Quotulatiousness

October 15, 2020

This is what happens when politicians delegate too much of their powers to the courts

Filed under: History, Law, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed recounts the stunning injustice of Soviet “justice”, in the person of Nikolai Krylenko:

Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., 10 October, 2011.
Photo by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons.

As I watched the first day of hearings on Judge Barrett’s nomination, I was reminded of a largely forgotten Soviet legal theoretician from decades ago. His name was Nikolai Krylenko. Judge Barrett is being given the Krylenko treatment by Democrat senators like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, meaning this: The only thing that matters is whether she will vote their party line in future cases.

Under the communist dictatorship of Lenin and then Stalin, Krylenko (1885-1938) rose through the Soviet Union’s legal system to become People’s Commissar for Justice and a Prosecutor General. He was a leading practitioner of the theory of “socialist legality,” which held that an accused person’s innocence or guilt depended on that person’s politics (real or imagined). It sounds nuts and indeed, it was. It was the stuff of Orwell’s nightmare, and one of the reasons the Soviet Union thankfully perished of its own poison.

In The Gulag Archipelago, the famous Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recounted an episode involving Krylenko. Shortly after Lenin’s Bolsheviks assumed power in 1917, an admiral named Shchastny was sentenced by one of the regime’s judges “to be shot within 24 hours.” When some in the courtroom expressed shock, it was Krylenko who responded thusly: “What are you worrying about? Executions have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is being shot.”

To Krylenko, the only morality was what served the Party and the State, which of course in the Soviet Union were one and the same. If your politics were not correct, you would be “corrected,” one way or the other. In Richard Pipes’ authoritative book, The Russian Revolution, Krylenko is quoted as exclaiming, “We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.”

At the Senate hearings for the Barrett nomination, it was apparent the first day that the Judge was being Krylenkoed. Hostile senators pronounced their verdicts before she had uttered a word, and those verdicts had nothing to do with Barrett’s stellar qualifications or keen legal mind. Legal analyst and George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley commented,

    What they were suggesting is that they will be voting against her because of what they expected her vote would be in a pending case, and that is a conditional confirmation … Here, the senators seem to be saying, “I’m not even going to listen; I’m going to vote against you because I don’t think you’re going to vote the right way …”

Judge Barrett clearly articulated her judicial philosophy, borne out by the way she has ruled at the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit: She believes the role of a judge or justice is to follow the Constitution and the law as written, not make stuff up in the service of a political agenda. How ironic that this is a point of fiery contention. Senators who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and the law hate the guts of a judge who does just that!

October 14, 2020

Winchester Lever Action Development: Model 1886

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Jun 2017

The Model 1886 was the first Winchester repeating rifle to improve on the original toggle locking system of the 1860 Henry, and it is also the first of John Moses Browning’s lever action designs. Browning met with Winchester executives to sell them his design for the Winchester 1885 single shot rifle, and mentioned that he was also working on a lever action repeating rifle that would be much stronger than the existing Model 1876. This was very interesting to Winchester, and they agreed to buy that design as well.

The new rifle used a pair of vertically sliding blocks to lock the bolt into the receiver upon firing, and allowed the weapon to safely chamber much more powerful rounds, up to and including the .50-100 Express. This rifle superseded the Model 1876 almost overnight, as it finally allowed a single rifle to have the power of the single shot buffalo rifles and the rapid firepower of the smaller caliber Winchesters.

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QotD: The frenetic pace of cancel culture

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

Today’s revolutionaries aren’t very good students of history, to say the least. They are full of zeal, have the requisite urge to destroy, the obligatory faith in their ability to remake humankind, the belief that widespread property destruction is good PR, and so on. What they lack is pacing.

You want to say: Slow down, young’uns! First you seize power and send all your class enemies to the camps or the grave. Then you turn on your own to purge the ideologically wobbly or those who are insufficiently zealous.

