Quotulatiousness

April 5, 2020

QotD: The fear of “becoming” your job

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

In fact, “losing ourselves in the part” used to be our big worry. Maybe I am just a customer service rep …? The office, the commute, my neckties all laid out for me at the start of each week … is that really all there is to life? What happens when the long nights start taking their toll — as they must — and I have to give up the bar band? What happens when the kids grow up?

You could see this worry everywhere in our culture, our art. Watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Judge Reinhold’s character is wrestling with this type of question, and he’s in high school, fer chrissakes. See what I mean about that movie being made on Mars? Remember that; it’ll be on the final.

There’s a certain type of person, though, who just couldn’t grok those worries, because the very notion of social roles was incomprehensible. We didn’t know about the autism spectrum back then, but that’s what that type of person effectively is: A high-functioning autistic. For the autistic, what’s now is forever. Bob’s nametag says “customer service representative.” Therefore, Bob is a customer service representative, and only a customer service representative, now and forever. Bob the family man, Bob the stamp collector, Bob the bar-band strummer … all those fry the autistic’s circuits. It says “customer service representative,” damn it! The train is fine.

Two sides of the same coin. Normal people were worried that they were becoming their jobs. The autistics couldn’t grasp that anyone could be anything else.

The autistics all went into the ivory tower, which gave us identity politics. “Identity politics” only makes sense to the autistic — that is, to people who can’t process change. Normal people have such a hard time with it because we can’t see the logical connection between, say, being gay and being pro-abortion. I mean, if you’re gay it’s a moot point, right? Nor is there any logical connection between being gay and favoring redistributive economics, or worrying about global warming, or whatever. Maybe you do believe in redistributive economics and are worried about global warming, but those are just individual opinions, right? I’m not obliged to vote Republican because I dig blondes. It’s a non sequitur.

Not to the autistic, it isn’t. They’re told that this — pro-abortion, being “green,” the whole Liberal schmear — just is gayness, and they go with it, because that’s the only way the world makes sense to them. Just how “gay” came to mean all that is above my pay grade, but we all know it’s true. More importantly, we all know they believe it, with all their hearts and souls.

That’s the situation in which we find ourselves, my young friends, here in the Current Year. Most of us would like to be team players, but we have no role models. Because the autistics control the culture, we’ve internalized their worries. If I’m a member of the team, we instinctively feel, then somehow I am the team, and only the team, now and forever. It’s a stark choice: Either I give up my individuality completely to advance the team’s goals, or I take my ball and go home.

But it’s a false choice, kameraden, one that could only be beaten into us by very long, very expensive training — i.e. the American “education” system, K-thru-PhD.

Severian, “Advice to Young Dissidents”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-01.

April 4, 2020

“Into The Fire” – The Vietnam War – Sabaton History 061 [Official]

Filed under: Asia, Australia, History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 3 Apr 2020

During the height of the Cold War, weapons ran hot in the jungles of Vietnam. Combat along the overgrown trails, the wide open fields of rice-paddies or the marshes of the Mekong Delta, was not only exhausting and relentless, but also the place where many of the old doctrines of warfare did no longer apply. The western coalition had to face the elusive guerilla methods of the North Vietnamese forces, who prepared ambushes and traps along the marching routes. The eerie quietness of the jungle was all too often broken by a sudden explosion of violence as troops marched right into the fire.

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April 3, 2020

“And what are your personal pronouns?”

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

Last week, Amy Alkon considered the demands of “pronoun authoritarians”:

Personally, I’m disturbed by the whole notion that we “include” people through calling them the right pronoun, which requires all this “homework” about a person before you say one word to them.

This new requirement for doing this seems to be a sort of religion that allows people to have power over others — to push them around and deem them thought and speech criminals, even if they simply forget to use somebody’s requested “pronoun.”

This also seems to be a way for people to feel special without earning it — to require people to find out all sorts of information about them, on penalty of being accused of a thought or speech crime and then cancelled.

