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Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
Gryphon
Charter Member
13619 posts |
Mar-25-14, 09:54 PM (EDT) |
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"A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
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So all day today I've had a bunch of ideas banging around in my head. Scenes for S5DS04, scenes for the second episode of TLOK6, the last piece of Desolation Angel: The Blue Flame Chronicle, the main action set-piece of Technical Difficulties, even a couple bits of the Day of Infamy retool. If you're curious about why I didn't write any of those things today, it's because school is in session and I was busy working on this crap instead. Yay. --G.
Benjamin D. Hutchins
HTY 492 – Spring 2014
March 23, 2014 Thoughts on Ellis's The Social History of the Machine GunAlthough it is a significant work on an important topic, not only in the context of twentieth-century warfare but also of the way in which armed conflict is managed today, John Ellis's The Social History of the Machine Gun is flawed in ways that may tend to damage one's confidence in its authority. Some of its flaws could be indicative of simple editorial carelessness, but a few stand out as so peculiar and evidently deliberate as to call the whole matter into question. The first and most prominent of these is the bewildering misidentification of one of the most prominent firearms designers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, John Moses Browning. At his first mention on page 16, Browning is identified as William Browning. Further, on page 41, in the caption of a photograph plainly depicting John M. Browning with his M1917 heavy machine gun, he is identified as William J. Browning – an arrestingly specific misnomer. This is not simply a case of attaching the wrong name to a person shown in an old photograph. John Browning was the designer of virtually every American firearm of consequence between 1885 and 1935 (despite the fact that he died in 1926). It may be argued that Browning is a minor figure in Ellis’s narrative, which focuses mainly on the Gatling and Maxim guns at that stage in machine gun history, and therefore this is not a significant error. I contend, however, that he was such a seminal figure in early-twentieth-century firearms history that blatantly misidentifying him thus, even in a context where he is being given only peripheral importance, is an egregious – even jarring – failure of scholarship.1 It is akin to reading a history of the General Motors Corporation and discovering a reference to GM’s competitors, Ernest Ford and Gerald E. Chrysler. Beyond this simple but startling error, Ellis indulges in other, more elaborate, curious lapses. On page 28 he trots out the tired allegation that Richard J. Gatling was a Confederate sympathizer who sited his factory in Cincinnati, Ohio, near the Kentucky border, in the hopes that it would be captured by the rebels. He has the grace to couch this accusation in weasel words like it seems and it is even alleged, but offers no evidence; in fact he has none to offer, as these allegations, made against Gatling during his lifetime, do not hold up to historical scrutiny.2 Furthermore, they are irrelevant to the topic being discussed, which is Gatling's struggle to get his invention noticed by the United States Army – a problem that was hardly unique to Richard J. Gatling or his eponymous gun. The problem of gaining military acceptance for machine guns in various guises will continue to preoccupy Ellis's narrative right through World War I, long after he has finished offhandedly impugning Gatling's character.3 Strange lapses and questionable digressions aside, there is historical value in this book. The central theme of the gulf between the machine gun's capabilities and military thought, and its horrific cost in the First World War, occupies the bulk of the work, and it’s a theme that deserves investigating. The narrative becomes a trifle repetitive here, true, but that is because the historical events themselves were repetitive, as the supposed best military minds of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in Europe, resolutely failed to learn the obvious lessons of the American Civil War. Or the Boer War. Or the Russo-Japanese War. Or, indeed, any armed conflict in which rapid-fire weapons were employed, up to and including most of the Great War itself. Ellis pulls no punches here, using example after example to illustrate not just the incompetence, but in many places the willful incompetence, of those responsible for the frightful slaughter the Western Front became in 1914 and remained for four long, soggy, bloody, miserable, utterly futile years – from generals refusing to adopt the machine gun in the first place to commanders at all levels failing to implement it properly or take it seriously once it reached the field. Powerful though this section is, it strikes me that Ellis missed an opportunity to contextualize the folly of the war more broadly. By focusing exclusively on the adoption (or, in most cases, non-adoption) of the machine gun itself, he shortchanges the myriad other ways in which Western military thinking had failed to advance in the century since Napoleon's defeat. This gives the illusory impression that the terror of World War I was more-or-less solely about the terrible killing power of the machine gun and the Allied generals' failure to grasp its significance, which is perhaps understandable in a book with such a specific focus, but overlooks much potentially useful context. To take just two examples:
