Quotulatiousness

June 18, 2013

A brief history of Habeas Corpus

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

In Reason, Jonathan Hafetz reviews a new book by Anthony Gregory called The Power of Habeas Corpus in America: From the King’s Prerogative to the War on Terror:

This tension between the ideal and the reality of habeas corpus is central to Anthony Gregory’s excellent new book, The Power of Habeas Corpus in America. Gregory, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, provides a valuable contribution to the literature on habeas corpus, one with broader implications for civil liberties, state power, and justice in a liberal democracy. The book does not attempt to capture all of the complex doctrinal shifts in habeas over the centuries. Instead, it synthesizes these developments to underscore a paradox: the way habeas serves as “both as an engine and a curb on state power.” In the process, Gregory charts how power dynamics have historically shaped struggles over habeas and its role in American society.

Gregory situates this paradox early in habeas‘ history. During the 15th and 16th centuries, habeas served mainly as a mechanism for England’s central courts to assert control over ecclesiastical courts and other rival tribunals. By demanding that reason be given why any of the king’s subjects was imprisoned, habeas helped increase the crown’s authority and legitimacy.

By the late 17th century, on the other hand, habeas had become a means of challenging royal authority itself, eventually taking on its modern incarnation as the Great Writ of Liberty. Yet even here, the story is more complex. Building on the pioneering work of historian Paul Halliday, Gregory points out that, contrary to popular interpretations, habeas‘ potential as a judicial constraint on state power was threatened by legislation. Gregory notes, for instance, how the famous Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, labeled by William Blackstone as a “second Magna Carta and stable bulwark of our liberties,” ultimately diluted the writ’s potency and flexibility by tying it down to statute. Increasingly, habeas‘ efficacy would be seen to depend on legislative action — an understanding perhaps best illustrated by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s statement that a federal court’s power to award the writ “must be given by written law.”

[. . .]

The contradictions within habeas were manifested during antebellum America, where the writ was used both to bolster slavery and to undermine it. Slave owners employed habeas to apprehend runaways — for example, by petitioning state courts in the North to assist in apprehending their “property.” Other state courts in the North, by contrast, sometimes used habeas to free slaves or block their return to the South. Ultimately, the ability of state courts to wield habeas in defense of individual liberty was limited by Supreme Court rulings barring state interference with the enforcement of federal fugitive slave laws and, eventually, with federal detentions generally — an example of what Gregory describes as the dangers of centralization.

A significant counter to Gregory’s thesis is the role federal habeas corpus played during the 20th century in helping enforce civil rights in the South and in advancing the criminal procedure revolution undertaken by the Supreme Court to protect the rights of defendants. Gregory’s account here runs against the traditional narrative in which habeas‘ centralization was critical to its continuing role in protecting liberty. In response, Gregory cites the declining utility of federal habeas corpus following several decades of Supreme Court decisions and congressional restrictions that have made it more difficult for prisoners not merely to obtain relief but even to have their claims heard by a judge. Federal habeas, Gregory writes, has become a “shell of what it promised to be.”

June 14, 2013

“The only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years is this libertarian idea”

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:46

In National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg responds to a recent Salon hit piece on libertarianism:

In a much-discussed essay for Salon, Michael Lind asks: “If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?”

Such is the philosophical poverty of liberalism today that this stands as a profound question.

[. . .]

That phrase, “the wave of the future,” became famous thanks to a 1940 essay by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She argued that the time of liberal democratic capitalism was drawing to a close and the smart money was on statism of one flavor or another — fascism, Communism, socialism, etc. What was lost on her, and millions of others, was that this wasn’t progress toward the new, but regression to the past. These “waves of the future” were simply gussied-up tribalisms, anachronisms made gaudy with the trappings of modernity, like a gibbon in a spacesuit.

The only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years is this libertarian idea, broadly understood. The revolution wrought by John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers is the only real revolution going. And it’s still unfolding.

