Quotulatiousness

June 27, 2018

Calico prohibition

Filed under: Business, France, History, India, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In the current issue of Reason, Virginia Postrel outlines an eighteenth-century French government attempt to prohibit calico cloth:

Calico printing, an image from Wellcome Images, via Wikimedia Commons

On a shopping trip to the butcher’s, young Miss la Genne wore her new, form-fitting jacket, a stylish cotton print with large brown flowers and red stripes on a white background. It got her arrested.

Another young woman stood in the door of her boss’ wine shop sporting a similar jacket with red flowers. She too was arrested. So were Madame de Ville, the lady Coulange, and Madame Boite. Through the windows of their homes, law enforcement authorities spotted these unlucky women in clothing with red flowers printed on white. They were busted for possession.

It was Paris in 1730, and the printed cotton fabrics known as toiles peintes or indiennes — in English, calicoes, chintzes, or muslins — had been illegal since 1686. It was an extreme version of trade protectionism, designed to shelter French textile producers from Indian cottons. Every few years the authorities would tweak the law, but the fashion refused to die.

Frustrated by rampant smuggling and ubiquitous scofflaws, in 1726 the government increased penalties for traffickers and anyone helping them. Offenders could be sentenced to years in galleys, with violent smugglers put to death. Local authorities were given the power to detain without trial anyone who merely wore the forbidden fabrics or upholstered furniture with them.

“The exasperation of the lawmakers, after forty years of successive edicts and ordinances which had been largely ignored, flouted or circumvented on a wholesale basis, can be sensed in this law,” writes the fashion historian Gillian Crosby in a 2015 dissertation on the ban. Her archival research shows a spike in arrests for simple possession. “Impotent at stopping the cross-border trade, printing or the peddling of goods,” she writes, “government officials concentrated on making an example of individual wearers, in an attempt to halt the fashion.”

They failed.

In the annals of prohibition, the French war on printed fabrics is one of the strangest, most futile, and most extreme chapters. It’s also one of the most intellectually consequential, producing many of the earliest arguments for economic liberalism. “Long before the more famous debates about the liberalisation of the grain trade, about taxation, or even about the monopoly of the French Indies Company, philosophes and Enlightenment political economists saw the calico debate as their first important battleground,” writes the historian Felicia Gottmann in Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism (Palgrave Macmillan).

Canada’s euphemistically named “High Risk Returnees”

Filed under: Cancon, Middle East, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Judith Bergman on the Canadian government’s kid-gloves approach to dealing with Canadian citizens who return to Canada after volunteering to serve with terrorist organizations:

Canadians who go abroad to commit terrorism – predominantly jihadists, in other words – have a “right to return” according to government documents obtained by Global News. They not only have a right of return, but “… even if a Canadian engaged in terrorist activity abroad, the government must facilitate their return to Canada,” as one document says.

According to the government, there are still around 190 Canadian citizens volunteering as terrorists abroad. The majority are in Syria and Iraq, and 60 have returned. Police are reportedly expecting a new influx of returnees over the next couple of months.

The Canadian government is willing to go to great (and presumably costly) lengths to “facilitate” the return of Canadian jihadists, unlike the UK, for example, which has revoked the citizenship of ISIS fighters so they cannot return. The Canadian government has established a taskforce, the High Risk Returnee Interdepartmental Taskforce, that, according to government documents:

    “… allows us to collectively identify what measures can mitigate the threat these individuals may pose during their return to Canada. This could include sending officers overseas to collect evidence before they depart, or their detention by police upon arrival in Canada.”

Undercover officers may also be used “to engage with the HRT [High Risk Traveler] to collect evidence, or monitor them during their flight home.”

In the sanitizing Orwellian newspeak employed by the Canadian government, the terrorists are not jihadis who left Canada to commit the most heinous crimes, such as torture, rape and murder, while fighting for ISIS in Syria and Iraq, but “High Risk Travelers” and “High Risk Returnees”.