- The machine gun was far from the only technology whose potential to shape the battlefield was underestimated or outright dismissed by the uniformed thinkers of the day. For instance, as late as the 1930s, influential military authorities were still voicing open skepticism about the strategic usefulness of the aircraft, a tool which one would think had proven its value many times over in the same war which finally drove home the importance of automatic fire. Ellis makes vague reference to other slowly-adopted military technologies in his conclusion, as part of a general view of twentieth-century war as an industrial undertaking, but he fails to draw the various threads of the topic together to give a really coherent broad context; - Similarly, no attention is given to the remarkable state of European political and social disarray that led to the Great War in the first place. While not directly relevant to the question of the machine gun, this fact – that Europe found itself involved in such a vast and destructive conflict in the first place because of applications of human folly, pigheadedness, and vanity so liberal as to make the British and French generals' heel-dragging about machine guns seem like a minor personality quirk – would have gone far toward informing the overall narrative. That such a disastrous moment in human history can be examined for one specific facet - a single aspect of military technology – without accounting for the overall insanity of the age is an interestingly compartmentalized view, but not, I think, one with much weight behind it. In the light of the above, Chapter VI might at first seem like another peculiar digression, veering as it does away from military matters entirely to discuss the civilian use of the Thompson submachine gun in the inter-war period (and a brief interlude in film studies), but in a way, this section actually strikes closer to Ellis's central theme than much of the material about World War I. This is, after all, a social history of the machine gun, and the non-military uses of such a weapon are surely relevant to that theme, as is its impact on the popular culture of its time. In particular, the Auto-Ordnance advertisement reproduced on page 151 is telling. "The ideal weapon for the protection of large estates," indeed. Ellis's concluding chapter, in which he examines the postwar impact of automatic weapons on military strategy, then endeavors to summarize his conclusion, is curiously abrupt considering the exhaustive nature of the middle part of his narrative. In the course of it, he brushes against matters that seem like they would have borne much closer scrutiny, such as the relevance of modern industrial production technologies to the genesis of modern weapons in the first place, in a manner too cursory, and too late in the work, to be really satisfactory. It is not until the final page that he comes to what, in hindsight, appears to have been his real point all along: the comparison of the machine gun, and both the military and civil society's struggle to understand its significance, with the atomic bomb. In the concluding paragraph, the entire work is revealed as a sort of historical shaggy dog story, 180 pages of scaffolding meant to support the grimly pessimistic conclusion that those who view technology in a positive light are naïve. It is a somewhat annoying bait-and-switch to be hurried past the omissions and context faults enumerated above only to be chided sarcastically that "those optimists who foresee [humanity] being conveyed triumphantly into a neon sunset would do well to ponder the history of the machine gun." As noted before, there is value here; the struggle to modernize the prevailing modes of thought about warfare is one which resonates today, in the era of armed drones and multi-million-dollar "smart weapons" on whose precise advantages few military theorists can seem to agree. In The Social History of the Machine Gun, however, this value is overshadowed – sometimes to a maddening degree – by quirky scholarship, sloppy editing, odd digressions, and a manipulative authorial bias which only reveals its true character at the very end. It is a deeply flawed and irritating work which finds its own academic usefulness compromised by its author’s overarching need to make his pessimistic concluding point. 1 It is doubly puzzling that such an error got past not one, but two editors, given that the edition we are reading is the book's second. That such a basic mistake could be committed and then go unnoticed during the book’s publication and its preparation for paperback release is slightly shocking – particularly in light of the fact that Browning is correctly named in another photograph caption on page 176, and in both the work’s bibliography and bibliographical essay. 2 Julia Keller, Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 124-5. 3 Again, one wonders where his editor was. Bibliography
Ellis, John. The Social History of the Machine Gun. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.
Keller, Julia. Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun that Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genuis Who Invented It. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.
