Quotulatiousness

February 13, 2023

Prostitution in the Roman Empire

Filed under: Europe, History, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

[Note: This is the introduction to a 95-minute lecture that can only be viewed on YouTube directly due to age restrictions. The link to the full video is here.]

seangabb
Published 13 Dec 2022

This lecture is concerned with the customs and institutions of paid sex in the Roman World. The main focus is on the market for paid sex between the founding of the Empire in the last decades before the birth of Christ, down to the establishment of Christianity as the faith of the Empire, with a brief overview of the shifting views of paid sex by the authorities in the Christian Empire. It involves extensive quotation from legal and literary and other contemporary sources, plus modern research and the archaeology, to provide an overview of a subject that if often harrowing and even disgusting, but that is, or should be, a core unit in any history of the Roman World. Subjects covered include:

Sex slaves
“Free” Prostitutes
Forced prostitution
Foundlings as prostitutes
The age of consent in ancient times
The legal status of prostitutes
Violence against prostitutes
Male prostitution
Castration of male sex slaves
The price of sexual services
Brothels
Erotic art
Sexually transmitted diseases
Christianity and prostitution

There is a full bibliography at the end of both ancient and modern sources.

Note: This lecture deals in an explicit manner with themes that are very controversial and that may give considerable offence. If you believe that you may be offended by any of the images and readings, please do not watch.
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QotD: Oaths in pre-modern cultures

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

First, some caveats. This is really a discussion of oath-taking as it existed (and exists) around the Mediterranean and Europe. My understanding is that the basic principles are broadly cross-cultural, but I can’t claim the expertise in practices south of the Sahara or East of the Indus to make that claim with full confidence. I am mostly going to stick to what I know best: Greece, Rome and the European Middle Ages. Oath-taking in the pre-Islamic Near East seems to follow the same set of rules (note Bachvarova’s and Connolly’s articles in Horkos), but that is beyond my expertise, as is the Middle East post-Hijra.

Second, I should note that I’m drawing my definition of an oath from Alan Sommerstein’s excellent introduction in Horkos: The Oath in Greek Society (2007), edited by A. Sommerstein and J. Fletcher – one of the real “go-to” works on oath-taking in the ancient Mediterranean world. As I go, I’ll also use some medieval examples to hopefully convince you that the same basic principles apply to medieval oaths, especially the all-important oaths of fealty and homage.

(Pedantry note: now you may be saying, “wait, an introduction? Why use that?” As of when I last checked, there is no monograph (single author, single topic) treatment of oaths. Rather, Alan Sommerstein has co-authored a set of edited collections – Horkos (2007, with J. Fletcher), Oath and State (2013, with A. Bayliss) and Oaths and Swearing (2014, with I. Torrance). This can make Greek oaths a difficult topic to get a basic overview of, as opposed to a laundry list of the 101 ancient works you must read for examples. Discussions of Roman oaths are, if anything, even less welcoming to the beginner, because they intersect with the study of Roman law. I think the expectation has always been that the serious student of the classics would have read so many oaths in the process of learning Latin and Greek to develop a sort of instinct for the cultural institution. Nevertheless, Sommerstein’s introduction in Horkos presents my preferred definition of the structure of an oath.)

Alright – all of the quibbling out of the way: onward!

So what is an Oath? Is it the same as a Vow?

Ok, let’s start with definitions. In modern English, we often use oath and vow interchangeably, but they are not (usually) the same thing. Divine beings figure in both kinds of promises, but in different ways. In a vow, the god or gods in question are the recipients of the promise: you vow something to God (or a god). By contrast, an oath is made typically to a person and the role of the divine being in the whole affair is a bit more complex.

(Etymology digression: the word “oath” comes to us by way of Old English āþ (pronounced “ath” with a long ‘a’) and has close cousins in Dutch “Eed” and German “Eid”. The word vow comes from Latin (via Middle English, via French), from the word votum. A votum is specifically a gift to a god in exchange for some favor – the gift can be in the present tense or something promised in the future. By contrast, the Latin word for oath is ius (it has a few meanings) and to swear an oath is the verb iuro (thus the legal phrase “ius iurandum” – literally “the oath to be sworn”). This Latin distinction is preserved into the English usage, where “vow” retains its Latin meaning, and the word “oath” usurps the place of Latin ius (along with other words for specific kinds of oaths in Latin, e.g. sacramentum)).

