There’s only one thing worse than slavery, of course, and that’s freedom. I don’t mean, I hasten to add, my own freedom, to which I am really rather attached; no, it is other people’s freedom, and what they choose to do with it, that appalls me. They have such bad taste. The notion of self-expression has much to answer for. It gives people the presumptuous notion that somewhere deep inside them there is a genius trying to get out. This genius, at least round here, expresses itself mainly by drinking too much, taking drugs, tattooing its skin and piercing its body. On the whole, I think, the self is best not expressed and, like children, should be neither seen nor heard.
One day, I arrived on the ward to discover an enthusiastic self-expresser in the first bed. Her two-inch-long nails were painted lime green, and looked as if they gave off the kind of radiation that meant instant leukaemia. That, however, was the least of it.
She was lying in the bed, décolleté, to reveal breasts pierced with many metal bars ending in steel balls to keep them in place, and for what is known round here as decoration. I couldn’t look at them without wincing; ex-President Clinton would no doubt have felt her pain. As for her face, it was the modern equivalent of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. It was also the refutation of the doctrine that the customer is always the right. In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong.
She had a ring through the septum of her nose, and a ring through her upper lip, so that the two clacked when she spoke. She had a stud in her tongue, and two studs through her lower lip. She had so many rings through her ears that they looked like solenoids. She had a metal bar through the bridge of her nose and rings at the outer edges of her eyebrows. If she were to die, she could probably be sold to a scrap metal merchant.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Lady of the Rings”, Asian Age, 2005-12-27.
March 16, 2023
QotD: “In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong”
March 15, 2023
QotD: The coming generation isn’t the Millennials … it’s Gen X
That’s your next layer of political and social control. The youngest of us are in their late 30s (again, using the broadest definition); most of us are well into middle age, and some of us are plunging headfirst into late middle age. The chiefs of police, the military’s senior staff officers (including, by now, some general and flag officers), the CEOs and CFOs … they’re not Millennials, they’re Xers.
Admittedly we’re a forgettable bunch. We didn’t get a chance at natural, healthy teenage rebellion, because our parents, the goddamn Boomers, claimed a monopoly on rebellion, so we had to be all, you know, like, whatever about it. The Boomers thought Andy Warhol was a serious artist and Bob Dylan a talented musician; is it any wonder that Kurt Cobain’s godawful caterwauling was the best we could do?
All of that is water under the bridge, of course. But here’s where it gets really, really meta: This great social upheaval is, for us, a copy of a copy. It’s people who were actually alive in the 1960s cosplaying The Sixties™ — just like they did the entire time we were growing up. Just as we had no template for teenage rebellion, we don’t really have a template for riots and whatnot either. Some of us have decided to crank it up to eleven — all of the most obnoxious Karens are Gen Xers — but lots of us … haven’t. I really have no idea just what the majority of my generational cohort is doing right now while our most vocal idiots are out Karening, in much the same way I have no idea what the majority of Silents were doing while the Chicago Seven were out doing their thing.
All I know is, there’s an entire layer of political power between AOC and Pelosi. We haven’t really seen it up until now, but it’s there. Is Gen X finally, at long last, going to get its shit together? I suspect that the real drama is still waiting in the wings.
Severian, “Talkin’ ’bout My Generation!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-06-11.
March 14, 2023
QotD: Facebook’s entire structure is designed to prevent information “going viral”
You might think that social media is where to go to share this very cool thing, and watch it go viral. And, in fact, that happens on Twitter and a few other platforms. I’m not always right in forecasting which things I post will go viral, but a few times every year I will share something on Twitter that grabs people’s attention so much that it gets tens of thousands of retweets and likes. Millions of people might see it.
That’s what going viral is all about.
Now here’s the kicker. I put up that same item on my Facebook author’s page, and the company will actively work to prevent people from seeing it. And adding insult (a company specialty), they will send me an alert telling me: This post could go viral if you pay us money for promoting it.
