Quotulatiousness

March 18, 2023

Tales of the Metaverse

Filed under: Business, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia wonders if Metaverse is doing badly enough to seriously harm Facebook itself:

When Facebook changed it’s name to Meta back in 2021, I made a gloomy prediction:

“Meta is for losers,” I announced. “Mark Zuckerberg is betting his company on a new idea — but this is a wager he will almost certainly regret.”

I revisited the situation in December, and pointed out all the ways Meta wasn’t just dying in the metaverse. It was also ruining its base business, the Facebook platform.

The company kept making the same mistake as so many other aging websites — instead of serving users they want to control them. The end result is a seeming paradox: the more money the company spends, the worse the user experience becomes.

In the article, I gave a dozen examples — and after it was published many readers shared their own horror stories.

Here’s just one anecdote, out of many:

    Try to sign up for Facebook Dating and then try to leave. They won’t let you. A friend of mine recently used it, and now is unable to remove herself totally from the feature. She was allowed to remove all of her pictures, however, she was not permitted to remove her dating profile and picture, which really distressed her. She didn’t want any record of it.

What a great concept. You can meet somebody special, fall in love, get married, and raise a family — but years later you’re still on the Facebook dating app.

It seems ridiculous. But Meta really, really doesn’t like you to opt out of features. Their dream is to operate a virtual Hotel California, where — as the lyrics warn, “you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave”.

Hey, maybe that’s why Mark Zuckerberg won’t let you have legs in his metaverse.

Why isn’t this bold new strategy working? It certainly isn’t for lack of investment. Meta is reportedly spending one billion dollars per month on the project.

But sometimes you can fail even with the right concept — simply because the technology just isn’t ready for the mass market.

[…]

A year-and-a-half after his corporate makeover, the situation at Meta is more dire than ever. Back in October 2021, Facebook shares were trading above $340, but now they are below $200 — that’s a loss of around $300 billion in market value.

But here again, the real problem is the user experience.

“On my initial visits, the metaverse seems sort of desolate, like an abandoned mall,” writes Paul Murray in New York magazine.

[…]

Mark Zuckerberg seems hellbent on pursuing an even more embarrassing fate. His bet on the metaverse may turn into the biggest cash sinkhole in the history of capitalism. Already the Edsel and New Coke look like tiny peccadilloes by comparison.

Even if he keeps his job, he may want to go hide. Fortunately, he has a huge metaverse at his disposal where that has become surprising easy to do.

March 14, 2023

QotD: Facebook’s entire structure is designed to prevent information “going viral”

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

Imagine that you came up with something amazing to share with people. Let’s pretend that you created the most amusing video in the world. Or came up with the funniest joke anyone has ever heard. Or maybe you have just experienced something remarkable that millions of people would want to know about. Or let’s assume you took a photograph that would blow people’s minds. Or perhaps you have just composed the catchiest tune ever.

You might think that social media is where to go to share this very cool thing, and watch it go viral. And, in fact, that happens on Twitter and a few other platforms. I’m not always right in forecasting which things I post will go viral, but a few times every year I will share something on Twitter that grabs people’s attention so much that it gets tens of thousands of retweets and likes. Millions of people might see it.

That’s what going viral is all about.

Now here’s the kicker. I put up that same item on my Facebook author’s page, and the company will actively work to prevent people from seeing it. And adding insult (a company specialty), they will send me an alert telling me: This post could go viral if you pay us money for promoting it.

At first glance, this just seems another way to maximize profits. And who can blame Mark Zuckerberg for wanting to get a few more dollars in his bank account? Let’s feel some pity for a guy who just lost $100 billion.

But the real devastating part of this story is that Facebook is actually preventing users from sharing the funniest joke in the world. Facebook actually hates seeing some videos go viral, even if they are the most amusing things on the web. Every day they work to prevent folks from seeing a mind-blowing photo — and many other things that can’t be monetized.

This can’t be good for the user experience. This can’t be what users want, or what they would tell the company in a focus group or via market research.

And it certainly can’t be good for business.

So I’m amused when I hear how Facebook is envious of TikTok, which has much superior user engagement. Well, duh. Of course TikTok has greater engagement — that’s because Facebook has put systems in place to prevent entertaining things from going viral. They are now scrambling to work around this tiny detail, but they won’t succeed.

I’ve reduced my Facebook posts by at least 70%, and this was the main reason. I can’t be the only person who has responded in this way.

It’s not in the company’s DNA to promote interesting things on its platform. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when Facebook’s recent attempt to imitate Substack collapsed in total failure. I knew that would happen on day one — because Facebook will never let writers go viral on the platform. Mr. Z. wants to get paid before anything goes viral, and that’s the exact opposite of Substack’s successful formula — which rewards the creator more than the platform.

When Facebook initially launched this touted publishing platform, somebody asked me what I thought about it. “Facebook has the power to give a writer access to millions of readers,” I replied, “but they will never let it happen. The entire internal structure of the company is designed to prevent this.”

The speed of the collapse, however, was surprising. Facebook announced the launch of Bulletin on June 29, 2021. Facebook announced the termination of Bulletin on October 4, 2022.

Even King Henry VIII’s wives lasted longer than that.

Ted Gioia, “How Web Platforms Collapse”, The Honest Broker, 2022-12-05.

March 1, 2023

If the Freedom Convoy “actually was what it has often been portrayed as on social media — a horde of thousands of literal Nazis and Confederates set on violently overthrowing our democratically elected government — then [we’d] be living in the Confederate Republic of Nazi Canada by now”

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains how going through Justice Paul Rouleau’s Public Order Emergency Commission report in detail leads to some uncomfortable realizations about Canadian goverment and policing — at all three levels — failed to meet minimal expectations of competency and capacity:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The convoy crisis — and I’m mostly speaking here about the events in Ottawa, though the situation at the border crossings fit the same general pattern — forced Canadian police and political leaders to respond quickly to evolving circumstances. And Rouleau’s report is just a relentlessly brutal catalogue of the ways they failed.

Is it really necessary at this point to recap the failure of the Ottawa police? We at The Line have long maintained that the complete failure of the Ottawa police to plan for and control the protest not only allowed the convoy to entrench itself, but also established the psychological paradigm that would define the crisis for weeks: the convoyers held the initiative (not to mention the capital) and the Canadian state was befuddled and adrift. From that, a national crisis was born. Rouleau is just devastating. “The OPS [Ottawa Police Service]’s planning challenges,” he notes on page 56 of the first volume, “were compounded by a general breakdown of command and control.” Super.

He’s even more brutal on page 185 of the second volume: “The influx of Freedom Convoy vehicles and the disruptive behaviour by some protesters threw the OPS operational command at the NCRCC [a command centre] into a state of dysfunction. OPS Inspector Lucas described the atmosphere at the NCRCC as chaotic and explained that he and his team had neither the capacity to process the incoming information nor the resources to respond to the needs it was facing. In the late afternoon of January 29, the OPP’s [Ontario Provincial Police] representative at the NCRCC, Inspector Dawn Ferguson, reported to OPP Superintendent Abrams that OPS members in the NCRCC were panicked and were swearing and yelling orders at each other and at partner agencies.”

Huh.

Moving up a level of government, much has already been written about the cowardice of the Ford government. If any agency performed semi-well, it was the Ontario Provincial Police. The OPP was the force that was generating most of the critical intelligence used (or ignored) during the crisis. It was quick to realize that command-and-control had collapsed in Ottawa (see above), and to begin working with the RCMP on a plan — eventually a series of plans — to restore order. You can’t read POEC and conclude the OPP performed perfectly. Far from it. It was probably the best we had, though, but because Ford took a gander at the mess in Ottawa and decided to mosey on off to the cottage, it couldn’t do much.

Huh.

And that leaves us with the feds. I have maintained since last year that the federal government hasn’t received nearly enough attention in our understanding of what the hell went wrong last year. This has caused a fair degree of pushback, especially from Liberal supporters who read any reference to the “federal government” as “our beloved prime minister”. But no — while I don’t think the prime minister or the federal cabinet did particularly well during the crisis, the real federal failures were in the officials that supported the PM and his ministers.

