Quotulatiousness

October 14, 2022

That time that H.G. Wells fell afoul of Muslim sentiments

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, India, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the New English Review, Esmerelda Weatherwax recounts an incident from the 1930s where Muslim protestors took to the streets of London in reaction to a recent Hindustani translation of H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World:

Screen capture of the 1938 Muslim protest march in London from a British Pathé newsreel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADausiEe4pM

… my husband was at the Museum of London and spotted a very brief mention of this protest in 1938 on a list of 20th century London events. I did some research.

The book they objected to was HG Wells’ A Short History of the World. This was originally published in 1922 but in 1938 an abridged version was tranlated into Hindustani and published in India. His observations about the Prophet Mohammed did not find favour with Indian Muslims (and as you know pre-partition the area called India covered what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh). There were protest meetings in Calcutta and Mumbai (then transliterated as Bombay) and the consignments of the books that WH Smith the booksellers sent to Hyderabad mysteriously never arrived. Investigation showed that the Sind government banned its import. Protests spread to east Africa and were reported in Nairobi and Mombasa.

The paragraphs concerned said “He seems to have been a man compounded of very considerable vanity, greed, cunning, self-deception, and quite sincere religious passion”. Wells concludes, not unfavourably, that “when the manifest defects of Muhammad’s life and writing have been allowed for, there remains in Islam, this faith he imposed upon the Arabs, much power and inspiration”.

There had been a number of Muslims living in east London for some years, sailors who came through the docks, retired servants, some professional men and in 1934 they formed a charitable association for the promotion of Islam called Jamiat-ul-Muslimin; they met on Fridays at a hall in Commercial Road.

On Friday 12th August 1938 a copy of A Short History of the World was, as apparently reported in the Manchester Guardian the following day “ceremoniously burned”. The main Nazi book burnings were over 5 years previously but I can’t but be reminded of them. I can’t access the Guardian on-line archive for 1938 as I don’t have a subscription, but I have no reason to doubt what they reported.

A few days later Dr Mohammed Buksh of Jamiat-ul-Muslimin attended upon Sir Feroz Khan Noon, the high commissioner for India. Sir Feroz tried to explain that in Britain we could (or could then) freely criticise Christianity, the Royal family and government as a right. He reminded Dr Buksh that Muslims were “a very small minority in England, and it would do them no good to try and be mischievous in this country, no matter how genuine their grievances were”.

Nazis Suck at Sabotage – WW2 – Spies & Ties 23

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 13 Oct 2022

They say every masterpiece has its cheap copy. Well, the German Sicherheitsdienst are trying to copy the success of the Soviet Partisans. With Walter Schellenberg, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich in charge, you know it’s going to be a bloody affair.
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The commercial failure of Bros

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

With the movie failing to find much of an audience, the director and lead actor blame homophobia, because that’s far easier than accepting that rom-com movies are quaint, out-of-date, and stale in the modern hookup culture:

In the case of movies, one might respond to Stoller and Eichner by saying that entertainers are supposed to provide products that the viewing public wishes to see. It might surprise the team behind the didactic Bros that many of us watch movies to be entertained, not to be preached at, seeing them as brief, trivial moments of escape from the drudge of daily life, not an opportunity to (as the Victorians would have said) “improve” ourselves. But even though it has proved an abject commercial failure, the movie is nonetheless instructive in how our culture is changing. And both its production values and its failure are likely signs not of the LGBTQ movement’s influence stalling, but of its remarkable success.

[…]

Romance depends upon sex being costly. It was the difficulty of obtaining sex, the need for that delicate, complicated, and unpredictable interpersonal dance between two people, that was the very essence of what it was to be romantic. In a world where sex is not simply casual but remarkably cheap, the notion of romance is dead. Romance requires a particular kind of culture in order to make sense. A world of hookups, one-night stands, and all-pervasive pornography is not one that gives people the cultural grammar and syntax to understand it. That the movie apparently contains scenes of sex and nudity is hardly exceptional today. But that’s the point: A world where sex and nudity are displayed on the screen is not a world where romance has any place. Just as explicit rap lyrics reflect a world antithetical to that in which Frank Sinatra sang “Fly me to the moon”, so the endless tedium of explicit sex on celluloid is not that of Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire in Funny Face. Romance depends upon social codes of restraint and modesty, and upon the idea that sex is not something casual but something special, even sacred.