In a vow, the participant promises something – either in the present or the future – to a god, typically in exchange for something. This is why we talk of an oath of fealty or homage (promises made to a human), but a monk’s vows. When a monk promises obedience, chastity and poverty, he is offering these things to God in exchange for grace, rather than to any mortal person. Those vows are not to the community (though it may be present), but to God (e.g. Benedict in his Rule notes that the vow “is done in the presence of God and his saints to impress on the novice that if he ever acts otherwise, he will surely be condemned by the one he mocks“. (RB 58.18)). Note that a physical thing given in a vow is called a votive (from that Latin root).

(More digressions: Why do we say “marriage vows” in English? Isn’t this a promise to another human being? I suspect this usage – functionally a “frozen” phrase – derives from the assumption that the vows are, in fact, not a promise to your better half, but to God to maintain. After all, the Latin Church held – and the Catholic Church still holds – that a marriage cannot be dissolved by the consent of both parties (unlike oaths, from which a person may be released with the consent of the recipient). The act of divine ratification makes God a party to the marriage, and thus the promise is to him. Thus a vow, and not an oath.)

So again, a vow is a promise to a divinity or other higher power (you can make vows to heroes and saints, for instance), whereas an oath is a promise to another human, which is somehow enforced, witnessed or guaranteed by that higher power.

An example of this important distinction being handled in a very awkward manner is the “oath” of the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones (delivered in S1E7, but taken, short a few words, verbatim from the books). The recruits call out to … someone … (they never name who, which as we’ll see, is a problem) to “hear my words and bear witness to my vow”. Except it’s not clear to me that this is a vow, so much as an oath. The supernatural being you are vowing something to does not bear witness because they are the primary participant – they don’t witness the gift, they receive it.

I strongly suspect that Martin is riffing off of here are the religious military orders of the Middle Ages (who did frequently take vows), but if this is a vow, it raises serious questions. It is absolutely possible to vow a certain future behavior – to essentially make yourself the gift – but who are they vowing to? The tree? It may well be “the Old Gods” who are supposed to be both nameless and numerous (this is, forgive me, not how ancient paganism worked – am I going to have to write that post too?) and who witness things (such as the Pact, itself definitely an oath, through the trees), but if so, surely you would want to specify that. Societies that do votives – especially when there are many gods – are often quite concerned that gifts might go awry. You want to be very specific as to who, exactly, you are vowing something to.

This is all the more important given that (as in the books) the Night’s Watch oath may be sworn in a sept as well as to a Weirwood tree. It wouldn’t do to vow yourself to the wrong gods! More importantly, the interchangeability of the gods in question points very strongly to this being an oath. Gods tend to be very particular about the votives they will receive; one can imagine saying “swear by whatever gods you have here” but not “vow yourself to whatever gods you have here”. Who is to say the local gods take such gifts?

Moreover, while they pledge their lives, they aren’t receiving anything in return. Here I think the problem may be that we are so used to the theologically obvious request of Christian vows (salvation and the life after death) that it doesn’t occur to us that you would need to specify what you get for a vow. But the Old Gods don’t seem to be in a position to offer salvation. Votives to gods in polytheistic systems almost always follow the do ut des system (lit. “I give, that you might give”). Things are not offered just for the heck of it – something is sought in return. And if you want that thing, you need to say it. Jupiter is not going to try to figure it out on his own. If you are asking the Old Gods to protect you, or the wall, or mankind, you need to ask.

(Pliny the Elder puts it neatly declaring, “of course, either to sacrifice without prayer or to consult the gods without sacrifice is useless” (Nat. Hist. 28.3). Prayer here (Latin: precatio) really means “asking for something” – as in the sense of “I pray thee (or ‘prithee’) tell me what happened?” And to be clear, the connection of Christian religious practice to the do ut des formula of pre-Christian paganism is a complex theological question better addressed to a theologian or church historian.)