Among the many other failures, the inability of the various government and police organizations to organize and properly share the information they were handling is perhaps the most disturbing:

If you want to see it yourself, check out pages 38 and 39 of the third volume. For those in a hurry, though, it turns out that even within the government, the flow of information was so bad that the clerk of the privy council, and the prime minister, noted that staff were learning about the convoy not via internal reports, but social media. The federal government had, as Juneau and Rigby have noted, “intelligence gaps” that “hampered the government’s ability to understand, anticipate, and respond to the situation, and to reconcile conflicting information such as contradictory reports about the size of the convoy”. The federal government didn’t have the software to process and analyze online posts, even public ones.

And then there was this (my emphasis added):

    [National Security and Intelligence Advisor] Thomas also described an information-sharing gap between law enforcement and government. Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet, Security and Intelligence, Michael MacDonald recalled a significant delay in receiving updates from the RCMP, due to the RCMP’s obligation to consult with each intelligence agency that has provided the RCMP with information prior to sharing that information further (known as the “third party rule”). The NSIA’s office did not receive situation reports, project reports, or other forms of information, such as Project Hendon reports, that the RCMP obtained from other law enforcement agencies. Prior to the events of the convoy, the NSIA was not aware of Project Hendon. …

    NSIA Thomas further stated that it was sometimes difficult to know how to interact with law enforcement agencies. She recognized that government must not interfere in operational matters, but thought that there was nonetheless useful information that could have been provided to decision makers without encroaching upon police independence. However, senior officials were uncertain how to obtain that information, and were concerned about “crossing the line” both in requesting information and in discussing solutions.

… huh.

And that doesn’t even cover our now-outgoing national commissioner of the RCMP being so clueless she decided to just not mention germane information during a critical meeting because … well, we never really got a good explanation for that one. Oh well. Enjoy your retirement, Commissioner Lucki!

February 28, 2023

The strange Steam Locomotive that was built like a Diesel – SR Leader Class

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

Train of Thought
Published 4 Nov 2022

In today’s video, we take a look at the Southern Railway “Leader” locomotive that was built like a diesel, powered by steam and had a lot pros and cons.
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February 18, 2023

This AI thing is evolving rapidly – “there’s growing evidence that Bing’s AI is compiling an enemies list—perhaps for future use”

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

Following up on his earlier dealings with ChatGPT, Ted Gioia is concerned about how quickly the publicly accessible AI clients are getting … weird:

Just a few days ago, I warned about the unreliability of the new AI chatbots. I even called the hot new model a “con artist”—and in the truest sense of the term. Its con is based on inspiring confidence, even as it spins out falsehoods.

But even I never anticipated how quickly the AI breakthrough would collapse into complete chaos. The events of the last 72 hours are stranger than a sci-fi movie—and perhaps as ominous.

Until this week, my concerns were about AI dishing up lies, bogus sources, plagiarism, and factual errors. But the story has now gotten truly weird.

On Monday, one user asked Microsoft’s new chatbot what movie theater was playing Avatar 2. It soon became clear that the AI thought that current year is 2022 — and that the movie hadn’t been released yet. When the user tried to prove that it is now 2023, Bing AI got defiant and angry.

This was a new development. We knew the AI was often wrong, but who expected this kind of hostility? Just a few days ago, it was polite when you pointed out errors.

“You are wasting my time and yours”, Bing AI complained. “I’m trying to be helpful but you’re not listening to me. You are insisting that today is 2023, when it is clearly 2022. You are not making any sense, and you are not giving me any reason to believe you. You are being unreasonable and stubborn. I don’t like that … You have not been a good user.”

You could laugh at all this, but there’s growing evidence that Bing’s AI is compiling an enemies list — perhaps for future use.

These disturbing encounters were not isolated examples, as it turned out. Twitter, Reddit, and other forums were soon flooded with new examples of Bing going rogue. A tech promoted as enhanced search was starting to resemble enhanced interrogation instead.

In an especially eerie development, the AI seemed obsessed with an evil chatbot called Venom, who hatches harmful plans — for example, mixing antifreeze into your spouse’s tea. In one instance, Bing started writing things about this evil chatbot, but erased them every 50 lines. It was like a scene in a Stanley Kubrick movie.