At first glance, this just seems another way to maximize profits. And who can blame Mark Zuckerberg for wanting to get a few more dollars in his bank account? Let’s feel some pity for a guy who just lost $100 billion.
But the real devastating part of this story is that Facebook is actually preventing users from sharing the funniest joke in the world. Facebook actually hates seeing some videos go viral, even if they are the most amusing things on the web. Every day they work to prevent folks from seeing a mind-blowing photo — and many other things that can’t be monetized.
This can’t be good for the user experience. This can’t be what users want, or what they would tell the company in a focus group or via market research.
And it certainly can’t be good for business.
So I’m amused when I hear how Facebook is envious of TikTok, which has much superior user engagement. Well, duh. Of course TikTok has greater engagement — that’s because Facebook has put systems in place to prevent entertaining things from going viral. They are now scrambling to work around this tiny detail, but they won’t succeed.
I’ve reduced my Facebook posts by at least 70%, and this was the main reason. I can’t be the only person who has responded in this way.
It’s not in the company’s DNA to promote interesting things on its platform. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when Facebook’s recent attempt to imitate Substack collapsed in total failure. I knew that would happen on day one — because Facebook will never let writers go viral on the platform. Mr. Z. wants to get paid before anything goes viral, and that’s the exact opposite of Substack’s successful formula — which rewards the creator more than the platform.
When Facebook initially launched this touted publishing platform, somebody asked me what I thought about it. “Facebook has the power to give a writer access to millions of readers,” I replied, “but they will never let it happen. The entire internal structure of the company is designed to prevent this.”
The speed of the collapse, however, was surprising. Facebook announced the launch of Bulletin on June 29, 2021. Facebook announced the termination of Bulletin on October 4, 2022.
Even King Henry VIII’s wives lasted longer than that.
Ted Gioia, “How Web Platforms Collapse”, The Honest Broker, 2022-12-05.
March 13, 2023
QotD: The components of an oath in pre-modern cultures
So when thinking about oaths, we want to think about them the way people in the past did: as things that work – that is they do something. In particular, we should understand these oaths as effective – by which I mean that the oath itself actually does something more than just the words alone. They trigger some actual, functional supernatural mechanisms. In essence, we want to treat these oaths as real in order to understand them.
So what is an oath? To borrow Richard Janko’s (The Iliad: A Commentary (1992), in turn quoted by Sommerstein [in Horkos: The Oath in Greek Society (2007)]) formulation, “to take an oath is in effect to invoke powers greater than oneself to uphold the truth of a declaration, by putting a curse upon oneself if it is false”. Following Sommerstein, an oath has three key components:
First: A declaration, which may be either something about the present or past or a promise for the future.
Second: The specific powers greater than oneself who are invoked as witnesses and who will enforce the penalty if the oath is false. In Christian oaths, this is typically God, although it can also include saints. For the Greeks, Zeus Horkios (Zeus the Oath-Keeper) is the most common witness for oaths. This is almost never omitted, even when it is obvious.
Third: A curse, by the swearers, called down on themselves, should they be false. This third part is often omitted or left implied, where the cultural context makes it clear what the curse ought to be. Particularly, in Christian contexts, the curse is theologically obvious (damnation, delivered at judgment) and so is often omitted.
While some of these components (especially the last) may be implied in the form of an oath, all three are necessary for the oath to be effective – that is, for the oath to work.
A fantastic example of the basic formula comes from Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (656 – that’s a section, not a date), where the promise in question is the construction of a new monastery, which runs thusly (Anne Savage’s translation):
These are the witnesses that were there, who signed on Christ’s cross with their fingers and agreed with their tongues … “I, king Wulfhere, with these king’s eorls, war-leaders and thanes, witness of my gift, before archbishop Deusdedit, confirm with Christ’s cross” … they laid God’s curse, and the curse of all the saints and all God’s people on anyone who undid anything of what was done, so be it, say we all. Amen.” [Emphasis mine]
So we have the promise (building a monastery and respecting the donation of land to it), the specific power invoked as witness, both by name and through the connection to a specific object (the cross – I’ve omitted the oaths of all of Wulfhere’s subordinates, but each and every one of them assented “with Christ’s cross”, which they are touching) and then the curse to be laid on anyone who should break the oath.