The scene makes more sense as an oath – the oath-takers are swearing to the rest of the Night’s Watch to keep these promises, with the Weirwood Trees (and through them, the Old Gods – although again, they should specify) acting as witnesses. As a vow, too much is up in the air and the idea that a military order would permit its members to vow themselves to this or that god at random is nonsense. For a vow, the recipient – the god – is paramount.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Oaths! How do they Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-28.

February 12, 2023

German Desperation in Korsun Pocket – Week 233 – February 11, 1944

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Italy, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 11 Feb 2023

It is crisis mode in the Korsun Pocket this week for the Axis troops surrounded, but they are also losing ground all over the Eastern Front this week, including the big prize of Nikopol. In Italy, it is a different story as the Germans play offense at Anzio, though with only small gains.
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Avro Vulcan: What made the Vulcan the best V bomber?

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

Imperial War Museums
Published 28 Apr 2021

The Avro Vulcan Bomber, the most famous of the British V bombers, is known for its distinctive howl and delta wing. Initially one of the delivery agents of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent during the Cold War, the Vulcan later fulfilled another role, undertaking the longest bombing raid in history for Operation Black Buck in the Falklands Campaign of 1982. One of the first operational RAF aircraft with a delta wing, this impressive Cold War jet has never lost its appeal. In this video, events and experiences coordinator Liam Shaw takes us through the extraordinary history and technological achievements of the Avro Vulcan. We go into the cockpit and hear first-hand from the people who flew this unique machine throughout its long and remarkable history.
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QotD: The heyday of Victorian newspapers

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

A few years ago, I did some research on three early Victorian murders that caused me to read several provincial newspapers of the time. I discovered incidentally to my research that the owners or editors of about half of the British provincial newspapers also sold patent medicines; and this made perfect sense, for by far the greatest advertisers in provincial newspapers were the manufacturers of patent medicines. The owners or editors of the newspapers sold advertisements to the producers of patent medicines, then they sold the newspapers in which the advertisements appeared, and finally they sold the products themselves to the readers. It was an excellent example of rational commercial synergy. (About half of the medicines, by the way, were either to cure or to prevent syphilis — a disease, then, that was a great support to the press of the time.)

Now, the principal quality or characteristic of the sellers of patent medicine has always been effrontery, that is to say the blatant insinuation of the false. Thomas Holloway’s innovation was to insinuate such falsehood on a mass or industrial scale. There was hardly a newspaper in which he did not place a weekly advertisement; moreover, he pioneered the advertisement that masquerades as news story. He would ensure that reports of miracle cures in faraway places, supposedly wrought by his pills and ointment, and written as matter-of-factly as possible, were placed in every newspaper, reports whose veracity no one could possibly check for himself, of course.

As Napoleon once said, repetition is the only rhetorical technique that really works — besides which hope and fear render people susceptible to effrontery. In Thomas Holloway’s time, the fear of illness was often, and the hope of cure rarely, justified; at least Holloway’s preparations were unlikely to do much harm (they contained aloe, myrrh, and saffron), unlike the prescriptions of the orthodox doctors of the time. They allowed for the possibility of natural recovery, whereas orthodox medicine often hurried its consumers into their graves. Nevertheless, the claims Holloway made for his ointment and pills were preposterous, and something is not curative just because it fails to kill.

Holloway made an immense fortune by his effrontery and founded a women’s college in the University of London on the proceeds.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Way of Che”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-10-28.

February 11, 2023

Americans tend to think other countries are just like America, but with weird accents and quaint clothing

Filed under: Education, Europe, Media, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sarah Hoyt on the common problem Americans (and to a lesser extent, Canadians) have in trying to understand other nations even if they’ve done some international travel:

I also see every country, regardless of their history making the assumption that the modus operandi and motives of other cultures and organizations is exactly the same as theirs. I’ve now mentioned about a million times the idiots who went over as Human Shields to Iraq because “they can’t even provide drinking water for their people, how would they have missiles” thereby completely missing the fact that other countries — dictatorships at that — have different priorities than say the US or England, even. In the same way, Portugal assumes that every country is as fraught as corruption as they are. Which works fine for other Latin countries, but fails them when it comes to other places, because as corrupt as we are … yeah. It’s nowhere near there yet. Russia assumes everyone moves, breathes and thinks only about them, and that everyone’s intention is to threaten them or conquer them, because they are obsessed with their dreams of national glory, and they think they should rule the world. And the US by and large goes around like a large vaguely autistic child who really, really, really doesn’t understand how different it is from other nations, or if it does assumes it’s worse.

