Quotulatiousness

January 27, 2024

QotD: McCarthy was right

It’s likely that just about everything you know about Joe McCarthy, his life, his political career and his work against the Soviet infiltration of American government is incorrect, the history having been almost without exception written by his staunch enemies, in turn building on the work of McCarthy’s contemporaries to delegitimise and destroy the junior Senator from Wisconsin. Even in the conservative circles, the memory of McCarthy is often treated as a bit of family embarrassment; in part the testament to how successful the left-wing narrative has been but also perhaps the faint memory that half of his own party (the so called liberal wing) despised him at the time and worked hand in hand with the Democrats to destroy him.

Yet McCarthy was right – not just in a general sense of clearly understanding that communism is not merely an alternative path to a brighter future but an evil and inhuman ideology at war with the liberal, democratic and Christian West, but also in focusing on the federal bureaucracy’s strangely ineffectual response to the presence in its ranks of many people, often in very senior and influential positions, suspected of working for the communist cause.

Contrary to the official version, it was never McCarthy’s role to unmask Red agents; a job more appropriately done by investigative agencies. In his legislative role overseeing federal bureaucracies, he made it his mission to inquire why so many individuals, whose loyalty has already been put under the question mark by numerous internal and external investigations, had no problems staying in sensitive jobs for years and moving unhindered from one agency to another. Those named by McCarthy (on the Democrat insistence) were not simply some random individuals with vaguely progressive sympathies; already at the time many of them have been identified as Soviet agents and security risks in the testimony of communist renegades (like Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley) or through secret FBI surveillance. Others were suspects on the account of their associations with Eastern European or local communists and causes.

Over the following decades, most have been further incriminated from a variety of sources, including Soviet defectors and the deciphered Venona transcripts of secret Soviet intelligence cables, which mention some 400 individuals in the 1940s and 50s United States as active agents and contacts or abettors and helpers. The problem was not Reds under the beds, but Reds quite literally in positions of access to highly valued classified information or positions of influence over the shape of US policy, from the White House, through the State Department, to a host of other departments and agencies. All this is now beyond any dispute, but these weren’t mere idle speculations at the time either. Lauchlin Currie, Owen Lattimore, Harry Dexter White, Nathan Silvermaster, T.A. Bisson and dozens and dozens of others did conspire in small groups and networks to pass on classified information to the Soviets or steer the American foreign policy into the direction favourable to the communists (particularly in China during and after the war). And yet, despite all having serious question marks over them, they were allowed to work in government for years undisturbed. It was not because of some giant communist conspiracy at the highest levels of government but because of the bureaucratic inertia, old boys’ networks and the organisational reluctance to admit problems – but also because communist agents within protected and promoted each other. Time and time again mistakes got buried instead of rectified. McCarthy dared to shed the public spotlight on the continuing outrage and ask why. It was like a poor country cousin being invited to a formal dinner by his big city relatives and dropping a loud fart between the entree and the main.

But the story of McCarthy goes beyond these well-established historical facts to the campaign of character assassination and falsification of the record that succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. There is truly nothing new under the sun when the entrenched liberal establishment wants to protect its turf and fend off its enemies and as you read what McCarthy has been subjected to in relatively short period of 1950-54 you will no doubt experience a sense of deja vu from recent history: indiscriminate mud throwing in a hope that something sticks; blatant lies, misrepresentations and misinterpretations of evidence; politicians working hand in hand with public servants to coordinate the attacks; destroying and withholding of information and evidence (for example, the security information about the suspected individuals being physically transferred from the State Department to the Truman White House so that it could not be subpoenaed or otherwise accessed; a practice condemned by the Republicans and then continued by the Eisenhower White House); blackmailing witnesses or preventing them from testifying; biased media running the narrative (fake news is nothing new); whitewashing the accused and discrediting the accusers; incessant lawfare; trumped up charges and defamation. Coincidentally, McCarthy too was compared to Hitler while at the same time being accused of helping Russians. McCarthyism is not what McCarthy has done to his supposed victims; it’s what the left has done to him. It’s what it keeps doing to people who get in the way and threaten to disturb the business as usual.

Arthur Chrenkoff, “Before there was Trump, there was Joe McCarthy”, Daily Chrenk, 2019-09-30.

January 22, 2024

Nationalization of British Railways: What Went Wrong?

