi Power market by offering the all-new, American-made High Power.
Note the spelling change, because this isn’t your granddad’s Hi Power.
“Controls are ambidextrous. A thumb-safety lever and a slide-stop lever can be found on either side of the new High Power, and the magazine release is reversible • While not interchangeable with the older unit on the left, the new magazines are more capacious • The mag well is expectedly wide and promotes fast reloads • The topstrap is smooth, but the semi-matte PVD finish prevents glare • The trigger is a great improvement over the original, thanks in part to the absence of a magazine-disconnect safety • Removing the slide is simple, but you have to control it against the tension of the recoil spring.”
Photos from Shooting Illustrated, most likely by Tamara Keel.
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500 Years of Correcting “Historical” Halloween Costumes
Bernadette Banner
Published 26 Oct 2019Ft. my attempts to re-draw them But Better.
[The auction is now concluded.]FOOTNOTES
1. “A literal armful of skirt”: Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and his Wife by Jan van Eyck, 1434 http://bit.ly/33ZToHd
2. 16th century split front skirts and square neckline, for comparison: “Portrait of Katherine Parr”, c. 1545 http://bit.ly/2BSUCs5
3. Examples of gowns cut in long panels: from Le Livre des faiz monseigneur saint Loys, composé à la requête du cardinal de Bourbon et de la duchesse de Bourbonnois (p. 195), 1401 – 1500 http://bit.ly/2WcpWLu
4. Exceedingly Extra sleeves: “Saint George Slaying the Dragon” by Jost Haller, c. 1450. Unterlinden Museum. Digital image from Wikimedia Commons. http://bit.ly/2JksLFe
5. Hoods: Le Livre des faiz monseigneur saint Loys, composé à la requête du cardinal de Bourbon et de la duchesse de Bourbonnois (p. 205), 1401 – 1500 http://bit.ly/33Ya7e6
6. Cap? Fillet? from Le Livre des faiz monseigneur saint Loys, composé à la requête du cardinal de Bourbon et de la duchesse de Bourbonnois (p. 211), 1401 – 1500 http://bit.ly/33ZI0Lx
7. French farthingale: “Ballet des fées des forêts de Saint-Germain – Entrée des Esperculates” Daneil Rabel, 1626 http://bit.ly/31M3dal
8. Queen Elizabeth I effigy bodies: “Corset from Elizabeth I’s wax effigy 1603” http://bit.ly/369ezJ5
9. “The Merchant Taylors”, 1749. The British Museum http://bit.ly/2JiYR42
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MPi-81: Steyr Basically Makes the Uzi
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Jun 2022
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