It seems outrageous to me that some stranger would be required to prep for conversation by investigating my history — that my family are Eastern European Jews, that old friends call me “Flamey” or “Flame-o,” that I eat keto, that I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah — and that they would be seen as disrespectful and even bigoted for failing to find out all the ways I’m (heh) unique and special.

But that’s what we’re requiring people to do with this notion that we have to ask “what is your preferred pronoun?”

And again, this is done now with threats embedded — with the threat that you will lose your job and be deemed a bigot if you don’t make this “What’s your pronoun?” business a priority.

Oh, and I will be very clear on this again: If you want me to call you “zhe” or “they” or “lemon pie with a slight dusting of confectioner’s sugar on top,” I will do my best to remember that and do it, because it’s kind.

But I think the considerations above are important, and I think it’s too easy to just accept the demand to ask people for their “pronouns” as a requirement for being considered decent — with the possible penalty of losing everything as the penalty for failing in some way, even by forgetting.

April 2, 2020

Fallen flag — the Pere Marquette Railway

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

This month’s fallen flag article for Classic Trains is the story of the Pere Marquette Railway by Kevin P. Keefe:

C&O’s formal acquisition of the Pere Marquette in 1947 did more than help usher in the postwar merger era; it also closed the book on a railroad with a colorful and quirky history. PM was created in 1900 by the consolidation of three roads: Flint & Pere Marquette; Detroit, Grand Rapids & Western; and Chicago & West Michigan. (The town of Pere Marquette; today we know the place as Ludington. Jacques Marquette, the French missionary and explorer, died and was buried here in 1675, and the name Pere Marquette had been given to the inlet lake off Lake Michigan, the river that feeds into it, and an 1847 community there.)

All three carriers had roots in the lumber industry, so the new Pere Marquette Railroad not only connected important Michigan cities, it also operated a branchline network covering much of the state’s Lower Peninsula. PM’s early corporate history was chaotic, marked by receivership and ownership changes. The Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton acquired PM in 1904 and for a time leased it to various parties, including the Erie Railroad. Thus did Baltimore & Ohio briefly control the PM through its ownership of the CH&D. When Pere Marquette came out of a receivership in 1907, it would be for only five years.

Those early, troublesome times, however, were marked by two strategic steps forward. One was the chartering of the Pere Marquette of Indiana, which built from New Buffalo, Michigan, southwest to Porter, Indiana, allowing PM to reach Chicago, via trackage rights on the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern (NYC). The second was the lease of the Lake Erie & Detroit River Railway, pushing PM eastward from Walkerville (Windsor), Ontario, to St. Thomas, thence to Suspension Bridge (Niagara Falls), New York, via rights on Michigan Central affiliate Canada Southern, and on to Buffalo on the NYC. Patched together as they were, these additions allowed PM to position itself as a Buffalo–Chicago bridge carrier.

Pere Marquette route map from a 1944 timetable.
Via Classic Trains.

In the ensuing years, the rectangular PM logo would largely disappear from view, although the road’s eventual 12 E7’s wore the script Pere Marquette train name, along with C&O identification, into the mid-1950s, thanks to equipment trust restrictions. PM’s three GE 70-tonners of 1947 were sold, but a few of its 16 EMD switchers (2 SW1’s of 1939 and ’42, 14 NW2’s of 1943–46) carried PM lettering into the 1960s, and C&O kept PM’s color pattern of yellow front-end bands with red pinstriping on a blue body on 11 more EMDs of 1948 that came fully lettered C&O: NW2’s 1850–1856 and E7’s 95–98.

As for the famous Berkshires, they, along with all of Pere Marquette’s steam locomotives, were retired by 1951. Eleven found a temporary reprieve on C&O’s Chesapeake District in Kentucky and West Virginia, but only for a few months. Two, 1223 and 1225, survived as display items in Michigan, and as a student at Michigan State University, I became involved with the restoration of the 1225, which today occasionally operates on excursions.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the Pere Marquette’s last equipment order as an independent railroad was in 1947 for six of EMD’s 1,500 h.p. BL2 “branchline” diesels, Nos. 80–85. Chosen to negotiate PM’s web of secondary lines — most of them rooted in the road’s origins as a logger — the homely diesels were as quirky and as singular as the PM itself. Pointedly, even though they sported the “speed striping” as found on the E7’s, the BL2’s were delivered in full “Chesapeake & Ohio” lettering.