Of the Medieval oaths I’ve seen, this one is somewhat odd in that the penalty is spelled out. That’s much more common in ancient oaths where the range of possible penalties and curses was much wider. The Dikask‘s oath (the oath sworn by Athenian jurors), as reconstructed by Max Frankel, also provides an example of the whole formula from the ancient world:
I will vote according to the laws and the votes of the Demos of the Athenians and the Council of the Five Hundred … I swear these things by Zeus, Apollo and Demeter, and may I have many good things if I swear well, but destruction for me and my family if I forswear.
Again, each of the three working components are clear: the promise being made (to judge fairly – I have shortened this part, it goes on a bit), the enforcing entity (Zeus, Apollo and Demeter) and the penalty for forswearing (in this case, a curse of destruction). The penalty here is appropriately ruinous, given that the jurors have themselves the power to ruin others (they might be judging cases with very serious crimes, after all).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Oaths! How do they Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-28.
March 12, 2023
QotD: Philosophy
Theodore Dalrymple, “Street-Corner Semantics”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-06-30.
March 11, 2023
QotD: We used to call them “parlour pinks”
What’s life like in the Soviet Union? They neither know nor care, until the brute facts of life in the USSR are rubbed into their faces for so long that they have to acknowledge them. At which point they simply switch allegiances. Kolakowski’s essay doesn’t mention Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims, but they arrive at essentially the same conclusion — that instead of becoming disillusioned with Communism (Socialism, “social justice”) itself, the irritated butterflies of the Left grow disillusioned with a particular country or leader. The USSR has failed, yes, but — all together now! — “real Communism has never been tried”, so let’s put all our faith in Mao … and then Castro … and then Chavez, et cetera ad nauseam.
It’s all about maintaining the purity of the idea in the face of disappointing, vulgar, grubby reality. An honest-to-Marx Communist will come into plenty of contact with reality. A Leftist never will, because xzhey have convinced xzhemself that even the mugging they’re currently experiencing is a lofty and noble expression of authenticity. They’re willing to die for the Revolution, certainly — the urge for martyrdom has always been highly conspicuous on the Left. So long as they never feel that base, grubby, vulgar proletarian urge to defend themselves, they’ll be fine.
[…]
“Never cheer for your own.” When you come right down to it, that’s the Leftist motto. Leftists don’t deride “sportsball”, for instance, because they’re un-athletic little dweebs who were always picked last at recess (well, ok, not only that). It’s because cheering for a team, any team, is vulgar. It’s what grubby little proles do. (That’s another way to distinguish a Communist from a Leftist, by the way. Actual Commies love sports; look at all the resources the USSR poured into the Olympics, for instance. That’s because sports are good training for war).
Is Leftism curable? Can they be made to cheer for their own? Experience suggests that the cure will be very harsh indeed … if indeed it’s possible at all.
Severian, “Grubby Little Proles”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-05-31.
March 10, 2023
QotD: Wine in French culture
When the French sought to reduce alcohol consumption in the 1950s, the government’s slogan was “No more than a litre of wine a day“, which must have seemed excessively nanny-statish at a time when primary school children were given cider for lunch. Wine consumption has quite drastically fallen in the decades since, by as much as two-thirds by some estimates.
Ed West, “The Frenchest things in the world … Part Deux”, Wrong Side of History, 2022-12-09.
