James Lyon
Published on 16 Jun 2016
October 25, 2017
History of the Royal Navy 1914 to 1970
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Crusader helmets
Lindybeige
Published on 4 Sep 2014Here I show you three common styles of crusader helmet, and I comment upon them.
Thanks to Dr David Tetard for the loan of his helmets. These particular ones were bought here:
www.getdressedforbattle.co.uk
http://www.kovexars.cz/index.php (HL 007 and 103)Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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QotD: Oligarchies and universal franchise democracy
Fortunately the ideologues had a solution to overcome these minor imperfections of limited franchise democracy… universal franchise.
The more recent concept of Universal Franchise Democracy, is founded on the ridiculous, and incorrect, early 1900’s assumption that all Europe’s problems can be traced back to a limited voting Oligarchy.
Clearly if the ‘ruling classes’ in a state are the rich and powerful – i.e., the naturally conservative propertied elements who make the economy work and provide the productive jobs – then the chattering classes who want change will need to enfranchise the not-rich and not-powerful, so they can ride the wave of demand for change into their ideal world. In fact so they can direct it to provide taxpayer funding for non productive jobs… For people like them.
It is certainly no accident that the modern ‘ruling class’ is the nouveau-rich chattering classes – and the power base they have established in the completely unproductive taxpayer-supported lawyers and civil servants and union officials – who lead inevitably to ‘leaders’ who have the right and duty to lecture their stupid populace for not being politically correct enough… People like Merkel, Obama, and the European Union President. (Go on, name him? He has more practical power to interfere in his ‘citizens’ lives than either of the other two. Who is he?)
It is not just the Australian Union Movement of which we can say ‘they used to consist of the cream of the working class, now they consist of the dregs of the middle class’. All the petty tyrants who gorge in the taxpayers trough, and who try and force the ignorant peasants under their care down the correct path – whether medieval monks selling indulgences, or modern human rights lawyers banning free speech on issues they disapprove of – tend to be the dregs.
The dregs, of the intellectual fervor, of the previous generation, of wrong thinkers.
The dregs of any intellectual movement eventually have to accept that their ideal is hogwash. Even Marxists have started to admit that after a century of promoting Communism, they can no longer hide the hideous nature of Communism. Still, they are not going to give up their world-view just because the evidence against it is so overwhelming that continued attempts to argue in favour of it become ridiculous. Instead they move smoothly to supporting another, equally ridiculous ideology that they think will support their worldview. Say Environmentalism, or Multiculturalism.
Nigel Davies, “The Solution is… European Union/Multiculturalism/Communism… Name your poison!”, rethinking history, 2015-12-26.
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October 24, 2017
German Defensive Strategy and Tactics At Passchendaele I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 23 Oct 2017Hindenburg Line Poster: http://bit.ly/HindenburgLinePoster
The Hindenburg Line, which was developed in early 1917, was designed to have depth and flexibility. Pillboxes, bunkers and machine gun nests all played vital roles in the system, as did the counter-attacking Eingreiftruppen. Since its conception, it had been effective when used properly, but Passchendaele would be where the Siegfriedstellung would face its toughest test yet. Allied superiority in artillery and aircraft, unrelenting bad weather and exhausted soldiers all put a huge strain on the German defence system, but would they be its undoing?
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The many false faces of Aleister Crowley
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb reviews a new collection of essays about Aleister Crowley:
Turning to practitioners of the occult, I see no evidence of special success. They do not live longer than the rest of us. However they begin, they do not stay better looking. Any success they have with money, or in bed, is better explained by the gullibility of their followers than by their own magical powers.
So it was with Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) — the “Great Beast 666,” or “the wickedest man alive.” He quickly ran through the fortune his parents had left him. He spent his last years in poverty. Long before he died, he had begun to resemble the mug shot of a child murderer. Whether his claims were simply a fraud on others, or a fraud on himself as well, I see no essential difference between him and the beggar woman who cursed me in the street. He had advantages over her of birth and education. But he was still a parasite on the credulity of others.
Nor can I see him as a thinker or writer of any real value. The book that I am reviewing does its best to claim otherwise. Its varied essays are all interesting and well-written. Anything by Keith Preston, who wrote the fourth essay, is worth reading. Mr Southgate has done a fine job on the editing and formatting. But I found myself looking up from every essay to think what a terrible waste of ability had gone into producing the book. Was Crowley a sort of national socialist, or a sort of libertarian? Was he a sex-obsessed libertine, or did he preach absolute self-control? I suspect all these questions have the same answer. The overall theme of the book is that he was a penetrating critic of “modernity,” and each of its writers — all, in my view, men of greater ability than Crowley — has done his best to reduce a corpus of self-serving nonsense to a coherent system of thought.
