History Hit
Published 21 Nov 2022‘Inside An M4 Sherman Tank With Historian James Holland’
In this video, military historian James Holland gets inside the most iconic tank of the Second World War — the ubiquitous US M4 Sherman Tank.
With over 50,000 having produced between 1942 and 1945, the Sherman was the most widely used medium tank by the United States and Western Allies in World War II.
Easily produced, maintained and equipped with a 75mm gun as well as a single hatch-mounted .50 caliber machine gun (plus two lighter .30 cals positioned in the turret and forward hull), the Sherman proved extremely effective against soft targets. It still lacked the range and firepower of the German Panther and Tiger tanks, but its speed, manoeuvrability and fast rate of fire made it ideal wartime workhorse.
More recently, the M4 Sherman has risen to stardom with the release of Hollywood blockbuster Fury (2014), starring Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf.
(more…)
March 19, 2023
Inside An M4 Sherman Tank With Historian James Holland
QotD: Are we re-enacting the “Crisis of the Third Century” or “Fall of the Roman Empire” this time?
At the risk of venturing too far into a field about which I know very little, there are two schools of thought about the collapse of the Roman Empire. One is that the Empire was a thoroughly rotten edifice by the late 4th century, and any little breeze would’ve sufficed to tip it over — pick any one of the events of the 4th century to designated as the tipping point, and everything else seems to be the collapse playing out. The other school, associated with Peter Heather — a very very badthinker, apparently — is that for all its problems the Empire could’ve staggered on pretty much indefinitely, had it not been hit with several overwhelming crises simultaneously … and even then, a lot more of the “Empire” survived than we generally credit, and that’s not including the Byzantines (who kept on keepin’ on for another thousand years).
Again, my knowledge of the topic is pretty weak, but y’all know that in general I believe inertia is one of the strongest forces in human affairs (just behind accident and error). What can’t continue, won’t … eventually, but there’s a lot of give in “can’t”. The “collapse” of the 5th century looked an awful lot like the “crisis” of the 3rd century, and not only did the Empire survive the third century crisis, in many ways it came back stronger than ever (one wonders what golden age might’ve been born had Aurelian lived).
It certainly does seem like we’re heading into a major crisis (yeah yeah, I know, thanks Nostradamus). Is it The End, or “merely” the Third Century Crisis? One wonders how it’s going down there in Brazil, and if there are any cagey young officers in the AINO Imperial Garrisons taking notes. The guys who grabbed the purple in the Third Century Crisis were called “the barracks emperors” for a reason, and we know (from the comments yesterday) that there are cabals of perverts alive and well in the officer corps.
2023 is shaping up to be really interesting. Ace of Grillers has done some reporting on the fossil fuel-intensive “Green” private jet flights of our beloved Transportation Secretary, Anal Pete. AOG thinks this is pretty obviously the butt bandit announcing his 2024 presidential run, and it’s hard to argue against it. Frankly I’m amazed Brandon has survived this long — is Dr. Jill that canny a political infighter, or is it just dumb luck that no one has felt the need to finish him off? — but it’s hard to see him making it too far into 2024. Veep Throat is of course running; we have yet to see Z Man’s predicted replacement of her with Gavin Hairgel, but I’m sure he’s in, too …
Frankly, I’m rooting for the Russians. You really want the wheels to come off, then start cheering for a big winter offensive from Ivan. Provided AINO doesn’t start cracking off nukes — a big, big IF — nothing would force the crisis like our “victory or death!” Juggalos getting their asses handed to them in the Donbas. The Z Man thinks they’ll pull a Ngo Dinh Diem on the Jewish Comedian here before too long; I wonder if they’ll even get the chance, or if it would matter if they did. I’m pretty sure Vlad’s done talking, if for no other reason than that he knows whatever faction of Juggalos he cuts a deal with will be betrayed by some other Juggalo faction. Unless the AINO peace proposals come written in the still-hot blood of a shitload of Kagans, he has zero reason to negotiate. And since The Media is still all in on their “total Ukrainian victory is just around the corner!” narrative …
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-12-16.
March 18, 2023
Tales of the Metaverse
Ted Gioia wonders if Metaverse is doing badly enough to seriously harm Facebook itself:
When Facebook changed it’s name to Meta back in 2021, I made a gloomy prediction:
“Meta is for losers,” I announced. “Mark Zuckerberg is betting his company on a new idea — but this is a wager he will almost certainly regret.”
