World War Two
Published 22 Jan 2022This is a rough week for the Germans — their trapped garrison at Velikie Luki is liquidated, and their trapped army at Stalingrad is … well, it isn’t going well for them. In fact, it isn’t going well for the Axis anywhere this week, being pushed back or retreating in New Guinea, the Caucasus, North Africa, and on Guadalcanal. Berlin is even bombed this week as well.
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January 23, 2022
Hitler’s Interference is losing the war – WW2 – 178 – January 22, 1943
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The oddity of the bookselling business
Unlike so many other retail operations, book stores have a different sales cycle because they can generally return unsold books (in good condition) to the publisher for a full refund. This means that 30% or more of the books on the shelf at Christmas will be shipped back to the publisher early in the new year, only to appear again on the discount shelves a year or two later for a fraction of the original retail price (and often in rather worse shape for all the additional handling). In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kennethy Whyte calls this the worst problem in book publishing:
“Indigo Books and Music” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0
Book publishing doesn’t work like most other retail businesses. If I were in the ugly sweater business, I’d sell 500 ugly sweaters to Saks at $200-a-piece. Saks pays me 500x$200=$100,000, marks the ugly sweaters up to $500, and lays them out on tidy glass shelves under track lighting. Whatever is left after the Christmas season is marked down to half price on crowded sales racks. If Saks still has some ugly sweaters in January, it will ship them to the outlet store where they’re offered at still greater discounts.
What happens to them if they don’t sell at the outlet doesn’t interest me because I’ve got my $100,000. If Saks ordered far too many ugly sweaters, that’s Saks’ problem.
In the book world, I sell 1,000 copies of a book to a retail chain like Barnes & Indigo for $15-a-piece, half the retail price. Barnes & Indigo pays me 1,000x$15=$15,000 and maybe puts some of the books on a front table, or maybe buries them on a bottom shelf in the darkest corner of the store. I might sell a two hundred, four hundred, or six hundred copies.
Let’s be generous and say 600 sell at Barnes & Indigo through the autumn and over the holidays. Come January, the store doesn’t put the remaining stock on sale: it packs up the unsold 400 and ships them back to me for a full refund. The 400 returns, or at least those of them that aren’t crumpled or coffee-stained, go back into the warehouse, which charges me fees to process the returns and more fees to store them. Sometime later, I get a notice of the returns and regret that extra glass of wine I ordered at dinner the night I thought I sold Barnes & Indigo $15,000 worth of books when, in fact, I only sold $9,000 worth of books, perhaps leaving me under-water on that particular title. I also regret boasting of the $15,000 sale to the author, who probably did some royalty math in his head and thought he was getting 40% more than he’ll actually receive.
Returns at publishing houses run somewhere between 25% and 30% annually, across all titles. That’s despite Amazon with its ruthlessly efficient algorithms seldom buying many more copies than it needs, and despite ebooks and audiobooks (which amount to a quarter of sales for many publishers) having almost zero returns.
Millions of books are returned to publishers at this time of year. Sales are slower in January and February, so bookstores hurriedly return all their remaining holiday-season stock and whatever else hasn’t moved to keep themselves in cash. Some of the returns go back into storage. Eventually, most are remaindered, or pulped, or buried. It’s a colossal waste of paper and ink, a headache in terms of shipping/handling/accounting, and dispiriting as heck. You might think you had a great year, hit all your sales targets, exceeded them, even, and then in about the third week of January begins the drip drip drip of returns, and it continues steadily through March. That’s if you’re lucky and it’s drips, not waves. And while the returns are concentrated in the first quarter, your books are returnable year-round, so even a pleasant summer afternoon can be ruined by the unexpected arrival of a pallet of unwanted stock.
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The Abandoned Hill With Two Members Of Parliament
Tom Scott
Published 6 Jul 2020Old Sarum, in Wiltshire, is a now-desolate hillfort run by English Heritage. But it was once one of the most important sites in southern England: so important that it had two members of Parliament. Then, it became a “rotten borough”: and a warning about power.
