Quotulatiousness

June 14, 2023

Wednesday web-droppings

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Education, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 22:22

A few items that I didn’t feel required a full post of their own, but might be of interest:

June 13, 2023

Liberal woman frustrated she can’t find non-conservative but traditionally masculine men

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

Tom Knighton responds to a progressive woman’s lament:

Originally found on fark.com about 15 years ago, artist unknown.

    She is at a loss because she wants to be with a masculine man but doesn’t want to compromise her morals and values. She asks her followers if she is asking for too much when she requests a man she can be “equal” with while he still provides for her.

What she doesn’t seem to get is that it was women like her that basically destroyed manhood to the point that there’s little chance she’ll find a liberal guy with traditional values.

See, liberal men are basically obligated to take the subservient role. They’re required by their ideology to accept that the woman is just as capable — and obligated — to be at least an equal in providing for the family, if not the provider herself.

Failure to act according to this, at least in their minds, is to undermine the feminist values the left claims to hold so dear.

It didn’t have to be this way. It was always possible to empower women without trying to tear masculinity down, which is what has been happening.

Opening doors for women, for example, is one of those things guys used to do all the time. It wasn’t that women were somehow incapable of operating a doorknob. It was because it was just something a gentleman did.

Now, if a man opens the door for a woman, he’s taking a chance. Will she appreciate it or will she launch into a feminist diatribe about the patriarchy?

Leftist men already know which they expect, so they do no such thing. Guys with more of a traditional lean, however, can and will open that door because they’re not impressed with feminist screeching.

The surprisingly authoritarian reflexes of the “true” anti-authoritarian

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray surveys the “anti-authoritarian” stances and actions of Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a dedicated opponent of all things Trump:

I’ve called the NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an “expert” on authoritarianism, an inversion blender, a narrative-producing machine with an astonishing gift for turning meaning upside-down. Your decision to drive north is ironclad proof that you intend to travel to the south! You’re spraying water on that fire to make it bigger! You gave me a sandwich because you want me to starve to death!

Currently, Ben-Ghiat’s frantic production of anti-authoritarian messaging on Twitter, the preferred platform of true intellectuals, is tightly focused on the dangerous authoritarianism of the megafascist Donald Trump, who is doing what all true authoritarians do: questioning and criticizing the government. Go stroll through Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Twitter posts. It’s like having lunch with Felix Dzerzhinsky. Only the guilty and the fascist elements resist the cleansing power of the state and its gloriously pure-hearted investigative apparatus!

A suggestion up front from the maître d’hotel: What you’re about to consume is the filet mignon of dimwitted propaganda. Chew it slowly. Savor. Let’s start with a light appetizer, a mere retweet, to tease the ironic gustation:

Archie Bunker and Meathead have become one, united by the power of the Trump. If a prosecutor charges you, the case is airtight, full stop. Government never charges innocent people with crimes. To criticize a prosecutor is to oppose the rule of law, which can only be defended by the immediate presumption of guilt. Here, let’s try it out:

Prosecutors wouldn’t be charging Rick Perry with crimes if they didn’t believe they had an airtight case.

Prosecutors wouldn’t be charging Kyle Rittenhouse with crimes if they didn’t believe they had an airtight case.

Prosecutors wouldn’t be charging Tom Robinson with crimes if they didn’t believe they had an airtight case. Atticus Finch is an authoritarian!

This is why criminal defense lawyers are all so infamously right-wing, by the way. Especially public defenders.

[…]

Nothing says progressive anti-authoritarian like the sacralization of national security as a preeminent value. If government says that something has been done in the name of national security, you must accept it and support it without question. Or else you’re an authoritarian, doubting the state security apparatus. Fascists always do that.

There is, of course, a long and deeply established tradition on the American political left of criticism directed at the FBI and DOJ — and at federal law enforcement in general, and at law enforcement in general, and the “carceral state” — as hegemonic instruments. Historians and activists on the left have long viewed the FBI with political suspicion, and with reason.

Until pretty much right this instant, because Trump.

Why The Far Side is a masterclass in storytelling

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Gaze
Published 26 Dec 2019

The Far Side by Gary Larson is one of the best and most praised cartoons in history. But what makes The Far Side so good? What is the legacy of Gary Larson? And most importantly: what can we learn from The Far Side?

