Quotulatiousness

August 10, 2022

Raising a generation to emulate Pavel Morozov

Filed under: History, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theodore Dalrymple on the dangers of a culture that welcomes and supports denunciation as a political mechanism:

Believed to be the only photograph of Pavel “Pavlik” Morozov (centre, wearing cap), circa 1930.

… a culture of denunciation is an important step in the direction of totalitarianism. Is there anyone whose life is such that the discreditable things done or said by him or her could not be woven into a reason for public execration or worse? The habit of denunciation was a powerful weapon in the hands of every totalitarian dictator.

In the Soviet Union, for example, the story of Pavel Morozov — little Pavlik — was used to inculcate the habit of denunciation as a social duty into Soviet children. Little Pavlik denounced his own parents and grandparents as kulaks, that is to say as rich and exploitative peasants, to the Soviet authorities, and was thereafter “martyred” for his truthfulness. Soviet children were encouraged to emulate lovely little Pavlik by snitching on all around them. There were posters in school of heroic children denouncing their fellows for something that they had done wrong. This was the Soviet version of truth-telling.

We should not complacently suppose that it couldn’t happen here — wherever here is. In Britain recently, which is suffering from a shortage of water because of unusually hot weather, residents of some areas have been prohibited from using hosepipes to water their garden — and have been encouraged to denounce neighbors or others to the authorities who flout the prohibition.

One can just hear the arguments in favor of such denunciations. It’s only fair and right, for example, that everyone should share the hardship caused by the shortage of water. It’s almost psychopathic of some not to obey the rules while most do so: Who do they think they are, that they are not obliged to obey? Moreover, we live in such times that, if you approach such a person directly, he’s likely to become furious and violent. It’s safer to call the authorities and let them deal with him.

This overlooks how easily the culture of denunciation can establish itself, and lead to a society in which everyone fears everyone else. Such is the way in which people are constituted that for many, at least, it’s a pleasure to bring harm to others in the name of doing good for society. That was the justification of denunciation in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Maoist China, as well as in a host of other totalitarian fiefdoms. And Maugham — he who actively solicits denunciations of Nick Cohen — even admits, perhaps without really meaning to, the pleasure he would derive from passing on any denunciations he receives in a kind of meta-denunciation, as it were.

This is authentically disgusting, but it has the merit of reminding us that totalitarianism did not land on earth like an asteroid but had its origins in the human heart, and that no society can be immune from the temptations of totalitarianism once and for all. Totalitarianism has its pleasures, chief of which is doing harm to others, albeit that today’s denouncer tends to become tomorrow’s denounced.

Barbarian Europe: Part 7 – The Lombards in Italy

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 31 Aug 2021

In 400 AD, the Roman Empire covered roughly the same area as it had in 100 AD. By 500 AD, all the Western Provinces of the Empire had been overrun by barbarians. Between April and July 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
(more…)

“Every nation is divided, and thrives on division. But France illustrates the rule rather too well.”

Filed under: France, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West on the historical divisions of the many regions in what we now know as “France”:

France is gigantic, like a continent in itself, and the most visited country on earth. It is four times the size of England and until the 17th century had a population four to five times as big (today it is 67 million v 56 million). Yet “France” until relatively recently extended not much further than Paris, in the area under the king’s direct control called the Île-de-France — beyond that, regional identity was distinctive and dialect pre-dominated.

As Robb writes, at the time of the Revolution just 11 per cent of the population, or 3 million people, spoke “French”; by 1880 still only one in five could communicate in the national language. Even with decades of centralisation, today there are still 55 distinct dialects in France; most are Romance, but the country is also home to Flemish, Alsatian, Breton and Basque-speaking communities. (Tintin has been translated into at least a dozen French dialects.) No regional identity in England, except the north-east, is as distinctive.

Many famous French historical figures wouldn’t have even understood “French”, among them St Bernadette, living in the then obscure village of Lourdes. She described the figure she saw as un petito damisela (or in French une petite demoiselle), the name for the local forest fairies in the Pyrenees. The Demoiselles dressed in white, lived in caves and grottos and were associated with water. They were also seen as being on the side of the poor, Robb points out, because here as is often the case there was a political underside to this folk belief. Indeed, a peasant conflict with the authorities from the 1830s to the 1870s had been called The War of the Demoiselles. But then conflict with the authorities — with Paris — almost defines French history.

[…]

If you like Robb’s work, you’ll also enjoy Fernand Braudel’s The Identity of France, published in 1986 and supposed to be part one of a series by the great 20th century historian. Unfortunately, Braudel was already dead by the time part one was published, and so the series was never finished.

Braudel loved his country and believed in a deep and abiding Frenchness, yet he was also fascinated by its divisions, the various different pay — from Gallo-Roman pagus — which translates as land, although it can mean either country or region. Within this, dialects can be very varied: Gascon is “quite distinct” to Languedocien and Provencal, he wrote, but in Gascony “two completely different patois” were spoken. Near to Salins the language spoken in each village “varies to the point of being unrecognisable” and “what is more extraordinary” the town “being almost half a league in length, is divided by language and even customs, into two distinct halves”.

France’s regional identity is defined by language, food — the division between butter and olive, wine and cider — and even roof tiles. Braudel was essentially a geographic determinist and, citing Sartre’s line that France was “non-unifiable”, the author lamented that: “Every nation is divided, and thrives on division. But France illustrates the rule rather too well.”

To illustrate the rivalry, compare the words of two 19th-century historians: Jean-Bernard Mary-Lafon, who contrasted the “refined and freedom-loving” southerners with “brute barbarism” of “knights from across the Loire”, violent, fanatical and pillaging. And Ernest Renan, who wrote in 1872: “I may be mistaken, but there is a view derived from historical ethnography which seems more and more convincing to my mind. The similarity between England and northern France appears increasingly clear to me every day. Our foolishness comes from the south, and if France had not drawn Languedoc and Provence into her sphere of activity, we should be a serious, active, Protestant and parliamentary people.”

He was surely mistaken, for it’s the south which is more Protestant and the north more Catholic. Just like in England, where regional and religious identity are intertwined.

Yet it is true that France’s great bounty was also its curse; this western European isthmus forms a natural unit within which the most powerful warlord could dominate, and that man was bound to be based somewhere on the Seine or Loire, close to the continent’s richest wheat-growing area. Yet in the early modern era this unit was far too big to govern effectively — 22 days’ ride from north to south — compared to England or the Netherlands. The author quotes an essayist who suggested that: “France is not a synchronised country: it is like a horse whose four legs move in a different time.”

Coca de Sant Joan & the Fires of Saint John’s Eve

Filed under: Europe, Food, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 22 Jun 2021
(more…)

QotD: “Most academics [are] twitchy closet cases with the social skills of autistic badgers”

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

… Why aren’t there more bright, ambitious young men going into [professional football] coaching?

I say the answer is: Institutional incentives. I’m not a football coach, but I was an academic — there’s a surprising amount of overlap in their institutional structures. Let me explain: In both cases, working conditions for everyone except those at the very tippy-top are brutal. We’d all willingly endure them, I think, for the kind of money and bennies big league coaches / tenured professors get, but below that tiny handful of folks everyone works even worse hours for far less compensation. Even coaches at dinky little high schools in the middle of Flyover Country spend countless hours breaking down film — he might only have fifteen kids on the team, but he’s expected to win with those fifteen kids, damn it, and win now.

Consider, then, what type of person would willingly sign up for such a life. Leave aside the question of whether or not what academics do has any intrinsic value. The fact remains that simply writing one’s dissertation takes, at minimum, a year or two of grinding toil. I’m the laziest sumbitch in captivity, and nobody’s better than me at gaming the system (especially a droolingly stupid system like academia), but even I pulled more 80+ hour weeks in grad school than I care to remember. It’s simple economics: You’ve got X dollars in grant money to hit the archives. Archives are always located in expensive cities in distant states, if not on different continents. Your X dollars run out pretty goddamn fast in a place like London, even when you’re staying at the cheapest hostel, living on ramen noodles and water, walking everywhere. Given that, you work, for as long as they’ll let you in the building, for as long as your eyesight holds.