Thanks to English Heritage: more information and how to visit: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/v…
Research and script assistance from Jess Jewell
Drone camera by Jamie Bellinger
Edited by Michelle Martin: https://twitter.com/mrsmmartin
Audio mix by Graham Haerther: https://haerther.netFilmed safely, following all local and national guidance: https://www.tomscott.com/safe/
SOURCES:
Corfield, P. (2000). Power and the professions in Britain 1700-1850. London: Routledge.Dodsworth, W. (1814). An historical description of the cathedral church of Salisbury: including an account of the monuments, chiefly extracted from Gough’s “Sepulchral Monuments,” and other authentic documents: also, biographical memoirs of the Bishops of Salisbury, from the earliest period by W. Dodsworth, verger of the Cathedral
English Heritage’s own research page: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/v…
http://www.historyhome.co.uk/c-eight/…
I’m at https://tomscott.com
on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott
and on Instagram as tomscottgo
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QotD: The British governments of the 1930s
It follows that British democracy is less of a fraud than it sometimes appears. A foreign observer sees only the huge inequality of wealth, the unfair electoral system, the governing-class control over the Press, the radio and education, and concludes that democracy is simply a polite name for dictatorship. But this ignores the considerable agreement that does unfortunately exist between the leaders and the led. However much one may hate to admit it, it is almost certain that between 1931 and 1940 the National Government represented the will of the mass of the people. It tolerated slums, unemployment and a cowardly foreign policy. Yes, but so did public opinion. It was a stagnant period, and its natural leaders were mediocrities.
In spite of the campaigns of a few thousand left-wingers, it is fairly certain that the bulk of the English people were behind Chamberlain’s foreign policy. More, it is fairly certain that the same struggle was going on in Chamberlain’s mind as in the minds of ordinary people. His opponents professed to see in him a dark and wily schemer, plotting to sell England to Hitler, but it is far likelier that he was merely a stupid old man doing his best according to his very dim lights. It is difficult otherwise to explain the contradictions of his policy, his failure to grasp any of the courses that were open to him. Like the mass of the people, he did not want to pay the price either of peace or of war. And public opinion was behind him all the while, in policies that were completely incompatible with one another. It was behind him when he went to Munich, when he tried to come to an understanding with Russia, when he gave the guarantee to Poland, when he honoured it, and when he prosecuted the war half-heartedly. Only when the results of his policy became apparent did it turn against him; which is to say that it turned against its own lethargy of the past seven years. Thereupon the people picked a leader nearer to their mood, Churchill, who was at any rate able to grasp that wars are not won without fighting. Later, perhaps, they will pick another leader who can grasp that only Socialist nations can fight effectively.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
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January 22, 2022
Belisarius: The General & The Eunuch
Epic History TV
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📖 The Wars of Justinian by Michael Whitby https://geni.us/Xxrd3
📖 Rome Resurgent by Peter Heather https://geni.us/ZFoU1
📖 The Armies of Ancient Persia: the Sassanians by Kaveh Farrokh https://geni.us/jMQo3z
📖 Late Roman Cavalryman AD 236–565 (Osprey) by Simon MacDowall https://geni.us/XMGl👕 Buy EHTV t-shirts, hoodies, mugs and stickers here! teespring.com/en-GB/stores/epic-histo…
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James I and his experiment with “personal rule”
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes explains why King James I grew frustrated in his dealings with Parliament and decided to avoid calling that body into session and ruling the kingdom directly:
King James I (of England) and VI (of Scotland)
Portrait by Daniel Myrtens, 1621 from the National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.
By the end of 1610, James’s disillusionment with the House of Commons was complete — it was, he said, after six years of fruitlessly wrangling for parliamentary taxes, like a “House of Hell”.