0:00 Pixar and Storytelling
1:22 How Gary Larson tells a story
2:42 The Far Side facts and figures
3:22 The level of detail in The Far Side
4:04 Telling a story with one image and a punchline
5:09 What is The Far Side about?
7:11 Gary Larson and naturalism
7:40 Controversy over The Far Side
8:10 The legacy of The Far Side
9:00 Conclusion
(more…)

June 12, 2023

Why Modern Movies Suck – The Strong Female Character

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Critical Drinker
Published 10 Jun 2023

One of the most tiresome tropes of the past ten years in moviemaking is the “Strong Female Character”. Not women who are smart, capable, well written and complex, but bland, boring, superficially “strong” characters designed to pander to simplistic ideals of female empowerment.
(more…)

June 11, 2023

The Invasion of Normandy begins! – WW2 – Week 250 – June 10, 1944

World War Two
Published 10 Jun 2023

The Allies’ gigantic amphibious invasion of France begins and by the end of the week they’ve carved out a decent-sized beachhead. Meanwhile in Italy the Allied advance takes Rome. The Soviets are launching new attacks of their own — now against the Finns, and the Japanese at Kohima … have just plain had enough.
(more…)

Ask Ian: Why So Few Reproduction Historic Guns?

Filed under: Business, Economics, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 22 Feb 2023

From Paul on Patreon:
“I’ve always thought there were a lot of older guns that deserve to be reproduced, many of which could be really simple to manufacture. PSA is planning the release of their StG44 repro which is exciting. But why don’t we see this sort of thing more often. I suppose not everyone in the firearms community is going to want this sort of thing, but I think there are a lot of guns that would sell well enough to justify their reproduction.”

Fundamentally, we don’t see more reproduction firearms because they are actually a lot harder and more expensive to make than people would think, and the market for them is smaller than people would think. Re-engineering old firearms for new production is a really substantial project, and the original data required rarely exists. The guns must be cheap enough and reliable enough to attract modern buyers, which will often require compromises on authenticity — which immediately reduces the already-small pool of potential buyers.
(more…)

QotD: The revolt against “meritocracy”

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

As with almost every one of these crusades the left goes on, it ain’t what they’re saying it is. And those of us on the right(ish) who think that it’s all part of a master plan to destroy society so the great communist utopia appears automagically aren’t precisely right. I mean, most people on the left would welcome collapse, because, yes, they believe a communist matriarchy is ONLY waiting for the “oppressors” who create capitalism and patriarchy to vanish (oblivious to the fact that “capitalism” is trading, which seems to be a natural condition of the human monkey and not eradicable by any regime real or imaginary; and that “patriarchy” doesn’t exist in the west.) But that’s not the point, because they don’t think they’re bringing about collapse. They think they’re fighting injustice.

When we say “merit” and “meritocracy” they think we’re using “code words” to say “white males”. There are reasons for this, besides the fact that the left is heavily into Manichaean thought systems that go something like: identify problem — find a person who MIGHT be responsible for/benefits from the system as it exists — assume that if that person were removed, the problem would be gone. See, French Revolution.

The initial confusion on the left arises from the fact that they might never, in fact, have witnessed meritocracy in their dealings or those of people around them.

This is because, as part of the long march, and to secure absolute control of all fields and institutions, the left has a mythology (the Manichaean thing again) that anyone who disagrees with them is evil. And of course, you don’t hire evil people.

The problem with that type of hiring is that you’re NOT hiring the best. And most people know they’re not the best. And hire someone less bright than they are. This in four generations takes you to the level of management/operation that takes monarchies twenty generations of inbreeding to achieve.

Right now, in everything but the hard sciences and STEM (and they’ve gotten into some of those, and can’t always be routed around.) the people in power would consider pouring piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the sole a feat of unachievable genius.

Most of them are so vacuous they don’t even know they’re incompetent. Or, like Michelle Obama in her essay on why everyone was mean to her at Harvard, they assume everyone else is just as incompetent.

The reason they get hired, stay hired and continue to get push/accolades/power is that they have the “right picture in head” by which you should understand “the left picture in head”. They view the world exactly as they were taught to view it by their Marxist teachers and professors. Reality is Manichean, and if there is any issue at all, you find the person who might be causing it (hint, usually you find the person who is a heretic to the left, even if in a minor thing) and you attack that person. If the person is not immediately obvious, you look for deviationism or examples of hidden thought crime.

