Royal Armouries
Published Jun 5, 2024This year marks the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of France which took place on 6th June 1944. From landing on the beaches of Normandy, the Allies would push the Nazi war machine and breach Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.
To commemorate this, we’re collaborating with Imperial War Museums to release a special two-part episode as Jonathan will look at some of the weapons that influenced and shaped this historic moment in history.
Part 1 is all about the “tip of the spear”, the Paratroopers.
0:00 Intro
0:55 STEN MK V
1:40 History of the Sten
3:00 Mark V Details
6:23 Usage in D-Day
8:38 M1A1 Carbine
10:38 M1A1 Details
14:09 Usage in D-Day
15:01 ACME ‘Cricket’ Clicker
17:31 The Longest Day
19:30 Outro[NR: I’m glad Jonathan discussed that bloody clicker scene in The Longest Day … it bugged me the very first time I watched the movie as a young army cadet in the mid-1970s.]
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September 18, 2024
D-Day 80th Anniversary Special, Part 1: Paratroopers, with firearms expert Jonathan Ferguson
QotD: Freelancing
That’s the ultimate difference between being a wage slave and a freelancer: the former has to put up with the megalomaniac infantile whining of their incompetent boss, whereas a freelancer has to put up with 12 of them.
A wage slave gets time off in lieu. A freelancer fits swing shifts between the daytime work.
You always have to keep a Plan B ready in case you need to fill gaps in your schedule. From the start of my freelancing career, I was a sub-editor SLASH writer. This evolved into journalist SLASH author SLASH print production. Then journalist SLASH trainer SLASH digital publishing. Plans C, D and E have proved most valuable.
It’s a pain in the arse. You have to get multiple business cards printed. You have to keep multiple career histories and CVs updated – something that LinkedIn, which itself accelerated the fad for wankers inventing dipshit slasher job titles, cannot handle at all.
Alistair Dabbs, “Multitasking is a myth: It means doing lots of things equally badly. Some people just like to take the p*ss”, The Register, 2019-09-27.
September 17, 2024
Unbearable anti-humanism
Tim Worstall responds to a recent dispatch-from-dystopia from Christopher Ketcham, decrying the “Unbearable Anthropocentrism” he sees in the world:
To true miserablists, this chart is pure bad news. How will we get to the revolution this way?
No idea who Ketcham is built then he doesn’t know who I am so we’re equal there. His complaint is that Our World in Data tends to show that the world is becoming a better place. Poverty is decreasing, infant mortality rates are falling, more folk have at least a square and ever increasing numbers are getting three and so on.
This is, as the cool kids say, problematic. Because if the thing to be opposed — capitalism and markets — is making the world a better place then where will we get the revolutionary fortitude to get rid of what is making the world a better place?
Something must be wrong here, right? Well, yes, it is:
For obvious reasons, Roser’s cheerful view of capitalist business-as-usual – and the data that would seem to support it – has made him a darling of libertarian market fundamentalists, who have lavished praise on his work.
See, this is problematic. So, what?
Given the support that Roser enjoys from billionaire oligarchs at the pinnacle of the capitalist system, one wonders if it is a coincidence that so much of the data he headlines for public consumption happens to valorize that system.
Oooooh, no, the claim isn’t that he’s writing lies. It’s just a question that is being asked. Could it, you know, I wonder if …
To which the correct answer is that Ketcham is a tosser. For it really is true that these last 40 years of global neoliberalism have coincided — at the very least coincided with — the greatest reduction in abject poverty in the entire history of our species.
But because capitalism, markets, the ghastly little tosser has to spread shade on someone reporting — honestly reporting — this truth. Hey, sure, we can have lots of lovely arguments about causation and so on. But reporting facts is wrong if they’re politically inconvenient? Someone will only report facts if they’re being paid — bribed — to do so?
Fuck off laddie, go die in a ditch.
Like, you know, far too many of us all did before this capitalism, markets, shit.