So, despite failing to reach a permanent financial settlement, James decided to try to rule without it. His debts were huge, and his deficit substantial. But after the failure of 1610 he would do everything he could to never have to summon a Parliament again. Although he couldn’t actually afford it, he decided to try ruling as an absolutist monarch anyway — to embark on “personal rule”.
This extraordinary decision, to be an absolutist ruler without adequate financial support, would have dramatic consequences for England’s foreign policy, and perhaps on the whole balance of Europe too. James had already tried to reduce the costs of war when he came to the throne in 1603, by immediately concluding a peace with the vast Spanish Empire. Yet peace now became a necessity — if he couldn’t even plug the deficit during peacetime, he could not possibly pay for a war. Recognising this, Spain intervened freely in the affairs of the Protestant German states, confident that England would not be able to come to their aid.
To make matters worse, James’s financial woes made him especially susceptible to foreign influence. A poor king could be bought. Some of the smaller but wealthier European dynasties began to offer James large sums for his children’s hands in marriage. In 1611, the duke of Savoy offered a vast dowry of £210,000 for his daughter to marry James’s eldest son and heir, Prince Henry. The notoriously wealthy grand duke of Tuscany even put in a bid for £300,000. France then offered £240,000 — not as high, but it had the greater status as a kingdom. Any of these amounts would have plugged the deficit for a few years, even if they were nowhere near to eliminating James’s debt. Yet Henry died in 1612 at the age of eighteen, before any match was agreed, and James’s new heir Charles was much younger and sickly. There was now no rush, so the bidding war ceased. Indeed, by 1616 Charles had given England’s rivals yet another way to influence its king. The Spanish Hapsburgs dangled the prospect of a gigantic dowry of £600,000, but dragged their feet in negotiations, keeping James focused for as long as they could on trying to keep them sweet.
In the meantime, with Henry’s death denying him an immediate windfall, James in 1613 turned [to] Ireland. The Irish Parliament had not been summoned for over a quarter of a century, but it could be a way to reduce the costs of the occupation of Ireland and even raise some funds. The Parliament was initially a disaster. James had flagrantly gerrymandered a Protestant majority by chartering dozens of new towns, particularly in the English plantations in Ulster. Each new town was a borough constituency able to choose its own MPs, and James could even select their initial members — especially in cases where the towns were actually only tiny villages. In protest, the Catholic MPs refused to even recognise the new borough MPs, so each side elected their own Speaker. The Catholic Speaker was only forced out of the chair when the Protestant Speaker was hoisted onto his lap. Nonetheless, although James was legally entitled to create as many new boroughs as he liked, he soon compromised and in 1615 the Irish Parliament ended up voting him some cash.
But the delays forced James’s hand, and in 1614 he briefly suspended his foray into personal rule by summoning the English Parliament again. He needn’t have bothered. Having embarked on personal rule, James had doubled down on legally dubious ways of raising cash, like imposing new customs duties without parliamentary approval — measures that had already been deeply unpopular with MPs in 1610. This time, the Parliament lasted just two months and two days before James dissolved it in a rage — the House of Hell had proved even more impudent than before. One of the veteran opposition leaders, Sir Edwin Sandys, went so far as to explicitly compare James’s impositions on trade to tyranny, before reminding the Commons that tyrants often met a bloody end. When the Parliament was dissolved, the king had MPs’ notes on impositions burned, and a few of the ringleaders were even briefly imprisoned. But with the dissolution of Parliament, which had not voted him any cash, he was still none the richer.
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World War Zero – The Russo Japanese War
The Great War
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The Russo-Japanese War is nicknamed World War Zero – it was a clash between two world powers that foreshadowed war on an industrial scale as seen just 10 years later again. Gigantic land battles like the Battle of Mukden showed the true cost in manpower and materiel when modern armies clashed and the naval side of the war showed the strategic importance of modern navies.