But these idiots are eating their own before they have power. Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling? Off to the gulag for believing in biological sex. The New York Times editorial-page editor earned defenestration for believing in free speech. Day after day on Twitter there’s a frenzy of witch-burning and heretic-stoning; the entire platform is like a self-lubricating guillotine.

Then again, it might be seen as a new, efficient model. After you’ve overthrown the tyrants and set up the People’s Committee, you have a new world to build. Even if you devote the morning to inventing a postcapitalist paradigm and spend the afternoon figuring out how to get fresh water and sanitation to your typhus-infested camp, that means you have to spend the evening drawing up proscription lists. Purging is necessary, but who has the time?

So they’re getting it out of the way now, purging the culture and the Twitter lists of people and things that need to be extirpated for the good of all.

Perhaps this is what happens when people who have been bingeing on TV shows for three months with no place to go decide to have a revolution. Instead of watching the shows once a week and pacing themselves, it’s a whole season in one day.

James Lileks, “Twinkling’s Canceled, Little Star”, National Review, 2020-07-06.

October 11, 2020

Winchester Lever Action Development: Model 1876

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 11 Jun 2017

While the Model 1873 was a very popular rifle, its pistol caliber cartridge did leave a segment of the market unaddressed. Winchester wanted a rifle that could chamber the larger and more powerful cartridges popular with long range hunters, and the Model 1876 would be that rifle.

Early attempts to enlarge the 1873 action to use the .45-70 Government cartridge were unsuccessful, for two reasons. First, the cartridge in its 45-70-500 infantry configuration was simply too powerful for the toggle lock design that had been the core of all Winchester’s rifles back to the 1860 Henry. In addition, the elevator mechanism used to feed the rifle had to be sized to a specific (and fairly precise) overall cartridge length. The variety of different bullet weights used in the .45-70 did not affect use in single shot weapons, but did cause problems for Winchester’s repeater.

The solution was for Winchester to design a new round for its scaled-up Model 1876. This was the .45-75, and it used a relatively light bullet and a bottlenecked case similar to the general design of the .44 WCF from the Model 1873. This bottleneck improved obturation, preventing powder fouling from leaking around the cartridge case and into the working parts of the rifle. This was not strictly necessary though, as new chambering of the 1876 would be quickly added, including the .45-60; a straight-wall shortened version of the .45-70 Government round.

While it did not blow the doors off the factory like the 1873 had, the Model 1876 was a popular rifle with its intended audience, with tens of thousands of rifles sold to men including Theodore Roosevelt.

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October 9, 2020

The passing of the “unipolar moment”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, India, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Dominion Ben Woodfinden considers the return of foreign policy concerns to Canadian politics after a multi-decade disappearance:

The collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in what the late Charles Krauthammer, in a famous Foreign Affairs essay [PDF], called the “unipolar moment” in which the United States became the unquestioned global hegemon, with no true political, economic, or ideological rivals left. We have been living for the last three decades in this moment.

But Krauthammer’s use of “moment” is deliberate. Krauthammer readily admitted that unipolarity was temporary, and that “no doubt, multipolarity will come in time.” Were he alive today, Krauthammer would probably be ready to proclaim the unipolar moment over. Great power rivalry is back, and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this, killing off any hopes that the relationship between an increasingly aggressive China and the United States could be anything other than adversarial.

This rivalry looks set to become the defining feature of the post-COVID international order, and as the Meng Wanzou case and the kidnapping of the two Michaels reveals, Canada finds itself unavoidably caught in the middle of this burgeoning rivalry. Where Canada fits into this is now one of the most important questions facing our country today.

Canada’s relationship with the United States is our most important relationship. We are unavoidably connected to our neighbour, and our relationship with the United States is a largely amiable one. But despite our integration and close ties with America, Canada remains a sovereign nation, and most Canadians retain a desire for Canada to continue to behave and act like one. Similarly, while it is a Canadian pastime to criticize the flaws and failings of our southern neighbour, we still share the same fundamental democratic values. Thus when it comes to figuring out where Canada stands in the middle of this new great power rivalry, we have little choice but to be broadly aligned with the United States and other free democratic nations.