Fuck off.
Noormohamed: “Nice newspaper, National Post. It’d be a shame if …”
One of the more blatant examples of Liberals saying the quiet part out loud:
We need to talk about Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed and his not so subtle reminder to the National Post that it wouldn’t exist without the benefaction of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government.
Noormohamed, Parliamentary Secretary for Heritage – the ministry responsible for media welfare – did so via a post on X in which he told NP Comment senior editor Terry Newman: “Your paper wouldn’t be in business were it not for the subsidies that the government that you hate put in place — the same subsidies your Trump-adjacent foreign hedge fund owners gladly take to pay your salary.”
I wrote at length about this for The Line and, being aware that there is some crossover among subscribers, I won’t repeat that, but here’s a summary, followed by an update and then we’ll dig a little deeper into government funding for media, trans activist extremism in the Senate and other juicy stuff.
As I wrote in The Line concerning the government’s willingness to put the squeeze on media, “Nothing Noormohamed said was untrue. He and I are in perfect alignment in the view that were it not for the patronage of the Justin Trudeau government, Postmedia (and likely the Toronto Star) would by now have ceased to exist. Some of its titles may have sold for parts, but most of its zombie products would have been dispatched long ago with a bankruptcy bullet to the brain, allowing new media to spring forth from decay.”
You can read it all here.
But the most alarming part of this story isn’t that Noormohamed said what he said. That was appalling but predictable. What’s truly chilling is that he could flex his muscles, whip out his influence and intimidate what was once a free and independent press in this country and get away with it.
There were just a handful of media responses to his highly inappropriate but not unexpected behaviour. A week later, I could find no fiery or even gentle editorials condemning his statements. My Google search revealed just three news stories (Western Standard, True North & Rebel News) while none of the nation’s leading commentators cleared their throats to object.
Perhaps this is because media decided it was no big deal that an influential government MP was reminding them to keep in mind just who is paying their bills when they sit down to write. It could also be that they are bothered by it but don’t wish to draw the public’s attention to their new role as government dependents because they know it undermines public trust in them. Or, they have just given up on the idea of freedom of the press but want to keep it as their dirty little secret. Maybe all three. All I could hear was the silence of the lambs being led to the slaughter.
Parisian Needlefire Knife-Pistol Combination
Forgotten Weapons
Published Nov 30, 2017Combination knife/gun weapons have been popular gadgets for literally hundreds of years, and this is one of the nicest examples I have yet seen. This sort of thing is usually very flimsy, and not particularly well made. This one, however, has a blade which locks in place securely and would seem to be quite practical. The firearm part is also unique, in that it uses a needlefire bolt-action mechanism. This is a tiny copy of the French military Chassepot system, complete with intact needle and obturator.
And, of course, since it is French the trigger is a corkscrew.
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
QotD: “Megacorporations” in history and fiction
And that data point brings us to our last point – and the one I think is most relevantly applicable for speculative fiction megacorporations – historical megacorporations (by which I mean “true” megacorps that took on major state functions over considerable territory, which is almost always what is meant in speculative fiction) are products of imperialism, produced by imperial states with limited state capacity “outsourcing” key functions of imperial rule to private entities. And that explains why it seems that, historically, megacorporations don’t dominate the states that spawn them: they are almost always products and administrative arms of those states and thus still strongly subordinate to them.
I think that incorporating that historical reality might actually create storytelling opportunities if authors are willing to break out of the (I think quite less plausible) paradigm of megacorporations dominating the largest and most powerful communities that appear so often in science fiction. What if, instead of a corporate-dominated Earth (or even a corp-dominated Near-Future USA), you set a story in a near-future developing country which finds itself under the heel of a megacorporation that is essentially an arm of a foreign government, much like the EIC and VOC? Of course that would mean leavening the anti-capitalist message implicit in the dystopian megacorporation with an equally skeptical take about the utility of state power (it has always struck me that while speculative fiction has spent decades warning about the dangers of capitalist-corporate-power, the destructive potential of state power continues to utterly dwarf the damage companies do. Which is not to say that corporations do no damage of course, only that they have orders of magnitude less capability – and proven track record – to do damage compared to strong states).
