Carter?
"Yes sir?"
What is it, Carter?
"An ocarina, sir"
Bring it up here!
I've had a really nice, small "English four-hole" unglazed terracotta pendant ocarina since I was a kid. They are actually really fun to play and very visceral, in a sense; the way you can get a chromatic scale from only four hole sizes combinatorially is intellectually satisfying and weirdly easy to learn.
It came with some sheet music that shows each note as a box with four dots in it that can be shown as either open or closed:
It sounds unusually sophisticated — perhaps even better after forty-plus years -- and it's actually a relatively new design. The ocarina is ancient but the four hole chromatic design dates from the 1960s, so it's newer than those Gretsch ocarinas in the article.
You can get them in all sorts of shapes and sizes -- Thomann sell hand-painted clay 4H ocarinas in the shapes of strawberries and clownfish.
I wish we'd been taught to play these in school instead of with those Aulos descant recorders that everyone in British schools, particularly teachers I imagine, grew to hate.
qbonnard 20 minutes ago [-]
I understand the intellectual satisfaction you're talking about. Now I'm wondering if we can push the minimalism to using these four holes with only two fingers. It seems doable from the diagram you link, using link fingers, and assuming half holes can be covered from the left side, and two holes can be covered with one finger at the same time. Would that work, or does the physicality of the instrument prevent that ?
nephihaha 1 hours ago [-]
I did recorder in primary school. One of the things I dimly remember along with certain games and rhymes. (I think in Irish schools they do the tin whistle.)
I gather a lot of schools are adopting ukuleles now. Ukes have a bad name, unfairly I think. (Listen to Eddie Vedder's "Ukulele Songs" album, very underrated). The ukulele is more forgiving than the recorder in my opinion.
dofm 29 minutes ago [-]
Music shops sell a lot of ukuleles. Huge numbers at Christmas, it's a very popular gift.
It's a fabulous instrument, nuanced and subtle, and you can buy beautiful instruments these days for really not much money at all.
But AFAIK its popularity in school as a teaching instrument has as much to do with Spongebob as it does its capability :-)
jhbadger 6 hours ago [-]
The US military thought a lot about how to entertain its soldiers because there was a lot of downtime during a war and most of them were draftees who didn't necessarily want to be there, Another thing they did was publish pocket paperback editions of books back when paperbacks were less common.
That still happens in America. Hike to a remote place, and get your friend to drop a keg in a mountain lake from his plane.
"Alpine Lake Keg Drop".
throw93949449 6 hours ago [-]
> most of them were draftees who didn't necessarily want to be there
It is called forced labour or slavery.
multjoy 5 hours ago [-]
It wasn’t slavery as they were paid and could be expected to be discharged at the cessation of hostilities.
Conscription is as old as society itself.
crote 3 hours ago [-]
> It wasn’t slavery as they were paid
Being paid some amount of money doesn't magically make it not slavery. Obvious counterpoint: what if a plantation owner "paid" each slave a single modern-day penny a year, would that make it okay?
> and could be expected to be discharged at the cessation of hostilities
Being let go when you're no longer needed doesn't stop it being slavery either. Would you no longer be a slave if the plantation owner released you after the harvest season? You'd just be re-captured for the next harvest, of course - either by the same owner or a different one.
> Conscription is as old as society itself.
So is slavery. That doesn't make it okay.
Definitions of forced labour, like the ILO Forced Labour Convention of 1930 for example, have to explicitly include "by the way, it's totally okay if it is done as part of mandatory military service" clauses for a reason.
There are obviously differences between traditional slavery and conscription, but conscription is still way closer to forced labour than it is to consensual service. Just look at what happens when you try to leave, for one!
danaris 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, to be fair, so is slavery.
I think it's important to acknowledge that conscription is a violation of human rights, and absolutely a violation of human autonomy and dignity.
The reason it exists is because historically, the primary source of military power has been the number of armed humans you can put on the battlefield. That's much less true now, but even in WWII the technology wasn't yet up to that point.
And while the US did not end up being materially at risk in WWII (aside from some very small exceptions like Pearl Harbor), that was not a guarantee going in. The Nazis were hellbent on wiping out all opposition to them, and the fear that, if Europe was lost, they would cross the ocean to attack us was not at all crazy. Furthermore, our allies absolutely were under existential threat—and in such a situation, it's frankly irresponsible of a nation not to use conscription if that's actually likely to make a difference.
Either saying "conscription is slavery, therefore it is never justifiable" or "conscription is nothing like slavery, soldiers get treated well" ignores enough of the truth that they're misleading at best. Sometimes you really do have to deal with nuance.
dmbrThnYou 3 hours ago [-]
You have the option to emigrate as opposed to fight, which is fundamentally what differentiates conscription from slavery (and human rights violations). You're not legally obligated to stay in your country.
throw734848 41 minutes ago [-]
Hello?
Germany introduced law, your are required to notify ministry and get permission, of you leave country for couple of weeks.
Ukraine closed border for men in like 10 seconds.
danaris 3 hours ago [-]
Um...what?
