Quotulatiousness

August 15, 2025

Ted Gioia on Hunter S. Thompson

Filed under: Books, Education, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I must admit that I got hooked on Hunter S. Thompson’s writing very early. I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in my mid-teens and it blew my mind. I couldn’t actually believe everything he wrote, but I couldn’t completely discount it either. I certainly haven’t read everything he wrote … especially his later sports commentary, but I have read most of the best-known books. On his Substack, Ted Gioia is running a three-part series on the writer and his work:

That’s Hunter Thompson. There’s always someone in control behind the wheel — even when he seems most out of control.

This hidden discipline showed up in other ways. Years later, when he ran for sheriff in Aspen or showed up in Washington, D.C. to cover an election for Rolling Stone, savvy observers soon grasped that Thompson had better instincts and organizational skills than some of the most high-powered political operatives. People rallied around him — he was always the ringleader, even going back to his rowdy childhood. And hidden behind the stoned Gonzo exterior was an ambitious strategist who could play a long term game even as he wagered extravagantly on each spin of the roulette wheel that was his life.

“I don’t think you have any idea who Hunter S. Thompson is when he drops the role of court jester,” he wrote to Kraig Juenger, a 34-year-old married woman with whom he had an affair at age 18. “First, I do not live from orgy to orgy, as I might have made you believe. I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people believe.”

That wasn’t just posturing. It had to be true, merely judging by how well-read and au courant Thompson became long before his rise to fame. “His bedroom was lined with books,” later recalled his friend Ralston Steenrod, who went on to major in English at Princeton. “Where I would go home and go to sleep, Hunter would go home and read.” Another friend who went to Yale admitted that Thompson “was probably better read than any of us”.

Did he really come home from drinking binges, and open up a book? It’s hard to believe, but somehow he gave himself a world class education even while living on the bleeding edge. And in later years, Thompson proved it. When it came to literary matters, he simply knew more than most of his editors, who could boast of illustrious degrees Thompson lacked. And when covering some new subject he didn’t know, he learned fast and without slowing down a beat.

But Thompson had another unusual source of inspiration he used in creating his unique prose style. It came from writing letters, which he did constantly and crazily — sending them to friends, lovers, famous people, and total strangers. Almost from the start, he knew this was the engine room for his career; that’s why he always kept copies, even in the early days when that required messy carbon paper in the typewriter. Here in the epistolary medium he found his true authorial voice, as well as his favorite and only subject: himself.

But putting so much sound and fury into his letters came at a cost. For years, Thompson submitted articles that got rejected by newspapers and magazines — and the unhinged, brutally honest cover letters that accompanied them didn’t help. He would insult the editor, and even himself, pointing out the flaws in his own writing and character as part of his pitch.

What was he thinking? You can’t get writing gigs, or any gigs, with that kind of attitude. Except if those cover letters are so brilliant that the editor can’t put them down. And over time, his articles started resembling those feverish cover letters — a process unique in the history of literature, as far as I can tell.

When Thompson finally got his breakout job as Latin American correspondent for the National Observer (a sister publication to the Wall Street Journal in those days), he would always submit articles to editor Clifford Ridley along with a profane and unexpurgated cover letter that was often more entertaining than the story. In an extraordinary move, the newspaper actually published extracts from these cover letters as a newspaper feature.

If you’re looking for a turning point, this is it. Thompson now had the recipe, and it involved three conceptual breakthroughs:

  1. The story behind the story is the real story.
  2. The writer is now the hero of each episode.
  3. All this gets written in the style of a personal communication to the reader of the real, dirty inside stuff — straight, with no holds barred.

Why can’t you write journalism like this? In fact, a whole generation learned to do just that, mostly by imitating Hunter S. Thompson …

The History of Pancit in the Philippines

Filed under: Asia, China, Food, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 11 Mar 2025

Rice and egg noodles cooked with shrimp and pork belly, and garnished with calamansi and hard-boiled egg

City/Region: Manila
Time Period: 1919

Pancit, a distinctly Filipino dish, has its roots in the food brought and cooked by Chinese immigrants who began moving to the Philippines in significant numbers by the 15th century. Like many immigrant communities, the Chinese in the Philippines cooked and sold food from, or close to, that of their homeland.

