Quotulatiousness

April 24, 2019

Opponents claim Doug Ford is using booze liberalization as a distraction … if so, it’s working well

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley documents just how Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s opponents are unable to ignore the (personally teetotal) Ford’s alcohol-related proposals:

A peculiar affliction has broken out among Ontarians who think their relatively new government is devoting far too much time and attention to liberalizing alcohol laws: They can’t stop talking about it.

I don’t mean people with entirely fair public health concerns (though I think those concerns are pretty marginal, given the modest changes). And I don’t mean the pearl-clutching hordes who think allowing alcohol consumption in parks will lead to mayhem, no matter how civilized the results might demonstrably be elsewhere. (That peculiarly Ontarian crew has certainly made itself heard, though, and it seems to include a surprising number of progressive millennials.)

I mean people who didn’t have particularly strong views one way or the other about 9 a.m. mimosas, tailgate parties, drinking in parks or buying beer at the corner store, or might even have supported some legislative relaxation, but who now can’t stop railing against them even as they deplore the government’s actions on objectively more serious files.

[…]

On letters and op-ed pages, you’ll find the topic of booze popping up in all sorts of places it objectively doesn’t belong — not if one doesn’t want to be distracted, anyway. It seems to lead people down all sorts of strange blind alleys. One Toronto Star columnist noted that neither Premier Doug Ford nor Finance Minister Vic Fedeli will “touch a drop themselves,” but that “they are making it easier for you to access just in time for breakfast, happy hour, or a nightcap.” So what? Why would anyone want the premier’s or finance minister’s personal tastes and preferences influencing public policy?

Another Star columnist spent seven paragraphs sneering at the idea of tailgating in Ontario before declaring herself perfectly fine with the idea. “But,” she asked, “is tailgating what Ontario needs?” Is that the standard, then? Government shall only allow the masses such entertainments as they “need”?

Using booze as a “distraction” is not a new tactic. It became a running joke during Kathleen Wynne’s tenure that whenever things were going (especially) badly for her government, she would pop up to announce another batch of supermarkets authorized to sell beer and cider (and sometimes, though much more rarely, wine!).

April 23, 2019

David Warren’s musings on the Notre-Dame de Paris fire

Filed under: Architecture, France, Media, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

There have been other incidents since the fire, most pressingly the horrific bombing attacks on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka, but David Warren would still like us to remember what happened a week ago in Paris:

A week has passed since the fire in, or on, Notre Dame de Paris; let me be the last to comment on a story that is stale-dated by any meejah standard. It dominated international mindwaves for only two days, but left images that viewers may be able to recall many decades from now.

“The church is on fire,” is a commonplace thought, when a church is visibly on fire, and I who am commonplace was thinking that while turning to the news. As an old meejah hack, who happens to know a little about Gothic architecture, I was prepared to discount the “fake news” that would be disseminated in “live time.” For instance, when told that the roof had collapsed, with strong hints that the building was now a write-off, I reflected that the roof is a hat, only. Stone vaulting lies underneath it, except the circle much of the spire fell through (as burnt offering onto the altar). Stone doesn’t burn easily; and even fallen vaulting can be repaired, having been erected with technology we would consider primitive today.

A spectacle: to see the ancient oak timbers, of great girth, burning up like matchsticks. But the craft masons of Notre Dame — far, far in advance of our modern Lego builders — expected fire and lived in a time so simple that they knew oak doesn’t burn without help. It isn’t big matchsticks. The idea that you need some serious accelerants to make it burn, and that only the accelerants would flame like that, was among my initial thoughts. We’ll see what comes of investigations. I also recalled two recent attempts to torch the cathedral, associated with terrorism.

Instead, the explanation of a clumsy accident by restoration workers was immediately accepted by the talking heads, and even Fox News hung up on a guest who had another theory. In favour of the politically correct, plausible account, I learnt that a fire alarm had sounded 23 minutes before the blaze itself was spotted. Paradoxically, this showed the ruinous consequences of depending exclusively on modern technology: the computers directed the first responders to the wrong place, away from the actual heat source.

