When thinking about the people involved in these activities, at least in most agrarian contexts, it is often important to distinguish between two groups of people: the shepherds themselves who tend the sheep and the often far higher status individuals or organizations which might own the herd or rent out the pasture-land. At the same time there is also often a disconnect between how ancient sources sometimes discuss shepherding and shepherds in general and how ancient societies tended to value actual shepherds in practice.
One the one hand, there is a robust literature, beginning in the Greek and Roman literary corpus, which idealizes rustic life, particularly shepherding. Starting with Theocritus’ short pastoral poems (called eidullion, “little poems” from where we get the word idyll as in calling a scene “idyllic”) and running through Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics, which present the pure rural simplicity of the countryside and pastoralism as a welcome contrast to the often “sordid” and unhealthy environment of the city (remember the way these “gentlemen farmers” tend to think about merchants and markets in cities, after all). This idolization only becomes more intense in Europe with the advent of Christianity and the grand metaphorical significance that shepherding in particular – as distinct from other rural activities – takes on. It would thus be easy to assume just from reading this sort of high literature that shepherds were well thought of, especially in a Christian social context.
But by and large just as the elite love of the idea of rural simplicity did not generally lead to a love of actual farming peasants, so too their love of the idea of pastoral simplicity did not generally lead to an actually high opinion of the folks who did that work, nor did it lead shepherds to any kind of high social status. While the exact social position of shepherds and their relation to the broader society could vary (as we’ll see), they tended to be relatively low-status and poor individuals. The “shepherds out tending their flocks by night” of Luke 2:8 are not important men. Indeed, the “night crew” of shepherds are some of the lowest status and poorest free individuals who could possibly see that religious sign, a point in the text that is missed by many modern readers.
We see a variety of shepherding strategies which impact what kind of shepherds might be out with flocks. Small peasant households might keep a few sheep (along with say, chickens or pigs) to provide for the household’s wool needs. In some cases, a village might pool those sheep together to make a flock which one person would tend (a job which often seems to have gone to either fairly young individuals or else the elderly – that is, someone who might not be as useful in the hard labor on the farm itself, since shepherding doesn’t necessarily require a lot of strength).
Larger operations by dedicated shepherds often involved wage-laborers or enslaved laborers tending flocks of sheep and pastured owned by other, higher status and wealthier individuals. Thus for instance, Diodorus’s description of the Sicilian slave revolts (in 135 and 104 BC; the original Diodorus, book 36, is lost but two summaries survive, those of Photios and Constantine Porphyrogennetos), we’re told that the the flocks belonging to the large estates of Roman magnates in the lowland down by the coast were tended by enslaved shepherds in significant numbers (and treated very poorly; when a Greek source like Diodorus who is entirely comfortable with slavery is nevertheless noting the poor treatment, it must be poor indeed). Likewise, there is a fair bit of evidence from ancient Mesopotamia indicating that the flocks of sheep themselves were often under state or temple control (e.g. W. Sallaberger, “The Value of Wool in Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia” or S. Zawadzki, “‘If you have sheep, you have all you need’: Sheep Husbandry and Wool in the Economy of the Neo-Babylonian Ebaddar Temple at Sippar” both in Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East and the Aegean eds. C. Breniquet and C. Michel, (2014)) and that it was the temple or the king that might sell or dispose of the wool; the shepherds were only laborers (free or unfree is often unclear).
Full time shepherds could – they didn’t always, but could – come under suspicion as effective outsiders to the fully sedentary rural communities they served as well. Diodorus in the aforementioned example is quick to note that banditry in Sicily was rife because the enslaved shepherds were often armed – armed to protect their flocks because banditry was rife; we are left to conclude that Diodorus at least thinks the banditry in question is being perpetrated by the shepherds, evidently sometimes rustling sheep from other enslaved shepherds. A similar disdain for the semi-nomadic herding culture of peoples like the Amorites is sometimes evident in Mesopotamian texts. And of course that the very nature of transhumance meant that shepherds often spent long periods away from home sleeping with their flocks in temporary shelters and generally “roughing it” exposed to weather.
Consequently, while owning large numbers of sheep and pastures for them could be a contributor to high status (and thus merit elite remark, as with Pliny’s long discussion of sheep in book 8 of his Natural History), actually tending sheep was mostly a low-status job and not generally well remunerated (keeping on poor Pliny here, it is notable that in several long sections on sheep he never once mentions shepherds). Shepherds were thus generally towards the bottom of the social pyramid in most pre-modern societies, below the serf or freeholding farmer who might at least be entitled to the continued use of their land.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part I: High Fiber”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-05.
November 10, 2024
QotD: The low social status of shepherds in the ancient and medieval world
November 7, 2024
Kemi Badenoch portrayed by the left as “the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class”
The left likes to think themselves the faction of racial equality, yet they often reveal themselves to be anything but when someone steps out of line (from their point of view) and chooses a different political worldview:
For centuries, Britain was ruled by an aristocracy. In recent decades, however, this concept has become rather passé, and we have been doing away with it — most recently with the vote to abolish hereditary peers in the House of Lords.
