Quotulatiousness

August 23, 2023

From “hunter-gatherer” to “settled farmer” as a Just-so story

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

The latest book review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf is James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by Jane Psmith:

Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one already. So, there are these hunter-gatherers, right, and one of the things they like to gather, while they’re roaming around the hilly flanks of Anatolia following herds of gazelles, is the large, carbohydrate-rich seeds of local grasses. Then one day some bright soul gets the idea of planting the seeds on purpose, people selectively replant the ones that have exciting mutations like “have really big seeds” and “don’t shatter your stalk and scatter your really big seeds everywhere when they’re ripe, just hang out and wait to be reaped,” and they all start staying in one place to tend their fields. They quickly discover that agriculture can create a lot more calories than foraging, so all of a sudden they have a nice surplus that can go towards supporting non-food-producing specialists like dedicated craftsmen, priests, bureaucrats (but I repeat myself) and kings to expedite and organize all that agricultural labor, and, hey presto! you have civilization.

Oh, cool, you read Guns, Germs, and Steel in high school too?

Only James C. Scott is here to tell you that’s not how it happened. And while you might be excused for thinking (especially if you’ve read our review of The Art of Not Being Governed) that this is Scott doing his contrarian “ooh, look, I’m turning the accepted narrative on its head” thing, you would be wrong. (Don’t worry, though, we definitely will get to the point where he does that.) He’s just offering a summary of the new scholarly consensus: the transition from mobile bands of hunter-gatherers to sedentary agriculturalists didn’t follow that neat logical progression, and it was far patchier, more tenuous, and more bidirectional than generally assumed. In fact, practically since the moment in the late 1920s that V. Gordon Childe coined the term “Neolithic revolution“, archaeological evidence has been accumulating that complicates every aspect of the story I just told you, from agriculture to sedentism to state formation.

To begin with, what constitutes agriculture? Back in the 1960s, paleobotanist Jack Harlan used a flint sickle to harvest enough wild Anatolian wheat in just three weeks to feed a family for an entire year. Now, we can probably agree that just harvesting a stand of wild wheat and storing the grain doesn’t really count as agriculture, but what about pulling up the non-wheat interlopers from a half-ripe stand you hope to harvest later in the year? What about saving some seeds and tossing them on a welcoming plot of soil next spring? What about digging up or burning other plants to make that welcoming plot? And then it turns out that all the harvesting and processing tools — those sickles, winnowing baskets, grindstones, and even purpose-built granaries — seem to have existed before there was any intentional cultivation, suggesting wandering tribes who came together only at harvest time but spent most of the year apart. Also, it seems all like those exciting morphological changes that make grain agriculture so efficient (big seeds and non-brittle rachis) come hundreds and hundreds of years after agriculture was established.1 Our simple story is already getting complicated! But it gets worse.

Archaeologists used to assume that sedentism — that is, people staying in one place year-round — and agriculture necessarily went together. In one direction this is obvious, because once you’re feeding your family from a particular plot of ground you probably want to stick around to weed and water it and keep away any animals (or other people) who might swoop in at the last minute and take your harvest. But it goes the other way, too: we generally assume that pickings as a hunter-gatherer are slim enough that your group needs to keep moving around to find more food. (Or, in the immortal words of the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium: “if you continue to hunt in this area, game will become scarce.”) This is actually true at higher trophic levels: large animals tend to migrate throughout the year, so people whose subsistence strategies depend heavily on hunting them will follow the herds. But hunter-gatherer mobility is a tendency, not an iron law, and the archaeological (and even historical) record is full of non-agricultural peoples who lived in one place year-round because their environment was rich enough to support it. This was common among the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, who created quite socially and materially complex cultures without agriculture, but it also shows up plenty of other places. The earliest sedentary culture we know about, the Natufians, flourished along the coast of what is now Israel more than thirteen thousand years ago, largely by gathering wild grains and hunting gazelles.

Do note, though, that it would be a mistake to call these non-agricultural environments “natural”, because humans have been actively managing our landscapes for at least a million years. The main tool before the widespread adoption of agriculture was fire, which can be used to stampede prey animals into a trap or to remove unwanted vegetation and make way for the grasses and shrubs that we, or our preferred prey, like to eat. “The game they subsequently bagged,” Scott writes, “represented a kind of harvesting of prey animals they had deliberately assembled by carefully creating a habitat they would find enticing”. It’s even been suggested that the Little Ice Age of the early modern period was due to the sudden cessation of burning activity (and its CO2 emissions) in the Americas when newly-introduced Old World pathogens killed off most of the people who did the burning.

Against the Grain focuses on the region archaeologists call Southwest Asia, people who like reading books about archaeology call the Fertile Crescent, and everyone else calls the Near and Middle East, but it zeroes in specifically on southern Mesopotamia. This wasn’t the first place to host year-round settlements, nor was it the site of the original crop domestications, but it is the home of the third element of the traditional story of the birth of civilization: the state. Scott is unwilling to define the state precisely, describing it instead as an “institutional continuum” where something can be more or less state-like, but he writes that “a polity with a king, specialized administrative staff, social hierarchy, a monumental center, city walls, and tax collections and distribution is certainly a ‘state’ in the strong sense of the term”. It was here, near the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf, that the earliest “statelets” arose, and it’s here, once again, that Scott brings up recent archaeological evidence that undermines the usual narrative. This time, the abandoned theory is that the region was as arid at the dawn of agriculture as it is today; an agricultural population might have succeeded in the oases and river valleys, but as numbers swelled they would need to undertake massive irrigation projects, which would in turn require “the mobilization of labor to dig and maintain the canals, which implied the existence of a public authority capable of assembling and disciplining that labor force”. In short, agriculture was assumed to have required a state. But it didn’t.

Scott’s argument draws heavily on the work of Jennifer Pournelle, who reconstructed the landscape of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium in the seventh and sixth centuries BC using a combination of remote sensing, ancient sediments, and climatological history, and concluded that, far from the arid landscape of today, the land between the rivers was in fact an “intricate deltaic wetland.”

    The inhabitants of these marshes lived on what are called “turtlebacks,” small patches of slightly higher ground, comparable to cheniers in the Mississippi delta, often no more than a meter or so above the high-water mark. From these turtlebacks, inhabitants exploited virtually all the wetland resources within reach: reeds and sedges for building and food, a great variety of edible plants (club rush, cattails, water lily, bulrush), tortoises, fish, mollusks, crustaceans, birds, waterfowl, small mammals, and migrating gazelles that provided a major source of protein. The combination of rich alluvial soils with an estuary of two great rivers teeming with nutrients, dead and alive, made for an exceptionally rich riparian life that in turn attracted huge number of fish, turtles, birds, and mammals — not to mention humans! — preying on creatures lower on the food chain.

Moreover, the first settlements in the area were right on the border between the brackish water of the coastal estuary and the freshwater ecology upstream, and on the incredibly flat floodplain of the lower Euphrates (the gradient is less than two inches per mile) that seam moved great distances with the tides. “Thus,” Scott writes, “for a large number of communities, the two ecological zones moved across the landscape while they remained stationary, taking sustenance from both”. They didn’t need to roam in search of new food sources; the food came to them. Agriculture — of the flood-retreat form, where seeds are sown in nutrient-rich new soils deposited by the retreating river, and which is the least labor-intensive type possible — was just another of their many diverse and overlapping subsistence strategies. The shift between wet and dry season, with its pulse of migrating animals and harvest of whatever seeds they had sown, can be considered moving zones on a longer timescale: a new habitat arriving on their doorstep to be added to the mosaic of available options. By 6000 BC, Scott says, they were “already agriculturalists and pastoralists as well as hunter-gatherers. It’s just that so long as there were abundant stands of wild foods they could gather and annual migrations of waterfowl and gazelles they could hunt, there was no earthly reason they would risk relying mainly, let along exclusively, on labor-intensive farming and livestock rearing.”

Thus do we, with James C. Scott, reject the old model in which agriculture leads almost at once to both sedentism and the state. Instead, we see sedentism arise in particularly favorable ecological niches as early as 12,000 BC, with most of the main founder crops and animals domesticated between 8000 and 6000 BC, and then a gap of almost four thousand years before the appearance of the state. A naively Whiggish view of history might ask, “What took so long?” But James C. Scott, being James C. Scott (yes, here we’re coming to the “turn it on its head” bit), thinks the more accurate question might be, “What went wrong?”

Frustration as a key driver in motivating mass unrest

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

Rob Henderson reviews the old classic The True Believer by Eric Hoffer:

Eric Hoffer made the case that if you peel back the layers of any mass movement, you will find that frustration is their driving force.

Frustration, though, doesn’t arise solely from bleak material conditions. The dockyard philosopher argued that “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.”

He points out in the years leading up to both the French and Russian Revolutions, life had in fact been gradually improving for the masses. He concludes, “It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt” and that “The intensity of discontent seems to be in inverse proportion to the distance from the object fervently desired.”

Personally, I saw this when I first arrived at Yale. I recall being stunned at how status anxiety pervaded elite college campuses. Internally, I thought, “You’ve already made it, what are you so stressed out about?” Hoffer, though, would say these students believed they had almost made it. That is why they were so aggravated. The closer they got to realizing their ambitions, the more frustrated they became about not already achieving them.

Hoffer’s conceptions of frustration highlight how if your conditions improve, but not as much or as quickly as you’d like, you will be vulnerable to recruitment by mass movements that promise to make your dreams come true.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “When inequality is the general law of society, the most blatant inequalities escape notice. When everything is virtually on a level, the slightest variations cause distress. That is why the desire for equality becomes more insatiable as equality extends to all.” For Hoffer, this insatiability cultivates frustration — a nebulous, simmering emotional state that can be harnessed by any ideology.

He describes what has now become known as the “Tocqueville effect”: A revolution is most likely to occur after an improvement in social conditions. As circumstances improve, people raise their expectations. Societal reforms raise reference points to a level that is usually not matched, eliciting rage and frustration.

Slovenian SAR80: Sterling Out-Simplifies the AR-180

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 May 2023

The British Sterling firm designed the SAR-80 (specifically, their engineer Frank Waters) as a very simple rifle to sell to countries outside the main NATO/Warsaw Pact spheres of influence. Sterling ended up getting a license to produce the AR-18 though, and didn’t put Waters’ design into production.

When the newly formed Chartered Industries of Singapore came looking for a rifle to produce, the SAR-80 design was a chance for Sterling to sell a production license. CIS needed something to produce domestically to equip the Singaporean Army, and the SAR-80 met their needs. After selling the rifles to their own Army, the company went looking for export clients. They found a few, including Croatia, the Central African Republic, and Slovenia. A total of about 80,000 SAR-80 rifles were made, and this is one of the Slovenian-contract examples.
(more…)

QotD: “Megacorporations” of the Roman era

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

The definition of a megacorp differs a bit, work to work. They are, of course, megacorporations in the literal sense; massive, vertically integrated companies that often have monopolistic control over multiple markets. But more fundamental to the definition of the megacorp is that they typically employ their own armed forces and either enforce their own law or are at least able to ignore the law more generally. It is not enough for a company to be big, it has to generate the sort of wealth to which M. Licinius Crassus famously quipped “no one was truly rich who could not support an army at his own expense” (Plut. Cras. 2.7).

Which is to say that what really defines a megacorporation is that it trespasses into domains usually occupied by the state: military, police and judicial functions – the use of force. A megacorporation is, simply put, a corporation so large and powerful that it begins to act as a state, be that in the form of the private armies of Cyberpunk 2077, the privatized police force of the Robocop franchise, or the straight-up corporate governments of Stellaris (which in turn channel things like the Spacer’s Guild or the Ferengi Alliance) And that is core to the generally dystopian leaning of megacorporations – they are meant to reflect capitalism and corporate empire building taken to an extreme, to the point where it has swallowed the entire rest of the society.

Taking that definition to history, we can actually see a fair number of megacorporations; they are by no means common, but they do exist. Going very far back, the Roman societates (lit: “fellowships”, but “business association” or “company” is an accurate enough rendering) of the publicani (businessmen who filled public contracts) exercised close to this sort of power in some of Rome’s early provinces. During the Middle and Late Roman Republic, the job of extracting tax revenue from the provinces was too administratively complex for the limited machinery of the Republic, so instead the senate directed the censors to auction the right to collect taxes. Groups of Roman businessmen (and often silent patrician partners) would group resources together to bid for the right to collect taxes from a province – any taxes they took in excess of that figure would be their profit.

These companies could be very large indeed. For instance, parts of the lex portorii Asiae (the customs laws for the Roman province of Asia) survive and include regulations for the relevant company including a slew of customs houses and guard posts (the law is incomplete, but mentions more than 30 collection points – all major ports – to which would also need to be added posts along the land routes into the province). From other evidence we know that the staff at customs posts included armed guards along with the expected tax collectors and bookkeepers. And we know that publicani were sometimes delegated local or Roman forces to do their work (e.g. Cic. Ad Att. 114, using Shackleton Bailey’s numbering). They also maintained the closest thing the Roman Republic had to a postal service (Cic. Ad Att. 108). It’s not clear exactly how many employees one of the larger tax collection companies might have had (and those for the province of Asia – equivalent to the west coast of Anatolia – would have been some of the largest), but it was clearly considerable, as were the sums of money involved.

To the cities and towns of a province, such Roman companies must have seemed like megacorporations, especially if they were in with the governor (which they generally were) and thus could call down the forces of Rome on recalcitrant taxpayers. And we certainly know that these publicani often collected substantially far more than was due to them under the law (the reason why “tax collector” and “sinner” seem to be nearly synonymous in the New Testament, a fact that gave Ernst Badian’s study of them, Publicans and Sinners, its title). At the same time, we see the clear limitations too: such companies were clearly subservient to the governor and to the Roman state. Administrative changes beginning under Julius Caesar and brought to completion under Augustus did away with some of the largest tax contracts and the influence of the societates publicanorum with them.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: January 1, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-01.

August 22, 2023

With Bill C-18 about to come into effect, there is zero sense for the “tech giants” to start negotiating

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Geist explains why there are no incentives for Google and Meta to begin any kind of negotiations with the Canadian government over the ruthlessly self-destructive Online News Act:

The rhetoric around Bill C-18 has escalated in recent days in light of the awful wildfires in NWT and British Columbia. In my view, the issues associated with these tragic events have little to do with Meta blocking news links and the attempt to bring it into the conversation is a transparent attempt to score political points (the connectivity issues with some NWT communities completely taken offline for days is somehow never mentioned). The reality is that Meta was asked about just this scenario at committee and it made it clear that it would not block any non-news outlet links. That is precisely what has been happening and the government’s legislative choices should be the starting point for understanding why compliance with the law involves blocking a very broad range of news links that extend beyond even those sources that are defined as “eligible news outlets”.

The government and supporters of Bill C-18 talking points now emphasize two things in relation to Meta blocking news links: the law has yet to take effect and there is room to address their concerns in the regulation-making process. Both of these claims are incredibly deceptive, relying on the assumption that most won’t bother to read the actual legislation. If they did, they would see that (1) the law has received royal assent and can take effect anytime and (2) the regulation making process addresses only a small subset of Bill C-18 issues with most of the core issues finalized. In other words, the time to shape the law and address many of the key concerns was before the government repeatedly cut off debate in order to ensure it that received royal assent before the summer break.

Start with when the law takes effect. As noted above, the law has been passed and received royal assent. It is the law of the land and there is no scope for changes or amendments without a new bill that must be passed by Parliament. Section 93 establishes when the provisions come into force. The law initially envisioned a staged approach whereby certain sections would be proclaimed in effect by the government in stage one, followed by four additional stages, some of which were contingent on certain regulations coming into force. Yet at the last minute the government approved a Senate amendment that basically discarded the entire approach. Section 93(6) states:

    (6) Despite subsections (1) to (5), any provision of this Act that does not come into force by order before the 180th day following the day on which this Act receives royal assent comes into force 180 days after the day on which this Act receives royal assent.

The entire law therefore takes effect no later than 180 days after royal assent, which is December 19, 2023. This change was included at the urging of the Canadian media sector (specifically Quebecor) which lobbied to have it take effect as soon as possible. Under this approach, the law can take effect at any time as the government need only issue the relevant Orders-in-Council. There is now little wiggle room. As of today’s post, the latest the law will take effect is in 120 days but it could happen well before that.

Once the law takes effect, the clock on negotiations and potential mediation and arbitration begins. The timelines are fixed in Section 19(1) of the law: 90 days to negotiate and 120 days for mediation. If there is no agreement and no request to the CRTC to extend the deadlines, the issue can go to final offer arbitration. To be clear, none of these timelines are subject to the regulation making process. They are fixed and they create obvious urgency for anyone facing compliance requirements.

The government threatened Meta and Google with mandated payment to Canadian news sources if their online services merely linked to articles or videos from those news sources. Meta and Google rationally decided that the tiny little Canadian market wasn’t worth the cost of paying CBC and other Canadian news outlets for the privilege of sending them readers and are in the process of obeying the letter of the new law and blocking such links on their respective platforms. They told the Canadian government that this is what they’d do if the law was passed in its current form, yet the government is pretending to be shocked and surprised that Meta and Google are going to obey the law.

After all, there’s no real risk that lives might be endangered because so many Canadians are used to getting their news by way of Facebook or Google, is there?

“… the theatrics employed by Hitler and Mussolini just seemed too weird and downright ridiculous to the British”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Germany, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In Spiked, Ralph Schoellhammer discusses some of the difficulties the Green Gestapo, er, I mean the likes of Extinction Rebellion and their mini-mes like Just Stop Oil have been encountering with the British public:

Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup, leader of the “Saviours of Britain”, also known as the Black Shorts.
Still from Jeeves and Wooster (1990).

I have long been convinced that one of the reasons why fascism never had a chance in Britain was due to the predispositions of her people. If nothing else, the theatrics employed by Hitler and Mussolini just seemed too weird and downright ridiculous to the British.

PG Wodehouse captured this perfectly in an exchange between a British wannabe fascist, Roderick Spode, and Bertie Wooster: “The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone.”

I don’t intend to liken fascists to environmentalists, but Brits have at least expressed a similar, visceral distaste for the theatrics of eco-activist groups in recent years. Marching in black “footer bags”, pretending to be the voice of the people, is just as ridiculous as holding up traffic in an orange “Just Stop Oil” t-shirt.

The environmental movement becomes more absurd by the day. The Guardian‘s George Monbiot, for instance, has just called for the reintroduction of deadly wolves and lynxes to Great Britain, in order to manage a surging deer population. One can only hope that this call to action will have about as much success as his campaign against meat, milk and eggs, which Monbiot is convinced are an “indulgence” humanity can no longer afford.

Sadly, the same is not true in Germany, where the elites are all too keen to humour even the most extreme climate fanatics. German discount supermarket Penny recently decided to increase the prices of its meat and dairy products, to include the environmental costs incurred in their production, as part of a week-long experiment. The price of frankfurter sausages rose from €3.19 to €6.01. The price of mozzarella rose by 74 per cent, to €1.55. And the price of fruit yoghurt rose by 31 per cent, from €1.19 to €1.56.

While the usual suspects in the establishment are clearly excited by this idea that in the future even shopping at a discount shop might become the preserve of the rich, average Germans are less pleased. Germany’s public broadcaster, WDR, asked Penny customers what they thought about the price-hike experiment. Due to a lack of enthusiasm from shoppers, WDR decided to have one of its employees cosplay as a happy shopper. That taxpayer-funded broadcasters now have to resort to outright fraud in order to drum up support for idiotic climate action tells you everything you need to know.

Societal norms breaking down even among music fans at concerts

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia on the increasing number of performing artists on stage who are being physically attacked by their own fans at live concerts:

Consider these recent events:

  • During a Pink concert in London, a fan tossed a bag of human ashes on stage. Pink was totally chill, and on the video of the incident can be heard asking: “Is this your mom?”
  • A fan threw a cellphone at Drake during a Chicago performance — and the singer almost caught it, but it hit his hand instead.
  • Pop singer Bebe Rexha wasn’t so fortunate, and a hurled phone sent her to the hospital in June.
  • Harry Styles has been repeatedly struck with objects while performing — taking on everything from a flying Chicken McNugget to a water bottle in the groin.
  • Country star Kelsea Ballerini was struck by a flying bracelet thrown by a fan in Boise, Idaho. Jewelry is a lovely gift, but in this instance the impact caused the singer to flinch, and stop playing her guitar. A few minutes later she had to leave the stage.
  • An assailant actually jumped on stage during an Ava Max performance in Los Angeles, and slapped the singer, scratching her eye in the process — before a security guard restrained him. The singer somehow managed to finish the song.
  • Rapper Latto got hit with a flying object during a concert in Germany. She responded by telling the perpetrator “I’ma beat your ass.”

It’s a curious coincidence that, during this same period, activists have started throwing things at famous works of art. You wouldn’t normally think of museums and concert halls as epicenters of paintball-esque outbursts. But in the year 2023, they are hot spots for all the worst tendencies.

Of course, there’s a long history of fans throwing things on stage. But until recently, they were usually nice things. Only in the rarest instance — for example, a vaudeville show of embarrassingly low quality — were tomatoes tossed at a performer.

[…]

Our culture has changed, and not for the better. I have come to believe — as I’ve explained elsewhere — that US society shifts between cycles of hot and cool. We are currently approaching the peak of the hot cycle, and this is always accompanied by anger, conflict, and violence.

When I first started to say this, more than 15 years ago, people were skeptical. But who will deny it after everything we’ve seen in the intervening years?

You may think that violence plays out on the battlefield, not at a pop concert. But music has always been a cultural indicator. In some ways, it is our most revealing source of information on society. Sometimes the future shows up in our music even before it gets covered in the newspapers.

So even if I am saddened by the craziness at music concerts, I can’t say I’m surprised There’s something ugly simmering in our society, and it has finally arrived at the pricey front row seats of concerts. All of sudden, fans have decided that an expensive ticket gives them the right to do something abusive to their favorite pop star.

It makes no sense, but it’s definitely part of the zeitgeist. And it will almost certainly get worse before it gets better.

But these cycles eventually turn. There’s a law of reflexivity at work. People do burn out on anger, sooner or later. I’m hoping it will be sooner in this instance.

History Summarized: Sparta’s Finest Hour

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 12 May 2023

It’s not Thermopylai.

SOURCES & Further Reading:
Constantine Cavafy, The Collected Poems. Translated by Evangelos Sachperoglou, Oxford University Press, 2008. – George Economou, On Translating C.P. Cavafy’s “Come, O King of the Lacedaimonians”. https://newohioreview.org/2013/09/02/… – Plutarch, Lives of Agis and Cleomenes. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin, W. Heinemann, 1968. – Polybius, Histories. Edited by F. W. Walbank and Christian Habicht. Translated by W. R. Paton, VI, Harvard University Press, 2012.
– For way the heck more about Kleomenes and Kratisikleia, you can also read my undergraduate Honors Thesis, Greekness in Peril: Cavafy and the Essence of Hellenism. 2018. https://www.academia.edu/44709355/Gre…
(more…)

QotD: Megafauna extinction

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

Another marker to put down about the extinction of the varied megafauna. A lot of which went extinct just as human beings – or varied ancestors of – turned up in the same area. The usual bit being that we eated it.

There is, sadly enough, a common misconception about our ancestors. Nature loving, that Rousseauesque fantasy of just drinking the clear water, munching on the acorns that fall unbidden. That humans don’t thrive on acorns matters not a whit to those who share this fantasy of an Elysian past. The truth being that humans – and proto- – were the most vicious beasts out there. That’s why we survived to thrive. It’s not just modern day humans who would scale down a cliff to throttle babbie seabirds for the pot after all.

So too with the bargain bucket meal on legs just found:

    Half-tonne birds may have roamed Europe at same time as humans

They roamed, we eated, they roamed no more. As with the arrival of the Maori in New Zealand and the exit of moas. The American horse disappearing about the same time Amerinds made it past the ice barriers into British Columbia and points south. Dodos and sailing ships and on and on around the globe. The major factor in megafauna going extinct being humans turning up to eat them.

Tim Worstall, “Crimea Fried Ostrich – And Then We Eated It”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-06-27.

August 21, 2023

Some good reasons why the Russo-Ukraine war is misunderstood in the West

Filed under: Europe, Media, Military, Railways, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A few days back, Bruce Gudmundsson outlined a few of the reasons the Western — particularly the English-language — reporting on the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine gets it wrong:

Railways have played a significant role in warfare since at least the Crimean War.
Navvies working on the Grand Crimean Central Railway, 1854. From Thomas Brassey, Railway Builder (1969).

As I live within a bowshot of a railroad crossing, the screech of metal wheels on metal rails frequently reminds me of one of the many things that so many Anglophone commentators get wrong about the war in Ukraine. Coming from places afflicted with (hat tip to Arlo Guthrie [NR: I’d give the credit to Steve Goodman, personally]) “the disappearing railroad blues”, these writers find it hard to imagine the degree to which Russian soldiers exploit the ability of the iron horse to move vast numbers of hundred-pound artillery shells. This blindspot, in turn, causes them to place far too much importance on means of movement, such as ships and trucks, that play second fiddle in the logistical symphony that supplies Russian forces in the field.

Tales of soldiers stealing pickles from convenience stores spark thoughts of another mistake that English-speaking critics have made with respect to the Russian supply system. Wise generals, from Alexander the Great to Francisco Franco, have long deployed vast quantities of food along with their armies. Nonetheless, the enduring fondness of English-speaking soldiers for bully beef, tinned biscuits, and other meals-ready-to-eat sets them apart from most other fighting men, past or present. To put things another way, we should not have been surprised that, when organizing an invasion of one of the great food-producing countries of our planet, Russian logisticians preferred the dispatch of fuel and ammunition to the delivery of items that could have been found in every bodega along the line of march.

Anglophone analysts also drew the wrong conclusions from reports of the loss, in battle, of Russian general officers. Such casualties, they argued, stemmed from an absence of trust. That is, Russian generals were killed because, lacking confidence in the competence of colonels, captains, and corporals, they felt obliged to exercise close supervision over forces engaged in combat.

The participation of generals in firefights, however, need not reflect an absence of faith in the fidelity and abilities of subordinates. Indeed, the original gangsters of “trust tactics” often recommended that the general officers commanding formations lead from the front. I suspect, moreover, that Russian leaders also understood that seeing a general die a soldier’s death usually exercises a positive influence on the morale of his subordinates. (“Say what you will about old General Strelkov, but he never asked us to do anything he wasn’t willing to do himself.”)

Finally, few who made much of the battle deaths of Russian general officers seem to have been aware that the Russian forces that crossed into Ukraine on 24 February 2022 were organized in a way that provided them with an extraordinarily high proportion of fighting generals. That is, when a peacetime formation formed a battalion tactical group, the general in charge of that organization usually took command of the unit it spawned. Thus, rather than having one general for every four or five battalions, the Russian forces of the first few months of the “special military operation” had five or six flag-rank officers for every four or five battalions.

What the parades are for | Dorktown

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

Secret Base
Published 8 Aug 2023

This is the second episode of our seven-part docuseries, The History Of The Minnesota Vikings.

For the Vikings, the 1970s were so full of comedy, drama, and doomed snowmobiling expeditions that we had to split this decade into two episodes. And we STILL had to leave stuff out! What a team.
(more…)

Baby Boomers – “a marketing category is not an age group”

Filed under: Health, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt (who’s a few years younger than me) tackles the generational conflict that always seems to flare up on social media, if not so much in real life:

I’m going to write about boomers, why a lot of us blame them for … almost everything, why my generation (roughly 55 to 64) not only are not boomers, but tend to be the most vociferous in “D*mn it, I’m not a boomer.” Why I’m vaguely amused that millennials call everyone older than them “boomer”. And why I find it bizarre that my kids both hate millennials and identify as millennials, though they both are d*mn close to z and closer to z in attitudes. (And the younger one in date of birth, I think.) And why all this is unfair, because a marketing category is not an age group, and yet, perfectly fair in aggregate, because demographics is not destiny, but it sure as heck is economy. And economics shapes your life in a way you probably can’t think about too deeply without becoming enraged.

So, yeah, friends, in-betweeners, X, millenials and Zers, lend me your ears. I come not to bury the boomers and not to praise them, but to explain to everyone, including the sane boomers in the audience why the fractiousness exists, and to give — under the heading of giving perspective on the lives of others that we normally keep quiet about — an idea of how my non-generation (We certainly are not Jones. We don’t jones for anything that the boomers had. We just aren’t them) has gone through. Without blaming the boomers, because an accident of birth is not their fault.

First of all, and taking in account that I’m the one who says the population is not booming out of control, let me dismiss the idea the baby boom wasn’t real. That’s goofy. (To put it mildly.) You can argue the causes, but for about ten years — no, not the twenty five claimed. Marketing generations are not demographic generations — after World War II, families grew. Blame it on prosperity, which allowed one parent to stay home and raise the sprogs. Blame it on tax credits (it has been argued if the comparable applied today, people would have families of five or six too.) Sure, blame it on the move rural to city, which was tied to prosperity too, and the fact that the newly independent nuclear families didn’t have to put up with grandma’s critique of their child bearing or raising. Or blame it on the men having been away and the relief of the long war being over.

Blame it on whatever you want, but even without looking at the numbers, just by looking at family histories, families of five or six weren’t rare. And three was about average, I think. Four not anything to remark on.

But, you’ll say, that’s fairly normal for the past period. Sure. My mom, who was almost a boomer comes from a family of five (should be six, one lost in infancy) and dad from a family of four. And I’m almost sixty, and both dad and I were very late children. So, yeah “But that was normal before.”

Yes, it was, but now throw in prosperity, moves to the cities and … It’s not the babies who were born, you see, it’s the ones who survived. Even mom who was raised, for brevity of explanation, in a slum where going to your playfriend’s funeral, or more likely his infant sibling’s funeral was absolutely normal, had more of her friends survive than was normal for her parent’s generation.

To put it another way. Up until the late 19th century, women routinely bore 10 children and didn’t get to raise a single one to adulthood.

Even in the nineteenth century, women at the upper class level Jane Austen wrote about, routinely made two or three baby shrouds as part of their trousseau. Because that many deaths were expected. By my parent’s time that had improved — no, not medicine, sanitation. Better drains, a weekly bath, and washing your clothes more than twice a year — to the point that you would regularly raise about half of what you bore. (My family, having steel constitutions rarely lost a child. To compensate, we were always relatively low fertility.)

The improvement brought on by rudimentary sanitation and washing up was such that in the nineteenth century Europe burst at the seams with kids, which led to rapid invention, expansion, and yes, the adoption of a lot of half baked ideas. Because that’s the result of a lot of kids suddenly in a society. Baby busts … well, most of the Middle Ages, lead to slow innovation, a tendency to ossify the social structures, laws and regulations increasingly made by old men, for a world they only imagine exists. Stop me when this sounds familiar.

The baby boom happened at the intersection of the discovery of antibiotics and their popularization and also inoculation of school aged kids, both of which meant an unexpected number of children surviving childhood and surviving it in good health. And people having about the number of children their parents had. BUT — and this is very important — those children grew to adulthood and did so without any significant physical impairment.

What it caused was the same effect as if everyone alive had decided to have double or more the number of children. It was a massive demographic elephant moving through the societal snake.

Cunk on America – Historian Reacts

Filed under: History, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Vlogging Through History
Published 9 May 2023
(more…)

QotD: Effrontery, snake oil and TV preachers

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

… effrontery has made great strides as a key to success in life, and indeed quite ordinary people now employ it routinely. There are consultants in effrontery training who not only commit it themselves but teach others how to commit it, and charge large sums for doing so. There was a time when self-praise was regarded as no praise, rather the reverse; but now it is a prerequisite for advancement.

The other day I was sent a video of a young woman — elegant, attractive, and very self-confident — giving a seminar on how other young women, one of them the daughter of a friend, could and should change their lives for the better. In a way, I admired the leader of the seminar’s effrontery (just as I secretly admire Thomas Holloway’s). She spoke in pure, unadulterated clichés, practically contentless, but with such force of conviction that, if you discounted what she actually said, you might have thought that she was a person of profound insight with a vocation for imparting it to others. Her audience was as lambs to the slaughter, or at least to the fleece; they had paid a large sum of money to listen to mental pabulum that would make the recitation of a bus timetable seem intellectually stimulating.

On catching glimpses in the past of American television evangelists, it was always a cause of wonderment to me that anyone could look at or listen to them without immediately perceiving their fraudulence. This fraudulence was so obvious that it was like a physical characteristic, such as height or weight or color of hair, or alternatively like an emanation, such as body odor (incidentally, pictures of Guevara always suggest, to me at any rate, that he smelled). How could people fail to perceive it? Obviously, many did not, for the evangelists were very successful — financially, that is, the only criterion that counted for them.

But the attendees of the seminar of which I saw a video clip were well educated, and still they did not perceive the vacuity, and therefore the fraudulence, of the seminar that they attended at such great expense to themselves.

But was not my own surprise at their gullibility a manifestation of my own gullibility, in supposing that intelligence and education make a man wise, rather than more sophisticated in his foolishness?

But at least most of their victims were uneducated, relatively simple folk.

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

August 20, 2023

Hitler Has a Bad Day – WW2 – Week 260 – August 19 – 1944

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

World War Two
Published 19 Aug 2023

This week the Allies invade Southern France, and do so very successfully. They’re also successful in the north, closing the Falaise gap and trapping huge numbers of Germans. In the East, however, the Germans manage to stop the Soviet drive on Riga with a counter attack, and in Warsaw they continue to brutally put down the Warsaw Uprising.
(more…)

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress