Quotulatiousness

August 20, 2024

Folk tale fictions about childbirth in “traditional cultures”

Filed under: Books, Health, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jane Psmith finds that “everyone” has been doing certain “traditional” things during and after childbirth that she somehow wasn’t informed about until just a short while ago:

I just had a baby, which means I have once again been immersed in a sea of advice about how “traditional cultures” do things. And miraculously, every single kid, I discover some new practice I’ve never heard of but that apparently just everyone did until about five minutes ago. This time it was vaginal steaming. (Don’t Google, it’s exactly what it says on the tin.)

Which cultures, exactly? Oh, you know … the traditional ones, the ones whose folk wisdom is untrammeled by Western medicalization, where the pregnant woman is treated to the most nutritious foods, birth is a joyous event surrounded by supportive kin, the new mother puts her baby to the breast the minute he’s born, and she’s waited on hand-and-foot in bed for a month afterwards. So, you know, not the Ngongo of central Africa, who forbid women from eating meat, or the Netsilik Inuit or !Kung, both of whom send laboring women off to give birth in silent isolation, or any of the peoples from Fiji to northern Alberta who delay nursing for days … In fact, you might be excused if you began to suspect that the real measure of how “traditional” a culture is boils down to how much it resembles the practices of crunchy WEIRD people. You might even, if you had a nasty suspicious frame of mind, conclude that all this discussion of “traditional cultures” is just a disguised way of asserting our own preferences.

None of which is actually unique to the babies. (I’ve written about the babies before.) It’s not even unique to our era. The idea that we have been corrupted by civilization, that more primitive societies lead purer, nobler, more harmonious lives and enjoy access to truths and virtues we have lost, goes back millennia.1 And so, naturally, does the practice of using the supposed superiority of those other cultures as clubs to beat our own. Tacitus’ Germania, for instance, is a fun read if borderline useless as a source on the actual Germanic tribes — but it’s a wonderful guide to the angst of the early Empire and the pervasive fear that greed, luxury, and ambition had replaced the nobility, valor, and honor that had once characterized the Romans. Nowadays, of course, no one writes about the barbarians’ fides and virtus; instead you’ll get paeans to their idyllic existence lived in harmony with nature, their peaceful sense of community, and probably their joyful embrace of gender and sexual diversity. But either way, most of the books about small-scale societies are actually books about us and what the people writing the books think we lack.

Even professional anthropologists tend to assume that small-scale (this is a polite way of saying “primitive”) societies are more satisfying, meaningful, and fulfilling than complex ones. But in their case it goes hand in hand with another, allied assumption: that these societies have developed beliefs, practices, and institutions that work well for them. After all, the thinking goes, we know that people change their tools and their behavior when their environment changes, abandoning anything that no longer serves their needs and adopting new ways of life. Therefore, anything they haven’t abandoned must be somehow adaptive. Sure, these “primal communities” might do things that seem odd to us — things like torture, infanticide, ceremonial rape, cannibalism, and so forth — but they must serve some useful function or they wouldn’t have persisted. Thus, for example, the classic ethnography of the Navajo argues that their overwhelming fear of witchcraft, which led to pervasive anxiety, a hypochondriacal obsession with magical curing rituals, and of course regular violence perpetrated against suspected witches, actually had great benefits because it allowed the Navajo direct their stress and hostility at marginal members of the community and “keep the core of the society solid”.

The problem with this framework becomes obvious as soon as you mentally translate from some strange foreigners with funny (or no) clothes to, say, a business in the industrialized world. (Which can easily be larger than the kind of small-scale society that interests anthropologists.) No one would ever say, “Well, sure, the leadership of this company allows their mediocre employees to bully their highly productive peers out of the department so they do better in the stack ranking, but the company hasn’t gone bankrupt so it must be a savvy business move. Probably the solidarity created by banding together to surreptitiously delete someone else’s code enhances productivity more than losing a 10x engineer detracts from it …” But this is exactly what anthropologists (professional and armchair) are tempted to do when they set out to understand and explain another culture. Yes, sometimes apparently bizarre behavior contains a deep and hidden wisdom, but sometimes it’s just messed up.

