I recently came across an article about Sigmund Freud’s theory of female psycho-sexual development, in which Taylor Kubota described penis envy as follows: “Women become envious of penises at a young age, when they realize boys derive more sexual pleasure from their penises than girls do from their own sexual organs. Freud said this penis envy grows over time.” This idea, which I had long disregarded and which didn’t correspond to my own experience (as a child I never saw or thought of boys’ penises; as a young woman I had no sense of lack) makes sense now in light of feminism’s decades-long attack on male sexuality. The attack is based, as feminists’ own words and policies indicate, on a febrile mix of resentment, envy, and projection in which the belief that men enjoy sex more than women (and that the enjoyment hurts women, in the typical zero-sum thinking of feminism) has fueled ever-more frenzied attempts at male neutering.
Serious psychotherapists or students of Freud should probably stop reading right now, as I am not attempting a genuine psychoanalytic analysis of feminism or indeed of penis envy, which has been widely dismissed as sexist or justified as women’s accurate recognition of men’s power. My theory — if it deserves that name — stems from the recognition that anti-sex feminism, involving the continual projection onto men of female sexual anxieties and discontents, has a far more extensive pedigree than most people realize, and that much feminist discussion and activism today take for granted that law and public policy are rightly directed towards “equalizing” not only rights or opportunities but also sexual experience itself, by prioritizing female pleasure and diminishing male.
It’s no revelation that many feminist-influenced women are hyper-alert to male advantage while being willfully blind to male disadvantage. In the arena of sexuality, where male and female most intimately and yet mysteriously interact, the irrational ferocity of feminist grievance-mongering reveals itself tellingly. Unwilling and unable to extend sympathetic understanding to male sexual difference, feminist ideology authorizes an envy-fueled anger that far surpasses legitimate caution.
A word about that legitimate caution. Throughout history, well-functioning societies have recognized the threat to civil order — and to women’s safety in particular — of male lust, and have passed laws and constructed codes of behavior to contain and direct it. Fathers and husbands have always been interested in protecting their womenfolk from sexual violence. Feminists, however, while exalting female sexuality as benign and beautiful, have repeatedly refused to recognize any manifestation of male sexuality as good. A mere glance at prominent feminist claims and policy initiatives highlights their continual misrepresentations.
Janice Fiamengo, “Do Feminists Suffer From Penis Envy?”, The Fiamengo File, 2023-03-26.
June 28, 2023
QotD: Freud and modern Feminism
June 27, 2023
QotD: Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, and the ANC
The impression Johnson gives is very much that of a man in way over his head, and when Mandela did try to assert himself, the results were usually buffoonish:
He declared that the solution to continuing violence in KwaZulu-Natal was for everyone to join the ANC … In 1995 he told a May Day rally that if the IFP continued to resist the ANC he would cut off all funding to KwaZulu-Natal, the most populous province. This was a completely unconstitutional threat which had to be quickly retracted. Similarly, when he dismissed Winnie from government he failed to read the constitution and thus had to reappoint her and later dismiss her again. Visiting Tanzania, he announced that: “We are going to sideline and even crush all dissident forces in our country.”
Mandela also made a lot of genuinely very big-hearted speeches pitching a “rainbow nation” vision of South Africa and begging whites not to flee the country, but every time the interests of justice conflicted with those of the ANC, he showed himself to be a party man first and foremost. The most revolting examples of this are two incidents in which independent prosecutors were investigating ANC atrocities (in one case a massacre of dozens of protestors, the other case an incident where some Zulus were kept in a cage inside a local ANC party HQ and tortured for months), and Mandela staked the full power of his moral authority on blocking the inquiries. In the case of the massacre, Mandela went so far as to declare that he had ordered the gunmen to shoot, which everybody knew to be a lie, but which meant that any attempt to pursue the coverup would mean taking down Mandela too. Nobody had the stomach to face that prospect, so the prosecutors dropped the case.
If Mandela was a figurehead, then who was really in charge? The answer is the main character of this book: Thabo Mbeki, the deputy president. Mbeki is a villain of almost Shakespearean proportions — paranoid, controlling, obsessive, bad with crowds yet charming in person. Even before Mandela was out of prison, he was already angling for the number two spot, shaping the narrative, quietly interposing himself between the charismatic Nobel peace prize winner and the true levers of power.