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

Railways Explained
Published 22 Oct 2023

In today’s video we continue uncovering the story of railway development in Great Britain, as part of a special trilogy marking the Railways Explained’s achievement of 100,000 subscribers!

This is actually the second video in series, and it covers a period from the aftermath of World War II to the momentous era of rail privatization, which was quite challenging period for British railways, full of ups and downs, but it is mostly marked by the formidable challenges.

We talked about the pivotal moments, such as the birth of British Railways, the ambitious Modernisation Plan, the influential Beeching Report, structural reforms, and the eventual transition to rail privatization, which all defined the British railways during this transformative period.

This insightful journey through time illuminates the intricacies and milestones of a railway system that has left an indelible mark on the United Kingdom’s transportation history.
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January 17, 2024

Look at Life – Kings of Speed

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

PauliosVids
Published 9 Dec 2018

British racing drivers have always been at the forefront of this exciting sport. This film examines what has helped to put them in this winning position.

From the comments:

alastairbeaton5245
3 years ago

This was the 1959 British Grand Prix at Aintree. Jack Brabham, who won the race, went on to win the first of his three World Championships, clinching the title in the last race of the year at Sebring when, having run out of fuel, he pushed his car over the line to finish fourth.

November 28, 2023

“This was a document from a parallel universe with familiar-sounding people and places, but a totally bizarre worldview and culture”

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

In the latest addition to Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, John Psmith reviews The Man Who Rode the Thunder, by William H. Rankin:

Like many little boys, I loved learning lists of things. One day it was clouds. How could I not love them? The names were fluffy and Latinate, delicate little words like “cumulus” and “cirrus” that sounded like they might float away on a puff of wind. But there was also a structure to the words, intimations and hints of taxonomy. Was the relationship of an altocumulus to an altostratus the same as that of a cirrocumulus to a cirrostratus? I wasn’t sure, but it seemed likely! So here I had not just a heap of words, but something more like a map to making sense of a new part of the world.

So I learned the names of all the clouds, but I quickly got bored of most of them. Only one of them held my attention, but it made up for the rest by becoming an obsession. Yes, it was the mighty cumulonimbus, the towering, violent monster that heralds the approach of a thunderstorm. By then I had already met plenty of them — one of my earliest memories is of huddling with my mother in the room of our house that was farthest from any exterior walls, while lightning struck again and again and again, the echoes of the previous thunderclap still reverberating off the landscape when the next one began. What, I wondered, would it be like to be inside one?

There’s one man who knows. His name is Colonel William H. Rankin, and he fell through a thunderstorm and lived to tell the tale. After his ordeal Rankin published a memoir that was a bestseller in the early ’60s, but is out of print today. If you click the Amazon link at the top of this page, you will see that secondhand copies of the paperback edition go for about $150. If that’s too steep for you, I’m told that Good Samaritans communists have uploaded high-quality scans of the book to various nefarious and America-hating websites, but this is a patriotic Substack and we would never condone that sort of behavior. Be warned!

I sought out and read Rankin’s memoir for the part where he falls through a cloud, so I was planning on skimming and/or skipping the hundred or so pages where he narrates his life and career up to that point. When I actually cracked open the pdf legally-purchased paperback, though, I found that I couldn’t. Somehow an artifact from an alien world had fallen into my hands. This was a document from a parallel universe with familiar-sounding people and places, but a totally bizarre worldview and culture.

They say you should read books to broaden yourself, to learn about foreign peoples and about cultures not your own. I was unprepared for late 1950s America being as foreign as it turned out to be. There’s a whole genre comprised of parodying the supposed mid-century American combo of sunny faith in scientific progress, squeaky-clean public morality, and blithe indifference to the horrors of industrial warfare. In my own reading and watching, I had only ever encountered the parodies, never the genuine article, until I read this book. Rankin’s memoir exudes gee-whiz enthusiasm from every pore. He is patriotic without a trace of irony, giddy as a schoolboy about advances in jet propulsion, and then uses a totally unchanged tone of giddiness and enthusiasm to describe melting hundreds of Korean peasants with napalm.