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Akiyama Saneyuki, Gundan (Tokyo: Jitsugyō no Nihonsha, 1917)Atsuo Yokoyama; Toshikatsu Nishikawa & Ichō Konsōshiamu, Heishitachi ga mita Nichi-Ro sensō, (Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 2012)
Corbett, Julian S., Maritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905, Volume I, (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015)
Corbett, Julian S., Maritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905, Volume II, (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015)
Деникин А. И. Путь русского офицера. (Нью-Йорк: Изд. им. А. Чехова, 1953)
Forczyk, Robert, Russian Battleship vs Japanese Battleship: Yellow Sea 1904-05, (Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd, 2009)
Hamby, Joel E, “Striking the Balance: Strategy and Force in the Russo-Japanese War” Armed Forces & Society, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2004)
Hosokawa Gentarō, Byōinsen Kōsai Maru kenbunroku (Tokyo: Hakubunkan Shinsha, 1993)
Ivanov, A & Jowett P, The Russo-Japanese War 1904-05, (Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd, 2004)
Jacob, Frank, The Russo-Japanese War and its Shaping of the Twentieth Century, (London: Routledge, 2017)
Jukes, Geoffrey, The Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905, (Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd, 2014)
Kowner, Rotem (ed), Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5, Volume 1: Centennial Perspectives, (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2007)
Lynch, George & Palmer, Frederick, In Many Wars By Many War Correspondnets, (Tokyo: Tokyo Printing Co. 1904)
Mozawa Yusaku, Aru hohei no Nichi-Ro Sensō jūgun nikki (Tokyo: Sōshisha, 2005)
Murakami Hyōe, Konoe Rentai ki (Tokyo: Akita Shoten, 1967)
Paine, S. C. M., The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)
Steinberg, John W; Meaning, Bruce W; Schimmelpennick van der Oye, David; Wolff, David & Yokote, Shinji (eds.), The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero, (Leiden: Brill, 2005)
Stille, Mark, The Imperial Japanese Navy of the Russo-Japanese War, (Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd, 2016)
Takagi Suiu, Jinsei hachimenkan (Tokyo: Teikoku Kyōiku Kenkyūkai, 1927)
van Dijk, Kees, Pacific Strife: The Great Powers and Their Political and Economic Rivalries in Asia and the Western Pacific, 1870-1914, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015)
Warner, Denis & Warner, Peggy, The Tide at Sunrise: A History of the Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905, (London: Angus & Robertson, 1974)
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Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
Editing: Jose Gamez
Motion Design: Philipp Appelt
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Research by: Jesse Alexander
Fact checking: Florian Wittig
Channel Design: Yves ThimianContains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2022
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“China’s statistics remain in the hands of officials who carefully do everything possible to make sure China’s image remains unblemished”
I’ve been a disbeliever in official Chinese statistics for many years — one of the first repeat topics on the blog in 2004 was the unreliable nature of Chinese government statistics on economic growth. As a result, I find it very easy to believe that the Chinese statistics on deaths due to the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic are unreliable, as John Horvat explains:
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.
As the latest wave of COVID cases surges in the West, all is quiet in the East. It has always been quiet. Millions have died from the coronavirus epidemic as it sweeps the world. However, few consider it strange that the nation where the virus first appeared amid an entirely unprotected public of 1.3 billion people should record a mere 4,636 fatalities over the past three years.
China’s statistics remain in the hands of officials who carefully do everything possible to make sure China’s image remains unblemished. They claim that low numbers are due to the communist nation’s brutal “zero tolerance” policies. China is presented as a model for the West.
Some voices are appearing that dispute this claim. One expert says the fatality figures are likely closer to 1.7 million. This figure would put China in the same camp as the rest of the world. It would also point to the failure of the world’s strictest lockdown and explain the recent shutdowns of whole cities and regions due to the virus, which supposedly kills no one in China.
[…]
Communist parties have always used statistics as a tool and weapon to advance their agenda. Officials feel free to change the numbers to reflect well upon the state, which controls everything. Truth is whatever furthers the fortunes of the party. If statistics must be changed as a result, there is no problem. Hence the notorious unreliability of communist statistics.