This was bad news for South Africa, because in contrast to Mandela’s “rainbow nation” optimism, Mbeki was a committed black nationalist who immediately set about purging whites from the government and looting white wealth, with little regard for whether this might kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Johnson ascribes a psychological motivation to all this, asserting that Mbeki suffered from a crushing inferiority complex vis-a-vis the white elites, and quoting several truly bizarre and unhinged public speeches in support of his diagnosis. A more prosaic explanation would just be that like many tyrants in the making, Mbeki sought to create and elevate “new men”, men who owed him everything and whose loyalty could thereby be assured.
Whatever the case, Mbeki quickly began to insist that South Africa’s military, corporations, and government agencies bring their racial proportions into exact alignment with the demographic breakdown of the country as a whole. But as Johnson points out, this kind of affirmative action has very different effects in a country like South Africa where 75% of the population is eligible than it does in a country like the United States where only 13% of the population gets a boost. Crudely, an organization can cope with a small percentage of its staff being underqualified, or even dead weight. Sinecures are found for these people, roles where they look important but can’t do too much harm. The overall drag on efficiency is manageable, especially if every other company is working under the same constraints.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: South Africa’s Brave New World, by R.W. Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-03-20.
June 26, 2023
QotD: The danger to mental health in a functioning meritocracy
The illusion that one would have been a success but for malevolent circumstance is a very necessary one for a lot of people, for there is no more pitiless or cruel a world than a pure and perfectly functioning meritocracy. Such an arrangement would confront everyone, or at least almost everyone, with his own mediocrity, for the mediocre are by definition in the majority. And who is not mediocre by comparison with Mozart? In a pure meritocracy, everyone would find his true, utterly deserved level; but it is a mere prejudice that if there were justice in the world, everyone would be better off. In a pure meritocracy, there would be no paranoid defense against one’s own nullity — one could blame only oneself for it and no one else. That is why the concept of equality of opportunity, besides implying a kind of Brave New World world, is so deeply vicious, and why so many people who promote it are obviously hate-filled. They do not want to serve humanity but torture it.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Grand Illusion”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-08-19.
June 25, 2023
QotD: We won’t be seeing any rebooted TV shows from the 1990s
Thirty years on, we can only dream of a government competent enough to cover up contact with extraterrestrials. As someone remarked at Z Man’s the other day, our government is now so retarded, Eric Swalwell — a high-ranking member of the House intelligence committee and putative presidential candidate — couldn’t successfully bone a hooker. Sorry, gang, the aliens won’t be stopping by; they only want to make contact with intelligent life.
Severian, “Random Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-17.
June 24, 2023
QotD: The plight of miners in pre-industrial societies
In the ancient Mediterranean, the clear testimony of the sources is that mining was a low-status occupation, one for enslaved people, criminals and the truly desperate. Being “sent to the mines” is presented, alongside being sent to work in the mills, as a standard terrible punishment for enslaved people who didn’t obey their owners and it is fairly clear in many cases that being sent to the mines was effectively a delayed death sentence. Diodorus Siculus describes mining labor in the gold mines of Egypt this way, in a passage that is fairly representative of the ancient sources on mining labor more generally (3.13.3, trans Oldfather (1935)):
For no leniency or respite of any kind is given to any man who is sick, or maimed, or aged, or in the case of a woman for her weakness, but all without exception are compelled by blows to persevere in their labours, until through ill-treatment they die in the midst of their tortures. Consequently the poor unfortunates believe, because their punishment is so excessively severe, that the future will always be more terrible than the present and therefore look forward to death as more to be desired than life.
It is clear that conditions in Greek and Roman mines were not much better. Examples of chains and fetters – and sometimes human remains still so chained – occur in numerous Greek and Roman mines. Unfortunately our sources are mostly concerned with precious metal mines and those mines also seem to have been the worst sorts of mines to work in, since the long underground shafts and galleries exposed the miners to greater dangers from bad air to mine-collapses. That said, it is hard to imagine working an open-pit iron mine by hand, while perhaps somewhat safer, was any less back-breaking, miserable toil, even if it might have been marginally safer.