Indeed, what’s remarkable about all of the states Lind identifies as proof that libertarianism doesn’t work is that they are in fact proof that it does. What made the American experiment new were its libertarian innovations, broadly speaking. Moreover, those innovations made us prosper. Even Sweden — the liberal Best in Show — owes its successes to its libertarian concessions.

I’m actually not a full-blown libertarian myself, but it’s an ideal I’d like America to move closer to, not further away from as we’ve been doing of late — bizarrely in the name of “progress,” of all things.

Nostalgia for a far-distant imperial era

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

At the Thin Pinstriped Line, Sir Humphrey pours cold water on the calls to re-establish the Royal Navy’s former fleet and base organizations overseas:

Humphrey has a certain pet hate on some internet sites, and this is the trend to ‘fantasy fleet’ creation. While the merits of discussing possible courses of action are interesting, in recent years these sort of threads have routinely become an excuse to wishlist large numbers of ships, aircraft and vessels in an almost fantasian order of battle which bears no resemblance to any current reality. Almost without exception these threads prove immensely dull to read, and rarely achieve more than listing different types of impressive ships in arbitrary ‘fleets’.

The concept of these so-called ‘fleets’ has often puzzled the author — it is something to which many posters cling to — the notion that the Royal Navy should somehow hark back to its imagined glory days and establish a ‘Far East Fleet’, a Med Fleet and south Atlantic squadrons, along with the supporting bases and dockyards. These impressive sounding titles are bandied around without really thinking what this means. Ironically, those who most loudly advocate the creation of these fleets are the ones who also demand that the MOD cuts the numbers of officials and Admirals to pay for it — as if adding an additional layer of command is going to somehow reduce officialdom.

For this post, Humphrey wants to consider why foreign dockyards and the concept of ‘Fleets’ is perhaps less relevant than ever to the Royal Navy of today, and considers that what may have worked in the past is not necessarily the model of the future fleet structure.

[. . .]

The other point which often crops up in Fantasy Fleet discussions is the keen desire for the RN to establish a network of overseas dockyards which will house whole squadrons of warships (presumably under the command of a newly re-established Fleet HQ). While it is wonderful to look back in history and see where the RN used to have permanent bases, it is hugely misleading to do so.

The author has a very personal view that the RN is in the business of sending warships to sea, and not the business of managing an unnecessarily large property portfolio. Every penny spent on building and sustaining shore infrastructure is a penny not being spent on a warship. While there is a very clear case for a well maintained and modern infrastructure, this does come at a cost. The RN already probably has a surplus of real estate relative to its fleet size, and much of this is buildings that are decades (and in some cases centuries) old, which require updating, refurbishment and refitting.

Historically overseas dockyards made perfect sense — in the early 20th century when communications were slow, it made immense sense to ensure that local dockyards could repair vessels on station, ensuring they were available in short order, rather than waiting weeks or months for spare parts to be sent out. The presence of coal or oil in the days before the RFA was a strategic necessity, while ammunition depots could easily store shells for use. Similarly, the reliance on troopships rather than trooping flights meant that long drafts for overseas personnel made sense — it wasn’t feasible to keep moving people around unless there was good reason to do so. Hence maintaining a strategic network of dockyards and accommodation facilities made enormous sense.

June 13, 2013

History without context

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:44

There’s a battle going on in Britain over the way history is taught in state schools:

Since the arrival of the national curriculum, public debate on school history has focused almost exclusively on what topics should be taught, namely whether the emphasis should be on British or world history. This debate has been fuelled by a steady stream of surveys revealing the ignorance of today’s school-leavers. One commissioned last summer by Lord Ashcroft found that while 92 per cent of 11- to 18-year-olds could identify the animated dog from the car insurance advertisements as Churchill, only 62 per cent could identify a photograph of Britain’s wartime prime minister. Fewer than half knew that the Battle of Britain took place in the sky.