[…]

Canada can accomplish these goals by prioritizing the strengthening of our relationship with other democratic nations that share our values and are also wary of the rise of an aggressive China with global ambitions. There is no shortage of other nations that fit this description. Most obvious are other Commonwealth nations with which we share common values and history. I’ve written before here in defence of CANZUK, a proposed agreement between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom that would strengthen economic ties and prioritize foreign policy and military coordination between these four nations. This is a good start, and strengthening the relationship between other Westminster nations to ensure that we all have an independent voice alongside America would be valuable to all prospective CANZUK members. [Federal Conservative leader Erin] O’Toole was an early supporter of CANZUK during his 2017 leadership bid, and this is something we should prioritize.

Another Commonwealth nation that Canada should prioritize the strengthening of economic and political relations with is India, a nation also threatened by an assertive China. While Canada-India relations have soured under the current government, rebuilding this relationship should be a priority. The current Indian government is not without its controversies and diaspora politics in Canada is complicated to put it mildly. But in the face of a confrontational and dangerous Chinese regime, we don’t have much choice other than to pursue closer and warmer relations with India, even if this will displease some.

Speaking in code and public health

Filed under: Government, Health, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Joshua Hind relates the tragedy that forced US emergency services to wean themselves off their many confusing (and sometimes conflicting) spoken codes and use plain language to help reduce tragic misunderstandings among different emergency response organizations:

“First responders on site of the Lac-Megantic train derailment” by TSBCanada is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In the beginning, it was standardized, and the best-known codes, like “10-4,” were consistent from town to town or state to state. But it didn’t take long for newer codes to emerge, which often meant different things depending on where you were. Efforts to reorganize the codes every 20 years or so only compounded the problem. On a local level, in any one town, it wasn’t a problem. But when cops or firefighters from different towns had to work together it could lead to disaster.

In 1970, a particularly severe wildfire season in California killed 16 people in a 13-day period and laid bare the cost of bad interagency communication. The rat’s nest of codes, abbreviations, and jargon prevented firefighters from different towns from communicating with the speed and clarity a major disaster demands. To address the problem, the U.S. Forest Service created FIRESCOPE, the first complete system for organizing and managing major incidents. One of the primary principles of this new system was to “develop standard terminology.”

Despite this effort, which later went national and then international (the province of Ontario has its own version, the “Incident Management System”) coded language continued to proliferate. Nearly 30 years after FIRESCOPE was launched, on September 11th, incompatible technology, lack of protocols, and a refusal to harmonize terminology likely contributed to the deaths of 121 firefighters who were caught in the collapse of the North Tower because they either didn’t hear or couldn’t understand the warnings that the building was about to fail.

Which brings us back to 2006, and FEMA’s notice to first responders. After decades of asking agencies to stop using coded language, the federal government made funding contingent on compliance. “The use of plain language in emergency response is a matter of public safety,” the memo’s introduction read. “There simply is little or no room for misunderstanding in an emergency situation.” From that point forward, all interdepartmental communication would have to be un-coded. A fire would be called “fire.” A shooting would be “a shooting.” And if you needed help, you’d say “HELP!”

Police, fire departments and paramedics slowly but surely got on board and started using some form of the incident management system which included plain language. As use of the system spread, other sectors, like large music festivals and other live events, began adopting the concepts to better synchronize public safety programs with the first responders who support them. Today it’s not unusual for producers, technicians and event security staff to attend training at the police college right next to fire captains and police officers.

Then COVID-19 happened, and we realized that no one had told Public Health.

October 8, 2020

Fallen Flag — The Pacific Electric Railway

Filed under: Business, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This month’s Classic Trains featured fallen flag is southern California’s iconic Pacific Electric Railway Company, whose streetcars, interurbans, and buses served the vast area in and around Los Angeles and San Bernardino from 1901 until the passenger services were sold off in 1953. The electric service was converted to bus and the last electric rail line was discontinued in 1961. At its peak in the 1920s the “Red Cars” service was said to be the largest electric railway system in the entire world.