It’s appalling, and in a society with no protection for the individual, it fills mass graves, but it is the way their minds — for lack of a better term — operate. They’ve been trained to operate that way. Not to look at human nature, or the conditions in the world, or even the limits of engineering and materials (what’s holding us back on batteries, for instance. They prefer to think oil executives, personally, are holding back the all-electric solar cars we should already have.) No. “Find the culprit” “Eliminate him/her” “Everything is beautiful in the garden”. Seen in this light, the Green Nude Heel makes “perfect sense”. And is a genius work in scope. Which is why she got all upset at criticism and thought that it only meant people wanted her to find all the little subculprits and work out all the details of the pogroms necessary to make it work. Not getting that people were saying “Not in this world, not with these humans, not in this REALITY”.

Sarah Hoyt, “Just Deserts”, According to Hoyt, 2019-06-06.

June 9, 2023

Putting an end to “stakeholder” capitalism

The Streetwise Professor explains what “stakeholder capitalism” is and why it needs to be staked through the heart to save western economies:

A graphic from Wikipedia showing typical internal and external stakeholders.

At its root, stakeholder capitalism represents a rejection – and usually an explicit one – of shareholder wealth maximization as the sole objective and duty of a corporation’s management. Instead, managers are empowered and encouraged to pursue a variety of agendas that do not promote and are usually inimical to maximizing value to shareholders. These agendas are usually broadly social in nature intended to benefit various non-shareholder groups, some of which may be very narrow (transsexuals) or others which may be all encompassing (all inhabitants of planet earth, human and non-human).

This system, such as it is, founders on two very fundamental problems: the Knowledge Problem and Agency problems.

The Knowledge Problem is that no single agent possesses the information required to achieve any goal – even if universally accepted. For example, even if reducing the risk of global temperature increases was broadly agreed upon as a goal, the information required to determine how to do so efficiently is vast as to be unknowable. What are the benefits of a reduction in global temperature by X degrees? The whole panic about global warming stems from its alleged impact on every aspect of life on earth – who can possibly understand anything so complex? And there are trade-offs: reducing temperature involves cost. The cost varies by the mix of measures adopted – the number of components of the mix is also vast, and evaluating costs is again beyond the capabilities of any human, no matter how smart, how informed, and how lavishly equipped with computational power. (Daron Acemoğlu, take heed).

[…]

Agency problems exist when due to information asymmetries or other considerations, agents may act in their own interests and to the detriment of the interests of their principals. In a simple example, the owner of a QuickieMart may not be able to monitor whether his late-shift employee is sufficiently diligent in preventing shoplifting, or exerts appropriate effort in cleaning the restrooms and so on. In the corporate world, the agency problem is one of incentives. The executives of a corporation with myriad shareholders may have considerable freedom to pursue their own interests using the shareholders’ money because any individual shareholder has little incentive to monitor and police the manager: other shareholders benefit from, and thus can free ride on, any individual’s efforts. So managers can, and often do, get away with extravagant waste of the resources owned by others placed in their control.

This agency problem is one of the costs of public corporations with diffuse ownership: this form of organization survives because the benefits of diversification (i.e., better allocation of risk) outweigh these costs. But agency costs exist, and increasing the scope of managerial discretion to, say, saving the world or achieving social justice inevitably increases these costs: with such increased scope, executives have more ways to waste shareholder wealth – and may even get rewarded for it through, say, glowing publicity and other non-pecuniary rewards (like ego gratification – “Look! I’m saving the world! Aren’t I wonderful?”)

H/T to Tim Worstall for the link.

QotD: The Fundamental Paradox of Internet Liberalism

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

  • If you were smart enough to understand what I’m saying, you’d be a liberal, too
  • You aren’t smart enough to understand it, because you’re not a liberal
  • And yet here I am, arguing with you anyway.

So who, exactly, is the dumb one?

Severian, “Alienation II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-30.

June 7, 2023

German Counterattack – D-Day [Part 4]

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 6 Jun 2023

When the amphibious landings begin, they run straight into Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. Eisenhower has predicted a third of his troops may fall. While they land, the news breaks across the world.
(more…)

Piercing the Atlantic Wall – D-Day [Part 3]

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

World War Two
Published 6 Jun 2023

With wide gaps struck in the Atlantic Wall, it is now up to the Allies to secure the beachheads and move inland. There they will face off with new German defenses, and the Norman geography.
(more…)

A Harbour goes to France – Mulberry Harbours – Normandy Landings

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

British Army Documentaries
Published 24 Jun 2020

Mulberry harbours were temporary portable harbours developed by the United Kingdom during the Second World War to facilitate the rapid offloading of cargo onto beaches during the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. After the Allies successfully held beachheads following D-Day, two prefabricated harbours were taken in sections across the English Channel from UK with the invading army and assembled off Omaha Beach (Mulberry “A”) and Gold Beach (Mulberry “B”).
(more…)

QotD: A “second front” in 1943

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Which brings us to the debate about the possibility of an invasion in 1943 – Roundup. Something that a surprising number of historians, and even a few not entirely incompetent generals, have suggested might have been possible, and should have been tried.