The government is fully aware of the security risk to which it is subjecting Canadians: According to the documents, “HRRs [High Risk Returnees] can pose a significant threat to the national security of Canada”. This fact raises the question of why the government of Canada is keen to facilitate these people’s “right of return” — when presumably the primary obligation of the government is to safeguard the security of law-abiding Canadian citizens.

Remy: Violent Video Games

Filed under: Gaming, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 26 Jun 2018

In prison for life, Remy looks back on his violent past and contemplates where it all went wrong and who’s to blame.

Written and Performed by Remy
Shot and Edited by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg
Mastering by Ben Karlstrom
Music tracks by Grind Time Production Squad

Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.

—————-

LYRICS:

In the clink
In the slammer
Yeah I’m doing hard time
For a crime that I committed
Back in 2009

See violent games lead to crimes
Wish I knew from the start
Before I ever got involved
In playing Mario Kart

I was hugging the turns
Heaving items for thrills
Ain’t seen a toad so damaged by shell
Since that last oil spill

But something happens to your brain
Doing virtual wrongs
Woke up the next morning
And it wasn’t too long before I was

Dropping bananas Upon every street
Hurling turtles
Hurting every single person I see

Then I was road-raging at plumbers
Nobody could stop me
I’d run princesses off the road so much
I joined the paparazzi

Now I’m in prison doing 20 to life
How could such a game be legal man
The danger is rife

Well my fate is sealed
Won’t be doing right
Because I’m playing violent video games tonight
And the things I do I then do in life
It’s a tragedy
I’m gonna be in jail for life

Reminds me of another time
My life went astray
Playing a World War 2 game
Back in 2008

I was only playing a minute
Then I felt an unease
Next thing I did right after playing
I interred the Japanese

Years later I would pay the judges
To win every race
It’s just what happens when you play
Too many games by EA

Now I’m doing life
With no chance of parole
Why didn’t anybody ban these games
How was I to know

CHORUS

Expert here
And forgive me for stalling
But violent video games
The stats are appalling

Just look at this graph
And as you can tell
As gameplay’s increased
Youth crime has as well

Uh – It’s gone down
Well who needs a chart?
I took 400 grand in loans
So you know that I’m smart

Like a guy leaving the mohel
You’re missing the point
Freedom’s when you only get to play
The games we anoint

Canada’s odd approach to open data

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist the contrast between what the Canadian government says about access to information and what they actually do:

The Liberal government has emphasized the importance of open data and open government policies for years, yet the government has at times disappointed in ways both big (Canada’s access-to-information laws are desperately in need of updating and the current bill does not come close to solving its shortcomings) and small (restrictive licensing and failure to comply with access to information disclosures).

For example, late last year, I noted that government departments had oddly adopted a closed-by-default approach to posting official photographs on Flickr. Unlike many other governments that use open licenses or a public domain approach, Canadians looking for openly licensed photographs for inclusion in learning materials, blog posts, or other content must rely on foreign governments. The restrictive licensing approach remains in place: those seeking photos on Flickr from the G7 will find Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s are “all rights reserved” but other governments attending the summit – including the United States, United Kingdom, Norway, and South Africa – all facilitate re-use of their photos through open licensing.

A restrictive approach to disclosing information about completed access-to-information requests has also emerged in recent months. Open disclosure of the completed requests benefits both the public and the government. For the public, completed requests are there for the asking as they can be obtained on an informal basis at no cost. For the government, completed requests can sometimes provide the information requested by the public, thereby reducing costs and saving time for government officials. For many years, the government maintained a database known as CAIRS, which featured lists of completed access to information requests. After that was cancelled, the government created an open government page that includes the last two years of requests (the information is searchable or downloadable). According to the site:

    Government of Canada institutions subject to the Access to Information Act (ATIA) are required to post summaries of processed ATI requests. You can search these summaries, which are available within 30 calendar days after the end of the month. Searches can be made by keywords, topic or field of interest. If you find a summary of interest, you can also request a copy of the previously released ATIA records.