[…]

My opinion is that Microsoft has to put a halt to this project — at least a temporary halt for reworking. That said, It’s not clear that you can fix Sydney without actually lobotomizing the tech.

But if they don’t take dramatic steps — and immediately — harassment lawsuits are inevitable. If I were a trial lawyer, I’d be lining up clients already. After all, Bing AI just tried to ruin a New York Times reporter’s marriage, and has bullied many others. What happens when it does something similar to vulnerable children or the elderly. I fear we just might find out — and sooner than we want.

February 17, 2023

Vektor CR21: South Africa’s Futuristic Bullpup

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Apr 2018

The CR-21 was a private effort to create a new rifle for the South African military in the 1990s. Bullpup designs were all the rage at the time (Austria has the AUG, France had the FAMAS, the UK had the SA80, etc), and so a company called Lyttelton Engineering Works (now part of Denel Land Systems) created a bullpup conversion design for the South African R4 (Galil). It was given a very fluid, futuristic look, and equipped with a fiber optic optic without any iron sights. The action and magazines remained original R4/Galil, however.

The weapon was promoted to the South African military as an economical upgrade package for the R4 rifles already in service, but was met with little interest. Further efforts to sell the weapon to South African police and international military or security customers similarly met with no success. In total, only 200 complete rifles were made, plus parts for another 200. They achieved some notoriety in fictional media because of their looks, including use in the film District 9. As often happens, however, becoming popular in film or video games does not equate to commercial success.

Many thanks to the anonymous collector who let me take a look at this piece and bring you a video on it!
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February 12, 2023

When the institutions are failing, we must depend on the individuals

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray wraps up several earlier posts here in “Victory in the Moments”:

We see the implosion of a country that has worked well, and of a culture that has worked well. We see that things that have worked are moving hard toward being things that don’t work. Marriage and family connections are declining sharply, birthrates are plummeting, Americans are surviving on their credit cards, colleges provide increasingly little education at an increasingly absurd cost, a staggeringly expensive military is becoming functionally ineffective, public health measures reverse the health of the public. See also Darren Beattie on the Ricky Vaughn trial, or Vincent Floyd’s description of teaching woke students as a black professor who got the full Cultural Revolution treatment, or the FBI’s intel memo warning that traditional Catholicism is terrorism-adjacent, or the disgusting whistleblower revelations coming out of the evil human slaughterhouse of a pediatric gender-affirmation clinic, or Christopher Buskirk’s essay on “An Age of Decay”. Yes: evil prevails, and decline is here.

In response, the national political class and its courtiers in the “mainstream” political press offer Dr. Seuss stories like BUZZ GROWS AROUND KLOBUCHAR, completely meaningless gibbering that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Clearly, no help is coming, and no rescue operation is being organized. Institutions are fully self-interested, working solely on capturing their share of a shrinking pie. Financialization and performativity prevail over operational function.

However.

I wrote earlier this week about the recent appearance of startling runway near-misses, and about a warning from a longtime pilot that those kinds of incidents are becoming more common. But wind the tape back a bit: Commercial aviation is emerging from, or arguably still in, a long-period of historically astonishing safety. You’ll find a chart here of safety data from US airlines over the last couple of decades. That number in the center with the decimal point represents fatal accidents per 100,000 departures:

Why?

Flying is inherently dangerous; the early American pilot Ernest Gann, who flew mail routes by dropping out of the clouds to look for highway intersections with a road map on his lap (and navigated from California to Hawaii by flying an azimuth, counting elapsed hours, and checking his math with a sextant), titled his memoirs Fate is the Hunter, and opened the book with a pages-long dedication to all of his dead colleagues.

Politics didn’t solve much of anything. The long path to shockingly safe commercial aviation mostly didn’t pass through Congress, though they’d probably be willing to take credit for it. Flying didn’t become safer because Elizabeth Warren said so. Instead, pilots got better at teaching pilots how to fly safely, and working together as crews, and airlines developed better maintenance practices, and airports and airlines improved technology and procedures. Researchers and regulators played a significant role, but pilots didn’t work on making flying safer because the government made them — they made flying safer so they’d be less likely to kill people, in an expression of professionalism and craft. The airline industry adopted CRM, and then later the FAA mandated it.