Reading this stuff fills me with the same feeling of vertigo that I get reading about Bronze Age Greek warriors — here is a human being just like me, but inhabiting a cultural, spiritual, and memetic universe so different from mine. Are we the same species? If we were to meet each other would we even be able to communicate? Or perhaps every age has had people like him and people like me, and all that’s changed is that the dominant mode of social interaction shifted from favoring one of us to the other. After all, I know people today who are incapable of irony or reflection. For instance, TSA agents. Was 1950s America an entire society of TSA agents? And if so, what am I to make of the fact that in so many ways it seems to have been more functional than America today?

October 6, 2023

Farnborough Airshow – 1959 (in colour)

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

spottydog4477
Published 28 Dec 2009

Farnborough Airshow – 1959 (in colour)

October 1, 2023

MGD PM9 Rotary-Action Submachine Gun

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 May 2017

The PM9 was an interesting an unique submachine gun designed by Louis Debuit for the French firm Merlin and Gerin (hence the MGD name – Merlin, Gerin, Debuit) in the late 1940s and early 50s. The design was intended to provide a very compact package, which it did with a very short action, folding stock, and folding magazine.

The PM9 uses a delayed blowback action, and the delaying is done by a rotating flywheel-type block and clock spring. The bolt and flywheel act somewhat like the piston and crank in an engine. As the bolt (piston) moved rearward in a straight line, it forces the flywheel (crank) to rotate because the two are connected. In the case of the PM9, the connection is a nub on the flywheel that rides in a vertical slot in the bolt. The flywheel is pushing against the clock spring to rotate, and the combination of the its inertia and spring pressure keep the bolt closed long enough for pressure to drop to a safe level. The rotary action allows this to be done in a much smaller package than typical submachine guns.

The PM9 was initially chambered for 7.65 French Long, but quickly changed to standard 9mm Parabellum for the production models. It used the same magazine as the German MP38/MP40, giving it a 32-round capacity. In addition to the model with a skeletonized folding stock, the PM9 was also available with a fixed wooden stock and either short barrel of long carbine barrel. A relatively small number of guns were produced in France in 1954 and 1955, but they failed to find commercial success. In 1956 the German Erma company acquired a license to build the PM9, but abandoned the idea after making a few prototypes.
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September 24, 2023

Architect Breaks Down Why All American Diners Look Like That | Architectural Digest

Filed under: Architecture, History, Railways, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Architectural Digest
Published 1 Jun 2023

Today Michael Wyetzner of Michielli + Wyetzner Architects returns to Architectural Digest to explore the design evolution of American diners. A cornerstone of American dining culture, their distinctive style has been emulated around the world making them a popular salute to the USA. Michael provides an expert look into the history behind their design evolution from the 1920s through to the 1960s and explains why all diners came to look like that.
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September 7, 2023

J.R.R. Tolkien was completely at odds with the literati of his day

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

In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank marks the 50th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien:

J.R.R. Tolkien

A romantic Edwardian, steeped in Northern European folklore and Victorian literature, Tolkien was and is despised by large parts of the fashionable literary establishment. I have known very few neutral reactions to his work. People either love or loathe Lord of the Rings, which seems doomed to eternally inspire adoration or ire, and nothing much in between.

The often ferocious response of many critics perhaps stemmed from the apparent anachronism of the book, combined with its massive popularity. It was published in 1954, at a time when literary modernism was dominant and pervading the academy. Modernist writers were obsessed with interiority, broke with prior literary convention, and traded in irony, ambiguity and convoluted psychology. Literary critics of the time were taking up the “New Criticism”, which dispensed not only with the previous generation’s fascination with historical context in favour of close reading, but also with the traditionalist concerns for beauty and moral improvement, which were regarded as subjective and emotionally driven. Spare, complex prose, focused on the darker side of society, was in vogue. Into this context dropped 1,200 pages of dwarves, elves and hobbits in a grand battle of good and evil. They were greeted with the sort of enthusiasm one can imagine.

Edmund Wilson called the books “balderdash”, a battle between “Good people and Goblins”. The book’s morality was a sticking point even for the most sympathetic critics, with Edwin Muir lamenting that “his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil”. As his work travelled into the 60s, political problems cropped up, with one feminist critic writing a book-length attack on the series to denounce it as “irritatingly, blandly, traditionally masculine”.

The mystery of how a book can so sharply divide opinion is answered perhaps by how profoundly original and unusual The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s wider legendarium are. They are shamelessly moralistic, written on the basis of exhaustive literary theory, linguistics, geography and world-building, and quite devoid of social commentary or Empsonian irony. Yet they are as much a radical departure from prior literary forms as modernist literature itself is, making the book doubly at odds with prevailing style and doubly original.

The moralism of Tolkien’s work is not, as some critics seem to suppose, the product of schoolboy simplicity. It is far too rigorous for that. So morally charged and orchestrated is the novel, that it would be numbered amongst the small number of works that might have passed Plato’s test for literature. Not only is this in respect of its exacting honouring of good characters and depreciation of wicked ones within its narrative framework, but equally in Tolkien’s utter refusal of allegory, thus meeting Plato’s challenge that poets are dangerous imitators of the world.

September 1, 2023

Nylon 66: Remington’s Revolutionary Plastic Rifle

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 May 2023

In the 1950s, Remington decided that it needed an inexpensive new .22 self-loading rifle to add to its catalog. In looking at how to reduce the cost of such a rifle, they hit upon the idea of using polymer to replace the wooden furniture typically used — and to replace the metal receiver as well. Remington was owned by DuPont at the time, and DuPont had developed an excellent strong polymer which they called “Nylon” — specifically, Nylon composition number 66.

Remington engineers developed a massively complex and expensive mold to inexpensively stamp out monolithic polymer .22 rifles in the mid 1950s. They knew this design would cause concern to a large part of their market because of its non-traditional construction, and so they put the new rifles through hundreds of thousands of rounds of grueling testing. It passed these trials with flying colors, and was released in January 1959 to pretty rave reviews. By the time it was finally taken out of production in 1987, more than 1,050,000 of them had been produced — a fantastic success on a pretty big gamble.

Thanks to Dutch Hillenburg for loan of this example to show you!
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August 16, 2023

QotD: Cognitive dissonance, or when cultists retcon reality

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

[Leon] Festinger’s book When Prophecy Fails was a study of a UFO cult which predicted the end of the world on a very specific date … in 1953. Festinger was on hand to see what happened to the cult when the world didn’t end, and he discovered a very important psychological principle. He called it “cognitive dissonance”, but since that term has taken on a life of its own, we’ll swipe one from [the] Internet and call it a “retcon”.

For those with even a moderate level of commitment to the cult (and I’ll leave it to you to speculate what moderate commitment to a cult might be; Festinger’s work is not without its critics), disconfirmation of the cult’s central belief led, astoundingly, to an even greater commitment to the cult. “The world will end on X date” was immediately retconned into “the world didn’t end on X date because of our righteousness“.

You know you’re really onto something when it seems head-slappingly obvious in retrospect. Yeah, of course they did that. Everybody does that to a degree. You expect something isn’t going to work out, then it does work out — it must be because you’re special, right? It’s another way of assigning yourself agency in a world where you’re basically powerless over the big stuff. Humans are wired to believe they have agency, that things happen for a reason. It sounds like I’m giving Festinger at best a backhanded compliment, but I’m very seriously singing his praises — “everybody knows” this stuff, but no one had isolated and described it before. That’s a major achievement — if I could have the equivalent of “discovered cognitive dissonance” on my tombstone, I’d die an ecstatically happy man.

Severian, “Quick Takes: Festinger Edition”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-19.

August 2, 2023

How Shipping Containers Took Over the World (then broke it)

Filed under: Business, Economics, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Calum
Published 5 Oct 2022

The humble shipping container changed our society — it made International shipping cheaper, economies larger and the world much, much smaller. But what did the shipping container replace, how did it take over shipping and where has our dependance on these simple metal boxes led us?
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July 22, 2023

Look at Life – Ticket to Tokyo (1959)

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

PauliosVids
Published 24 Nov 2018

Travelling with Britannia Airline from London via Bombay to Tokyo to discover Japan and back via Hong Kong.

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July 21, 2023

Belgian Gendarmerie FAL w/ DSA Receiver

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Apr 2023

A few months ago FN America was able to import 400 parts sets from original Belgian Gendarmerie FAL rifles. I got one of them, and had it completed by DSA. They made receivers with Gendarmerie markings, as well as the barrel and other parts not included with the kit. So today we’ll take a look at the finished rifle and the work that went into completing it.
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July 18, 2023

Life lessons from Thomas Sowell’s memoir

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

Rob Henderson took a lot away from his recent reading of Thomas Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey, including some fascinating lessons from Sowell’s time in the US Marine Corps:

Trust people who value being honest more than being nice.