Yet, as the old guard fades, a new elite has taken its place. Inherited traits — particularly skin colour and sex — now grant special dispensations. Utterances that would be unthinkable for most are allowed, and positions incommensurate to talent are dispensed.
This is because the new aristocracy is flush, often through little toil of its own, with moral authority — a valuable currency wielded by what we might call the Patricians of Victimhood.
Their power rests on the idea that Britain is a fundamentally racist country, brimming with other nasty “isms” that can be contained only by them. To deny this is heresy — but to disprove it is a crime for which no punishment is too great.
This was evident when Kemi Badenoch, a black woman, was elected Saturday to lead the Conservative Party. This historic first for Britain might have been expected to please those preoccupied with combating racism, perhaps even chalked up as a win.
Instead, Badenoch was lambasted by politicians who have built careers campaigning about racism. Dawn Butler, a Labour MP, shared a post accusing Badenoch of representing “white supremacy in blackface” — an insult so improbable that it conjures only an image of a face-painted Justin Trudeau.
The post, now removed from Butler’s X account, read: “Today the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class (in Britain) is likely to be made leader of the Conservative Party. Here are some handy tips for surviving the immediate surge of Badenochism (i.e. white supremacy in blackface).”
Another Labour MP, Zara Sultana, said Badenoch was “one of the most nasty & divisive figures in British politics”, for, among other things, “downplaying racism”.
Badenoch is opposed to identity politics. She believes in meritocracy and that Britain — as she told her children recently — “is the best country in the world to be black”. Badenoch’s optimism is well founded: a 2023 World Values Survey found that Britain is indeed one of the least racist countries in the world.
November 6, 2024
QotD: “Colourism”
which reinforce the inherently colonial practice of “colourism” – the discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone.
It’s not colonial, it’s classist. Dark skin means sun exposure. That is, someone who works for a living outside in the fields. Pale skin means someone rich enough to stay inside. Thus the bits in Jane Austem where the girls worry about their bonnets for they might get freckles.
This also changed, entirely, when work for poor people moved inside and only the rich could afford to get away for a tan. Suddenly, to have a tan – darker skin – became a mark of wealth, not poverty.
A change rather reflected in make up in fact, pre WWII (about, roughly) the aim was to powder or cream the face to be pale, pale, white. Post[-WWII] much foundation make up is to add colour, not take it away.
This also explains the popularity of sunbeds and fake tans, something which a century ago would have been quite literally unthinkable.
Colourism exists, most certainly, but that flip shows that it’s about class, not colonialism.
For the part about it that the colonialism reason cannot explain is why that flip.
That it’s about class also explains why colourism happens in places that never were colonies – Thailand say.
Tim Worstall, “Educashun”, Tim Worstall, 2020-01-12.
November 1, 2024
“[H]er plan will mean the obliteration of your savings, the end of banks and even the destruction of ‘money as we know it'”
It’s astonishing how many highly placed bureaucrats, NGO functionaries, and the very, very wealthy are super gung-ho for reducing the rest of us to the status (and living conditions) of medieval serfs:
This week, VW announced plans to cut tens of thousands of jobs and to close three factories. That is a very big deal, because they have never closed a single German factory before. I try to avoid economic topics, but this story is so much bigger than economics. As Daniel Gräber wrote in Cicero last month, “the VW crisis has become a symbol for the decline of our entire country“.
The Green leftoid establishment are eagerly blaming management for these failures, which is on the one hand not entirely wrong, but on the other hand not nearly an absolution. The German state of Lower Saxony holds a 20% stake in Volkswagen, and so they also manage the company. Recently, in a fit of virtue, they placed a Green politician – Julia Willie Hamburg – on its supervisory board. Hamburg does not even own a car and has used her position to argue that Volkswagen should regard itself not as an automobile manufacturer but as a “mobility services provider” and shift its focus away from “individual transport”.
The absurdly named Julia Willie Hamburg is merely symptomatic of a broader phenomenon. Germany has succumbed to political forces that have nothing but indifference and disdain for the industries that have made us prosperous. Our sitting Economics Minister, Robert Habeck, gave an interview to taz in 2011 in which he said that “fewer cars will not lead to less economic growth, but to new industries”, and attacked “the old growth theory, based on gross domestic product“. And behind Green politicians like Habeck are even more radical forces, like Ulrike Herrmann, the editor of taz, for many years a member of the Green Party and also an open advocate of wide-scale deindustrialisation. Because I am going to quote Herrmann saying some very crazy things, you need to know that she is in no way a fringe figure. She appears regularly on all the respectable evening talkshows and every politically informed person in the Federal Republic knows who she is.
Herrmann has outlined her political views in various books like The End of Capitalism: Why Growth and Climate Protection Are Not Compatible – and How We Will Live in the Future. From these monographs, we learn that Herrmann sees climatism as a means of imposing a centrally planned economy in which we will own nothing and be happy. Happily, Herrmann also talks a lot, and in her various speeches and interviews she states her vision for decarbonising Germany in very radical terms. I am grateful to this twitter user for highlighting typical remarks that Herrmann delivered in April of this year before a sympathetic audience of climate lunatics.
