Quotulatiousness

October 31, 2018

Store-bought Halloween costumes of old

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

Richard Lorenc explains why the Halloween costumes your parents bought for you as a kid … sucked:

While my husband and I were recently struggling to figure out our costumes for this Halloween (and we still don’t have any idea), he pulled up some old commercials on YouTube. The off-the-shelf options that trick or treaters had were, in a word, pitiful.

Basically, costume makers thought it was ok to make a front-only plastic mask (in any color, really) of a character and top it off with a plastic smock featuring an illustration of said character with either its name or the name of the show or movie it comes from. There was no attempt to dress in the character’s actual attire. If you wanted that, you’d either have to know a professional costumer or cobble together something from your closet.

Take a look for yourself at just how costume-poor we used to be:

Obviously, every costume is an opportunity to generate interest in a brand or franchise, and slapping on a logo is an easy way to get a name out there, but these costumes truly heralded a dark time for Halloween. Some may even argue that it demonstrated crass consumerism at its worst, with cynical companies taking the easiest route to grabbing a couple of bucks from desperate parents.

September 1, 2018

The Tartan Myth | Stuff That I Find Interesting

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

Jabzy
Published on 22 Jun 2017

https://www.patreon.com/Jabzy

https://twitter.com/JabzyJoe

June 27, 2018

Calico prohibition

Filed under: Business, France, History, India, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In the current issue of Reason, Virginia Postrel outlines an eighteenth-century French government attempt to prohibit calico cloth:

Calico printing, an image from Wellcome Images, via Wikimedia Commons

On a shopping trip to the butcher’s, young Miss la Genne wore her new, form-fitting jacket, a stylish cotton print with large brown flowers and red stripes on a white background. It got her arrested.

Another young woman stood in the door of her boss’ wine shop sporting a similar jacket with red flowers. She too was arrested. So were Madame de Ville, the lady Coulange, and Madame Boite. Through the windows of their homes, law enforcement authorities spotted these unlucky women in clothing with red flowers printed on white. They were busted for possession.

It was Paris in 1730, and the printed cotton fabrics known as toiles peintes or indiennes — in English, calicoes, chintzes, or muslins — had been illegal since 1686. It was an extreme version of trade protectionism, designed to shelter French textile producers from Indian cottons. Every few years the authorities would tweak the law, but the fashion refused to die.

Frustrated by rampant smuggling and ubiquitous scofflaws, in 1726 the government increased penalties for traffickers and anyone helping them. Offenders could be sentenced to years in galleys, with violent smugglers put to death. Local authorities were given the power to detain without trial anyone who merely wore the forbidden fabrics or upholstered furniture with them.

“The exasperation of the lawmakers, after forty years of successive edicts and ordinances which had been largely ignored, flouted or circumvented on a wholesale basis, can be sensed in this law,” writes the fashion historian Gillian Crosby in a 2015 dissertation on the ban. Her archival research shows a spike in arrests for simple possession. “Impotent at stopping the cross-border trade, printing or the peddling of goods,” she writes, “government officials concentrated on making an example of individual wearers, in an attempt to halt the fashion.”

They failed.

In the annals of prohibition, the French war on printed fabrics is one of the strangest, most futile, and most extreme chapters. It’s also one of the most intellectually consequential, producing many of the earliest arguments for economic liberalism. “Long before the more famous debates about the liberalisation of the grain trade, about taxation, or even about the monopoly of the French Indies Company, philosophes and Enlightenment political economists saw the calico debate as their first important battleground,” writes the historian Felicia Gottmann in Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism (Palgrave Macmillan).

June 22, 2018

What the well-dressed politician shouldn’t be wearing

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ann Althouse reacts to a New York Times article on what clothes “say” about the wearer:

I clicked on that title because I thought it was going to say that it’s a mistake for female candidates to wear pants (in any form) rather than a skirt/dress (of some kind). But the article lumped skirted suits and pantsuits together.

To my eye, women in pants look less dressed up than a man in a standard business suit, and I don’t think women should put themselves at that disadvantage, especially since pantsuits look sloppier on a woman’s body than a business suit on a man’s body.

I don’t mean to insult women by saying that, but women’s bodies are (generally) shaped differently than men’s and women’s pants are (generally) fitted differently from men’s suit pants. Men’s suit pants do not hug the legs or crotch, so they completely deflect attention away from the lower body. Men’s suits bring us right up to the shoulders — the idealized shoulders — and and then, via shirt and tie, aim us straight at the face.