And all that is to complete the bare minimum requirement for the possibility — by no means anywhere near the certainty — of securing an entry-level job. I’d ask “Who in his right mind would ever do that?”, but the answer is obvious: Nobody in his right mind would. You have to either really, really want to be an academic (coach), or have absolutely no other choice. Most academics, of course, are the latter — they’re twitchy closet cases with the social skills of autistic badgers. But wannabe-coaches, I hypothesize, face a similar dilemma: You’re an athlete who has made his living off his body. And a nice living it was, too, while it lasted … but now you’re 35 and your body just can’t do it anymore. You have no other skills. What else is there to do, but try coaching?

Severian, “Organizational Behaviour in the Human Male”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-23.

August 9, 2022

When asking a simple, factual question is treated as a direct personal attack

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray explains why just asking for [certain] facts is enough to trigger people who think you’re somehow saying that they’re not “good people”:

Come back to the cultural sewer with me, just for a moment, because here’s the last time I’ll lay a quote on you from Klaus Schwab’s COVID-19: The Great Reset, from a discussion about public health measures to contain the pandemic:

    This is ultimately a moral choice about whether to prioritize the qualities of individualism or those that favour the destiny of the community. It is an individual as well as a collective choice (that can be expressed through elections), but the example of the pandemic shows that highly individualistic societies are not very good at expressing solidarity.

Now: Pharmaceutical products sometimes fail, and sometimes cause serious harm, and it frequently takes a while for reality to get out of the dugout and take the field, so keep taking your FDA-approved Vioxx. It’s safe and effective! I rarely give up on books, but I gave up on Ben Goldacre’s 2012 book Bad Pharma about halfway through — for the same reason you’d stop eating a skillfully prepared shit sandwich. I felt like, yes, I get the point: Sometimes a drug is ineffective, sometimes a drug is outright harmful, and the manipulation of science and of regulatory agencies is more common than you would ever have wanted to know.

But it’s different this time, even while “this time” fits a very long pattern. As much as Big Pharma course corrections are always hard, this one will be infinitely harder. We’re not currently debating the efficacy of a pharmaceutical product, or of a class of pharmaceutical products; instead, we’re debating self-conception, social status, and cultural position. The claim “I don’t think these mRNA injections are as safe as they’ve been made out to be” is a character attack that threatens to take people out at the core like dynamite under a bridge: Are you saying I’m not a good person?

Bad Cattitude has been on fire lately on the topic of elite self-hypnosis and the descent into an “entirely hallucinatory landscape”. Consistent with this shrewd feline analysis, look again at what Klaus Schwab said about lockdowns and the suppression of economic activity in the name of public health: He said that shutting down our open societies was a “moral choice” about “expressing solidarity”. (My mask is for you, your mask is for me!) The discussion isn’t about what works, and has never been about what works. It has never been a discussion about the efficacy of anything; it’s a posture about social character, and always has been. Are you a bad, selfish person, or are you a good person who believes in kindness? The subtext about social class strikes me as too obvious to explicate, because mean people belong in their trailer parks in flyover country, and kind people are high-status. Review the lawn signs if you doubt this.

So when you question the little vial of fluid that goes into a syringe to be injected into your body, you’re not asking questions about the way a medical product works — or at least, you’re not asking questions that are perceived, by advocates of the injections (or the lockdowns, or the masks), as a discussion about safety and efficacy. You say, “Does it work? Is it safe?” — but they process it as an attack on their moral choice to express solidarity:

Are you saying we should have stood up for selfishness? Which means, if we bring the subtext to the surface, Are you saying we should have engaged in low-status behavior?

The Never Ending Failures in France – WW2 – Spies & Ties 21

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

World War Two
Published 8 Aug 2022

The typical image of the French Resistance is of a man, beret at an angle, cigarette hanging from his bottom lip, captured MP40 across his chest. But one of the most successful resistance leaders is a woman – Marie-Madeline Fourcade. And right now, the Germans have her on the run!
(more…)

“Canada’s not broken: here’s a set of totally arbitrary social media listicles to prove it, h8rs!”

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

Meant to post this on the weekend, but another lengthy Rogers internet outage got in the way. From the most recent weekly Dispatch from The Line:

We try to avoid spending too much time on Twitter nowadays, but we’ve noticed a trend emerge on the site that irks us. It’s not new, exactly, but it seems to have become a favoured rhetorical tactic among Liberals and their apologists. And as it touches on virtually all of the blurbs above, it’s worth noting.

We’ll call it Rebuttal by Listicle, and it works a little like this: rather than actually engage with critiques of the country or the government, partisans will simply post random rankings that show Canada is at the top of some subjective set of metrics like “freedom” or “quality of life”.

To wit:

And this:

Because these listicles look impressive and official, the partisans in question can treat them with the weight of proven scientific truth. Canada’s great! Look, the list proves it! Them’s the facts!

We have three major problems with this rhetorical tactic.

The first is optics: Please tell the couple priced out of the housing market in every major urban centre, the one that is now worried about the grocery bill, can’t fill the car with gas, and frets about heating costs next winter, that none of these problems really matter. That they should just be grateful and happy with this definitely not-broken country because Canada scored well in a ranking compiled by an intern at an American newspaper. Show the lists to the person suffering a lingering illness, with no family doctor, in a town where the ER is closed, and wait patiently for their enthusiastic high five.

You want to guarantee Prime Minister Poilievre, this is the way to go about it: smarmily dismissing legitimate grievances and concerns by tweeting a list and calling it a day.

And, of course that’s presuming the ranking was subject to even a moderate degree of fact checking, logic, or scientific scrutiny goes into these rankings at all.

Let’s look a little more carefully at the ones posted by former Trudeau senior aide Gerry Butts, shall we?

He has a whole thread devoted to cherry picking Canada-topping rankings compiled by something called The World Index. What is The World Index? Well, we don’t know, Bob. The Twitter bio says: “Know the world. Focus on economics, art & culture, science, technology, sports, travel, politics and military affairs.” Okay. The only website listed takes us to an Instagram account with 37 followers.

The list above, in which Canada hits #1 for Best Countries for Quality of Life, 2021, is from U.S. News & World Report, an American media company. We checked out their methodology for the 2021 survey, and this is what we found: it’s a survey of 17,000 people, run by an academic. What’s being surveyed? Glad you asked! “Participants assessed how closely they associated an attribute with a nation.” You’ll be thrilled to note that these 17,000 people around the globe gave Canada near perfect scores on being “not bureaucratic”, and having a “well developed public health system”, “well-distributed political power”, and “transparent government practices”. (Lol, *dies inside*.)

Hey, it’s great that people associate Canada with being awesome, but we hope that when Liberals talk about “evidence-based policies”, they are using actual, you know, evidence, not just rankings by survey participants.

Permanent way junction renewal – the old way

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

grovesey69
Published 26 Feb 2013

Old B&W film of relaying railway permanent way. Includes making the baseplates from scratch and building an S&C layout piecemeal. Some say the old ways are best!! they certainly knew what they were doing.

Bit of dud film in the middle but does not spoil it too much

(more…)

QotD: Fusty old literary archaism

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For as long as I can remember, readers have been trained to associate literary archaism with the stuffy and Victorian. Shielded thus, they may not realize that they are learning to avoid a whole dimension of poetry and play in language. Poets, and all other imaginative writers, have been consciously employing archaisms in English, and I should think all other languages, going back at least to Hesiod and Homer. The King James Version was loaded with archaisms, even for its day; Shakespeare uses them not only evocatively in his Histories, but everywhere for colour, and in juxtaposition with his neologisms to increase the shock.

In fairy tales, this “once upon a time” has always delighted children. Novelists, and especially historical novelists, need archaic means to apprise readers of location, in their passage-making through time. Archaisms may paradoxically subvert anachronism, by constantly yet subtly reminding the reader that he is a long way from home.