G. Mac Sebree covers the origins of the line in the late nineteenth century:

The story begins in 1895, when a line was completed from Los Angeles to Pasadena; a mere 10 years later, the system was virtually complete. To a great degree, PE was the brainchild of Henry Huntington, nephew of one of the Central Pacific’s “Big Four,” Collis P. Huntington. An active real-estate promoter, Henry needed the Big Red Cars and the transportation they provided to help sell lots and homes in the hinterlands.

His uncle’s Southern Pacific took control of the PE in 1911 in a deal that left the Los Angeles Railway, the narrow-gauge intracity system, in the nephew’s hands. The PE was built to standard gauge, and SP saw a brilliant future in freight for the interurban.

Pacific Electric route map.
Original data from http://sharemap.org/public/Los_Angeles_Pacific_Electric_Railways_(Red_Cars) via Wikimedia Commons.

Interurbans were not considered Class I railroads (or any other class — they were not “steam railroads”), but from the very start, PE was big business. The California Railroad Commission said the property was worth $100 million in Depression dollars. Atypically for an interurban, the system served as a gathering network for carload freight shipments from citrus groves, manufacturing plants, oil refineries, warehouses, and the harbor at San Pedro. The three line-haul railroads serving southern California — Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and especially SP — depended on the Pacific Electric to some degree.

Yet in its heyday, PE carried huge numbers of passengers. As late as 1953, 50 percent of its revenue came from riders — but absolutely none of its profit. An all-time list shows that PE operated 143 distinct passenger routes. Despite the so-called “Great Merger of 1911,” in which local and interurban services were supposedly separated, the heaviest PE passenger lines largely served the L.A. urban area. An example was the street-running L.A.–Hollywood–Beverly Hills line, in which two-car trains rumbled down Hollywood Boulevard at 10-minute intervals.

At one time or another, PE single-truck Birney cars plied local lines in Pasadena, Long Beach, Santa Monica, Redlands, Santa Ana, and San Pedro, although the 1920s were not far along before management sought to sell off or abandon these albatrosses.

After World War 2, the writing was on the wall for the Red Cars, as urban expansion and greatly increased car ownership cut at the economic basis for rail passenger service in southern California, especially as the new freeways were built.

After the war, though, things went downhill rapidly. As soon as buses were available, Pacific Electric began wholesale rail passenger-service abandonments. The new freeways were regarded as the rapid transit of the future. PE President Oscar Smith saw one possibility for saving rail service — if the state would pay. Just before the war, a short section of freeway between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley had been built, with the PE tracks relocated to the center of the new highway.

Why not replicate this all over the basin? The PE would cooperate, but public officials turned a deaf ear, and that was that. Freight service, meanwhile, prospered, but by the mid-1950s, PE began replacing its electric locomotives and box motors with diesels (a few steam locomotives also had been used during the war). Over the years, PE rostered about 100 electric locomotives and at least 75 box motors — big business, indeed.

In 1953, PE sold its passenger service (four rail lines out of the 6th and Main station, two out of Subway Terminal, and many bus lines) to Metropolitan Coach Lines. The Metropolitan Transit Authority, first formed in 1951, bought MCL on March 3, 1958, and the end for electric passenger service came in 1961. SP continued the freight work with diesels, and merged PE away on August 13, 1965. Today under the Union Pacific shield, a good bit of the old PE freight lines remain in service, unique survivors, busier than ever.

A veteran Pacific Electric “Big Red Car” already lettered for successor Metropolitan Coach Lines in the 1950s.
Photo by Voogd075 via Wikimedia Commons.

Winchester Lever Action Development: Model 1873

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 9 Jun 2017

With the Model of 1873, Winchester was able to address the major remaining weakness of the Henry and 1866 rifles — the cartridge. The 1873 was introduced in tandem with the .44 Winchester Center Fire cartridge (known more commonly today as the .44-40). This cartridge kept the 200 grain bullet from the .44 Henry Rimfire round, but used a brass case (as opposed to copper) and was able to increase the powder charge from 28 grains to 40, for a substantial increase in velocity.