(And as an aside, I know you can make an argument that Cyberpunk 2077 does actually adopt this megacorporation-as-colonialism framing, but that’s simply not how the characters in the game world think about or describe Arasoka – the biggest megacorp – which, in any event, appears to have effectively absorbed its home-state anyway. Arasoka isn’t an agent of the Japanese government, it is rather a global state in its own right and according to the lore has effectively controlled its home government for almost a century by the time of the game.)
In any event, it seems worth noting that the megacorporation is not some strange entity that might emerge in the far future with some sort of odd and unpredictable structure, but instead is a historical model of imperial governance that has existed in the past and (one may quibble here with definitions) continues to exist in the present. And, frankly, the historical version of this unusual institution is both quite different from the dystopian warnings of speculative fiction, but also – I think – rather more interesting.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: January 1, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-01.
September 16, 2024
Stephen Fry on artificial intelligence
On his Substack, Stephen Fry has posted the text of remarks he made last week in a speech for King’s College London’s Digital Futures Institute:
Yes, I’m still 12
So many questions. The first and perhaps the most urgent is … by what right do I stand before you and presume to lecture an already distinguished and knowledgeable crowd on the subject of Ai and its meaning, its bright promise and/or/exclusiveOR its dark threat? Well, perhaps by no greater right than anyone else, but no lesser. We’ll come to whose voices are the most worthy of attention later.
I have been interested in the subject of Artificial Intelligence since around the mid-80s when I was fortunate enough to encounter the so-called father of Ai, Marvin Minsky and to read his book The Society of Mind. Intrigued, I devoured as much as I could on the subject, learning about the expert systems and “bundles of agency” that were the vogue then, and I have followed the subject with enthusiasm and gaping wonder ever since. But, I promise you, that makes me neither expert, sage nor oracle. For if you are preparing yourselves to hear wisdom, to witness and receive insight this evening, to bask and bathe in the light of prophecy, clarity and truth, then it grieves me to tell you that you have come to the wrong shop. You will find little of that here, for you must know that you are being addressed this evening by nothing more than an ingenuous simpleton, a naive fool, a ninny-hammer, an addle-pated oaf, a dunce, a dullard and a double-dyed dolt. But before you streak for the exit, bear in mind that so are we all, all of us bird-brained half-wits when it comes to this subject, no matter what our degrees, doctorates and decades of experience. I can perhaps congratulate myself, or at least console myself, with the fact that I am at least aware of my idiocy. This is not fake modesty designed to make me come across as a Socrates. But that great Athenian did teach us that our first step to wisdom is to realise and confront our folly.
I’ll come to the proof of how and why I am so boneheaded in a moment, but before I go any further I’d like to paint some pictures. Think of them as tableaux vivants played onto a screen at the back of your mind. We’ll return to them from time to time. Of course I could have generated these images from Midjourney or Dall-E or similar and projected them behind me, but the small window of time in which it was amusing and instructive for speakers to use Ai as an entertaining trick for talks concerning Ai has thankfully closed. You’re actually going to have to use your brain’s own generative latent diffusion skills to summon these images.
[…]
An important and relevant point is this: it wasn’t so much the genius of Benz that created the internal combustion engine, as that of Vladimir Shukhov. In 1892, the Russian chemical engineer found a way of cracking and refining the spectrum of crude oil from methane to tar yielding amongst other useful products, gasoline. It was just three years after that that Benz’s contraption spluttered into life. Germans, in a bow to this, still call petrol Benzin. John D. Rockefeller built his refineries and surprisingly quickly there was plentiful fuel and an infrastructure to rival the stables and coaching inns; the grateful horse meanwhile could be happily retired to gymkhanas, polo and royal processions.
