Monday, June 06, 2011

Caribou Barbie and Paul Revere

Okay, so Caribou Barbie got the Paul Revere thing as confused as George W. Bush, who once proclaimed to a worker at a cafe, "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family." But she had a point to more than her head. That point being that Paul Revere *was* warning that the British were coming to take the guns -- of the Massachusetts militia. A *real* militia, formed by local governments for self defense purposes, and their guns were kept in *arsenals*, not at home. Just like our National Guard today. Dudes don't get to take their military weapons home with them from the Guard arsenals, yo.

So anyhow, the Brits decided these local militias were arming for something other than peaceful purposes and decided to go seize those weapons from the arsenals, and in the famous tale Paul Revere supposedly rode to warn the colonials that the British were coming to seize their guns -- from the arsenal (a.k.a. "National Guard armory"), not their personal weapons from their homes, because if people did own a personal weapon it was likely a fowling piece useless for military purposes. Which means the Brits *were* going out to seize guns. But not people's personal guns. Militia guns stored in the colonial equivalent of National Guard armories.

So in a word, Caribou Barbie's point was mostly on her head, but there is at least a *little* truth to the notion that Paul Revere did ride to protect the right of the National Guard to have guns in their armories. Oh wait, that wasn't what Caribou Barbie was saying at all, was it?

- Badtux the Pointless Penguin

10 comments:

  1. It's not so much what CB said, it's just that she said it. The woman has a voice that irritates a real man all the way to his family jewels. It is like raking finger nails over a black board. Every time I hear her start yapping I want to look for a sock to stuff in her pie hole.
    The good part of it is that she is a media Ho and hopefully the money will be to great for her to give up to run for a job that she is not even remotely qualified to talk about much less try to perform.

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  3. Erm, no, the militia was *not* the army. The British Army was the army -- full-time paid professional soldiers. Same thing with the Continental Army that was formed after the events of 1775 -- full-time paid professional soldiers. The militia was the National Guard of the era, part-time soldiers called out to deal with situations such as natural disasters, slave rebellions, and Indian insurrections. They were also called out to deal with invasions, but were notoriously unreliable, generally going home as soon as the British left the area they mustered from and quick to throw down their (armory-issued) weapons and run for home upon seeing the first glimpse of British steel coming at them as fast as sturdy German legs could trot. Just read George Washington's letters about the militia. Please. They're pretty clear about how useless he found them as a military force, they were part-time citizen soldiers whose limited training was about dealing with slave rebellions and Indian uprisings, not take on professional soldiers.

    And the question of why the 2nd Amendment was added to the Consitution is pointless, since I support an expansive reading of the Bill of Rights including the 2nd Amendment, an expansive reading which is based on the Forgotten 9th. That is, if there is the least ambiguity in the text such that some interpretation could support there being a right, I support it as being a right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights even if the founders had no such intent. In that case I feel the proper resolution would be a Constitutional amendment, not simply saying "it's not a right 'cause I say so, nya nya".

    - Badtux the History Penguin

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  4. It's not so much what CB said, it's just that she said it. The woman has a voice that irritates a real man all the way to his family jewels. It is like raking finger nails over a black board. Every time I hear her start yapping I want to look for a sock to stuff in her pie hole.

    Which is another reason why it's stupid, this subconscious lust that her 60+ year-old male followers have about fucking Moosilla. Because after the grinding was done (90 seconds they'd last, I betcha) then you'd have to listen to her. You'd have to strangle the cnut. At least then you could have sex with the corpse.

    they were part-time citizen soldiers whose limited training was about dealing with slave rebellions and Indian uprisings, not take on professional soldiers.

    If you're fighting a rabble (slaves, Injuns, labour strikers) all you need is a bigger and slightly better organized rabble. If you're taking on an army, with guys who know how to do things like lay down covering fire, enfilade and organize supply lines to bring up new ammo in a timely fashion, you need an army. Ask the poor sods in the Libyan rabbles, who can't defeat Quadaffi's African Hessians.

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  5. If you're fighting a rabble (slaves, Injuns, labour strikers) all you need is a bigger and slightly better organized rabble

    And armed with military weapons rather than civilian weapons. Don't forget that. Military weapons of the day were quite different from civilian weapons. Civilian weapons were either slow-loading long rifles or fowling pieces (those things with the big bell on the front for loading with loose shot, basically a shotgun). Military weapons were muskets -- fast-loading smoothbore slug-throwers that could get off four or five rounds in the same amount of time it took to get off one round with a rifle. Muskets with bayonets. *SHINY* bayonets if properly maintained. Shiny *SCARY* bayonets, which if they were coming at you tended to cause you to decide you wanted to be somewhere else, rapidly, as fast as your feet would carry you. Needless to say, a barely-armed rabble faced with a well-armed barely-better-than-a-rabble coming their way tended to say "Feets, gets me out of here!" and disperse rapidly as fast as their legs could haul them away.