In addition, the Model 1873 used a lighter steel frame and introduced a sliding dust cover on the top of the action to help keep out dirt and debris. The centerfire nature of the cartridge made it possible to handload ammunition when a commercial source was not available (Winchester sold the reloading tools). The 1873 was available with a wide variety of options, including barrel and magazine lengths, buttstock and grips, sights, and fancy options like engraving. It would prove to be a massively popular weapon both in the United States and abroad, cementing Winchester’s position as the premier manufacturer of American repeating rifles.

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October 7, 2020

The Great Swamp Fight: The Bloodiest Day of King Philip’s War

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 6 Oct 2020

In December 1675, in the midst of King Philip’s War, an army of Puritan colonists made a preemptive strike against the neutral Narragansett tribe. Their desperate battle in the snowy wilderness of Rhode Island became a touchstone in the cultural lore of Anglo New England, while the subsequent massacre would go down as the darkest, most tragic event in Narragansett history.

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~REFERENCES~

[1] Eric Schultz and Michael Tougias. King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict (1999). The Countryman Press, Page 269

[2] Douglas Leach. Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip’s War (1958). Parnassus Imprints, Page 58-62

[3] Leach, Page 112-117

[4] Schultz & Tougias, Page 246-247

[5] Schultz & Tougias, Page 247-255

[6] Leach, Page 127-129

[7] Schultz & Tougias, Page 259

[8] Leach, Page 129

[9] Leach, Page 148-149

[10] Joseph Dudley. Second Letter of Joseph Dudley (2001). Bigelow Society http://bigelowsociety.com/rod/battles…

[11] Schultz & Tougias, Page 260-261

[12] Leach, Page 130-131

[13] Benjamin Church. Entertaining Passages Relating to King Philip’s War, Tercentenary Edition (1975). Pequot Press, Page 95-102

[14] Schultz & Tougias, Page 264-265

[15] Leach, Page 131

[16] Church, Page 101

[17] “History – Perseverance.” Narragansett Indian Nation http://narragansettindiannation.org/h…

Ten Minute History – The French Revolution and Napoleon

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Middle East, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Matters
Published 12 Sep 2016

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Tenminhistory
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4973164

This episode of Ten Minute History (like a documentary, only shorter) covers the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars from the beginning of King Louis XVI’s reign all the way to the death of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1821. The first half covers the life and death of Louis XVI during the events of the revolution, including the rise and fall of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror. The second half covers the rise of Napoleon, the Napoleonic Wars and the eventual allied victory over France.

Ten Minute History is a series of short, ten minute animated narrative documentaries that are designed as revision refreshers or simple introductions to a topic. Please note that these are not meant to be comprehensive and there’s a lot of stuff I couldn’t fit into the episodes that I would have liked to. Thank you for watching, though, it’s always appreciated.

QotD: The gullible generation

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

World War II, which I have described (in The Probability Broach) as a struggle between competing brands of fascism, was much the same thing. For the beleaguered people of Europe, it meant being forced to choose between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Would you rather be shot or gassed?

For Americans, it meant looking for protection by a political regime so grossly and criminally corrupt that future historians will shake their heads, wondering how an entire people could be such suckers. “The Greatest Generation”, that miserable collectivist mouthpiece Tom Brokaw has called them. Looking back over what my father told me of his life, how his family suffered in the government-caused Great Depression, how he and his comrades risked unspeakable danger in the war, and how he became a prisoner in Germany — all to aggrandize the virtual godhood of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — I call them “The Gullible Generation”.

On the other hand, people loved the Roosevelt Administration so much that they passed a Constitutional amendment to make sure that no sonofabitch could ever be elected to more than two Presidential terms again.