Benz’s contemporary Alexander Graham Bell once said of his invention, the telephone, “I don’t think I am being overconfident when I say that I truly believe that one day there will be a telephone in every town in America”. And I expect you all heard that Thomas Watson, the founding father of IBM, predicted that there might in the future be a world market for perhaps five digital computers.
Well, that story of Thomas Watson ever saying such a thing is almost certainly apocryphal. There’s no reliable record of it. Ditto the Alexander Graham Bell remark. But they circulate for a reason. The Italians have a phrase for that: se non e vero, e ben trovato. “If it’s not true, it’s well founded.” Those stories, like my scenario of that group of early investors and journalists clustering about the first motorcar, illustrate an important truth: that we are decidedly hopeless at guessing where technology is going to take us and what it’ll do to us.
You might adduce as a counterargument Gordon Moore of Intel expounding in 1965 his prediction that semiconductor design and manufacture would develop in such a way that every eighteen months or so they would be able to double the number of transistors that could fit in the same space on a microchip. “He got that right,” you might say, “Moore’s Law came true. He saw the future.” Yes … but. Where and when did Gordon Moore foresee Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Bit Coin, OnlyFans and the Dark Web? It’s one thing to predict how technology changes, but quite another to predict how it changes us.
Technology is a verb, not a noun. It is a constant process, not a settled entity. It is what the philosopher-poet T. E. Hulme called a concrete flux of interpenetrating intensities; like a river it is ever cutting new banks, isolating new oxbow lakes, flooding new fields. And as far as the Thames of Artificial Intelligence is concerned, we are still in Gloucestershire, still a rivulet not yet a river. Very soon we will be asking round the dinner table, “Who remembers ChatGPT?” and everyone will laugh. Older people will add memories of dot matrix printers and SMS texting on the Nokia 3310. We’ll shake our heads in patronising wonder at the past and its primitive clunkiness. “How advanced it all seemed at the time …”
Those of us who can kindly be designated early adopters and less kindly called suckers remember those pioneering days with affection. The young internet was the All-Gifted, which in Greek is Pandora. Pandora in myth was sent down to earth having been given by the gods all the talents. Likewise the Pandora internet: a glorious compendium of public museum, library, gallery, theatre, concert hall, park, playground, sports field, post office and meeting hall.
Anger sells – “Words like ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, ‘awful’, ‘hate’, ‘sick’, ‘fight’, and ‘scary’ each predict a 2.3% increase in click-through rates”
Rob Henderson explains the incentives that lead to provoking as much anger as possible among readers (and especially voters):
It seems like people are angrier than ever. According to a poll by CBS News, 84 percent of Americans believe we are angrier than previous generations. Another survey recently found that nine in ten Americans can name either a recent news event or something about American politics that made them angry, while only half could identify a recent news event or something about American politics that made them proud.
What explains this feeling of rage? One noteworthy reason is that exploiting anger is politically convenient.
The strategic use of anger in politics has transformed it from a natural human emotion into a weapon of division, with far-reaching consequences for our social cohesion and democratic governance.
According to Steven Webster, author of “American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics” and assistant professor of political science at Indiana University, “Anger provides ample benefits to those politicians who are able to use it most skillfully”.
Indeed, across political settings, angry people are more likely to vote than those who are not angry. In other words, politicians who can stoke anger can use it to motivate their base. The angrier voters are at the opposing party, the more likely they are to show up to the polls to support their own party. As Webster puts it, “angry voters are loyal voters”.
Political anger has consequences that extend beyond how Americans view their governing institutions or the opposing political party. When American voters are angry about politics, they are inclined to avoid social interactions or social events where they are likely to come into contact with those whose political leanings differ from their own.
In a chapter titled “Emotions in Politics” published last year, the psychologists Florian van Leeuwen and Michael Bang Peterson suggest that along with other emotions, anger “seems to be a distinct strategy for increasing what one is entitled to in the minds of others”.