Look, it’s part of the reason our intelligence services are so sucky. To completely understand what other countries are doing and why, you have to know they have very different cultures. They’re not you. Most countries can sort of extrapolate other countries, but America is so different we suck at it. This is why we tend to think places like the USSR (Russia’s party mask) were totes super powers. Because for America to do and say the things they did and said, we’d have to be very sure of our power. But other countries aren’t America. So we go through the world acting like gullible giants.

In fact Americans have one of the weirder cultures in the world. It’s just not in your face weird as China (whose history reads like they should be extra-terrestrials.) It’s subtle and more in the mental furniture.

Because of this, and because we’re a continent-sized nation, born and bred Americans (as opposed to imports like me) read not just the rest of the world but history hilariously wrong. (The history part is because at least when I went through school here — one year — American schools suck at teaching history. It’s all names and dates, not “Why did France do that?” Yeah, probably not worse than the rest of the world, now that all the books have just-so Marxist explanations, but still stupid.)

I had friends in my writers’ group back when who were writing, say, ancient Egyptian families and couldn’t understand in most of them the teens wouldn’t be/act the same as American teens now. Heck, my dad’s generation in Portugal, less than 100 years ago weren’t “teens” really. Their equivalent was under ten. Because by 12 most of the boys in the village were apprenticed in the job they’d have for life. (And dad was in school, yes, but it was way tougher than even I had.) They didn’t have time. And even I — and you guys know my basic disposition — didn’t sass my parents as American teens do, because there was a deep “fund” of “respect the elders” in the culture. I still have trouble calling people older than I — even colleagues — by their first name.

And then there’s the hilarious — or sad — misunderstandings like the Human Shields mentioned above. It’s sad, because they will buy other countries at face value, but are willing to entertain their own country might be evil. Which is why we have a large contingent of open-mouth guppies who think that the US invented slavery. Even though places around the world still have slavery. Including China, where everyone is a slave, it’s the degree that varies, of course.

The problem is made worse — not better — by idiotic travel abroad.

To understand the differences in a country, you need to live with them, as one of them, for a while. You need to speak the language well enough you understand overheard conversations. Etc.

My experience coming over as an exchange student for 12th grade was about ideal. I lived with an American family, as one of their kids, and attended a school nowhere USA (okay, a suburb of Akron, Ohio) and yeah, I had slight celebrity status in the school — being one of three foreign exchange students — but not that much. So I got to experience the normal life of normal people in normal circumstances, which was an eye-opener.

I always wanted my kids to follow me in this experience, but you know, things got complicated around the time they were of age to do it. So they didn’t. They still have experienced life as an every day foreigner when we visit my parents. In fact the issue there is that they never get past the irritation “What do you mean we can’t do that” and towards “oh, it’s just different. Still sucky, but different.”

Going over for two weeks, with or without the guided tour, staying in nice hotels and associating only with people at your social level and not past the level of polite interaction does not enlarge the mind. Instead, it gives a false sense of knowing what the world is like. This is where we get the “socialists” who know it’s good, because look at all the magnificent buildings in Europe, and the fact everyone has time to sit in the coffee shop and socialize with friends. And look at all the amazing public transportation. And and and. If you lived there, or knew history, you’d know most of the buildings created by socialists in the 20th and 21st century are already crumbling. (Some start before being finished.) You’d know people sit around in coffee shops either because they are unemployed, they pretend to work and their boss pretends to pay them, or all of the above. And all of it is paid for in a significant reduction in lifestyle and just the general comfort of life. (Take it from me. Their lifestyle is two social economic levels down from us, for the same relative “income level.” So, you know, upper class is middle-middle class here.) And you’d know the frustration of waiting for the bus on a rainy, windy day, getting soaked, but the bus is late because all the bus drivers went out for a pint together. And suddenly there’s five of them in a row, but you’re already soaked and starting to cough. More importantly you’d know the public transport only works because everyone works in the city and lives in crowded suburbs, in stack-a-prole apartments, while the countryside is relatively empty. And the people who live there need to buy gas at ridiculous prices, so they can barely afford it.