But you can’t access them until they’ve been published, and several government departments are as much as a year behind in making these records available.

Mary Seacole – I: A Bold Front to Fortune – Extra History

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Extra Credits
Published on 9 Jan 2016

Mary Seacole treated soldiers during the Crimean War – but she took a long path to get there. She grew up in Jamaica, the daughter of a local hotel owner and a Scottish soldier. She admired her doctress mother and wanted to be like her, but she also yearned to travel and see the world. In 1821 she accepted a relative’s invitation to visit London, and turned herself from a tourist to a businesswoman by importing Jamaican food preserves. She traveled with her business for several years before returning home to Jamaica, where she married a white man named Edwin Seacole and started a general store. Their venture failed, and disaster struck: fire destroyed most of Kingstown, and both Mary’s husband and her mother died in 1843. Mary survived and rebuilt the hotel, but she set out to start a new life in Panama and was immediately greeted by a cholera epidemic. She helped contain it, and earned a reputation that helped her start her own business across the street from her half-brother’s. When word reached her that the Crimean War back in Europe needed nurses, she left her business behind and went to sign up. Both the War Office and Florence Nightingale’s expedition rejected her, but Mary determined to find her own way there.

QotD: Male homosexuality in ancient and modern times

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Most educated people in the U.S. and Europe have a default model or construction of homosexual behavior which I will call “romantic homosexuality”. Romantic homosexuality is homoeroticism between equals; men or women of roughly the same age and social position, with the relationship having affective elements similar to the emotional range in heterosexual relationships (from one-night stand through lifetime marriage).

[…]

Over and over again, the pattern of male homosexual behavior in pre-modern sources is overwhelmingly one of pederasty and domination sex. And not just in pre-modern sources but in most of the present-day world as well. […] We may further note that there are, broadly speaking, two contending models of “normal” — acceptable or semi-acceptable male homosexual behavior — observable in human cultures. In one model, that of the modern West, romantic homosexuality is relatively tolerated, while pederasty and domination sex are considered far more deviant. I’ll call this the homophilic construction. It’s what most of my readers accept as normal.

But in the other, older model, pederasty and domination sex are considered more “normal” than romantic homosexuality. In cultures with this model, the “top” in an episode of pederasty or domination sex is not necessarily considered homosexual or deviant at all; any stigma attaches to the passive partner. Romantic homosexuality is considered far more perverse, because it feminizes both partners. I think of this as the “classical” construction of homosexuality, as it describes the attitudes of ancient Rome – but it persists in cultures as near to our own as South America and the Mediterranean littoral.

It’s the classical construction that is the rule in human cultures. The homophilic one is the exception; in fact, I am not able to identify any culture which held to it until after the Industrial Revolution in Europe. And not all of Europe has acquired it yet. Even in the English-speaking countries, where the homophilic construction is most entrenched, the connotations of sexual insults and threats in our language still reflect the older model.

To put it another way, the male homosexuals of the last two centuries in our culture have engaged in a massive reinvention of homosexuality that is still underway. Specifically the male homosexuals; lesbians began the game with romantic homosexuality as their dominant mode. I have not identified any culture in which it was considered more normal for lesbians to have sex with prepubescent girls or with dominated inferiors.

[…]

This analysis raises two interesting questions. The first one is about the past: what changed? That is, how did the homophilic construction replace the classical one, where it did? I’m only speculating here, but I think the proximate cause may have been the sentimentalization of family life around the turn of the 19th century in Europe, which in turn was enabled by a sharp fall in infant mortality rates. Both processes started earlier and moved faster in England and the Anglosphere than they did elsewhere.

The other interesting question is whether this reinvention is sustainable in the longer term. If my analysis is correct, modern homosexuals are bucking a pretty strong biological headwind. How strong can be judged by a chilling little statistic I picked up years ago from a how-to manual written by homosexual SM practitioners for newbies, er, learning the ropes; it noted that, adjusted for population size, male homosexuals murder each other at a rate 26 times that of the general population.

