Quotulatiousness

September 27, 2020

CHECKMATE, LINCOLNITES! Confederate DESTROYS Yankee with FACTS and LOGIC

Filed under: History, Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 23 May 2019

Checkmate, Lincolnites! Debunking the three or four arguments Neo-Confederates always make when they talk about the Civil War.

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QotD: The persuasive power of the newspapers

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

It is a standard part of the mythology that newspapers tell their readers what to believe — and the readers believe them. This is why the left keeps shrieking about the barons controlling the press, it could only be that poisoning of the minds of the proletariat which keeps said left from sweeping all before it in politics. The actual study — you know, science — of how this works is that newspapers follow the prejudices of their readers. The Sun is not socially conservative and rightish in its views because Rupert Murdoch is so but because a large portion of the British working class is so.

Or, as we might put it, the reason the left doesn’t sweep the board with the votes of the proletariat is because large numbers of the proletariat think the left either don’t represent them, or are aware that the left are nuts.

Tim Worstall, “This Will Be An Interesting Test – Geordie Greig To Daily Mail Editor”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-06-08.

September 25, 2020

QotD: “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!” [“Let them eat cake!”]

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

It’s one of the most famous remarks in history — an instantly recognizable catchphrase to convey haughty indifference to the misfortune of others. And we all know who said it and why: It was Marie Antoinette (1755–1793), the queen whose life was claimed by the French Revolution, dismissing news that the peasants were starving due to the high price of bread.

In the original French, the Queen allegedly said, Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!, which doesn’t quite translate to “let them eat cake.” Brioche is sweet, eggy bread that tastes only vaguely like cake. The translated English word “cake” made Marie Antoinette seem even haughtier than in French. But it’s beside the point, since Marie Antoinette never uttered “let them eat cake” in any language. There is no historical evidence that she ever uttered that phrase. The story is pure invention. It’s a historical legend that rivals the myth of Nero “fiddling” while Rome burned. And yet this outlandish fabrication has shaped our image of Marie Antoinette for more than two centuries.

Compared to other historical falsehoods, this legend is easy to trace to its source. It was the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In book six of his Confessions, written in 1767, Rousseau wrote of a “great princess” who had, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied with those words cited above, Qu’ils mangent de la brioche! Was Rousseau referring to Marie Antoinette? This is impossible. When he wrote that passage, Marie Antoinette was still a girl living at the Habsburg court in Vienna (under her original name, Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna). Rousseau’s story was entirely made up, probably borrowed from another source. And while his book wasn’t published till 1782, this was still seven years before the French Revolution began. In fact, the first time someone (spuriously) put the words “let them eat cake” in Marie Antoinette’s mouth was a half-century later, in a book published by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, Les Guêpes.

Matthew Fraser, “Marie Antoinette: Figure of Myth, Magnet for Lies”, Quillette, 2020-06-24.

September 16, 2020

QotD: Firearms apocrypha

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

Certain models of Smith & Wesson have bits of apocryphal lore that become permanently entwined with them. You can’t see a top-break .44 Russian without someone telling you that the weird hook on the trigger guard was to parry saber slashes.

People like to repeat the myth that the tiny M-frame .22 “Ladysmith” was discontinued because a puritanical D.B. Wesson heard that it was popular with “ladies of the night”, because that’s sexier than the fact that it was selling poorly, expensive to make, and constantly broke when people ran the then-new .22 Long Rifle cartridges through the fragile little guns.

Similarly, there’s a legend involving Mr. Wesson that’s attached to the final iteration of the .38 Double Action […] In this case, the story goes, D.B. heard the tale of a police officer who, while arresting a miscreant, had the offender reach over and pop the latch on his top-break Smith, dumping the rounds on the ground, like Jet Li with the slide of a movie prop Beretta. The officer, goes the legend as it was told to yours truly, was killed in the ensuing struggle.

Moved by the fate of the dead officer, the apocryphal tale has Mr. Wesson designing the Perfected Model top-break. This model features a Hand-Ejector style cylinder latch that must be operated in conjunction with the more normal “T”-shaped barrel toggle in order to break the revolver open.

This origin myth is almost certainly, to use the technical term, a load of hooey.

Tamara Keel, “Sunday Smith #60: .38 Double Action Perfected Model”, The Arms Room, 2020-06-14.