The problem is complicated by anxious officials who must report good news to party leaders or face the consequences of their failures, including death. Zero tolerance numbers may be statistically impossible and even absurd, but most officials prefer their survival over inconvenient truths.
Also disturbing is the complicity of Western media that repeat the cooked numbers of communist regimes. Few dare to question impossible figures or “follow the science” when leftist prestige is involved. During the long Cold War, the West presented the Soviet Union as the second-largest economy. When the Berlin Wall fell, the actual size of the economy was found to be significantly less.
Even in a centrally planned socialist state, incentives matter. In the west, failing to meet expected standards may get you fired (unless you work for the government), but in authoritarian states like China it can get you shot or exiled to a remote labour camp for years or decades. The top statisticians know that the numbers they work on are … massaged … at every stage even before they are aggregated for regional or national reporting, but there is literally no point in telling the truth and there is much to be gained by “scenario-ing them rosily” because your bosses will only accept good news regardless of reality.
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1842 Retreat From Kabul
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 22 Sep 2021On January 13, 1842, a single man on horseback approached the British garrison at Jalalabad, where soldiers were waiting for a retreating army of several thousand. Exhausted, the man had part of his skull shaved off by a sword and his horse was so exhausted that it would soon perish. As he was brought into the walls of the city the lone man was asked where the rest of the army was. “I am the army,” he replied. Thus ended a disastrous retreat from Kabul, where a British force of some 4,500 soldiers and thousands of civilians was almost entirely destroyed.
This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
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QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with artillery
(I should note I am using “railroad networks” as a catch-all for a lot of different kinds of communications and logistics networks. The key technologies here are railroads, regular roads (which might speed along either leg infantry, horse-mobile troops and logistics, or trucks), and telegraph lines. That last element is important: the telegraph enabled instant, secure communications in war, an extremely valuable advantage, but required actual physical wires to work. Speed of communication was essential in order for an attack to be supported, so that command could know where reserves were needed or where artillery needed to go. Radio was also an option at this point, but it was very much a new technology and importantly not secure. Transmissions could be encoded (but often weren’t) and radios were expensive, finicky high technology. Telegraphs were older and more reliable technology, but of course after a barrage the attacker would need to be stringing new wire along behind them connecting back to their own telegraph systems in order to keep communications up. A counter-attack, supported by its own barrage, was bound to cut these lines strung over no man’s land, while of course the defender’s lines in their rear remained intact.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
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January 21, 2022
Boris is in trouble, threaten the BBC to take the heat off him!
In Spiked, Gareth Roberts wonders why Britons should continue to pay an annual license fee to support a media conglomerate that demonstrably hates them and their country:
Culture secretary Nadine Dorries, the most ardent of Boris Johnson stans, obligingly threw the deadest of cats on to the table at the weekend to distract from the woes of her beleaguered boss. She announced a two-year freeze on the BBC licence fee and dangled the prospect of scrapping it entirely.
Dorries must be well aware that any threat to the BBC always results in a Furies’ chorus of anger, horror and prophecies of woe, coming from precisely those people the Tory grassroots are likely to detest. And up they obligingly popped – Polly Toynbee, Nish Kumar, Gary Lineker, all present and correct. This wasn’t so much political theatre as a pantomime with stock phrases and responses. She’s behind you!
Behind all this repetitive call and response, there is something different this time around, on both sides. Dorries was noticeably blatant and direct when she tweeted that this licence-fee consultation “will be the last” (though she seemed less so in the Commons a couple of days later). And her detractors seemed more at a loss, struggling to find the counter examples of BBC excellence that used to come quickly and easily to hand. Citizen Khan creator Adil Ray tweeted a BBC promotional video asking “What has the BBC ever done for us?” that was made 36 years ago. Comedian Simon Day provided a list of great BBC comedies going back to the 1950s, which contained only one show commissioned in the last 15 years.
