What have been the effects of progressive, centralized control of education, healthcare, and social services? It is true that the backwards practices of a few local school boards have been reformed, but the loss of a rich layer of church and private charity social services has impoverished local social capital. While today’s mass communication and the Internet removed one of the impulses to community (“I’m bored. Let’s go into town and hang out!”), a lot of the loss is due to the crowding out by a monopoly government, which had deep pockets and would use them to continue failed policies, as Microsoft in the 80s used the profits from its near-monopoly OS business to keep creating mediocre applications software until the innovators in applications were destroyed.
Very wealthy people have always been freer than others from the stifling social controls and judgments of bourgeois community standards. The elite of Paris and London in the 1800s often kept mistresses and dabbled in drug use without having their lives destroyed. The lower classes did not have the wealth to recover from errors, and those who did not hew to bourgeois social norms were isolated and damaged.
As the upper middle classes in the US grew as wealthy as the elite had been in the previous century after WWII, the sexual revolution and War on Poverty bestowed more social freedom on everyone — the middle and upper classes got birth control, sexual freedom, and women in the workplace, while the poor got programs to “uplift” them from poverty (a term which exposes the condescension involved). Social workers in vast numbers were hired to distribute assistance, free of any obligation — except for unmarried mothers, who were told their assistance would be cut if they married a working man.
Over the course of several generations, the well-off used their freedoms and came out relatively unscathed — families were still largely intact, children were still trained in the arts of civilization and followed the path of university and marriage into professional careers. But the artificial assistance to the poor, with its lack of community obligations and support and its immediate withdrawal in the event of marriage and better work, removed the social incentives that keep healthy communities healthy. Intact families grew less common. Crime and social pathologies became the norm in poor inner-city communities. As conditions worsened, the motivated and organized left for more civilized neighborhoods with better schools. The segregation of cities and even whole regions by income increased. Whole generations of children were poorly raised, poorly schooled, and left to drift without purpose or guidance from now-absent fathers, who were in prison or adrift themselves.
Jeb Kinnison, “Real-life ‘Hunger Games'”, According to Hoyt, 2015-09-25.
June 27, 2017
QotD: The mistakes of the wealthy versus the mistakes of the poor
June 26, 2017
What Latin Sounded Like – and how we know
Published on 12 Aug 2016
Classical Latin went extinct, yet we still know how to pronounce it. Proof!
Take a trip with me back to Catholic school, then back even further to old Rome. We’ll see what Latin pronunciation did – and did NOT – sound like in the mouths of the Romans. Thanks to ancient authors and modern Romance languages, we’ll even glimpse a range of evidence for the speech of Caesar and pauper alike!
SERMO VULGARIS ALL DAY LONG, am I right? 😉
Tank Chats #11 Valentine
Published on 24 Nov 2015
The eleventh in a series of short films about some of the vehicles in our collection presented by The Tank Museum’s historian David Fletcher MBE.
The Valentine – A popular and reliable British tank. It was designed and built by Vickers-Armstrongs Ltd., in 1938 and offered to the Army who accepted it for production shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939.
It made quite a name for itself in the North African campaign and also served with New Zealand forces in the Pacific and with Soviet troops on the Russian front.
http://tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1949-344
June 25, 2017
Spain and the Spanish Arms Industry in WW1 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. C&Rsenal
Published on 24 Jun 2017
Spain was one of the neutral nations of World War 1. A deep social divide and a decline from world power meant that they stayed out of the global conflict. Still, the war affected Spain in many ways. One of the consequences was the establishment of a huge arms industry that supported France and other fighting nations.
Fort Drum – America’s concrete battleship
Published on 15 Sep 2016
After the United States acquired the Philippines from Spain, the U.S. Board of Fortifications recommended that important harbors be fortified. This led to the development of defenses on several islands at the mouth of Manila and Subic Bays. One of these was El Fraile Island which would later become Fort Drum, America’s concrete battleship.
Read more about America’s concrete battleship, Fort Drum, here: http://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/americas-concrete-battleship-defended-manila-bay-until-the-very-end
June 24, 2017
The Articles of Confederation – Lies – Extra History
Published on Jun 17, 2017
The Articles of Confederation gave the United States their name, but even beyond that, they exposed many of the issues that would underlie this new nation for the rest of its history. James Portnow interviews series writer Soraya Een Hajji about the Articles of Confederation!
June 23, 2017
The Disillusionment of Lawrence of Arabia I THE GREAT WAR Week 152
Published on 22 Jun 2017
Almost a year after the secret signing of the Sykes-Picot-Agreement, British intelligence officer and guerrilla fighter T.E. Lawrence learns about the deal. He learns how the French, British and Russians are carving up the Middle East while officially supporting the Arab Revolt. Lawrence is increasingly frustrated with this double crossing behaviour and warns his superiors about the consequences.