    All of which made the militia far different from professional militaries of the day, which were drilled in the sort of maneuvering needed to cope with the military weapons of the day and which would cut militia to shreds if the militia didn't run -- and the militia knew it. Which is why the Battle of Long Island was such a fiasco, basically the Brits used typical strategies for dealing with ambushes (they ambushed the ambushes, basically, sending their skirmishers out to probe for the ambushes then taking out the ambushes from behind) and the militia broke and ran because they were completely undone, their only usable strategy was unworkable and they had nothing to fall back on. George Washington reputedly threw his hat down in the mud and let out a string of curses that would have caused dignified ladies to blanche and seek their fainting couches if they'd overhead what he said when the reports came back of just how bad a fiasco that one was...

    Anyhow that's the deal with militia vs. professional soldiers in that era. It was all about training. Without training, you couldn't even load your weapon rapidly... supposedly trained musketmen could get off four shots per minute. Barely-trained ones would be lucky to get off one shot per minute. Four times as much lead in the air tends to be a bit of a force multiplier for the side puttin' that lead in the air. Just sayin' ;).

    - Badtux the History Penguin

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  6. Now the righties are trying to edit Wikipedia so that Palin doesn't look as stupid. From whose point of view, I have no idea.

    But it makes me wonder why you would want a leader for whom you must scramble to edit history and the facts whenever she opens her mouth.

    On another blog, I likened that kind of life to the Twilight Zone episode where Billy Mumy had magical powers.

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  7. But it makes me wonder why you would want a leader for whom you must scramble to edit history and the facts whenever she opens her mouth.

    Same as with any cult of a guru or other mind-controlling whack-job, Nan. Once you've committed yourself to The One, you don't bother to examine the facts. You line up to defend The Leader. I think that's why reich-wingers on blog comments are always snarking about Hopey being "The One" for liberals. It's projection. THEY are slavish followers of their cult leader, so to deflect the bad feelings that gives them about themselves, they attribute that characteristic to lefties.

    It's another bug in the software of human psychology, the way religion is. We're hard-wired (maybe that would make it a hardware bug, now that I think about it) to follow the leader of the monkey troop because that's how all those generations of stupid monkeys survived, by committing themselves to do what the smart money screeched. Now, 5 million years later, the descendants of the stupid monkeys are willing to edit Wikipedia (which I regard as useful only for uncontroversial topics like the history of the Roman Empire, since so many people want to tweak it for their ideological ends) to defend Sarah's screeching.

    We must not think bad thoughts, eh?

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  9. "The Boston Globe quoted Brendan McConville, a Boston University history professor admitting that Palin got her Revere facts right.

    What she's saying there is essentially right...When Paul Revere was stopped by British soldiers the night of his famous ride, he did say to them that the countryside is mobilizing and you've lost the element of surprise.
    "

    "Andrew Malcolm of the L.A. Times also backed up Sarah's account

    That the Republican non-candidate, in fact, knew more about the actual facts of Revere's midnight ride than all those idiots unknowingly revealing their own ignorance by laughing at her faux faux pas? How secretly embarrassing this must be, to be forced to face that you're dumber than the reputed dummy.

    The well-known fable is Revere's late-night ride to warn fellow revolutionaries that...the British were coming. Less known, obviously, is the rest of the evening's events in which Revere was captured by said redcoats and did indeed defiantly warn them of the awakened militia awaiting their arrival ahead and of the American Revolution's inevitable victory.

    Palin knew this. The on-scene reporters did not and ran off like Revere to alert the world to Palin's latest mis-speak, which wasn't.

    Like a number of famous faux gaffes in American politics, the facts of the situation no longer really matter.
    "

    Both quotes from:
    http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/06/big_media_eats_crow_while_palin_plays_gotcha.html

    David Duff

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  10. Uhm, Duffer. It doesn't matter, what Palin said was utter gibberish even if she did have a basic fact right (the fact that the Brits were marching to seize guns -- albeit not *personal* firearms). English is clearly not the lady's native language given that she mangles it worse than George W. Bush did. I wonder if "Snowbilly" is a language?

    - Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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