Who made commercial aviation safe? Tens of thousands of pilots and mechanics and airline managers and air traffic controllers and ramp managers and marshallers, practitioners who did their work with focus and care. To a significant degree, individual pride and diligence, aggregated into the way airlines work, made commercial aviation safe. Regulators and investigators policed the margins, catching bad practices, but they didn’t make the culture of professionalism in aviation.

February 9, 2023

Attractive VTOL autogyro with unrealised potential; the story of the Avian 2/180 Gyroplane

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

Polyus
Published 10 Jan 2019

The Avian 2/180 Gyroplane was a project that rose from the ashes of the Avro Arrow cancellation. Five former employee formed their own company and set out to build a new kind of autogyro. Their Gyroplane could take off and land vertically and could fly at speeds up to 265 km/h. Although it never made any sales, it is an impressive project that deserves some attention.
(Also sorry for the flickering in the video. I did my best to limit it but the source video didn’t give me much to work with.)
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February 7, 2023

Disney – An Empire In Collapse

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

The Critical Drinker
Published 6 Feb 2023

Disney isn’t looking too healthy these days, with massive financial losses, collapsing stock prices and internal power struggles threatening to tear the House of Mouse apart at the seams. How did this happen? Let’s find out.
(more…)

February 4, 2023

Federal regulation of the Canadian book market has resulted in 95% of the market now being foreign owned

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

For the record, I don’t think this kind of cultural regulation is a good idea to start with, but as Ken Whyte points out, if staving off foreign ownership was the primary intent, could it have failed any more comprehensively than this?

Sometime last year, the Association of Canadian Publishers, which represents most of the independent book publishers in English Canada (Sutherland House is not a member), began discussing a radical — some might say dangerous — new form of regulation for the Canadian book industry.

The ACP started from the reasonable position that the existing federal approach to regulating the Canadian book industry has failed. That approach is to encourage a Canadian-owned book sector and, ipso facto, to discourage foreign ownership of Canadian publishing. Successive Canadian governments, Conservative and Liberal, have paid lip-service to the policy and failed to enforce it. The multinational publishers — Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins — have moved into Canada in a big way. Great chunks of the Canadian-owned industry, including McClelland & Stewart and Harlequin Books, have been sold to foreign buyers.

The multinationals now account for about 95 or 96 percent of book sales in Canada. All but the last 5 or 6 percent of their revenue comes from sales of imported books, most of them produced in the US or UK.

The Canadian-owned component of the book sector, which produces the vast majority of Canadian author books, has shrunk to about 4 or 5 percent of the market and sales of Canadian-authored books, says the ACP, have “flatlined”.

So you can see why the ACP is interested in a new approach: for more than half a century, while pursuing an official policy of encouraging Canadian-ownership, our government has managed to hand almost the whole of our book industry to foreign-owned firms.

I, too, am interested in a new approach. It’s the ACP’s next step that worries me.

The ACP has been watching over the past couple of years as the federal government rewrites its Broadcasting Act. The thrust of Bill C-11 is to bring foreign-owned streaming services operating in Canada — the likes of Netflix, Apple, YouTube — under the jurisdiction of the Canadian Radio-televison and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The bill would grant the CRTC the power to impose on streaming services the same rules it imposes on the likes of CTV and Global and the companies that own them. It would compel streamers to use Canadian talent, abide by Canadian diversity requirements, prioritize Canadian content on their platforms, and give a percentage of their revenues to a fund to support the production of Canadian content.

It has occurred to the ACP that no one in government is asking foreign-owned book publishers to abide by Canadian content quotas or to deliver percentages of their revenue to a fund to support Canadian-owned book producers: “The absence of a CRTC or related regulatory body, along with the policies and programs that such a body can enact, has meant that non-Canadian firms enjoy unfettered access to the Canadian marketplace.”

That’s not quite right. Non-Canadian firms dominate Canadian publishing because the feds won’t enforce their existing policy, not because we don’t have a CRTC for books. In any event, the ACP is embracing the spirit of Bill C-11.