British and Irish Iron Age hill forts and settlements mapped in new online atlas
In the Guardian, Steven Morris talks about a new online resource for archaeological information on over 4,000 Iron Age sites:
Maiden Castle in Dorset. View of the west gate and ramparts (English Heritage)
Some soar out of the landscape and have impressed tourists and inspired historians and artists for centuries, while others are tiny gems, tucked away on mountain or moor and are rarely visited.
For the first time, a detailed online atlas has drawn together the locations and particulars of the UK and Ireland’s hill forts and come to the conclusion that there are more than 4,000 of them, mostly dating from the iron age.
The project has been long and not without challenges. Scores of researchers – experts and volunteer hill fort hunters – have spent five years pinpointing the sites and collating information on them.
[…]
Sites such as Maiden Castle, which stretches for 900 metres along a saddle-backed hilltop in Dorset, are obvious. But some that have made the cut are little more than a couple of roundhouses with a ditch and bank. Certain hill forts in Northumbria are tiny and probably would not have got into the atlas if they were in Wessex, where the sites tend to be grander.
Many hill forts will be familiar, such as the one on Little Solsbury Hill, which overlooks Bath. But there are others, such as a chain of forts in the Clwydian Range in north-east Wales, that are not so well known. Many are in lovely, remote locations but there are also urban ones surrounded by roads and housing.
The online atlas and database will be accessible on smartphones and tablets and can be used while visiting a hill fort.
H/T to Jessica Brisbane for the link.
QotD: Philosophy
I believe the most important moment in the foreseeable future of philosophy will come when we realize that mad old Nazi bastard Heidegger had it right when he said that we are thrown into the world and must cope, and that theory-building consists of rearranging our toolkit for coping. I believe the biggest blind spot in analytical philosophy is its refusal to grapple with Heidegger’s one big insight, but that evolutionary biology coupled with Peirce offers us a way to stop being blind. I believe that when the insights of what is now called “evolutionary psychology” are truly absorbed by philosophers, many of the supposedly intractable problems of philosophy will vanish.
Eric S. Raymond, “What Do You Believe That You Cannot Prove?”, Armed and Dangerous, 2005-01-06.
June 22, 2017
Hunting the Bismarck – II: The Mighty HMS Hood – Extra History
Published on May 18, 2017
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The Bismarck had been sighted, and the British fleet raced to intercept it with their own flagship: the mighty HMS Hood. As Hood and her escort caught up, a harrowing battle between four giant ships ensued.
June 21, 2017
Greek Rifles and Pistols of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. C&Rsenal
Published on 20 Jun 2017
If you want to learn more about the firearms of World War 1, subscribe to C&Rsenal: http://youtube.com/candrsenal
Othais explains the rifles and pistols that Greece fielded in the First World War, among them the legendary Mannlicher–Schönauer M1903 and the Greek Gras M1874.
June 20, 2017
Hero or Burden? – King Constantine I of Greece I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
Published on 19 Jun 2017
King Constantine I of Greece embodies the complex history of modern Greece in the early 20th century. By some he was and still is perceived as a hero who united the country. Others perceive him as a burden who only brought problems to Greece.
QotD: The essential horror of army life
One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish civil war. The Latin type of latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were made of some kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your feet. In addition they were always blocked. Now I have plenty of other disgusting things in my memory, but I believe it was these latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so often to recur: ‘Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending Democracy against Fascism, fighting a war which is about something, and the detail of our lives is just as sordid and degrading as it could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army.’ Many other things reinforced this impression later; for instance, the boredom and animal hunger of trench life, the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging quarrels which people exhausted by lack of sleep indulge in.
The essential horror of army life (whoever has been a soldier will know what I mean by the essential horror of army life) is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to be fighting in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all armies. Orders have to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of officer and man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of war set forth in books like All Quiet on the Western Front is substantially true. Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true that the social background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics and general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.) But the laws of nature are not suspended for a ‘red’ army any more than for a ‘white’ one. A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.
George Orwell, “Looking back on the Spanish War”, New Road, 1943 (republished in England, Your England and Other Essays, 1953).
June 19, 2017
The Articles of Confederation – IV: Constitutional Convention – Extra History
Published on May 27, 2017
What if we kept the Articles of Confederation? The Alternate History Hub explores: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1NTboCDbtk
The war finally ended and the United States secured their independence from Great Britain, but immediately their Confederation seemed to be on the verge of falling apart. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison teamed up to organize a new convention where all the states would not just reform the Articles of Confederation, but replace them entirely.
June 18, 2017
Ottoman Soldiers in Europe – Naval Tactics – Officer PoWs I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
Published on 17 Jun 2017
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Another exciting episode of Out Of The Trenches featuring naval tactics, the treatment of officers as prisoners of war and two questions related to the Ottoman Empire.
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