However, having become a history teacher at a state secondary school two years ago, I have realised that such debates miss the real problem. I was surprised to learn that since its inception the national curriculum has stipulated a sensible split of British and world history: every pupil between the ages of 11 and 14 is expected to study a chronological sweep of British history from 1066 to the present day. To understand the degradation of history teaching, one has to focus not on what history is taught, but how it is taught.

[. . .]

The main tenet of a child-centred view of history teaching is the idea that pupils should not be “passive” recipients of a teacher’s knowledge, but “active” individuals empowered to find things out for themselves. As a result, “chalk and talk” teaching from the front is heavily discouraged. After a senior member of staff observed one of my lessons, I was told that my role was to be the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage”.

Instead of learning through listening to teachers or reading books, pupils are expected to do so through projects. It did not take me long to work out why pupils are so ignorant of British history, despite spending over a year studying it (as laid down by the national curriculum). To study the Norman Conquest, pupils would re-enact the Battle of Hastings in the playground, conduct a classroom survey to create their own Domesday Book, and make motte-and-bailey castles out of cereal boxes. Medieval England would be studied through acting out the death of Thomas Becket, and creating a boardgame to cover life as a medieval peasant. For the Industrial Revolution, pupils pitched inventions to Dragons’ Den and lessons on the British Empire culminated in the design of a commemorative plate showing whether it was or was not a “force for good”.

Such tasks allow pupils to learn about history in an enjoyable and engaging way — or so the theory goes. In reality, all content and understanding of the past is sucked out, and the classroom begins to resemble the playground. An unfortunate side-effect is that pupils are frequently confused by the inevitable anachronisms involved in making history “relevant”. “Sir, how many Victorians would have had a TV?” I was asked. Imaginative tasks and projects can be excellent supplements to a history lesson, but when they become the mainstay of classroom activity, the consequences are disastrous.

Proponents of child-centred education are impervious to such criticism because progressive teachers have long denied the importance of knowledge in the first place. Instead, skills are seen as paramount. When I first visited my current school, the assistant head asked me how I intended to prepare for my new career. I responded that I was going to spend a few weeks boning up on my general historical knowledge. “I wouldn’t worry about that,” she said. “History is a skills-based curriculum. You should really be able to teach it without knowing anything at all.”

Update: Of course, the same issue with history appears in other countries too:

“Back to the hole in the boat: America is losing its historic literacy. Recently some 556 seniors surveyed at 55 of the nation’s top colleges — only 60 percent placed the American Civil War in the correct half of the 19th century. Only 34 percent identified George Washington as the American general at the Battle of Yorktown. Thirty-four percent thought it was Ulysses S. Grant. At 78 percent of the institutions polled, no history whatsoever was required in the undergraduate program. Historian David McCullough said, “We are raising a generation of young Americans who are historically illiterate.”

June 12, 2013

Corey Robin refutes David Brooks, “The Last Stalinist”

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:03

David Brooks wrote a column the other day that got lots of applause from the communitarians on both sides of the aisle for blaming Edward Snowden’s atomistic individualism and his “inability to make commitments and connections”. At Jacobin, Corey Robin explains why:

This is an old argument on the communitarian right and left: the loss of social bonds and connections turns men and women into the flotsam and jetsam of modern society, ready for any reckless adventure, no matter how malignant: treason, serial murder, totalitarianism.

It’s mostly bullshit, but there’s a certain logic to what Brooks is saying, albeit one he might not care to face up to.

In the long history of state tyranny, it is often those who are bound by close ties of personal connection to family and friends that are most likely to cooperate with the government: that is, not to “betray” their oaths to a repressive regime, not to oppose or challenge authoritarian rule. Precisely because those ties are levers that the regime can pull in order to engineer an individual’s collaboration and consent.

Take the Soviet Union under Stalin. Though there’s a venerable tradition in social thought that sees Soviet totalitarianism as the product of atomized individuals, one of the factors that made Stalinism possible was precisely that men and women were connected to each other, that they were in families and felt bound to protect each other. To protect each other by cooperating with rather than opposing Stalin.