That’s the case the late UCLA anthropologist Robert Edgerton set out to make in Sick Societies: that some primitive societies are not actually happy and fulfilled, that some of their beliefs and institutions are inadequate or actively harmful to their people, and that some of them are frankly on their way to cultural suicide. The mere fact that people keep doing something doesn’t mean it’s actually working well for them, but just as the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, your society can stay dysfunctional longer than you can stay alive.

    1. At least in the Occident. My informant tells me that the Noble Savage is a less common trope in, say, China. Maybe the Blue savages are just less noble.

German magazine Der Spiegel warns about “The Secret Hitlers” of the far right who threaten western civilization

Filed under: Gaming, Germany, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The spectre of Hitlerian fascism looms over the western world once again, but Der Spiegel won’t take this threat lying down:

“How Fascism Begins”: The present cover of Der Spiegel, depicting Björn Höcke, Marine le Pen and Donald Trump as the new fascists. Establishment German hysteria about “the right” is now achieving an intensity to rival American hysteria about race during the Summer of Floyd.

Hitler is not like other mortals; he may not really be dead, and his spirit is likely to return at any moment. Perhaps it already has. This is why our foremost news magazine, Der Spiegel, chose this image to head their cover story on “The Secret Hitlers“, a bizarre opus of current-year political lunacy penned by Lothar Gorris and Tobias Rapp.

“Is fascism returning?” Gorris and Rapp want to know. “Or is it already here, in the form of [Donald] Trump, [Viktor] Orbán [or Björn] Höcke? And if so, could it disappear again?” What follows, they explain, is “an attempt to identify evil”.

This is the kind of insanity that comes over you when you elevate establishment political ideology into a civic religion. You reduce the entire project of state politics to a dubious exercise in piety, where the aim is not to achieve good outcomes or develop pragmatic solutions, but to engage in moral peacockery. For the Gorrises and the Rapps of our discourse, the greatest problem facing the liberal faithful of the Federal Republic is not mass migration, deindustrialisation, soon-to-be-insolvent pension programmes or the overblown state entitlement system, oh no. It is finding and rooting out mythological political demons and preventing the second coming of the secular antichrist.

Gorris and Rapp (for convenience, I will refer to these feeble-minded men henceforth as Grapp) open with an extended anecdote about a 2016 board game called Secret Hitler.

    The setting is the year 1932, the Reichstag in Berlin. The players are divided into two groups: Fascists and Democrats, with the Democrats making up the majority, which sounds familiar. The Fascists have a decisive advantage at the start: they know who the other Fascists are, which also reflects the truth in the history books. The Democrats don’t have this information; every other player could be friend or foe. The fascists win the game if they get six laws through the Reichstag or if Hitler is elected Chancellor. To win, the Democrats must pass five laws or expose and kill Hitler.

    The basic premise of the game is that everyone pretends to be democrats. In truth, the real democrats would only have to trust each other and the fascists wouldn’t stand a chance. But it’s not that simple, because sometimes the democrats have to vote in favour of a fascist law for lack of options and therefore fall under suspicion of fascism. Which is exactly what the fascists want.

    One realisation: there is no guarantee of the right strategy that will ultimately see the good guys win and the bad guys lose. One wrong decision that feels right, and Hitler is Reich Chancellor. It was all chance, just as there was no inevitability in 1933. The other realisation: it can be fun to be a fascist.

The cryptofascist myth will never cease to amaze me. Absolutely everybody in 1933 knew who “the fascists” were. The ones in Italy literally called themselves fascists, which was one way to identify them. The ones in Germany openly derided liberalism and dreamed of a nationalist revolution that would put an end to the hated bourgeois democracy of the Weimar Republic. Hitler was a national politician who wrote and spoke openly of his aims. Secret Hitler in no way “reflects the truth in the history books”. It is a deformed fantasy about modern politics, which reflects nothing so much as the burning demand for and the vanishing supply of actual Nazis to hyperventilate about.