The same point can be made with reference to what we might call romantic tragedy. Take Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The story simply could not be set in modern America because Anna, married to the tedious Karenin but falling in love with the dashing Vronsky, would simply file for divorce and move out of Karenin’s house and into that of her lover. The tragic romance is rooted in the impossibility of Anna’s situation, given the way sex is seen through the powerful moral lens of nineteenth-century Russian society. The genre of romantic tragedy depends upon a specific moral framework. So does the genre of romantic comedy. But the sexual revolution has obliterated that moral framework.

To return to Bros, it is frankly as ridiculous to make a rom-com in the twenty-first century as it is to hire a cast and crew on the basis of modern categories of identity rather than professional competence. And, while the Bros team might regard its box office failure as discouraging, it might just as easily be evidence of the triumph of the LGBTQ movement in wider society as it is of a residual resistance to the same. Please don’t blame homophobia for your commercial failure. Romance is dead. And you helped to kill it.

When Potatoes were Illegal

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 7 Jun 2022
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QotD: High school

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

Those of us on the back nine of our lives remember high school as a process of differential diagnosis. You try on a certain set of social roles to see which, if any, fit. You don’t go out for the baseball team because it’s the first step to making the Majors. Really, you might not even like playing baseball all that much. You go out for the baseball team because you want to be a Jock. If you make the team, you’re a Jock for a while, leading the Jock life and learning its lessons. If you don’t make the team, you go find something else — the Debate Club, heavy metal music, whatever — and learn the lessons those lifestyles teach.

You didn’t understand this back then, of course, but your parents did, and — crucially — your teachers did. If you wanted to be a Metalhead this semester, they’d treat you like a Metalhead, complete with the “Why are you wasting your potential (and ruining your ears) with that godawful noise?” They’d make a show of having a Very Serious Conversation with you about the dangers of drugs and satanism … knowing full well that you weren’t on drugs, weren’t sacrificing virgins to Moloch (if for no other reason than you didn’t actually know any girls), and would, in fact, come back as a clean-scrubbed Preppie after summer break your junior year.

The key word in “adolescent rebellion”, after all, is adolescent. All of that stuff was just practice. If it proceeded in the normal way, what going through all the permutations of high school identity taught you was:

  • you’re a fairly normal person; and
  • that’s ok.

In other words, you are not a collection of externals — clothes, music, hairstyles. You’re you. The externals can change, fairly radically — remember that one summer you broke your nose trying to be a skater? — but there’s a core in there that’s you. Which is great, because it means that you are just a person who takes customer service calls in a cubicle farm to pay the bills; they’re not going to put “Here lies Bill, a Customer Service Representative” on your tombstone.

Severian, “The Basic College Girl”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-24.

October 13, 2022

The Nazis’ Justification for the Genocide – October 9, 1943 – WAH 081

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, Greece, History, Italy, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 12 Oct 2022

This week the Nazis go on the record about their genocide of the Jews. Meanwhile the Jews in Denmark are coming closer to safety, and the Roman Jews are again at peril.
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Are we to believe that Prime Minister Trudeau lied about the Freedom Convoy? To the fainting couches!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Some recent revelations show that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was … less than perfectly honest … about the intelligence reports he was receiving about the Freedom Convoy:

It has now been revealed that statements by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau associating the “Freedom Convoy” with Nazism were unfounded, according to Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) documents published by Blacklock’s Reporter.

On January 31, 2022, Trudeau conflated support for the “Freedom Convoy” with “Nazi symbolism” in his first press conference addressing the massive anti-mandate demonstration that captured the world’s attention in the first two months of the year.

Trudeau also stated at the time that he would not meet with the truckers because of their supposed “hateful rhetoric” and “violence towards citizens”, behavior he consistently implied was a core aspect of the movement’s strategy to put an end to COVID jab mandates nationwide.

Contradicting Trudeau’s characterization, the now-revealed documentation from CSIS, dated February 2 – just two days after the prime minister’s initial comments – explain that the protest was predominantly comprised of “patriotic Canadians standing up for their democratic rights” and not of those holding extremists beliefs.

Detailing how the presence of bigoted imagery is “not unique” when it comes to large-scale protests, CSIS also noted that the presence of swastikas on some flags was “not necessarily to self-identify as Nazis but to imply the Prime Minister and federal government are acting like Nazis by imposing public health mandates”.

It was therefore the conclusion of CSIS that while some attendees had manually added swastikas to flags, it was to associate Trudeau with Nazism as a statement of their opposition to the ideology.

