Backroom Errata

[Montmorency]

concupiscible
Concupiscible is a word meaning "worthy of being desired" or worthy of being lusted after. This archaic adjective can also refer to passionately desiring something. It does make one think of bodice rippers or possibly … literotica. Or, you know, of Channing Tatum with his shirt off in Magic Mike, which we would definitely describe as concupiscible.

https://www.dictionary.com/e/s/archa...#concupiscible

Good. One topic you probably have special familiarity with that others here would be interested in, but would find it challenging to navigate on their own, is how Ukrainian media is covering recent aspects of the country's relationship with America. If you have any comments we have a suitable thread for them.

As an historian approaching secondary sources I have found that the best was to approach ellipsis is to ask "what has been omitted and why?"

But you didn't do that, which shows the very process behind your supposition to be supposititious.

I said the way the source was quoted made it look suspect, then I quoted a professional review which suggested that the author has a tendency to make miss-representations in the book.

Unless you can support your reading from the review, you are the one guilty of misrepresentation here; the line you quote (without citation) gives no such implication. If it were the case that disagreement over academic conclusions eo ipso equated to misrepresentation by one party, scholarship across all fields of inquiry would hardly be possible.

If it's long either quote it in full or quote part of it and paraphrase.

Partial quotations are properly used if they materially represent the substance of the quote or highlighted meaning. No one holds that partial quotation is inherently misleading, but if someone did it would not be rational for them to apply such a standard knowing the prevalence of partial quotation. If one does not believe partial quotation is always misleading, one would have to make a case on the facts of a specific instance. You still have not.

I am not being absurd and accusing me of such is just an insult.

if one were even to follow your reasoning, it would refute itself as bare pretense. One could imagine finding a second review, a review in existence saying, "Gropman is widely considered in the field to be prone to dishonestly presenting sources to the opposite of their meaning." But one could not point to such a review to justify their initial characterization of the quote as misleading if it came to their attention after they had attacked the quote - that would be ex ante reasoning, a sharpshooter fallacy.

Malpractice warrants condemnation. You cannot be ignorant of the implications of falsely and maliciously accusing a historian of dishonest historiography.

Sometimes a critique of poor historiography is just a critique of poor historiography.

If you were more self-aware you would reflect on how this line redounds to you.

That was always going to ellit and obtuse response.

How could I take this as anything other than an admission that you have been purposely obtuse with (i.e. trolling) me?


I went to the trouble of getting access to the original work, The Air Force Integrates 1949-1964. The relevant section is "The Freeman Field Mutiny." The unit (477th Bombardment Group) in question had since its formation seen conflict between segregationist white officers - including the commanders - and black officers. The black officers were denied access to the white officers' club (barred under penalty of arrest). This was a widespread policy under First Air Force Commander General Frank Hunter, and a colonel under his command had been reprimanded in 1943 by the Chief of Air Staff in Washington when black officers put segregation to the test (they didn't even have a colored club) and were arrested. The surprisingly perspicacious military regulations prohibited racial segregation of officers' facilities, on the account that

...the idea of racial segregation is disliked by almost all Negroes and downright hated by most. White people and Negro . . . fail to have a common understanding of the meaning of segregation . . . . The protesting Negro . . . knows from experience that separate facilities are rarely equal, and that too often racial segregation rests on a belief in racial inferiority.

But Hunter didn't take this too seriously, protesting that "The doctrine of social equality cannot be forced on a spirited young pilot preparing for combat." Also in 1943 under Hunter, Colonel William Colman shot his black chauffeur because he didn't want a black chauffeur and was given a light punishment.

Low unit readiness, refusal to promote any blacks over whites (one calculated loophole was to designate all blacks as trainees and only whites as supervisors), and the officers' club issue led to open insubordination when the unit was transferred to inadequate basing (movement back and forth between Godman and Freeman Fields) and the whites tried to formalize segregation of officers. In summary, in April 1945 the blacks forced their way into the white club en masse; 61 were arrested, 3 later court-martialed. On following days even more officers attempted mass entry and were arrested. The incident gained national notoriety in Congress and the press. Within days the commanders attempted to force all officers to sign consent to segregated facilities. All whites signed, but some blacks refused. These were arrested, leading to the renewed insubordination of almost all black officers, with a resultant closing of of the white club as they tried to gain ingress.