Desertion has, historically, been a capital crime. Trying to paint conscription as not being a kind of captivity because "you're not legally obligated to stay in your country" is at best wildly disingenuous, and at worst just flat-out wrong.
I think you might need to take quite a bit more time to consider this issue, lest you prove your username much truer than you probably want.
pfdietz 3 hours ago [-]
> Desertion has, historically, been a capital crime.
And it remained so for the US in WW2, although the sentence was carried out just once.
Major General Norman "Dutch" Cota, who was at the execution, called it "the toughest 15 minutes of his life". For context, Cota was also present at the bloodbath on Omaha Beach, where he famously rallied troops.
dmbrThnYou 3 hours ago [-]
You can absolutely emigrate prior to the conscription coming to fruition. It has to be permanent, or it's draft evasion, but it is perfectly legal.
Sorry for the edits confusing things. I can see earlier how you thought I meant desertion as opposed to emigration.
throe94944i 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, they were paid!! Plastic ocarinas!
freedomben 5 hours ago [-]
You're both right. We don't want to water down the term "slavery" by using it for draftees, but it is a form of temporary slavery. Slave's have always been "paid" in the form of room and board (however meager), but it's still slavery.
dctoedt 5 hours ago [-]
> It is called forced labour or slavery.
In war, people who tolerate military conscription and discipline will conquer those who're slaves to pigheaded "you're not the boss of ME!" individualism.
It'd be nice if humans would voluntarily abandon war someday. But a corollary of the First Commandment is to face facts.
crote 3 hours ago [-]
> In war, people who tolerate military conscription and discipline will conquer those who're slaves to pigheaded "you're not the boss of ME!" individualism.
Sure, right up until it leads to fragging. During the Vietnam War about a thousand superiors were killed by their subjects. You can't give someone weapons, try to force them into a suicidal mission, and not expect them to use it to stop the mission. Give someone only a hammer and everything looks like a nail...
cucumber3732842 4 hours ago [-]
That doesn't make it not forced though.
Most of this sub thread people who are unwilling to say "yeah it's forced labor and that's fine considering the details" doing mental gymnastics to make it not forced.
derektank 4 hours ago [-]
Just because something is forced, doesn’t make it slavery. I’m forced to pay taxes; that doesn’t make me a slave. Nor was a tenant farmer in the Middle Ages when required to provide corvée. I think the primary objection in this thread is to the use of the word slavery, which is simply not the same thing.
bloomingeek 4 hours ago [-]
I agree with your account, the problem is how many perceive slavery. Here in the south (USA) many still think the slaves before the Civil War were "happy". They obviously weren't slaves. Until ALL mankind looks slavery fully in the eye for understanding, we will continue to undervalue those other then ourselves.
throw734848 37 minutes ago [-]
I remember story how Irish migrants were used to digg deep holes. Walls could collapse any moment, and bury the crew alive. Slaves were deemed too valuable to risk in such jobs!
cwmoore 3 hours ago [-]
I don’t think there can be a bright line between acceptable and unacceptable coercion of liberties.
p-e-w 3 hours ago [-]
> Nor was a tenant farmer in the Middle Ages when required to provide corvée.
Many historians now concede that there is little to no meaningful difference between various forms of feudal servitude and slavery.
Slaves in the later Roman Empire also had certain rights, including the right to buy their own freedom in many cases. That doesn’t mean they weren’t slaves.
derektank 32 seconds ago [-]
I will have to disagree with these historians. There is a fundamental difference between having legal personhood and being chattel. To be bound is not the same thing as to be owned.
TomK32 4 hours ago [-]
In peacetimes, yes, but if it's defensive war I don't see many arguments against a draft, it can't be generalized though.
crote 3 hours ago [-]
If there's anything worth defending, people will volunteer to defend it.
mitthrowaway2 12 minutes ago [-]
Seems like there's a clear free-rider problem, the volunteers make the sacrifice and the non-volunteers reap the benefits.
esafak 55 minutes ago [-]
What if people do but not in enough numbers? Farewell, sweet country!
WJW 13 minutes ago [-]
If the country doesn't have enough people to defend it, perhaps it's good and just that some other community gets to control the territory? A country isn't really anything except for its people, after all.
p-e-w 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed, and there are many historical examples of this.
Today’s average Western nation-state tends to be a rathole that spits into the faces of its citizens every single day, until the moment the state is under attack, at which point everyone is told that they owe their lives to their sacred motherland that has done so much for them.
throw734848 40 minutes ago [-]
There is shit ton of opposition, people are literally defending themselves with guns from kidnappers !
stevage 3 hours ago [-]
Interesting that they don't seem to have had much cultural impact. I've never heard of these, never seen them in war films. You don't hear songs wistfully using a wartime ocarina or referring to them.
zulux 10 minutes ago [-]
Does this explain why all the kids in the States got recorders after the war? It's still a thing in 4th grade for most kids in public school.
tomcam 2 hours ago [-]
Same. I was just able to order an original kit on eBay for $40, so demand isn’t high.
brudgers 21 hours ago [-]
That explains the Joey's ocarina in the movie Stalag 17.
jrop 2 hours ago [-]
An old favorite. "How stupid can you get, animal?"
warmedcookie 4 hours ago [-]
Good movie, time to rewatch
5 hours ago [-]
snorkel 5 hours ago [-]
Back in the day in elementary school we were each issued a tonette
microgpt 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 16:37:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It came with some sheet music that shows each note as a box with four dots in it that can be shown as either open or closed:
https://ocarinasongbook.com/fingering-charts/four-hole/
It sounds unusually sophisticated — perhaps even better after forty-plus years -- and it's actually a relatively new design. The ocarina is ancient but the four hole chromatic design dates from the 1960s, so it's newer than those Gretsch ocarinas in the article.