Nikolai Bukharin’s confession in a 1938 show trial to an extraordinary career of counterrevolutionary crime, crimes he clearly did not commit, has long served as a touchstone of the manic self-liquidation that was supposed to be communism. It has inspired such treatments as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror, and Godard’s La Chinoise. Yet contrary to the myth that Bukharin somehow chose to sacrifice himself for the sake of the cause, Bukharin was brutally interrogated for a year and he was repeatedly threatened with violence against his family. In the end, the possibility that a confession might save them, if not him, proved to be potent.

[. . .]

Back to David Brooks. Brooks likes to package his strictures in the gauzy wrap of an apolitical communitarianism. But Brooks is also, let us not forget, an authority- and state-minded chap, who doesn’t like punks like Snowden mucking up the work of war and the sacralized state. And it is precisely banal and familial bromides such as these — the need to honor one’s oaths, the importance of family and connection — that have underwritten popular collaboration with that work for at least a century, if not more.

Stalin understood all of this. So does David Brooks.

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

June 7, 2013

The world’s longest undefended “no touching zone”

Filed under: Cancon, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

H/T to John Farrier for the link.

June 6, 2013

D-Day 1942 or 1943

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Europe, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

At Military History Now, there’s a look at a few of the allied plans for invading France before the actual June 6, 1944 operation:

IKE’S SLEDGEHAMMER
Almost as soon as America entered the war with Nazi Germany, generals Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall were both lobbying for a strike across the English Channel into France. One plan foresaw a joint British and American assault on either of the French port cities of Cherbourg or Brest as early as the fall of 1942. The operation, codenamed Sledgehammer, would see a force of just six divisions attack, capture and hold either one of the two strategically-vital, deep-water harbours. The force, which likely would have totalled no more than 60,000 men, would have been expected to withstand the inevitable Nazi counterattacks until spring when more reinforcements could arrive. Despite the fact that the Germans would have been free to throw as many as 30 divisions at the invaders, the U.S. Joint Chiefs (as well as the Soviets) endorsed Sledgehammer wholeheartedly. The American commanders seemed to favour any plan that would bring U.S. forces into action in Europe quickly, while Stalin was thrilled at the prospect of an Allied offensive in Western Europe — anything to divert German forces away from the Russian front. Oddly enough, while the mission called for the heavy use of American air and sea power, at the time there was still only a handful of combat-ready U.S. Army units in England. As such, the ground portion of the invasion would be left entirely up to the British military. Cooler heads, namely Prime Minister Churchill, convinced Eisenhower to shelve Sledgehammer – Britain was already stretched thin in Egypt and America still had yet to fully mobilize for the war in Europe. An invasion of France would simply have to wait.

OPERATION ROUNDUP
Later in 1942, the Allies roughed out a second plan to put troops ashore in Western Europe the following spring. This operation, dubbed Roundup, called for 18 British and 30 American divisions to hit a series of landing zones along a 200 km stretch of coastline between Boulogne-sur-Mer near Calais and the port of Le Harve. Overhead, more than 5,700 Allied aircraft were to sweep the skies of the Luftwaffe clearing the way for a series of airborne drops. D-Day was set for some time in April or May of 1943. The British, already strained by three years of total war against the Axis, were understandably reluctant to throw their army headlong into the teeth of Germany’s Channel fortifications. They pushed instead to attack Sicily and Italy – what Churchill called the “soft underbelly of Europe” — by way of North Africa. A sober appraisal of British and American fleet strength, air assets and manpower ultimately convinced the Allied high command that no invasion could be mounted until 1944 at the earliest. For one thing, American factories had yet to manufacture enough of the landing craft needed for such a massive undertaking. Washington and London turned their attention instead towards a late 1942 invasion of Tunisia – Operation Torch. The rest is, as they say, history.

As any Canadian military historian would probably have said to either of these proposals … I have two words: Operation Jubilee.