How this story ends is not the issue and can be studied to independent satisfaction. Here is the place to reemphasize the total lack of cause to suspect any manipulation of primary material on the author's part to insert racist sentiment. Indeed, below is the full excerpt around the prompting screenshot, which is sourced to a "Rpt. of Racial Situation" on Freeman Field with scope of the few weeks before the mutiny:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Some whites made "disgruntled remarks" in the presence of
blacks, but all those put in the report had been made at the
white officers' club. They included, for example, the following
remarks:

c. "If one of them makes a crack at my wife, laughs or whistles
at-her, like I saw them do to some white girls downtown,
so help me, I'll kill him."

d. "I killed two of them in my home town, and it wouldn't
bother me to do it again."

e. "I went to the show on this base my first and last time
because I'm afraid I'll get into trouble some night when
they start making remarks about the white actors and actresses:
besides that, the smell in the show is terrible."

h. "Their club is better than ours. Why don't they stay in
their place."

i. "That isn't just what they are looking for. What they
want to do is stand at the same bar with you, and be able to
talk with your wife. They are insisting on equality . . . . "75

That is, the source material listed what it described as "disgruntled remarks" from white officers, prompted by Negro agitation for desegregated facilities. Gropman quotes these remarks - not idly or coincidentally assembled - from the report. For quote (i) to have been deceptively included one would have to believe that an officer signaled approval of blacks talking to his wife as equals, and that this was included in a list of negative racial remarks from other white officers. If one does not believe this, then there is no way in which the quote could have been materially misrepresented. To have advanced on nothing but sentiment any notion that this remark must have instead been supportive of the desegregationist aim the white officer class from Hunter down had long been unified in suppressing among blacks, is indefensible. In the worst case, you did not identify any conceivable misrepresentation but chose to level a spurious character assault regardless. To continue in this vein would be repugnant for any so-called scholar, a confirmation of bad faith. Complaints of mistreatment at my hands would hold little weight in that light, and would be deserving of more than disgruntled remarks.

Indeed, it is possible - but I can't remember the last time you actually argued against my point directly. Remember the time you spent pages accusing me of being transphobic just because I said I could appreciate why some fathers are more worried about their daughters safety than being socially inclusive to complete strangers? Remember how you you interpreted my critique of Beskar's appeal to gender-fluidity as transphobic when my point was actually that trans people are rarely gender-fluid and are often actually very much gender-conforming, just not their physical gender?

I remember that your statements entailed rather more than that, which I delineated carefully, and I never accused you of transphobia. You are rewriting the terms of a discussion after the fact.

Your combative style means you attack the other person on what you percieve their platform to be, rather than trying to understand that platform.

I see a reflexive refusal on your part to grapple with flaws in your positions as they have been stated.

So you expect others to raise certain arguments for you so that you can respond to them? See above about attacking percieved targets. I'm not you, I don't understand you, I don't know what you want.

If you want to discuss something raise it, if nobody argues against it then it may just be because we all agree with you and aren't interested in debating it.

It shouldn't be difficult to grasp. For example, if I post about a proposed policy, I will privately consider pros and cons, and open questions, as well as potential challenges to both the pros and cons from various perspectives. I may or may not post about some of these, which in full would look like a rather dense and meandering wall of text. I would however be prepared to discuss these points should someone else present an opportunity. Insofar as there is any response it almost never works out that way here, so I should probably leave well enough alone.

The question is malformed, because as I said Anglo-Saxon society doesn't work like that.

It is a mere logical necessity of hierarchy.If you are thinking through any attachments you have to Anglo-Saxon culture, step back. Some propositions:

A. Churls are lower in status than thanes.
B. Slaves are lower in status than churls.
C. Churls and above are free.
D. Slaves are not free.
E. Churls are the lowest-status men who are free.

A churl is simply anyone not a noble or a slave,

What is a whole number between 1 and 3? There is only one whole number between 1 and 3.

3. Suggesting it's generous to condescend to use consistent orthography is just another insult. Talk about not being able to back down.

I bet you and all your colleagues routinely use "king" instead of "cyning" alongside Old English words, because king is a generic term with the same meaning.

Right, and there's no evidence for this - it's a 19th Century invention.

What's the evidence against this? I have presented evidence for, and common sense agrees.

The ONLY thing all churls have in common is being free and not being noble and some of them DO NOT directly work the land. Do you not see how different that is to later Norman society, and how it is different to the plight of the modern American wage-slave?

This account on its terms alone maps pretty well to the broad middle class today, which ranges from garbage collectors to oncologists. Why do you reject my defense of the weak analogy and inadvertently argue for the strong?

Let's put this another way - you are a churl - but so is Warren Buffet.

Is Warren Buffet economically constrained?

In fact, the more appropriate interpretation of the churl with regards to modern American society (so much as it is applicable) is that all Americans are churls because all Americans are equal before the law. What you are trying to do is to compare wealthy Americans today to a legally distinct class that existed over a thousand year ago.

You're abusing language. Literal formal peerage is not what's relevant.