Two weeks after the CSIS report was produced, Trudeau doubled-down on his conflation of the Freedom Convoy with Nazism, accusing the Conservative Party of Canada, and in particular Jewish MP Melissa Lantsmann, of standing “with people who wave swastikas”.

How to Make a Spatula | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published 23 May 2022

It’s a small project but not to be despised. Paul would start anyone new to woodworking with this simple and straightforward kitchen utensil simply because of some of the techniques you will use for many years to come.

Whether you later choose to make a kayak or a guitar neck, a three-legged stool, or a tool handle, everything taught in this wooden spatula, together with the tools, will be the same techniques.

It’s a win-win project, and Paul has used this with hundreds upon hundreds of his students through the years.
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QotD: “Russia is a nation built for tank warfare”

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Some nations possess very large numbers of tanks indeed — others barely any. Russia, China and North Korea are some of the worlds largest tank fleet operators, with thousands of tanks listed on their order of battle. Russia is a nation built for tank warfare — large open borders, and endless steppes that have over the last century played host to some of the biggest armoured battles ever seen. Having visited the Kursk salient many years ago, Humphrey can personally attest to the sheer size of the Eastern Front, and how a militarized society can make good use of armour.

Russia also benefits from an outstanding rail network able to quickly move tanks and other heavy elements of military power such as APCs and self-propelled guns around easily, and has the space and reserves of conscript manpower from previous generations to draw on to crew its simple but effective designs, such as the T64 and T72.

This is underpinned by a national philosophy which is best summed up as “don’t throw away any military asset that, no matter how old it is, could be used to kill an invader”. There are storehouses across Russia full of elderly tanks that with a bit of TLC could, probably function as a last gasp capability. Russia regularly exercises its armoured capability, mobilising forces and moving them around the country to test readiness against the theoretical threat of a NATO invasion.

Russia then is a nation intended for operating tanks, but only when supported by a logistics chain that can support the front. Start moving away from the Russian landmass and their ability to sustain a force at any distances is quickly called into doubt. While Russia may “rank” as the largest tank operator in the world, much of this is only a threat to any nation foolish enough to invade Russia in the first place.

Sir Humphrey, “Tanks for nothing — Why it does not matter if the British Army has fewer tanks than Cambodia”, Thin Pinstriped Line, 2019-04-24.

October 12, 2022

Medically assisted suicide in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Common Sense, Rupa Subramanya discusses how quickly MAID (Medical Assistance in Death) became a commonality in Canada:

Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

When we think of assisted suicide or euthanasia, we imagine a limited number of elderly people with late-stage cancer or advanced ALS in severe pain. The argument for helping them die is clear: Death is imminent. Why should they be forced to suffer?

In 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide was constitutional. In June 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, otherwise known as the Medical Assistance in Dying Act. MAiD was now the law of the land. Anyone who could show that their death was “reasonably foreseeable” was eligible. In this respect, Canada was hardly alone: The Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, among others, allow assisted suicide. So do ten states in the U.S.

In 2017, the first full year in which MAiD, which is administered by provincial governments, was in operation, 2,838 people opted for assisted suicide, according to a government report. By 2021, that figure had jumped to 10,064 — accounting for more than 3 percent of all deaths in Canada that year.

There have been a total of 31,664 MAiD deaths and the large majority of those people were 65 to 80 when they died. In 2017, only 34 MAiD deaths were in the 18- to 45-year-old category. In 2018, that figure rose to at least 49. In 2019, it was 103; in 2020, 118; and in 2021, 139.

Today, thousands of people who could live for many years are applying — successfully — to kill themselves.

Indeed, in some Canadian provinces nearly 5 percent of deaths are MAiD deaths. In 2021, the province of Quebec reported that 4.7 percent of deaths in the province were due to MAiD; in British Columbia, the number was 4.8 percent. Progressive Vancouver Island is unofficially known as the “assisted-death capital of the world”, doctors told me.

Why the dramatic increase? Over the past few years, doctors have taken an increasingly liberal view when it comes to defining “reasonably foreseeable” death. Then, last year, the government amended the original legislation, stating that one could apply for MAiD even if one’s death were not reasonably foreseeable. This second track of applicants simply had to show that they had a condition that was “intolerable to them” and could not “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable”. This included applicants like Margaret Marsilla’s son, Kiano.