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Verbena
Charter Member
442 posts |
Mar-25-14, 11:40 PM (EDT) |
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1. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #0
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In other words, it's political propaganda poorly disguised as a scholarly work. Decidedly not the first time -that's- happened. =)
--------
this world created by the
hands of the gods
everything is false
everything is a LIE
the final days have come
now
let everything be destroyed --mu |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
13619 posts |
Mar-25-14, 11:46 PM (EDT) |
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2. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #1
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>In other words, it's political propaganda poorly disguised as a
>scholarly work. Decidedly not the first time -that's- happened. =) Mm,=no, I don't think the agenda in play here is political, as such. The closing is too nihilistic for that. Ellis isn't pushing for a political outcome so much as voicing a weirdly academic parallel to your freaky-ass sigblock, oddly enough. (WTF is with that, anyway?) I can't quote it right now for logistical reasons but will try to remember to do so tomorrow. --G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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Verbena
Charter Member
442 posts |
Mar-26-14, 00:10 AM (EDT) |
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3. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #2
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LAST EDITED ON Mar-26-14 AT 00:16 AM (EDT)
Oh! The sig is from Blazblue: Continuum Shift. It's one of Mu-12's quotes during her big instant-kill super move. That said, it's a bit out of date--the sequel was just released and Mu's no longer so nihilistic. (Or, well, mind-controlled by a villain.)As for Ellis' book...well, perhaps I'm paranoid, but any time someone presents a gun as -inherently- evil rather than simply a tool whose user is what's good or evil, I immediately think of the gun control lobby. I'll skip the diatribe here, I'm sure it's all been heard before.
Edit: If you happen to care, the sig is taken from this move: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOGGb9MK3Co
-------- this world created by the
hands of the gods
everything is false
everything is a LIE
the final days have come
now
let everything be destroyed --mu |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
13619 posts |
Mar-28-14, 11:09 PM (EDT) |
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8. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #3
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LAST EDITED ON Mar-28-14 AT 11:13 PM (EDT)
>As for Ellis' book...well, perhaps I'm paranoid, but any time someone
>presents a gun as -inherently- evil rather than simply a tool whose
>user is what's good or evil, I immediately think of the gun control
>lobby.Machine guns are an awkward case, even for firearms hobbyists like me. They're technically interesting artifacts (the inner workings of a Gatling gun, for instance, are quite fascinating) and, well, fully automatic fire is fun... but any realistic assessment has to concede that they have no practical use apart from killing a lot of people really quickly. Which is... er... a hard sell on the basis of non-inherently-evilness. (Mind you, Richard Gatling specifically thought his invention would save lives, because he had the charmingly naïve idea that a weapon as terrifyingly effective as an automated gun would prompt the nations of the world to avoid warfare altogether - or at least that their vastly increased effectiveness would reduce the size of armies. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that a general, handed a weapon that would make one man as effective in combat as 100 previously had been, would never think, "Hey, that means I can let the other 99 guys go home!") Anyway, at that point you run up against a lot of really thorny ethical questions, such as whether it's OK to enjoy/admire/collect them when you're not OK with what they're actually for. That's not a debate I want to have here? I'm just pointing out that it is a meaningful factor to consider. --G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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Pasha
Charter Member
797 posts |
Apr-01-14, 02:12 PM (EDT) |
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26. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #8
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LAST EDITED ON Apr-01-14 AT 02:12 PM (EDT)
>Machine guns are an awkward case, even for firearms hobbyists like me.
> They're technically interesting artifacts (the inner workings of a
>Gatling gun, for instance, are quite fascinating) and, well, fully
>automatic fire is fun... but any realistic assessment has to
>concede that they have no practical use apart from killing a lot of
>people really quickly. Which is... er... a hard sell on the basis of
>non-inherently-evilness. Interestingly, the Gatling gun isn't technically an automatic weapon according to the rules laid down by the BATFE. You have to keep pushing the crank, which means that you're not firing more than one round per activation of the firing mechanism. I keep being tempted to commission one in .22lr or something, mostly as an artifact.
--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."
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Gryphon
Charter Member
13619 posts |
Apr-01-14, 02:23 PM (EDT) |
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27. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #26
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LAST EDITED ON Apr-01-14 AT 02:55 PM (EDT)
>>Machine guns are an awkward case, even for firearms hobbyists like me.
>> They're technically interesting artifacts (the inner workings of a
>>Gatling gun, for instance, are quite fascinating) and, well, fully
>>automatic fire is fun... but any realistic assessment has to
>>concede that they have no practical use apart from killing a lot of
>>people really quickly. Which is... er... a hard sell on the basis of
>>non-inherently-evilness.
