Kirk: Mike, you pose an interesting question. On the one hand, the average soldier is usually an idiot about weapons and other important matters, like body armor. On the other hand, the people running Ordnance and procurement are often equally idiotic about what the poor bastards down at the pointy end require. The gripping hand is that reality will take its course, and the guys down at the sharp end of things will eventually learn what they need the hard way, demand it of Ordnance and procurement, and...
Mike: Kirk, as an ex-army guy you’ve probably been asked this question many times before, but what approach would you take with regard to the basic infantry weapons: would you give individual units, or even soldiers, more freedom to choose what they want? Either wholesale freedom (they effectively buy their own gun and then army logistics supplies them with the relevant ammo and parts), or limited freedom (they can choose a gun from a widevariety offered by the army)? Or would you stick with the...
Kirk: It depends on which ones you were talking about, and the time you’re talking. In a lot of cases, the “indentured servitude” amounted to outright chattel slavery. In others, it was a contracted period of labor that paid for your passage to the Americas. I’ve got access to family records that show more of the latter than the former–Because we were the indentured servants. Actual mileage may vary… The other point was that quite a considerable number of the...
Sam J.: “…Look at how many European indentured servants and children of early colonials ran off into the woods to be Indians, who were far more congenial than their square parents and masters…” It’s because they weren’t servants they were slaves. 50% did not survive their “servitude”.
Kirk: Well, duh… Let’s take a look at where 90% of your problem children come from in the Army: They’re not the children of the working class mid-range IQ types, at all. The majority of your really big problem children are your idjits like Manning (and, there’s an ironic surname for ya…). The really major troublemakers are all the high-IQ types who overthink things, and commit to courses of idiocy because, reasons… Reasons that the average person never has occur to...
Kirk: Coupla’ things here: Fussell may have known some things, but what he didn’t know about weapons could have filled volumes. The Allies had several fine equivalents to the 88; the thing they didn’t have was bloody-minded commanders like the Germans did, who put pistols to the heads of the Luftwaffe flak commanders who refused to do anything else besides shoot at airplanes, in order to get them to, y’know, use their guns on tanks. If I remember rightly, the Germans were assed-up...
Kirk: Modern civilization enables an awful lot of parasitism, which would have been culled from the gene pool back in the days of yore, when we still ran around in hunter-gatherer bands. Of course, the likely reason that we were stuck in that mode for so long boiled down to there not being enough “agents of change” in the population group, and let’s face the facts: The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is awfully damn attractive. Look at how many European indentured servants and children of...
Wan Wei Lin: Graham: Sounds like you are exploring the concepts of Human Geography, as I understand it, which considers the dominant influences on a society such as resources, culture, geography, etc. Your excellent observation on ‘dumbness’ also affects societies as an input since a base level average IQ is necessary to organize a civilization making it possible to develop a functional culture. Mindset theory apparently ignores this. From your examples of grade school and Scot Presbyterians,...
Graham: Not that it isn’t a world full of all types- gifted dilettantes wasting away drunk or doped, or designing software, moderately intelligence people making major contributions through sheer effort, and every type in between. But even then, as there is an environmental component that brings out capabilities, so there is an innate element that generates commitment, dedication, and willingness to work. We won’t create any of the successful types of people by blathering about anything that...
Graham: I went to grade school from junior kindergarten to grade 5 in one school in inner suburban Toronto, middle school in another, high school in a third. From September, 1974. It was good public education, to a fairly uniform standard in the Ontario of that day, so nobody had even theoretical grounds for egalitarian complaint. The schools were pretty much the same. Still ed theory had a good early grip. My mother made sure I got the old school grade 1 teacher from the two choices available. I suspect...
Kirk: I’ve never even heard of this drivel, before. And, reading about it, I don’t feel like that’s a major loss, either. The root problem to a lot of this crap is people wanting easy shortcuts, and thinking that there is some magical solution to things, something that they can do or put into effect that will enable the lazy and slovenly to succeed. Guess what? There isn’t anything that substitutes for hard work, dedication to craft, and commitment–Except more hard work,...
Graham: I think the phrase “growth mindset theory” may have finally soured me completely on educational or indeed workplace psychobabble, and I have had to develop a pretty high tolerance for it. More needed every year, perhaps every day up here. The engine of this is the American campus, but Canada has long been a cluster of enthusiastic lab rats. Monkeys, if you prefer. One exception to the engine point- Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at least for Canada the...
Graham: Ah, apparently he started out with really old surplus, a single shot Berdan which predated the Mosin Nagant. Something from the Krag/Martini/Snider/Chas sepot/Gras/Dreyse/early Mauser era of rifles. And invented by an American. I had never even heard of this rifle: https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Berdan_rifle
Graham: I don’t know what the actual laws were, but various memoirs and narrative history accounts down the years seem to suggest there were a surprisingly large amount of firearms in private hands in both Germany and the USSR in the run up to the war. Soviet sniper Vasily Zaitsev supposedly learned his skills from his father/uncle/grandfather or some such kinsman, out on the hunt in Siberia both using military surplus rifles. I wonder what registration system they had in place…
Graham: Interesting possibility- I hadn’t heard that, but the armed services of Canada were especially close to those of the US then [I mean, even by standards in which they have been pretty close most of the time] so I could see that happening. I wonder if it would be the same arrangement as recent times- embeds deployed with their American units to war in the Middle East, too. It came up in our media and political system and was more or less treated as normal and unremarkable even by the Liberal...
Adar: “Any chance your friend had served in Vietnam? I know Canadians have often joined the US armed forces and probably still do but a particularly large tranche went down to fight in Vietnam. IIRC, many joined the Marines but I always assumed others went to the Army.” During that era of the Vietnam War more Canadians were in the USA military than in the Canadian military. Of the only two foreign nationals that have won the Medal of Honor one was a Canadian. I have it on good authority that...
Lu An Li: Airsoft, paintball and laser tag in the USA are modern versions of the old German sport shooting.
Kirk: No, he was of my generation. His uncles, however, did serve in the US Army during Vietnam, both the Canadian and American ones. Irony was, as he put it, the Canadians actually saw combat, while his American ones got stuck in jobs where they didn’t–Which apparently served as a bit of a point of friendly harassment at family get-togethers. I gathered that the border where he grew up was… Somewhat permeable.
Graham: Kirk, Any chance your friend had served in Vietnam? I know Canadians have often joined the US armed forces and probably still do but a particularly large tranche went down to fight in Vietnam. IIRC, many joined the Marines but I always assumed others went to the Army. There may have been different policies on foreign recruitment that I don’t know about. Canadian Vietnam vets were long officially unpopular and unofficially popular here. Just curious. I am not sure the citizen versus subject...
Graham: Good interview, a little bit of history from a guy with an interesting perspective.