Napoleon’s Downfall: Why He Lost the Battle of Nations

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 10 Feb 2023

After the brief summer 1813 cease fire, Napoleon’s campaign in Germany resumes. Surrounded by the Allies — which also manage to slowly turn the tide at Großbeeren, Dennewitz, Kulm, and Dresden — his only remaining option is the ultimate battle which takes place in October 1813 at Leipzig: The Battle of Nations.
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Tank Chats #167 | French Panhard EBR | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Africa, France, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 28 Oct 2022

How much do you know about the Panhard EBR? Join David Willey for this week’s Tank Chat as he covers the development, design and use of this French armoured car.
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February 10, 2023

Hitler’s Jazz Band – WW2 Documentary Special

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 9 Feb 2023

Does Adolf Hitler like Duke Ellington? No, and nor do many National Socialists. But the story of the music in the Third Reich is more complicated than you might think. What if we told you that Joseph Goebbels has tried to create a Nazi-approved swing band tasked with bringing the Jazz War to the Allies?
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QotD: Before Star Wars or the MCU there was … the Arthurian Narrative Universe

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’m referring to the obsession with knights and their adventures — and especially those linked to King Arthur and his Round Table. These were the most popular stories in Europe for hundreds of years. Readers couldn’t get enough of them, and even as the stories got stale and predictable, the audience demanded more and more.

The situation is almost exactly the same as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We have a major character named King Arthur, but he was linked to numerous spinoffs and sequels. The other heroes connected to him soon established their own brands — including Lancelot, Merlin, Gawain, Tristan, Percival, and many others. Readers who enjoyed one of the heroes, often became fans of others.

If you make a list, the Arthurian Narrative Universe (ANU) has more than fifty protagonists. Not all of them became major brands, but that’s no different from the movie business, where even Disney can’t keep every superhero on the payroll.

Even more to the point, these stories were business initiatives, expected to enrich their owners. It’s hardly a coincidence that the most influential collection of stories about King Arthur in English, Le Morte d’Arthur published in 1485, originated as a profit-making venture by the earliest commercial publisher in Britain.

William Caxton was not only the first person to set up a printing press in England, but also the first retailer of printed books in the country. He acquired the manuscript of Le Morte d’Arthur from Thomas Malory, the Stan Lee of his day, and turned it into the single most influential secular British book between the time of Chaucer and the rise of Shakespeare.

He didn’t do it because he loved English history. (The painful truth is that very little — in fact next to nothing — in the Arthurian tales comes from documented historical events.) He didn’t even publish the book because he loved a good story. Caxton wanted to make a buck — or a pound sterling, I ought to say. He had identified the right brand franchise, much like the Walt Disney Company in the current day, and would milk it for all it was worth.

But here’s the most amazing thing about his brand franchise: Arthurian stories had been circulating in manuscript for more than 300 years at this point. And many of the details in these narratives are much older than that, reaching back to accounts of knights who fought in the Crusades, if not earlier.

We can trace the story of Lancelot and his adulterous romance with Queen Guinevere at least back to 1180. The story of the knights’ quest for the Holy Grail dates at least back to 1190. The first mention of King Arthur is no later than 828 AD.

Stop and consider the implications. King Arthur was the most popular brand franchise in secular narratives when he was 650 years old!

Of course, it was absurd. Nobody undertook knightly adventures of this sort during the Renaissance, but storytellers pretended otherwise. Everything about these narratives was outdated, unrealistic, and repetitive — the people who read these tales didn’t own suits of armor or compete in jousting tournaments. Those things had disappeared from society. But the audience still wanted these stories, so the same plots and characters got recycled again and again.

Ted Gioia, “Don Quixote Tells Us How the Star Wars Franchise Ends”, The Honest Broker, 2022-11-09.

February 9, 2023

QotD: Collecting taxes, Medieval-style

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I want to begin with an observation, obvious but frequently ignored: states are complex things. The apparatus by which a state gathers revenue, raises armies (with that revenue), administers justice and tries to organize society – that apparatus requires people. Not just any people: they need to be people of the educated, literate sort to be able to record taxes, read the laws and transmit (written) royal orders and decrees.