>
>Interestingly, the Gatling gun isn't technically an automatic weapon
>according to the rules laid down by the BATFE.Yes, I knew someone was going to point that out. It's true, a Gatling gun isn't a machine gun by the official definition of the term. It is, however, a machine gun. If you follow. I actually have a complete set of diagrams for a .22-caliber rimfire six-barrel Gatling. I doubt I'll ever get around to building one - the only machine shop I have access to Isn't Really For That, and there's the question of acquiring the materials and whatnot - but there's always the possibility. I know my boss is intrigued by the notion. Similarly, I'd rather like to own an AK-47, even though if one could ever make a case for a machine being evil it would have to be that one - partly because I'm a student of the era that produced it, partly because of its fascinating and extemely checkered history (it's the only firearm I can think of that appears on a national flag), and partly because it's such a perfect piece of design for the imperfect manufacturing environment where it was produced. Its crudity is its sophistication. That's a hell of a good engineering trick. --G.
"This is not a democracy! I have a gun, so I'm in charge! Many governments around the world function on this principle! And some of them last for months!" - Gordon Freeman
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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Pasha
Charter Member
797 posts |
Apr-01-14, 06:58 PM (EDT) |
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29. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #27
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>>Interestingly, the Gatling gun isn't technically an automatic weapon
>>according to the rules laid down by the BATFE.
>
>Yes, I knew someone was going to point that out. It's true, a Gatling
>gun isn't a machine gun by the official definition of the term. It
>is, however, a machine gun. If you follow. I do actually follow, it was just a reasonable segue into the "which means I can make one!" topic. >I actually have a complete set of diagrams for a .22-caliber rimfire
>six-barrel Gatling. I doubt I'll ever get around to building one -
>the only machine shop I have access to Isn't Really For That, and
>there's the question of acquiring the materials and whatnot - but
>there's always the possibility. I know my boss is intrigued by the
>notion. I wonder if I actually first heard about this from you, then. I recall having a discussion with SOMEONE about this on...livejournal? several years ago, and tracking down plans for one chambered in 5.56 (which are sitting on a hard drive somewhere). But that just seems excessive for "I wanna go down to a range and turn this crank so everyone can smile". Do you remember where you got those .22 plans? >Similarly, I'd rather like to own an AK-47, even though if one could
>ever make a case for a machine being evil it would have to
>be that one - partly because I'm a student of the era that
>produced it, partly because of its fascinating and extemely checkered
>history (it's the only firearm I can think of that appears on a
>national flag), and partly because it's such a perfect piece of design Guatamala has a rifle of some sort on it. (There is, of course, a relevant wiki page: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_flags_with_weapons#Cannon_or_Gun) >for the imperfect manufacturing environment where it was produced.
>Its crudity is its sophistication. That's a hell of a good
>engineering trick. "AK-47: You might have trouble hitting the side of a barn from inside, but by God when you pull the trigger it goes bang." Also, I'm pretty sure that you could build one in a cave with a box of scraps, even without being tony stark. --
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did." |
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Peter Eng
Charter Member
971 posts |
Mar-26-14, 04:07 AM (EDT) |
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5. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #0
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>
>If you're curious about why I didn't write any of those things
>today, it's because school is in session and I was busy working on
>this crap instead.
