Quotulatiousness

May 18, 2013

The micro-state of Sealand

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Liberty, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Thomas Hodgkinson reports on his week-long visit to the tiny nation of Sealand:

Sealand

Seven miles off the coast of Suffolk, there is a country. It isn’t a very big country. In fact, its surface area extends to no more than 6,000 square feet, which is about twice the size of a tennis court. You won’t find it on Google Maps and it isn’t a member of Nato or, indeed, the EU. But it exists. And I know, because I’ve been there.

[. . .]

The reason for this suspicion of strangers in general lies in the violent, picaresque nature of its past. Sealand was built in 1943 by the Royal Navy as an anti-aircraft fortress designed to shoot down Luftwaffe planes. In those days it was equipped with two 94mm Vickers heavy anti-aircraft guns and two 40mm Bofors light anti-aircraft guns, and manned by 120 seamen crammed into accommodation in the hollow concrete towers. It was known as HM Fort Roughs, or Roughs Tower for short. Abandoned after the War, it gathered rust and guano, a gloomy relic of conflict, until the era of pirate radio in the 1960s.

Then two rival entrepreneurs competed for possession, regarding the fort as the perfect place (since it was outside the three-mile zone that then constituted British territorial waters) from which to broadcast pop music to a grateful generation of teenagers. The piratical pair were the long-haired Irish chancer Ronan O’Rahilly, of Radio Caroline fame, and one Roy Bates, a cravat-wearing former Army major.

Each time one of them put men on Roughs Tower, the other would send people to eject them, sometimes forcibly. It was a question of who was prepared to go further, and the answer turned out to be the Englishman. For Bates, the solitary fortress became far more than a radio project. It became an obsession that would absorb not only his life, but also the lives of his wife and children.

The key thing, he knew, was to maintain a presence. With even one occupant, Roughs Tower was tough to take. But Roy couldn’t afford a guard, so instead he plucked his 14-year-old son Michael out of school and put him up there, sometimes with his daughter Penny, sometimes with his wife Joan. For Michael, this was a welcome escape from the dreary rigours of a public-school education, but as he confided to me during a long lunch on-shore after my visit, “I expected it to last six months, not 40-something years”.

Sealand2

US Navy’s UAV conducts touch-and-go landing on carrier deck

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

It’s still a work in progress: perfect conditions, no particular weather concerns, totally clear flight deck, but it shows that unmanned aircraft are becoming capable of much more than they’ve done so far:

An X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS) demonstrator conducts a touch and go landing on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77), marking the first time any unmanned aircraft has completed a touch and go landing at sea. George H.W. Bush is conducting training operations in the Atlantic Ocean.

The booming market in pre-owned high fashion clothing

Filed under: Business, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:14

A market I have to admit I was almost completely ignorant about, but it’s poised to become a very busy, competitive market if it can overcome a few hurdles:

There’s been a digital explosion in the market for pre-owned fashion. In the past year, we’ve seen a veritable land grab in the online consignment and resale space with the number of “re-commerce” sites now exceeding 50 — and many more, no doubt, incubating in Silicon Valley, New York, London and beyond. Several market levels are being addressed: mall/high street (Threadflip, Tradesy), thrift (LikeTwice, NiftyThrifty), upmarket (TheRealReal), haute vintage (Byronesque) and boutique (ReFashioner, my own company).

It may seem like these sites are dealing in a mere by-product of the fashion industry. But no, this is the product. Everything that’s bought becomes pre-owned. A tidal wave is building and it has the power to undermine or even destroy. Indeed, the stockpile of merchandise is overwhelmingly vast. I did the math in 2009 for ReFashioner’s beta, a luxury fashion swap site: $880 billion trapped in closets. And that’s just high-end womenswear in the US.

[. . .]

As with flash sales, this inventory is delimited by the retail market. And it’s wayward. The ROI sucks when every SKU is singular and inventory is locked up — literally — in houses. And there’s something of a standoff between buyer and seller: the non-professional seller, accustomed to seeing 100 percent mark-ups in the real world, wants top dollar for her career basics and contemporary designer wear, while the buyer wants Zappos-like service, Etsy pricing and Net-a-Porter merchandising. There are other issues too: resistance to higher ticket items without fittings, sketchy return policies, knock-off trading.

But there’s more. This merchandise is personal. It’s not just a numbers game, it’s about everything fashion means to us. It’s about honouring the past of the clothes and their place in our lives. If this is going to work, we need to add content and context. Idealistic, maybe. But idealism is how things get changed and idealism can work to the advantage of this category.

H/T to Virginia Postrel for the link.

The “most balanced gender studies textbook available”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Cathy Young has some concerns with a popular gender studies textbook:

A few months ago, a post with a shocking claim about misogyny in America began to circulate on Tumblr, the social media site popular with older teens and young adults. It featured a scanned book page section stating that, according to “recent survey data,” when junior high school students in the Midwest were asked what they would do if they woke up “transformed into the opposite sex,” the girls showed mixed emotions but the boys’ reaction was straightforward: “‘Kill myself’ was the most common answer when they contemplated the possibility of life as a girl.” The original poster — whose comment was, “Wow” —identified the source as her “Sex & Gender college textbook,” The Gendered Society by Michael Kimmel.

The post quickly caught on with Tumblr’s radical feminist contingent: in less than three months, it was reblogged or “liked” by over 33,000 users. Some appended their own comments, such as, “Yeah, tell me again how misogyny ‘isn’t real‘ and men and boys and actually ‘like,’ ‘love‘ and ‘respect the female sex‘? This is how deep misogynistic propaganda runs… As Germaine Greer said, ‘Women have no idea how much men hate them.'”

Yet, as it turns out, the claim reveals less about men and misogyny than it does about gender studies and academic feminism.

I was sufficiently intrigued to check out Kimmel’s reference: a 1984 book called The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective by psychologists Carol Tavris and Carole Wade. The publication date was the first tipoff that the study’s description in the excerpt was not entirely accurate: the “recent” data had to be about thirty years old. Still, did American teenage boys in the early 1980s really hold such a dismal view of being female?

When I obtained a copy of The Longest War, I was shocked to discover that the claim was not even out of context: it seemed to have no basis at all, other than one comment among examples of negative reactions from younger boys (the survey included third- through twelfth-grade students, not just those in junior high). Published in 1983 by the Institute for Equality in Education, the study had some real fodder for feminist arguments: girls generally felt they would be better off as males while boys generally saw the switch as a disadvantage, envisioning more social restrictions and fewer career options (many responses seemed based on stereotypes — e.g., husband-hunting as a girl’s main training for adulthood — than 1980s reality). But that’s not nearly as dramatic as “I’d rather kill myself than be a girl.”

Update, 19 May: Welcome to all the visitors from Reddit. I think this is the first time one of my posts got linked from Reddit (and several thousand of you have dropped by in the last 24 hours). To mark the occasion, I’ve added a Reddit link to the Sharing options on all posts.

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