I revisited the situation in December, and pointed out all the ways Meta wasn’t just dying in the metaverse. It was also ruining its base business, the Facebook platform.
The company kept making the same mistake as so many other aging websites — instead of serving users they want to control them. The end result is a seeming paradox: the more money the company spends, the worse the user experience becomes.
In the article, I gave a dozen examples — and after it was published many readers shared their own horror stories.
Here’s just one anecdote, out of many:
Try to sign up for Facebook Dating and then try to leave. They won’t let you. A friend of mine recently used it, and now is unable to remove herself totally from the feature. She was allowed to remove all of her pictures, however, she was not permitted to remove her dating profile and picture, which really distressed her. She didn’t want any record of it.
What a great concept. You can meet somebody special, fall in love, get married, and raise a family — but years later you’re still on the Facebook dating app.
It seems ridiculous. But Meta really, really doesn’t like you to opt out of features. Their dream is to operate a virtual Hotel California, where — as the lyrics warn, “you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave”.
Hey, maybe that’s why Mark Zuckerberg won’t let you have legs in his metaverse.
Why isn’t this bold new strategy working? It certainly isn’t for lack of investment. Meta is reportedly spending one billion dollars per month on the project.
But sometimes you can fail even with the right concept — simply because the technology just isn’t ready for the mass market.
[…]
A year-and-a-half after his corporate makeover, the situation at Meta is more dire than ever. Back in October 2021, Facebook shares were trading above $340, but now they are below $200 — that’s a loss of around $300 billion in market value.
But here again, the real problem is the user experience.
“On my initial visits, the metaverse seems sort of desolate, like an abandoned mall,” writes Paul Murray in New York magazine.
[…]
Mark Zuckerberg seems hellbent on pursuing an even more embarrassing fate. His bet on the metaverse may turn into the biggest cash sinkhole in the history of capitalism. Already the Edsel and New Coke look like tiny peccadilloes by comparison.
Even if he keeps his job, he may want to go hide. Fortunately, he has a huge metaverse at his disposal where that has become surprising easy to do.
If not “woke”, then what should we call it?
Freddie deBoer devoutly hopes for a proper term to use instead of the by-now highly pejorative term “woke”:
As I have said many times, I don’t like using the term “woke” myself, not without qualification or quotation marks. It’s too much of a culture war pinball and now deemed too pejorative to be useful. I much, much prefer the term “social justice politics” to refer to the school of politics that is typically referred to as woke, out of a desire to be neutral in terminology. However: there is such a school of politics, it’s absurd that so many people pretend not to know what woke means, and the problem could be easily solved if people who support woke politics would adopt a name for others to use. No to woke, no to identity politics, no to political correctness, fine: PICK SOMETHING. The fact that they steadfastly refuse to do so is a function of their feeling that they shouldn’t have to do politics like everyone else. But they do. And their resistance to doing politics is why, three years after a supposed “reckoning”, nothing has really changed. (If there’s no such thing as the social justice politics movement, who made the protests and unrest of 2020 happen? The fucking Democrats?)
The conceit is that “woke” has even shaggier or vaguer boundaries than “liberal”, “fascist”, “conservative”, or “moderate”. And I just don’t think that’s true.
“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene — woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.
The US Adopts A Maxim: The Colt Model 1904
Forgotten Weapons
Published 9 Nov 2022The US Army spent nearly 16 years languidly testing the Maxim gun, but was never willing to actually make a decision until a final trial in 1903 finally settled the matter. The Maxim was deemed the best available machine gun and a contract was signed with Vickers, Sons, & Maxim to purchase 50 (later increased to 90). Eventually a total of 287 were procured; 90 from VSM and a further 197 made by Colt in the US. The first British guns were chambered for .30-03, with the Colts all made for the later .30-06 (and the VSM guns updated to that standard).
The Model 1904 was the heaviest Maxim gun ever made, weighing in at 62 pounds for the gun and another 80 for its tripod. Despite excellent reliability and durability, it was so heavy and unwieldy that it was pretty universally hated by American soldiers. The final order for 1904 Maxims was placed in 1908 and just the following year the M1909 Benet Mercie light Hotchkiss pattern was was adopted. By the time World War One arrived, half the Maxims had already been relegated to long-term storage. They were pulled out of the warehouses for training troops prior to their deployment to Europe, but they never saw any more significant military use.