(Note: for a more detailed primer on what this kind of apparatus can look like, check out Wayne Lee’s (@MilHist_Lee) talk “Reaping the Rewards: How the Governor, the Priest, the Taxman, and the Garrison Secure Victory in World History” here. He’s got some specific points he’s driving at, but the first half of the talk is a broad overview of the problems you face as a suddenly successful king. Also, the whole thing is fascinating.)

In a pre-modern society, this task – assembling and organizing the literate bureaucrats you need to run a state – is very difficult. Literacy is often very low, so the number of individuals with the necessary skills is minuscule. Training new literate bureaucrats is expensive, as is paying the ones you have, creating a catch-22 where the king has no money because he has no tax collectors and he has no tax collectors because he has no money. Looking at how states form is thus often a question of looking at how this low-administration equilibrium is broken. The administrators you need might be found in civic elites who are persuaded to do the job in exchange for power, or in a co-opted religious hierarchy of educated priests, for instance.

Vassalage represents another response to the problem, which is the attempt to – as much as possible – do without. Let’s specify terms: I am using “vassalage” here because it is specific in a way that the more commonly used “feudalism” is not. I am not (yet) referring to how peasants (in Westeros the “smallfolk”) interact with lords (which is better termed “manorialism” than as part of feudalism anyway), but rather how military aristocrats (knights, lords, etc) interact with each other.

So let us say you are a king who has suddenly come into a lot of land, probably by bloody conquest. You need to extract revenue from that land in order to pay for the armies you used to conquer it, but you don’t have a pile of literate bureaucrats to collect those taxes and no easy way to get some. By handing out that land to your military retainers as fiefs (they become your vassals), you can solve a bunch of problems at once. First, you pay off your military retainers for their service with something you have that is valuable (land). Second, by extracting certain promises (called “homage”) from them, you ensure that they will continue to fight for you. And third, you are partitioning your land into smaller and smaller chunks until you get them in chunks small enough to be administered directly, with only a very, very minimal bureaucratic apparatus. Your new vassals, of course, may do the same with their new land, further fragmenting the political system.

This is the system in Westeros, albeit after generations of inheritance (such that families, rather than individuals, serve as the chief political unit). The Westerosi term for a vassal is a “bannerman”. Greater military aristocrats with larger holding are lords, while lesser ones are landed knights. Landed knights often hold significant lands and a keep (fortified manner house), which would make them something more akin to European castellans or barons than, say, a 14th century English Knight Banneret (who is unlikely to have been given permission to fortify his home, known as a license to crenellate). What is missing from this system are the vast majority of knights, who would not have had any kind of fortified dwelling or castle, but would have instead been maintained as part of the household of some more senior member of the aristocracy. A handful of landless knights show up in Game of Thrones, but they should be by far the majority and make up most of the armies.

There’s one final missing ingredient here, which is castles, something Westeros has in abundance. Castles – in the absence of castle-breaking cannon – shift power downward in this system, because they allow vassals to effectively resist their lieges. That may not manifest in open rebellion so much as a refusal to go on campaign or supply troops. This is important, because it makes lieges as dependent on their vassals as vassals are on their lieges.

Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-12.

February 8, 2023

“Smoking has been a net gain for the Treasury ever since King James I started taxing it heavily in the 1600s”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christopher Snowden asks whether we should believe the consistent claims of public health advocates on how much things they disapprove of (smoking, drinking, etc.) “cost” the taxpayer:

If smoking costs the taxpayers £173 billion, then how much does widespread forced feeding of office pastries cost?

If you say that a certain activity costs society £10 billion a year, most people would assume that if that activity disappears, society will save £10 billion a year.

They might have different ideas of what “society” means. Some will assume that the £10 billion is a cost to taxpayers while others will assume that some of the cost is borne by private individuals and businesses. But the majority will, quite reasonably, assume that the cost is to other people, i.e. those who do not participate in the activity.

And nearly everyone will assume that the £10 billion is money in the conventional sense of cash that can be exchanged for goods and services.

