Quotulatiousness

October 4, 2021

Debunking the myth of hollow-grind sharpening

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

Stumpy Nubs
Published 22 Jun 2021

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QotD: Theresa May is to Boris as Neville Chamberlain was to Winston

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Whisper it gently, but there’s a mysterious woman in Boris Johnson’s life. Someone very special to him. Though she gets none of the credit, she’s the secret of his success, so it’s time she emerged from the shadows and received the recognition she deserves. Step forward … Theresa May.

Exactly two years ago, our second female Prime Minister was bowing out. After a torrid time in office it was finally over, and it ended with characteristic grace. In her resignation statement, she blamed no one for her fall, expressing only gratitude for the chance she’d had to serve the country she loved.

Her critics were not so generous. Ranked against other Prime Ministers […] she fares poorly. In particular, she suffers by comparison to her successor. He delivered Brexit; she didn’t. He won a majority; she lost one. But that’s not the whole story. Two years on from the end of her premiership, we need to tell the truth: which is that Boris owes it all to Theresa.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a successful PM is found to be in debt to a predecessor. Winston Churchill, for instance, owed a great deal to the much-maligned Neville Chamberlain. The reason why Britain was able to hold out against Hitler was that, before the war, Chamberlain had rearmed the country. In particular, he built up the fighter capacity of the RAF, which proved so crucial in the Battle of Britain.

As for Chamberlain’s infamous failures, these too were foundational to Churchill’s success. It’s unlikely that the great man would have become Prime Minister had Chamberlain not exhausted the credibility of appeasement. Indeed she did more than Chamberlain to ensure ultimate triumph of her successor, and looking beyond the obvious low points of her premiership a very different picture emerges. Indeed, she provided the key ingredients for the victories that followed.

Peter Franklin, “Boris owes it all to Theresa May”, UnHerd, 2021-05-23.

October 3, 2021

This is Russia, The Soviet Thermopylae – WW2 – 162 – October 2, 1942

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

World War Two
Published 2 Oct 2021

The fighting for Stalingrad continues, but the Soviets forces are split and the Volga is on fire. In the Caucasus, the Axis forces for the most part are being held in check — at one point a single Soviet battalion holds off an entire Army Corps — but they’re being pushed back on the Kokoda Trail in the South Seas.
(more…)

Trudeau’s no-show on the very first “National Day for Truth and Reconciliation” wasn’t accidental

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

In The Line, an explanation of sorts for the Prime Minister effectively boycotting his own National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to go on a family vacation in British Columbia:

Thursday was Canada’s first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. According to Heritage Canada, it is a day that “honours the lost children and Survivors of residential schools, their families and communities. Public commemoration of the tragic and painful history and ongoing impacts of residential schools is a vital component of the reconciliation process.”

To mark the occasion, ceremonies were held in Indigenous communities across the country. Politicians from every level of government took part. In those provinces where it was not a holiday, schoolchildren wore orange shirts and learned about a shameful part of their country’s past, and came home telling their parents that “every child matters”.

And Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, who lowered the flag on federal buildings and has kept it down ever since, who has made reconciliation the centrepiece of his leadership, went surfing in Tofino. But not before lying about it — his official itinerary had him in private meetings in Ottawa, and it was only after Toronto Sun reporter Bryan Passifiume noticed that a federal jet had taken off from Ottawa and made its way to one of the most gorgeously isolated parts of the country that the PMO admitted that Trudeau wasn’t in Ottawa working the phones, he was in Tofino playing in the waves. When he was tracked down by a team from Global news, he turned his back to the camera and walked sullenly away along the beach.

What are we to make of this behaviour? Social media was full of people calling it an “own goal” or an “unforced error” or a “self-inflicted wound”, and that Trudeau’s officials should have known that this trip was a bad idea, and urged him to put it off by a day or two.

We think these people are getting it wrong. To call this an error in judgment fundamentally misunderstands Justin Trudeau’s psychology and what motivates him. As far as we at The Line can tell, the timing of this trip, the location, and the predictable negative reaction, was very deliberate, and is entirely in keeping with the prime minister’s previous behaviour. To put it bluntly, the prime minister is taking a suck attack.