The truth, I think, is that, beyond a desire to impose on everyone about him, Crowley had no fixed ideas, but he was too bad a writer for this to be apparent. Take these examples of his prose:
We are not for the poor and sad: the lords of the earth are our kinsfolk. Beauty and strength, leaping laughter, and delicious languor, force and fire are of us…” [quoted, p.68]
The sexual act… is the agent which dissipates the fog of self for one ecstatic moment. It is the instinctive feeling that the physical spasm is symbolic of that miracle of the Mass, by which the material wafer… is transmuted into the substance of the body. [quoted, p.151]
In the second of these, he seems to show an influence of D.H. Lawrence — or of the sources that made Lawrence into another bad writer. In the first, he has certainly been reading too much Swinburne. I confess that I have not read anything by Crowley beyond the quotations in this book. Having seen these, though, I am not curious to look further. He was a nasty piece of work in his private life, and a victim of early twentieth century fashion in everything else.
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Why Women Fainted So Much in the 19th Century
Today I Found Out
Published on 8 Oct 2016In this video:
Dropping like flies (or at least as far as many stories indicate), it seems as if well-bred ladies in the 1800s struggled to maintain consciousness when faced with even the slightest emotional or physical shock. Over the years there have been several theories as to why this seemed to happen, from the women’s garb to simply conforming to societal expectations.
Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/05/women-fainted-much-19th-century/
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October 23, 2017
The Spitfire’s Fatal Flaw
Real Engineering
Published on 3 Aug 2016
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October 22, 2017
Otto von Bismarck – II: A Man of Great Ideas – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 21 Oct 20171848. Revolution swept Europe as the working class rose up to claim their freedoms from an oppressive ruling class. But as a member of that ruling class, Bismarck had some resistance to this movement. He channeled his wild energy into productive avenues, gradually becoming the man of realpolitik that we know today.
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Interview With Pär Sundström from Sabaton I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 21 Oct 2017Learn more about Sabaton: http://www.sabaton.net/
Sabaton is a Heavy Metal band from Sweden. Battles and events during World War 1 inspired them to do multiple songs about them and Indy is talking with bass player Pär Sundström about the process.
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German capitulation…
arutixar
Published on 1 Jan 2015Germany offers their surrender to Allied forces…
Sketch by Mel Smith and Griff-Rhys Jones.
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October 21, 2017
Can You Move in Armour?
Medievalists
Published on 30 Jun 2016“Moving in harness”, a short film by Daniel Jaquet, realised by Vincent Deluz. On display at the exhibition “Armatus Corpus” at the Military Museum, Castle of Morges, Switzerland – The issue of mobility in armour is addressed there with striking images of actual armour pieces to demonstrate the range of movement allowed when worn. Today, our contribution follows the same goals, but with other technological means and approach. In this video we have put in images the deeds of the famous knight Jean le Maingre, known as Boucicaut, which were put in writing in the early 15th century. It includes a well-known passage where his training in armour is described in some details, outlining what you could actually do in a late medieval armour.
Learn more at http://www.medievalists.net/2016/07/can-you-move-in-armour-an-experiment-in-mythbusting/
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October 20, 2017
Operation Albion Concludes – Allied Failures In Belgium I THE GREAT WAR Week 169
The Great War
Published on 19 Oct 2017100 years ago this week, Operation Albion comes to a successful end for the Germans, as revolution is on the horizon in Russia. The Allies aren’t faring quite so well on the Western Front, where the weather continues to worsen and the death toll climbs ever higher. Haig believes a breakthrough is imminent and German morale is tested. The stalemate continues, but sooner or later the Battle of Passchendaele must come to an end.
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October 18, 2017
Wheel of Future History
exurb1a
Published on 16 Oct 2017It’s 2017. No jet packs yet, but 3D printed beer will be here soon so just shhhhhhhhh.
The poem near the end is ripped off from Rudyard Kipling’s “If”. It’s a good one. Check it out ► https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if—
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Are There Parts of German WW1 Warships in Space?
Real Engineering
Published on 19 Jul 2017
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QotD: The course of economic progress in a nutshell
It is customary in these days of “slow food” to sneer at these devices, to aver that a real cook doesn’t need more than a cast-iron dutch oven, a good chef’s knife and a sense of adventure. As someone who took herself off to Chicago for three months with pretty much exactly this set of equipment (okay, also an electric pressure cooker), I can testify that this is true — sort of. You can get by with a very minimal set of equipment if you know how to cook. But as someone who has done so, I have to ask: Why would you?
I mean, yes, I know how to chop onions just fine. But doing so makes me cry like the dickens, unless I wear goggles. I know how to make great lemon curd, béchamel, hollandaise, caramelized onions. But my Thermomix makes them just as well, and I can read a novel instead of standing at the stove, stirring. I can whisk up an angel food cake in a copper bowl … or I could let the stand mixer do that, and my arms won’t hurt.
For that matter, I could also go out and grow my own wheat, mill it myself, and then mine some salt and cultivate some wild yeast to bake bread. But I don’t do these things, because subsistence farming is actually pretty arduous and unrewarding, which is why few of us have chosen to live off the grid. I see no reason to romanticize the grunt labor of the kitchen. If a machine does it as well as I do, and fits in my paycheck, I’ll happily outsource to the machine, and save my labor for the stuff the machine can’t do. This being basically the entire history of human economic progress to date.
Megan McArdle, “Give Thanks for Williams-Sonoma and the Garlic Press”, Bloomberg View, 2015-12-07.
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