Get over this adolescent prejudice against archaism, and an ocean of literary experience opens to you. Among other things, you will learn to distinguish one kind of archaism from another, as one kind of sea from another should be recognized by a yachtsman.

But more: a particular style of language is among the means by which an accomplished novelist breaks the reader in. There are many other ways: for instance by showering us with proper nouns through the opening pages, to slow us down, and make us work on the family trees, or mentally squint over local geography. I would almost say that the first thirty pages of any good novel will be devoted to shaking off unwanted readers; or if they continue, beating them into shape. We are on a voyage, and the sooner the passengers get their sea legs, the better life will be all round.

David Warren, “Kristin Lavransdatter”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-03-21.

August 8, 2022

The British left briefly rediscovers an interest in free speech … no, wait, they’re back to loving Big Brother again

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

In Spiked, Tom Slater recounts the brief moment last week that the great and good of British left wingers found nice things to say about freedom of speech. A very brief moment:

The British left – or what passes for it today – briefly pretended to care about free speech this week. Which was kind of cute. It was all sparked by Tory leadership no-hoper Rishi Sunak’s bonkers suggestion that people who “vilify” Britain should be put on the Prevent anti-radicalisation programme, alongside all the Islamists and fascists. “Who are the real snowflakes?”, thundered one left-wing commentator. “Fascism creeps ever closer”, warned Richard Murphy, a one-time adviser to Jeremy Corbyn, as he wondered out loud if he might soon end up in “some camp of Sunak’s choosing for ‘re-education'”.

This is probably the meme that Darren Brady posted which drew the attention of Hampshire Police’s crack “hurty words and pictures” squad last week.

Such principled expressions of horror, over an insanely authoritarian policy that almost certainly will never be implemented, might have had a bit more weight had the exact same people not studiously ignored a very real incident of state censorship – and attempted re-education – that went viral last week. I’m referring, of course, to Hampshire Police’s arrest of 51-year-old army veteran Darren Brady, all because he posted an offensive meme, which arranged four “Progress Pride” flags to resemble a swastika – a clumsy commentary on the authoritarianism of the contemporary LGBT movement.

The details chillingly echo Richard Murphy’s tweeted fever dream. Reportedly, the police had visited Brady 10 days before they tried to arrest him, informing him that he had committed an offence by posting the flag meme. They offered him a deal: pay for a £60 “community-resolution course” and they’d downgrade his offence to a “non-crime hate incident”, which would still appear on an advanced background check. Brady refused and contacted Harry Miller, leading campaigner against thoughtpolicing, who was present at the arrest and spent a night in the cells himself for trying to obstruct the cops. Going by the footage, now seen around the world, the (several) officers who attended Brady’s home had no idea what offence he was supposed to have committed, saying only that he had “caused anxiety”.

So, state censorship? Yep. Threats of re-education? Yep. The police showing up at someone’s door for no other crime than expressing an opinion? Big yep. Just because it was done in a Keystone Cops sort of fashion doesn’t make the treatment of Brady any less sinister. And yet there hasn’t been a peep of protest from the left-leaning intelligentsia. The armed wing of the state is going about harassing and arresting people purely for upsetting someone on the internet. And yet the people who pass themselves off as liberal, progressive, radical even, are clearly not the tiniest bit bothered about it.

Brady isn’t an isolated case, either. Britain is fast becoming a warning to the Western world about “caring” censorship, about trying to quite literally police “hurtful” speech. According to one investigation, nine people a day are arrested in the UK over offensive things they post on the internet. On top of that, more than 120,000 people have had so-called non-crime hate incidents recorded against their name. These alleged incidents needn’t be investigated or even be credible to be recorded. So much so that an Oxford professor once managed to get a hate incident recorded against then home secretary Amber Rudd, for a speech she gave about immigration that he later admitted he hadn’t even listened to, let alone witnessed in person.