Pere Marquette 1225, a Berkshire 2-8-4 steam locomotive, passes through Alma in March 2009.
Photo by Chelseyafoster via Wikimedia Commons.

The Pere Marquette also had a maritime division and one of their ships had a disastrous voyage (via Wikipedia) 110 years ago:

The Pere Marquette operated a number of rail car ferries on the Detroit and St. Clair Rivers and on Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. The PM’s fleet of car ferries, which operated on Lake Michigan from Ludington, Michigan to Milwaukee, Kewaunee, and Manitowoc, Wisconsin, were an important transportation link avoiding the terminal and interchange delays around the southern tip of Lake Michigan and through Chicago. Their superintendent for over 30 years was William L. Mercereau.

Pere Marquette 18

On September 10, 1910, Pere Marquette 18 was bound for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from Ludington, Michigan, with a load of 29 railroad freight cars and 62 persons. Near midnight, the vessel began to take on massive amounts of water. The captain dumped nine railroad cars into Lake Michigan, but this was no use — the ship was going down. The Pere Marquette 17, traveling nearby, picked up the distress call and sped to assist the foundering vessel. Soon after she arrived and she could come alongside, the Pere Marquette 18 sank with the loss of 28 lives; there were 33 survivors. Her wreck has yet to be located and is the largest unlocated wreck of the Great Lakes.

April 1, 2020

The end of US neutrality? The Lend-Lease Act – WW2 Special Episode

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 31 Mar 2020

The United States of America aims to remain neutral during World War Two. But they see it in their best interest to aid the British in their fight against Nazism. The Lend-Lease Act is designed to do exactly that.

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Colorizations by:
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Sources:
Plane by Graphic Enginer from the Noun Project
people by ProSymbols from the Noun Project
Allierte soldater under kampene om Narvik, courtesy Arkiv i Nordland https://flic.kr/p/a829tg

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation in Time”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 4”
Phoenix Tail – “At the Front”
Hakan Eriksson – “Epic Adventure Theme 3”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”

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A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
1 hour ago (edited)
On 11 March, 1941, American President Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act, as Indy has covered in the weekly episode on that week. We wanted to revisit that bill in a special episode since it is arguably one of the most consequential American actions of the war before December 1941. Now, the effects of the bill are not visible immediately, but later in the war we will definitely revisit some of the materiel that entered British service under Lend-Lease. We hope you all remain safe and healthy!
Cheers, Joram

Woodrow Wilson (pt.2) | Historians Who Changed History

The Cynical Historian
Published 8 Feb 2018

This is the second part of a 2 part episode. The first covered Woodrow Wilson from his early years to the 1912 election. This episode is covering his presidency. I highly recommend you go see the previous one, because I’m going to refer to stuff in it a lot here.

They only allow 5 cards, so here are all the previous episodes referenced:
Wilson Part 1: https://youtu.be/Hm0Gzz53YJo
Birth of a Nation: https://youtu.be/zzsvOBjRXew
Philippine Insurrection: https://youtu.be/mmYk0xxjDDA
WWI causes: https://youtu.be/NTrk7XktTrc
WWI effects: https://youtu.be/G3vKUgoTghg
Border Wars: https://youtu.be/qs4Lp39Y8W8
Russian Intervention: https://youtu.be/1mC1bmzbgxY
1919 Red Scare: https://youtu.be/S4Pi2nYcYNw
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[Full references in the YouTube description]

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Wiki:
The presidency of Woodrow Wilson began on March 4, 1913 at noon when Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated as President of the United States, and ended on March 4, 1921. Wilson, a Democrat, took office as the 28th United States president after winning the 1912 presidential election, gaining a large majority in the Electoral College and a 42 percent plurality of the popular vote in a four–candidate field. Four years later, in 1916, Wilson defeated Republican Charles Evans Hughes by nearly 600,000 votes in the popular vote and secured a narrow majority in the Electoral College by winning several swing states with razor-thin margins. He was the first Southerner elected as president since Zachary Taylor in 1848, and the first Democratic president to win re-election since Andrew Jackson in 1832.
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Hashtags: #History #WoodrowWilson #PresidentWilson #KKK #BirthOfANation #Segregation #JimCrow #Wilsonianism #Interventionism #EspionageAct #SeditionAct