When the Liberals came to power in 2015, winning a very surprising majority government, it was almost completely due to the perceived magnetism of Justin Trudeau. He charmed Canadians, he charmed the press, and he charmed foreigners; his “because it’s 2015” line made international headlines and made him the figurehead of youthful, global progressive politics. He was the handsome noble young prince here to save us all.

The problem is, when you’re at the top there is only one way to go in politics and that’s down. And so inevitably came the 2019 federal election, in which Liberal fortunes were undermined by two main things: the fallout from the SNC-Lavalin scandal that saw two ministers and his senior adviser resign, and the emergence of a number of photos showing a very grownup, but very immature, Justin Trudeau cavorting around in blackface. After the Liberals were reduced to a minority, with his own reputation heavily, er, stained, Trudeau disappeared in what was clearly an epic sulk. When he re-emerged in the public eye, he’d grown a beard that was clearly designed to Add Gravitas to his public image.

He did it because he could do it, and he’d do it again just to show Canadians just how disappointed he is in them and how much harder they will need to work to regain the privilege of his leadership. We could use a man like Bertolt Brecht again…

The Triumph Spitfire Story

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

Big Car old account
Published 8 Mar 2019

To help me continue producing great content, please consider supporting me: https://www.patreon.com/bigcar

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The Spitfire is a beautiful automobile, a thing of wonder penned by an Italian genius, but it almost never happened. If not for a chance find in the dusty corner of a factory it would have remained merely a “could have been”. But Triumph produced a car that still inspires new creations today and has a strong and loyal fan base around the world, nearly sixty years since it burst on the scene.

#TriumphSpitfire

QotD: Taxes

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

Not paying taxes is against the law.
If you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be fined.
If you don’t pay the fine, you’ll be jailed.
If you try to escape from jail, you’ll be shot.
Thus I — in my role as citizen and voter — am going to shoot you — in your role as taxpayer and ripe suck — if you don’t pay your fair share of the national tab.
Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask yourself, “Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?”

P.J. O’Rourke

October 2, 2021

Signs of “white privilege” apparently include swearing and wearing second-hand clothing

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

It’s gotten to the point that I half expect to be told that even breathing is a clear indicator of “white privilege”. Brendan O’Neill reports on a mandatory University of Kent diversity and inclusion course that declares white people swearing or wearing second-hand clothes are clearly evidence of their “privilege”:

Plato’s Closet used clothing store in Oshawa, Ontario. Obviously a nest of racial privilege.
Detail from Google Street View.

So now wearing second-hand clothes is a sign of “white privilege”. Just when you thought you’d heard it all from the loopy identity lobby, they come out with the idea that putting on a vintage dress or a musty old man’s shirt you bought from Oxfam is proof that you enjoy racial favouritism. This crackpot claim is made in a course being foisted on students at the University of Kent. If you can wear second-hand clobber without this being held up as yet another example of the “bad morals of [your] race”, then you are apparently white and you’re definitely privileged.

I have so many questions. First, who exactly is going around saying to ethnic-minority people who dare to don vintage fashion, “Oh God, how typical of your race to wear second-hand clothes?”. I am going to say “nobody”. When racist toerags do accost people who look different to them, it is usually not to critique their Seventies florals or dad’s old blazer. Secondly, it will surely be news to all the less well-off white kids who have little choice but to wear second-hand clothes – “hand-me-downs” – that their repurposed trainers and patched-up jumpers are proof of their privilege. Some of us who crazily cling to the belief that class and income remain the key shapers of privilege in our society might even say that the wearing of second-hand clothes in such circumstances is proof of the absence of privilege. Mad, I know.

The Kent course, titled “Expect Respect”, is only the latest example of students being inculcated into the ways of moral conformism. It’s a mandatory module, which takes four hours to complete, and is designed to raise students’ awareness about white privilege, microaggressions, pronouns and other riveting topics. The module includes a “white privilege quiz” – such fun! – in which the freshers are grilled over the societal benefits enjoyed by whitey. Apparently if you can swear without being called a disgrace to your race or go shopping without being followed or harassed, then you enjoy white privilege. Students who correctly identify all the indicators of racial privilege get a gold star. Presumably those who don’t get branded with the letter “R” for racist.