(more…)
March 16, 2023
Once it was possible to be a fully fledged techno-optimist … but things have changed for the worse
Glenn Reynolds on how he “lost his religion” about the bright, shiny techno-future so many of us looked forward to:
Okay, there’s optimism and then there’s totally unrealistic techno-utopianism…
Listening to that song reminded me of how much more overtly optimistic I was about technology and the future at the turn of the millennium. I realized that I’m somewhat less so now. But why? In truth, I think my more negative attitude has to do with people more than with the machines that Embrace the Machine characterizes as “children of our minds”. (I stole that line from Hans Moravec. Er, I mean it’s a “homage”.) But maybe there’s a connection there, between creators and creations.
It was easy to be optimistic in the 90s and at the turn of the millennium. The Soviet Union lost the Cold War, the Berlin Wall fell, and freedom and democracy and prosperity were on the march almost everywhere. Personal technology was booming, and its dark sides were not yet very apparent. (And the darker sides, like social media and smartphones, basically didn’t exist.)
And the tech companies, then, were run by people who looked very different from the people who run them now – even when, as in the case of Bill Gates, they were the same people. It’s easy to forget that Gates was once a rather libertarian figure, who boasted that Microsoft didn’t even have an office in Washington, DC. The Justice Department, via its Antitrust Division, punished him for that, and he has long since lost any libertarian inclinations, to put it mildly.
It’s a different world now. In the 1990s it seemed plausible that the work force of tech companies would rise up in revolt if their products were used for repression. In the 2020s, they rise up in revolt if they aren’t. Commercial tech products spy on you, censor you, and even stop you from doing things they disapprove of. Apple nowadays looks more like Big Brother than like a tool to smash Big Brother as presented in its famous 1984 commercial.
Silicon Valley itself is now a bastion of privilege, full of second- and third-generation tech people, rich Stanford alumni, and VC scions. It’s not a place that strives to open up society, but a place that wants to lock in the hierarchy, with itself on top. They’re pulling up the ladders just as fast as they can.
March 15, 2023
Not only is the science “settled” … it’s already in the school textbooks
David Friedman on his attempts to follow up on claims made in a textbook on climate change already in use in US public schools:
Introduction to Modern Climate Change by Andrew Dessler is an elementary climate science textbook, now in its third edition. In Chapter 9, “Impacts of Climate Change”, it has:
Scientists predict that sea level will rise 47 to 73 cm (19 to 29 inches) above 1995–2014 levels by 2100. This may not sound like a significant challenge, but it is much larger than the 18 cm of sea level experienced over the twentieth century, which is already challenging for many who live near sea level. Like temperature, these predictions of sea-level rise might sound small but, also like temperature, they are not. In Florida, for example, a sea-level rise in the middle of the projected range would inundate 9 percent of Florida’s current land area at high tide. This includes virtually all of the Florida Keys as well as 70 percent of Miami-Dade County. Almost one-tenth of Florida’s current population, or nearly 2 million people, live in this vulnerable zone, and it includes residential real estate valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. It also includes important infrastructure, such as two nuclear reactors, three prisons, and 68 hospitals.
That struck me as implausible, given what else I had seen on the effect of sea level rise. The footnote for the claim was to Stanton and Ackerman (2007), which turned out to be not a peer reviewed journal article but a report commissioned by the Environmental Defense fund, an environmentalist group. It includes the same claims, but for 27 inches of sea-level rise not the 24 inches that is Dessler’s “middle of the projected range”. It refers the reader to Appendix C for “detailed sources and methodology”. Going there, I found:
To estimate the impact of sea-level rise on land area, populations, and public and private assets and infrastructure, we began with a 1:250,000 Digital Elevation Model (DEM) map of the State of Florida, and divided the state into “vulnerable” and “not vulnerable” zones demarcated by 1.5 meters of elevation and other factors described by Titus and Richman (2000) as corresponding to 27 inches of sea-level rise.
So what they are showing as the vulnerable area is not the 27 inch or 24 inch contour but the 1.5 meter (5 feet) contour. The explanation, from Titus, J.G. and C. Richman (2001). “Maps of lands vulnerable to sea level rise: modeled elevations along the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts“. Climate Research 18: 205–228, a journal article written by two EPA people and presumably peer reviewed:
Thus, at a typical site, the 1.5-meter contour would be flooded by spring high tides (i.e., high tides during new and full moons) when sea level rises 80 cm
Figure 1 below (Titus and Richman Figure 4) is a map of Florida with the region within the 1.5 meter contour colored red, the region between 1.5 and 3.5 blue. Dessler’s middle of the projected range is 60 cm. Stanton and Ackerman’s 27 inches is 68.6 cm. The map shows what its authors claim would be flooded at 80cm.