There, Herrmann elaborated on her vision for a future economy in which all major goods would have to be rationed:
Talking about rationing: It’s clear that if we shrink economically, we won’t have to be as poor as the British were in 1939; rather, we’d have to be as rich as the West Germans were in 1978. That is a huge difference, because we can take advantage of all the growth of the post-war period and the entire economic miracle.
The central elements of the economy would have to be rationed. First of all, living space, because cement emits endless amounts of CO2. Actually, new construction would have to be banned outright and living space rationed to 50 square metres per capita. That should actually be enough for everyone. Then meat would have to be rationed, because meat production emits enormous amounts of CO2. You don’t have to become a vegetarian, but you’ll have to eat a lot less meat.
Then train travel has to be rationed. So this idea, which many people also have – “so okay then I don’t have a car but then I always travel on the Intercity Express trains” – that won’t work either, because of course air resistance increases with speed. Yes, it’s all totally insane. Trains won’t be allowed to travel faster than 100 kilometres per hour, but you can still travel around locally quite a lot. This is all in my book, okay? But I didn’t expand on it there because I didn’t want to scare all the readers.
At this point Herrmann begins to cackle manically, ecstatic at the thought that millions of Germans will be stuck riding rationed kilometres on slow local public transit.
August 20, 2024
You’re the Top! A History of the Top Hat
HatHistorian
Published Nov 21, 2021A short history of one of the most recognizable and formal hats of our time: the top hat!
Version française ici:
• Le top du top: l’histoire du Haut-de-…With thanks to Norman Caruso for advice on how to get me started on youtube. Please check out his channel
The first top hat belonged to my great grandfather and is the better part of a century old.
The collapsible top hat comes from from Delmonico Hatter https://www.delmonicohatter.com/Title sequence designed by Alexandre Mahler
am.design@live.comThis video was done for entertainment and educational purposes. No copyright infringement of any sort was intended.
August 14, 2024
QotD: The solipsism of the American media
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-09.
August 12, 2024
Lions, foxes and wolves
N.S. Lyons tries to explain how Britain has gotten into its current social and political plight by recalling the works of Niccolò Machiavelli:
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.
The riots that have recently wracked the streets of the UK reflect decades of pent up public frustration with the country’s governing elite, especially their total refusal to control mass immigration despite vote after vote demanding they do exactly that. The pot has now boiled over. But the ongoing back-and-forth of ethnic violence also represents a signal that the British elite’s whole broader strategy of governing – one based in the fundamental personality of the ruling class itself – may be beginning to break down. And that carries some significant implications.
To understand why, however, we need to take a brief detour back about five centuries to Niccolò Machiavelli. He identified two archetypical psychological profiles of people who become leaders: the cunning but weak fox, who can outmaneuver his opponents but is “defenseless against wolves”; and the strong and brave lion, who likes to fight and who can scare off wolves but who is “defenseless against traps”. Machiavelli argued that a true statesman must embody both personalities, or risk destruction.
A distant student of Machiavelli, fellow Italian political theorist Vilfredo Pareto, would later expand the metaphor further. Observing history, he noted that the rise and fall of states and civilizations could be matched to a cyclical pattern in the collective personality of their ruling classes.
Nations are founded by lions, who are a society’s natural warrior class – its jocks, so to speak. They establish and expand a kingdom’s borders at the point of a sword, pacifying external enemies. Like Sparta’s Lycurgus or Rome’s Augustus, their firm hand often also puts an end to internal strife and establishes (or re-establishes) the rule of law. Their authority can be dictatorial, but it is relatively honest and straightforward in nature. They value directness and the clarity of combat. They are comfortable with the use of raw force, and open about their willingness to use it, whether against criminals or their own enemies. They have a firm sense of the distinction between enemies and friends in general – of who is part of the family and who is a prowling wolf to be guarded against. The security and stability they establish is what allows the nation to grow into prosperity.
Security and prosperity produce a proliferation of foxes. Foxes are unsuited to and deeply uncomfortable with the employment of force; they prefer intellectual and rhetorical combat, because they’re nerds. They seek to overcome obstacles through clever persuasion or the manipulation of people, information, narratives, and formal processes. If they have to use physical force they will, but prefer to disguise its nature and are prone to use it ineptly. The brainy and cosmopolitan foxes have talents the lions don’t, however: they are good at managing complexity and scale, navigating the nuances of diplomatic alliances, or extracting profits from an extensive empire.
As long as peace prevails, civilizations come increasingly to morally prize the indirect and diplomatic methods of foxes and to avoid and indeed abhor the strength and violence of lions. And as states grow larger and more complex, establishing new layers of bureaucracy, law, and procedure, this quickly favors the byzantine organizing and scheming of foxes. In comparison lions are inarticulate and unprepared for the traps of more underhanded mammals. So eventually a wholesale replacement of the elite occurs: the lions who founded the nation are pushed out of its leadership, marginalized and excluded by a class of foxes who see them as brutish relics of a barbaric age.