World War II gave government complete, dictatorial control of American society, control of industry, control of communications, control of the economy, control that Roosevelt had desperately lusted after before the war, but failed to achieve. If anyone objected, or insisted on his rights under the Constitution, all the other side had to say was, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

The government enjoyed that level of control. Once the war was won, and people looked forward to a period of peace, the government plunged us into the Korean War, Vietnam, and an increasing number of undeclared and stupid conflicts in order to retain its power. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” never worked quite as well as it had to shut dissenters up, but it’s clear that this scam will go on and on and on until something drastic is done to stop it.

L. Neil Smith, “The Deep State”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-04-14.

October 6, 2020

⚜ | The Great Tank Destruction Myth ft. The Chieftain

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

Military Aviation History
Published 24 May 2018

Planes kill tanks in the thousands, Sir! Why, do they really? Lets find out.

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Tank Encyclopedia.org,

Zeller, “Estimates concerning the effectiveness of some contemporary American fighters in
defeating a defended and undefended IS-III tank”,

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#CAS #GroundAttack #Typhoon

October 5, 2020

“Letters to a Young Contrarian was fundamentally a twentieth-century work by a man who thought of himself as a sixties radical”

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Roland Elliott Brown considers the work of Christopher Hitchens, and particularly his Letters to a Young Contrarian from 2001:

The book is now nearly twenty years old. Hitchens wrote it in late 2000 and early 2001 for Perseus Books’ Rilke-inspired “Art of Mentoring” series, and it was published a month or so after 9/11. In view of this timeline, it occupies an eerily-placid DMZ between the “acceptable” 1990s Hitchens, whose only big sin against the political left had been to hound the centrist Bill Clinton, and the ostensibly-more isolated one post-2001, who took heart at the prospect of America using its military might against jihadis and Baathists. The book was largely a post-mortem on the intellectual battles of the twentieth century, and a lesson in writerly integrity. Today, it reads as a riposte to the new “populism” and the “awokening”.

Since Hitchens’s death from oesophageal cancer in 2011, his presence has been missed on major subjects. In a counterfactual world, it seems likely that Syria, ISIS, and the Iran nuclear negotiations (all entangled) would have occupied him in the first half of the 2010s, and that the potential unravelling of the American republic would have worried him in the second. Part of what his admirers miss, too […] is his performative flair. Though new media weren’t his passion, he owes much of his legacy to his YouTube archive, wherein his long-form lectures, debates, and C-span interviews seem, in hindsight, to have provided a model for the popularity of long-form podcasts.

The Letters can be read as a guide to giving an authentic performance as a political actor. Hitchens begins by selling an imagined student his lifestyle; in one good month, he writes (with some perhaps-inauthentic modesty), he has given evidence against Mother Teresa at the Vatican, taken pride in his arguments over Bosnia as Slobodan Milosevic went to the Hague, and had the thrill of being sued by Henry Kissinger. What the world needs now, the book implies, is for the young to find their appetite for the takedown. (One wonders to what extent his search for successors may have emerged from early intimations of mortality: in one C-span interview about the book, he also urged the youth not to take up smoking.)

[…]

But to reiterate, Letters to a Young Contrarian was fundamentally a twentieth-century work by a man who thought of himself as a sixties radical. Other sixties people like Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal, with whom Hitchens would later fall out over the War on Terror, figure here in heroic roles. Radicals, he argues in the third chapter, are needed to force major issues. Would slavery have ended in America, he asks, if not for the fanaticism of John Brown? Many of his mentors — Peter Sedgwick, E.P. Thompson — were sometime British communists (and long-time socialists) who had ditched the Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary (what a pity, then, that he never got to debate “the left” with Jordan Peterson).

Of course, Hitchens was not the only sixties radical to court influence in the 2000s, nor was he the most influential. Much of the radicalism he valued now comes to us — via less subtle mentors — in parody form: as sixties-worship gone sour, as a morbid focus on immutable characteristics, as a desire to short-circuit debate, as the unclean spirit that possesses young journalists to misrepresent their subjects so that they can gloat about the takedown. East of the old Iron Curtain, Alexander Lukashenko borrows a page from the dissidents of ’89 by carrying on “as if” there had been no pandemic, “as if” he had won a presidential election, and “as if” NATO was getting ready to invade Belarus. In such times, it seems worth living “as if” the cigarette-smoking ghost still had an eye on the scene.