March 30, 2020

FP-45 Liberator Pistol

Filed under: Greece, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Nov 2015

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

Hammer price: $2250

The Liberator is one of those interesting artifacts of WWII; an extremely simple single-shot .45 caliber pistol made by the boxcar-load (a million, specifically) with the intention of being dropped en masse across Europe to promote civilian sabotage against German occupation forces. They were manufactured by the Guide Lamp division of GM in record time – just 10-11 weeks for a literal million-gun production run. However, as they were being manufactured, shipped, and put into storage the motivation behind the project largely evaporated. British SOE ultimately decided not to distribute any in France, and only distributed a small number to partisans in Greece.

In the US, the Army stockpile of Liberators was transferred to the OSS, and a fair number were actually distributed in India, China, and the Philippine Islands – although they did not ultimately have any measurable impact on the war effort.

QotD: Free speech is the safety valve we must not eliminate

[W]hen you’re a peddler of Utopia, you can’t admit you’re wrong or that your methods are crazy. After all, your cult of Marx (a college-professor friend recently shocked his students by pointing out Marx is a 19th century western idea — born of the mechanical age and the idea you can make everything just so — and that imposing this interpretation on non-Western systems is colonialist) promises eventual paradise and world domination. You can’t be wrong. It would mean your whole life has been in vain, and everything you’ve been taught is a lie.

The system might have moved the downtrodden from those “exploited” by the industrial revolution, to “minorities” “third world people” and people with interesting colorations — mostly because the “exploited” workers kept rising up in the world and spitting in the eye of Marx, the ungrateful bastages — but it’s totally still true and the way of the future. Even if it requires conceptualizing a future where no one works and everything is free, since they’ve now tossed the “workers” out of their ideal society. (Again, ungrateful bastages who don’t know how “good” the intellectuals are for them.) But it is totally the future!

So all those people who say that it’s still spinach and to hell with it? They’re just trying to destroy the train of happiness leading to the station of utopia.

Which means they must be silenced. If they’re just silenced, then the system will work fine, and everyone will be happy and joyful.

So the latest attack is on free speech. Because free speech can be hurty and say things the left doesn’t want to hear. Bad bad free speech must be stopped.

They already have laws against “hate speech” or “harassment”, which according to a comment here is “saying something I don’t like more than once” in most of the world.

The US is holding fast in our unreasonable devotion to the first amendment which irks the left as much as our devotion to the second. Don’t we understand that bad speech hurts people? And leads to bad think?

In any institution they control, from companies code of conduct to deplatforming people on twitter, to Google strangling hits to dissenting blogs, etc, they are already silencing that nasty, evil feedback.

Because if only they don’t hear the whistles of rising steam, the engine will never explode.

Cotton stuffed in their ears, they keep feeding more coal to the engine of public opinion and stopping up the steam vents.

The end of this is what happened to Ceausescu and his repulsive wife: “Beloved leader of the morning, pile of cooling, bullet riddled meat in the afternoon.”

But they don’t see it. They’re convinced if they just stop the feedback, the machine will work fine.

And they’re going to take all of us into the explosion. Mind you, in the end we win, they lose, but it’s going to get very rough there for a while.

Unfortunately when dealing with true believers, there’s nothing you can do but let them utterly prove their system wrong, before sane people can build again.

Sarah Hoyt, “Breaking the Gears”, According to Hoyt, 2018-01-03.