But a curious thing then happens, Pareto observed: the instability of societies overly dominated by foxes begins to increase relentlessly. The foxes, reluctant to properly distinguish and identify real threats, or to openly employ force even when necessary, find themselves defenseless against wolves both internal and external. When faced with escalating challenges, the foxes tend to resort to doubling down on their preferred strategy of misdirection, manipulation, and attempting to bury or buy off threats rather than confront them directly. This does nothing to solve problems that require the firm use of force, or the threat of it, such as keeping packs of wolves on the other side of the borders. Eventually, when things get bad enough, foxes may desperately lash out with violence, but do so indecisively, ham-fistedly, or in entirely the wrong direction. The wolves, for their part, can instinctively smell weakness and just keep coming.
Like the rest of the West, Britain has been ruled for decades now by an effete managerial elite whose system of technocratic control is absolutely characteristic of foxes. There could be no better example of this than how the government has attempted to manage immigration and the ethnic tensions it has brought to unhappily multi-cultural Britain. It has sought to control public perception of the problem, and indeed has strived mightily to pretend the entire problem simply doesn’t exist.
It has done so, in classic foxlike fashion, through careful control of media and online information, engaging in an effort to downplay inconvenient facts, obscure the identity of terrorists and violent criminals, memory-hole potentially divisive events, and censor counter-narratives. Those who have continued to speak out on the issue are smeared with reputation-destroying labels like “racist”, “xenophobic”, or “far right” in order to deflect others from listening to them. This reflects foxes’ consistent instinct to turn first and foremost to information warfare and narrative manipulation over direct confrontation. Hence the ruling elite’s immediate reaction to the latest riots: blaming them on “misinformation” and “unregulated social media” – the implication being that nothing at all would be amiss if the information common people had access to could just be better suppressed.
“Premier Doug Ford’s plans for the demon liquor will lead us all to untold poverty and perdition”
In the National Post, Chris Selley points and laughs at the classist viewing-with-alarm and frenzied pearl-clutching over the impending rule change that will allow wine and beer to be sold (and even served) in convenience stores like the 7-Eleven chain:
The plight of poverty-stricken Ontarians, forced to get drunk at their local 7-Eleven dive bar.
Gin Lane, from Beer Street and Gin Lane via Wikimedia Commons.
Ontario politics in recent weeks has played out as something like a real-time satire of itself, with the Latent Methodist Brigade still insisting Premier Doug Ford’s plans for the demon liquor will lead us all to untold poverty and perdition. The news this week has only made them more upset: Japanese convenience store empire 7-Eleven will open licensed areas in 58 of its 59 stores in Ontario, in which you can enjoy an alcoholic drink with your hot dog, nachos or chicken nuggets. The company says it’ll add 60 jobs.
Fifty-eight is not a large number, you will agree, in a province with many thousands of licensed premises, any of which might get you drunk and send you back out to your car or boat (though of course they shouldn’t). Some of those thousands of licensed premises are even attached to gas stations, I can report. And many gas-station convenience stores in Ontario sell beer, wine and liquor as independently run “LCBO agency stores”.
For the record, 7-Eleven announced they were doing this way back in December 2022. Pro-forma neo-puritan controversy ensued, and quickly died down. Two 7-Elevens already operate as licensed restaurants in Ontario, apparently without incident, along with 19 in Alberta. (Unfortunately, bien-pensant Ontarians are trained from birth to believe Alberta’s liquor-retail reforms in the 1990s were a grotesque misadventure that everyone there regrets.)
Nevertheless, the same pro-forma neo-puritan freakout is playing out again.
“Let me get this straight. 7-Eleven locations where people fuel up their cars will now allow folks to drink on the premises? What could possibly go wrong?” sneered JP Hornick, president of the Ontario Public Service Employees’ Union (OPSEU), who was last seen dragging LCBO employees into a disastrous tantrum-cum-strike over expanding retail access.
“We need a government that will focus on real things including bringing down hospital wait times, fixing schools and tackling the housing crisis as their signature achievements, amongst many more,” Toronto Coun. Josh Matlow correctly averred on Twitter … and then, as is the fashion here, went full non-sequitur: “Doug Ford made sure we could drink coolers inside a 7-Eleven.” As if the government decided it could only pick one.
(And can I just say here, any Toronto city councillor complaining about another politician’s lack of “signature achievements” is on bloody thin ice.)
Every fully paid-up member of the Laurentian Elite [Spit!] believes with all their flinty hearts that Alberta is a barren wasteland of ruined lives thanks to the demon liquor being sold in corner stores. Initial issues from a generation ago are firmly ensconced as “the way it is” with liberalized booze access out there in the wild west.
August 9, 2024
Domicidal maniacs in charge
Lorenzo Warby provides an oh-so-useful word to accurately capture what the diversity-at-all-costs elites running most western countries these days are actually up to:
Domicide is the destruction of home. It comes in the “hard” version — the physical destruction of houses and infrastructure.
Domicide also comes in a “soft” version — flooding localities with new people, separating people from, and otherwise degrading, their heritage. When folk say Britain is becoming “unrecognisable”, it is the domicidal effect of mass migration they are referring to.
The UK is suffering from a domicidal elite, one that uses mass migration to break up working-class communities; asymmetric multiculturalism to elevate incoming cultures over those of native English (the Celtic fringe get minority brownie points); favours non-“white” faces in advertising; asymmetric race-swapping in entertainment against the native English; denigration of British history as racist, white supremacist, imperialist, colonialist, etc.
Much of this is insulting virtue-signalling allied to, or presenting, cartoonish (simplified) and caricature (distorted) history. It all undermines social cohesion. But it is the use of migration policy as a systematic weapon against the resident working class which does the most damage. Though two-tier policing — obviously treating Muslims in particular with a deference not shown to the natives, especially when it comes to policing speech — is also highly corrosive of social cohesion.
Many working-class communities in Britain were already fairly dysfunctional — though the British state is not innocent in those dysfunctions1 — and sections of the British working class are very far from admirable. None of this justifies the use of mass migration to make things worse for such folk, however much it may help to explain the moralised class contempt that underlies so much of modern progressivism and modern managerialism.
To improve such things, to “level up”, requires a strong sense of how to create and maintain social order. Modern progressivism is strongly antipathetic to such understanding. To “level up” also requires a strong sense of custodianship, which managerialism typically lacks: particularly progressivist managerialism.
Indeed, modern feminist, progressivist, managerialism—in its lack of custodianship; lack of social solidarity;2 in its antipathy to taking the problems of social order seriously — is running the British state into the ground. The post-medieval British aristocratic and mercantile elite did a much better job of state management. But those elites had mechanisms — such as duelling, that forced men to defend their reputation at the risk of their life, and grand country houses, that turned into expensive investments in social isolation if you behaved badly — that selected for character.
Nowadays, the British elite only selects for capacity and even that is being degraded by DEI undermining the signals of competence. It turns out, over the longer term, character matters more than capacity. For capacity without character selects for manipulative, anti-social personalities that degrade institutions over time.
1. For a particularly brutal depiction in fiction of the dysfunctional British welfare state — especially its school system — see Christopher Nuttall’s Mystic Albion series, especially the first book.
2. Feminisation of institutions and discourse has tended to degrade social solidarity, see Benenson et al, 2009. The most conspicuous example of this in the UK is how uncouth it is in elite circles to mention the systematic rape and sexual exploitation of underage working class girls by overwhelmingly Muslim gangs.
August 4, 2024
QotD: Canada’s “middle class”
There’s the “middle class” that’s constantly prioritized, flattered and fetishized by every campaign and candidate; critiques of people who come from such a privileged class they can’t possibly understand the concerns of normal people; sometimes bizarre pitches aimed at those who want a better future for their kids and just need a boost (camping, anyone?); and leaders who come from hardscrabble backgrounds — except that maybe they don’t quite.
But if class is an ever-present anthem running through campaign 2019, it’s a tune no one seems to know the proper words to, or they’re deliberately mumbling nonsense lyrics and assuming no one else will notice.
[…]
Then there is the electorally beloved — and conveniently poorly defined — “middle class”. Given all the campaign trail hot air devoted to lauding the values and hard work of this population and lionizing their noble struggles, you would think that at some point, other corners of the electorate would get ticked off about being ignored by politicians in favour of these golden children.
But they don’t, because pretty much everyone thinks that’s them.
Shannon Proudfoot, “The ‘family shame’ of Canadian politics: class struggle”, Maclean’s, 2019-10-04.
July 2, 2024
The virtue-signalling Olympics … aka “Glastonbury”
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill documents the awesomely awful human beings at the Glastonbury music festival this year (like most years):
“Sign of the times @ Glastonbury Festival” by timparkinson is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
Virtue-signalling reached its nadir on Friday night. It was at the Glastonbury music festival. Of course it was. A swaying crowd of the time-rich, turbo-smug thirtysomethings who make up Glasto’s clientele passed around an inflatable dinghy filled with dummies designed to look like migrants crossing the English Channel. As some band you’ve never heard of sang a song about “beautiful immigrants”, the audience hoisted the blow-up boat above their heads and basically crowd-surfed it. What a gauche display of phoney virtue. What an orgy of hollow vanity. Surely it would have been cheaper to rustle up a banner saying, “Aren’t we fucking wonderful?”.
It will surprise not a living soul that the boat was the handiwork of Banksy, every posh twat’s favourite graffiti artist. Banksy has never once seen a moneyed, mostly white audience that he didn’t want to titillate with platitudes about Tory scum and cruel capitalism, so it was only natural he would gravitate towards Glastonbury. He knows it’s rammed with people called Archie and Poppy who lap up his unsubtle stencils about the rat race that is neoliberal society and how dreadfully frightful war can be. So who better to dragoon into his boat stunt than these folk who likewise love advertising to the world how much they care about migrants and stuff?
Let’s leave to one side how unbelievably crude it is for a rich graffitist and Brits who can afford to fork out £355 to listen to crap music for five days to celebrate boat journeys that often end in death. One wonders if any of the audience members who cheered illegal immigration later retired to one of Glasto’s luxury yurts, which contain not only “proper flushing toilets” but also toilet attendants. You can hire one for £5,000, which, ironically, is around the same amount of money dirt-poor migrants are forced to stump up to criminal gangs for a seat on one of their perilous crossings that the righteous of Glasto think it’s a hoot to sanctify.
No, even worse than the sight of the well-off of Worthy Farm using the wretched of the Earth to burnish their moral credentials is the fact that if any Channel-crossing migrant were to rock up to Glastonbury they’d be cuffed and shoved in the back of a paddy wagon faster than you could say “What time’s Dua Lipa on?”. Glastonbury is one of the most fortified zones in Britain. It is surrounded by a fence that is 4.12m high and 7.8km long and which has numerous “unique high-security features”, including an “external roadway to prevent tunnelling”, a “45-degree overhang to prevent climbing” and “zero nuts and bolts to stop the fence being tampered with”. “No borders!”, cry the virtuous of Glasto while surrounded by a border fence that the screws of Alcatraz would have envied.
June 29, 2024
Oh no! The filthy proles are getting too many calories! Let’s re-impose rationing!
Tim Worstall suggests that the regular “viewing with alarm” thumbsuckers about purchased meals having “too many calories” are actually an indication of a strong desire by the great and the good to stick their regulatory noses into the lives of ordinary people:
“Indian take away in Farrer Park” by Kai Hendry is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .
This headline is, of course, wrong.
Some takeaway meals contain more calories than daily limit, UK study finds
There is no daily limit. We do not have laws stating how much food we are allowed to eat. Of course, there are those who want there to be such laws but there aren’t, as yet. What there is is a series of recommendations about the limits we should impose upon ourselves:
Some takeaway meals contain more calories in one sitting than someone is advised to consume in an entire day, a study of British eating habits has revealed.
That’s better.
Cafes, fast-food outlets, restaurants, bakeries, pubs and supermarkets are fuelling the UK’s obesity crisis because so many meals they sell contain dangerously large numbers of calories, it found.
That’s not better. Because a plate of food containing a lot of calories is not a danger. Eating many of them might be but that the average household can get a gutbuster for some trivial portion of household earnings is a glory of modern civilisation, the very proof we require that we’re all as rich as Croesus.
And this is actually true too. That we are gloriously rich and it’s our food supply that proves this. As Brad Delong likes to point out back 200 years (yes, about right, 1820s is as it was really changing but 300 years would be better) it took a full day’s work to be able to gain 2,000 calories a day for a day labourer. There are 800 million out there still living at that standard of living. We can buy 2,000 calories — if we go boring stodge — for 30 minutes work now.
By history and by certain geographies we are foully rich these days. Which is the complaint of the wowsers of course. They’re a revival of the puritans and their sumptuary laws. How dare it be true that people fill their bellies with food they actually like?
Six out of 10 takeaway meals contain more than the 600-calorie maximum that the government recommends people should stick to for lunch and dinner in order to not gain weight, according to the research, which was carried out by the social innovation agency Nesta.
One in three contain at least 1,200 calories – double the recommended limit.
And? So, folk can buy lots of food for not much money. This is the very thing that makes having a civilisation possible — cheap food. My wife and I do indeed partake of an Indian occasionally — and find the takeout portions rather large. So, we have one amount for lunch or dinner and we’ve a refrigerator in which to keep the excess for a supper or snack another day. This is not beyond the wit of man to organise.
We don’t order in food very often, but when we do we usually manage to get both dinner on the night and lunch on the morrow from a typical order. If the nosey parkers have their way, they’d limit what we were allowed to buy — for our own good, of course — so we’d almost certainly still pay the same amount for less food. Such a deal!
June 9, 2024
Rishi Sunak “promised to run Britain like a start-up. On that account, he has delivered. Over one-third of start-ups crash and burn within two years.”
Christopher Gage pokes a bit of goodnatured fun at British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s awful start to his re-election campaign:
This week on the campaign trail might just enter the political history books. Rishi Sunak, the man who themed his cheese-melting campaign on national pride and security, slipped off home early from the D-Day commemorations in France.
World leaders gathered at the event on Thursday to honour the eightieth anniversary of the Normandy landings. You know, the one attended by a dwindling platoon of demigod veterans in what might be the final year graced by their presence. To riot in understatement, this Irish goodbye was inadvisable. Sunak might as well have fed Dame Judi Dench to a ravenous gang of XL bullies.
Our prime minister is one of life’s thoroughbred winners. From one of the most exclusive schools in the country, Sunak went on to Oxford and then to Stanford university. Cultured in our meritocratic petri-dish, Sunak has never failed a thing in his 44 years. Until now.
Twenty-odd points behind Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour, Sunak is on course to finish third in a two-horse race.
It gets worse. This week, Nigel Farage announced he would stand for election as the Reform Party candidate in Clacton. That Essex seat is the living, breathing symbol of pissed-off, left-behind, white-working-class, fucking furious Great Britain.
The polls have broken Tory brains. Clamped around the Conservative Party’s noodle neck is Reform’s roid-head paws. The right-wing upstarts trail the Tories by just two points. And that was before Sunak committed the social equivalent of tarmacking over the Princess Diana memorial garden on Mothering Sunday.
Sunak is a one-colour pie chart of hubris. After losing the Tory leadership election to the ludicrous Liz Truss, Sunak got handed the top job by knowing the right string-pullers.
Breathless commentary from back then christened Sunak as a Silicon Valley start-up guru, furnishing the boy wonder with LinkedIn adjectives such as “brilliant” and “dynamic”.
Sunak parrots the pediculous babble beloved of that skulk of Babbitts. With blue-sky thinking, and by sticking to core competencies, Sunak has a plan to deliver. He promised to run Britain like a start-up. On that account, he has delivered. Over one-third of start-ups crash and burn within two years.
What went wrong? Sunak’s indulgent reboots have crashed his operating system. Not so long ago, he was an anti-woke culture warrior reeling off tiresome jibes about trans people. Then came spartan Sunak, trusted centurion of the Telegraph comment section.
Too late. For the best part of two years, Sunak has circulated in meme-form around this teetering island, his existence a boundless source of second-hand embarrassment and ridicule.
With each reboot, Sunak sunk further. Ordinary people have a radar for bullshit. They don’t see such shapeshifting as necessary brand correction to meet market demands. They see duplicity and serpentine salesmanship bordering on fraud. In the plain English of my council-estate youth: Sunak is full of shit.
With his wings smeared in beeswax, Rishi Sunak is Icarus. And Nigel Farage is the sun.
Farage is more than the sun. Farage is Wetherspoon Man.
A quick image search for “Nigel Farage beer” provides lots of evidence for “Wetherspoon Man”During his visit to Clacton, Farage fittingly visited a Wetherspoon pub. For the unfamiliar, Wetherspoon pubs owe their undeniable success to their reliability and recognition. Wherever you may be in Britain, you know what you’ll get in one of Wetherspoons’ 800-odd cavernous boozers: A decent burger, chips, and a pint for half an hour on the minimum wage, alongside cheap, cheap booze.
Critics scoff. But they’ll never find a Wetherspoon empty at any time of day or on any day of the week.
Farage announced his plans and doubled the Reform vote in Clacton. His appeal relies on the Wetherspoon model. Farage is the same wherever he may be and to whomever he may talk. Dressed like a hobbyist gamekeeper, he sinks pints, smokes fags, and cracks jokes. “Nigel” says what a sizeable swathe of left-behind Britain thinks and wants to hear.
His many detractors don’t get it. How can a privately educated former metals trader claim to speak for the people? For the same reason that populist parties are lapping at the walls of power across Europe: their erstwhile champions are too busy peacocking their pronouns in their Twitter bios.
May 8, 2024
The cocoa shortage is really the same economic trend that caused the Victorian “servant problem”
Tim Worstall explains not only why your favourite chocolate bar is going to be more expensive, but also why your olive oil will do the same and why it really is the same thing as the Victorian and Edwardian upper class complaints about “the help”:
Upper classes expected maids and other servants to be cheap, eager, and easy to replace. This began to change quickly in the Victorian era, as women found better-paying jobs in commerce and industry that didn’t require bowing and scraping and putting up with constand, casual abuse from oblivious wealthy snobs.
As you might have noticed, cocoa is getting very much more expensive. Futures prices (no, futures are not a good guide to actual market prices but still) have gone from $3,000 a tonne or so (-ish, you understand ) to $12,000 and back to $8,000 or so. According to the usual suspects this is climate change. According to those a little more informed there’s El Nino, there have been a few rusts and plant plagues to deal with. Low prices led to not much planting in recent years — all sorts of little problems that led to that burst of higher prices.
Real prices have changed, the sort of Cadbury’s bar that my wife likes a piece of with her afternoon coffee has gone up by a € a bar in recent weeks (I know, I know, “Send Munnies! Quick!”) and so something must be done.
But there’s a much larger and more significant problem here and one to which there may or may not be a solution. The servant problem.
One of those things you learn when living in foreign is that the poorer a country is the easier it is to get a servant and the cheaper a servant is when you get one. This doesn’t wholly make sense to folk until it’s explained. A poor place is one where wages are low — where wages are low is a poor place. They’re the same statement. So, wages for a servant are low in poor countries.
We can up that a little as well. Poor people spend — truly poor people that is — some 80% of their income on food and shelter. So, when you’re in one of those truly poor places you can gain access to a servant — their fulltime, undivided services — for $2 a day plus a bowl of boiled rice and being allowed to sleep in the barn. Because, if they were out there in the cash economy they’d be paid $2 a day (800 million still live at that level out there) and they’d have to buy their own bowl of rice and a tarpaulin to shelter under out of that.
Servants are cheap in poor places because human labour is cheap in poor places because a place with cheap labour is a poor place. QED.
As places become richer human labour costs more. Which is why the letters pages of The Lady started to fill up with complaints about the uppityness and demands of servants from about the 1880s onwards — about the time that British wages at that low and untrained end first started to substantially rise above mere subsistence. This is also one of our major political problems now that middle class women have the vote. They’re using the franchise to insist that government do something about that servant problem. That’s what all that insistence upon child care subsidies and freebies is about. Those middle class women going off to their terribly important power skirt jobs can no longer afford to hire some working class popsie to look after their kids — so government must be forced to do so instead. The correct answer being look after your own damn kids, obviously.
But cheap labour in poor places:
Britain is at risk of olive oil shortages as the industry is wracked by a production crisis.
Fears are growing over the risk of empty shelves as growers across Europe battle a combination of extreme weather, inflation and high interest rates.
Interest rates matter because you plant, wait some number of years, only then do you gain olives. You will then gain them for many decades even centuries, but that wait without income is more painful the higher interest rates get.
There are rusts, plant plagues, afflicting the crop across much of Europe. Of course we’ve those blaming everything on climate change but that’s just the usual bollocks.
However, low wages in poor places. I live in the middle of an oil producing area. Vast waving acres of olive trees in fact. I’ve also lived, until recently, in an historically poorer area of the same country. Where much of the land — little 2 and 4 acre farms (if they were lucky) which might raise a few goats, a sheep (cheese more than anything) and have a couple or four olive trees — has been simply abandoned. The place is getting richer, no one wants to scrape a living on 4 acres of land these days. Rightly so. 4 acres is an adventurous garden, not a living. The absence of those goats is also why the wildfires are getting so much worse — there’s more scrub to burn.
I can take you to places where there are hundreds of acres of such land. Plenty of olive trees in there too, all fruiting and none of them being picked. Because picking olives from the occasional tree is hard bloody work. Spread a net beneath it, hit the tree hard, a lot. Collect up the net with all the olives. Then sort them. By hand. Each single one needs to be checked (for worms and rot) and then nicked. Then you can take them down to the oil mill (every village has at least one) and you hand over the olives and get back the oil, minus a percentage for the mill owner.
March 21, 2024
Banksy is “a jester to the woke court, the cheeky clown of received opinion”
As a certified curmudgeon, I’ve never seen the attraction of Banksy’s various bits of artistic … whatever it is properly called. At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill helps put Banksy into proper perspective:
I guess it wasn’t enough that us polluting plebs are chided for our transgressions against Mother Nature every time we watch a BBC nature documentary. And by politicians of all persuasions. And by columnists who summer in Tuscany. And by aristocratic arseholes called Edred and Poppy who won’t even let us enjoy the football or the snooker without cutting through the fun with their cut-glass tones to remind us we’re hazardous to Gaia. No, we also have to be walloped with an eco-sermon as we cycle to work down the Hornsey Road.
Unsurprisingly, the elites are lapping up Banksy’s latest missive in spray paint. A Radio 4 expert on Banksy – I’m dying – raved to the BBC that his message is “clear” and it “really resonates”: “Nature’s struggling and it is up to us to help it grow back.” The founder of Haringey Tree Protectors – I’m not making this up – gushed in the Guardian about how Banksy’s “stark image” reminds us that “in the climate crisis we just can’t continue treating our tree canopy with such savagery”. Pruning leaves is barbarism now. You just know that when green-fingered Charles III saw the Banksy pic during his morning peruse of the papers he gave it a kingly nod of approval.
That’s what Banksy is, isn’t it – a jester to the woke court, the cheeky clown of received opinion? He larps as rebellious, sneaking about in the dead of night to put up his technically illegal “art”, but in truth he has not once voiced an opinion that wouldn’t win noisy murmurs of approval at a soirée in Daunt Books. Brexit is bad, Israel is insane, the paparazzi are scum, don’t vote Tory, capitalism is a rat race, Save the Planet – honestly, browsing Banksy’s back catalogue of stencilled eyesores is like being stuck in a lift with one of those craft-beer centrists who says cockwomble a lot.
His Finsbury Park fake tree captures the conformist thinking that hides in his guerrilla-art performance. It’s a public-information campaign masquerading as graffiti. “Save the trees” – Rishi Sunak could say that. He has, in fact. He recently announced a ban on felling trees without “proper consultation”. Banksy’s tree also has that whiff of hysteria that always attends dinner-party efforts to alter the behaviour of the lower orders. The idea that we’re obliterating trees with “savagery” is bullshit. London’s a forest. Literally. The UN defines a forest as anywhere that is at least 20 per cent trees – London is 21 per cent trees. The “world’s largest urban forest”, as Time Out puts it.
So relax, Banksy. Chill in the no doubt cushy pad you bought from selling your graffiti to philistine luvvies. London’s fine. If anything were to make me leave this great city, it wouldn’t be a want of trees but the oversupply of your sixth-former propaganda. Only a few months ago he put up a “STOP” sign in Peckham decorated with three drones to signal his desire for a ceasefire in Gaza. Radical.
Look, it can be irritating when artists decide to épater la bourgeoisie. That slogan, dreamt up by the decadent poets of late 19th-century France, means to take glee in scandalising the middle classes. But surely Banksy’s style of pandering to the middle classes – let’s call it servir la bourgeoisie – is worse? He is simply smuggling the received wisdom of society’s self-styled betters under the cover of edgy graffiti. From his anti-Brexit mural showing a workman sadly chipping one of the yellow stars from the EU flag to his image of Brits pledging their allegiance to the flag of Tesco – consumerism is slavery, y’all – his every utterance is chattering class to the core.