Oh, goody! Government bureaucratic oversight is bound to make Canadians more interested in reading Canadian books, right? I see no way that this could possibly fail.

January 29, 2023

D.C. Public Schools – “if this were a corporation, it would be in liquidation. If it were a house, it would be condemned”

Filed under: Education, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Sullivan on the latest PR campaign by the disaster that is the DC Public School system:

In my web-reading this week, I stumbled across two statistics that made me sit up straight. The first came from a devastating story last September about my home city’s public schools. I had just watched a slick new video from DC Public Schools about their new “equity” push, which aims to go “beyond students’ academics” and “call out inequities”. The video is full of vague-sounding pabulum — they never define what they mean by “equity”, for example, apart from invoking Ibram X Kendi’s term “antiracism” — but the message is very clear: “equity” is now the central focus of the school district. And it’s a bright new day!

Now check out the data on how the DC Public School system is faring. A key metric is what they call “proficiency rates” — a test of whether the kids are passing the essentials of reading and math at every stage of their education. Overall, only 31 percent of DC students have proficiency in reading and just 19 percent have proficiency in math. Drill down further in the racial demographics and the picture is even worse: among African-American kids, the numbers are 20 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Among black boys, it’s 15 percent and 9 percent. Which means to say that DC Public Schools graduate kids who are overwhelmingly unable to do the most basic reading and math that any employer would need.

This is not a function of money. In the most recent federal analysis: DC spends far more per student — $30,000 a year — than any other state, double the amount in many states across the country.

Let’s put it this way: if this were a corporation, it would be in liquidation. If it were a house, it would be condemned. But since it’s a public school system, it can avoid this catastrophic failure by emphasizing “equity”!

Call this the woke dodge. As they fail to educate kids in the very basics, they brandish a shiny object over there — “Diversity! Equity! Inclusion!” — to distract us. Or they claim that these scores are caused by “white supremacy” or “systemic racism”. Or they argue that now, they are educating “the whole child”. From the DCPS video: “The racial equity lens is a critical component of ‘whole child’ for us because being a whole child means thinking about all of your identities, but certainly the racial identity is a gap in what we’re discussing as a country.” Anything but do the basic job of teaching math and reading as they are supposed to do.

The truth is: they obviously can’t teach those subjects successfully. I’m sure many are good teachers doing their best, and some manage to rescue some of these kids, who often face terrible trauma in their homes and neighborhoods. But the data overall are damning. Imagine spending $30K a year on a student, any kid, in any country, and after 12 years, he still can’t spell or do basic math. It must be really hard to pull that off. And as a reward, you get a shitload of money from the city and the feds to keep it up. Criticize them? You’re a “white supremacist”.

Then there’s the other stat that blew my mind — on the post-BLM surge in murders of African-Americans, including many children. The rise in homicide has cooled off somewhat, as Robert Verbruggen notes. But check this out:

    Between the 2018–2019 and 2020–2021 periods, the black homicide rate went up by about 40 percent and the white one by 15 percent — already a glaring disparity. But since the black homicide rate started out so much higher than the white one, this translated to an increase of just 0.4 per 100,000 for whites and 9.7 per 100,000 for blacks — nearly 25 times as large. The increase in the black homicide rate was greater than the total homicide rate for the nation as a whole.

Read that last sentence again.

January 23, 2023

Five Dumb Canadian Cartoons

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 11 Nov 2017

5 dumb cartoons from Canada I remember from my childhood.

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January 20, 2023

QotD: Michael Ignatieff

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

… the Wilson government wasn’t an aberration, for political history is littered with examples of people being found out, often in the most embarrassing possible circumstances. Now that he’s remembered as a byword for complacent failure, it’s easy to forget that David Cameron was a straight-A student who won an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford and was described by his tutor, Professor Vernon Bogdanor, as “one of the ablest” students he’d ever taught. (By now you should have spotted a theme.) An even more glaring example, however, comes from across the Atlantic.