Barbarian Europe: Part 6 – The Birth of England

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

seangabb
Published 4 Aug 2021

In 400 AD, the Roman Empire covered roughly the same area as it had in 100 AD. By 500 AD, all the Western Provinces of the Empire had been overrun by barbarians. Between April and July 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
(more…)

Boring British politicians

Filed under: Books, Britain, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Katherine Bayford compares the last set of cabinet ministers appointed by lame duck PM Boris Johnson with some of the Parliamentarians of the 20th century … and it’s difficult not to feel nostalgic for a past Golden Age at Westminster:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

One of Boris Johnson’s final, whimpering acts of power in his premiership was to appoint a new cabinet. Fatally wounded by a team of ministers made up of those with little charm, intelligence or experience, who was actually left for Boris to replace them with?

A veritable who’s-that of the worst unknowns that can be found down the side of parliamentary benches was swiftly conscripted in. I tell a lie — Johnny Mercer MP achieved mild public recognition for defending elderly soldiers accused of war crimes and getting very angry at certain risqué insinuations made in the comments section of the Plymouth Herald.

[…]

There is nothing unusual about this class of minister, however. They are representative figures: dim, without verbal sparkle, frequently light on narrow policy insights and wider understandings of social and economic history. The median British politician has been like this for decades now. Tony Blair would bemoan the shoddy material he had to work with at every reshuffle, and David Cameron likewise found himself struggling for a front bench neither too hateful nor too stupid. The difference in political acumen and sophistication from the most forgotten of ministerial interviews from fifty years ago reveal a steep decline in both the eloquence and elegance of our politicians.

Perhaps the 20th century spoiled the voting public. Pick any decade and you will discover frontline politicians with vast hinterlands. Harold Macmillan recited Aeschylus — in the original Greek — whilst lying shot in the trenches. Enoch Powell rose from private to brigadier during the Second World War, after becoming the youngest professor in the empire. When Winston Churchill was attempting to stay solvent in the face of decades worth of excess, he maintained financial buoyancy by being the highest-paid journalist in the world. Publishers adored him. He could be trusted to write a million-word definitive biography of his relative, the first Duke of Marlborough. Roy Jenkins would in turn distinguish himself as a biographer of Churchill — as well as Gladstone, and the Chancellors of the Exchequer at large. Second-hand embarrassment is the only proper response when comparing such authorial endeavours to Boris Johnson’s biography of Churchill.

It’s not a matter of our politicians not being able to write anymore. Compared to the recent past they can barely speak. Political debates have succumbed to an entropic, deadening mediocrity. Recent discourse between a patronising, bland Sunak and a po-faced, blank Truss was not a nadir: it was standard fare.

Look upon this 1970 debate between Jenkins and Powell. Both men hold articulate and intelligent positions, arguing intricately and considerately, with a commitment to truth rather than point-scoring. They agree where relevant and have an ability to articulate clearly and fluently. Half a century on, political debate of such quality seems unrealisable. When watching vintage ministerial debates, the viewer is struck by the level of knowledge and attention that the speakers assumed their audience would possess, whether on the finer points of tackling inflation or whether IRA bombers deserved to the death penalty.

The slightest glance at cabinets fifty years ago demonstrates a far higher set of standards and abilities than those found today. Harold Wilson — always keen to consolidate as much power as possible — nevertheless packed his cabinet with the best and brightest, even if he kept them in positions in which they wouldn’t be able to outshine him. Wilson himself was a subtle and clever debater, not above using cheap PR tricks (such as his much-perfected pipe smoking) but always as a tool to realise his political vision.

Mediocrity requires mediocrity in order to survive. When judged against excellence — or even simple competence — the insufficiencies of today’s politician become intolerable. It is this which leads the public to distrust politicians more than their policy choices.

FN-DA1: The BAR for NATO

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Apr 2022

After World War Two, FN put the BAR back into production. This was initially the FN-D version with a quick-change barrel, but with NATO’s adoption of the 7.62mm cartridge, there was a demand for the BAR in that chambering. The Belgian Army adopted this new round, and plenty of other nations did as well. This prompted FN to release a new version of the FN-D for it, designated the FN-DA1.

In addition to the new chambering, the DA1 also had these three changes:
– Larger bipod feet and a wider bipod stance
– A rear aperture sight instead of an open notch
– A more protected barrel release latch

The FN-DA1 would remain in production until 1967, when it was finally discontinued.
(more…)

QotD: How houses have changed to fit the times

Filed under: Architecture, History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s unexceptional today to come across an open-plan apartment, because (except for the very rich) we don’t typically share our homes with servants, and we have efficient ventilation and climate control. Try to imagine living in an open-plan Victorian flat with a coal-burning kitchen range and fireplace puffing out smuts, a maid and a cook to keep on top of the grime and the food preparation: it doesn’t work. Try, also, to imagine a contemporary home without a living room with a TV in the corner. Go back to the 1950s and well-designed homes also had a niche for the telephone — the solitary, wired communications device, typically bolted to the wall in the hallway or at the foot of the stairs, for ease of access from all other rooms.

But today telephones have collapsed into our pocket magic mirrors, and TVs are going in two directions — flattening and expanding to fill entire walls of the living room, and simultaneously shrinking to mate with our phones. A not-uncommon aspect of modern luxury TV design is that they’re framed in wood or glass, made to look like a wall-hanging or a painting. The TV is becoming invisible: a visitor from the 1960s or 1970s might look around in bafflement for a while before realizing that the big print in middle of the living room wall is glowing and sometimes changes (when it’s in standby, running a screensaver). Meanwhile, microwave ovens and ready meals and fast food have reduced the need for the dining room and even the kitchen: to cook a family dinner and serve it in a formal dining room is an ostentatious display of temporal wealth, a signal that one has the leisure time (and the appliances, and the storage for ingredients) to practice and perfect the skills required. The middle classes still employ cooks: but we outsource them to timeshare facilities called restaurants. Similarly, without the daily battle to keep soot and dirt at bay, and equipped with tools like vacuum cleaners and detergents, the job of the housemaid has been shrunk to something that can be outsourced to a cleaning service or a couple of hours a day for the householder. So no more cramped servants’ bedrooms.

The very wealthy ostentatiously ape the behaviour of the even richer, who in turn continue the traditions they inherited from their ancestors: traditions rooted in the availability of cheap labour and the non-existence of labour-saving devices. Butlers, cooks, and live-in housemaids signal that one can afford the wage bill and the accommodations of the staff. But for those who can’t quite afford the servants, the watchword seems to be social insulation — like the dining room at the opposite end of the corridor from the kitchen.

The millionaire’s home cinema, in an auditorium of its own, is the middle class TV in the living room, bloated into an experience that insulates its owner from the necessity of rubbing shoulders with members of the public in the cinema. Likewise, the bedroom with en-suite bathroom insulates the occupants from the need to traipse down a corridor through their dwelling and possibly queue at the bathroom door in the middle of the night.

Types of domestic space come and go and sometimes change social and practical function.

The coal cellar is effectively dead in this era of decarbonization and clean energy, as is the chimney stack. Servants’ quarters are a fading memory to all but the 0.1% who focus on imitating the status-signaling behavior of royalty, although they may be repurposed as self-contained apartments for peripheral residents, granny flats or teenager basements. The dining room and the chef’s kitchen are becoming leisure pursuits — although, as humans are very attached to their eating habits, they may take far longer to fade or mutate than the telephone nook in the hallway or the out-house at the end of the back yard.

Likewise, outdoor climate change and indoor climate control are changing our relationship with the window. Windows used to be as large as possible, because daylight lighting was vastly superior to candlelight or oil-lamp. But windows as generally poor insulators, both of sound and heat, and indoor lighting has become vastly more energy efficient in recent years. Shrinking windows and improving insulation (while relying on designed-in ventilation and climate control) drive improvements in the energy efficiency of dwellings and seem to militate against the glass bay and big sash windows of yesteryear.

Charles Stross, “Social architecture and the house of tomorrow”, Charlie’s Diary, 2019-04-29.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress