… there’s a reason 99.998% of the Internet is porn, and that reason is: The Internet, itself, has rewired our brains.
Yeah, I’m a history guy, not a biologist, and no, I can’t show you the specific spots on the fMRI that prove it, but look, you can test this yourself. Ever been around kids? It’s easiest to see in the early grades, so go to a daycare or afterschool program. Trust me, you can pick out right away, with 100% accuracy, the kids who spend more than 3 hours a day at daycare. This is not a knock on daycare providers, lots of whom are good, dedicated people doing hard work. Rather, it’s a knock on the situation, because if a kid’s in daycare that long, it means the parents both work long-hour, high-stress jobs. How do you think the kid’s home life is, under those conditions?
You know as well as I do that when the kid gets home from day care, he gets plunked in front of a tv, a video game, an iPad, a smartphone, some kind of glowing box. That’s what’s rewiring their brains. That’s not “ADHD,” which doesn’t really exist. “ADHD” is a cope, a bit of shorthand, to describe what’s actually going on, which is: These kids’ heads have been rewired. They need constant stimulation. Everything needs to be in five-minute chunks for them, because they’ve never known anything different. Asking them to sit down and pay attention for any length of time – say, in a 60 minute lecture, like our old Prussian (from the 18th century!) system requires – is like asking one of us to suddenly run a marathon, or bench press 300 lbs. It can’t be done; we don’t have the equipment.
Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-21.
May 24, 2021
QotD: The internet is rewiring our brains
May 22, 2021
Guns in the Movies – like this S&W Model 29
Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Feb 2017Today we have not so much an examination of a specific firearms, but rather a look at how Clint Eastwood’s film portrayal of Dirty Harry Callahan drove a huge wave of popularity of the Smith & Wesson Model 29 — “the most powerful handgun in the world.”
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
May 21, 2021
Andrew Potter – “the greatest gift you can give a generation is to ignore them”
In The Line Andrew Potter speaks up for those forgotten folks who were born after the end of the Baby Boom but before the Millennials appeared:
Generation X Word Cloud Concept collage background
Best Motivation Blog: What Generation Is X https://fatinsl.info/?arsae=https%3A%2F%2Fbestmotivationblog.blogspot.com%2F2020%2F04%2Fwhat-generation-is-x.html
… just as a sense of futurelessness, futility and invisibility catalyzed the original Generation X mentality in the early 90s (as well as the music, art, film and writing that mentality made manifest), this atavistic indignation spurred [Generation X author Douglas] Coupland to write his wonderful screed. It’s great stuff, with quotable lines in every paragraph. (I especially liked “Immunology is not a smorgasbord. How dare you make us subsidize your cluelessness with our bodies.”)
But I want to take issue with the claim that this is a case of Gen X getting screwed yet again. As a fully paid-up member of Gen X, I’ve grown to appreciate over the decades the extent to which the greatest gift you can give a generation is to ignore them.
Let’s back up a bit. Does Generation X even exist? Does any generation exist for that matter? Sociologists and demographers argue that the concept of a “generation”, be it Boomer, Millennial, Zoomer, what have you, is just the result of confusing cohort effects with generational effects. The idea of distinct generations might be good for selling soft drinks or cars or condos or nostalgia, but there is nothing remotely predictive or explanatory about it.
But as I’ve argued before, this just misunderstands what a generation is, and the role they play in our ongoing cultural self-understanding. Whatever else it is, a generation is something that has its own tastes and moods and fashions and jargon, its own sense of what is in and what is out, what is cool and what’s square, and who belongs and who does not. In short, more than anything else a generation is a scene. It is about who and what you claim as your own, and who claims you.
A big part of what helps define a generation are the battles it chooses to fight. The Boomers spent decades obsessed with their countercultural campaign against The Man, while Millennials have spent their time and energy mining the deepest recesses of identity politics. As for Generation X, our principal preoccupation was the question of authenticity and the fear of selling out.
It is hard to underestimate the role of technology in all of this. It is commonly argued that a generation is formed by the technological ecosystem in which it grows up, and while there’s obviously something to that, what is important for Gen X is not what our technology allowed us to do, but what it protected us from.
In particular, what we were protected from was surveillance. I don’t know a single person I grew up with who doesn’t thank their lucky stars that there were no cellphones with cameras around when we were growing up, that there was no Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or TikTok. I can’t imagine what it is like to grow up under the glaring distributed panopticon of social media, knowing that all your friends, everyone at your school, and even your parents are watching your every move, judging your every utterance.