The Dieppe Raid, also known as the Battle of Dieppe, Operation Rutter and, later, Operation Jubilee, was a Second World War Allied attack on the German-occupied port of Dieppe. The raid took place on the northern coast of France on 19 August 1942. The assault began at 5:00 a.m. and by 10:50 a.m. the Allied commanders were forced to call a retreat. Over 6,000 infantrymen, predominantly Canadian, were supported by a Canadian Armoured regiment and a strong force of Royal Navy and smaller Royal Air Force landing contingents.

The objective of the raid was discussed by Winston Churchill in his war memoirs:

    “I thought it most important that a large-scale operation should take place this summer, and military opinion seemed unanimous that until an operation on that scale was undertaken, no responsible general would take the responsibility of planning the main invasion…

    In discussion with Admiral Mountbatten it became clear that time did not permit a new large-scale operation to be mounted during the summer (after Rutter had been cancelled), but that Dieppe could be remounted (with the new code-name “Jubilee”) within a month, provided extraordinary steps were taken to ensure secrecy. For this reason no records were kept but, after the Canadian authorities and the Chiefs of Staff had given their approval, I personally went through the plans with the C.I.G.S., Admiral Mountbatten, and the Naval Force Commander, Captain J. Hughes-Hallett.”

Objectives included seizing and holding a major port for a short period, both to prove it was possible and to gather intelligence from prisoners and captured materials, including naval intelligence in a hotel in town and a radar installation on the cliffs above it. Although the primary objective was not met and secondary successes were relatively few, some knowledge was gained while assessing the German responses. The Allies also wanted to destroy coastal defences, port structures and all strategic buildings. Due to the failure to secure Dieppe this objective was not met in any systematic sense. The raid had the added objective of providing a morale boost to the troops, Resistance, and general public, while assuring the Soviet Union of the commitment of the United Kingdom and the United States.

A total of 3,623 of the 6,086 men (almost 60%) who made it ashore were either killed, wounded, or captured. The Royal Air Force failed to lure the Luftwaffe into open battle, and lost 96 aircraft (at least 32 to flak or accidents), compared to 48 lost by the Luftwaffe.[2] The Royal Navy lost 33 landing craft and one destroyer. The events at Dieppe later influenced preparations for the North African (Operation Torch) and Normandy landings (Operation Overlord).

Operation Jubilee clearly showed that the plans for both Sledgehammer and Roundup would have been bloody failures.

June 5, 2013

The “threat” of American English

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:53

Things must be pretty quiet over in Britain, if some of the concerns being aired are about the baleful influence of American English on the language used in the Mother Country:

Does this actually matter? No. On the contrary, we should welcome American English, as it bequeaths to British English more synonyms. English is such a brilliant language for the very reason it has so many different words for similar things, a result of its dual Germanic/Latinate parentage. In the language of Shakespeare, Dickens and Hollywood you can describe someone as hungry or famished, fast or rapid, good or benevolent, bad or malevolent. It’s no coincidence that the first modern thesaurus was in English — Roget’s, in 1805.

In any case, many alleged ‘Americanisms’ are merely old English words that fell into disuse, notably ‘fall’ for autumn, ‘diaper’, ‘faucet’, ‘candy’ and ‘gotten’. The latter is especially useful, as in British English ‘got’ has to double up as a present tense verb for ‘possess’ and a past participle for ‘attain’ and ‘become’. The prohibition on ‘gotten’ is both chauvinistic and illogical when you consider the uncontroversial ‘forgotten’. Instead of complaining about American English, it would be more interesting to explore why Americans speak the way they do. For instance, New England was settled by people from south-east England, which is why Bostonians also don’t pronounce the ‘r’ in ‘car’ (think Cliff from Cheers propping up the baa). Much of the rest of America was settled by Irish and Scots, which is why they also articulate a strong ‘r’ in ‘Iron Maiden’. And Americans say ‘I’m good’, not to boast of their moral worth but to indicate their state of being, because Germans — another emigrant people — use gut as an adverb as well as an adjective.