August 7, 2020

Myth and Reality of the Ross MkIII Rifle

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Jun 2013

There is a long-standing urban legend about the Canadian Ross rifle, a straight-pull bolt action that was used in lieu of the SMLE by Canadian troops early in World War One. The story is that the Ross would sometimes malfunction and blow the bolt back into its shooter’s face, with pretty horrible results. Well, I wanted to learn “the rest of the story” — could this actually happen? What caused it? How could it be prevented? In short, what would a Ross shooter need to know to remain safe? And if I could get some cool footage of a bolt blowing out of a Ross in the process, all the better.

Well, reader Andy very generously provided a sporterized Ross for the experiments, and I started reading into what the issue really was. Turns out that the legend was quite true — you can put a Ross MkIII bolt together the wrong way, and it will allow you to fire without the locking lugs engaged, thus throwing the bolt back out of the gun at high velocity. However, the issue was recognized fairly quickly, and the vast majority of Ross rifles were modified with a safety rivet to prevent this from happening. It is also quite easy to determine if a Ross is assembled correctly, once you know what to look for.

http://www.forgottenweapons.com

July 29, 2020

QotD: Grog in the Royal Navy

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

More generally, though, do we have any historical evidence of groups whose alcohol consumption was documented with any confidence, to see how they fared?

Actually, we do, at least as a floor: we know the quantity of the Royal Navy’s spirit ration, which until 1823 was based on half a pint of rum (284 millilitres in foreign) per man per day. We also know its minimum strength, since it was tested by trying to ignite gunpowder soaked in it: it had to be over 57% alcohol by volume (“proof strength”) to pass. That’s sixteen units of alcohol – not per week, but per day – or north of a hundred units a week, just for the issued ration before sailors bought any extra from the purser. (No wonder Jack Tar was jolly back in those days!)

But clearly, we would expect a body of men consuming such suicidally destructive quantities of booze to be physical wrecks, raddled by cirrhosis and disease? As Dr James Lind (he of the discovery that citrus fruits were a sovereign remedy for scurvy) put it,

    It is an observation, I think, worthy of record that fourteen thousand persons, pent up in ships, should continue, for six or seven months, to enjoy a better state of health upon the watery element, than it can well be imagined so great a number of people would enjoy, on the most healthful spot of ground in the world.

(For context, around this point the Navy won the battle of Quiberon Bay, with twenty ships – who had less than one man sick per ship).

The ration was halved in 1823, and again in 1850, but for a hundred and twenty years until Black Tot Day in 1970, the Navy still issued nearly thirty units of alcohol a week to everyone on the lower deck (junior rates got theirs diluted, seniors got neat rum). Either folk were hardier back then, or Britannia managed to rule the waves and keep her sailors reasonably healthy despite being a pack of hopelessly addicted alcoholics.

Jason Lynch, “How Much Is ‘Too Much’?”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-05-08.

June 21, 2020

QotD: “[T]he fascinating modern science of high-tech grave robbing”

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

Since then, an endless stream of anthropologists have assured us that race is just a social construct, that ancient peoples made pots not war, that Aryan conquests in India and Europe were Nazi delusions, that the caste system was imposed on the egalitarian Indians by British colonialists, and many other agreeable suppositions.

As Fitzgerald’s friend Hemingway ended The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

But now the brilliant Harvard geneticist David Reich has published a bombshell scientific book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, whose revelations would have been found congenial by a smarter version of Buchanan (such as Fitzgerald himself).

Despite Reich’s occasional need to stop his otherwise lucid narrative to spew irrational rage against his fellow race-science heretics such as James D. Watson, the genome expert conclusively demolishes the post-Boasian anthropologists’ conventional wisdom.

[…]

Reich learned the fascinating modern science of high-tech grave robbing from Svante Pääbo. This Swedish biologist invented the techniques for extracting from ancient skeletons their DNA. (Interestingly, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act makes it hard to get hold of ancient American Indian skeletons, but other races’ ancestors appear to be fair game.)

Reich applied to Pääbo’s breakthrough the traditional American knack for vast industrial scale. Assisted by English code-cracker Nick Patterson’s innovations in extracting meaning from bits and pieces of ancient genomes, Reich’s factory-like lab at the Broad Institute has been churning out a tsunami of papers on fascinating questions of prehistory.

Steve Sailer, “Reich’s Laboratory”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-03-28.