Provoking rage against selected groups is an effective way to promote unity in politics. Today, many Americans across the political spectrum are encouraged to feel they are being victimized. It’s no coincidence that one of Donald Trump’s go-to lines on the campaign trail is “They’re laughing at us”. Being laughed at induces humiliation, which often quickly transforms into rage.
In a notable historical illustration of a political movement using anger as a limitless source of ideological fuel, consider the case of the “Recalling Bitterness” campaign in Maoist China. In the 1960s, the communist dictator Mao Zedong grew worried that ordinary Chinese citizens were developing lukewarm attitudes about the socialist revolution. In response, the regime forced people into rituals in which they publicly announced how bad life was before they had been liberated. Mao ordered writers and artists to rewrite history through the lens of class struggle to suit the needs of his political agenda. Regime officials held meetings encouraging peasants to describe how much better life was now compared to pre-liberation, hoping to convince them that the revolution’s successes outnumbered its failures. The “devils” here were reactionaries, landlords, rich farmers, and counterrevolutionaries. Documenting the rituals of the Recalling Bitterness campaign, the historian Guo Wu has written, “Only poor peasants were allowed to speak; former landlords and rich peasants were silenced”.
Who Really Won The Korean War?
Real Time History
Published May 17, 2024Only five years after the end of WW2, the major nations of the world are once again up in arms. A global UN coalition and an emerging Chinese juggernaut are fighting it out in a war that will see both sides approach the brink of victory — and defeat.
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QotD: The origins of Marmite
In 1902 the Marmite Food Extract Company was formed in Burton upon Trent, two miles from the Bass brewery which had been there since 1777. Yeast is a single-cell fungus originally isolated from the skin of grapes, used in brewing, winemaking and baking since ancient times. I have read somewhere that the yeast Bass used was descended from the original batch employed since its inception, endlessly reproducing itself right up to the present time.
The waste product from brewing was transported to the Marmite factory, where salt, enzymes and water were added to the slurry before it was simmered for several hours then poured into vats ready for bottling.
The product was an instant hit and within five years a second factory had to be built in Camberwell Green, south London. Marmite was given a huge boost with the discovery of vitamins. It was found to be a rich source of vitamin B, deficiency of which was responsible for the condition beriberi which afflicted British troops during the Great War. They were subsequently issued with Marmite as part of their rations. In the 1930s the folic-acid-rich product was used to treat anaemia in Bombay mill workers, and malnutrition during a malaria epidemic in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.
Alan Ashworth, “That Reminds Me: My mate Marmite”, The Conservative Woman, 2024-06-05.
September 15, 2024
The Occupation of Japan Begins – a WW2 Epilogue Special
World War Two
Published 14 Sep 2024The war is over and the occupation of Japan has begun. The country has largely been destroyed by Allied bombs, and shall be rebuilt, physically, economically, and even governmentally. But what will the new government be? What shall become of the Emperor? Who is to actually do the occupation? Today we look at all this and more.
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My Man Godfrey (1936) with William Powell and Carole Lombard
The Film Detective
Published Nov 15, 2018During the height of the Great Depression, a scavenger hunt party game brings a pair of spoiled sisters, Irene and Cornelia Bullock (Carole Lombard and Gail Patrick) to a city dump looking for a “forgotten man”. They find down-and-out hobo Godfrey Parks (William Powell), who accompanies one of the sisters back to the party to be presented as a scavenger hunt find, and ends up warily accepting her offer to become the family butler. Irene falls for Godfrey, but is unaware of his mysterious past. Nominated for six Academy Awards, My Man Godfrey might be the screwiest of all screwball comedies.