The flavor in this dish is so wonderful and complex and I really like the texture of the thin rice noodles and thicker egg noodles. The homemade shrimp liquor not only reduces waste, but adds so much flavor.

A note on ingredients: Some of the Filipino ingredients may be hard to come by, so I’ve included some substitutions in the ingredients list that may be easier to find.

    1/8 kilo miki
    1/8 kilo bijon
    1/8 kilo pork
    25 shrimps
    3/4 cup water
    1/2 head garlic
    1 tablespoon kinchay
    1/2 onion
    1 cake bean cake
    1 hard-boiled egg
    1 tablespoon patis
    6 calamansis
    Cut the bean cake in small pieces. Peel the shrimps; pound the shells in a mortar; strain the juice and save it. Cook the pork; add the bean cake. Sauté the shrimps; when cooked, remove them and the bean cake from the carajay. Fry the onion and the garlic; remove from the carajay. Put the pork, the shrimps, and the bean cake in the carajay; add the patis; cook a few minutes. Soak the bijon in water 4 minutes. Wash the miki. Add the miki and the bijon to the mixture in the carajay; add the shrimp liquor. Cover and cook slowly 10 minutes. Serve with fried garlic and with slices of boiled egg. Cut the calamansis in halves and serve with pansit.
    — Housekeeping: A Textbook for Girls in the Public Intermediate Schools of the Philippines by Susie M. Butts, 1919

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August 14, 2025

D-Day’s Flat Pack Ports OR Lord HT Gets Cross with The Fat Electrician

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

HardThrasher
Published 13 Aug 2025

In which we use the ‪@the_fat_electrician‬ as an excuse to talk about the Mulberry Harbours, make a specific threat to a building in the United States and get to oogle at giant bits of floating concrete.

Primary Source – Codename Mulberry – Guy Hartcup, Pen & Sword Military. Kindle Edition 2014 (org. 1977)
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“Just war” theory and nuclear weapons practice

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack, Nigel Biggar discusses the postwar argument about whether the use of nuclear weapons against Japan was justified or not:

Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, taken from “Enola Gay” flying over Matsuyama, Shikoku, 6 August, 1945.
US Army Air Force photo via Wikimedia Commons.

For pacifists, Christian or otherwise, the answer is clear: since any deliberate killing is wrong, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 was wrong about two hundred thousand times over.

But that clear answer generates further questions whose answers aren’t so obvious. If killing is always wrong, then the United States should never have gone to war against Imperial Japan and therefore its ally, Hitler’s Germany. What, then, would have stopped the triumph of brutally racist Japanese imperialism in Asia and massively murderous Nazism in Europe? The noble witness of innocent non-violence?

Unfortunately, the historical evidence is that the kind of people who ran the slave-labour camps in Burma, and the likes of Dachau in Germany and Auschwitz in Poland, were not at all shamed by the face of vulnerable innocence; on the contrary, it excited their lust for domination and they fed upon it.

On the other hand, those who think that war can sometimes be justified, might judge that the mass killing of civilians by the atomic bombs was, simply by its massive extent, indiscriminate and therefore unjust. But there are two problems here. The first is that the vast majority of people, certainly in the UK and the USA, regard the war against Hitler and his allies as morally justified, notwithstanding the fact that that cost between 60 and 80 million deaths, well over half of them civilian.

Image credit – Wikipedia

And the second problem is that the ethical tradition of “just war” thinking doesn’t say that we may not kill civilians, even on a massive scale; it only says that we may not kill them intentionally. If a military objective can’t be achieved except by risking the possible or probable deaths of civilians, then it may still be attempted, provided that the objective is sufficiently important, militarily, and that all reasonable measures are taken to avoid or minimise the side-effect of civilian casualties. The reason for this permissiveness is that in most circumstances just war would be impossible to prosecute otherwise.

So, for the “just war” proponent, if the intention in dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was to destroy vital military or military-related targets, and if there was no more discriminate way of achieving that end, then the bombing was morally justified. It was deeply, deeply tragic—but nevertheless just.

“Sound of Silence” cover in Classical Latin (BARDCORE)

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

the_miracle_aligner
Published 29 Mar 2025

What Marc Anthony sang after he gave an epic speech at Caesar’s funeral.

One of my favorite songs and one I was supposed to upload on the Ides of March this year but got late. As punishment, I will do one for dearly departed Julius every year from now. RIP Caesar.
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August 13, 2025

The Korean War Week 60: Neutral Zone Violations and the 38th Parallel Standoff – August 12, 1951

Filed under: China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 12 Aug 2025

UN Commander Matt Ridgway is extremely frustrated by the Communist delegation’s unyielding stance on the 38th Parallel at the Kaesong peace talks. Chinese violations of the neutral zone highlight the fact that the war still goes on, though, as do the preparations for a UN offensive soon to be launched, to really reignite the active war in a big way.

Chapters
00:00 Hook
00:50 Recap
01:15 Ridgway’s Frustration
05:01 Neutral Zone Violations
08:57 Van Fleet’s Plans
12:28 Conclusion
13:50 Call to Action
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“[A]ll those land acknowledgments weren’t just symbolic: they [were] advance notice”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya discusses the — in my opinion, insane — court ruling in British Columbia that invalidated existing land titles in part of the Vancouver area, handing the titles to the properties over to the Cowichan First Nation:

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has granted several First Nations a portion of a 1,846-acre land claim on Lulu Island. B.C. Supreme Court

It turns out that all those land acknowledgments weren’t just symbolic. They may have been advance notice.

When Canada adopted its constitution in 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau slipped in a ticking time bomb: an explicit recognition of indigenous land rights without constitutional protection for property rights for other Canadians. That constitutional clause has fueled decades of lawsuits from First Nations — Canada’s indigenous people — asserting claims to huge portions of their ancestral territories.

Last Thursday, the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that the Cowichan Nation holds “Aboriginal title” to about 1,846 acres of land on the south shore of Lulu Island in Richmond, and constitutionally protected rights to fish in the south arm of the Fraser River.

This 275,000-word judgment doesn’t just affect government-owned lands. It also includes private property now owned by third parties. So if you’re a Canadian who is a property owner in British Columbia and not indigenous, your claim on what you think you own has just been superseded by indigenous claims, called a “senior” claim in legalese. Down the road, your land or house could be expropriated by the federal government and turned over to an indigenous group that claims ownership.

That has already happened in Ontario, where three northern Ontario First Nations claimed in a lawsuit last month that a 14-acre public park in Kenora called Anicinabe Park is actually unceded territory and should be returned.

“In constitutional terms, aboriginal rights trump private property rights,” Bruce Pardy, a professor of constitutional law at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, told me. He pointed to last November’s ruling by a New Brunswick judge that the court might be in position to order the government to seize private property and turn it over to an indigenous group making a claim on it.

As Prime Minister Mark Carney tries to fast-track major infrastructure projects — roads, bridges, pipelines, power plants, and more — all part of his plan to boost Canada’s global competitiveness and reduce reliance on the U.S., some of those ambitions might be snarled by indigenous land claims that take years to resolve. The British Columbia case began in 2019 and is considered to be the longest trial in Canadian history.

The day before the Cowichan Nation ruling in British Columbia, a Yukon First Nation announced that it would oppose all new mining claims on its traditional territory while a regional land-use plan is developed. Yukon First Nations leaders said that new claims are “unwelcome” and “unlawful”, and that they plan to challenge the mining industry to protect the land from further industrial activity.