June 15, 2020

African History Disproves Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Filed under: Africa, Books, Economics, Environment, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Cynical Historian
Published 26 Oct 2019

There’s a question in the history profession that if sufficiently answered could not only reshape how we conceive ourselves, but reveal the best course of action for politics around the world. What makes the West strong? While there are many answers, the most popular of these has been Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel. You’ll see his argument all over the place, including a NatGeo documentary. But of course it has its detractors, to the point that some historians consider it pseudo-history. Now I think that’s going too far, but there are enough problems with his thesis that we can’t take it as the final answer to these questions. So let’s talk about that.

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errata
10:32 – not “Blaut’s theory” but “Diamond’s theory” (thx PunkSci)
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references:
James M. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians: The Colonizer’s Model of the World, Volume Two (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000), 149-172. https://amzn.to/2YFt0iQ

Michael C. Campbell and Sarah A. Tishkoff, “African Genetic Diversity: Implications for Human Demographic History, Modern Human Origins, and Complex Disease Mapping,” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 9 (22 September 2008): 403-433.

Jared Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: WW Norton, 1997). https://amzn.to/2GK6AqI

Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). https://amzn.to/2H0ylv7

Richard York and Philip Mancus, “Diamond in the Rough: Reflections on Guns, Germs, and Steel,” Human Ecology Review 14, no. 2 (2007): 157-162.

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May 10, 2020

“Blitzkrieg”: Stuka & Panzer – DEBUNKED

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, Russia, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Military History Visualized
Published 21 Aug 2018

Join me in War Thunder for free using this link http://v2.xyz/WarThunderMilitaryHistory and get a premium tank or aircraft and three days of premium time as a bonus.

The popular view is that the Wehrmacht used a combination of Panzers and Stukas to roll over Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and later the Soviet Union. Whereas the Panzers were heavily supported by Stukas overwhelming enemy ground forces.

The problem is that the details on how this was actually done are rather scarce. As such, there are various assumptions and misconceptions around, at least I had plenty of them myself before I took a closer look. So, in this video we will take a deeper dive on how Panzers and Stukas actually coordinated their efforts in Poland 1939, France 1940 and the Soviet Union 1941 (Operation Barbarossa).

“Kommandeure der Luftwaffe” (Commanders of the Air Force) – usually called Koluft.

“Flieger Verbindungsoffiziere” (Pilot Liason Officers) – usually called Flivo.

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» SOURCES «

Corum, James S.: “The Luftwaffe’s Army Support Doctrine, 1918-1941”. In: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Jan., 1995), p. 53-76

Murray, Williamson: “The Luftwaffe Experience, 1939-1941”. In: Cooling, Benjamin Franklin (ed.): Case Studies in the Development of Close Air Support. Office of Air Force History: Washington DC, United States (1990), p. 71-113

Citino, Robert M.: Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm. The Evolution of Operational Warfare. Kansas University Press: US (2004).

Pöhlmann, Markus: Der Panzer und die Mechanisierung des Krieges: Eine deutsche Geschichte 1890 bis 1945 (Zeitalter der Weltkriege), Paderborn 2016.

Creveld, Martin van; Canby, Steven L.; Brower, Kenneth S.: Air Power and Maneuver Warfare, Air University Press: 1994.

Brütting, Georg: Das waren die deutschen Stuka-Asse. 1939-1945. Motorbuch Verlag: Stuttgart, Germany (1984)

Stahel, David: Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East. Cambridge University Press: UK (2009)

Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Band 2: Die Errichtung der Hegemonie auf dem europäischen Kontinent

Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Band 4: Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion

Munzel, Oskar: Die deutschen gepanzerten Truppen bis 1945

Corum, James S.: The Roots of Blitzkrieg. Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform

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April 20, 2020

Understanding the Lost Cause Myth

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Cynical Historian
Published 16 Apr 2020

The Lost Cause Myth has changed American history. Though it is a hateful ideology today, to ignore it is to give it power. We must understand the myth in order to defeat it.
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Connected videos [see YouTube description for linked videos to parts of this discussion]
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See pinned comment and its replies for references, notes, responses, and errata
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Wiki: The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, or simply the Lost Cause, is an American pseudo-historical, negationist ideology which holds the view that the cause of the Confederacy during the American Civil War was a just and heroic one. The ideology endorses the supposed virtues of the antebellum South, viewing the war as a struggle which was primarily waged in order to save the Southern way of life, or to defend “states’ rights”, in the face of overwhelming “Northern aggression.” At the same time, the Lost Cause minimizes or completely denies the central role of slavery in the buildup to and outbreak of the war.