Figure 2 below is a population density map of Florida from Wikipedia to which I have added the 1.5m contours from Figure 1. The large flooded area on the southern tip of Florida includes none of the densely populated area around Miami; only one of the tiny areas farther north appears to be in part on a populated area. That is not surprising — areas very close to sea level are likely to be marsh, in this case the everglades, and poor places to build on.
Stanton and Ackerman claim that their own calculations, using data bases of elevation and population, produce a total population in the at-risk area of 1.5 million. That was the figure Dessler gave in his first edition, presumably increased to almost 2 million in the third edition to reflect the increase in Florida’s population. Figure 2 shows why I don’t believe it. The flooded areas are in places almost all of which have very low population density, making it hard to see how flooding nine percent of the land area, most of it in the everglades, can flood almost ten percent of the population. Even if all of the Florida Keys are flooded, their total population is only about 80,000.
That problem is in addition to the fact that Dessler’s claim is for 60 cm of sea level rise, Stanton and Ackerman’s, from which Dessler got his figure for how many people are flooded, is for 68.6 cm (27 inches), and Titus and Richman get the 1.5 m contour that Stanton and Ackerman say they are using by assuming 80cm of sea level rise. Further reasons for suspicion are that Stanton and Ackerman gave figures for sea level rise substantially higher than either the IPCC figure at the time or the current IPCC figure, which suggests that they were trying to make the consequences of climate change look as scary as possible, and that they write “1.5 meters of elevation and other factors described by Titus and Richman (2000) as corresponding to 27 inches of sea-level rise” when Titus and Richman actually describe 1.5 meters as corresponding to 80 cm (31.5 inches) of sea level rise.
Irish Soda Bread from 1836
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 14 Mar 2023
(more…)
Mining the moon would be “harmful” to indigenous people, say activists
Among the many, many things that are said to be harmful to indigenous culture we’re now told to include any kind of Lunar exploitation as modern colonialism:
Artist’s conception of Helium-3 mining on the surface of the Moon.
Image from Inhabitat.com
Humans have boldly ventured beyond the Earth into space for more than half a century now. It’s a testament to the ambition of the modern world.
And today, humanity is still more ambitious. A new space race is underway between the US and China to mine the Moon for rare metals. NASA is even hoping to establish a long-term presence on the Moon and eventually send humans to Mars.
But it seems that some scientists-cum-activists, in hock to identity politics, want to rein in that ambition. Speaking ahead of a US conference on the ethics of space exploration, held by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) last week, astrobiologist Dr Pamela Conrad told the Guardian that space exploration, particularly efforts to mine the Moon, is in danger of becoming an exercise in “colonialism” and “exploitation”. Conrad warned that “if something that’s not here [on Earth] is seen as a resource, just ripe to be exploited, then that [perpetuates] colonialism”.
Conrad’s fellow panellist at the conference, Dr Hilding Neilson, went even further. According to Neilson, a member of the Native American Mi’kmaq people, indigenous people have a deep connection with celestial bodies like the Moon. They therefore have a more profound and, by implication, superior “way of knowing” the Moon compared with those advocating space exploration. The latter merely see the Moon “as a dead object to be conquered”, Neilson says – meaning that those advocating space exploration are “essentially cheering on the history of colonialism”.
There are so many problems with this argument it’s difficult to know where to start. Both Conrad and Neilson appear to be using the specific and brutal practice of “colonialism” to describe – and demonise – humanity’s attempt to master nature in general. That’s a flawed enough approach to take to the history of our growing mastery of nature on Earth. But it’s even more flawed in the context of space.
After all, there’s one big difference between laying claim to the resources of other countries under colonialism and attempting to mine the Moon – nobody lives on the Moon! So no one would be “exploited” or “colonised” if humans were to mine it. Space exploration is therefore not the same as colonialism.
An Aircraft Carrier Without A Deck? | The Remarkable Brodie Landing System
Rex’s Hangar
Published 21 Sept 2022Today we’re taking a look at the remarkable Brodie Launch System. This device could be used on land or aboard ships, and it was designed to provide accessibility for light aircraft in extremely remote locations during WW2.