Everyone in the world — except Dutch and Scandinavian footballers — learns American English because it is today’s lingua franca. It’s the principal means for disseminating ideas and getting work, as Latin used to be. As Luc Ferry of Le Figaro, writing approvingly of the new French legislation, noted last week: ‘Si Descartes n’avait pas écrit en latin, come le feront encore après lui Leibniz ou Spinoza, il n’aurait jamais été lu dans le monde entier.’ People stopped using French when that country went into decline and lost influence in the nineteenth century, and it was the same story for British English in the twentieth. But neither language has disappeared, and neither is ‘threatened’ by American English. It’s also worth remembering that as America declines, so will its influence and the importance of its language. No empire lasts for ever.

If any English-speaking country has to be concerned about the invasive nature of Americanisms, it’d be Canada. So far, thank goodness, nobody outside Quebec seems to feel that we need to get the government involved in defining what is and isn’t proper in Canadian English (and Quebec’s linguistic worry-warts don’t give a rat’s ass about English anyway, except where it starts filtering into their version of French…)

June 4, 2013

Finland’s cardboard box babies

Filed under: Europe, Health, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

An interesting bit of history on the BBC News website:

It’s a tradition that dates back to the 1930s and it’s designed to give all children in Finland, no matter what background they’re from, an equal start in life.

The maternity package — a gift from the government — is available to all expectant mothers.

It contains bodysuits, a sleeping bag, outdoor gear, bathing products for the baby, as well as nappies, bedding and a small mattress.

With the mattress in the bottom, the box becomes a baby’s first bed. Many children, from all social backgrounds, have their first naps within the safety of the box’s four cardboard walls.

Mothers have a choice between taking the box, or a cash grant, currently set at 140 euros, but 95% opt for the box as it’s worth much more.

The tradition dates back to 1938. To begin with, the scheme was only available to families on low incomes, but that changed in 1949.

“Not only was it offered to all mothers-to-be but new legislation meant in order to get the grant, or maternity box, they had to visit a doctor or municipal pre-natal clinic before their fourth month of pregnancy,” says Heidi Liesivesi, who works at Kela — the Social Insurance Institution of Finland.

So the box provided mothers with what they needed to look after their baby, but it also helped steer pregnant women into the arms of the doctors and nurses of Finland’s nascent welfare state.

In the 1930s Finland was a poor country and infant mortality was high — 65 out of 1,000 babies died. But the figures improved rapidly in the decades that followed.

Marx for the modern era

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:33

A case for finding the proper modern interpretation of the works of Karl Marx:

The first view (held mostly by its detractors) is that Marxism is little more than the politics of resentment — a philosophical justification for the hatred of success by those who failed to achieve it. The politics of resentment offers three different methods for bringing its program of economic jealousy to fruition: Under socialism, the unsuccessful use the power of government to forcibly extract wealth and possessions from the successful, bit by bit until there is nothing left; under the more extreme communism, the very notion of wealth or success is eliminated entirely, and anyone who seeks individual achievement is punished or eliminated; and finally under anarchy, freelance predators would be allowed to steal or destroy any existing wealth or possessions with no interference from the state. Marx himself saw pure communism as the ultimate goal, with socialism as a necessary precursor, and perhaps just an occasional dash of anarchy to ignite the revolutionary fires.

But there is another, more intriguing and less noxious, view of Marxist thought that gets less attention these days because its anachronistic roots in the Industrial Revolution seemingly render it somewhat irrelevant to modern economics. Marx posited that factory workers should own the factory themselves and profit from its output, since they’e the ones actually doing the work — and the wealthy fat cat “capitalists” should be booted out of the director’s office since they don’t really do anything except profit from other people’s labor. Marx generalized this notion to “The workers should control the means of production,” and then extended it further to a national scale by declaring that the overall government itself should be “a dictatorship of the proletariat,” with “proletariat” defined in this context as “someone who actually works for a living.” The problem with this theory in the 21st century is that very few people actually work in factories anymore due to exponential improvements in automation and efficiency, and fewer still produce handicrafts, and the vast majority of American “workers” these days don’t actually create anything tangible. Even so, there is an attractive populist rationality to this aspect of Marxism that appeals to everyone’s sense of fairness — even to those who staunchly reject the rest of communist theory. Those who do the work should reap the benefits and control the system; hard to argue with that.