There are some points in their favour. The invasions of North Africa definitely took resources that could have been built up in Britain, and therefore slowed things down. (And the withdrawal of the new escort carriers, escort groups, and shipping from the Battle of the Atlantic for the North African adventure, definitely did huge damage in the loss of shipping and supplies, slowing things down further.) As a result the huge buildup in North Africa was much easier to use against Italy before moving on to France. Certainly another distraction or delay … but only if you don’t think that knocking Italy out of the war would make Germany weaker!

But once Sledgehammer [the plan to invade France in 1942] was abandoned, this operation was the only possible way to get US troops into combat in Europe, short of shipping some to Russia. It was also the only possible way of coming close to keeping Roosevelt’s ridiculous promise to the Russians.

[…]

Nonetheless it is wrong to think that the British never had any intention of [mounting Operation] Roundup. Despite what Roosevelt and many other Americans convinced themselves, the British were, at the start of 1942, far more optimistic about the possibility of invading Europe through France in 1943 than they had been about Sledgehammer. Their studies seemed to show that Germany would only have to be weaker, not suddenly collapse, to make invasion in 1943 a realistic possibility. Realistic that is as long as the rest of the plans for training and shipping troops, building and concentrating invasion craft, and moving enough supplies to make it sustainable, all came together.

They didn’t.

For the British, the middle of 1942 revealed how little would be available in time for the middle of 1943. Even on the best assumptions of American training and preparation, there was no chance that the majority of forces for Roundup would not be British … assuming they could supply them either. In practice mid-1942 saw the Axis continue to advance on every front. Burma collapsed; the Allied position in New Guinea was under threat; the Japanese were still expanding to places like Guadalcanal; Rommel was advancing in Egypt; the Germans were advancing on the Caucasian oil fields and towards the Middle East; and more and more was needed just to keep Russia in the war. As a result British troops, shipping and supplies were continuing to flow away from Britain, not towards it.

Much of the Royal Navy was trying to save the dangerous losses caused by [US Chief of Naval Operations Admiral] King’s refusal to have convoys in American waters (too “defensive-minded” he thought.) These alone, the worst eight months of the war, were threatening to scupper Roundup. The rest was so busily deployed in the Indian and Pacific Oceans against the Japanese, or North Atlantic trying to fight supplies through to Russia (a high proportion of tanks and planes defending Moscow were British-supplied), that there was virtually nothing left in the Med to slow Rommel’s advance. The merchant ships surviving the fight across the oceans were actually more vitally needed to take men and equipment from the UK to other places than to bring in a buildup for the UK.

Nor was the American buildup going to plan. Less well-trained troops were becoming available too slowly, could not be shipped in adequate numbers anyway, and were in no condition to face German veterans. (The very best US units to go into action in 1942 – the Marines in Guadalcanal – and 1943 – the 1st Infantry and 1st Armored divisions which were actually professional troops not conscripts in North Africa – had very steep learning curves. Particularly at Kasserine. They were clearly not fit to face German veterans yet.

And American resource buildup was also not up to promises. King and MacArthur were milking supplies far beyond what had originally been agreed under “Germany first”. In practical terms they were doing so for the same reasons the British were: an immediate desperate situation had to be saved before a future ideal one could be pursued.

Nonetheless I have read all sorts of apparently serious suggestions that after North Africa was cleared, or at the very least after Sicily was cleared, an invasion of France should have happened.

Delusional.

Nigel Davies, “The ‘Invasion of France in 1943’ lunacy”, rethinking history, 2021-06-21.

June 6, 2023

Through The Gates of Hell – D-Day [Part 2]

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 20:20

World War Two
Published 6 Jun 2023

When the amphibious landings begin, they run straight into Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. Eisenhower has predicted a third of his troops may fall. While they land, the news breaks across the world.
(more…)

« Newer PostsOlder Posts »

Powered by WordPress