Particularly intense periods of Lost Cause activity occurred around the time of World War I, as the last Confederate veterans began to die out and a push was made to preserve their memories, and they also occurred during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in reaction to growing public support for racial equality. Through activities such as building prominent Confederate monuments and writing school history textbooks, they sought to ensure that future generations of Southern whites would know about the South’s “true” reasons for fighting the war, and support white supremacist policies, such as Jim Crow laws. In this manner, white supremacy is a characteristic of the Lost Cause narrative.

The Lost Cause narratives typically portray the Confederacy’s cause as a noble one and they also portray its leaders as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry, who were defeated by the Union armies through numerical and industrial force that overwhelmed the South’s superior military skill and courage. Proponents of the Lost Cause movement also condemned the Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, claiming that it had been a deliberate attempt by Northern politicians and speculators to keep the South down. The Lost Cause theme has also evolved into a major element in defining gender roles in the white South, in terms of preserving family honor and chivalrous traditions. The Lost Cause has inspired numerous Southern memorials and religious attitudes.
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Hashtags: #history #LostCause #Mythology

QotD: The Columbus myth

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

My conclusion was that the Rabbi’s view of the history of the ketubah fitted a pattern I have seen in other contexts — moderns believing in bogus history that supports their self image of superiority to those ignorant and unreasonable people in the past.

My favorite example is the Columbus myth, the idea that the people who argued against Columbus were ignorant flat-earthers who thought his ships would sail off the edge. That is almost the precise opposite of the truth. By the time Columbus set off, a spherical Earth had been the accepted scientific view for well over a thousand years. Columbus’s contemporaries not only knew that the Earth was round, they knew how big around it was, that having been correctly calculated by Eratosthenes in the third century B.C.

By the fifteenth century they also had a reasonably accurate estimate of the width of Asia. Subtracting the one number from the other they could calculate the distance from where Columbus was starting to where Columbus claimed to be going and correctly conclude that it was much farther than his ships could go before running out of food and water. The scientific ignorance was on the side of Columbus and those who believed him; he was claiming a much smaller circumference for the Earth and a much larger width of Asia, hence a much shorter distance from Spain to the far end of Asia. We will probably never know whether he believed his own numbers or was deliberately misrepresenting the geographical facts in order to get funding for his trip in the hope that he would find land somewhere between Spain and Japan, as in fact he did.

David D. Friedman, “Slandering the Past”, Ideas, 2018-02-14.

April 13, 2020

QotD: Foucault’s “Ship of Fools”

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

And so, Foucault tells us, in the fifteenth century there is a sudden emergence of a complex of artistic and philosophical themes linking madmen, the sea, and the terrible mysteries of the world. These culminate in the “Ship Of Fools”:

    Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then knew, had an affinity for each other. Thus, “Ships of Fools” crisscrossed the seas and canals of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse, or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors.

This was such a great piece of historical trivia that I was shocked I’d never heard it before. Some quick research revealed the reason: it is completely, 100% false. Apparently Foucault looked at an allegorical painting by Hieronymus Bosch, decided it definitely existed in real life, and concocted the rest from his imagination.

Foucault apologists try to rescue this, say that he was just being poetic in some way. He wasn’t. Page 8 in my copy: “Of all these romantic or satiric vessels, the Narrenschiff [Ship Of Fools] is the only one that had a real existence — for they did exist, these boats that conveyed their insane cargo from town to town.” He really, really doubled down on this point. As far as I can tell, this is just as bad a failing of scholarship as it sounds – and surprising, since everything else about the book gives the impression of Foucault as an incredibly knowledgeable and wide-ranging scholar.

Scott Alexander, “Book review: Madness and Civilization”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-01-04.

April 11, 2020

QotD: Zhou Enlai’s famous “too early to say” comment on the French Revolution

Filed under: China, France, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When Chinese premier Zhou Enlai famously said it was “too early” to assess the implications of the French revolution, he was referring to turmoil in France in 1968 and not — as is commonly thought — to the more distant political upheaval of 1789.