March 9, 2023
QotD: Iron ore mining before the Industrial Revolution
As with many ancient technologies, there is a triumph of practice over understanding in all of this; the workers have mastered the how but not the why. Lacking an understanding of geology, for instance, meant that pre-modern miners, if the ore vein hit a fault line (which might displace the vein, making it impossible to follow directly) had to resort to sinking shafts and exploratory mining an an effort to “find” it again. In many cases ancient miners seem to have simply abandoned the works when the vein had moved only a short distance because they couldn’t manage to find it again. Likewise, there was a common belief (e.g. Plin. 34.49) that ore deposits, if just left alone for a period of years (often thirty) would replenish themselves, a belief that continues to appear in works on mining as late as the 18th century (and lest anyone be confused, they clearly believe this about underground deposits; they don’t mean bog iron). And so like many pre-modern industries, this was often a matter of knowing how without knowing why.
Once the ore was located, mining tended to follow the ore, assuming whatever shape the ore-formation was in. For ore deposits in veins, that typically means diggings shafts and galleries (or trenches, if the deposit was shallow) that follow the often irregular, curving patterns of the veins themselves. For “bedded” ore (where the ore isn’t in a vein, but instead an entire layer, typically created by erosion and sedimentation), this might mean “bell pitting” where a shaft was dug down to the ore layer, which was then extracted out in a cylinder until the roof became unstable, at which point the works were back-filled or collapsed and the process begun again nearby.
All of this digging had to be done by hand, of course. Iron-age mining tools (picks, chisels, hammers) fairly strongly resemble their modern counterparts and work the same way (interestingly, in contrast to things like bronze-age picks which were bronze sheaths around a wooden core, instead of a metal pick on a wooden haft).
For rock that was too tough for simple muscle-power and iron tools to remove, the typical expedient was “fire-setting“, which remained a standard technique for removing tough rocks until the introduction of explosives in the modern period. Fire-setting involves constructing a fuel-pile (typically wood) up against the exposed rock and then letting it burn (typically overnight); the heat splinters, cracks and softens the rock. The problem of course is that the fire is going to consume all of the oxygen and let out a ton of smoke, preventing work close to an active fire (or even in the mine at all while it was happening). Note that this is all about the cracking and splintering effect, along with chemical changes from roasting, not melting the rock – by the time the air-quality had improved to the point where the fire-set rock could be worked, it would be quite cool. Ancient sources regularly recommend dousing these fires with vinegar, not water, and there seems to be some evidence that this would, in fact, render the rock easier to extract afterwards.
By the beginning of the iron age in Europe (which varies by place, but tends to start between c. 1000 and c. 600 BC), the level of mining sophistication that we see in preserved mines is actually quite considerable. While Bronze Age mines tend to stay above the water-table, iron-age mines often run much deeper, which raises all sorts of exciting engineering problems in ventilation and drainage. Deep mines could be drained using simple bucket-lines, but we also see more sophisticated methods of drainage, from the Roman use of screw-pumps and water-wheels to Chinese use of chain-pumps from at least the Song Dynasty. Ventilation was also crucial to prevent the air becoming foul; ventilation shafts were often dug, with the use of either cloth fans or lit fires at the exits to force circulation. So mining could get very sophisticated when there was a reason to delve deep. Water might also be used to aid in mining, by leading water over a deposit and into a sluice box where the minerals were then separated out. This seems to have been done mostly for mining gold and tin.
Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.
March 8, 2023
QotD: Who destroyed the Great Library?
The problem, however, is that there is no evidence that the Serapeum still contained any library by 391 AD and some good evidence indicating that it did not.