Stefan Labbé in BIV last week:

A B.C. court has handed the Cowichan Tribes and other First Nations title over a chunk of federal and city land in Richmond that for centuries was used as a winter fishing village, before colonial administrators evicted the people who lived there.

The landmark Aug. 7 ruling was handed down after more than 500 days of litigation before the B.C. Supreme Court.

It gives the Cowichan Tribes, the Stz’uminus First Nation, Penelakut Tribe, Halalt First Nation — as well as the Lyackson First Nation in a supporting role — Aboriginal title over the Tribes’ historic Tl’uqtinus village on the southeast side of Lulu Island.

The ruling also gives the First Nations fishing rights at the mouth of the Fraser River.

In a joint statement, the First Nation plaintiffs said: “We raise our hands to the generations of leaders” who fought for the return of the Tl’uqtinus village lands and their fishing rights in the Fraser River.

B.C. Supreme Court Justice Barbara Young suspended her decision for 18 months “to allow for an orderly transition of the lands” in keeping with the principle of reconciliation.

“Now that this multi-year journey has concluded, it is my sincere hope that the parties have the answers they need to return to negotiations and reconcile the outstanding issues,” she wrote.

Jamie Sarkonak in the National Post wrote on Monday:

This case of “land back” in action (Cowichan Tribes v. Canada) casts a shadow over the country’s property system. It jeopardizes the default means of owning land in Canada — the estate in fee simple, where owners have exclusive rights to sell land — wherever Aboriginal title is found to exist.

Aboriginal title is the right of an Indigenous group to use, control and reap benefits from the land. It’s granted to claimant groups that can prove they are descended from the sole occupants of an area at the time the British asserted sovereignty. Unlike regular fee simple ownership, it’s enshrined in Section 35 of the 1982 Constitution and impossible to sell to anyone but the Crown.

The Cowichan claim covered the site of their summer village near the mouth of the Fraser River, where they had established continuous, exclusive seasonal occupancy dating back to European contact in the 1790s.

In 1846, the British Crown asserted sovereignty over that land and the rest of what would become B.C. The following years would see property being surveyed and auctioned off to public and private buyers — but not the Cowichan summer village. Instead, it was set aside in 1860 and continued to be used as a settlement for the group. Colonial officials considered the possibility of making it into a reserve, and took initial steps to do so. After B.C. joined Canada in 1871, however, the summer village was carved into parcels and sold over the years until 1914. Purchasers included private parties (including “well-placed men” in the colony) and even the municipality itself; some of the land purchased privately would eventually be sold back to the Crown. Today, about half of these lots are held by public bodies, with the other half falling under private ownership.

A map shows the Cowichan title lands outlined in black. (B.C. Supreme Court) Photo by B.C. Supreme Court

The question before the B.C. Supreme Court was whether the taking of those village lands was legal to begin with. Justice Barbara Young (a Harper appointee, by the way) concluded it was not.

QotD: The New York Times and their 1619 project

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

In a NYT town hall recently leaked to the press, a reporter asked the executive editor, Dean Baquet, why the Times doesn’t integrate the message of the 1619 Project into every single subject the paper covers: “I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting … I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.”

It’s a good point, isn’t it? If you don’t believe in a liberal view of the world, if you hold the doctrines of critical race theory, and believe that “all of the systems in the country” whatever they may be, are defined by a belief in the sub-humanity of black Americans, why isn’t every issue covered that way? Baquet had no answer to this contradiction, except to say that the 1619 Project was a good start: “One reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that”. In other words, the objective was to get liberal readers to think a little bit more like neo-Marxists.