Conditions were not always so bad though, particularly for free miners (being paid a wage) who tended to be treated better, especially where their labor was sorely needed. For instance, a set of rules for the Roman mines at Vipasca, Spain provided for contractors to supply various amenities, including public baths maintained year-round. The labor force at Vipasca was clearly free and these amenities seem to have been a concession to the need to make the life of the workers livable in order to get a sufficient number of them in a relatively sparsely populated part of Spain.
The conditions for miners in medieval Europe seems to have been somewhat better. We see mining communities often setting up their own institutions and occasionally even having their own guilds (for instance, there was a coal-workers guild in Liege in the 13th century) or internal regulations. These mining communities, which in large mining operations might become small towns in their own right, seem to have often had some degree of legal privileges when compared to the general rural population (though it should be noted that, as the mines were typically owned by the local lord or state, exemption from taxes was essentially illusory as the lord or king’s cut of the mine’s profits was the taxes). It does seem notable that while conditions in medieval mines were never quite so bad as those in the ancient world, the rapid expansion of mining activity beginning in the 15th century seems to have coincided with a loss of the special status and privileges of earlier medieval European miners and the status associated with the labor declined back down to effectively the bottom of the social spectrum.
(That said, it seems necessary to note that precious metal-mining done by non-free Native American laborers at the order of European colonial states appears to have been every bit as cruel and deadly as mining in the ancient world.)
Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.
June 23, 2023
QotD: Children and fire
Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, 2015.
June 22, 2023
QotD: Nuclear non-proliferation and the Russo-Ukraine war
As one of Shute’s characters, a scientist, explained, “The trouble is, the damn things got too cheap. The original uranium bomb cost about fifty thousand quid towards the end. Every little pipsqueak country like Albania had a stockpile of them, and every little country that had that, thought it could defeat the major countries in a surprise attack”. Significantly, Shute’s future war, set in 1963, wasn’t triggered by the usual NATO-Warsaw Pact arsenals of nuclear weapons, but the proliferation of them elsewhere. Then, as now, it is not Russian or Chinese aggression that should worry those with nightmares of nuclear cataclysm, but that of other countries. Thanks to the NPT, IAEA and the UN, these possibilities are contained. Today, the world’s weapons of mass destruction stand at one tenth of their number during the Cold War.
Indeed, the very origins of the current Ukraine crisis illustrate how the international order has managed to contain potential proliferation. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, Ukraine possessed the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, greater than those of Britain, France and China combined. Kyiv soon realised it couldn’t afford to maintain the warheads and remain a credible nuclear military power. A solution was found, whereby the weapons would be destroyed, but only in exchange for security assurances that the United States and Russia would respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.
What Ukraine signed on 5 December 1994 was the Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances, in which Bill Clinton for the United States, Boris Yeltsin for Russia and John Major for Great Britain promised to protect Ukraine and its territorial integrity in recognition of Kyiv surrendering the protection of its nuclear arsenal. There was no mention of military guarantees, which Ukraine assumed were implied. Additionally, Kyiv promised to adhere to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
After the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, the G7 nations complained that Russia had breached the Budapest Memorandum. Vladimir Putin replied evasively that since, in his view, a new regime had seized power from Ukraine’s previously pro-Moscow premier Viktor Yanukovych, “Russia has not signed any obligatory documents with this new state”. Since then, Russia has lied and prevaricated over its betrayal of Budapest. In 2016, Sergey Lavrov went so far as to claim, “Russia never violated Budapest memorandum. It contained only one obligation, not to attack Ukraine with nukes” — a gross distortion of the Memorandum’s many obligations.
However, the West responded in 2014 only with mild economic sanctions. Arguably, the apathy of the anti-interventionist Barack Obama and David Cameron, influenced by a London awash with Russian money, emboldened Vladimir Putin. Few experts disagree that had the West responded in 2014 as they did in 2022, Russia’s expansionist ambitions into Ukraine would have ended long ago. Yet, there is plenty of room for optimism. The Russo-Ukraine conflict has not spread because of the international order and its treaties. Apart from North Korea and Iran, neither of whom have quite perfected their devilish devices, nuclear proliferation of third parties has been held in check.