The list of things that are apparently signs of white privilege grows longer and more demented by the day. Saying “I don’t see colour” is white privilege. Eating French food is white privilege. Drinking milk is white privilege. Saying “I don’t have white privilege” is white privilege. Of course it is. “For white people to dismiss the benefits they’ve reaped because of their whiteness only goes to show how oblivious – and privileged – they really are”, says one writer. This is the Kafkaesque trap of identity politics. There’s no winning in this slippery game. Refuse to acknowledge another person’s race and you’re racist. But obsess over another person’s race and presumably you’re also racist. Saying “I don’t see difference” is racist. But saying “Oh you seem different, where are you from?” is racist too. Confess your white privilege, and clearly you’re privileged. Deny it and you’re really privileged. It’s like being an old lady on a ducking stool in medieval times. Float, you’re a witch. Die, you’re a witch.

This Is Sparta: The Material Remains of a Warrior Polis

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

Thersites the Historian
Published 1 Oct 2021

A video about the material remains to be found at Sparta, or perhaps more precisely, why there isn’t more to see given the obvious importance of Sparta.

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I was unaware that Sparta, after its final military defeat by Roman forces in 192 BC, was effectively turned into a full-time “Living History” theme park for the benefit of tourists … subsidized by the Roman state.

Federal NDP going through the six phases of political campaigns – enthusiasm, disillusionment, panic, the search for the guilty, the punishment of the innocent, and the promotion of the uninvolved

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

The NDP had high, high hopes for the September election, largely pinned on the undoubted popularity of their leader among young voters. As Joshua Hind shows, it didn’t work out at all the way they had hoped:

Federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh taking part in a Pride Parade in June 2017 (during the NDP leadership campaign).
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Only the most die-hard supporters of the New Democratic Party thought the recently-concluded 2021 federal election was winnable in the way 2015 felt very winnable in the early days. Still, the NDP’s showing at the polls — a single-digit increase in popular vote and a single new seat — is undeniably disappointing for a party that spent big to win back seats.

With that disappointment gnawing at them, the NDP and its faithful are bound to want to assign some blame, a process which always starts with the leader. But that’s a uniquely tough proposition for the NDP, who not only has Canada’s Best-Liked Leader™ in Jagmeet Singh, but has also positioned Singh to be the entire personality and profile of the party. In trying to create another singular figure like Jack Layton, the NDP has painted itself into a tight corner.

In project management there’s an old joke about the “Six Phases”. Like the stages of grief, the six phases of project management are the various emotional states into which all large projects — construction, software development, political campaigns — can be divided. They are: enthusiasm, disillusionment, panic, the search for the guilty, the punishment of the innocent, and the promotion of the uninvolved.

It’s easy to see the first three in an election, where enthusiasm, disillusionment and panic often happen all at once. Now in the post-election period, parties must wade into the more fraught final phases.

The search for the guilty started the moment the networks called the election for Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, and Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is already under scrutiny. The Greens, for their part, got a head start on punishing the innocent by pinning their party’s staggering immolation exclusively on their (now former) leader, Annamie Paul.

For the NDP, things are more delicate.

Jagmeet Singh, who’s personable, well-spoken and very photogenic, was front and centre in every aspect of the NDP’s campaign. Their bus exclusively featured his name and picture, the first page on their website is simply labelled, “Jagmeet”, and every campaign stop was focused on the leader and his appeal. But the “leader first” tactic that arguably got the most attention was the social media campaign, specifically Singh’s appeal to young voters through TikTok.

Singh is the undisputed Canadian political TikTok champion, with nearly 850,000 followers and videos that regularly rack up millions of likes. His content is charming and apparently quite credible with TikTok users, at times fun, mischievous and pleasantly silly. It’s also clearly the platform Singh likes best. His Instagram account is mostly reposts from Twitter, and his Twitter account, while popular, doesn’t get nearly the response he earns on TikTok. Because it’s so important to Singh, and presumably the NDP, it can also form the basis for appraisals of both, and that creates new challenges.