That suggests to me that a tendency for male homosexuals to drift into the darker corners of domination sex is still wired in beneath the modern homophilic construction. It might take actual genetic engineering, of a kind we don’t yet have, to fix that wiring. Until then, I wish them luck. Because (and here I make the first and only value claim in this essay) whatever one’s opinion of homophilic homosexuals might be, the behaviors associated with the pederastic/dominating classical style are entangled with abuse and degradation in a way that can only be described as evil. Modern homosexuals deserve praise for their attempt to get shut of them.

Eric S. Raymond, “Reinventing Homosexuality”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-06-17.

June 26, 2018

Henry Johnson And The Harlem Hellfighters I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 25 Jun 2018

The 369th Infantry Regiment from Harlem, New York was an all-black unit that served on the Western Front. But not under American command, but loaned tot he French Army.

Saragarhi – The Last Stand – Extra History

Filed under: Asia, Britain, History, India, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Extra Credits
Published on 5 Aug 2017

A humble signal station manned by only twenty one Sikh soldiers of the British Empire finds itself beset by 10,000 attackers. There is no hope for relief, but even knowing it will come at the cost of their lives, the Sikhs refuse to stand down.

Twenty one men in the 36th Sikh Regiment stand against thousands of attackers, prepared to make their final stand.

QotD: Writing essays in school

Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

To find their way in American life, high-­schoolers need to be able to speak English, to read, to listen to and respect other people’s opinions, to have a command of the basic elements of courtesy and, to a lesser extent, to write. (They do not need to know how to write a thesis sentence. More injury is done to high-school essays by the imposition of the thesis-­sentence requirement than by any other means. The trick, kids are sometimes told, is to begin with a word like “although.” No.)

Nicholson Baker, “Fortress of Tedium: What I Learned as a Substitute Teacher”, New York Times Magazine, 2016-09-07.

June 25, 2018

The oddly variable careers of Royal Navy ships named HMS Lion

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Every now and again, a random question leads me to odd results … in this case I wondered about the Royal Navy ships named HMS Lion, which I remembered as being used for a First World War battlecruiser (Vice-Admiral Beatty’s flagship through the actions at Heligoland Bight and Jutland) and a Cold War light cruiser (whose sister ships were converted into hybrid light cruiser/amphibious assault ships). Earlier ships of that name had even more interesting careers (from the Wikipedia disambiguation page):

HMS Lion, lead ship of the Lion-class of Royal Navy battlecruisers.
Photo from the Imperial War Museum, via Wikimedia Commons.

  • English ship Lion (1511) was a 36-gun ship of the Royal Scottish Navy captured in 1511 and sold in 1513.
  • English ship Lion (1536) was a 50-gun ship built in 1536 and on the navy list until 1559.
  • English ship Lion (1547) was a Scottish ship captured in 1547 and later lost off Harwich.
  • English ship Lion (1557) was a 40-gun ship, also known as Golden Lion. She was rebuilt four times, in 1582, 1609, 1640 and 1658. After her 1609 rebuild she was renamed Red Lion, but this was reverted to Lion after the 1640 rebuild. She was sold in 1698.

Modern naval ships are considered long-in-the-tooth after 25-30 years of service. HMS Lion (the HMS was not consistently applied to royal ships until the eighteenth century, but let’s just let that slide here) of 1557 was only undergoing her first rebuild/life extension at the point a modern ship would already be under consideration for dismantling. She was still in royal service for three more rebuildings, and was sold (not scrapped) after 141 years of active service. But the Royal Navy was far from done with using this name:

  • HMS Lion (1665) was a 6-gun ketch, also known as Young Lion. She was captured from the Dutch in 1665, sold in 1667, repurchased in 1668 and sunk as a foundation at Sheerness in 1673.
  • HMS Lion (1683) was a fifth rate captured from the Algerians in 1683 and sold the same year.
  • HMS Lion (1702) was a 4-gun stores hoy of 99 tons burthen purchased in 1702. A French privateer captured her off Beachy Head in 1708, but she was recaptured in 1709.[1]
  • HMS Lion (1709 hoy) was a 4-gun hoy launched in 1709. She was wrecked in 1752.[2]
  • HMS Lion (1709) was a 60-gun third rate launched in 1709, rebuilt in 1738 and sold in 1765.