The Kremlin shows no sign of taking steps to escalate to a nuclear level. It is not in its interests, or those of its allies, to do so. None of the 32 nations who recently abstained from condemning Russia in the 24 February UN vote would welcome Vladimir Putin and his cronies flinging nukes around. The qualified support of major powers like China, India and Pakistan is attached to the cheap oil and arms procurements they have negotiated with Moscow. Any hint of Tsar Vladimir “going nuclear” would see their abstentions morph into support for the West. Putin, for all his rhetoric, cannot afford to go it alone with just the six who voted with him at the UN. In military terms, they offer nothing.
The world’s various international arms treaties provide plenty of optimism that this will remain a regional war. So far, Putin’s threats have melted away as the morning mist. The scenario he implies, akin that in On the Beach and other nuclear-war-scare novels and films, is so unlikely as to be discounted. They and all the rest of the post-apocalyptic genre are written as nail-biting entertainment, not history or current affairs.
Peter Caddick-Adams, “Putin, Shute and nukes”, The Critic, 2023-03-09.
June 21, 2023
QotD: Working online
[…]
For lots of people, the office was their only social outlet. Coffee breaks, water cooler chatter, happy hours … for lots of people, that was pretty much it, socially. “Work/life balance” was always a joke, because all your friends are work friends, so even if you’re “socializing” and not “working”, it’s with the same people from the office, talking about office stuff. And the longer you stayed in the same job, the higher up the corporate ladder you got, the more specialized your position, the worse it got – your rookie customer service reps still had buddies from college to hang out with, but junior managers tended to hang out exclusively with other junior managers, etc. The “professions”, of course, are famously clannish — the only ways to talk to a lawyer or doctor are to hire one, or be one.
Severian, “More Scattered Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-13.
June 20, 2023
QotD: When kings and emperors become gods
Divine rulership was not universal however – it was subject to cultural context. In Egypt, the Pharaoh was the Living Horus, a physical incarnation of the divine; when he died he became Osiris, the ruler over the underworld. The mystery of the duality whereby a Pharaoh was both a specific person (and might be a different person in the future) but also the same god each time seems to owe something to the multipart Egyptian conception of the soul. Naram-Sin, an Akkadian King (2254-2218 B.C.) represents himself as divine (shown by his having horns) on his victory stele; future kings of Akkad followed suit in claiming a form of divinity, albeit a lesser one than the big-time great gods.
But in Mesopotamia, the rulers of Akkad were the exception; other Mesopotamian kings (Sumerian, Babylonian, etc) did not claim to be gods – even very great kings (at least while alive – declaring a legendary ruler a god is rather more like a divine founder figure). Hammurabi (king of Babylon, c.1810-c.1750 B.C.) is shown in his royal artwork very much a man – albeit one who receives his mandate to rule from the gods Shamash and Marduk. Crucially, and I want to stress this, the Achaemenid kings of Persia were not considered gods (except inasmuch as some of them also occupied the position of Pharaoh of Egypt; it’s not clear how seriously they took this – less seriously than Alexander and Ptolemy, quite clearly). The assumption that the Persians practiced a divine kingship is mostly a product of Greek misunderstandings of Persian court ritual, magnified in the popular culture by centuries of using the Persian “other” as a mirror and (usually false) contrast for European cultures.
But the practice that my students often find most confusing is that of the Roman emperors. To be clear, Roman emperors were not divinized while they were alive. Augustus had his adoptive father, Julius Caesar divinized (this practice would repeat for future emperors divinizing their predecessors), but not himself; the emperor Vespasian, on his deathbed, famously made fun of this by declaring as a joke, “Alas! I think I’m becoming a god” (Suet. Vesp. 23.4). And yet, at the same time, outside of Rome, even Augustus – the first emperor – received cult and divine honors, either to his person or to his genius (remember, that’s not how smart he is, but the divine spirit that protects him and his family).