May 20, 2021
The Birth Control Movement and Eugenics – A Curious Link | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.18 – Winter 1923
TimeGhost History
Published 19 May 2021In the winter of 1923, a controversial activist takes a Catholic doctor to trial for libel. The proceedings capture a much bigger moment in the history of the interwar period: the controversial — but inherent — link between birth control and eugenics.
(more…)
May 18, 2021
What is Maskirovka? Russian Military Deception #Military101
Military History Visualized
Published 5 May 2017A short introduction into Russian Military Deception — called Maskirovka. “Maskirovka is most simply defined as a set of processes designed to mislead, confuse, and interfere with accurate data collection regarding all areas of Soviet plans, objectives, and strengths or weaknesses.” (Smith, Charles L.: “Soviet Maskirovka“, in: Airpower Journal – Spring 1988)
Military History Visualized provides a series of short narrative and visual presentations like documentaries based on academic literature or sometimes primary sources. Videos are intended as introduction to military history, but also contain a lot of details for history buffs. Since the aim is to keep the episodes short and comprehensive some details are often cut.
» HOW YOU CAN SUPPORT MILITARY HISTORY VISUALIZED «
(A) You can support my channel on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/mhv(B) You can also buy “Spoils of War” (merchandise) in the online shop: https://www.redbubble.com/people/mhvi…
» SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS «
twitter: https://twitter.com/MilHiVisualized
tumblr: http://militaryhistoryvisualized.tumb…» SOURCES «
Maier, Morgan: A Little Masquerade: Russia’s Evolving Employment of Maskirovka
http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/si…Smith, Charles L.: “Soviet Maskirovko“, in: Airpower Journal – Spring 1988
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/ai…Lindley-French, Julian: NATO: Countering Strategic Maskirovka. Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute. (2015)
Glantz: The Red Mask: The Nature and Legacy of Soviet Military Deception in the Second World War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian…
Keating, Kenneth: The Soviet System of Camouflage
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/…Krueger, Daniel: Maskirovka – What’s in it for us?
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/…» TOOL CHAIN «
PowerPoint 2016, Word, Excel, Tile Mill, QGIS, Processing 3, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Audition, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Animate.» CREDITS & SPECIAL THX «
Song: Ethan Meixsell – “Demilitarized Zone”
In future, if you’re on TV, do not use your hands or fingers under any circumstances … OK?
… as a Jeopardy contestant has recently discovered, there is no hand gesture that is free from the slightest hint of an emanation of a penumbra of white supremacy:
And then they came for the integers. The small social universe surrounding the syndicated game show Jeopardy has been boiling over for the past month because of a hand gesture made by a contestant, Kelly Donahue, at the outset of the April 27 episode. Donahue, returning to the show as a three-time winner, held up three fingers in a gesture of triumph and tapped his chest with them. He had done something similar on earlier episodes, flashing a “one” after his first win and a “two” after his second.
Needless to say, he had to be immediately chastised. A small number of conspiracy theorists felt his use of three fingers to represent three of something “resembled very closely a gesture that has been co-opted by white power groups, alt right groups and an anti-government group that calls itself the Three Percenters.”
That quote is taken from an indignant open letter signed by almost 600 members of a private Facebook group for former Jeopardy contestants, in which the signers demanded to know why Donahue’s heinous Nazi code, “whether intentional or not,” hadn’t been cut from the show before broadcast.
[…]
Smith’s column doesn’t actually get around to answering the question, although with a little legwork he was able to establish that the Facebook group had actually approached the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish grandparent of all anti-hate monitoring groups, for advice. The ADL told the addled ex-contestants, “Uh, it looks to us like the guy’s just making a three,” which led some in the internet cocoon to conclude they were being “gaslit.” Smith also talked to members of the Facebook group who knew that their fellow contestants were talking twaddle and fomenting harassment of an innocent man, but who were afraid to contradict the leaders of a witch hunt, lest the purifying fire be kindled beneath their own tootsies.
Smith does identify a crucial point in what is otherwise a workaday tale of cancel culture run mad. Former Jeopardy contestants, every last three-o-phobic one of them, are people selected specifically for high intelligence and wide knowledge. This didn’t make the signers of the letter any less obtuse, or any more resistant to a complicated conspiracy theory. It was their knowledge of disaggregated facts that made them susceptible in the first place.
May 17, 2021
An older BBC dramatization on the slave trade that seems to have gone down the memory hole
At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin wondered why the BBC hadn’t gotten around to showing a 1970s historical series through the year-and-more of the pandemic lockdowns. He doesn’t mention the name of the series, and an unusually unhelpful BBC site search didn’t turn up a name but IMDB suggests it was 1975 and the series was called The Fight Against Slavery:
Fifty years ago, the BBC screened a dramatised documentary series about the fight to abolish the slave trade. Even a year of the virus limiting new series, at a time of great BBC eagerness to talk about racism, has not made them screen it again.
– I see one reason why they have not: the series displayed sleazy white slave traders and abusive white slave owners prominently, but it also showed white people eager to end the slave trade and (much worse) black people eager to continue it. It included the king of Dahomey’s threat: “if you do not allow me to sell you my slaves, their fate will be a great deal worse” (a very brief scene of the Dahomey murder spectacle lent meaning to his remark). After abolition was voted, it showed a white slave trader assuring the Dahomans, as a drug dealer might his suppliers, “It is one thing for parliament to pass a law …”, hinting at the Royal Navy’s long and hard campaign to enforce it.
– Only recently did I spot another reason why they would not want to show it again – the scene in which a corrupt old white slave trader warns his young colleague that “it’s more than your life’s worth” to doubt the ability of their slave-selling hosts to count very accurately the quantity of trade goods being handed over in exchange, and to assess their quality knowledgeably. The traders well knew that Africans counted two plus two as four, just as they did. Any trader who imagined that black ability to add diverged enough from white to enable an attempt to short-change them had learned otherwise long before the 1780s.
– The southern Confederacy thought the same. Until its death throes, it forbade enlisting a southern black as a Confederate soldier because, as one Confederate senator put it, “If blacks can make good soldiers then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” (Perhaps also because even southern white Democrats realised that southern black desire to fight against blacks being freed was likely to be a very minority taste.) But there was one exception. Every regiment had its regimental band, which played to set the pace at the start and end of marches, used trumpets to signal commands in battle – and fought when other duties did not supervene. From its start to its end, Confederate law said any black could enlist as bandsman, with the same pay and perquisites as a white – a very rare example of formal legal equality. (Playing music requires the ability to count time. For the woke, “dismantling the legacy of the Confederacy” apparently includes dismantling its realisation – shared by the Victorian composer Dvorak – that blacks often excelled in music so much as to overcome prejudice against black ability. Today, it’s “racist” to value instrumental skill.)
“Politically correct” has meant “actually wrong” ever since the first commissar explained to the first party comrade that it was neither socialist nor prudent to notice a factual error in the party line. “Structurally racist” is PC’s modern companion. No longer are the woke content merely to imply (“mathematics is racist”, “punctuality is racist”, “politeness is racist”) that blacks can’t count, can’t tell the time and can only behave crudely. They’re starting to say it in words of fewer syllables.
If I’d scrolled down to the comments, I’d have discovered that Natalie Solent had also dug up the name of the series:
Natalie Solent (Essex)
May 10, 2021 at 4:30 pm
Outstanding post, Niall. Was the BBC series you mentioned “The Fight Against Slavery“, written and narrated by Evan Jones? I have not seen it – given that I was ten or eleven in 1975 my parents probably thought I was too young too see it.However someone called “InternetPilgrim” has put up three videos of the series on YouTube. There is a link to Part I here, Part II here and Part III here, so I will try to remedy that lack soon.
May 15, 2021
Baelin’s Route review, a discussion on why Viva La Dirt League’s Baelin’s Route is such a great story
Writers Block
Published 10 May 2021In this video we will discuss why Viva La Dirt League’s movie Baelin’s Route is such a masterpiece of story telling.
Viva La Dirt League — Baelin’s Route https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEe-Z…
May 13, 2021
QotD: Blogging
I’d say it’s a throwback to the old newspapers, the days when partisan slants covered everything from the play story to the radio listings, but this is different. The link changes everything. When someone derides or exalts a piece, the link lets you examine the thing itself without interference. TV can’t do that. Radio can’t do that. Newspapers and magazines don’t have the space. My time on the internet resembles eight hours at a coffee shop stocked with every periodical in the world — if someone says “I read something stupid” or “there was this wonderful piece in the Atlantic” then conversation stops while you read the piece and make up your own mind.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2002-10-10.
May 12, 2021
Critics are all conspiracy theorists says minister actively planning to regulate speech online
The Trudeau government has come a long, long way from those far-distant days when they were all about “openness” and “accountability” and especially about protecting free speech:
Last night, Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault posted a remarkable tweet that should heighten concerns about Bill C-10, forthcoming online harms legislation, and the government’s intent with respect to free speech. In the weeks since it opened the door to treating all user generated content as a “program” subject to CRTC regulation, there has been mounting public criticism and concern about the implications for free speech. While the tech companies have remained relatively silent, Canadians have been speaking out. Those voices now include the Government of Saskatchewan, with Minister of Justice Gord Wyant writing to Guilbeault to urge the federal government to stop Bill C-10 from proceeding or amend it to ensure that “all creative Internet content generated by Canadians will be exempt from any regulatory supervision by federal government agencies.”
Given the opposition – as well as Guilbeault’s well-documented disastrous interviews on CBC and CTV – one would have thought the Minister would be seeking to assuage public concern. Instead, Guilbeault took to Twitter last night to suggest that the public anger over Bill C-10 was a matter of “public opinion being manipulated at scale through a deliberate campaign of misinformation by commercial interests that would prefer to avoid the same regulatory oversight applied to broadcast media.”
Over the past few weeks of intense Bill C-10 debate, nothing has left me angrier or more concerned than this tweet. First, the conspiracy theory amplified by Guilbeault is plainly wrong and itself quite clearly misinformation. The concerns regarding the bill have been backed by law professors, experts, Justice Ministers, former CRTC chairs, and hundreds of others. To claim this is a tech-inspired misinformation campaign lends support to the view that Guilbeault still does not understand his own bill and its implications. Moreover, not only have the tech companies remained relatively quiet, but most did not even appear before the Heritage Committee as part of its study. To suggest that having largely ignored the bill, the companies are now engaged in some grand conspiracy is lunacy.
One of the fun notions of C-10 is having some sort of popularity cut-off for regulation to kick in … the more popular your online output becomes, the closer you’ll get to having one of Justin’s CRTC apparatchiks censoring your work:
Looking at a highly influential document among progressive groups
Matthew Yglesias on Tema Okun’s “The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture” and its role in furthering progressive emotions over what they consider to be the most racist society in human history (that is, the modern west but especially the United States):
Click to see full-size image.
Debating abstractions is difficult and frustrating, and the discourse about “wokeness” and “cancel culture” has become a snakepit of semantic debates, bad-faith actors, and people of goodwill talking past each other.
So I want to talk instead about one specific document, not because I think it’s the most important document in the world, but because I don’t really see anyone who I read and respect talking about it even though I’ve seen it arise multiple times in real life.
I’m talking about “The Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture” by Tema Okun, which I first heard of this year from the leader of a progressive nonprofit group whose mission I strongly support. He told me that some people on the staff had started wielding this document in internal disputes and it was causing big headaches. Once I had that on my radar, I heard about it from a couple of other nonprofit workers. And I saw it come up at the Parent Teacher Association for my kid’s school.
It’s an excerpt from a longer book called Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups that was developed as a tool for Okun’s consulting and training gigs.
But today, even though it’s not what I would call a particularly intellectually influential work in highbrow circles — even ones that are very “woke” or left-wing — it does seem to be incredibly widely circulated. You see it everywhere from the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence to the Sierra Club of Wisconsin to an organization of West Coast Quakers.
Which is to say it’s sloshing around quite broadly in progressive circles even though I’ve never heard a major writer, scholar, or political leader praise or recommend it. And to put it bluntly, it’s really dumb. In my more conspiratorial moments, I wonder if it’s not a psyop devised by some modern-day version of COINTELPRO to try to destroy progressive politics in the United States by making it impossible to run effective organizations. Even if not, I think the document is worth discussing on its own terms because it is broadly influential enough that if everyone actually agrees with me that it’s bad, we should stop citing it and object when other people do. And alternatively, if there are people who think it’s good, it would be nice to hear them say so, and then we could have a specific argument about that. But while I don’t think this document is exactly typical, I do think it’s emblematic of some broader, unfortunate cultural trends.
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
QotD: The true artist
Christopher Shinn, Twitter, 2018-10-04.
May 11, 2021
QotD: The (disappointing) sex lives of the rich and famous
Severian, “Junkies”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-18.
May 10, 2021
Baelin’s Route – An Epic NPC Man Adventure
Viva La Dirt League
Published 9 May 2021Baelin (Rowan Bettjeman), a simple background NPC in the video game Skycraft has been walking the same route for as long as he can remember. However, his peaceful (and mindless) routine is violently shaken as a short-tempered Adventurer (Ben Van Lier) drags him off his path and into a dangerous quest to escort a mysterious NPC girl named Willow (Phoenix Cross) across the harsh world of Azerim.