I can easily believe in electrical short circuits as a fire hazard, especially since having had myself to flee a building where a cost-cutting landlord was having an elevator repaired by what I characterized as “a Romanian comedy team.” (They buzz-sawed through a live electrical cable, then themselves fled the scene of their handiwork as smoke shot up the shaft through the building. Luckily this smoke warned all tenants to evacuate; the building’s siren alone would have been taken by everyone as yet another false alarm.)

April 20, 2019

The damage to (and the PR spin about) Notre-Dame de Paris

Filed under: France, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Never Yet Melted, some quick analysis from Matthew Keogh (posted originally to Facebook) are quoted on the carefully curated public information made available about Notre-Dame de Paris, even while firefighters were still busy trying to contain the blaze:

Notre Dame Cathedral Fire, a few facts you should know courtesy of the mainstream media:

1. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown.

2. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown, but it has been ruled an accident (despite the fact that the exact cause of the blaze is still unknown).

3. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown, but Islam is the real victim here.

4. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown which means the damage has not been thoroughly assessed, but it’s not arson.

5. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown which means the damage has not been thoroughly assessed, but Macron is setting up an international appeal for funding to rebuild despite not knowing how much is needed because the damage has not been thoroughly assessed.

This is the sort of information you get when journalists are in bed with the politicians.

QotD: They used to be called the Jet Set, but now they’re the Transnational Elite

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… there is a certain level of pride that attaches to being ignorant of those one considers his inferiors. After all, it’s the natural duty of the simple shopkeeper to know the names of the Great Lords, but it is not the duty of the Great Lords to know the names of the shopkeepers. In fact, it’s the Great Lords’ class obligation to go out of their way not to know the names of the shopkeepers, because this Duty to Know flows in one direction — upwards — and hence ignorance of one’s lessers tends to solidify and reify the assumptions of certain castes being superior to others. It makes certain that everyone understands who’s important, and who’s not.

(I know, I sound like a communist — I can’t help it. I have to agree with Dennis the Peasant — “I mean, class is what it’s all about.” I guess I would say I’m agreeing with the communist critique of the rigid reification of class structures, but I happen to think the communists and their pink fellow travelers have largely captured the upper classes. I guess by my theory they’re so good at this because they’ve spent so long plotting vengeance for the exact same slights (which they largely imagined). In a similar way they’ve gotten quite good at blacklisting and guilt-by-association, eh?)

At any rate, it is your duty to know the values and customs of living of Piers Morgan, but due to his high station (ahem) he is proudly ignorant of yours. As is so often the case in our increasingly dysfunctional and nasty politics — in which certain parties refuse to even admit that their opponents are free citizens entitled to have beliefs at all — the Out-Classes are deemed all-but-officially Beneath Notice.

Michael Totten has written a crackerjack piece — or at least I think it is — about this principle in action among our foreign policy sages, the internationalist “elite.” He detects the exact same sort of phenomenon going on when the International “elite” visit foreign nations — because anyone who doesn’t share 90% of their cultural values (and the wealth that permits/encourages these values — the International Elite is not middle-class!) is beneath notice and not worth knowing about, they don’t bother asking anyone but the 3% of the population which largely shares their beliefs and cultural inputs about their intentions and their political agenda.

Which means, in Egypt, they only ask the jet-setting wealthy Westernized elite about the prognosis for Egyptian democracy. And in Lebanon, they only ask the educated, urbane population of Beirut about their desires for the country.

And they ignore all the “Dirty People,” the low people who aren’t worth networking with and probably wouldn’t be any fun to have a sexual affair with. Unfortunately — and this has huge consequences for American foreign policy — it turns out those Dirty Poor People greatly, greatly outnumber the small coteries of educated elites that cluster in every capital country.

And we don’t know about them, because they’re Beneath Notice, and our elites are too busy clinking champagne glasses in the main ballroom of the local Ritz-Carlton franchise.

And so our “elites” — and honestly, we need to start looking for a more accurate discriptor — come back with completely-wrong information about foreign countries.

Why, as Totten says (changing the words a bit), “All of these Egyptians are swell, educated, moderate, sexually-loose cosmopolitans! Why, democracy has a smashing chance of working out here!”

Yeah, not so much. Not so much.

Ace, “The Unburstable Bubble of Willful Ignorance of the International Self-Purported Elites”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2013-01-09.