I think it is common for us, sitting outside of these systems, to view this sort of two-step dance, “I’m not a god, but you can give me divine honors in the provinces and call me a god, just don’t do it too loudly” as fundamentally cynical – and to some degree it might have been; Augustus was capable of immense cynicism. But I think it is possible to view this relationship outside of that cynicism through the lens of the ideas and rules we’ve laid out.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part IV: Little Gods and Big People”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-15.
June 19, 2023
QotD: Nietzsche’s view of women
H.L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1913.
June 18, 2023
QotD: Good intentions do not automatically mean good results
Another United Nations agency, its peacekeeping force in Haiti, was responsible for the most serious epidemic of cholera of the twenty-first century so far. Before 2010, cholera had been unknown in Haiti despite the country’s poverty and lack of hygiene. Then, from 2010 to 2018, it suffered outbreaks of cholera that have affected perhaps a tenth of the population and caused between 10,000 and 80,000 deaths (the exact figure will never be known).
The evidence suggests that cholera was brought to Haiti by United Nations peace-keeping troops from Nepal. Whether Haiti needed peacekeeping troops at all may be doubted: at the time it suffered from civil unrest rather than from war. One suspects that the peacekeeping force was employed more to keep the Haitians from leaving Haiti than to keep the peace.
Be that as it may, some Nepali troops arrived fresh from a cholera epidemic in Nepal, established a camp next to the Artibonite River from which many Haitians drew their water. The Nepalis emptied their sewage directly into the river, and some of them were infected with the cholera germ. There was soon an outbreak of cholera among the local population of extraordinary violence. The Haitians guessed at once that the Nepali troops had brought the cholera, but this was strongly denied.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Negligence and Unaccountability at the United Nations”, New English Review, 2019-07-09.
June 17, 2023
QotD: Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo
The Right, meanwhile (and again, strictly for convenience), had an equally impossible fantasy, since however it manifested itself — CivNat, BoomerCon, Normie, pick your Internet-speak — it was predicated on the “Left” being physically capable of leaving well enough alone. Alas, “the motherfucker” which the Left feels compelled to burn down includes institutions, infrastructure, the foundations of empirical knowledge, along with the idea of “knowledge” itself — in short, ambient civilization. It’s not that they won’t leave you alone, gang, it’s that they can’t, since whatever is, is wrong.
Will it be a nicely organized civil war, with Ordinances of Secession and neato-looking battle flags and stirring speeches and truly excellent beards on all the general officers? Doubtful. See above. The whole “secession” schmear takes some doing, and we’re living in a world where the mere ability to walk slightly faster than a reanimated corpse is an appealing-enough fantasy to keep a tv series running for over a decade. But people these days absolutely loathe each other, to the point that, when someone finally does pull the trigger — and someone will — the killing won’t stop for a long, long, long time, McDonald’s be damned.
Severian, “Random Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-17.
June 16, 2023
QotD: Sailing ships in the real world versus sailing ships in Rings of Power
Square sails, which are rigged perpendicular to the direction of the ship work by having the wind strike the sail and pile up into it, which creates a high pressure zone behind the sail (because all of the air, blocked by the sail, is “stacking up” there) and a low pressure zone in front of the sail, which pushes the ship forward, technically a function of aerodynamic drag. The upside is that square sails can produce a lot of power, which is handy for big, heavy ships, especially in areas with predictable and favorable winds (such as the Atlantic trade winds). The downsides are two: on the one hand, top speed is limited because the faster the ship goes, the lower the apparent wind on the sails, which in turn reduces how much they can push the ship. On the other hand, square sails only work if the ship is moving in more-or-less the same direction as the wind is, within about 60 degrees or so (so the ship has a c. 120 degree range of movement relative to the wind). Moreover, for square sails to work, the air hitting them from behind needs to be substantially confined by their shape; this is why square sails are made to billow outward into an arcing shape as the wind hits them, instead of being held taught and fully flat against the mast.