In 2023, those numbers are almost certain to rise.

Next March, the government is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide-seekers to include the mentally ill and “mature minors”. According to Canada’s Department of Justice, parents are generally “entitled to make treatment decisions on their children’s behalf. The mature minor doctrine, however, allows children deemed sufficiently mature to make their own treatment decisions.” (The federal government does not define “mature”, nor does it specify who determines whether one is mature. On top of that, the doctrine varies from one province to another.)

Dr. Dawn Davies, a palliative care physician who supported MAiD when it was first conceived, said she had “tons of worries” about where this might lead. She could imagine kids with personality disorders or other mental health issues saying they wanted to die. “Some of them will mean it, some of them won’t,” she said. “And we won’t necessarily be able to discern who is who.”

Hugh Scher, an attorney advising Margaret Marsilla, told me: “While other countries have explored extending assisted suicide to minors, those governments have insisted on substantial safeguards, including parental notification and consent. Canada is poised to become the most permissive euthanasia regime in the world, including for minors and people with only psychiatric illness, having already removed the foreseeability of death or terminal illness as an essential condition to access euthanasia or assisted suicide.”

History’s Real Macbeth

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 11 Oct 2022
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The two traditions of the American political left

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

Chris Bray responds to a post by Leighton Woodhouse that declares that “left libertarianism” has won the battle for the soul of the American left:

I see two traditions on the American political left.

One is a tradition skeptical of authority, or aggressively hostile to it: Striking miners battling Coal and Iron Police, or Pinkertons, or Colorado sheriffs, or the National Guard; Wobblies fighting cops in the street; Great War-era socialists attacking the military draft, and going to prison for it; the Weatherman planting bombs in police and military offices. This tradition on the left views government as authority, a repressive servant of the status quo — “the executive committee of the bourgeoisie”. Leftists in this tradition say that of course government serves capitalism and corporate power, and of course the government isn’t on our side. Go back to the Coal and Iron Police to see how radical labor activists saw them: state-sanctioned police, with badges, on the private payroll of the industrialists. The young radical George Orwell, writing about his time fighting in Spain: “When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

The other is a tradition centered on the supposedly inherent decency, wisdom, and fairness of government, a tradition that runs through the capital-p Progressive Era and Woodrow Wilson, to the New Deal, and onward into the Great Society. In this tradition, state power is benevolence itself, and points its kindness downward. Government interposes itself between the downtrodden worker and the power of the wealthy, ensuring the dignity of the poor. Tax the rich! In this tradition, government represents our best selves, our highest yearning for a better world. Why, just look at how much more equitable the progressive income tax made our social order, back when marginal tax rates were so much more fair at the top. Government serves, protects, nurtures: It’s the tool of the ordinary man, offering the noble guarantees of Social Security and Medicaid. Of course government is on our side, fellow downtrodden, and we need more of it.

Those two traditions don’t fit together, though the obvious way to square the circle is to say that a Bill Ayers opposes the power of the state when it opposes him, and embraces it if he thinks his side has come to control it. This would mean that there aren’t two ideological traditions — just two different instrumental postures. But no one who survived the Ludlow Massacre thought the government was a benevolent servant of the working man.

As Leighton Woodhouse notes, we have a good deal of what looks like anti-authority leftism in our cities, in the form of movements that call for the end of mass incarceration, the defunding of the police, and the transition to a social services model in response to homelessness and drug addiction. In this view, rising crime and growing homelessness are signs of urban leftists rejecting authority as a tool. Homelessness is not a crime, you fascists!

But I’ve written before about the incredible strangeness of progressive political columnists denouncing Donald Trump’s vicious authoritarianism, and then proudly pivoting to an expression of their approval of the warm and caring Justin Trudeau — who cracked down on incipient Trumpism in his country by boldly freezing the bank accounts of dangerous participants in the evil right-wing truck convoy. When government freezes the bank accounts of protesters, government is fighting against authoritarianism, obviously. More government power means less authoritarianism!

Walther P38 Development

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Apr 2016

The Walther P38 was adopted by Germany in 1938 as a replacement for the P08 Luger — not because the Luger was a bad pistol, but because it was an expensive pistol. Walther began development of its replacement in 1932 with two different development tracks — one was a scaled-up Model PP blowback in 9x19mm and the other was the locked-breech design that would become the P38.

The initial prototypes look externally quite similar to the final P38, although the locking system went through several changes and the controls did as well. Several of the early developmental models used shrouded hammers.