The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms. That’s why this issue wasn’t called, say, “special issue”, but a “project”. It’s as much activism as journalism. And that’s the reason I’m dwelling on this a few weeks later. I’m constantly told that critical race theory is secluded on college campuses, and has no impact outside of them … and yet the newspaper of record, in a dizzyingly short space of time, is now captive to it. Its magazine covers the legacy of slavery not with a variety of scholars, or a diversity of views, but with critical race theory, espoused almost exclusively by black writers, as its sole interpretative mechanism.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that view deserves to be heard. The idea that the core truth of human society is that it is composed of invisible systems of oppression based on race (sex, gender, etc.), and that liberal democracy is merely a mask to conceal this core truth, and that a liberal society must therefore be dismantled in order to secure racial/social justice is a legitimate worldview. (That view that “systems” determine human history and that the individual is a mere cog in those systems is what makes it neo-Marxist and anti-liberal.) But I sure don’t think it deserves to be incarnated as the only way to understand our collective history, let alone be presented as the authoritative truth, in a newspaper people rely on for some gesture toward objectivity.

Andrew Sullivan, “The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism”, New York, 2019-09-13.

August 12, 2025

German-Soviet Invasion of Poland 1939

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

Real Time History
Published 8 Aug 2025

Germany and the Soviet Union both regarded the Polish state as a creation of the post-WW1 system, and both had claims on Polish territory. In the summer of 1939, Adolf Hitler decided to invade Poland in a fait acompli against the Allies. In a secret agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union they agreed on dividing up the Polish state and Eastern Europe.
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Negev 7: Israeli Scales up to a 7.62 NATO Machine Gun

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 31 Mar 2025

The Israeli Negev machine gun had a rather long development cycle, beginning in 1985 but not seeing final completion and issue until 1997. Once on the market, it proved to be a pretty successful weapon, used by the Israeli military and also a number of export client around the world. In 2012, IMI released an improved newer version, the Negev 7. This was made exclusively as a 7.62mm NATO caliber gun, as opposed to the original Negev which was only made in 5.56mm NATO.
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August 11, 2025

Smug Canadian boomer autohagiography rightly antagonizes the under-35s

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Education, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Fortissax had an argument with one of his readers over a smug, self-congratulating meme about how wonderful Canada was in the 1990s and early 2000s:

What we lived through long before Trudeau was the Shattering, the breakdown of Canada’s social cohesion, driven by left-liberalism with communist characteristics applied to race, ethnicity, sex, and gender, and punitive almost exclusively toward visibly White men. My generation, those millennials born on the cusp of Gen Z, saw post-national Canada take shape not in the comfortable suburban rings of the GTA or the posh boroughs of Outremont and Westmount, but in self-segregated, ghettoised enclaves of immigrants whose parents never integrated and were never required to.

Memes like that are dishonest because they feed a false memory. The 2000s were not normal. Wages were stagnant, housing was already an asset bubble, and immigration was still flooding in under a policy that explicitly forbade assimilation. Brian Mulroney had enshrined multiculturalism into law in 1988. Quebec alone resisted, carving out the right to limit immigration under the 1992 Quebec–Canada Accord. After Chrétien, Stephen Harper brought in three million immigrants, primarily from China, India, and the Philippines in that order.

The Don Cherry conservatives of that era were Bush lite. They were rootless, cut off from their history, their identities manufactured from the top down since the days of Lester B. Pearson. They conserved nothing. For Canadian youth, it was the dawn of a civic religion of wokeness, totalitarian self-policing by striver peers, and the quiet coercion of every institution. My memories of that decade are of constant assault — mental, physical, spiritual — from leftists in power, from encroaching foreigners, and from the cowardice of conservatives.

Your 2000s might have been great. For us, they were communist struggle sessions. In 2009 we were pulled from class to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama, a foreign president, as a historic moment for civil rights. Our schools excluded us while granting space to every group under the sun: LGBT safe spaces and cultural clubs for Italians, Jamaicans, Jews, Indians, Indigenous, Balkaners, Greeks, Slavs, Portuguese, Quebecois, Iroquois, Pakistanis — every culture celebrated except our own. Anglo-Quebecers and Anglo-Canadians got nothing but an Irish club, closely monitored for “white supremacy” and “racism” by the HR grandmas of the gyno-gerontocracy of English Montreal. Students self-segregated, sitting at different cafeteria tables and smoking at different bus shelters. At Vanier, Dawson, and John Abbott College, these divisions were institutionalised. I remember walking into the atrium of Dawson, my first post-secondary experience, greeted by a wigger rolling a joint while a Jamaican beatboxed to Soulja Boy.