(more…)
QotD: The coming generation isn’t the Millennials … it’s Gen X
That’s your next layer of political and social control. The youngest of us are in their late 30s (again, using the broadest definition); most of us are well into middle age, and some of us are plunging headfirst into late middle age. The chiefs of police, the military’s senior staff officers (including, by now, some general and flag officers), the CEOs and CFOs … they’re not Millennials, they’re Xers.
Admittedly we’re a forgettable bunch. We didn’t get a chance at natural, healthy teenage rebellion, because our parents, the goddamn Boomers, claimed a monopoly on rebellion, so we had to be all, you know, like, whatever about it. The Boomers thought Andy Warhol was a serious artist and Bob Dylan a talented musician; is it any wonder that Kurt Cobain’s godawful caterwauling was the best we could do?
All of that is water under the bridge, of course. But here’s where it gets really, really meta: This great social upheaval is, for us, a copy of a copy. It’s people who were actually alive in the 1960s cosplaying The Sixties™ — just like they did the entire time we were growing up. Just as we had no template for teenage rebellion, we don’t really have a template for riots and whatnot either. Some of us have decided to crank it up to eleven — all of the most obnoxious Karens are Gen Xers — but lots of us … haven’t. I really have no idea just what the majority of my generational cohort is doing right now while our most vocal idiots are out Karening, in much the same way I have no idea what the majority of Silents were doing while the Chicago Seven were out doing their thing.
All I know is, there’s an entire layer of political power between AOC and Pelosi. We haven’t really seen it up until now, but it’s there. Is Gen X finally, at long last, going to get its shit together? I suspect that the real drama is still waiting in the wings.
Severian, “Talkin’ ’bout My Generation!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-06-11.
March 14, 2023
“Strangely, my friends have a more negative view of the feminist movement than I do”
Bryan Caplan explains why he chooses to write the books he writes:
Almost by definition, writing controversial books tends to provoke negative emotional reactions. Anger above all. Anger which, in turn, inspires fear. And not without just cause; the sad story of Salman Rushdie sends shivers down the spine of almost any writer. If you write controversial books — or care about someone who does — you should be at least a little afraid of the anger your writing inspires.
[…]
In contrast, when I announced the imminent publication of Don’t Be a Feminist, the fear went through the roof. Several folks warned me of “career suicide”. Others told me that I had no idea what horrors awaited me. Friends staged mini-interventions on my behalf.
The underlying premise, naturally, was that the feminist movement is at once terribly powerful and horribly bad-tempered.
My best guess is that the warnings are overblown. Strangely, my friends have a more negative view of the feminist movement than I do. Whether my guess is right or wrong, though, all this intense, widespread fear really ought to trouble the feminist conscience.
If I said, “Hi” to one of my kids’ friends, and they responded by fleeing in terror, my reaction would be, “Did I do something to scare him?” I would ask my kids, “Why was he so afraid of me?” If such incidents started to repeat, I would be severely troubled. “I thought I came off as a friendly dad, but I guess I’m seen as an ogre.”
The same applies if I were a feminist, and I discovered that critics are literally afraid to criticize feminism. If only a few critics feared feminism, my question would be, “What did we do to scare them?” If I discovered that fear of feminism was widespread, a full soul-search would be in order. “I thought we came off as a friendly movement, but I guess we’re seen as ogres.”
And guess what? Fear of feminism plainly is widespread.
What, then, are feminists doing wrong? Above all, cultivating and expressing vastly too much anger. Sharing your angry feelings is an effective way to dominate the social world, but a terrible way to discover the truth or sincerely convince others. Maybe you don’t mean to scare others; maybe you’re just acting impulsively. Yet either way, the fear feminists inspire is all too real.
Social media, selfies, and depression
In The Free Press, Jonathan Haidt notes the inflection point at which young liberal women started to become depressed at a much higher rate than the rest of the population — a trend that has continued for over a decade:
In September 2020, Zach Goldberg, who was then a graduate student at Georgia State University, discovered something interesting in a dataset made public by Pew Research. Pew surveyed about 12,000 people in March 2020, during the first month of the COVID shutdowns. The survey included this item: “Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” Goldberg graphed the percentage of respondents who said “yes” to that item as a function of their self-placement on the liberal-conservative 5-point scale and found that white liberals were much more likely to say yes than white moderates and conservatives. (His analyses for non-white groups generally found small or inconsistent relationships with politics.)