Another longer-service veteran than the vast majority of modern naval ships.

  • HMS Lion (1753) was a transport launched in 1753, hulked in 1775, and sold in 1786.
  • HMS Lion (1763) was a cutter purchased in 1763 and sold in 1771.
  • HMS Lion (1774) was a discovery vessel in service from 1774 to 1785.
  • HMS Lion (1777) was a 64-gun third rate launched in 1777. She was used as a sheer hulk from 1816 and was sold for breaking up in 1837.

One assumes the name was changed before 1781, even though the hull was still in use for long after other ships named HMS Lion were respectively in commission and then out of service with the Royal Navy:

  • HMS Lion (1781) was a schooner purchased around 1781 and sold in 1785.
  • HMS Lion (1794) was a 4-gun vessel, originally a Dutch hoy. She was purchased in 1794 and sold in 1795.
  • HMS Lion (1823) was a schooner in service from 1823 and sold in 1826.
  • HMS Lion (1847) was an 80-gun second rate launched in 1847. She was converted to screw propulsion in 1859 and became a training ship after 1871. She was sold for breaking up in 1905.
  • HMS Lion (1910) was a Lion-class battlecruiser launched in 1910 and sold in 1924.
  • HMS Lion (1939) was to have been a Lion-class battleship. She was laid down in 1939, but work was suspended later that year, and again in 1942. The order was finally cancelled in 1945 and she was broken up on the slipway.
  • HMS Lion (C34) was a Tiger-class cruiser launched in 1944 as the Minotaur-class HMS Defence. She was finally completed to a revised design in 1960. She was placed in reserve in 1964 and was scrapped in 1975.

The History of Non-Euclidian Geometry – The World We Know – Extra History – #5

Filed under: History, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 23 Jun 2018

Up until the 20th century, people assumed light behaved like a wave, passing through the “aether wind” — a fluid with incomprehensible properties. When the Michelson-Morley experiment disproved the aether’s existence, Einstein put out the theory of relativity — that space and time were part of the same package.

It’s 1887. Physics is almost complete. We almost know enough to see the clockwork of the universe. Only one last great question remains: how does light travel?

Differences between the United States and the “idealized” United States of Europe

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall, in the Continental Telegraph:

There are those who think – urge, wish for perhaps – the European Union is or should become the United States of Europe. Lots of central bureaucratic control, the nation states left as just the remnants of once independent countries like the US states are these days. In some ways the two systems are very much the same already. No US state has any control at all over trade across its own border. Nor does any EU one. Trade is an issue solely the competence of the central organisations, respectively Washington DC and Brussels. Equally, both systems use this central control of trade and trade only to expand that central control.

In the US there was a case that Federal control of trade meant that the Feds got to decide who could grow wheat where and when. The usual sort of planning idiocy led to the Feds telling farmers who could grow how much and when. One farmer claimed he was only growing for his own consumption and this shouldn’t be limited. The centre (the Supreme Court) disagreed, the crux being that if he didn’t grow for his own consumption he would buy, this affected inter-state commerce, he had to obey the Feds. The EU takes this a step further. The Single Market rules are nominally about trade. Anything legal to be buying and selling in one place is such in all is a reasonable explanation of the nub of the matter. Sure, exceptions and all that. But this then smuggles into all law that continental (Roman Law really) idea that what is legal to do is something that the legislation defines. Instead of that Common Law idea that legislation, the law even, defines what it is illegal to do all other things being legal.