We became amateur anthropologists out of necessity, forced to navigate a nationwide cosmopolitan experiment from birth. We learned the distinctions between squabbling southeastern Europeans of the former Yugoslavia, and we did not care if Kosovo was Serbia or whether Romanians and Albanians were Slavic, they all acted the same way. We learned the divides within South Asia, the rivalries between Hindutva and Khalistani, the differences between a Punjabi, a Gujarati, a Telugu, a Pakistani, a Hong Konger, a mainlander, and a Taiwanese. We know the shades of Caribbean identity, the factions of the Middle East, and the intricacies of North African identity. We should never have needed to know these things, but we do.

For us, childhood in this cesspit was the seedbed of radicalism. We never knew an era when contact with foreigners was limited to sampling food at Loblaws. All we know is being surrounded by those who hate us, governed by a state that wants to erase us, with no healthcare, no homes, no jobs that are not contested by foreigners, and no money to start families.

Stalin’s Death: The Day the USSR Changed Forever! – W2W 39

Filed under: Government, History, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 10 Aug 2025

March 1953: Stalin’s sudden death triggers a whirlwind of conspiracies, paranoia, and a deadly battle for control inside the Kremlin. As Beria, Khrushchev, and the Soviet elite scramble for power, the fate of the world’s largest superpower hangs in the balance. Was Stalin murdered by his inner circle, or did his own regime consume him? Discover the truth behind the downfall, the rise of Khrushchev, and the birth of the KGB in the Cold War’s most dramatic turning point.
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Speed vs Armour: The Unexpected History of Fast Tanks

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 21 Mar 2025

Would you rather go to war in a tank that was quick but lightly armoured – or heavily armoured but slow?

The concept of fast tanks has existed since the First World War, but making a tank fast is easier said than done. You can increase the speed, but only by compromising the other two sides of The Iron Triangle.

Whilst a good power to weigh ratio is key to making a tank go fast, there are other factors that need to be considered. J Walter Christie pioneered the innovative helicoil spring suspension system – an invention that allowed tanks to cope with travelling at high speeds across country. Although not picked up by the US Army, the brilliance of Christie’s suspension was recognised by the Soviets and soon made an appearance on the BT-Series of tanks – and most effectively on the T-34.

Back in the UK, the newly mechanised cavalry was making use of some brand-new Cruiser tanks. Whilst these were fast vehicles, this was coming at the cost of effective protection. Some military thinkers advocated for the concept of “speed as armour” but results were mixed – with the Crusader and Cromwell both proving to be capable tanks.

After the war, the British Army finally moved on from “speed as armour” and settled on sacrificing a bit of speed for the sake of better protection. This was incorporated first into the concept of Universal Tanks and remains a fixture in the modern Main Battle Tank.

So, we’ll ask again. Would you rather go to war in a tank that was quick but lightly armoured – or heavily armoured but slow?

00:00 | Introduction
00:51 | What Makes it a Fast Tank?
02:39 | What is a Fast Tank For?
04:39 | Suspension of Disbelief
06:34 | Speedy Soviets
08:29 | Cruisers Replace Cavalry
11:20 | The Second Wave
13:19 | Cruising in Europe
19:08 | One Tank to Do It All
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QotD: The job of the fuller

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

Our woollen fabric now has another step before it is fully finished, a mechanical and chemical processing known as fulling, which might both be done as a finishing process for newly woven fabric or as a cleaning process for clothing that had become soiled (though it should be noted that worsted wool is not generally fulled, so not all woollen products would be put through this process). Fulling accomplished two things, it scoured, which removed any remaining oils in the fabric (remember that, even if the wool had been scoured raw, it is likely to have been re-oiled to aid spinning and protect the fibers) which cleansed the wool, while the mechanical action of fulling matted the fibers together, increasing the strength of the wool and allowing it to more effectively repel water. The process, as done in the ancient and medieval world, was generally fairly simple: fabrics were immersed in a solution with a cleaning agent in a large basin and then trampled underfoot by a fuller. The actual act of mechanically treading the cloth underfoot was called “tucking” or “walking”. This mechanical trampling enabled the cleaning agents to penetrate fully into the fabric and dissolve away whatever grease, oils, dirt or other impurities might be there.