April 19, 2019

“The Proms” may include hip-hop and break-dancing in future seasons

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The BBC is eager to destroy as much as it can of British tradition, and introducing hip-hop into the Proms is a great way of furthering that goal, as Kim du Toit expostulates wildly (and for the record, I agree with him):

FFS, we don’t need more exposure to modern music — it assails our ears in shops, restaurants, malls, from passing teenagers’ inadequate headphones as they walk by us in the street, and from stereo speakers more valuable than the cars which encase them as they stand next to us at the traffic light. And it is not repeat NOT “part of the classical world”, unless your idea of “classical” includes lyrics which refer to women as bitches and whores in every other line, and four times during the chorus. It’s fucking jungle music — all beat and little melody — and if someone takes offense at the word “jungle”, I invite you to visit any part of the African wilderness and listen to the kind of music that is performed there, and explain to me the difference. And now this swill is going to be featured at the Proms… and isn’t that special?

What the Proms used to give the public was exposure to some of the greatest music ever created, music of exquisite beauty, unparalleled technical expertise and sophistication born of an unmatched cultural heritage — and boy, are we ever in need of more of that, these days. Instead, we’re going to hear “songs” from some asswipe called N’Jiggy featuring overpowering bass, over-loud drums and underwhelming artistic value other than (you heard it here first) a few “sampled” fragments of Beethoven’s Ninth scatted around like diamonds in a pigsty.

“Saboteurs” – Norwegian Heavy Water Sabotage – Sabaton History 011

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published on 18 Apr 2019

As the scientific masterminds of the early 1940’s discover the destructive capabilities of splitting atoms, some of them try to weaponise it. One special product is important in the creation of such a weapon: heavy water. The Norwegians have a plant that produces heavy water at Vemork. The Allies, desperate to slow down the German progress towards the development of a nuclear weapon, decide to sabotage it. The Sabaton song “Saboteurs” from the Coat Of Arms album is about the dangerous mission that is conducted by the British and Norwegians in the winter of 1940 to sabotage the Norwegian Heavy Water production for the Nazis.

Support Sabaton History on Patreon (and possibly get a special edition of The Great War): https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album ‘The Great War’ right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…

Watch more videos on the Sabaton YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Sabaton?…
Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShop

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Maps by: Eastory
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski

Eastory YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

QotD: The revolution will be YouTubed, which might snuff it out before it gets underway

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I think that a number of factors will ultimately tamp it down [campus protests/riots]. The ability of people to record videos of police has been a tremendous spur to calls for reform. But police are not the only people who can be filmed in public; so can protesters. I suspect that as people discover what can happen when future employers google up videos of you shouting “[expletive deleted] the police” or screaming at professors and speakers, the costs of this sort of protest will rise, and there will be less of it. Moreover, I suspect that both alumni and state funding for schools where this sort of thing happens a lot will often decline, putting pressure on administrators to curb it.

Megan McArdle, “Ask Me Anything”, Reddit, 2017-04-10.

April 18, 2019

Shakespeare’s work is merely used to highlight the brilliance and originality of modern theatrical directors

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Anthony Daniels reports for Quadrant Online of how he recently attended a performance of a play by some unimportant dead English white guy:

The precise date of the discovery by theatre directors that they are greater than Shakespeare cannot be specified: the discovery was more a process than an event. But by the time I saw a production of Richard II at the Almeida Theatre a few weeks ago, the superior genius of any director over that of Shakespeare was an established principle and indisputable fact.

[…]

But if I had an elevated conception of Shakespeare, how naive and mistaken I was! I knew nothing of Richard II — the play, that is, not the king — until I saw the production by Joe Hill-Gibbins. How narrow had been my previous conception of it! I discovered, among other things, that Richard was a short, fat fifty-eight-year-old in a black T-shirt, with a crown of the kind that is awarded to the person who finds the fève in the galette des rois that the French eat on the sixth of January, that the Duke of Norfolk was a woman dressed like a cleaning lady, and that all the action of the play takes place in what looks like a large biscuit tin, without exit or entrance. All this, of course, means something far deeper than anything that a mere Shakespeare could convey, being deeply symbolic, and therefore required real inventive genius on the part of the director to bring forth.