Director: Gregory La Cava
Writers: Morrie Ryskind, Eric Hatch
Starring: William Powell, Carole Lombard, Alice Brady, Gail Patrick, Eugene Pallette, Jean Dixon
QotD: “Primordial” Marxism
Inconveniently, the only place this ever actually happened was in a Communist country – Poland – in 1981. I’m not going to get into the complicated historiography of how the Soviet Revolution itself failed to fit the causal sequence Marx expected; consult any decent history. What’s interesting for our purposes is that capitalism accidentally solved the immiseration problem well before then, by abolishing Marx’s proletariat through rising standards of living – reverse immiseration.
The most forward-thinking Marxists had already figured out this was going to be a problem by around 1910. This began a century-long struggle to find a theoretical basis for socialism decoupled from Marxian class analysis.
Early on, Lenin developed the theory of the revolutionary vanguard. In this telling, the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously respond to immiseration with socialist revolution but needed to be led to it by a vanguard of intellectuals and men of action which would, naturally, take a leading role in crafting the post-revolutionary paradise.
Only a few years later came one of the most virulent discoveries in this quest – Fascism. It is not simplifying much to say that Communists invented Fascism as an escape from the failure of class-warfare theory, then had to both fight their malignant offspring to death and gaslight everyone else into thinking that the second word in “National Socialism” meant anything but what it said.
During its short lifetime, Fascism did exert quite a fascination on the emerging managerial-statist elite. Before WWII much of that elite viewed Mussolini and Hitler as super-managers who Got Things Done, models to be emulated rather than blood-soaked tyrants. But Fascism’s appeal did not long survive its defeat.
Marxists had more success through replacing the Marxian economic class hierarchy with other ontologies of power in which some new victim group could be substituted for the vanished proletariat and plugged into the same drama of immiseration leading to inevitable revolution.
Most importantly, each of these mutations offered the international managerial elite a privileged role as the vanguard of the new revolution – a way to justify its supremacy and its embrace of managerial state socialism. This is how we got the Great Inversion – Marxists in the middle and upper classes, anti-Marxists in the working class being dismissed as gammons and deplorables.
Leaving out some failed experiments, we can distinguish three major categories of substitution. One, “world systems theory”, is no longer of more than historical interest. In this story, the role of the proletariat is taken by oppressed Third-World nations being raped of resources by capitalist oppressors.
Though world systems theory still gets some worship in academia, it succumbed to the inconvenient fact that the areas of the Third World most penetrated by capitalist “exploitation” tended to be those where living standards rose the fastest. The few really serious hellholes left are places (like, e.g. the Congo) where capitalism has been thwarted or co-opted by local bandits. But in general, Frantz Fanon’s wretched of the Earth are now being bourgeoisified as fast as the old proletariat was during and after WWII.
The other two mutations of Marxian vanguard theory were much more successful. One replaced the Marxian class hierarchy with a racialized hierarchy of victim groups. The other simply replaced “the proletariat” with “the environment”.
Eric S. Raymond, “The Great Inversion”, Armed and Dangerous, 2019-12-23.
September 14, 2024
Sten MkIII: A Children’s Toy Company Makes SMGs
Forgotten Weapons
Published Jun 5, 2024Lines Brothers was a company in the UK that made sheet metal childrens’ toys prior to the war. When production of the Sten guns began, Lines Bros was a parts subcontractor. Their engineers analyzed the design alongside the machinery the company had available and redesigned a version of the Sten that they could make very quickly and cheaply in-house, by replacing the tube receiver with a rolled and spot-welded piece of sheet steel. Their first order came in January 1942, to a whopping 500,000 guns, which were designated the MkIII.
The Sten MkII and MkIII were produced simultaneously, and Lines Brothers was the only producer of the MkIII. Ultimately they got three contracts, although the second one was cancelled before it was completed and the third was never begun. A total of 876,794 MkIII Stens were made by September 1943. Once submachine gun production caught up with British needs, the MkII was found to be the superior of the two designs and only it remained in production.
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QotD: Academia
Severian, “Storytelling Fail”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-13.