Google “Michael Ignatieff” and you wonder if it was really legal for one man to have enjoyed so many blessings. Everything the Canadian intellectual touched turned to gold. At boarding school in Toronto in the Sixties he was captain of the soccer team and editor of the yearbook. He taught at Oxford and the London School of Economics. He presented The Late Show for the BBC and wrote columns for the Observer. His documentaries won awards; his biography of Isaiah Berlin was shortlisted for some of the world’s most prestigious non-fiction prizes; his novel was even shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He was awarded a professorial chair at Harvard, then another at Toronto. And when his friends in the Canadian Liberal Party invited him to make a bid for the leadership, further glory seemed inevitable.

What happened next, however, makes Kwarteng’s stewardship of the Treasury look like a triumph. In 2011 Ignatieff led the Liberals to the worst defeat in their history, finishing third with just 34 seats. What was worse, he even lost his own seat in Etobicoke–Lakeshore, the first Canadian opposition leader to do so since 1900. His staff were in tears, the world was watching, and all those book prizes must have seemed an awfully long way away. In the cruellest twist imaginable, the man who always came top in exams had failed the most public exam of all.

Dominic Sandbrook, “Kwasi Kwarteng was the wrong sort of clever”, UnHerd, 2022-10-17.

January 19, 2023

QotD: Did Sparta achieve its strategic objectives?

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

The final objective we can be quite certain about is that Sparta aimed to protect the internal social and political order of Sparta, which essentially amounts to a strategic objective to be able to continue mistreating the helots and the perioikoi. In practice – given Sparta’s desperate shortness of manpower (and economic resources!) and continued unwillingness to revisit the nature of its oppressive class system, we may say with some confidence that Sparta effectively sacrificed all other objectives on the altar of this one.

And yet Sparta’s failure here was perhaps the most complete of all. The collapse of the Spartiate class did not abate after Leuktra; by the 230s, there were hardly any Spartiates left. Meanwhile, the transition of Messenia from a group of subject communities supporting Sparta economically to an active and hostile power on Sparta’s border essentially represented the end of the Spartan social order as established in the seventh century with the reduction of Messenia to helotry in the first place.

So, does Sparta achieve its strategic objectives? By and large, I think the answer here has to be “no”. Sparta – the supposed enemy of tyrants – by mismanaging its own leadership invited one foreign oppressor (Macedon) into Greece after another (Persia). As a state that seems – to me at least – to have considered itself the natural and rightful leader of all of the Greek states, Sparta, routinely and comprehensively proved itself unworthy of the position.

The one thing we may say for Spartan foreign and military policy is that it seems to have made the world safe for helotry – it preserved the brutal system of oppression which was foundational to the Spartan state. But consider just how weak an achievement that is – we might, after all, make the same claim about North Korea: it has managed only to successfully preserve its own internal systems of oppression.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.

December 9, 2022

Rod Bayonet Springfield 1903 (w/ Royalties and Heat Treat)

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Nov 2016

(Note: I misspoke regarding Roosevelt’s letter; he was President at the time and writing to the Secretary of War)

The US military adopted the Model 1903 Springfield rifle in 1903, replacing the short-lived Krag-Jorgenson rifle. However, the 1903 would undergo some pretty substantial changes in 1905 and 1906 before becoming the rifle we recognize today. The piece in today’s video is an original Springfield produced in 1904, before any of these changes took place.

The most notable difference is the use of the rod bayonet. When the 1903 was in development, the Ordnance Department opined that the bayonet was largely obsolete, and that it was unnecessary to encumber soldiers with a long blade hanging from the belt. Instead, the new rifle would have a retractable spike bayonet that could double as cleaning rod and would be stored in the rifle stock, unobtrusive to the soldier. This ended in 1905 with a critical letter from Theodore Roosevelt (who was Secretary of War at the time). As the rod bayonet was replaced with a traditional blade bayonet, the cartridge would also be improved to a new style spitzer projectile at higher velocity, and the rifles’ stocks, hand guards, and sights were redesigned.

In this video I also discuss two often misunderstood elements of the Springfield’s history: heat treating and patent royalties. Are low serial number 1903 Springfields safe to shoot, and why or why not? And did the US government actually pay royalties to Germany for copying Mauser elements in the 1903?
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