Once this is accepted then of course the next step is that there must be regulation of all things so as to tell people what it is legal to do. In this manner all sorts of things get smuggled in. Vacuum cleaner motors must be limited to a certain size or power. Because those whose lives are unfortunate enough that they’ve time to spare to be concerned about legislation on such matters note that they can be and thus incorporate their trivialities into legislation. The extent of this reach is larger than you think. The underlying legal, not political, justification for recycling targets is that some countries – Holland, where digging a hole gains nothing but wet boots – don’t have space for landfill. This would put them at a disadvantage if other countries do have the space, therefore all must recycle.

Giving the centre power always, but always, means an extension of the centre’s power. The two systems aren’t so different then.

What’s inside Ikea’s “wood” ?

Filed under: Business, Woodworking — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Rag ‘n’ Bone Brown
Published on 12 May 2018

In this video I cut open one of Ikea’s Linnmon shelves to find out what’s inside.

QotD: Gandhi and the British army

Filed under: Africa, History, India, Media, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The film, moreover, does not give the slightest hint as to Gandhi’s attitude toward blacks, and the viewers of Gandhi would naturally suppose that, since the future Great Soul opposed South African discrimination against Indians, he would also oppose South African discrimination against black people. But this is not so. While Gandhi, in South Africa, fought furiously to have Indians recognized as loyal subjects of the British empire, and to have them enjoy the full rights of Englishmen, he had no concern for blacks whatever. In fact, during one of the “Kaffir Wars” he volunteered to organize a brigade of Indians to put down a Zulu rising, and was decorated himself for valor under fire.

For, yes, Gandhi (Sergeant-Major Gandhi) was awarded Victoria’s coveted War Medal. Throughout most of his life Gandhi had the most inordinate admiration for British soldiers, their sense of duty, their discipline and stoicism in defeat (a trait he emulated himself). He marveled that they retreated with heads high, like victors. There was even a time in his life when Gandhi, hardly to be distinguished from Kipling’s Gunga Din, wanted nothing so much as to be a Soldier of the Queen. Since this is not in keeping with the “spirit” of Gandhi, as decided by Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi, it is naturally omitted from the movie.

Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.

June 24, 2018

Europe and the refugees

Filed under: Africa, Europe, Government, Italy, Law, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theodore Dalrymple on the various European governments’ attitudes and actions on the refugee problem:

Europe, despite its Union, is as divided as ever. Recently, when Italy’s new right-wing government — anxious to prove its credentials — refused to allow a boat carrying 629 African migrants to dock in Italy, Spain’s new left-wing government — equally anxious to do the same — accepted the boat. When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, criticized the Italians for their decision, the Italian government accused the French of hypocrisy, inasmuch as they had refused to take more than 9,000 migrants from Italy that they had previously agreed to accept.

This story is revealing in several aspects. The first is that, whatever attitude governments take to the migrants, no one truly believes that they are more of an asset than a liability. Madrid’s action, for example, was taken on “humanitarian” grounds, rather than because it believed that Spain would benefit from the migrants’ presence. When European leaders discuss the migrant question, it is always in terms of sharing the burden, not the assets, equitably. No one speaks of foreign investment in this way, which suggests that European politicians believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that the free movement of people and capital are different in an important way.

The leaders speak of sharing the burden, then, and are incensed when countries such as Hungary and Poland refuse point-blank to take any migrants from Africa or the Middle East. But I have never seen mentioned in this context the question of where the migrants themselves want to go. They might as well be inanimate toxic waste as far as the discussion is concerned, rather than human beings with wishes, desires, ambitions, and so forth. They are but pawns in a political game. Hungary, for example, is deemed duty-bound to take x number of migrants: no one asks whether x number of migrants can be found who want to go to Hungary. Nor is the question ever discussed in public whether Hungary, having open borders, would be held responsible for making the migrants stay there once they had arrived. Short of penning them in, how exactly would you keep them in Hungary, or in Poland?

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