Women’s pantsuits are more fitted in the leg and use color in a way that draws the eye downward, and they often do things with the jacket — such as making it very long — to cover up what’s happening down there in the legs. But then the jacket is distracting.

In the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton’s jackets were flat-out weird, with perplexing patch pockets. In fact, I don’t like Vanessa Friedman’s reference to the “Elizabeth Warren/Hillary Clinton/Kirsten Gillibrand mold,” because Warren and Gillibrand wear very low-key things and Hillary Clinton launched into clothes that we struggled to understand, that got compared to loungewear or sci-fi costumery.

I don’t really know what the best answer is. It depends on the individual. But you’re asking to be trusted with responsibility, not to be enjoyed as a pop star or fashion maven. You don’t want to look as though you’re seeking power for purpose of expressing your individuality.

June 13, 2018

Cultural appropriation is the universal outcome of inter-cultural contact

Filed under: China, Food, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Claire Lehmann talks about the most recent ginned-up outbreak of cultural appropriation idiocy:

The flare-up was reported on internationally, and dozens of op-eds both condemning and defending the tweet and the dress spilled forth. Writing in The Independent, Eliza Anyangwe officiously declared that the teenager who wore the offending dress, Keziah Daum, was “the embodiment of a system that empowers white people to take whatever they want, go wherever they want and be able to fall back on: ‘Well, I didn’t mean any harm.’” The title of the piece was “Cultural Appropriation Is Never Harmless.” But it failed to define what cultural appropriation actually is.

For most observers, these complaints are bemusing and baffling. For many, no defense or condemnation of cultural appropriation is required, because such complaints are almost beyond the realm of comprehension in the first place. Without cultural appropriation we would not be able to eat Italian food, listen to reggae, or go to Yoga. Without cultural appropriation we would not be able to drink tea or use chopsticks or speak English or apply algebra, or listen to jazz, or write novels. Almost every cultural practice we engage in is the byproduct of centuries of cross-cultural pollination. The future of our civilization depends on it continuing.

Yet the concept was not always so perplexing. Originally derived from sociologists writing in the 1990s, its usage appears to have first been adopted by indigenous peoples of nations tainted by histories of colonization, such as Canada, Australia and the United States. Understandably, indigenous communities have been protective of their sacred objects and cultural artifacts, not wishing the experience of exploitation to be repeated generation after generation. Although one might be quizzical of complaints about a girl wearing a cheongsam to her prom (the United States has never colonized China) even the most tough-minded skeptic should be able to see why indigenous peoples who have historically had their land and territories taken away from them might be unwilling to “share their culture” unconditionally. Particularly when it is applied to the co-opting of a people’s sacred and religious iconography for the base purposes of profit-making, the concept of cultural appropriation seems quite reasonable.

Nevertheless, the concept quickly becomes baffling when young Westerners, such as Mr. Lam, of the cheongsam tweet, use the term as a weapon to disrupt the natural process of cultural exchange that happens in cosmopolitan societies in which culture is, thankfully, hybrid. When controversies erupt over hoop earrings or sombrero hats or sushi or braids or cannabis-themed parties, the concept of cultural appropriation appears to have departed from its formerly understood meaning — that is, to protect sacred or religious objects from desecration and exploitation. It appears that these newer, more trivial (yet vicious) complaints are the modern-day incarnation of sumptuary laws.

Elites once policed what their social inferiors could wear, in part to remind them of their inferiority, and in part to retain their own prestige and exclusivity. In Moral Time, the sociologist Donald Black, explains that in feudal and medieval societies, sumptuary laws were often articulated with religious or moralizing language, but their intention and effect was simply to provide a scaffold for existing social hierarchies. Writing in the 15th century, French philosopher Michel de Montaigne made the astute observation in his essay “Of Sumptuary Laws”: “’Tis strange how suddenly and with how much ease custom in these indifferent things establishes itself and becomes authority.”

May 30, 2018

A point about cloaks

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

Lindybeige
Published on 28 Nov 2012

I shot this ages ago, but there were massive delays because the special effects for the weather were a nightmare and just refused to work. Anyway, recently I found the time to wrestle with the software again, and I never managed to get them to work properly, but at least I managed to find a long tedious convoluted work-around using two different editing packages.