>The book you had to write about is crap. What you wrote is in no way crap. Personally, I wouldn't assume that you weren't writing things for EPU on some level of your consciousness. Professional writers do all sorts of things while the paying copy is being pulled together in the subconscious, and not all of them look like writing the book. Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here. |
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Mercutio
Member since May-26-13
450 posts |
Mar-27-14, 03:35 AM (EDT) |
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6. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #0
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>resolutely failed to learn the obvious lessons of the American Civil
>War. Or the Boer War. Or the Russo-Japanese War. Or, indeed, any
>armed conflict in which rapid-fire weapons were employed, up to and
>including most of the Great War itself. I once took a course on the the the military history of World War I that, on the first day of class, began with the Battle of Petersburg. My professor was absolutely adamant that we couldn't properly contextualize it without that. Your academical writing style reminds me a lot of my own. (I intend that as a compliment, although you may not receive it as one.) It also reminds me a little of David Halberstam. (Again: compliment.) You eschew a carefully neutral, high-minded professorial tone for a more conversational, engaged one, addressing the reader directly as if speaking to them in a lecture hall or, indeed, across a table in a comfortable pub. But at the same time, you avoid coming off as a raging polemicist. It's personal without being sloppy, which is a real hard balance to strike. (I should note that I have no inherent problems with either a studiously neutral form of writing or raging polemics. Both have their place.) For a man who professes not to have a lot of patience with serious literary types, Ben, you sure do write like one when the need arises. :) -Merc
Keep Rat |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
13619 posts |
Mar-28-14, 11:15 PM (EDT) |
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9. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #6
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>For a man who professes not to have a lot of patience with serious
>literary types, Ben, you sure do write like one when the need arises. Well, perhaps. There are lines that I try not to cross, though. For example, I would punch myself in the face before using the word hermeneutic in an academic paper. Or epiphenomenal. --G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
13619 posts |
Mar-29-14, 01:49 PM (EDT) |
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17. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #12
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>That reminds me of an astonishingly pretentious book that, in its
>preface, used the author-invented word "architechtonics" without the
>slightest bit of irony. (It was, as I recall, a book on something
>along the lines of social theory intersecting with abstract theater --
>and I mean abstract theater that's difficult to distinguish from the
>most self-involved of performance art.) Which is silly, because if you take the word apart it becomes obvious that it refers to designed terrestrial crust formations, presumably of a kind that would be written up in the Magrathean Journal of Planetary Engineers. --G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
13619 posts |
Mar-29-14, 11:50 AM (EDT) |
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13. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #11
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>
>>Well, perhaps. There are lines that I try not to cross, though. For
>>example, I would punch myself in the face before using the word
>>hermeneutic in an academic paper. Or epiphenomenal.
>
>But what are your feelings on weltanschung? :) Well, if I misspelled Weltanschauung that egregiously, I'd at least deserve to lose a few points. :) Anyway, your snark is mildly misdirected. I obviously don't mind - hell, I enjoy - a five-dollar word or three, especially when they convey a shade of meaning not readily available with simpler language or are used for humorous or sarcastic effect (as with, e.g., virtually every use of sesquipedalian in human history). For instance, I often enjoy foreign loan words like Weltanschauung, specifically because they often have a slightly different flavor that their English equivalents. Sure, it means "worldview", but it's differently shaded, probably because it hints at a closer connection to the original usage in Enlightenment-era German philosophy. It's a much subtler was of connecting with all that than blathering pompously on about Hegelian dialecticalism. What I object to is gratuitous use of obnoxious jargon just for the sake of looking clever. I must remember to provide an example from one of the readings for yesterday's HTY 407 class discussion sometime when I'm not posting from my phone. --G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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Gryphon
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13619 posts |
Mar-29-14, 01:09 PM (EDT) |
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14. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #13
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I promised you an example, and here is one. This is the concluding paragraph of "The Habermasian Public Sphere and 'Science in the Enlightenment'" by Thomas Broman of the University of Wisconsin, Madison (Hist. Sci., xxxvi, 1998).As I have tried to show here, the public sphere is a category that can do this kind of work. On the one hand, it has the great virtue of being a real historical phenomenon, marked by concrete events (the spread of periodical literature, the formation of masonic lodges) that can be located in a particular era. It was also marked by a certain self-consciousness among its participants, and to that extent, the public sphere is partially an actor's category. But just as importantly, the public sphere can be seen as a system for the formation of concepts, as Foucault described such a system in The archaeology of knowledge. 61 The patterns of knowledge that are created and their role in the exercise of power are not to be understood on the basis of the unity of subjective consciousness, Foucault argued, nor their logical necessity. Seen this way, the development of the public sphere in the eighteenth century manifested a new discursive formation, what I have called the discourse of criticism, and this discourse fundamentally reconfigured the basis on which knowledge was considered authoritative. Of course, none of this invalidates the reality of judgements of trustworthiness made by Shapin's more or less civil natural philosophers, nor would I suggest their judgements are merely epiphenomenal. But it does suggest that there is still a larger integrative social history of truth waiting to be written, one that takes account of both science and civility and the larger discursive transformation represented the emergence of the public sphere. In such a hypothetical history, I am convinced, there will be a clear role to be played by science in the Enlightenment. 61 Michel Foucault, The archaeology of knowledge, transl. by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1982), 31-76. There are 21½ more pages just like that before that paragraph. That is the kind of academic I don't want to be. Compared to Broman, John Ellis was a wizard, even if he didn't know who John Browning was or quite what he himself was trying to say at some points. --G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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MoonEyes
Member since Jun-29-03
179 posts |
Mar-29-14, 04:52 PM (EDT) |
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18. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #15
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>It may be a lack of context or familiarity with the subject matter,
>but reading the paragraph quoted above causes me to have the following
>as a reaction: That particular piece always, in turn, remind me of Wolfgang Pauli and his(supposed)statement, "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!" Not only is that not correct, it's not even WRONG! ...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers! |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
13619 posts |
Mar-30-14, 01:07 AM (EDT) |
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21. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #18
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>That particular piece always, in turn, remind me of Wolfgang Pauli and
>his(supposed)statement, "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht
>einmal falsch!"