Now it is true that a lot of erstwhile liberals went over to National Socialism after the Nazis seized power, but these were not the secret fascists of Grappian fever dreams. The were just followers, as are a great many of the self-professed liberals active today. Were communists or illiberal nationalists to take over tomorrow, millions of people would line up behind the new political ideology like the sheep that they are, and I suspect that Grapp would be right at the head of that line.

Because our crack fascist identifiers suffer from a crushing lack of self-awareness, they declare that “relapsing into fascism is the primal fear of modern democratic societies”. Such a relapse, they explain, “long sounded hysterical and unimaginable”, but “now it seems serious and real”.

You’re the Top! A History of the Top Hat

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

HatHistorian
Published Nov 21, 2021

A short history of one of the most recognizable and formal hats of our time: the top hat!

Version française ici:
• Le top du top: l’histoire du Haut-de-…

With thanks to Norman Caruso for advice on how to get me started on youtube. Please check out his channel

The first top hat belonged to my great grandfather and is the better part of a century old.
The collapsible top hat comes from from Delmonico Hatter https://www.delmonicohatter.com/

Title sequence designed by Alexandre Mahler
am.design@live.com

This video was done for entertainment and educational purposes. No copyright infringement of any sort was intended.

QotD: The printing press was to the Reformation what social media is in the Current Year

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Quotations, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Consider the Reformation. I’m in no way qualified to walk you through all the various doctrinal issues, but in this case a superficial analysis is not only sufficient, it’s actually better. Instead of getting lost in the theological weeds, I want to focus on the process. So let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that nothing Luther said was all that original, theologically — you can find pretty much any tenet of “Lutherism” (as it then was) somewhere in the past, often among the Church Fathers (the “double predestination” that drove Calvinists insane is straight out of St. Augustine, for example). Wyclif, Hus, Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilius of Padua, all those guys were proto-Luthers, at least in part.

The thing about Luther, then, wasn’t what he said, so much as how he said it.

Martin Luther was the world’s first spin doctor. Though he insisted for a long time that his famous 95 Theses were, and were always intended to be, a scholastic debate between clergymen, Luther mastered the use of printed propaganda. His opponents soon followed, or tried to, in an ever-increasing spiral of printed viciousness. Mutatis mutandis, the exchanges between Luther, Erasmus, Thomas More (to say nothing of a thousand lesser lights) and their opponents all sound shockingly Current Year. They’re snarky and waspish at best, grotesque ad hominem at worst. Modern flame wars have nothing on the way Thomas More and William Tyndale tore into each other, for instance, and More and Tyndale were rank amateurs compared to Luther.

As with the Current Year, where being first on social media is the only criterion that matters, so the printing press injected something very like “hot takes” into the late-Medieval intellectual atmosphere. If you tried to respond to your opponents the old-fashioned way — with closely reasoned, heavily cited arguments, on parchment, hand-copied by monks — you might win the intellectual battle … 500 years later, among historians who thank you for providing such a useful glimpse into late-Medieval mentalités, but in your own time you’d get fired at best, get burned at the stake at worst, if you didn’t respond instantly, in kind.

The printing press, in other words, represented a quantum leap in the velocity of information. Those who grasped its fundamentals prospered, while those who fell behind perished. King Henry VIII, for instance, fatally damaged his cherished intellectual reputation when he deigned to attack to Luther in person. Luther hit back with a tirade that wouldn’t be out of place on Twitter1, and Henry responded in kind, and now the king, who was hip-deep in self-inflicted shit by that point, had to drop the fight. Having been publicly abused by a mere ex-monk, he had to quit the field with his tail between his legs.

Severian, “Velocity of Information”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-10.