The insight into modern society is banal, the connection to Anglo-Saxon society is misconstrued. I simply pointed this out and now we're having a big fight about how I'm a bad historian?

You just like picking fights.

As I said, I didn't post that for its insight - countless others, including Obama, have made it in more or less detail - but because I thought you would like it.

Right now this is two separate "fights." If you're a bad historian it's not because of obtuseness over the content of the churl analogy.

I don't believe you, on either point. We've spent weeks litigating it and you seem unrepentant.

Yes, I'm saying I won't bother litigating your perception of me going forward. How much appetite I have to continue any other dispute is still indeterminate.

I just clicked the link and realised it was more screed, and you'd already accused me of supporting racism on my birthday. Yet, great present, more work.

What? It's a link to a White House press release. I didn't accuse you of supporting racism.

No, I get it. You don't get the point I'm trying to make - so your supposedly "good argument" doesn't address itself to my thesis. So you've demonstrated that you either don't understand my argument or you want me to make a different one.

Yes, I was saying your pedantry was misplaced and sketched a better attempt.

Like I said, if you don't like my contributions or value them (and you never do) why do you keep soliciting them?

Sometimes I have (I don't know how valuable 'America be craycray' is, but I'll take it). It's been a rough spot lately.

I gave you may opinion in my fist most - banal point - completely misunderstands Anglo-Saxon society and here we are days later and you're trying to argue against my interpretation of the historiography making points that are directly contradicted by the sources you quote.

I've covered this.

You're still tangling up wealth, power, and class in a totally anachronistic way. The medieval King has wealth and power because of his class, his social status, he doesn't get that status because of his wealth and power.. You really need to accept what I'm telling you when I tell you that America doesn't really have an "Upper Class" as it is traditionally understood, otherwise you're going to keep making these anachronistic comparisons.

Trump is a churl.

By anachronistically insisting that archaic class distinctions and modern class distinctions would have to map to each other one to one to be compared at all you make the error you accuse me of.

I meant "oppressed and immiserated". If I wrote that and sent it to my supervisor I'd get it back with the last word triple underlined and the word "miserable" above it with multiple question marks.

Some of the sources I quoted use the word immiserated, and it's hardly an unfamiliar word. El gustando no disputando.

You've quoted sources that demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of the most basic concepts we are discussing - you continue to hold to an American concept of class as being wealth-derived.

Are you saying the sources are wrong about something, or that I've misunderstood them? To clarify, I never said Anglo-Saxon class was based on wealth. Modern class is largely wealth-based.

The fact is you're making a rear-guard action over a point that's clearly no longer accepted - i.e. that churls were the "lower class" of Anglo-Saxon society when in reality they were not, some of them had not only legal but actual rights and privileges in Anglo-Saxon society, some did not. Some were economically constrained (geburs) but many were not. Despite which they constituted a single legal class in society.

The best I can give you is that you're opposing an equivocation of status and class that no one fouled over. To say that someone is lower-status is not to imply that they have no rights or resources. If there were a world in which the worst-off lived like kings as we know them, it would still be correct to call them lower or lowest-status.

This is not quite the case in Europe, although the aristocracy have become less and less powerful over the last five decades in particular.

I've linked in this very thread how the majority of wealth in American and European countries is inherited. There is more to aristocracy than a certain title.

I certainly wasn't nice to you yesterday, but then again you insinuated I was racist just because I critiqued a source on racism in the American Air Force, and it was my birthday.

I didn't, but if you're frequently in the position of thinking I'm insinuating bigotry on your part, well - guilty conscience perhaps?

Why don't you just avoid phrases like "deserve ridicule", especially when I've quoted a review of said book which indicates far more serious forms of misrepresentation in the work. Also, do you actually think I'm being ridiculous, if so why do you bother?

I won't bother. You've lost credibility.

Have you considered just asking for clarification?

I do that frequently, and then you complain I'm accusing you of something.

Also - have you considered that you hold beliefs that I consider patently ridiculous? Like the belief that it's possible to differentiate between right and wrong without appeal to any higher power? I could give you a long, well sourced, argument on how a conceptual "higher power" is necessary to be able to define something as "right" or "wrong" and the difference between the objectively right and human perception which is only "subjectively right". Such an argument would, however, be utterly pointless between us because you would reject it on unprovable first principles - you would first dispute my definition of "right" and then you would argue that there is no discernible "higher power" and therefore I must be wrong.

Whatever the case, your argument would be not even wrong.

The only reason to have such a discussion would be to try to better understand each other's positions but given you have indicated you have no interest in exploring philosophical beliefs you reject. So - utterly pointless.

I have interest, but you're not that person.