Canada’s CBC has a similar attitude toward Canadian culture and (ugh!) Canadians that the BBC displays, but the CBC gets direct government subsidies rather than a formal TV license required of all British TV owners. It’s quite reasonable to wonder what benefit Canadian taxpayers and British license-holders derive from all this financial support of increasingly unwatched TV and online propaganda that mocks and belittles them:
What this seems to show is that the BBC is now in a fix. In a way, the BBC hasn’t changed all that much. It is doing now what it has always done, reflecting and embodying a certain section of the middle class. When that section was sane, or at least fairly sane, that could be irritating on occasion, but we all forgave it because it had its heart in the right place. But in the past decade, the nominally “liberal” middle class has, to put it politely, gone both doolally and totalitarian.
To consume the BBC since about 2012 is to be never more than 10 minutes away from being scolded or berated, usually based on some spurious identity-politics talking point imported from the sick vortex of American academia. (On Radio 4 this happens much more frequently, about every 35 seconds.) It is unbearable, like paying £159 a year, on pain of imprisonment, to be told off by a particularly irritating polytechnic lecturer.
BBC News gets a lot of stick for this, understandably, but the Beeb’s drama, comedy and documentary output is now infested with it, too. It’s the same crushingly banal suite of opinions across everything.
Life before Blair was a grey, damp horror, a cultural wasteland of prejudice where Oswald Mosley had huge amounts of support (strangely enough, insinuating that people’s grandparents were all fascists doesn’t endear them to you). Working-class whites are bigots who can’t be trusted with basic information in case they start a race war. Fiona Bruce has kittens live on air when a doctor states the simple fact that it’s impossible to change sex. The BBC’s younger journalists have to be told that people have different opinions. If upper-class or working-class people can’t be shamed or blamed for something, the BBC just isn’t interested. It is stultifyingly bourgeois.
The BBC is often valued, and often trumpets itself, as a thing that brings the nation together. I think it has transmogrified into doing the opposite, with a superior sneer that treats Britain like something it’s found on its shoe.
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Why Wilhelm I Didn’t Want To Be German Emperor
Real Time History
Published 20 Jan 2022Get the Smartest Bundle in Streaming: https://smartbundle.com/thegreatwarsb
The proclamation of the German Empire on 18 January 1871 is usually portraited as a glorious ceremony. Most people associated it with the famous paintings from Anton von Werner. But the ceremony itself was far from well organized and the soon-to-be Emperor Wilhlem I himself was not to thrilled about the whole affair.
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https://realtimehistory.net/podcast – interviews with historians and background info for the show.» LITERATURE
Arand, Tobias: 1870/71. Der Deutsch-Französische Krieg erzählt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018Bartmann, Dominik (Hrsg.): “Ausst.-Kat. DHM‚ Anton von Werner. Geschichte in Bildern.” Berlin 1993
Bauer, Gerhard u.a. (Hrsg.): Ausst.-Kat. MHM Dresden “Krieg – Macht – Nation. Wie das deutsche Kaiserreich entstand”. Dresden 2020
Bühl-Gramer, Charlotte: Anton von Werner – “Die Proklamierung des Deutschen Kaiserreichs 1871”, in: Der Europäische Bildersaal. Europa und seine Bilder, hrsg. v. Michael Wobring und Susanne Popp. Schwalbach/Ts. 2014. S. 86-97
Gouttman, Alain: La grande défaite. 1870-1871. Paris 2015
» SOURCES
Deuerlein, Ernst: Die Gründung des Deutschen Reichs 1870/71 in Augenzeugenberichten. Gerlingen 2011 (Neuauflage)Goncourt, Edmond de: Journal des Goncourts. II.1. 1870-1871. Paris 1890
Meisner, Heinrich Otto (Hrsg.): Kaiser Friedrich III. Das Kriegstagebuch von 1870/71. Berlin, Leipzig 1926
Merkelbach, Thea (Hrsg.): Ferdinand Viebig. Der Krieg 1870/71. Aus den Erinnerungen eines preußischen Offiziers. Zell/Mosel 2021
N.N. (Hrsg.): Bismarcks Briefe an seine Gattin aus dem Kriege 1870/71. Stuttgart, Berlin 1903
Werner, Anton von: Erlebnisse und Eindrücke 1870-1890. Berlin 1913
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Conservatives versus the “Blob”
Sam Ashworth-Hayes is writing here about the British Conservative party, but just swap out the names and it’s equally applicable to the Canadian equivalent, and very likely true for the rest of the western world:
“Palace of Westminster”by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The Conservative party is trapped in a nightmare of its own making. Number 10 is rocked by scandals, support in the polls is plummeting, the Northern Ireland Protocol (Chekhov’s car bomb) waits patiently for its return to the newscycle. As with every good nightmare, there is the sense of unease that something remains undone.