So says a retired American diplomat, Charles W. (Chas) Freeman Jr., who was present when Zhou made the comment during President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972.

Freeman, who was Nixon’s interpreter during the historic, weeklong trip, made the disclosure last week during a panel discussion in Washington about On China, the latest book by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The discussion was moderated by Richard McGregor, a journalist and China expert who wrote about Freeman’s comments for the Financial Times of London.

In an interview yesterday, Freeman elaborated on his recollection about Zhou’s comment, the conventional interpretation of which is frequently offered as evidence of China’s sage, patient, and far-sighted ways. Foreign Policy magazine, for example, referred last month to that interpretation, saying the comment was “a cautionary warning of the perils of judgments made in real time.”

The Washington Post‘s recent review of Kissinger’s book likewise referred to the conventional understanding of Zhou’s remark.

Freeman described Zhou’s misconstrued comment as “one of those convenient misunderstandings that never gets corrected.”

He said Zhou’s remark probably was made over lunch or dinner, during a discussion about revolutions that had succeeded and failed. They included, Freeman said, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, both of which the Soviet Union crushed.

He said it was clear from the context and content of Zhou’s comment that in saying it was “too early to say” the Chinese leader was speaking about the events in France in May 1968, not the years of upheaval that began in 1789.

Freeman acknowledged that the conventional interpretation makes for a better story but added that it was “absolutely clear” from the context of the discussion that Zhou was speaking about 1968.

W. Joseph Campbell, “‘Too early to say’: Zhou was speaking about 1968, not 1789”, Media Myth Alert, 2011-06-14.

April 8, 2020

Debunking the claim that “80% of America’s drugs come from China”

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

Eric Boehm tries to sort out where the startling claim came from … because it’s not true:

While reading about the COVID-19 outbreak, you’ve probably encountered this particularly shocking statistic at one time or another: 80 percent of America’s pharmaceutical drug supply comes from China.

It’s a statistic that has made the rounds in right-wing publications for a while — offered as proof that China-heavy global supply chains are putting Americans at risk — but it has also popped up in mainstream outlets, including in pieces published in Politico and The Atlantic. Wherever it is deployed, the stat carries an unstated implication: What if China decides to cut us off in the middle of a pandemic? Could America face a dramatic shortage of key pharmaceutical drugs at the moment when we are most in need? And that distorted claim that says America has been too reliant on China has been seized by politicians like Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) as evidence that globalization has undermined America’s pandemic response.

[…]

How much is a lot? “In all, 80 percent of the U.S. supply of antibiotics are made in China,” [Politico contributors Doug Palmer and Finbarr Bermingham] wrote, linking back to a press release from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa).

But that’s not what the press release says.

Grassley’s statement was publicizing a letter Grassley sent on August 9 to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the FDA, asking them to conduct more inspections of foreign drug manufacturing facilities to make sure they meet American standards.

“Unbeknownst to many consumers … 80 percent of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients are produced abroad, the majority in China and India,” Grassley wrote.

There’s the first bit of context collapse: the authors of the Politico piece merged Grassley’s “80 percent … are produced abroad” into “80 percent … are made in China.”

All of this also raises another question: Where is Grassley getting that information? His letter sources that claim to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report which itself cited FDA data on pharmaceutical manufacturers around the world. And that report makes it clear that the U.S. has a diverse supply chain for drugs that goes well beyond India and China.

“Nearly 40 percent of finished drugs and approximately 80 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) are manufactured in registered establishments in more than 150 countries,” is how the GAO summed up America’s pharmaceutical supply chain.

In two jumps, we’ve gone from “80 percent of American drugs are manufactured in more than 150 countries around the world” to “80 percent of drugs come from two countries” to “80 percent of drugs come from China.”

Now, a further complication. The FDA only tracks drug manufacturing facilities — not the supply chains of specific drugs.

That “lack of structural transparency and available supply chain data about drugs,” researchers at the University of Minnesota researchers wrote last month, is one of the reasons why making accurate assessments about potential drug shortages is difficult. Indeed, it was this same bit of missing information that Grassley was encouraging the FDA to address back in August.

Source: FDA; Safeguarding Pharmaceutical Supply Chains in a Global Economy, October 2019.

April 6, 2020

MYTH BUSTED? Laying a hand plane on its side vs. sole

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

Stumpy Nubs
Published 20 Apr 2019

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