While the same actress took the parts of the Duke of Norfolk, Bushy and Green (all of them looking like cleaning ladies and each indistinguishable from the other because they could not leave the stage even to change costume), and the parts of both the Earl of Northumberland and the Bishop of Carlisle by other actresses, actual women’s roles such as that of Richard’s Queen were expunged entirely from the text. Between them, three actresses played five male parts and only one female. There is a profound lesson in this somewhere, no doubt in enlightened gender fluidity.

Most of the lines were delivered as if they were a religious incantation in a dead language that both the celebrants and the congregation desired to get over with as quickly as possible, clear diction being one of the many tools by which class hegemony is so unjustly exercised. The actor who took the part of Richard, it is true, was comprehensible, but made the acting of Sir Henry Irving appear taciturn by comparison. If emphasis is good, overemphasis must be better: no more stiff upper lip, we are all hysterics now, and can understand nothing that is not accompanied by gesticulation.

The director fortunately realised that Shakespeare got the order of his play wrong: Richard’s great speech in Act V scene 5 (“I have been studying how I may compare / This prison unto the world …”) was actually a prologue. The director is not the interpreter of Shakespeare, but rather Shakespeare is, and ought to be, the occasion, the opportunity, for the director to place his own immortal (and highly original) genius before the world.

April 15, 2019

QotD: De Gaulle and the BBC

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Media, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Above all he loved France, or the idea of it. He saw in the defeat of 1940 a danger that his country would simply disappear, having failed to defend itself and having fled from the battle without properly drawing its sword. This was not a foolish fear. Great civilizations can and do vanish, and one of the best ways of doing so is to abandon the struggle to survive.

He must have greatly resented the fact that he owed so much to Britain. He was intelligent enough to know that Britain, a country few Frenchmen can ever fully trust, was his best hope and only refuge. He understood, as many French patriots could not, that the terrible attack on the French fleet by the British Navy at ­Mers-el-­Kébir in 1940 was in fact necessary, in case its great ships fell into the hands of the Germans. He would have done the same himself had the position been reversed, and he knew it. It was this generosity of mind that made him great. But how he must have loathed being dependent on the British Broadcasting Corporation for his access to the French people. For it was the BBC that made him. Until he finally appeared for the tumultuous, ecstatic liberation of Paris in 1944, he was only a voice, heard fleetingly on illegal broadcasts. Almost nobody in France had the faintest idea what he looked like. But all had a certain idea of de Gaulle, the spirit of France that refused to surrender. And when they finally saw this towering, ­fearless figure walking calmly down the Champs-Élysées amid the snipers’ bullets, he did not disappoint them. He was, it turned out, a giant so tall that one could imagine ice forming on his upper slopes when—as so often ­happened—he was annoyed or impatient with his people. His great height set him apart from the ­beginning. He once complained, “We ­giants are never at ease with others … the armchairs are always too small, the tables too low, the impression one makes too strong.”

Peter Hitchens, “A Certain Idea of France”, First Things, 2019-04.

April 14, 2019

QotD: Sun Tzu isn’t your life coach and Confucius never said that

Filed under: Books, China, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Popular uses of East Asian philosophies often tend this way: toward making the circumscribed expansive, toward making small wisdoms carry water for all the wisdom. This is how the ancient military theorist Sun Tzu might end up guiding your retirement savings, coaching your kid’s football team, improving your marriage, or even raising your kids. Sun Tzu’s Art of War has been leveraged into self-help advice on all of these subjects and more. Superficially, and also for trained scholars of early Chinese military history, it might seem that Sun Tzu is in fact only really interested in managing violent conflict well. But at a deeper level – which is to say, at the level of what might be marketed to gullible Western consumers – he is actually addressing all of life’s mysteries. What reads like straightforward instruction on wartime espionage might yet have something to teach us about our children. To access this deeper meaning, we need to assume that ‘oriental’ wisdom is never about this or that, but always about everything. And importantly, at root, it is reassuring.