Winchester Lever Action Development: Model 1866

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Jun 2017

While the Henry Repeating Rifle had been an serious leap forward in firearms capability, it was not without problems. The biggest single weakness of the Henry was its magazine. The tube magazine was open to dirt and debris, the follower could easily come to rest on the shooter’s hand or anything used as a rest and stop the weapon from feeding, and the while system was rather prone to being damaged.

These problems would all be addressed with the addition of Nelson King’s new loading gate idea, which allowed Winchester to omit the exposed follower entirely, solving a bunch of complaints all at once. The new system was more durable, more reliable, and allowed the rifle to be loaded without the awkward manipulation required by the Henry. The King improvement also allowed the addition of a wooden handguard, which was a welcome addition — it does not take very many black powder rounds for a barrel to become uncomfortably hot to the touch.

At the same time that these improvements were being made, company politics were taking shape to end Benjamin T. Henry’s involvement with the company. Henry attempted to take over ownership of the company because he felt he was not profiting as much as he should, but he had assigned his patent rights to Oliver Winchester in exchange for his contract to manufacture the guns. As a result, Winchester was able to create a new company (the Winchester Repeating Arms Company) with full rights to the design patents and sideline Henry.

The 1866 rifle, which was formally called simply the Winchester Repeating Rifle would continue to use the .44 Henry Rimfire cartridge, but would be made in a wider variety of configurations than the Henry had been, including carbine, rifle, and musket barrel lengths. It would prove to be a very popular rifle, and opened the path to further improvement, as it put the Winchester company on excellent financial footing.

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QotD: Language changes to accord with critical studies theory

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

A Canadian Broadcasting [Corporation] program also debuted a new term this past week: “non-straight cisgender people.” This is the newly approved newspeak for gay people, parsed through the language of critical queer studies. The proponents of this new language seem eager to retire familiar terms like “gay men” or “lesbians” — perhaps because they suggest that the homosexual experience is rooted in basic human nature and can exist outside the parameters of structural oppression. So they find ways to define us in terms of queer theory, insisting there are only oppressed LGBTQ+ people. That’s also why, for example, so many on the left insist that gay white men had very little to do with Stonewall, which was led, we’re told, by trans women of color, subsequently betrayed by white men, who stole the movement from them. That this is untrue is irrelevant. It’s a narrative which serves to dismantle structures of oppression. And that’s all that matters.

Leading progressive maternity and doula organizations now deploy and encourage a whole array of “gender-neutral language” with respect to sex, birth, labor, and parenting. And so we now have the terms “chest-feeding,” “persons who menstruate,” “persons who produce sperm,” and “birthing person” for breastfeeding, women, men, and mothers, respectively. And instead of a butthole, we have a “back-hole”; instead of a vagina, we have a “front hole.” “Ovaries” and “uterus” are now rendered as “internal organs,” which may strike you as somewhat vague. These may sound completely absurd now, but given the choke hold critical gender theory has on almost all elite organizations, you can be sure you’ll hear them soon enough. They’ll likely be mandatory if you want to prove you’re not a transphobe. It was an objection to one of these terms — “people who menstruate” — that got J.K. Rowling tarred again as a bigot.

Those of us who oppose this abuse of the English language, who try to abide by Orwell’s dictum to use the simplest, clearest Anglo-Saxon words to describe reality, are now instantly suspect. Given the fear of losing your job for resisting this madness, most people will submit to this linguistic distortion. As you can see everywhere, the stigma of being called a bigot sweeps away all objects before it. But the further this goes — and there is no limiting principle in critical theory at all — the less able we are to describe reality. Which is, of course, the point. Narratives, only narratives, exist. And power, only power, matters.

Andrew Sullivan, “China Is a Genocidal Menace”, New York, 2020-07-03.

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