ORIGINAL ‘BAELIN’S ROUTE’ SOUNDTRACK: https://mikenewport.hearnow.com/
SUPPORT ON PATREON – http://bit.ly/VLDLpatreon
DISCORD – http://bit.ly/VLDLdiscord
TWITTER: http://bit.ly/VLDLtwitter
INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/VLDLinstagram———————————- TWITCH ——————————-
———————————– MERCH——————————–
Merchandise: bit.ly/VLDLmerch
Songs: http://bit.ly/VLDLmusic
From the comments:
Young Dad Gaming
36 minutes ago
Okay, I know people keep talking about how good the choreography is … and we need to discuss that a little further. That was almost a full minute of a single take of a fight scene from guys who make comedy videos. That in itself is impressive and should be lauded as one of the best action scenes on YouTube.
May 9, 2021
“The PMO and senior defence officials knew [about the sexual assault allegations]. For three years. … No one cared.”
The federal government collectively and individually (in the person of Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff) continues to do their vastly unconvincing Sergeant Schultz imitation, “I see nothing! I hear nothing! I know nothing!”
John Banner as Sergeant Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes, 1965.
CBS Television promotional photo via Wikimedia Commons.
We at The Line ended a long week staring agog and aghast at Katie Telford, the prime minister’s chief of staff, who was interviewed by members of the Standing Committee on National Defence over her knowledge (such as it was) of the sexual misconduct allegations made against now-retired Army general Jonathan Vance.
Vance, until recently the chief of the defence staff, the highest position in the Canadian Armed Forces, was accused of sexual misconduct by a female subordinate in 2018, but nothing came of it because, well, hey, Telford explained. Life is complicated. Right?
We don’t really have the emotional wherewithal to summarize the entire proceeding at length. Suffice it to say that nothing new was learned. Telford’s defence continues to be the same as the ones offered by other Liberal officials — they knew there was an allegation of some kind, but not what the allegation was. And they were clearly content to leave it that way for three years. The problem for Telford, of course, is that Global News already obtained documents showing internal emails among senior staff openly discussing “sexual harassment” allegations against Vance. We accept that Telford and other high mucky-mucks didn’t know the details of the allegations, but if they didn’t know that they were related to sexual misconduct, their ignorance was a product of a deliberate, sustained multi-year effort.
Our official opposition wasn’t exactly draping itself in glory either, alas, which might explain why they remain a distant second in the polls. The Tory MPs on the committee clearly had their battle plan, and they were sticking to it: they wanted to know why Telford hadn’t told the PM that there had been allegations of some kind against Gen. Vance, or who had made that decision, if not her. We know that they wanted to know this because they asked her this 50 or so fucking times. And each time she just declined to answer, offering up some word salad instead. Yet the Tory MPs just kept going in again and again, like infantry marching into machine-gun nests in one of the dumber battles of the First World War. We assume their strategy was to create memorable soundbite moments of Telford refusing to answer, or maybe trip her up into a gotcha. But the Tories spent so much time repeating the one question Telford had already made manifestly clear she was not gonna answer that they didn’t ask a way better question: what the hell are women in the armed forces supposed to react to the fact that their government knew that there were sexual misconduct allegations against Gen. Vance, and that they just sat around and waited for him to retire three years later?
Look, we weren’t born yesterday. If we were, we wouldn’t be as exhausted as we are. (Though probably roughly equally as frightened of sudden loud noises.) We know that there is a political desire for the CPC to link Trudeau himself to the scandal. But there was a bigger, more profound scandal laying right before their eyes — everyone in the PMO and the senior levels of National Defence knew there were unanswered questions about Gen. Vance and they were all A-fucking-OK with that. For years. The right questions to ask weren’t what Trudeau knew, and when, or who chose to tell (or not tell) him this, that or the other thing. The only relevant question is how these people could dare look any female member of the military, or any of their loved ones, in the eyes.
The PMO and senior defence officials knew. For three years. They didn’t know everything, but they knew enough to know they should know more. No one cared. So Gen. Vance stayed in command, and oversaw the military’s efforts to, uh, root out sexual misconduct and end impunity among high-ranked abusers.
That’s what the CPC should have been asking about, and that’s what Canadians should be angry about. But they didn’t, and we aren’t. And that’s why nothing’s gonna change.