Triangular or lateen or fore-and-aft sails work on a different principle. They are arranged parallel to the direction of the ship (that is, fore-and-aft of the mast, thus the term) and want to also be close to parallel to the wind (both square and triangular sails can, in some configurations, be moved around the mast to a degree to get an ideal direction to the wind). The way they work is that the wind hits the sail on its edge and the air current splits around the sail, but not evenly; the sail is turned so that the back side takes more wind, causing the sail to billow out, creating a wing-like shape when viewed from above. That in turn acts exactly like a wing, creating a high pressure zone behind the sail and a low pressure zone in front of the sail and thus generating aerodynamic lift as the wind passes over the surface (rather than pressing up behind it) the same way that an airplane’s wings keep it in the air. The clever part about this is that the lift generated doesn’t have to be in the same direction the wind is going, so a ship using these kinds of sails can move up to within around 45 degree of the wind (sailing “close hauled” – a ship rigged like this thus has a much larger 270 degree range of motion relative to the wind). Also – as noted above – depending on the ship’s “point of sail” (direction of movement relative to the wind), accelerating may not decrease the wind’s apparent speed (because you may not be sailing directly away from it), and so triangular sails often function better in light winds, sailing into the wind, and at very high speeds (but they provide less power for large, heavy ships sailing with the wind). And again, there is a lot of complexity in terms of the different functions of these types of sails, but we’re really just trying to make a fairly simple point here so everyone please forgive the simplification.
And that’s it: all sails work on one of those two principles (at any given time); the point in discussing this is to note that we’re dealing not with aesthetics here but with objects that need to interact in fairly fundamental ways with aerodynamics and so have shapes that are dictated by that function (and also, sails are cool). You can combine those two principles in a lot of exciting ways to create different “rigs” with different sailing qualities, but you those principles are your options – you cannot create some other kind of sail which works on different principles. Indeed, most of the more complex sailplans of larger ships use a combination of square and lateen sails, but each sail in the plan must be using one of these two principles; there are no other options.
And those of you looking back at what these ships [in Rings of Power] look like may have already guessed the problem here. These are clearly square-rigged ships; the sails are all perpendicular to the ship’s direction and the sail shape is symmetrical over the keel (that is, same shape on the port and starboard) and are unable to be angled in any event. But every single sail has a gigantic hole in the center because of the split mast. So the air you want to build up behind the sail is instead flowing through the hole between the masts. The sails even angle slightly, curling backwards at their outer edges channeling the air towards the gaps. But that air flowing through the gaps is going to lessen (not remove, but substantially lesson) the pressure differential over the sail which will cut the drag the sails generate which will make the ship much slower.
What is worse is that between the two masts and between the foremast and the bowsprit, the ships mount additional secondary sails. Now in a rig-plan that made any sense, these would be triangular sails in both shape and principle (e.g. gaff-rigged sails incorporated into a square-rig sailing pattern common for full rigged ships as well as staysails between the masts or between the foremast and the bowsprit, also common for full rigged ships), but the designers here have only managed one of those two things. The sails are triangular in shape, but are positioned perpendicular to the wind direction and then symmetrically matched. That means they both do nothing with the wind moving through that center channel we’ve created, but also their triangular shape is entirely useless because they’re functioning on drag instead of lift.
It’s not that this sail plan wouldn’t work: the big sails would create at least some aerodynamic drag which would push the ship forward. But this is a sail plan which would work much more poorly than a far more basic plan with just a single central mast mounting a single very large square sail. You could even keep the exotic junk-style sail supports (they’re called battens; everything on sailing ships has a funny name) if you wanted and just make the ships junk-rigged! Or, if you want a lot of fancy sails which aren’t in square shapes, you could go with a multi-masted dhow or xebec sail plan which would give you lots of overlapping triangular sails and also fit the Mediterranean/Roman vibe you were going for.
Moreover, while these sails aren’t square shaped, this is a pure “square sail” ship rig, which for ocean-going ships ostensibly used by great mariners is awful. Square sails only work well when running before the wind: they “tack” (zig-zagging from one close-hauled point of sail to another to climb up the wind) really poorly; some pure square-rigged ships cannot tack at all without the assistance of rowers. That’s is part of the reason why “full rigged” square-sailed age of sail ships nevertheless had triangular sails in gaff-rigging or as stay-sails or what have you, to enable the ship to tack effectively (the fancy term for this is how “weatherly” a ship is: how able it is to sail close to the wind; weatherlyness also depends on hull shape and a host of other factors). With a pure square-sail setup, these ships can only go in the direction of the wind, which is going to make it impossible to use them effectively as ocean-going ships because the prevailing winds on the ocean are very consistent: they will almost always be blowing the same way, which means these ships can sail out, but then can’t sail back. In short these ocean-going mariners have ships which cannot go on the oceans.