In this video I will take a look at both initial “MP” pistols (the blowback and the locked breech), then the Armee Pistole (aka the AP) in its standard configuration and also a long barreled model with a shoulder stock, then the second Model MP, and finally the HP which was the commercial model of the final P38. In addition, I will check out a sheet metal prototype of the locked breech model form the very beginning of the development program.
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QotD: Luxury beliefs

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

Luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes … The way that people used to demonstrate their social class was through material goods, through expensive items … Today, it’s not necessarily the case … [Affluent] students will often downplay their wealth or even lie about how rich their parents are … [Now,] it’s luxury beliefs. It’s the unusual, novel viewpoints that they’re expressing to distinguish themselves. They crave distinction, that’s the key goal here …

An easy way to show that you’re not a member of the riff-raff, the masses, is to hold the opposite opinion, or a strange opinion that maybe doesn’t make sense, because it shows you’re not one of them. It’s not just the opinion itself, but the way that you express it. If you express it using vocabulary that no-one has ever heard of, for example … You often are not paying the price for your luxury beliefs, but even if you do, it’s still not nearly the same as the cost inflicted on the lower classes if they were to adopt those luxury beliefs too. […]

I talked to a friend of mine who was telling me, “When I set my Tinder radius to one mile, just around the university, and I see the bios of the women, a lot of their profiles say things like ‘poly’ or ‘keeping it casual’ – basically, they’re not interested in anything too serious.” He says something like half of them have something like that in their bio. And then he said, “But when I expand the radius on my Tinder to five miles, to include the rest of the city and the more run-down areas beyond the university bubble, half the women are single moms.” And basically, the luxury beliefs of the former group, the educated group, trickled down and ended up having this outsize effect on the people who are less fortunate, who don’t have the [social and] economic capital of the people who can afford that belief.

David Thompson, quoting from the transcript of a TRIGGERnometry interview with Rob Henderson, David Thompson, 2022-07-11.

October 11, 2022

Growing grapes for wine

Filed under: Business, USA, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

A guest post at Founding Questions from Allen discusses his many years of growing grapes:

I grew grapes for wine, the noble Vitis Vinifera, for close to 30 years. My heart went out of it when I saw the advent of celebrity wine producers. I could stomach the idea of box wine for women with their cats, after all what else did they have, but the very idea that celebrity itself might indicate discernment or ability was a bridge too far for me.

A good wine can enhance a meal. In fact given any other choice I will choose water with lemon if a decent wine is not available. The acid in the wine, or from the lemon, keeps the palate clear and lets you get more flavor out of a well done meal. Then there is the allure, “why yes I grow my own grapes and make my own wine my dear, care for a glass?” If there is a better way to get a lady to throw her panties at a farmer I don’t know what it is. Oh, and that is FNG, that country song, “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”. No she doesn’t, you damn dope.

I know it sounds trite but good wine starts in the dirt and everything in the dirt ends up in the wine. I had sandy, rocky soil with minimal amounts of organic material. Vines need to struggle to make good wine grapes. I did fertilize but with composted organic material and a mixture of manures. If your manure still contain some amount of ammonia in it the wine will have an interesting bouquet so patience grasshopper, give it 2-3 years to compost well. Watering, I always drip irrigated but sparingly. If you’ve got city water its treatment chemicals will end up in the wine so avoid it as much as possible. I had my own deep water wells so I didn’t have that worry. It’s the same with pest treatments. I planted a certain type of tree near the vineyard that Ladybugs were partial to. Ladybugs do a number on most common insect pests.

So you’ve got your dirt now what? Dig son dig. My preferred vine and row spacing was 8 feet by 8 feet, 8 feet between vines with rows 8 feet apart. I dug a trench approximately 3 feet wide by 3 feet deep for each row of vines. Before you ask, yes I did it by hand. Machinery can actually make things worse as it can compact the soil to rock hard consistency where it isn’t digging. The idea here is to get the vines’ roots to run deep and spread. If your soil is especially compacted a power auger is useful to break up the soil.

Next up you need a trellis because grapes require a lot of support. I used a four wire trellis with two arms to spread the canopy out. The more leaf area you have the more photosynthesis and consequently higher growth you will have. It also will drive the acid sugar balance in the grapes. You’ll have to experiment with it to find out what works best for your location and microclimate. Fortunately you have that 4 to 5 years before you get a good crop.

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