>
>Not only is that not correct, it's not even WRONG! That's a good one. The early nuclear physicists were a very quotable bunch - particularly Niels Bohr, who has many of my favorite science quotes, rightly or apocryphally, attributed to him, including: "Young man, we are all agreed that your hypothesis is crazy. What divides us is whether it is crazy enough to be right." "If quantum mechanics does not offend you, that is an indication that you don't understand it." and of course, the immortal "Einstein! Stop telling God what to do!" --G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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MoonEyes
Member since Jun-29-03
179 posts |
Mar-30-14, 08:09 AM (EDT) |
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22. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #21
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>That's a good one. The early nuclear physicists were a very quotable
>bunch - particularly Niels Bohr, who has many of my favorite science
>quotes, rightly or apocryphally, attributed to him, including: It is, isn't it? Harsh, too. Imagine getting that one on your paper? Ow. >"Young man, we are all agreed that your hypothesis is crazy. What
>divides us is whether it is crazy enough to be right." Quite a fitting quote, considering it was Pauli he said it to. :) >"If quantum mechanics does not offend you, that is an indication that
>you don't understand it." I'm not so much offended by it as my brain has been quite thoroughly twisted about by it. I also don't understand it. >and of course, the immortal
>
>"Einstein! Stop telling God what to do!" Well, of course! If god wants to play dice, who is Albert to tell him he can't?
Very nice quotes all of them. Quotes of this kind are fun, real or made up.
...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers! |
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Mercutio
Member since May-26-13
450 posts |
Mar-30-14, 00:14 AM (EDT) |
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19. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #13
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>Well, if I misspelled Weltanschauung that egregiously, I'd at
>least deserve to lose a few points. :) I think it's already been largely established I will never, ever be right about either spelling or grammar when it comes to you, despite my having an actual english degree. :) >Anyway, your snark is mildly misdirected. It was actually not snark, so much as it was me trying to be Mister Clever Pants and not really succeeding. Also, man, that passage you quoted? That is indeed some rough going. I'm not sure its the most effective pedagogy in the world to be tossing that at people who aren't philosophy majors (or very, very focused history majors) in their third or fourth year. >What I object to is gratuitous use of obnoxious jargon just for the sake of
>looking clever. Worth noting: while I'm sure you disapprove of this use of it just as much, jargon is often deployed as a kind of street cred on the part of the writer or speaker, to prove they're a member of the fraternity, as it were. Talking about, say, hermeneutics (or exegesis, if you're specifically a biblical scholar) is a way to prove "yes, I've actually done my research and paid my dues on this topic, which means you should at least take a look at my opinions, right, guys? C'mon! I need this journal article to get published if I'm ever going to get tenure!" Sort of like demonstrating to the guy at the shooting range that you know a cartridge and a bullet are two different things, to hearken back to a previous discussion that touched on pretentious deployments of jargon. :) -Merc
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Gryphon
Charter Member
13619 posts |
Mar-30-14, 00:59 AM (EDT) |
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20. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #19
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>Worth noting: while I'm sure you disapprove of this use of it just as
>much, jargon is often deployed as a kind of street cred on the part of
>the writer or speaker, to prove they're a member of the fraternity, as
>it were.Jargon has its uses, and that is indeed one of them; I'm annoyed by it, but not nearly as much as I am when someone busts it out solely to establish that he or she is cleverer than the reader. (Richard Dawkins does this a lot. Dawkins is routinely so insufferable I'm vaguely embarrassed to agree with him.) True story: Once, when I worked at the (now-defunct) local newspaper, I had to write a small item about production being resumed at the (now-defunct) local paper mill. It was just a minor update, as the mill was running normally at that time and had performed a routine shutdown for maintenance. At one point I noted the precise time, according to the mill manager I'd spoken with, when production was considered to have been fully resumed: paper was on the roll at 6:45 PM. My six-year-old cutlet of an editor changed it to "paper was loaded onto a roll at 6:45 PM", which doesn't mean the