But when it comes to estimates from “public health” campaigners about the cost of drinking/smoking/obesity, all these assumptions would be wrong. Most of the “costs” are to the people engaged in the activity and they are not financial costs. Taxpayers would not pay less tax if they disappeared. In general, they would pay more.

Last month I mentioned an estimate of the “cost” of gambling in the UK and said:

    These studies have no merit as economic research. They are purely driven by advocacy. The hope is that the average person will wrongly assume that the costs are to taxpayers and agitate for change.

The main aim of these Big Numbers is to convince the public that heavily-taxed activities place a burden on society that exceeds the tax revenue, thereby justifying yet more taxes and prohibitions.

In the case of smoking, this has become more and more difficult. Smoking has been a net gain for the Treasury ever since King James I started taxing it heavily in the 1600s. Today, as the smoking rate dwindles and tobacco duty rises ever higher, anti-smoking campaigners have got their work cut out duping non-smokers into thinking otherwise.

Tobacco duty brings in about £12 billion a year. For years, groups like Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) used a figure of £13.74 billion as the “cost of smoking”. This came from a flimsy Policy Exchange report which included £5.4 billion as the cost of smoking breaks and £4.8 billion as the cost of lost productivity due to premature mortality. Neither of these are costs to the taxpayer. They are not even external costs, i.e. costs to non-smokers.

Last year, in a review commissioned by the Department of Health, Javed Khan came up with a figure of “around £17 billion” as the “societal cost” of smoking. This included “reduced employment levels” (£5.69 billion) and “reduced wages for smokers” (£6.04 billion). Again, these costs fall on smokers themselves and are not external costs. They are, in other words, none of the government’s business.

Last week, a report commissioned by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) pulled out all the stops and announced that the cost of smoking to Britain was now — wait for it! — £173 billion. Go big or go home, eh?

The ghastly Thirty Years’ War in Europe

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams outlines the state of Europe four hundred years ago:

A war as long and as complex requires something like this to help keep the narrative somewhat understandable.

Exactly four hundred years ago, a dark shadow was slithering across mainland Europe. It stretched its bleak, cold presence into each hearth and home. Everything it touched turned to ruin. Musket and rapier, smoke and fire, ruled supreme. Nothing was immune. Animals and children starved to death, mothers and adolescent girls were abused and tortured. The lucky ones died, alongside their brothers and fathers, slain in battle. Possessions were looted, crops destroyed, barns and houses burned. There seemed no end to the evil and pestilence. Sixteen generations ago, many believed the end of the world had arrived.

This was not a tale of Middle Earth. The place was central Europe in the early 17th century. In 1618 the future Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand II, a zealous follower of the Jesuits, had attempted to restore the Catholic Church as the only religion in the Empire and exterminate any form of religious dissent. Protestant nobles in Bohemia and Austria rose up in rebellion. The conflict soon widened, fuelled by the political ambitions of adjacent powers. In Europe’s heartland, three denominations fought it out: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism.

The result was an interwoven tangle of diplomatic plot twists, temporary alliances and coalitions, as princes, bishops and potentates beseeched outside powers to help. The struggle, which lasted for thirty years, boiled down to the Roman Catholic and Habsburg-led Holy Roman Empire, fighting an incongruous array of Protestant towns and statelets, aided by the anti-Catholic powers of Sweden under Gustavus Adolphus, and the United Netherlands. France and Spain also took advantage of the distractions of war to indulge in their own sub-campaigns. Britain took no formal part but was about to become embroiled in her own civil war.

The principal battleground for this collective contest of arms centred on the towns and principalities of what would become Germany, northern Italy, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. The war devastated many regions on a scale unseen again until 1944–45. For example, at Magdeburg on the River Elbe, 20,000 of 25,000 inhabitants died, with 1,700 of its 1,900 buildings ruined. In Czech Bohemia, 40 per cent of the population perished, with 100 towns and more than a thousand villages laid waste. At Nordlingen in 1634, around 16,000 soldiers were killed in a single day’s battle. The town took three centuries for its population to return to pre-war levels. Refugees from smaller settlements swelled the many walled cities, increasing hunger and spreading disease.