Although the “factory” is no longer the basic building block of the American economy, Marx’s notion that “The workers should control the means of production” can be rescued and made freshly relevant if it is re-interpreted in a contemporary American context.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

May 31, 2013

Reason.tv: What Game of Thrones teaches about crony capitalism

Filed under: Economics, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

“The game of thrones in general is a game of cronyism because it’s all about forming political alliances, especially with people who can make you better off economically speaking,” says Auburn University Economics Instructor Matthew McCaffrey.

McCaffrey has recently written about the economics involved in the popular Game of Thrones novels by George R.R. Martin as well as the HBO series based on the books. He sat down with ReasonTV’s Tracy Oppenheimer to discuss the various economic concepts that develop alongside the character-driven plot line, such as sin taxes, coin clipping, and the ever-present cost of borrowing.

According to McCaffrey, Martin extensively researches historical economic systems to make “the Realm” as plausible as possible.

“As part of his process he ends up uncovering a lot of historical details that usually get lost in a fantasy book of this kind,” says McCaffrey, “just practical difficulties of running a kingdom, how public finance works, how the game of thrones corrupts the people who play it and how it ends disastrously for the people who don’t play it well.”

May 30, 2013

High speed steam run

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:54

LNER A4 Class 4464 (60019) “Bittern” has been given dispensation to run at 90MPH on the East Coast Main Line in July, to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of Mallard’s world speed record, subject to a satisfactory high speed test. This is that test. The weather was perfect — damp, cool, no wind. Bittern left Didcot at 05:23 am and flew through Slough 05:58 at full pelt for an average of 60mph over the 35 miles. The 6.2 mile section between Maidenhead and Slough was completed in 4 minutes, an average of 93MPH. Using film time markers I timed the whole train at 90mph through Taplow where this film was shot.

Given the two sets of hand cranked data, and with no speed gun to hand, I am happy to put the 90MPH stamp on the film title.

H/T to Jim Guthrie for the link.

May 28, 2013

Unseemly worship of the military state

Filed under: History, Liberty, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:21

L. Neil Smith received one of the many email chain letters from a conservative acquaintance about “thanking a veteran” and indulged in a bit of fisking:

So with all that in mind, let’s consider the Memorial Day claims my friend sent to me, and I can only hope he’ll be my friend after this.

“It is the veteran, not the preacher, who has given us freedom of religion.”

The truth is that neither the veteran nor the preacher ever gave us such a right, it is ours, under natural law, the very moment we are born. It can certainly be suppressed, and has been other places in the world, and here, as well — ask any Mormon — but this government hasn’t fought a war to defend any American’s rights since the Revolution.

“It is the veteran, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.”

Once again, not so. When the War of 1812 “broke out” — the U.S. was attempting to bestow the blessings of American life upon Canada whether Canada wanted them or not — and people objected (New England nearly seceded over it) people were accused of “sedition”, a charge that should be impossible under the First Amendment, and thrown in jail.

Later, Abraham Lincoln used the Army to smash the printing presses of his political opposition and intimidate voters during the 1864 election.

“It is the veteran, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.”

Freedom of speech and of the press are natural rights, as well, which governments in general, and the American government in particular, have always regarded as a threat. If any single individual can be thanked for it, that honor belongs to John Peter Zenger (look him up). At some point, the establishment press became so corrupt, concealing or excusing government atrocities, that they became a part of government, and a new press — the Internet — had to evolve in its place.

“It is the veteran, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to assemble.”