I wrote to Goldberg and asked him to redo it for men and women separately, and for young vs. old separately. He did, and he found that the relationship to politics was much stronger for young (white) women. You can see Goldberg’s graph here, but I find it hard to interpret a three-way interaction using bar charts, so I downloaded the Pew dataset and created line graphs, which make it easier to interpret.
Here’s the same data, showing three main effects: gender (women higher), age (youngest groups higher), and politics (liberals higher). The graphs also show three two-way interactions (young women higher, liberal women higher, young liberals higher). And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition.
Data from Pew Research, American Trends Panel Wave 64. The survey was fielded March 19–24, 2020.
Graphed by Jon Haidt.In recent weeks — since the publication of the CDC’s report on the high and rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens — there has been a lot of attention to a different study that shows the gender-by-politics interaction — Gimbrone, Bates, Prins & Keyes (2022), titled: “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs”. Gimbrone et al. examined trends in the Monitoring the Future dataset, which is the only major U.S. survey of adolescents that asks high school students (seniors) to self-identify as liberal or conservative (using a 5-point scale). The survey asks four items about mood/depression. Gimbrone et al. found that prior to 2012 there were no sex differences and only a small difference between liberals and conservatives. But beginning in 2012, the liberal girls began to rise, and they rose the most. The other three groups followed suit, although none rose as much, in absolute terms, as did the liberal girls (who rose .73 points since 2010, on a 5-point scale where the standard deviation is .89).
Data from Monitoring the Future, graphed by Gimbrone et al. (2022). The scale runs from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum).
The authors of the study try to explain the fact that liberals rise first and most in terms of the terrible things that conservatives were doing during Obama’s second term, e.g.,
Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.
The progressive New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg took up the question and wrote a superb essay making the argument that teen mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue. She dismissed Gimbrone et al.’s explanation as having a poor fit with their own data:
Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.
After examining the evidence, including the fact that the same trends happened at the same time in Britain, Canada, and Australia, Goldberg concluded that “Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word ‘selfie’ entered the popular lexicon.”
Turkey has always been the awkward ally in NATO, but for how much longer?
In Strategika, Zafiris Rossidis examines the shift of Turkish sentiment away from its longstanding role in the NATO alliance and toward a more Russian-friendly and more independent stance in international affairs:
Turkish flag.
Photo by Burak Su via Wikimedia Commons.
A poll conducted in December 2022 by the Turkish company Gezici found that 72.8% of Turkish citizens polled were in favor of good relations with Russia. By comparison, nearly 90% perceive the United States as a hostile country. It also revealed that 24.2% of citizens believe that Russia is hostile, while 62.6% believe that Russia is a friendly country. Similarly, more than 60% of respondents said that Russia contributes positively to the Turkish economy.
Turkey began to distance itself from the United States as early as 2003, when it refused the passage of American troops to Iraq. In 2010, it destroyed the U.S.–Israel–Turkey triangle, breaking up with Israel. In 2011, Turkey implemented a policy in Syria that was hardly in line with U.S. interests. The final distancing took place in 2016, with the July coup, for which Turkey blamed the United States.
Turkey considers itself very important to the United States but declares that Ankara can live without Washington. This concept has become the point of departure for Turkey in its quest to reconstitute the Ottoman Empire. Minister of the Interior Süleyman Soylu declares that the Turkish government will design the new world order with the help of Allah, and Western powers will eat the dust behind almighty Turkey (December 8, 2022).
According to a RAND Corporation volume on Turkey, there are four scenarios for the future of Turkish strategic orientation: 1) Turkey will remain a difficult partner for the United States; 2) Turkey will become democratic and unite with the West; 3) Turkey will be between East and West, but have better relations with powers such as China, Iran, and Russia, than with the U.S. and the EU; and 4) Turkey will completely abandon the West.
From the evidence in the case of the Russian–Ukrainian war, Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran justify the Russian invasion since NATO and the EU have designs on their neighborhood. Above all, they are united by a common hatred for the West. They are frenemies and they know it: on the contrary, the U.S. tends to invest in frenemies as if they were true friends.
The U.S. observed the rapprochement of Turkey and Russia without renouncing the traditional alliance with Turkey, which today has no longer such importance. Turkey was useful when it was an “enemy” of the USSR and the U.S. made far too many concessions for the sake of this useful enmity. In short, there is some inertia in the modification of the principle “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, as of course “the friend of a friend is my friend”. Turkey’s role in NATO worries the U.S., as Ankara–Moscow relations have acquired some shared strategic characteristics.