Too diminutive to defend themselves, all states hired mercenaries, of whom a huge number flourished in the era, enticed by the prospect of quick wealth in exchange for proficiency with sword and musket. Employed by every antagonist, but beholden to no one, these armed brigands — regiments would be too grand a term for the uniformed thugs they were — roamed at will. With their pikes and their muskets, they plundered the countryside in search of booty, food and transport. In their wake, they left burning towns, ruined villages, pillaged farms. Lead was stripped from houses and church roofs for ammunition.

Left to right:
The Defenestration of Prague (23 May, 1618), The death of Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen (16 November, 1632), Dutch warships prior to the Battle of the Downs (21 October, 1639), and The Battle of Rocroi (19 May, 1643).
Collage by David Dijkgraaf via Wikimedia Commons.

When in the winter of 1634 Swedish mercenaries were refused food and wine by the inhabitants of Linden, a tiny Bavarian settlement, they raped and looted their way through the village, leaving it uninhabitable. Across Europe, travellers noted the human and animal carcasses that decorated the meadows, streams polluted by the dead and rotting crops, presided over only by ravens and wolves. No respect was shown for the lifeless. Survivors stripped corpses of clothing and valuables; if lucky, the deceased were tossed into unmarked mass graves, since lost to history.

Having triggered the war, Ferdinand predeceased its end. We can never know how many died in Europe’s last major conflagration triggered by religion. Archives perished in the flames, and survivors were not interested in computations. Historians now put the death toll at between 8 and 12 million. Probably 500,000 perished in battle, with the rest, mostly civilians, expiring through starvation and disease. We think these casualties may equate to as much as 20 per cent of mainland Europe’s population and perhaps one-third of those in modern Germany, bringing the Thirty Years’ War a potency similar to the Black Death or either world war. The region did not recover for at least three generations.

Economic activity, land use and ownership altered terminally. When the exhausted powers finally met in October 1648 at Osnabrück and Münster in the German province of Westphalia to end the directionless slaughter, of whom self-serving militias were the only beneficiaries, Europe’s balance of power had shifted tectonically. Fresh rules of conflict and the legitimacy of a new network of 300 sovereign states, independent from a Holy Roman Emperor or a Pope, marked the struggle as a watershed moment, leading to the Enlightenment and an era that disappeared only with Napoleon.

February 7, 2023

The Soviet Union Adopts an SMG: Degtyarev’s PPD-34/38

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Oct 2022

The Soviet Union adopted its first submachine gun in 1935 after trials of some 14 different design in 1932/33. The winner of the trials was Vasily Degtyarev, once of the Soviet Union’s most prolific firearms designers. His model 1934 was a simple blowback gun reminiscent of the MP-28,II albeit with different trigger and magazine systems. The PPD34 used a 25-round box magazine, chambered for 7.62x25mm Tokarev. It was put into slow production, with just 3,300 or so produced by the end of 1938. During that time, Degtyarev made a number of small improvements to the gun, smoothing out the teething problems that are always found in new production systems. This improved version was designated the PPD34-38.

During the time, the submachine gun was not considered a priority by the Red Army. The leading generals did not see the value in the class of arms, and actually pulled all the PPDs from service in 1939 and had them put into storage. Only a few months later, the Red Army would be given a grim demonstration of SMG effectiveness when they closed the border into Finland and encountered determined Finnish resistance with kp/31 Suomi SMGs.

Some Suomis were captured by Soviet troops, and were very well liked — for obvious reasons. The inevitable inquiry into why the Red Army did not have such a weapon led to a frantic re-issuing of PPDs and production of as many as possible. At Stalin’s direction, the Suomi drum magazine was copied and adapted to the PPD34-38 as well. This required the addition of a short feed tower to fit the magazine well initially deigned for a standard box magazine. While PPD34-38 production continued, the PPD40 was quickly designed and put into production alongside the older model. Eventually, both were replaced in service by the PPSh-41, which was truly designed for mass industrial production.
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February 6, 2023

Why Traditional English Cheddar Is Aged In Caves | Regional Eats

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

Food Insider
Published 9 Oct 2019

The earliest record of cheddar anywhere is at Cheddar, in Somerset, in 1170. The land around this village has been at the heart of English cheesemaking since the 15th century. Today, as many Cheddar producers have upscaled and require more land, there is only one traditional cheesemaker left in the village.
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