March 29, 2020

For dedicated progressives, the answer to every question is always “more government”

Arthur Chrenkoff on the constant demand from the left for expanding the role of government in, basically, everything:

But even in more developed and democratic countries of Europe, while not leading to the overthrow of the political and economic system, World War One had contributed to a significant increase in the size and the power of the state. Even more so World War Two, where the war experience translated into post-war Keynesian-inspired social democratic welfare states, ironically nowhere more so than in the United Kingdom where the Tories won the war but the Labour won the peace. In some ways, the mobilisation of the state to fight a total war was merely the continuation of the mobilisation to fight the Great Depression, an economic upheaval like none before, which helped bring national socialism to power in Germany and realigned the American politics for the next half a century around a New Deal consensus. The GFC did not leave as extensive a legacy, except perhaps in the right’s surrender on government spending, budget deficits and public debt. If you are no longer restricted by the existing revenue, there is really no limit how big the government can grow.

Over the last two decades the left has been trying to use climate change as another crisis not be wasted. If the problem was CO2, bigger state and smaller market were always the answers if you listened to Bernie Sanders and AOC with their Green New Deal or to Extinction Rebellion, or Greta Thunberg or any number of other high profile individuals and groups. By and large, this has not worked because the threat of a hotter planet and a more extreme weather has never been immediate enough, despite all the 10 and 12 year deadlines until a “point of no return” and all the overheated, panic-mongering rhetoric about the end of the world.

Enter stage left Coronavirus. What opportunities have been missed or simply impossible to seize as a result of the GFC (because the economic crisis wasn’t in the end deep enough) or the “climate emergency” (because the threat was never urgent enough) are here to be seized during the pandemic, even more so if the pandemic (or the responses to) leads to a genuine global economic depression, perhaps worse than the one 90 years ago. No sane person wishes deadly pandemics on the world, but since it’s already here might as well act. The pretty sober and comfortably elite Economist calls what has already occurred around the world “the most dramatic extension of state power since the second world war.”

It has been noticeable to me, as I’m sure it has been to many others, how large sections of the left seem to be salivating at the prospect of complete and prolonged lock-downs and martial law-type situations. Such measures might possibly be in the end necessary to finally halt and contain the spread of the contagion (or, then again, they might not be), but the sheer rush towards them and enthusiasm by people, many of whom have spent the last five years decrying Donald Trumps of the world as dictators-in-waiting, leads me to believe that for many progressive and radical people authoritarianism is like rape: the public fear of it often masks the secret fantasies about it. It’s not a question of what, and not even of who’s in charge, even though they would prefer to be the ones at the helm, as long as it actually happens, because the state, being the left’s domain, will be the ultimate beneficiary and in time so will they. The left loves power, no matter how much they protest it’s all for the greater good. That’s why everyone wants to be a commissar and no one actually wants to be the proletarian.

But never mind COVID martial law; even if it were to last a few months, people need to be let out of their houses eventually and life has to return to some semblance of normality. What the left is more interested and more passionate about are the long lasting consequences, the fruit of power shifts in the world upended by a bat virus. The current crisis presents an almost unparalleled opportunity to expand the scope of governments at the expense of the private sector and the peoples and institute far-reaching changes to just about every aspect of life.

March 28, 2020

Woodrow Wilson (pt.1) | Historians Who Changed History

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

The Cynical Historian
Published 28 Dec 2017

Time to finally tell you why I’ve used Woodrow Wilson as a bit of a rhetorical punching bag. This is part 1 of a 2 part series. This part will cover his life and scholarship before the presidency. It’s going to be quite a trip. [References on YouTube description]

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Wiki:
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924) was an American statesman and academic who served as the 28th President of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910 and then ran and was elected as a progressive Democrat to the office of Governor of New Jersey. Wilson’s victory in the 1912 presidential election made him the first Southerner elected to the presidency since Zachary Taylor in 1848. He also led the United States during World War I, establishing an activist foreign policy known as “Wilsonianism.” He was a major leader at the Paris [Versailles] Peace Conference in 1919, where he championed the proposed League of Nations. However, he was unable to obtain Senate approval for U.S. membership. After he suffered debilitating strokes in September 1919, his wife and staff members handled most of his presidential duties.
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Hashtags: #History #WoodrowWilson #LostCause #historians #Princeton #biography

March 27, 2020

The Wuhan Coronavirus sucks, our data on it sucks … but our media suck most of all