?he attraction between the two countries lies in their equally authoritarian governance models and the fact that their strategic culture and operational codes bear similarities: Both countries are revisionist, aggressive, and assertive in their regions; both countries claim to be encircled, which they use as a pretext for their unilateral actions; and both countries have militarized their foreign policy, waging hybrid warfare, resorting to proxy warfare, and blackmailing countries that offer resistance. Russia and Turkey cooperate on natural gas and oil pipelines; Russia has sold weapons such as the S-400 missile system to Turkey; Russia has provided technical assistance in the construction of Turkey’s nuclear plants; the two nations have collaborated in Central Asia (i.e., Azerbaijan); they import and export each other’s commodities; and Turkey has illegally transported Russian fuel to China and Iran, thereby bypassing sanctions on Russia, to mention only a few.
But the big issue for U.S.–Turkey relations against the backdrop of the Russian–Ukrainian war has four strands: First, the issue of the important role Turkey plays in the grain export agreement, which if cancelled will create a food crisis in Africa. Second, Turkey’s blackmailing of the NATO candidacies of Sweden and Finland. Third, the Turkish application to purchase the F-16 and the possible conflict between Congress and the Biden administration over the administration’s request to grant Turkey the license to do so. Finally, Turkey’s non-adoption of NATO sanctions against Russia. The possibility of Erdoğan using a strategy of tensions with Greece (e.g., multiple violations of Greek airspace, aggressiveness in the Aegean, weaponization of immigration, threats of bombing Athens with the new “Tayfun” short-range ballistic missile) to rally the electorate around his party and detach it from any opposition — all recent polls have AKP trailing the opposition — prior to the June election is one explanation for Turkey’s behavior that is being considered by the U.S., which nonetheless is angered that Turkey is the only NATO country that has not adopted the sanctions against Russia.
QotD: Facebook’s entire structure is designed to prevent information “going viral”
You might think that social media is where to go to share this very cool thing, and watch it go viral. And, in fact, that happens on Twitter and a few other platforms. I’m not always right in forecasting which things I post will go viral, but a few times every year I will share something on Twitter that grabs people’s attention so much that it gets tens of thousands of retweets and likes. Millions of people might see it.
That’s what going viral is all about.
Now here’s the kicker. I put up that same item on my Facebook author’s page, and the company will actively work to prevent people from seeing it. And adding insult (a company specialty), they will send me an alert telling me: This post could go viral if you pay us money for promoting it.
At first glance, this just seems another way to maximize profits. And who can blame Mark Zuckerberg for wanting to get a few more dollars in his bank account? Let’s feel some pity for a guy who just lost $100 billion.
But the real devastating part of this story is that Facebook is actually preventing users from sharing the funniest joke in the world. Facebook actually hates seeing some videos go viral, even if they are the most amusing things on the web. Every day they work to prevent folks from seeing a mind-blowing photo — and many other things that can’t be monetized.
This can’t be good for the user experience. This can’t be what users want, or what they would tell the company in a focus group or via market research.
And it certainly can’t be good for business.
So I’m amused when I hear how Facebook is envious of TikTok, which has much superior user engagement. Well, duh. Of course TikTok has greater engagement — that’s because Facebook has put systems in place to prevent entertaining things from going viral. They are now scrambling to work around this tiny detail, but they won’t succeed.
I’ve reduced my Facebook posts by at least 70%, and this was the main reason. I can’t be the only person who has responded in this way.
It’s not in the company’s DNA to promote interesting things on its platform. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when Facebook’s recent attempt to imitate Substack collapsed in total failure. I knew that would happen on day one — because Facebook will never let writers go viral on the platform. Mr. Z. wants to get paid before anything goes viral, and that’s the exact opposite of Substack’s successful formula — which rewards the creator more than the platform.
When Facebook initially launched this touted publishing platform, somebody asked me what I thought about it. “Facebook has the power to give a writer access to millions of readers,” I replied, “but they will never let it happen. The entire internal structure of the company is designed to prevent this.”
The speed of the collapse, however, was surprising. Facebook announced the launch of Bulletin on June 29, 2021. Facebook announced the termination of Bulletin on October 4, 2022.
Even King Henry VIII’s wives lasted longer than that.
Ted Gioia, “How Web Platforms Collapse”, The Honest Broker, 2022-12-05.