same thing at all, and made me look, to the people I'd spoken with and everyone else in town who understood how papermaking works (which was just about everybody in West Podunk in 2004), like I didn't know what the fuck I was talking about. When I called him on it, he replied dismissively, "We don't use jargon here." My answer was to say something along the lines of, "Do we consider our audience here, or is that no longer considered important at J-school these days?" and clock off for the day, which got me the first of several emails from the publisher saying basically, "Please try not to antagonize Aaron? He emailed me that he wants to 'write you up for insubordination', which isn't even a thing." I cannot prove, but strongly suspect, that he was eventually sacked because he played the "it's that fucking guy or me" card and it didn't go the way he was expecting. That was a strange, strange workplace. The publishers routinely frustrated the shit out of me, and habitually downplayed my abilities as justification for not paying me more, but they valued my work more than they would ever have admitted out loud and were weirdly wary of pushing me too far. (Something the guy they sold the paper to was not particularly concerned about, but that's another story.) --G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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Mercutio
Member since May-26-13
450 posts |
Mar-31-14, 02:18 AM (EDT) |
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25. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #20
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>Jargon has its uses, and that is indeed one of them; I'm annoyed by
>it, but not nearly as much as I am when someone busts it out solely to
>establish that he or she is cleverer than the reader. (Richard
>Dawkins does this a lot. Dawkins is routinely so insufferable I'm
>vaguely embarrassed to agree with him.) I have the same relationship with Dawkins that I have with the late Christopher Hitchens; I spent a number of years thinking he was pretty amazing, then a number of years realizing that just because I agree with the guy in the abstract it doesn't mean he's not a jerk, and then came to the conclusion that he is, in fact, a loathsome human being. >True story: I'm curious, does your book have stories like this about your time at the newspaper, or is it just a collection of your columns? Also, cripes, this Aaron guy sounds like a shitty editor. If you hadn't specifically mentioned he went to J-school, I would have assumed he was a newly-minted MBA. "We don't use jargon?" Have you opened the business section of any newspaper in the country there, buddy? Although having said that, J-school... may have inadequately prepared him for his chosen career. I have a friend who graduated from KU's J-school. Very good program (the University Daily Kansan is perhaps the finest student newspaper in the country), very good teachers. He did some fine editorial work there. Only he graduated in 2002. I.E, his entire education was in what is today called "traditional" media, taught by people whose experience and wisdom turned out to be wholly irrelevant to the journalism environment he was entering. He was real bitter and angry about that for a long time, and sometimes acted out on it inappropriately. -Merc
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Gryphon
Charter Member
13619 posts |
Apr-01-14, 02:52 PM (EDT) |
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28. "RE: A Boring Look Inside the Non-Process"
In response to message #0
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>In particular, the Auto-Ordnance
>advertisement reproduced on page 151 is telling. "The ideal weapon
>for the protection of large estates," indeed. Hey, I found that ad online. Check it out, it's simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. The chapter on the Thompson gun is probably the best part of The Social History of the Machine Gun, in fairness, and I should probably have mentioned it more than just in passing, but I was working to a length limit. It's also the part of the book that comes closest to being an actual social history, since - much more than the long section on WWI, which deals almost exclusively with military matters - it actually discusses how the Thompson gun affected society. In particular, there's the section I alluded to in my review where Ellis goes off to do a short Film Studies paper that might be called "The Tommy Gun in Gangster Cinema". On the page with the Thompson ad, Ellis quotes William J. Helmer in The Gun that Made the Twenties Roar (a book I shall have to track down, I think): "A company that could fancy a cowboy mowing down bandits, or envision a householder pouring machine gun fire into his darkened dining-room in defence of the family silver, might well have misjudged its markets." (This is by far the wittiest remark in the book, which is kind of a shame since it's a quotation from another one.) --G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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