That something would be “conserving”. Set aside economic policy, where the Conservatives and Labour are still just about separable — although the new interest in higher taxes, spending and regulation is rapidly eroding this gap — and judge the period on the social axis: same-sex marriage, net migration at record highs, the march of progressive ideas through academia, business and press and into government speeches. You could be forgiven for thinking that Labour won the 2010 election, and every bout subsequent.
Why is that the Conservative party governs in such a fundamentally unconservative way? Part of the issue is that the average Conservative MP is, on social issues, basically indistinguishable from the average Labour voter, while the average Labour MP is to the left even of this. The centre of gravity in Parliament is well to the left of the general population.
A second part of the answer — and a partial cause of the first — is that the infrastructure of British politics is not designed for the right. When Michael Gove and his then-Special Advisor Dominic Cummings attempted to shake up the English education system in 2014, they found themselves publicly at war with what they termed “the Blob”: an amorphous conglomerate of civil servants, academics and unions that acted to gum up change and ensure stasis in the interests of its members. Rightwards reform is received as violent revolution, whilst the constant leftwards drift goes unremarked and unchallenged.
When Cummings made his way to Number 10, so did the concept of the Blob, expanded to include the BBC, various quangos, much of Whitehall and what is sometimes called “civil society”. The example of hate crime policy is illustrative of the general idea. The concept is not dissimilar to Curtis Yarvin’s “Cathedral”, or the Trumpian “deep state”. Critics of such accusations point out, not unreasonably, that coordinating so many constituent parts would be almost impossible — but this misses the point entirely. The purpose of a system is what it does, and individual elements responding to an ecosystem of incentives that produce given results can act in a remarkably coordinated way, when those incentives point in the same direction.
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A Rare Navy Stopgap: the CLLE MkI Naval Enfield
Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Sep 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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The British Royal Navy tended to accumulate some of the obsolescent patterns of Enfield rifles around the turn of the 19th century, as the Army had higher priority for the new types of rifle. This resulted in a rather odd and poorly-documented pattern, the Charger-Loading Lee Enfield (CLLE) MkI Naval.
Produced around 1910-1912, these guns began as original production Long Lee (or Metford) rifles. In 1910, the new MkVII high velocity Spitzer ammunition was adopted, and it was largely issued on charger clips for use in the new SMLE rifles. The Royal Navy decided that it wanted to be able to use this ammunition, and so it converted some (exact numbers are unclear) of the old Long Lees with a mishmash of updates.
The rear sights were recalibrated for MkVII ammunition, but not changed in style. So, no windage adjustment was possible on either the front or rear.
A charger bridge was added, including a channel cut to allow a sight picture on the old-style sights. This also involved removing the early pattern dust covers on the bolts.
The resulting guns were marked “HV” for “high velocity” in front of their rear sights. The right side of the receiver socket retained the original production markings, and “CLLE MkI” was added to the left side of the sockets.
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QotD: Wrecking online civility is merely a byproduct
Turning people into hateful shitheads raging in echo chambers is just a side effect.
Tamara Keel, Twitter, 2021-10-19.
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