    1. Again, mutatis mutandis. Though this sounds to modern ears like an abject apology on Luther’s part (“especially as I am the offscouring of the world, a mere worm who ought only to live in contemptuous neglect”, etc.), in context it’s a vicious attack. For one thing, what’s a great king like Henry doing responding to a “mere worm”? And Henry had to know, since Wolsey did nothing without his master’s orders … except everyone had heard the rumors that Henry was just a dimwitted playboy, and Cardinal Wolsey was really the king in all but name, so maybe he didn’t know. Either way Henry, who prided himself on being an intellectual, was a fool. That’s the kind of thing that would get you executed in the 16th century, and here’s this “mere worm” publishing it, for all the world to see, with no possibility of reprisal from a supposedly puissant monarch.

August 19, 2024

Bret Devereaux on Nathan Rosenstein’s Rome at War (2004)

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Although Dr. Devereaux is taking a bit of time away from the more typical blogging topics he usually covers on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, he still discusses books related to his area of specialty:

For this week’s book recommendation, I want to recommend N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004). This is something of a variation from my normal recommendations, so I want to lead with a necessary caveat: this book is not a light or easy read. It was written for specialists and expects the reader to do some work to fully understand its arguments. That said, it isn’t written in impenetrable “academese” – indeed, the ideas here are very concrete, dealing with food production, family formation, mortality and military service. But they’re also fairly technical and Rosenstein doesn’t always stop to recap what he has said and draw fully the conclusions he has reached and so a bit of that work is left to the reader.

That said, this is probably in the top ten or so books that have shaped me as a scholar and influenced my own thinking – as attentive readers can no doubt recall seeing this book show up a lot in my footnotes and citations. And much like another book I’ve recommended, Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003), this is the sort of book that moves you beyond the generalizations about ancient societies you might get in a more general treatment (“low productivity, high mortality, youth-shifted age profile, etc.”) down to the actual evidence and methods we have to estimate and understand that.

Fundamentally, Rome at War is an exercise in “modeling” – creating (fairly simple) statistical models to simulate things for which we do not have vast amounts of hard data, but for which we can more or less estimate. For instance, we do not have the complete financial records for a statistically significant sample of Roman small farmers; indeed, we do not have such for any Roman small farmers. So instead, Rosenstein begins with some evidence-informed estimates about typical family size and construction and combines them with some equally evidence-informed estimates about the productivity of ancient farms and their size and then “simulates” that household. That sort of approach informs the entire book.

Fundamentally, Rosenstein is seeking to examine the causes of a key Roman political event: the agrarian land-reform program of Tiberius Gracchus in 133, but the road he takes getting there is equally interesting. He begins by demonstrating that based on what we know the issue with the structure of agriculture in Roman Italy was not, strictly speaking “low productivity” so much as inefficient labor allocation (a note you will have seen me come back to a lot): farms too small for the families – as units of labor – which farmed them. That is a very interesting observation generally, but his point in reaching it is to show that this is why Roman can conscript these fellows so aggressively: this is mostly surplus labor so pulling it out of the countryside does not undermine these households (usually). But that pulls a major pillar – that heavy Roman conscription undermined small freeholders in Italy in the Second Century – out of the traditional reading of the land reforms.

Instead, Rosenstein then moves on to modeling Roman military mortality, arguing that, based on what we know, the real problem is that Rome spends the second century winning a lot. As a result, lots of young men who normally might have died in war – certainly in the massive wars of the third century (Pyrrhic and Punic) – survived their military service, but remained surplus to the labor needs of the countryside and thus a strain on their small households. These fellows then started to accumulate. Meanwhile, the nature of the Roman census (self-reported on the honor system) and late second century Roman military service (often unprofitable and dangerous in Spain, but not with the sort of massive armies of the previous centuries which might cause demographically significant losses) meant that more Romans might have been dodging the draft by under-reporting in the census. Which leads to his conclusion: when Tiberius Gracchus looks out, he sees both large numbers of landless Romans accumulating in Rome (and angry) and also falling census rolls for the Roman smallholder class and assumes that the Roman peasantry is being economically devastated by expanding slave estates and his solution is land reform. But what is actually happening is population growth combined with falling census registration, which in turn explains why the land reform program doesn’t produce nearly as much change as you’d expect, despite being more or less implemented.