Having once been a “campus organizer” myself, I am well aware how little we had to do with defending the right to assemble, and how very badly it was done. But please, don’t be ridiculous. Two words: Kent State.

“It is the veteran, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.”

Actually, to the extent that any human institution is responsible for the right to a fair trial, it’s a thousand years of English Common Law.

“It is the veteran, not the politician, Who has given us the right to vote.”

A dubious gift, at best, but it didn’t come from any politicians or veterans. Thank the Greeks, and don’t forget the Basques, whose methods of self-government were consciously imitated by the Founding Fathers.

I like and admire veterans, My dad was a vet and his dad before him. But name any war the United States ever fought to defend American rights.

Charles Joseph Minard died for our (infographic) sins

Filed under: History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Do you remember seeing the amazingly informative diagram by Charles Joseph Minard on the statistical side of Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow:

Charles Joseph Minard's famous graph showing the decreasing size of the Grande Armée as it marches to Moscow (brown line, from left to right) and back (black line, from right to left) with the size of the army equal to the width of the line. Temperature is plotted on the lower graph for the return journey (Multiply Réaumur temperatures by 1¼ to get Celsius, e.g. −30 °R = −37.5 °C)

Charles Joseph Minard’s famous graph showing the decreasing size of the Grande Armée as it marches to Moscow (brown line, from left to right) and back (black line, from right to left) with the size of the army equal to the width of the line. Temperature is plotted on the lower graph for the return journey (Multiply Réaumur temperatures by 1¼ to get Celsius, e.g. −30 °R = −37.5 °C)

That is what a really good infographic can be. But, as Tim Harford points out, they’re not all that good:

Camouflage usually means blending in. That wasn’t an option for the submarine-dodging battleships of a century ago, which advertised their presence against an ever-changing sea and sky with bow waves and smokestacks. And so dazzle camouflage was born, an abstract riot of squiggles and harlequin patterns. It wasn’t hard to spot a dazzle ship but the challenge for the periscope operator was quickly to judge a ship’s speed and direction before firing a torpedo on a ponderous intercept. Dazzle camouflage was intended to provoke misjudgments, and there is some evidence that it worked.

Now let’s talk about data visualisation, the latest fashion in numerate journalism, albeit one that harks back to the likes of Florence Nightingale. She was not only the most famous nurse in history but the creator of a beautiful visualisation technique, the “Coxcomb diagram”, and the first woman to be elected as a member of the Royal Statistical Society.

Data visualisation creates powerful, elegant images from complex data. It’s like good prose: a pleasure to experience and a force for good in the right hands, but also seductive and potentially deceptive. Because we have less experience of data visualisation than of rhetoric, we are naive, and allow ourselves to be dazzled. Too much data visualisation is the statistical equivalent of dazzle camouflage: striking looks grab our attention but either fail to convey useful information or actively misdirect us.

[. . .]

Those beautiful Coxcomb diagrams are no exception. They show the causes of mortality in the Crimean war, and make a powerful case that better hygiene saved lives. But Hugh Small, a biographer of Nightingale, argues that she chose the Coxcomb diagram in order to make exactly this case. A simple bar chart would have been clearer: too clear for Nightingale’s purposes, because it suggested that winter was as much of a killer as poor hygiene was. Nightingale’s presentation of data was masterful. It was also designed not to inform but to persuade. When we look at modern data visualisations, we should remember that.

May 27, 2013

Recreating ancient hairstyles – the “Hairdo archaeologist”

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

BBC News has an interesting short video on the intersection of hairstyles and archaeology:

Janet Stephens earns a living trimming, straightening and dyeing the hair of customers seeking the latest look.

But the stylist from the US city of Baltimore is more interested in the hairdos of the past.

Stephens is a hairstyle archaeologist who specialises in recreating how women in ancient Rome and Greece wore their hair.

She spoke to the BBC about a museum visit that marked the start of a long journey of discovery on which she solved a historical mystery and had her work published in an academic journal.

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