How Does It Work: Toggle Actions

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Jun 2021

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Toggle actions are a relatively exotic locking system that are relatively common and well-known because the system was used in a pair of particularly successful early guns: the Luger and Maxim/Vickers. There have also been toggle-action shotguns, military rifles, sporting rifles, and submachine guns, but the system went out of favor by the 1930s (except in the mind of one Adolf Furrer).

Most toggle-action designs use the toggle as a locked breech system, unlocked by a secondary operating system (usually short recoil). However, toggle system can also be the basis for delayed blowback actions, as in the Pedersen rifle.

For a full playlist of toggle-action firearms, check here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…

Contact:
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QotD: Cat-haters

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

Like 95% of men in America, I am one hundred percent in favor of cat-hunting, although I am not part of the 75% who support hunting non-feral cats living in their girlfriends’ apartments.

Steve H. “Time to Shoot All the Cats”, Hog on Ice, 2005-04-14.

October 1, 2021

This French General Saved Strasbourg From Total Destruction During the Franco-Prussian War 1870

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

Real Time History
Published 30 Sep 2021

The symbolic city of Strasbourg had been besieged since the early stages of the Franco-Prussian War. The German siege troops are ready to breach the walls of the city and take it by storm. To avoid the destruction of the city, French general Uhrich surrenders and chooses, in his view, honor above glory.

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» LITERATURE
Arand, Tobias: Gestorben für “Vaterland” und “Patrie”. Die toten Krieger aus dem Feldzug von 1870/71 auf dem “Alten Friedhof” in Ludwigsburg. Ludwigsburg 2012

Ders.: 1870/71. Der Deutsch-Französische Krieg erzählt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018

Chrastil, Rachel: The Siege of Strasbourg. Cambridge, 2014

» SOURCES
Busch, Moritz: Graf Bismarck und seine Leute vor Paris. Bd. 1. Leipzig 1878

Du Casse, Albert: Journal authentique du Siège de Straßbourg. Paris 1871

Fischbach, Gustave: Le siège et le bombardement de Strasbourg, Paris, 1871

Fontane, Theodor: Der Krieg gegen Frankreich 1870-1871. Bd. 2. Berlin 1874

Kriegsgeschichtliche Abtheilung des Großen Generalstabs (Hrsg.): Der deutsch-französische Krieg 1870-71. II.1. Berlin 1878

Meisner, Heinrich Otto (Hrsg.): Kaiser Friedrich III. Das Kriegstagebuch von 1870/71. Berlin, Leipzig 1926

N.N. Straßbourg. Paris 1874

N.N. (Hrsg.): Theodor Fontane. Kriegsgefangen – Erlebtes 1870. Briefe 1870/71. Berlin (0st) 1984

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Social media proves Derrida correct – “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (“there is nothing outside the text”)

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

A look at how social media — especially Twitter — shows that Derrida had a valid point … even if that isn’t the original intent.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004).
Photo from https://bettyrojtman.huji.ac.il/media-gallery/detail/15698/15538 via Wikimedia Commons.

Derrida once said “il n’y a pas de hors-texte“, “there is nothing outside the text”, and since the social damage to words uttered ratio of that phrase must be among the highest in history, it’s worth exploring. Just so we’re clear, I have no idea what Derrida was trying to do with “deconstruction”, outside of the most basic general concept (I often doubt Derrida his own self had any idea what he was trying to do, but that’s irrelevant). But let’s do some “deconstruction” of our own on that phrase, since that has some interesting implications.