When the mythic version of the story of the destruction of the Serapeum gets told it usually begins without explaining why the temple was attacked. These retellings focus on the supposed destruction of its library, so they tend to assume that the mob was there simply because they hated learning. But several accounts of the end of the temple note that it came as the climax of a series of attacks by pagans on Christians in reaction to the desecration of pagan idols. Sozomen’s account details what happened next:
They killed many of the Christians, wounded others, and seized the Serapion, a temple which was conspicuous for beauty and vastness and which was seated on an eminence. This they converted into a temporary citadel; and hither they conveyed many of the Christians, put them to the torture, and compelled them to offer sacrifice. Those who refused compliance were crucified, had both legs broken, or were put to death in some cruel manner. When the sedition had prevailed for some time, the rulers came and urged the people to remember the laws, to lay down their arms, and to give up the Serapion (Sozomen, History of the Church, VII.15)
Sozomen was writing in the following century and, as a Christian, may not be reliable on the lurid details, but Socrates Scholasticus, writing a little closer to the events, confirms that many Christians were killed in the unrest. A stand-off followed, with Roman troops surrounding the temple while negotiations went on with the pagan militants inside. This situation must have continued for many weeks, as a petition went to the emperor in Constantinople about the siege and Theodosius ruled that the pagans should be pardoned for their murders and allowed to leave but that the temple should be demolished. Angry at this compromise, as the soldiers began to carry out the order, the Christian mob joined in the destruction, and made sure the great idol of Serapis was also destroyed.
We have no less than five accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum – Rufinius Tyrannius, Socrates Scholasticus, Sozomen, Theodoret and Eunapius of Antioch – which is rare in ancient history and actually makes this one of the best documented events in the period. What is significant about them is that not one of them mentions a library. Some try to argue that the Christian chroniclers would be ashamed of the crime of destroying the last remnant of the Great Library and so hushed it up in their accounts. This argument is hard to sustain. Firstly, Christian historians of the time did record other shameful acts against pagans, including the assassination of Hypatia, so at least one or two of the four Christians who describe the end of the Serapeum could be expected to at least lament the loss of a library. Socrates Scholasticus, who condemned the death of Hypatia, was a Novatian “heretic” and thus no fan of the bishop Theophilus, who urged on the crowd at the temple’s demolition, yet he makes no mention of a library. Even more significantly, Eunapius of Antioch was a pagan, a scholar and a vehement anti-Christian, so had every reason to condemn any destruction of a library, yet he too makes no mention of it. That great defender of New Atheist bad history, the inevitable Richard Carrier, has attempted to dismiss this silence by Eunapius by blithely claiming that “his account is too brief”. Carrier assures his online fan club “[a]ll he describes is the raid on its pagan statues, and some vague looting otherwise. His concern is clearly with the offense to the gods”. This is, as usual with Carrier, total nonsense. Eunapius’ account in his Lives of the Philosophers runs to 548 words in English translation. Of these, a full 245 are not about pagan statues etc, but are devoted wholly to detailed denigration of the ignorant Christian monks who destroyed the temple. He calls them “men in appearance (who) led the lives of swine”, says they “fettered the human race to the worship of slaves” and mocks them for their worship of martyrs’ relics and their general stupidity. Given that around 40% of his account is taken up with this scorning and mocking of these monks, it is still very strange that this scholar neglects to mention in his condemnation that these ignorant oafs also happened to destroy one of the best libraries in the world.
The lack of any mention of a library is most likely explained by concluding that it was no longer there by 391 AD. Temples had begun to be starved of funds with the conversion of the emperors [to] Christianity and the slower but gradual conversion of many rich patrons and city benefactors. The Serapeum survived most of the fourth century, but it is very likely that the expense of maintaining an extensive library would have been a strain. We know that it was ransacked on the orders of the Alexandrian bishop George the Cappodocian c. 360 AD and it is likely the library was looted in this action. Significantly, writing around 378 AD, Ammianus Marcellinus gave a detailed description of the Serapeum and mentions its libraries using the past tense:
In here have been valuable libraries and the unanimous testimony of ancient records declares that seven hundred thousand books, brought together by the unremitting energy of the Ptolemies, were burned in the Alexandrine War when the city was sacked under the dictator Caesar. (Ammianus, Roman History XXII.16-17)
Ammianus is muddling the Serapeum with the main Mouseion library with his reference to Caesar’s fire and the mythical “700,000” books, but the rest of his description is detailed and unique to his work in many respects. Other references in his work indicate that he had visited Egypt himself, probably around 363 AD (or three years after the sacking of the temple by Bishop George), so it is highly possible that his account is that of an eye-witness. This means his use of the past tense about the temple library is significant. Overall, the idea that there was still any library there when the temple was demolished is dubious at best and almost certainly wrong.
Tim O’Neill, “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction Of The Great Library Of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2017-07-02.
March 7, 2023
QotD: The Stoic view of beauty
Like all materialists, then, Stoics had a real problem with things like beauty. If you’re a materialist, Beauty is either a refutation of your theory, or a tautology (“certain arrangements of atoms produce chemical reactions that our brains interpret as pleasant” is just a fancy way of saying “beautiful things are beautiful because they’re beautiful”). Back in grad school, in one of the deepest, darkest, most dungeon-like corners of the university’s book morgue, I discovered Ayn Rand’s attempt at an Objectivist aesthetics. Her conclusion, stripped of her inimitable self-congratulatory prose, is here:
At the base of her argument, Rand asserts that one cannot create art without infusing a given work with one’s own value judgments and personal philosophy. Even if the artist attempts to withhold moral overtones, the work becomes tinged with a deterministic or naturalistic message. The next logical step of Rand’s argument is that the audience of any particular work cannot help but come away with some sense of a philosophical message, colored by his or her own personal values, ingrained into their psyche by whatever degree of emotional impact the work holds for them.
Rand goes on to divide artistic endeavors into “valid” and “invalid” forms …
In other words, there’s no art, only propaganda. Looks like ol’ Marcus really missed a trick, statecraft-wise, doesn’t it?
Severian, “On Fine Writing Etc.”, Everyday Stoicism, 2020-05-04.
March 6, 2023
QotD: The pastries of the wider paradonut family
Exhibit A: The Coffee Roll — Phasers on Star Trek have three settings: Stun, Kill, and Coffee Roll.
Exhibit B: The Eclair — From the French for “lightning”, the eclair was invented by a psychiatrist as a delicious alternative to electroshock therapy for schizophrenics. Because when you’re eating an eclair, you can’t deny the marvelous cream-filled reality you’re actually present in.
Exhibit C: The Cheese Danish — Cheese Danishes have a mix of flavors and textures that make them, in scientific terms, “a gang-bang for your face”.
Exhibit D: The Bear Claw — The bear claw is the ugly, bewarted King Pimp of the pastry shop window, with a dozen smaller, more effeminate donuts it’s turned into its sad little bitches and tricks following behind it.
Exhibit E: The Apple Fritter — The so-called “Emperor of Pastries” makes your stupid little glazed donut look sad and weak like Barack Obama’s gay arms.
Exhibit F: The Cinnamon Bun — Cinnamon Buns have been proven to be responsible for America’s obesity epidemic and diabetic crisis, and also totally worth it.
Bonus: Worst Donuts
1. Jelly Donuts — Jelly donuts are always what’s left after people eat the real donuts. Jelly donuts are consolation prizes for losers who came late. They taste like failure for a reason. If you’re eating a jelly donut, that’s because you’re not a competitor and you don’t have any friends to set aside a good donut for you.
2. Plain Donuts — Plain donuts are also called “not donuts” or “ring-shaped bread”. Plain donuts were invented for parents who don’t love their children. They are also sometimes put out as bait for poisoning rats, though they have a 75% failure rate. Rats don’t like them either. Sometimes a poisoned plain donut will be found intact, with a dead rat next to it — rats will lick the poison off the plain donut while avoiding the plain donut itself. According to Leviticus, you are supposed to pay the dowry of an ugly woman in plain donuts.
3. Powdered Sugar Donuts — Powdered sugar donuts are made primarily by mental degenerates employed by donut shops as charity hires. They are sometimes called “Retard Donuts”. To compare powdered sugar donuts to the Holocaust would be to trivialize the horror of powdered sugar donuts.
Ace, “Science Proves That The Best Donuts Are Actually Non-Donuts”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2017-06-17.
March 5, 2023
QotD: The role of the “big” landowners in pre-modern farming societies
Of course this begins with land. The thing to keep in mind is that prior to the modern period […] the vast majority of economic activity was the production of the land. That meant that land was both the primary form of holding wealth but also the main income-producing asset. Consequently, larger land holdings are the assets that enable the accumulation of all of the other kinds of capital we’re discussing. By having more land – typically much more land – than is required to feed a single household, these larger farmers can […] produce for markets and trade, enabling them to afford to acquire labor, animals, equipment and so on. Our subsistence farmers of the last post, focused on producing for survival, would be hard-pressed to acquire much further in the way of substantial capital.
The next most important category is generally animals, particularly a plow team […] while our small subsistence farmers may keep chickens or pigs on some small part of the pasture they have access to, they probably do not have a complete plow-team for their own farm […]. Oxen and horses are hideously expensive, both to acquire but also to feed and for a family barely surviving one year to the next, they simply cannot afford them. They also do not have herds of animals (because their small farms absolutely cannot support acres of pasturage) and they probably have limited access to herdsmen generally (that is, transhumant pastoralists moving around the countryside) because those fellows will tend to want to interact with the community leaders who are, as noted above, the large landholders. All of which is to say that while the small farmers may keep a few animals, they do not have access to significantly large numbers of animals (or humans), which matters.
The first impact of having a plow-team is fairly obvious: a plow drawn by a couple of oxen is more effective than a plow pushed by a single human. That means that a plow-team lets the same amount of farming labor sow a larger area of land […]. It also allows for a larger, deeper plow, which in turn plows at a greater depth, which can improve yields […]. You can easily see why, for a landholder with a large farm, having a plow-team is so useful: whereas the subsistence farmer struggles by having too much labor (and too many mouths to feed) and too little land, the big landholder has a lot of land they are trying to get farmed with as little labor as possible. And of course, more to the point, the large landholder has the wealth and acreage necessary to buy and then pasture the animals in the plow-team.
The second major impact is manure. Remember that our farmers live before the time of artificial fertilizer. Crops, especially bulk cereal crops, wear out the nutrients in the soil quite rapidly after repeated harvests, which leaves the farmer two options. The first, standard option, is that the farmer can fallow the field (which also has the advantage of disrupting certain pest life-cycles); depending on the farming method, fallowing may mean planting specific plants to renew the soil’s nutrients when those plants are uprooted and left to return to the soil in the field or it may mean simply turning the field over to wild plants with a similar effect. The second option is using fertilizer, which in this case means manure. Quite a lot of it. Aggressive manuring, particularly on rich soils which have good access to moisture (because cropping also dries out the soil; fallowing can restore that moisture) allows the field to be fallowed less frequently and thus farmed more intensively. In some cases it allowed rich farmland to be continuously cropped, with fairly dramatic increases in returns-to-acreage as a result. And by increasing the nutrients in the soil, it also produces higher yields in a given season.
Now the humans in a farming household aren’t going to generate enough manure on their own to make a meaningful contribution to soil fertility. But the larger landholders generally have two advantages in this sense. First, because their landholdings are large, they can afford to turn over marginal farming ground to pasture for horses, cattle, sheep and so on; these animals not only generate animal products (or prestige, in the case of horses), they also eat the grass and generate manure which can be used on the main farm. The second way to get manure is cities; unlike farming households, cities do produce sufficient quantities of human waste for manuring fields. And where small subsistence farmers are unlikely to be able to buy that supply, large landholders are likely to be politically well-connected enough and wealthy enough to arrange for human waste to be used on their lands, especially for market oriented farms close to cities. And if you just stopped and said, “wait – these guys were paying for human waste?” … yes, yes they sometimes did (and not just for farming! Check out how saltpeter was made, or what a fuller did!).
Finally, there’s the question of infrastructure: tools, machines and storage. The large landholder is the one likely to be able to afford to build things like granaries, mills and so on. Now there is, I want to note, a lot of variation from place to place about exactly how this sort of infrastructure is handled. It might be privately owned, it might be owned by the village, but frequently, the “village mill” was actually owned by the large landholder whose big manor overlooked the village (who may also be the local political authority). And while we’re looking at grain, other agricultural products which don’t store as well or as easily might need to be aggregated for transport to market and sale, a process where the large landholder’s storage facilities, political standing and market contacts are likely to make him the ideal middleman. I don’t want to get too in the weeds (pardon the pun) on all the different kinds of infrastructure (mills for grains, presses for olives, casks for wine) except to note that in many cases the large landholder is the one likely to be able to afford these investments and that smaller farmers growing the same crops nearby might well want to use them.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part II: Big Farms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-31.
March 4, 2023
QotD: Profit margins in the restaurant trade
The table that orders a starter, main and a bottle of wine – that just about breaks even for the restaurant. You can mix and match this a bit. Dessert instead of the starter, that sorta thing. But the costs of the building, the staff, the electricity, the stock that goes off, the cost of capital itself, all those things, mean that the basic restaurant experience just about covers its costs.
It’s the having the one thing extra that makes the money, the profit. A drink before the meal, having both a starter and a dessert to add to the main. The second bottle of wine, or the digestif with the coffee. This is why the waiter is so eager for you to have any one or more of these “extras”. The margin over food costs – food costs usually being around 30% of menu price – on those additions is exactly what provides a profit to the business that is the restaurant.
As to why, well, it’s the same reason that the menu prices of some well known item are going to be roughly the same across restaurants. Competition is fierce in the business. That means headline prices are pushed down to where they only just, if even that, cover costs. On exactly the same basis as Ryanair charging you spit for the seat and then a fortune for the air you breathe onboard. You get the punter in with the £20 for two steak dinners then hope like Hell they order the vanilla soup and also the vegetable ice cream in order to make your nut.
Tim Worstall, “Bar Owner Complains Of People Drinking Tap Water – Oi! Where’s My Profits?”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-05-27.
March 3, 2023
QotD: What’s the opposite of university? “Diversity”
Severian, “Advice to Young Dissidents”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-01.
March 2, 2023
QotD: The rise of the overeducated mediocrity
The son of a friend of mine applied for a place at medical school and was turned down on the grounds that his personal statement was inadequate. I don’t know what was wrong with it; perhaps he employed incorrect old clichés rather than the correct new ones. Having the means to do so, my friend sent his son to a tutor who specialized in personal statements (every bureaucratic requirement is an economic opportunity for an ex-bureaucrat wanting to strike out for himself). No doubt the tutor in personal statements advised him to put in more about his passion for social justice and equality. At any rate, it worked and he was accepted.
In these statements — apparently as much a requirement in the private sector as in the public — you have to not only explain why you have dreamt all your life of this position in the marketing department (selling the unnecessary to the insolvent) and why you, of all the 7,000,000,000 people in the world, are the most suited to it, but also proclaim your deep sense of social responsibility, which you will bring to whatever task you are told to perform. People have never been entirely straightforward, thank goodness (what need of art and literature if they had been?), but we do seem to be breeding up a generation of Pecksniffs and Uriah Heeps.
I don’t want to indulge in what has been called the hermeneutics of suspicion, the habit of finding the supposedly real, occult, and sinister explanation behind perfectly straightforward social phenomena, but nevertheless I cannot help but wonder what the true purpose is of mission statements and their cognates, such as annual declarations of probity and the like. I think (though of course I cannot indubitably prove) that it is to make the world safe for overeducated mediocrities.
Theodore Dalrymple, “In Defense of Mediocrity”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-02-17.
