Quotulatiousness

June 29, 2024

“No sane person can possibly believe that this man is capable of being president now, let alone for another four years”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Joe Biden’s performance in the first Presidential debate on Thursday night was so bad that even his strongest supporters in the media have turned on a dime and are now contemplating his replacement:

This is not a hard column to write. In fact, I wrote it twice already! But last night’s debate performance by Joe Biden is the end of his campaign. It’s over. Done. No sane person can possibly believe that this man is capable of being president now, let alone for another four years. No sane person can vote for him.

And watching him barely capable of finishing a sentence, staring vacantly into the middle distance, unable to deliver a single coherent message even when handed an ideal question, incapable of any serious rebuttals to Trump’s increasingly deranged lies … well, the first thing I felt was intense sadness. This was elder abuse — inflicted, in part, by his wife.

The second thing I felt was rage. His own people chose to do this. That alone reveals a campaign so divorced from reality, so devoid of a rationale or a message, so strategically incompetent, it too has no chance of winning. It is an insult to all of us that a mature political party would offer someone in this physical and mental state as president for the next four years. And it has always been an insult. That the Democrats would offer him as the only alternative to what they regard as the end of liberal democracy under Trump is proof that they are either lying about what they claim are the stakes or are utterly delusional. If Trump is that dangerous, why on earth are you putting forward a man clearly in the early stages of dementia against him? Have you decided to let Trump win by default because you’re too scared to tell an elderly man the truth?

And if they have not told him the truth on this, what else are they afraid to tell him?

The mainstream media also bears responsibility for once again being an arm of the DNC establishment, running countless stories about Biden’s acuity and sharpness from inside sources, while attacking the few journalists who actually dared write the most obvious truth about this election: Biden has deteriorated rapidly in the last four years, he is unrecognizable from the man who ran in 2020, and we’ll be lucky if he is able to function as president for the next six months, let alone four years.

I watched MSNBC after the debate. It was like watching State TV in Russia. It took them an hour to acknowledge what the world had just seen, as they danced pathetically around what was staring them in the face. They are literally administration spokespeople — Jen Psaki has the exact same job she always had — waiting for instructions on what to say out loud. And they have all lied through their teeth for months about Biden’s fitness, only to refuse any accountability. Joe Scarborough recently declared on his show:

    Start the tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth: and F— you if you cannot handle the truth. This version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever.

To which the only response is: No, F— you, Mr Scarborough. And fuck all the lies you have told.

But there is a huge, gleaming, hopeful silver lining, as I’ve noted many times before. For the first time this year, we have a chance of keeping Trump out of the Oval Office with a new nominee from a younger generation. No, I don’t know who — except it obviously cannot be Kamala Harris, who would lose by an even bigger margin than the ambling cadaver. But that is what politics is for! There is time for a campaign before a convention that could now be must-see television. A future campaign already has a simple message that vibes with the moment and instantly puts Trump on defense: it’s time for the next generation to lead. We are choosing between the past (Trump) and the future, between the old and the young, between the insane versus the coherent.

All it takes is a credible Democrat of stature to say they are running against Biden. Then all the bets are off. He or she need not criticize Biden, and, in fact, should lionize his service. But they can say they’re running because beating Trump is the first and most important objective, and, at this point, it is obvious that Biden simply cannot beat Trump.

Does anyone have that courage? The person who shows it will instantly become the front-runner. Go for it.

In The Free Press, Bari Weiss points the finger at all of the American media and the apparatchiks of the Biden administration who have been loudly and consistently proclaiming that Biden was in great mental shape, running rings around his advisors, and fit, rested and ready to debate Trump:

Rarely are so many lies dispelled in a single moment. Rarely are so many people exposed as liars and sycophants. Last night’s debate was a watershed on both counts.

The debate was not just a catastrophe for President Biden. And boy—oy—was it ever.

But it was more than that. It was a catastrophe for an entire class of experts, journalists, and pundits, who have, since 2020, insisted that Biden was sharp as a tack, on top of his game, basically doing handstands while peppering his staff with tough questions about care for migrant children and aid to Ukraine.

Anyone who committed the sin of using their own eyes on the 46th president was accused, variously, of being Trumpers; MAGA cult members who don’t want American democracy to survive; ageists; or just dummies easily duped by “disinformation”, “misinformation”, “fake news”, and, most recently, “cheapfakes”.

Cast your mind back to February, when Robert Hur, the special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice to look into Biden’s handling of classified documents, came out with his report that included details about Biden’s health, which explained why he would not prosecute the president.

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Can anyone doubt that characterization after watching Biden’s debate performance?

Yet Eric Holder told us that Hur’s remarks were “gratuitous”. The former attorney general tweeted: “Had this report been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised”. Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama adviser, said Hur’s report was a “partisan hit job”. Vice President Kamala Harris argued: “The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts, and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous”. The report does not “live in reality”, said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, stressing that the president was “sharp” and “on top of things”.

June 25, 2024

QotD: Progress and decline

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

The past has always interested me more than the future. This backward-looking tendency has only been reinforced by reaching, somewhat unexpectedly, the age of 70. I can’t say that I don’t feel my age because I don’t know what feeling any particular age is like — but one repeatedly hears that 60 is the new 40, 70 is the new 50, and so on; certainly, the human aging process has slowed since I was born. When I look at photos of people who were 50 in the year of my birth, 1949, they look much older and more worn-out than do 50-year-olds now; and if I had lived only to my life expectancy at birth, I would be dead these last four years.

So progress must have occurred in the intervening time, despite the pessimism that infects those who, like me, are of retrospective temperament and hypersensitive to deterioration. It is not hard to enumerate many things that have improved. They relate principally, but not only, to material conditions. My best friend when I was very young was one of the last children in Britain to suffer from polio, which paralyzed him from the waist down. The quickest form of written communication was then the telegram, and anything other than local telephone calls had to go through an operator. To call across the Atlantic required a reservation and was ferociously expensive; the resultant conversation always seemed to take place during a violent storm. In England, the food was generally disgusting, and meals were to be endured as a regrettable necessity instead of enjoyed (it puzzles me still how people could have cooked so badly). Cars broke down frequently, and every November, pollution produced fogs so thick that you couldn’t see the hand in front of your face (I loved them). Rationing continued for eight years after the war, and disused bomb shelters, present in every park, were where illicit sexual fumbles and smoking took place. Incidentally, for an adult male not to smoke was unusual (75 percent did so); we must have lived in a perpetual fog of foul-smelling tobacco, to judge by the distaste caused by even a single lit cigarette in these virtuous times. Poverty, as raw necessity, still existed. Murderers were sometimes hanged — as well as, more rarely, the innocent. Overt racial prejudice was, if not quite the norm, certainly prevalent.

Yet not everything has improved, though the deterioration has been less tangible than the progress. To give one example: by age 11, I was free to roam London, or at least its better areas, by myself or with a friend of the same age. The sight of an 11-year-old child wandering the city on his own did not suggest to anyone that he was neglected or abused. I remember, too, the evening papers piled up at newsstands; people would throw coins on top of the pile and take their copy. It never occurred to anyone that the money might get stolen; nowadays, it would never occur to anyone that the money would not be stolen. The crime statistics bear out this sea change in national character.

Theodore Dalrymple, “What Seventy Years Have Wrought”, New English Review, 2019-10-26.

May 7, 2024

QotD: Cicero’s De Senectute

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

“Everyone wants to get old; and everyone complains once they have,” wrote Cicero in his De Senectute (On Old Age). “So great is the inconstancy and perversity of foolishness.” The De Senectute was one of the most commonly assigned books in American high schools a century ago; you can still find the old textbooks moldering in second-hand bookshops. It is one of the most thoroughly relevant books ever written, as we invariably get old if we do not die young: Why not consider what makes old age a worthwhile stage of our lives? It is a book we could wish more Americans would read, as this year’s election cycle only seems to confirm that America is an old country. The book’s message is easily conveyed: Nature is not your enemy. “In this we are wise,” Cicero writes, “we follow nature, as our best guide, almost as our god.” Cicero uses a theatrical metaphor: “Old age is the final scene in life’s drama.” The drama is penned by Nature herself: “The rest of the play is well designed; do you believe Nature neglected to consider how it all would end?”

John Byron Kuhner, “Marlene Dietrich’s War on Nature”, First Things, 2024-02-05.

April 17, 2024

QotD: The mid-life crisis, male and female versions

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

Most men get over the strippers-and-sports-cars overreaction pretty quickly, generally to be replaced by a new outlook on life. The guys who have come through the midlife crisis are generally a lot better people — more focused, more outgoing, far less materialistic — because they’ve taken up, however briefly, the perspective of Eternity. If you’re religious, you wonder if you’ll merit heaven. If you’re not, you wonder how you’ll be remembered. Either way, you start thinking about the kind of world you want to leave behind you, and what you’re going to do to achieve it with whatever time is left to you.

Which is why I’ve found the COVID overreaction so bizarre. Realizing your own mortality changes things. You can always tell, for instance, when it has happened to a younger person — when they come home, combat vets often act like middle-aged men going through a midlife crisis. Readjustment to civilian life is hard. Read the great war narratives, and it’s clear that none of them ever really “got over it”. Robert Graves and Ernst Junger, for instance, both lived to ripe old ages (90 and 103, respectively), and were titans in fields far removed from battle … and yet, the war WAS their lives, in some way we who haven’t been through it will never understand, and it comes through in every line they wrote.

If the Covidians were really freaking out about COVID, then, I’d expect one of two broad types of reaction: Either party-hearty midlife crisis mode, or a new determination to get on with whatever’s left of life. Obviously neither of those are true, and I just can’t grasp it — these might be your last few weeks on Earth, and that’s how you’re going to spend them? Sitting in your apartment like a sheep, wearing a mask and eating takeout, glued to a computer screen?

If you want a measure of just how feminized our society has become, there you go. Call this misogyny if you must, but it’s an easily observed fact of human nature — indeed, it has been observed, in every time, place, and culture of which we have knowledge — that post-menopausal women go a bit batty. Though a man might know for certain that he dies tomorrow, he can still keep plugging away today, because he’s programmed to find real meaning in his “work” — we are, after all, running our snazzy new mental software over kludgy old caveman hardware.

Women aren’t like that. They have one “job”, just one, and when they can’t do it anymore, they get weird. In much the same way high-end sports cars would cease to exist if middle aged men ceased to exist, so there are entire aspects of culture that don’t make sense in any other way except: These are channels for the energies of post-menopausal, and therefore surplus-to-requirements, women. You could go so far as to say that pretty much everything we call culture — traditions, history, customs — exist for that reason. Women go from being the bearers, to being the custodians, of the tribe’s future.

Severian, “Life’s Back Nine”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-11.

April 16, 2023

Raising the minimum retirement age may be necessary, but it will never be politically popular

Filed under: France, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As protests and riots continue against the French government’s attempt to raise the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64, Theodore Dalrymple explains why he finds sympathy with the working poor who will be most directly hurt by the change:

Riot police on the streets of Bordeaux as violent protests against French government plans to raise the retirement age continue.
YouTube screen capture from an AFP report.

As I hope to be able to work till my dying day, I am perhaps not the right person to animadvert on the present disturbances in France about the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64. My work has always been pleasing to me, and it remains so; I even manage to delude myself sometimes that it is important.

I am forced to recognize, however, that not everyone is in the same happy position as I. I am sure that if I had been a dustman all my life, I should not hope to be emptying dustbins at my present age (73), let alone at the age of 85. While my work remains work, and in a certain sense occasionally even hard work, especially when I have to think, what I do is not physically demanding. No one ever got arthritis or fibrosis of the lung by writing a few articles.

The reform of the pension system in France, from my limited understanding of it, is rather unfair. It is true that some reform is necessary: There are ever fewer workers to fund the pensions of ever more pensioners (the system being entirely unfunded by investment). On the other hand, it is those who do the most unpleasant and unremunerative jobs who have to work the longest, and the reform only increases this unfairness. As the old cockney song has it, it’s the rich what gets the pleasure.

Nevertheless, the extreme opposition to the reform, which is hardly a radical one, strikes most foreigners as rather strange. In a way it is also sad, for it implies that a long retirement is the main aim of all that precedes it, which in turn implies that all the work done for several decades before retirement has been an unpleasant imposition rather than something of value in itself. That the quid pro quo for a longer life expectancy is a greater number of years spent working seems not to strike anyone with force.

The demonstrators probably think, no doubt correctly, that the reform is the thin end of a wedge: If it is allowed to pass without a fuss, there will be further such reforms until the retirement age will be 70, 80, or never, depending on life expectancy. As for the younger demonstrators, they do not seem to worry much that it is they who will be paying for the people older than themselves to retire early, the distant prospect of early retirement being more real to them than the far more proximate high rates of taxation.

October 5, 2022

QotD: The deceptive nature of youth

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

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort — to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires — and expires, too soon — too soon before life itself.

Joseph Conrad, “Youth”, 1898.

September 22, 2022

QotD: In my 20s … and in my 40s

Filed under: Health, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Me in my 20s: Falls down flight of stairs. Brushes self off and gets on with life as usual.

Me in my 40s: Sleeps with head at slightly different angle than usual. Spends 3 weeks taking painkillers for neck pain whilst sobbing and wondering if my life will ever be the same again.

Amanda (@Pandamoanimum), Twitter, 2022-06-13.

June 10, 2022

The common male delusion that they “age like fine wine”, unlike women who “hit the wall”

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

Ed West considers the brutal truth that while beauty may indeed be fleeting, ugliness is life-long:

George Clooney at the White House, 12 September, 2016.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons.

The male psyche is filled with delusions, forming a sort of psychological protection against real life. Just as men tend to overestimate how competent they are at any given task, they are programmed to wildly overestimate their value in the mating market. The brutal truth of dating apps has shown that around 80% of men are basically unattractive and, in many societies, a significant chunk would fail to find a mate at all, forced to set out on a longship in the hope of winning glory and a girlfriend. We don’t contemplate this, because reality would be just too much to take for most of us.

Among the many delusions males have is the idea that, unlike women, they don’t become less attractive with age; in the minds of many men, female attractiveness peaks early and, while most men don’t improve with age, looks are less important for us so female preference doesn’t really change.

That explains the popularity of a certain genre of feature piece, usually in the Daily Mail, in which women in their 30s lament that there aren’t any available men left, and they can’t get a date despite being beautiful and wealthy and having their own career. Many quite embittered men take pleasure in these pieces, gleeful that the shoe is now on the other foot, and that the women who spurned them have hit “The Wall”.

The Wall is the name given to the drop in female attractiveness that comes with age, the decline beginning quite early, around 20 or 21, as judged by searches on dating sites and the number of approaches a woman receives. There are even cruder measurements, such as the average hourly earnings of strippers, lap dancers or prostitutes, and which again show a decline from the early 20s which becomes steep after 30. If you think that’s a depressing measurement, there are even bleaker ones highlighted by Louise Perry in her new book, on rape victims, which show a very similar pattern.

These are all quite horrible measurements, but then science is an empty moral void and the data only has deeper meaning if you choose to give it any. It doesn’t measure attractiveness as most of us feel it; people become more interesting as they get older, and as men mature their interests change, too. What’s strange about our species is that men’s prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain concerned with judgement — doesn’t fully mature until around 25. As women enter their peak for male attention, their male contemporaries have not even finished maturing yet, and are at the pinnacle of stupid behaviour (as measured by things like car accidents).

Some men take pleasure in female contemporaries hitting the Wall, because while those contemporaries became very desirable in their late teens, they struggled to find a date, and so convinced themselves that they were playing a long game. But it just isn’t true — men hit the Wall, too, and it’s not even that much later.

Many men seem blissfully unaware that, while the dating game may seem brutal and unfair in adolescence, it’s going to remain brutal and unfair later, just in different ways. They’re not going to mature into a debonair George Clooney-type who has the women gushing over his overgrown ear hair. They’re just going to become increasingly repulsive as they age.

May 13, 2022

QotD: Youthful (writing) indiscretions

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

To reach middle age, one must first pass through an earlier stage of simultaneously knowing very little about the world while believing oneself to understand it completely. Youthful folly is particularly unfortunate in budding writers, who inevitably commit their stupidity to the page. If they write for publication — rather than privately composing the worst novel ever written in the English language, as I did at that age — their silliness will linger for posterity to sample.

Megan McArdle, “In attacking Neomi Rao, Democrats are arguing against progress — in more ways than one”, Santa Cruz Sentinal, 2019-02-06.

April 15, 2022

QotD: Men without hobbies shouldn’t ever retire

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

I took an older guy somewhere during my early-morning Uber shift, and we got to chatting about retirement. He was in his early sixties and was thinking about retirement in the next couple of years or so — he’d reached all the retirement “qualifications” in terms of his age, length of service, and so on — and when I asked him what he was going to do after retirement, he said quite simply, “I don’t know.” He had no outside interests other than his work, he said, and had no hobbies or anything to keep him occupied when he would quit working.

This set off all sorts of alarm bells in my head, because I’d confronted the very same thoughts when I planned on retiring back in 2016 on reaching age 62 (which seems to be the “killer” age discovered by the researchers).

Worse than that, I either know men personally or have heard of many instances of men who have died soon — very soon — after retiring early. (When men retire at a later age, they paradoxically seem to live longer, as the study shows.) Sometimes, men die within six months of getting their gold watch, after many decades of working with little or even no time off for illness. Where I differ from the study is that I think I know the real reason why this happens.

We’re working dogs.

As long as men have work to do, we do fine. We have a purpose in life, we get up in the mornings with a day’s work ahead of ourselves, and this gives us a reason to live. It’s all tied up, I believe, in our inherent nature as providers and all that goes with it. When that activity stops earlier than expected — at 62, most of us have at least fifteen or even twenty more years to live — subconsciously we still feel that we are capable of working, providing and in short contributing to ourselves and others.

But when that ends, it’s as though a switch is turned off somewhere and our brains simply say, “Oh well, that’s it,” and we die. It may be that illness has been kept at bay through our industry and now given an empty playing field, so to speak, it takes over; or it may be that we do things that are more dangerous (the study mentions driving more as one activity), or perhaps we working dogs just feel useless and our existence, pointless.

Kim du Toit, “Working Dogs”, Splendid Isolation, 2018-02-15.

March 8, 2022

QotD: Modern pop music

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

One of the pleasures of middle age is the utter freedom you feel when you realize it’s no longer necessary to care about pop music. This emotion takes several forms; at its worst you become a peevish coot suffused with suspicion: These youngsters are wearing their hats in a style that fills me with unease. But at its best, you realize that there’s more to life than pop music. You need not worry whether the sludgy thrash-rock ground out by yowling scowlers is post-punkabilly infused with a neo-hippie sensibility, or the other way around. If something new comes along that you like, fine. But don’t think it makes you hip. You’re not hip. Hip, like Trix, is for kids.

James Lileks, “Turning into an old crunker”, Star-Tribune, 2005-05-29.

August 24, 2021

QotD: Happiness and aging

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

… our immune system evolved to hum along at peak capacity when we’re happy but to slow down dramatically when we’re not. This is why long-term unhappiness can literally kill you through its immune-suppressing effects, and why loneliness in late adulthood is deadlier than smoking. Indeed, once you’re over sixty-five you’re better off smoking, drinking, or overating with your friends than you are sitting at home alone.

With this background in mind, Trivers hypothesized that older adults evolved a strategy of turning this relationship on its head, becoming more focused on the positive things in life in an effort to enhance their immune functioning. Such a strategy would be more sensible for older than younger adults for two reasons. First, older adults have a weaker immune system than younger adults, and face greater threats from tumors and pathogens. Second, older adults know much more about the world than younger adults do, so they don’t need to pay as much attention to what’s going on around them. For example, when older adults interact with a surly bank employee or a harried flight attendant, they have a library of related experiences to draw upon and can respond to the situation effectively without giving it much thought. As a result, they can afford to gloss over some of the unpleasant things in life.

William von Hippel, The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy, 2018.

August 21, 2020

QotD: Our overprotective culture

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

Our society has become an overprotective mother. If you protect people, you reduce their competence.

There’s a rule of thumb for dealing with elderly people in old age homes: Never do anything for anyone that they can do for themselves. It sounds cruel, but it’s not cruel.

This is one of the pathologies of our culture. A major pathology, and this is associated with a kind of immaturity and a kind of fear and this Oedipal mother problem, which is, “I don’t want you to suffer any distress right now.” Fine, but what about tomorrow and next week and next month? You might have to suffer a lot of distress right now so that you’re better next week and next month.

Jordan Peterson, “Christie Blatchford Sits Down With ‘Warrior For Common Sense’ Jordan Peterson”, National Post, 2018-02-07.

May 11, 2020

“I’m so old, I don’t even buy green bananas anymore”

Filed under: Health, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

While I’m not quite at Kim du Toit‘s advanced age, I have had a few intimations of mortality over the last few years that do force a certain amount of introspection:

The other day I made reference to the fact that I would be unlikely to be flying anywhere in 2020, and might only do so in late 2021 — and for the first time in my life, I said to myself, “… should I live that long.”

I think the most depressing thing about getting old is that you get wary of making long-term plans — the old joke “I’m so old, I don’t even buy green bananas anymore” is a perfect example — and it can be depressing.

It doesn’t have to be, of course. A friend of my own vintage recently embarked on a business venture which involves a massive construction project, and when I asked him when the whole thing will be finished, he said airily, “About fifteen or twenty years’ time.” If that is true, he would be around eighty years old at completion date.

I’m not sure I would do anything like that. At the same time, I’m still buying green bananas, so to speak, so there’s that.

At some point in a person’s life, you become resigned to the fact that you’ll never climb Everest, or race at Monaco, or make a billion dollars, or sleep with some famous beauty (maybe because she just died). Those are the big dreams, of course, and mostly — realistically, even — just pipe dreams. Still, their disappearance is a little of a jolt; which is probably a preparation for a much bigger disappointment when you realize that your age precludes you from doing something that you did only little while ago. As an example, I’m most likely never going to be able to go deer-stalking in Scotland with Mr. Free Market, Doc Russia and Combat Controller again, because the trudging over the uneven ground of the Cairngorm Mountains is, to put it mildly, unthinkable. I made a joke about that with the guys during a telemeeting, the other day, and said that if I were to do it again, I would only ever shoot at a distance no further than 50 yards away from the Land Rover — i.e. close to the road — whereupon Mr. Free Market said bluntly, “Then you’re never going to take another shot” (because most of the stalks now involve a prospect of a mile or two’s scrambling before the deer even come within a respectable shooting distance, assuming they haven’t moved in the interim).

So goodbye to all that, then.

It’s even more poignant when you think of your approaching end with regards to family and friends, especially family. New Wife’s elder son has given her a grandson; my own kids’ prospect of doing the same is becoming more and more remote with each year. That, actually, doesn’t bother me too much as I’ve never been one of those parents who pushes their kids to provide grandchildren — in fact, I specifically told mine that I would never push them that way, and I’ve kept my promise. But it also means that I’ll never be able to do the grandfather things with grandsons that my own grandpa did with me, and that’s a little sad.

January 30, 2020

QotD: Nutrition and aging from the middle ages to the 20th century

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

Those of us who didn’t grow up in the first world (second and a half at best!) know d*mn well how people lived in the 20th century, with nominal indoor plumbing, but without a lot of changes of clothing, washers and dryers, heated houses, etc. (The trains from the mountains, where it was colder, in winter, smelled like a mix of VERY unwashed bodies and wood smoke. You never forget that smell.) The particular etc. I have in mind in this case is the lack of refrigeration.

Look Portugal is fertile enough that a careful planner can feed a family on less than an acre of land (particularly the area I come from, apparently one of the oldest inhabited in Europe and whose name in Indo European translated as wet and fertile valley.) I’m sure the food available to us in the 20th century when you could buy improved seeds, etc. was way better than the one available to people in the middle ages.

But … yeah, no. We didn’t eat like people do now. Not even close. For one, meat was fairly scarce. We mostly ate fish (thanks to the coasts!) and vegetables. Oh, and we were relatively lucky. A lot of people got almost no protein. The most common lunch among the people was the “isca” that is a bit of fried flour which might or might not have a couple of shreds of codfish in it. The very poor ate a lot of vegetable soup.

And again this was in the 20th century. In winter vegetables more or less vanished and the only fruit available were the wrinkled, flour-like apples.

Christmas treats were dried fruit, not cookies. It tells you all you need to know. (Yes, it was healthy too except for the scarce protein for most people, but no one said the way we eat is particularly healthy.)

I’m not complaining, but I know that we ate massively better than my parents did in the mid 20th century. And they ate better than their parents. So, kindly, do not tell me some serf on a medieval estate got his choice of however many flavors of ice-cream.

Sure the very rich ate well, if sometimes oddly. But the average person, not so much.

And as for living as long? Yeah, no.

I still remember vividly — as do many our age — when 60 was old, 70 VERY old.

Yes, I’m concerned for my parents in their late eighties. And that’s, as my dad puts it “after 80, that’s old”. But it would surprise no one is they lived another 10 years. Because a lot of people do now. And now one makes a big deal of people who turn 100. (Even though 114 seems to be, a little inexplicably, our hard drop-off limit.)

And besides we KNOW. Shakespeare at 58 — two years older than I’m now — was “very old.”

So kindly take your “people lived about as long,” fold it all in corners and put it where the sun don’t shine, even if people in the arctic in winter will be a little puzzled by it.

Sarah Hoyt, “What if I Told You?”, According to Hoyt, 2019-11-05.

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