If you take it as written — that there is nothing outside the text; that is, that the text exists as a complete unit of meaning, for its own sake — then it seems to argue for a kind of “positivism” in communications. Something like Orwell’s desire to develop “window pane” prose — writing so clear that the author would disappear and only the ideas would come through, unfiltered. Alas, this is a habit of mind that seems impossible to develop. No matter how clear your prose is, “writing” is one of those dialectical relationships so beloved of Marxists and stoned sophomores (lot of overlap between those groups, admittedly). In some vague, yet real and obvious, way, “writing” doesn’t exist apart from “reading”. Sure, sure, you can make marks on a page, but that’s all it is, until someone sits down to read it …

… at which point his personality comes into play, his worldview, his circumstances, his history, to be somewhat pretentious about it. And this will be true even if — in a lot of cases, especially if — you confine your prose to simple statements of fact. For instance, back in the early days of smartphones, I watched a minor miscommunication between a buddy and his girlfriend escalate into something very close to a relationship-ending fight, simply because neither party would stop texting and, you know, actually use the telephone they were texting with. A five minute phone call would’ve straightened it all out, and needless to say a face-to-face chat would’ve solved the “problem” in about ten seconds, but since text messages are devoid of subcommunication and, crucially, context, each party naturally brings his or her own biases to it, and, well … screaming, relationship-ending blowout for the win.

See also: Twitter. Like most people, I gave it a look-see when I first heard about it. I quickly concluded that it wasn’t for me. Not because it was vapid garbage, you understand — Facebook was always vapid garbage, but it had some utility for all that, as Twitter does — but because I just don’t think in discrete chunks the way Twitter requires. I just can’t process the fact that “replies” are their own distinct utterances, devoid of all other context, that can come in at random times. A Twitter “thread” is a mad babble of people shouting past each other; it’s not “communication” in any sense my brain can handle, so I dropped it …

The Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron – Voyage of the Damned

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Drachinifel
Published 13 Mar 2019

The story of a few good men’s struggle, against their own commanders, their own fleet, their own ships and their own men.

Want to support the channel? – https://www.patreon.com/Drachinifel

Want to talk about ships? https://discord.gg/TYu88mt

Music – https://www.youtube.com/c/NCMEpicMusic

QotD: Raising your daughter to be “premium dating fodder”

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

Let’s start with the fact that apparently there are so many women getting “ghosted” (abandoned by men after brief romantic encounters) that they now constitute a demographic cohort big enough to be a presidential voting bloc.

Which is surprising, because for the last twenty years or so, American girls have been raised from birth to be premium dating fodder, primed from the first whiff of puberty to be Available for Sex on Saturday Night. So why are they being ghosted in droves? Abandoned and left to die alone, clutching their pets and Warren for President signs?

You’d think these girls would be experts at snagging a mate. Years of sex ed, birth control pills, and permission to date early and often with no judgement from the grownups should have guaranteed they’d have suitors dangling from their every finger, lines outside the door, dates every night, so many engagement rings shoved under their noses they’d be blinded by the shimmering sight of all those diamonds nestled against black velvet.

What happened?

Parenting: The New Sex Trafficking

Munchausen by proxy is a mental illness in which the mother (it’s almost always the mother) injures or sickens her own child on purpose for attention and sympathy. Grooming is a crime in which an adult nurtures a child over a long period of time to be open to receiving sexual advances.

American parenting is starting to resemble a terrifying combination of both.

How else to explain why girls are being turned out — groomed for extreme antisocial sexual behavior from a young age — not by pimps, but by their parents and teachers?

When it comes to sex ed, I believe in the screenwriting theory known as Chekhov’s gun: if you show a gun in the first act, it must be fired by the third. If you show kids the sex toys (and worse) in the first grade, the sex toys will be used by high school.

Recently, NPR published “What Your Teen Wishes You Knew About Sex Education”. In the article, we meet Electra McGrath-Skrzydlewski, who made a point of telling her fourth-grade daughter Lily, well, everything. “She was very open from the get-go, even before those were things that I needed to know about,” her daughter recounts.

Lily came out as pansexual at age 12.

At an institutional level, we are creating a cursed generation of females expert at every imaginable permutation of sex with an infinite number of partners, while largely shunning the other thing, the main thing, the only thing still emitting any heat in the cold, merciless hearth of contemporary life: the dream of forming a family.

Because the shocking truth is: No one wants to wife a sex expert.

Peachy Keenan, “Big Pimping: How American Parents Turn Their Daughters Out”, The American Mind, 2020-03-05.

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