The cleaning agents for fulling wool varied by time and place. Roman fulleries generally used urine allowed to sit for a time (becoming “stale” – such urine is known as “wash”) because that concentrated the ammonium in the urine which acted as the cleansing agent. By the Middle Ages, we see the use of “fuller’s earth” (ammonia-rich clay), although urine continued to be used as well, presumably for its greater availability. As J.S. Lee notes (op. cit., 53), from the late twelfth century, we begin to see the use of water-power to replace the fullery worker as the treading agent, with the use of heavy wooden hammers driven by a water wheel to pummel the fabric.

Once this process was done the clothes or fabric were removed from the basin, scrubbed and wrung out fully, before being rinsed. In the Roman context – Roman fulleries (fullonicae) are fairly well archaeologically preserved and so give clues to the process at that time – the rinsing basins are set up to allow workers to walk in and out of them (some have working benches) which suggests that rinsing may have included additional scrubbing and wringing to make sure to remove both all of the impurities as well as all of the cleaning agents (Flohr, The World of the Fullo, 179-81). Fabrics would then have to be hung to be dried. In the Roman context, artwork tends to show clothes hung over high beams in the fullonica to dry; in the medieval context they were often hung to dry outdoors on long wooden frames called “tenters”.

Finally, the cloth would be “napped” (also called “raising the nap”, “rowing”, “teasing”, or polishing), which may have actually been the most labor intensive part of the process. Cloth would be brushed first, to raise the nap (the fuzzy, rough raised surface on woolen cloth), which would then be sheared to leave the cloth smooth. This stage also provided an opportunity for burling (and now you know why the coat factory is in Burlington), the inspection of the cloth and the manual removal of burrs, knots and other defects. Flohr (op. cit.) argues that this stage in the process consumed the bulk of the time and labor of fulling (a point on which J.S. Lee concurs for the Middle Ages). It is to a significant degree unfortunate that the sensational “they washed clothes in urine!” element of fulling has tended to eclipse the rest of the process in not only the popular imagination but occasionally in the scholarly discourse (the already cited Flohr, The World of the Fullo is a good antidote to this).

The position of fulling in the production chain of textiles seems to have varied a bit over time. In the medieval and early modern periods, fulling was generally done only once, as a final finishing stage in cloth production. By contrast, as Miko Flohr argues (op. cit., 57ff), the primary job of the Roman fuller was effectively as a laundry (though they may have treated freshly woven wool as well). Part of this probably has to do with differences in Roman clothing; Roman clothes were generally fairly simple in shape which must have made them easier to put through a fullery as a completed garment. Myself, I wonder if the changing role of fulling has to do with the introduction of soap during the later Roman Empire, which would have made it more possible for clothes to be laundered domestically (the Romans cleaned their bodies with oil, scraping it off with a strigil, which while perfectly good for cleaning skin would obviously not do for clothes, but soap and scubbing will work for both).

Fulling was generally a commercial (that is, not household) operation, done by professional fullers and we’ll talk about them (along with dyers and cloth merchants) in just a moment in terms of their place in society.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-04-02.

August 10, 2025

Hitler Prepares for War and Genocide in the Soviet Union – WW2 Fireside Chat

Filed under: Germany, Greece, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 9 Aug 2025

Indy and Sparty sit down to chat about the planning stages of Operation Barbarossa. They discuss how genocide was intrinsic to the plan from the start, whether invading Yugoslavia and Greece ruined the timetable, and whether the whole plan was even feasible.
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