As the Korean War intensified, Sowell was drafted into the Marine Corps. He notes that color did not matter, as all new recruits were treated with equal disdain. Sowell describes his life in the Marine barracks in Pensacola. There were two non-commissioned officers permanently stationed to oversee the young marines. One was Sergeant Gordon, “a genial, wisecracking guy who took a somewhat relaxed view of life”. The other was Sergeant Pachuki, “a disciplinarian who spoke in a cutting and ominous way” and was always “impeccably dressed”.

Sowell and his peers preferred Sergeant Gordon, as he was more easygoing. Sowell had to go into town to pick up a package. Sowell asked his Chief Petty Officer if he could leave the base to retrieve his package. Sowell received permission.

Later, while Sowell was not on base, he was marked as absent and was accused of being AWOL (absent without leave), a serious offense. Sowell knew Sergeant Gordon, the nice one, had overheard him asking for permission to leave the base. Gordon denied having heard anything, and told Sowell, “You’re just going to have to take your punishment like a man”. Gordon fretted that if he crossed the higher-ups, he would be reassigned to fight in Korea.

But unasked, Sergeant Pachuki came forward and spoke with the colonel, explaining the situation. As a result, Sowell was exonerated and returned back to his duties.

Referring to Gordon, the “nice” sergeant who betrayed him, Sowell writes, “People who are everybody’s friend usually means they are nobody’s friend”.

A “free good” is a costless good that is not scarce, and is available without limit.

Sowell would regularly needle Sergeant Grover, another member who outranked him.

Here’s the excerpt:

    Some were surprised that I dared to give Sergeant Grover a hard time, on this and other occasions, especially since he was a nasty character to deal with. Unfortunately for him, I knew that he was going to give me as hard a time as he could, regardless of what I did. That meant it didn’t really cost me anything to give him as hard a time as I could. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was already thinking like an economist. Giving Sergeant Grover a hard time was, in effect, a free good and at a zero price my demand for it was considerable.

Sowell learned he could receive something he enjoyed (pleasure at provoking Grover) in exchange for nothing.

    Much of what you see has been carefully curated with an agenda in mind.

One of Sowell’s assignments in the Marine Corps was as a Duty Photographer on base. One day after submitting some of his photos, Sowell had the following exchange with the public information office sergeant:

    “They are good pictures, he said. “But they do not convey the image that the public information office wants conveyed.”

    “What’s wrong with them?” I asked.

    “Well, take that picture of the reservists walking across the little wooden bridge carrying their duffle bags.”

    “Yeah. What’s wrong with it?”

    “The men in that picture are perspiring. You can see the damp spots on their uniforms.”

    “Well, if you carry a duffle bag on a 90-degree day, you are going to sweat.”

    “Marines do not sweat in public information photographs.”

    “Okay, what was wrong with the picture of the reservists picking up shell casings after they had finished firing? That was one of my favorites.”

    “Marines do not perform menial chores like that, in our public relations image.”

    “But all these photos showed a very true picture of the reservists’ summer here.”

    “We’re not here to tell the truth, Sowell,” he said impatiently. “We are here to perpetuate the big lie. Now, the sooner you understand that, the better it will be for all of us.”

When I visited the Air Force recruiter in high school, I saw the brochures with images of well-groomed airmen in their dress blues graduating from basic training. I had no knowledge that much of that training would involve mind-numbing minutia. I suppose this is true for other career fields too. You see radiant coverage of academic research in legacy media outlets, or fun twitter threads outlining interesting research findings. You see the brand new hardcover book with all the glowing blurbs and reviews. You don’t see all the drudgery of research or writing behind the scenes.

Sometimes, it doesn’t pay to have too big a reputation.

Sowell and his fellow marines would sometimes have impromptu boxing matches around the barracks on base. One day Sowell was up against another guy and threw a sloppy right hand. The guy stumbled back, tripped, and fell to the ground. Although Sowell had swung and missed, witnesses thought he had knocked the other guy out.

Later, Sowell went up against another guy named Douglas. Douglas relentlessly came at Sowell and gave him a serious beating. Douglas told Sowell afterwards that the reason he was so aggressive was that he feared Sowell’s “one punch” could turn the fight around at any time. “Sometimes,” Sowell writes, “it doesn’t pay to have too big a reputation.”

April 26, 2023

Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation Chicken

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 25 Apr 2023
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