Worse than the bizarre uses of Sun Tzu are the seemingly endless heartwarming and encouraging things that Confucius is claimed to have said. Blandly inspirational Confucius memes are now so numerous and so detached from reality that they have spawned a meta-meme, one that reads: ‘Confucius: I never said all that shit.’ Most of the memes detailing what Confucius ‘said’ say little that is compelling or even mildly interesting. But that is exactly why it’s so important to append ‘Confucius said’ to them. Without this addendum, bracing us to receive a bit of ‘Eastern wisdom’, we might believe them to be yet more dull mini-homilies. Which, to be clear, they are. Poor old Confucius features in these memes as a mystical oriental kitten, telling us all to hang in there!

Amy Olberding, “Tidying up is not joyful but another misuse of Eastern ideas”, Aeon, 2019-02-18.

April 12, 2019

Fields of Verdun – The Battle of Verdun – Sabaton History 010

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Media, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Sabaton History
Published on 11 Apr 2019

One of the bloodiest battles in the history of humankind was fought out on the hills in Northern France. Verdun was a tactical and symbolical city with great value to France. In 1916, the German army launched a massive attack, accompanied by a tremendous artillery bombardment, upon which the French defenders put their foot down, stating that “on ne passe pas!” — they shall not pass.

Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album The Great War on which “Fields of Verdun” will be featured right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1-JsD0M

Support Sabaton History on Patreon (and possibly get a special edition of ‘The Great War): https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShop

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Maps by: Eastory
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski

© IWM (Q 56546), (Q 23760), (Q 23892), (Q 69971), (Q 87751), Q 87757), (Q 23878).
Battle Of Verdun, Uploaded by RV1864 on Flickr.

Eastory YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

From the comments:

Sabaton History
1 day ago (edited)
Last week we announced our upcoming album The Great War which will release on July 19 this year. This week, we’re covering a song from that album. “Fields of Verdun” is about the Battle of Verdun 1916 and will be featured on the new album. Since Indy hosted “The Great War” for over four years, the episode is very personal for everyone involved. Thank you all very much for your support and positive reactions to the trailer release. Haven’t seen the trailer? You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1-JsD0M

Cheers and Rock on!!

April 11, 2019

QotD: How to improve David Lynch’s Dune

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Dune (1982) is a Lawrence of Arabia pastiche with a mad bucket of half-baked science fiction tropes bolted onto it. It includes so much extraneous, confusing detail from the novel’s world, but when you think of all the things it omits you really get a good sense of why Lynch (or anyone?) could not form it in 2 or 3-hours.

I think there are two things that could be done to fix it. Firstly, remove all the speaking and turn the whole thing into a hallucinatory Lynchean nightmare, perhaps to be accompanied by Brian Eno’s mythic 45-minute album of Dune music. […]

Secondly, use Lynch’s movie as the basis for a full-length animated TV miniseries by rotoscoping it and bringing back the original actors for several hours or so of newly-animated scenes.

Rob Beschizza, “Sorry, David Lynch’s Dune sucks (or does it?)”, Boing Boing, 2017-04-21.

April 7, 2019

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and the murders at the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey

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

I was too young to know anything about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter except what I “learned” from listening to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” long after the events. In Quillette, Lona Manning recounts the story, which doesn’t agree with Dylan’s interpretation (but Dylan was far from the only journalist or celebrity to be fooled):

How many people who followed the BBC Radio 4 podcast series about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter were startled — or even outraged — when Carter was not triumphantly vindicated in the final episode?

In the small hours of June 17, 1966, two black men walked into a late-night Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey and opened fire on the occupants. They left bartender James Oliver and patron Fred Nauyoks dead at the scene and mortally wounded a woman named Hazel Tanis, who would succumb to her injuries a month later. Another customer named Willie Marins lost an eye in the shooting but survived. Neighbors Patty Valentine and Ronald Ruggiero told police that they had seen two black males flee the scene in a white vehicle. This testimony was corroborated by petty thief Alfred Bello who walked past the dead and the dying to empty the cash register after the shooters had fled.

Half an hour later, Paterson police stopped middleweight boxer Rubin Carter and his companion John Artis in a car bearing out-of-state plates that matched the eyewitnesses’ description. A search of the car yielded a .32 and a 12 gauge shotgun, the weapons police later determined had been used in the shooting. Carter and Artis were eventually indicted by a grand jury and convicted of the Lafayette murders in 1967. Carter vehemently protested his innocence and his case became a cause célèbre after his 1975 autobiography found its way into the hands of Bob Dylan. Carter was retried in 1976, after the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the first conviction had been unsafe. Despite support from Dylan, Muhammad Ali and the New York Times, the two were convicted again. John Artis was paroled in 1981, and Carter was finally released in 1985 after the second conviction was overturned and prosecutors declined to try him a third time.