And of course this has been a theme of these posts but please, showrunners: when you are doing the visual design for a fantasy-historical society, you are not going to outsmart centuries of professional shipwrights with a brainstorming meeting and some concept art. So instead of trying to show that the Númenóreans are great mariners (“the sea is always right!”), which is the point of giving their super-cool ships so much screentime and is an essential thing to establish about their society, by making up a ship design that is going to end up invariably being much worse than historical designs, just go adopt a historical design that was successful. For my part, I’d have probably contrasted traditional Elven ships with a single sail-type (probably square) on a single mast with the advanced Númenóreans using lots of lateen sails.
That said, the fact that the Númenórean ships are terrible is fine because frankly, I wouldn’t want to sail to this battle either.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part III: That Númenórean Charge”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-02-03.
June 15, 2023
QotD: Incels
Freddie deBoer, “Some Reasons Why Smartphones Might Make Adolescents Anxious and Depressed”, Freddie deBoer, 2023-03-07.
June 14, 2023
QotD: In hindsight, calling it “Operation HONOUR” was quite ironic
Loyalty up, remember?
As a young soldier, I had actually worked for this particular NCO. He was an artifact of the Old Army and had a reputation as a hardman. He liked to brag about picking Friday night fights in Native bars out on the Prairies (he wore weighted gloves for extra knock-out power). He described to us in detail what he would do to his wife after a training weekend. He told us she would never say no, followed up with a chuckle and “like she has a choice”. If you were weak in his eyes, he’d belittle you publicly as a “queer” or a “faggot”. The funny thing was that this guy was overweight and never showed up for ruck marches or PT tests. His annual conduct-after-capture briefing was basically forty minutes of “you’re gonna get raped but that doesn’t make you gay”. One of his favourite war stories was about stray dog duty in Bosnia. He’d lure in the strays with peanut butter on the end of shotgun then blow their brains out. Riveting stuff.
Overnight I had gone from from being this man’s subordinate to being his superior, so when the General said we had a duty to report, I did my duty. The next week I was in front of the Regimental Sergeant-Major being asked why I was interfering with a strong NCO’s career prospects. That’s when I learned that loyalty up meant loyalty to the Regiment, and that sensitive matters such as this were handled internally and off the record. That one-way conversation was a major push towards putting in my application for the Regular Force. I didn’t want to be around that type of nonsense (“oh my sweet summer child” says the peanut gallery). Not long after I left, my former supervisor sexually assaulted the mess steward.
[…]
In February 2021, an investigation was opened into General Jonathan Vance, who had just finished his tenure as Chief of Defence Staff. Major Kellie Brennan, a subordinate of Vance at various times, accused him of a preventing her from disclosing their long-running affair. Since their relationship began in 2001, Vance had been married twice. DNA testing confirmed that Vance was the father of one of Brennan’s children, but he had never acknowledged or taken responsibility for the child. Vance plead guilty to obstruction of justice in March 2022 and received a conditional discharge with twelve months of probation.
The heat and light generated by an investigation of the outgoing Chief of Defence Staff led to an unprecedente level of scrutiny on the CAF’s senior leadership. In 2021 alone, the Governor General of Canada, the Minister of National Defence, the incoming Chief of Defence Staff, the Vice Chief of Defence Staff, Commander Canadian Special Operations Command, and Commander Military Personnel Command, amongst others, would resign, retire, or be re-assigned amidst allegations of impropriety. Since 2021, recruiting and retention levels have continued to free fall and the federal government has set aside $900 million in class-action lawsuit compensation for current and former CAF members who experienced sexual harassment, assualt, or discrimination. The social trap has been sprung.
“Shady Maples”, “A Question of Loyalty”, The Powder Horn, 2023-03-12.