Those conclusions remain both important and contested. What I think will be more valuable for most readers is instead the path Rosenstein takes to reach them, which walks through so much of the nuts-and-bolts of Roman life: marriage patterns, childbearing patterns, agricultural productivity, military service rates, mortality rates and so on. These are, invariably, estimates built on estimates of estimates and so exist with fairly large “error bars” and uncertainty, but they are, for the most part, the best the evidence will support and serve to put meat on the bones of those standard generalizing descriptions of ancient society.

If you’ve never worked in the private sector, you have no idea how regulations impact businesses

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

In the National Post, J.D. Tuccille explain why Democratic candidates like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who have spent little or no time in the non-government world have such rosy views of the benefits of government control with no concept of the costs such control imposes:

The respective public versus private sector experiences of the 2024 Presidential/Vice Presidential candidates.
New York Times

In broad terms, Democrats have faith in government while the GOP is skeptical — though a lot of Republicans are willing to suspend disbelief when their party controls the executive branch.

The contrast between the two parties can be seen in stark terms in the resumes of the two presidential and vice-presidential tickets. The New York Times made it easier to compare them earlier this month when it ran charts of the career timelines of Trump, J.D. Vance, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Their roles at any given age were colour-coded for college, military, private sector, public service or politics, federal government and candidate for federal office.

Peach is the colour used by the Times to indicate employment in the private sector, which produces the opportunities and wealth that are mugged away (taxation is theft by another name, after all) to fund all other sectors. It appears under the headings of “businessman” and “television personality” for Trump and as “lawyer and venture capitalist” for Vance. But private-sector peach appears nowhere in the timelines for Harris and Walz. Besides, perhaps, some odd jobs when they were young, neither of the Democrats has worked in the private sector.

Now, not all private-sector jobs are created equal. Some of the Republican presidential candidate’s ventures, like Trump University, have been highly sketchy, as are some of his practices — he’s openly boasted about donating to politicians to gain favours (though try to do business in New York without greasing palms). I’m not sure I’d want The Apprentice on my resume. But there must be some value to working on the receiving end of the various regulations and taxes government officials foist on society rather than spending one’s career brainstorming more rules without ever suffering the consequences.

In 1992, former U.S. senator and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern penned a column for the Wall Street Journal about the challenges he encountered investing in a hotel after many years in government.

“In retrospect, I … wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day,” he wrote. He bemoaned “federal, state and local rules” passed with seemingly good intentions but little thought to the burdens and costs they imposed.

The lack of private sector stints in the career timelines of Harris and Walz means that, like pre-hotel McGovern, they’ve never had to worry about what it’s like to suffer the policies of a large and intrusive government.

That said, it’s possible to overstate the lessons learned by Republicans and Democrats from their different experiences. Vance, despite having worked to fund and launch businesses, has, since being elected to the U.S. Senate, advocated capturing the regulatory state and repurposing it for political uses, including punishing enemies.

Not only does power corrupt, but it does so quickly.

The US Navy’s mis-managed decline continues

Filed under: Business, Government, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Niccolo Soldo from his weekend wrap-up of various news articles that caught his eye:

Artist’s rendering of the US Navy’s FFG(X) Constellation-class guided missile frigate. Initial contract awarded 30 April, 2020, but delivery of the first ship is not expected until 2029 due to design changes and other issues.
US Navy image via Wikimedia Commons.

One data point that works in favour of American Declinism is the US Navy’s inability to not just keep up with the Chinese in terms of the production of ships, but to also maintain its own production output. Many lightly-armed littoral combat ships have been retired, for example, with nothing to replace them.

These production setbacks have been pointed out to me, with one mutual on Twitter/X reiterating the point so that I get it (I do!). This is an actual problem that requires solving, and fast. It is partially to blame for the Americans effectively ceding the Red Sea to the Houthis (for now).

AP has done a partial deep-dive (horrible language here, I apologize) on this issue:

    The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. Combined with shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes and cost overruns, it has put the U.S. behind China in the number of ships at its disposal — and the gap is widening.

    Navy shipbuilding is currently in “a terrible state” — the worst in a quarter century, says Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. “I feel alarmed,” he said. “I don’t see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It’s taken us a long time to get into it.”

    Marinette Marine is under contract to build six guided-missile frigates — the Navy’s newest surface warships — with options to build four more. But it only has enough workers to produce one frigate a year, according to Labs.

A lot of the guys who know how to do this work are retiring or have already retired. Sound familiar?

    One of the industry’s chief problems is the struggle to hire and retain laborers for the challenging work of building new ships as graying veterans retire, taking decades of experience with them.

    Shipyards across the country have created training academies and partnered with technical colleges to provide workers with the skills they need to construct high-tech warships. Submarine builders and the Navy formed an alliance to promote manufacturing careers, and shipyards are offering perks to retain workers once they’re hired.

    Andreini trained for his job at Marinette through a program at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. Prior to that, he spent several years as a production line welder, making components for garbage trucks. He said some of his buddies are held back by the stigma that shipbuilding is a “crappy work environment, and it’s unsafe.”

The problem:

    Much of the blame for U.S. shipbuilding’s current woes lies with the Navy, which frequently changes requirements, requests upgrades and tweaks designs after shipbuilders have begun construction.

    That’s seen in cost overruns, technological challenges and delays in the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Ford; the spiking of a gun system for a stealth destroyer program after its rocket-assisted projectiles became too costly; and the early retirement of some of the Navy’s lightly armored littoral combat ships, which were prone to breaking down.

    The Navy vowed to learn from those past lessons with the new frigates they are building at Marinette Marine. The frigates are prized because they’re less costly to produce than larger destroyers but have similar weapon systems.

Now check this out:

    The Navy chose a ship design already in use by navies in France and Italy instead of starting from scratch. The idea was that 15% of the vessel would be updated to meet U.S. Navy specifications, while 85% would remain unchanged, reducing costs and speeding construction.

    Instead, the opposite happened: The Navy redesigned 85% of the ship, resulting in cost increases and construction delays, said Bryan Clark, an analyst at the Washington-based think tank Hudson Institute. Construction of the first-in-class Constellation warship, which began in August 2022, is now three years behind schedule, with delivery pushed back to 2029.

    The final design still isn’t completed.

Shifting threats:

    Throughout its history, the Navy has had to adapt to varying perils, whether it be the Cold War of past decades or current threats including war in the Middle East, growing competition from Chinese and Russian navies, piracy off the coast of Somalia and persistent attacks on commercial ships by Houthi rebels in Yemen.

    And that’s not all. The consolidation of shipyards and funding uncertainties have disrupted the cadence of ship construction and stymied long-term investments and planning, says Matthew Paxton of the Shipbuilders Council of America, a national trade association.

    “We’ve been dealing with inconsistent shipbuilding plans for years,” Paxton said. “When we finally start ramping up, the Navy is shocked that we lost members of our workforce.”

How is the US Navy supposed to protect Taiwan from a potential Chinese invasion?

Evolution of WW2 German Tank Destroyers

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

The Tank Museum
Published May 3, 2024 19 products

Used extensively by the German army of World War Two, the “tank destroyer” was developed to counter the increasing dominance of the tank on the battlefield.

Germany would field a massive 18 different types of tank destroyer in World War Two – compared with the 7 or 8 different types used by US, British and Commonwealth forces. One of these in particular, Sturmgeschütz III, would destroy more tanks than any other AFV in the entire conflict.

In this video we look at the development, strengths and weaknesses of German tank destroyers: from the 17 tonne Hetzer to the massive 70 tonne Jagdtiger — the heaviest tracked vehicle of the War.

00:00 | Introduction
00:59 | The First Tank Destroyers
04:14 | Avoiding Close Combat
06:59 | Jagdpanther
12:05 | Jagdtiger
15:31 | Hetzer
18:01 | Stug III
22:51 | Conclusion

This video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.

#tankmuseum #jagdpanther #stugiii #hetzer #jagdtiger

QotD: Government efficiency

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Our greatest threat today comes from government’s involvement in things that are not government’s proper province. And in those things government has a magnificent record of failure.

Ronald Reagan, quoted in “Inside Ronald Reagan”, Reason, 1975-07.

August 18, 2024

Hirohito Announces Surrender – War Continues – WW2 – Week 312 – August 17, 1945

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 17 Aug 2024

Hirohito broadcasts Japan’s surrender to the world- despite an attempted to coup to prevent it from happening, and much of the world celebrates, but the war isn’t really over. The Soviets are busy invading Manchuria, and there’s revolution in Vietnam and Indonesia.

00:00 Intro
00:22 Recap
00:49 Attempted Coup In Japan
04:12 Hirohito Surrenders
08:54 Japanese Surrender In China
12:05 Soviets In Manchuria
17:52 Revolution In Vietnam
20:33 Summary
21:07 Conclusion
(more…)

A view of the near future – “What if calling someone stupid was illegal?”

Filed under: Americas, Books, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Christopher Gage suspects that Lionel Shriver’s new book Mania didn’t require a lot of deep thinking about possible future trends, just a few glances at the headlines in British newspapers would provide all the inspiration necessary:

Lionel Shriver’s novel, Mania, asks “What if calling someone stupid was illegal?”

Set in an alternate timeline eerily flirtatious with our own, Mania depicts a world in which intelligence and competence, those oppressive agents of the modern bête noire — contrast — provoke outraged mobs.

The Mental Parity Movement demands a Khmer-Rouge-style Year Zero. To suggest the existence of differing abilities and competencies is to be “brain-vain”. In this final “great civil rights fight”, stupidity is euphemised as “alternative processing”. The mob cancels Frasier for brain vanity. After regulations prevent Pfizer from hiring qualified scientists, a toxic vaccine lays waste to millions.

The protagonist, a free-thinking academic named Pearson, cancels herself after she adds Dostoevsky’s The Idiot to her class syllabus. But the book is not the offending item. The word “idiot” is illegal. So too, is the “D-Word”. Pearson falls foul of social services after calling her seven-year-old daughter “dumb”. Her daughter grasses her up for this most heinous offence. For her crimes, Pearson endures a mandatory course entitled “Cerebral Acceptance and Semantic Sensitivity”.

Akin to our culture, mass neurosis devours that of Mania. The citizens scour the earth for evidence of the gravest offence: cognitive bigotry.

The Mental Parity Movement even renames “sage” — stripping the haughty herb of its sapiosexual swagger.

Mania imagines a world in which mediocrity is brilliance and where platitude is profundity. I suspect Shriver wasted little time on research. Turning on one’s television furnishes a commonplace book with a bottomless wealth of material.

This week, Harry and Meghan embarked on an unroyal tour of Colombia. On the agenda was a summit on misinformation and online harm. At this “responsible digital future” fandango, the former soap actress and the former royal spermatozoa relayed their fears. Essentially, hordes of toothless oiks with Wi-Fi often say nasty things online.

On stage, Harry adopted the pose of the modern soothsayer. His tieless open collar oozed Sicilian ease.

Speaking in Adverb English, Harry avoided anything as threatening or as harmful as a declarative sentence. Harry talks as if everything is a question as not to arouse predators. The Prince droned on, auditioning the Californication of his mother tongue. The same mother tongue Harry’s ancestors spread around the globe via what some may deign to be less than inclusive methods.

How can I put this in Mania-approved euphemism? Harry is minimally exceptional. Harry is to intelligent thought what lead pipes are to potable water.

.30-06 M1918 American Chauchat – Doughboys Go to France

Filed under: France, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published May 4, 2024

When the US entered World War One, the country had a grand total of 1,453 machine guns, split between four different models. This was not a useful inventory to equip even a single division headed for France, and so the US had to look to France for automatic weapons. In June 1917 Springfield Armory tested a French CSRG Chauchat automatic rifle, and found it good enough to inquire about making an American version chambered for the .30-06 cartridge. This happened quickly, and after testing in August 1917, a batch of 25,000 was ordered. Of these, 18,000 were delivered and they were used to arm several divisions of American troops on the Continent.

Unfortunately, the American Chauchat was beset by extraction problems. These have today be traced to incorrectly cut chambers, which were slightly too short and caused stuck cases when the guns got hot. It is unclear exactly what caused the problem, but the result was that most of the guns were restricted to training use (as best we can tell today), and exchanged for French 8mm Chauchats when units deployed to the front. Today, American Chauchats are extremely rare, but also very much underappreciated for their role as significant American WWI small arms.
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QotD: Cell phones on airplanes

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

The thought of people being able to use cell phones on airplanes during flight is almost too horrible to contemplate. But I understand why the airlines are considering it: They’ve run out of new ways to make flying unpleasant. Long lines, inexplicable delays, lost baggage, no food, filthy airplanes, unhappy workers (is anyone else worried about planes being flown by despondent pilots who’ve had their pensions stolen from them?) — allowing people to use their cell phones is the only way for the airlines to freshen up the hell they’ve created for us.

Andrew Sullivan, “Terror Cells”, AndrewSullivan.com, 2005-08-09.

August 17, 2024

Twit/X – Hellsite or online Hotel California?

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

Ed West on the odd phenomenon of people loudly claiming they’ve had it with “this hellsite” and that they’re decamping to social-media-site-of-the-minute, yet in many, many cases they’re back on “this hellsite” not very long afterwards:

There was something of a trend in the late 2000s for former hell-raising journalists to start more sedate publications because they felt that society was changing, and people didn’t want to drink and party as much as they used to. It was heralded as the end of the “new lad” and the rise of a more mature outlook among men, largely by culture journalists whose job it is to invent societal trends.

And I remember reading these articles and always thinking “isn’t this just you getting old?” None of my friends go out and get pissed four times a week anymore — what does this say about British society?

I’ve long felt the same about Twitter, that while it’s immensely useful as a resource for news and information, and interacting with friends, I’ve got to the stage where it’s not fun. But that’s probably just middle age, and at a certain point people should avoid too much time joking around on social media, lest they become Facebook boomer memes. (Or, in Britain, go to jail.)

This week I was on the Spectator Americano podcast talking about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, following my recent post on how he had changed the nature of the place. (I promise this is the last time I write about every journalist’s favourite social media site for at least two weeks.)

Everyone claims to hate Twitter, I pointed out, but they never leave. I actually started writing this piece a few months back, and noted that many people have bailed out from “X”, as no one calls it, among them academic Kathleen Stock, satirist Andrew Doyle and Labour politician Dawn Butler.

I’ve had to rewrite this because I think they’re all back now. In fact almost everyone who leaves the Hellsite soon returns; it’s a running joke, because we’re all addicted. I checked in on Threads the other day and it was full of people expressing their relief about breaking their Twitter habit and finding a new home. We shall see.

Others, like Alastair Campbell, have set up accounts on Bluesky but still proclaim their intention to stay on Twitter to fight the far-Right. Okay, sure.

Stock and Doyle seemed to be leaving in part because of the toxicity of their own side, in their case gender-critical feminists, and this kind of unpleasantness can indeed feel worse than when it comes from opponents. Watching online debates about immigration, for instance, I’m often reminded of GK Chesterton’s famous quote about pity and truth:

    The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

On one side will be vaguely establishment figures repeating arguments that feel warm-hearted and kind but also untrue, and on the other, mostly anonymous users citing a wealth of studies to show that the situation is actually much worse than that, and clearly having better arguments, while often being incredibly unpleasant and personal to the journalists involved. The fact that anonymous users are often the most informed and insightful accounts adds to the Chestertonian feel.

Forgotten War Ep1 – Witness the Rising Sun

Filed under: Asia, Britain, China, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

HardThrasher
Published Aug 14, 2024

In January 1942 the Japanese Army poured over the border with Burma, and pushed back the Indian and British Armies to the border with Burma. Today we look at how that disaster came about, why and the first phase of the campaign
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