Sports reporters Joel Hammer and Steve Crossman spent 18 months researching and reinvestigating the case and promised listeners of the BBC’s podcast that they would provide the “full” and “true” story. Their in-depth look at the crime provides far more detail about the murders than can be gleaned from Bob Dylan’s 1975 protest song or the hagiographic 1999 Norman Jewison film starring Denzel Washington. Dylan accused the prosecution team of framing Carter for the slayings and called them “criminals in their coats and their ties” who were “free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.” Crossman and Hammer are likewise very critical of the prosecution; for example, they think that Alfred Bello should never have been allowed to testify. How could the life of such a man, be in the palm of some fool’s hand? And they argue that the prosecution ignored — or perhaps even suppressed — an investigation into a very plausible suspect, Eddie Rawls (who is now deceased). But they stop short of calling it a frame-up and an attempt at judicial murder.

On the other hand, Crossman and Hammer think the “racial revenge motive” was a reasonable one. The very first newspaper accounts of the slaughter at the Lafayette Grill included the speculation that the murders were committed in revenge for the slaying, earlier that night, of black bartender Roy Holloway and this would also be the prosecution’s contention. That Crossman and Hammer now accept the plausibility of this theory is a significant concession to the prosecution’s version of events, not least because it was Judge Lee Sarokin’s rejection of this motive which led him to overturn the second conviction—the prosecution’s case, he ruled, had been based on “racism rather than reason.”

Coincidentally, on the front page of the East Bergen Record, under the murder story, there was a wire service article about Stokely Carmichael proclaiming “Black Power” at a rally in Mississippi, an event which marked the transition from the peaceful civil rights tactics of Dr. Martin Luther King to the radical activism of the Black Panthers. These two articles encapsulated all the elements of the Lafayette Grill case that continue to be debated over 50 years later. Why did someone walk into a working-class bar and slaughter the occupants? Was the black community in Paterson in a ferment that night because a white man blew off Holloway’s head with a shotgun? And what, if anything, did this have to do with the state of race relations in America at the time?

QotD: Good writers and bad

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Thinking about it, what often makes a writer good, is that they avoid the things that all bad writers seem to share. In this sense, “good” is not a state in itself, but simply not being in the state we call “bad.” A great wordsmith is further away from the state of bad writing than someone who is just an average writer. That average writer can appear to be much better, by offering keen insights and clever observations. The path to becoming a good writer, therefore, starts with avoiding the things that define a bad writer.

The most common trait of bad writers, it seems, is they write about themselves. Unless you are an international man of mystery, you’re not that interesting. No one is. Bad writers, always seem to think they are the most interesting people they know. This is what made former President Obama such a boring speaker. No matter the subject, his speech was going to be a meditation on his thoughts and feelings about the subject. It became a game of sorts to count how many times he referenced himself in a speech.

That’s the hallmark of bad writing. Instead of focusing on the subject, the writer focuses on himself, which suggests he does not know the material. Even when relating an experience or conversation, the good writer makes himself a secondary character in the story, not the focus. Bad writers are always the hero of everything they write, as if they are trying to convince the reader of something about themselves. Good writers avoid this and focus on the subject of their writing.

The Z Man, “How To Be A Bad Writer”, The Z Blog, 2019-03-03.

April 5, 2019

The Carolean’s Prayer – Soldiers of the Swedish Kings – Sabaton History 009

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Sabaton History
Published on 4 Apr 2019

The Swedish Kings had to rely on the quality of their armies, often facing foes that had superior numbers. A special soldier class was created. Admired in Sweden and feared on the battlefield, the Caroleans were the secret weapon of the Swedish army. The Sabaton song “The Carolean’s Prayer” is about these remarkable soldiers and their heroic status.

Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album The Great War right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…

Support Sabaton History on Patreon (and possibly get a special edition of The Great War): https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShop

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Maps by: Eastory
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski

Eastory YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

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