Filed under: China, Government, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The all-hysteria, all the time media will have much to regret once the worst of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic has run its course:

  • The data we have sucks, and thus any conclusions we are drawing mostly suck too. The data is worse than just being incomplete or bad — if it was randomly distributed, we could live with that. But the lack of test kits and how we have deployed the few we have means that the data is severely biased. We are only testing people who are strongly symptomatic. If there is a normal distribution of outcomes from this disease, we are only testing on the right side of the distribution. We have no idea where the median is or how long the tail is to the left side of asymptomatic outcomes. The only thing we absolutely know about the disease is its not as deadly as the media is portraying as we are missing hundreds of thousands of cases in the denominator of the mortality rates. The media has also been terrible about reporting on risk factors of those who died. When a bunch of people died suddenly in Seattle, one had to read down 5 paragraphs into the story to find that they were all over 70 in an old-age home. Or when prime-of-life people die, facts such as their being type 1 diabetics — a known severe risk factor for this virus (and one that makes it different from the flu) are left out.
  • The media is constantly confusing changes in measurement technique and intensity with changes in the underlying progress of the virus itself. Changes in case numbers have as much to do with testing patterns and availability than they do with the real spread of the disease.
  • While COVID-19 is likely worse than the normal flu, our perceptions of how much worse are strongly affected by observer bias. Frankly, if every news broadcast every night spent 15 minutes reciting flu deaths each day, we would all be hiding in our homes away from flu. They present a healthy man in his thirties dying clearly as the tragedy it is, but the spoken or unspoken subtext is, “this is abnormal so this thing is much worse.” But it seems abnormal because we do not report on the very real stories of healthy young people who die of the flu. My nephew who was 25 years old and totally healthy with no pre-existing conditions died of the flu last month — and no one featured this tragedy on the national news.
  • The data we are getting sucks worse because the media has decided, as one big group, that for our own good they are going to limit all facts about the virus to only the bad ones. There is a strong sense — you see it on Twitter both in Twitter’s policies as well as Twitter group attacks — that saying anything that might in any way reduce one’s fear of the disease should be banned for our own good. One of the more prominent examples was Medium removing an article NOT because it was proven wrong but because it took one side of a very open question and it was obviously decided it was “unsafe” to allow that side to even be aired.

March 25, 2020

Bonus QotD: Cognitive dissonance and the very, very woke

Like everyone, I’m tired of the Wuhan Flu freakout. But I owe a debt to future historians to leave them a primary source, so I’m going to do this last brief post on it, then move on. Unless something major happens, this is my final word on the subject […]

We’ve written a lot here on the West’s “crisis of legitimacy.” Well … this is it. Let’s break down some of the big factors in play:

The first, biggest, and in some ways only factor that matters, legitimacy-wise, is cognitive dissonance. We spent a lot of time here back in the days arguing about whether or not it’s a real thing […] I finally took the position that it’s real, but only for stuff that rises to level of actual cognition … which you just don’t see too much of anymore. Indeed, the whole point of Postmodern Leftism, when you come right down to it, is not having to think. Identity politics gives you The One Right Answer for most every situation; it’s just a matter of filling in the Social Justice Mad Lib. Any apparent conflict between One Right Answers is dealt with by ad hominem.

An example will probably help: Trannies vs. Feminists. Feminists, of course, are all in on The One Right Answer that “gender is just a social construction.” But Trannies actually believe this — if you feel you’re really a woman, then you are, your twelve-inch wang be damned. How, then, can impeccably #woke lesbians refuse to have sex with the aforesaid twelve-inch wang, since gender is just a social construction and Thundercock identifies as a lesbian? Easy: ad hominem. Oh, gender’s just a social construction all right … it’s just that any be-penised individual who “constructs” himself as a lesbian is lying for personal gain (#wokeness, as everyone knows, gives one the ability to read minds).

This isn’t a problem for the Left as a whole, much less for our entire society, because of the tiny numbers involved. Despite showing up pretty much everywhere in popular culture, gays are a small fraction of the population. Trannies are a fraction of a fraction, and since militant lesbianism is almost entirely political anyway (lesbian bed death is very real), about the only place this could possibly be a live issue is on the loonier college campuses.

Severian, “The Real Crisis”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-03-17.

March 24, 2020

Thompson 1921: The Original Chicago Typewriter

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Oct 2018

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The first prototype Thompsons submachine guns (and it was Thompson who coined that term, by the way) were produced in 1919 and dubbed the “Annihilators”. The gun was intended to be a military weapon to equip American soldiers in World War One, but by the time the gun was developed the war had ended. Still, Thompson and his Auto-Ordnance company contracted with Colt to manufacture 15,000 of the guns. These were the Model of 1921, and they were marketed to both the US military and as many European armies as Thompson and his salesmen could reach. They found few takers in the climate of the early 1920s, however, and sales were slow.

This is the first in a 5-part series about the development of the Thompson, concluding with a trip to the range to fire three different patterns side by side…

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March 23, 2020

QotD: Men’s blindness toward women

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

There is a lot of talk about Toxic Masculinity. No one ever talks about Toxic Femininity. Though every woman who is a functional human being knows about it, as does anyone who has ever lived or worked in a predominantly female environment.

So, why does no one talk about it? Well, mostly because the left believes that “designated victims”™ are sacred and must never be called on their own bullshit, no matter how smelly. Hence also the bizarre idea of racial “privilege” that tells you holocaust survivors should be attacked for “white privilege” but the Obama girls raised as the creme de la creme, and never facing a day of privation in their lives don’t have any privilege and are victims.

But there’s also other stuff going into it. To an extent — to the extent that historically for biological reasons men dominated public life — the fact that no one talks about the bad side of female modes of being in society is the result of patriarchy.

Men are ridiculously, idiotically, insanely blinkered about women. They don’t really see women as they see other men, but through rosy glasses as much better than men. The “oh so smart” former president with the depth of a rain puddle in Colorado told us that women are so much better than men and that the world would be better under women. Which means he’s basically a bog standard male who has never given the matter a thought, and is going on what “everybody knows.” (It occurs to me this man, if he’d been born to an ultra conservative Arab family in one of the ultra conservative Muslim countries would also be telling us that women’s hair emits seductive rays. He’s a suit that speaks. Or an empty chair, if you prefer.)

Of course it is right evolutionarilly that men should feel that way about women. It keeps the species going. It is also bizarre though, and leaves men curiously defenseless now that women view themselves as an aggrieved class and are trying to take over public life and exclude men.

In fact it leaves as the only defense in society that most women — even the feminists who pretend otherwise — unless completely and extensively broken and indoctrinated know what other women are and therefore will not trust any of them. As they shouldn’t. I can’t imagine a worse hell than what Obama is proposing.

Sarah Hoyt, “Toxic Femininity”, According to Hoyt, 2019-12-18.

March 21, 2020

The M9A1 Bazooka: Now With Optics and Quick Takedown

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 Aug 2018

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The Bazooka — or rather the Launcher, Rocket, 2.36″, M1 — was introduced by the United States in 1942, the result of a fast development by two Army officers, Captain Leslie Skinner and Lt. Edward Uhl. The US had no infantry antitank weapon at that point, and it had become quite clear that such a thing was needed. The Bazooka offered a theoretical effective range of 300 yards, throwing a 1 pound hollow-charge projectile capable of penetrating 4 inches of armor plate. The 2.36 inch bore measurement, incidentally, was chosen as the inch equivalent of 60mm, to match the common mortar size.

In October of 1943, an improved M9 version was introduced, using a magnet firing system instead of the unreliable batteries of the original. A followup M9A1 variant was adopted in June of 1944, which broke down into two parts for easier transportation, and the T90 optical sight was added in September of 1944. These were effective weapons against armor early in the war, but the heavier tanks introduced late in the war were too heavily armored for the Bazooka to be very effective — although it remained a valuable tool for attacking pillboxes and other fortified positions. It would continue to see extensive service in the Korean War, although its limited armor penetration was particularly acute in that conflict.

Note that the inert M6 rocket in the video is not being sold with the Bazooka.

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