You can get them in all sorts of shapes and sizes -- Thomann sell hand-painted clay 4H ocarinas in the shapes of strawberries and clownfish.
I wish we'd been taught to play these in school instead of with those Aulos descant recorders that everyone in British schools, particularly teachers I imagine, grew to hate.
I gather a lot of schools are adopting ukuleles now. Ukes have a bad name, unfairly I think. (Listen to Eddie Vedder's "Ukulele Songs" album, very underrated). The ukulele is more forgiving than the recorder in my opinion.
It's a fabulous instrument, nuanced and subtle, and you can buy beautiful instruments these days for really not much money at all.
But AFAIK its popularity in school as a teaching instrument has as much to do with Spongebob as it does its capability :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Editions
Put beer into drop tanks on Spitfires
https://planehistoria.com/flying-pubs-spitfires-flew-beer-to...
"Alpine Lake Keg Drop".
It is called forced labour or slavery.
Conscription is as old as society itself.
Being paid some amount of money doesn't magically make it not slavery. Obvious counterpoint: what if a plantation owner "paid" each slave a single modern-day penny a year, would that make it okay?
> and could be expected to be discharged at the cessation of hostilities
Being let go when you're no longer needed doesn't stop it being slavery either. Would you no longer be a slave if the plantation owner released you after the harvest season? You'd just be re-captured for the next harvest, of course - either by the same owner or a different one.
> Conscription is as old as society itself.
So is slavery. That doesn't make it okay.
Definitions of forced labour, like the ILO Forced Labour Convention of 1930 for example, have to explicitly include "by the way, it's totally okay if it is done as part of mandatory military service" clauses for a reason.
There are obviously differences between traditional slavery and conscription, but conscription is still way closer to forced labour than it is to consensual service. Just look at what happens when you try to leave, for one!
I think it's important to acknowledge that conscription is a violation of human rights, and absolutely a violation of human autonomy and dignity.
The reason it exists is because historically, the primary source of military power has been the number of armed humans you can put on the battlefield. That's much less true now, but even in WWII the technology wasn't yet up to that point.
And while the US did not end up being materially at risk in WWII (aside from some very small exceptions like Pearl Harbor), that was not a guarantee going in. The Nazis were hellbent on wiping out all opposition to them, and the fear that, if Europe was lost, they would cross the ocean to attack us was not at all crazy. Furthermore, our allies absolutely were under existential threat—and in such a situation, it's frankly irresponsible of a nation not to use conscription if that's actually likely to make a difference.
Either saying "conscription is slavery, therefore it is never justifiable" or "conscription is nothing like slavery, soldiers get treated well" ignores enough of the truth that they're misleading at best. Sometimes you really do have to deal with nuance.
Germany introduced law, your are required to notify ministry and get permission, of you leave country for couple of weeks.
Ukraine closed border for men in like 10 seconds.
Desertion has, historically, been a capital crime. Trying to paint conscription as not being a kind of captivity because "you're not legally obligated to stay in your country" is at best wildly disingenuous, and at worst just flat-out wrong.
I think you might need to take quite a bit more time to consider this issue, lest you prove your username much truer than you probably want.
And it remained so for the US in WW2, although the sentence was carried out just once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Slovik
Major General Norman "Dutch" Cota, who was at the execution, called it "the toughest 15 minutes of his life". For context, Cota was also present at the bloodbath on Omaha Beach, where he famously rallied troops.
Sorry for the edits confusing things. I can see earlier how you thought I meant desertion as opposed to emigration.
In war, people who tolerate military conscription and discipline will conquer those who're slaves to pigheaded "you're not the boss of ME!" individualism.
It'd be nice if humans would voluntarily abandon war someday. But a corollary of the First Commandment is to face facts.
Sure, right up until it leads to fragging. During the Vietnam War about a thousand superiors were killed by their subjects. You can't give someone weapons, try to force them into a suicidal mission, and not expect them to use it to stop the mission. Give someone only a hammer and everything looks like a nail...
Most of this sub thread people who are unwilling to say "yeah it's forced labor and that's fine considering the details" doing mental gymnastics to make it not forced.
Many historians now concede that there is little to no meaningful difference between various forms of feudal servitude and slavery.
Slaves in the later Roman Empire also had certain rights, including the right to buy their own freedom in many cases. That doesn’t mean they weren’t slaves.
Today’s average Western nation-state tends to be a rathole that spits into the faces of its citizens every single day, until the moment the state is under attack, at which point everyone is told that they owe their lives to their sacred motherland that has done so much for them.