Another thing I can say about the cloak I’m wearing in this, is that it turned out that the pattern on it was a very effective camouflage – acting a lot like modern military disruptive patterned materials. I have heard that the various tartans had colours in them to match the seasons, and were used for that purpose.

www.LloydianAspects.co.uk

March 25, 2018

The appearance of wealth

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Victor Davis Hanson on how the wealthy once were eager to appear as distinct from the common herd as possible:

Even in the mostly egalitarian city-states of relatively poor classical Greece, the wealthy were readily identifiable. A man of privilege was easy to spot by his remarkable possession of a horse, the fine quality of his tunic, or by his mastery of Greek syntax and vocabulary.

An anonymous and irascible Athenian author — dubbed “The Old Oligarch” by the nineteenth-century British classicist Gilbert Murray — wrote a bitter diatribe known as “The Constitution of the Athenians.” The harangue, composed in the late fifth century B.C., blasted the liberal politics and culture of Athens. The grouchy elitist complained that poor people in Athens don’t get out of the way of rich people. He was angry that only in radically democratic imperial Athens was it hard to calibrate a man by his mere appearance: “You would often hit an Athenian citizen by mistake on the assumption that he was a slave. For the people there are no better dressed than the slaves and metics, nor are they any more handsome.”

The Old Oligarch’s essay reveals an ancient truth about privilege and status. Throughout history, the elite in most of the Western world were easy to distinguish. Visible class distinctions characterized ancient Rome, Renaissance Florence, the Paris of the nineteenth century, and the major cities of twentieth century America.

A variety of recent social trends and revolutionary economic breakthroughs have blurred the line separating the elite from the masses.

First, the cultural revolution of the 1960s made it cool for everyone to dress sloppily and to talk with slang and profanity. Levis, T-shirts, and sneakers became the hip American uniform, a way of superficially equalizing the unequal. Contrived informality radiated the veneer of class solidarity. Multimillionaires like Bruce Springsteen and Bono appear indistinguishable from welders on the street.

The locus classicus is perhaps Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg, who wears T-shirts, jeans, and flip flops to work. His reported wealth of $71 billion makes him the world’s fifth-richest man. The median net worth of Americans is about $45,000. Zuckerberg is worth more than the collective wealth of about 1.5 million Americans — or about all the household wealth in Philadelphia put together. And yet, he looks perfectly ordinary. When I walk the Stanford campus — where many of the world’s wealthiest send their children — the son of a Silicon Valley billionaire looks no different from a machinist’s daughter on full support from Akron.

Second, technology has done its part to dilute superficial class distinctions. The nineteenth-century gap between a rich man in his fine carriage — with footman and driver — and someone walking three miles to work has disappeared. The driving experience between a $20,000 Kia bought on credit with $1,000 down and a $80,0000 Mercedes paid in cash is mostly reduced to the superficial logo on the hood and trunk. An alien from Mars could not easily distinguish, at least by sight, between the two cars. Even after a ten-minute ride, an alien might be puzzled: What exactly did that extra $60,000 buy?

March 18, 2018

QotD: National flags

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

If you have never investigated or thought through this odd phenomenon of national anthems, it might not occur to you that it is not OK to tamper with the lyrics. There was a time not so long ago when national flag etiquette was fairly severe. Flags were seen as essentially military emblems, and their use was informed by military protocols. When flags started to be turned into clothing and ironic art in the 1960s, and were exposed to the demoralizing effects of marketed consumer kitsch in the 1970s, these developments were greeted with unease. Not so much in Canada, of course: our flag was invented as a marketing device in a time of consumerism, and it had not been used to soak up oceans of blood, so it lacks the sobering associations other flags have. It had a virgin birth. We are quite welcome to slap it onto a backpack or a truck bumper.

The point is that flags can now be visually remixed with near-total freedom by artists and designers and inserted into all sorts of contexts with relatively little discomfort. If you want to put Donald Trump in an editorial cartoon with a gore-oozing Stars and Stripes, no contemporary American will kick up too much fuss. Yet the taboos around anthems, as Remigio Pereira discovered, seem to have grown stronger. And even as someone who was instinctively furious with him, I am not quite sure how this happened, or why.

Colby Cosh, “Let’s talk about anthems”, National Post, 2016-07-14.

March 3, 2018

How A Man Shall Be Armed: 11th Century

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

Royal Armouries
Published on 20 Feb 2017

Discover how a Norman knight of the 11th Century would be armed for battle with the finest equipment available.

February 23, 2018

“…the Trudeaus playing ‘Mr Dressup and Family’ in exotic locations on the taxpayers’ dime isn’t the problem”

Filed under: Cancon, India, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The press is having a hard time presenting Justin Trudeau’s India trip in a positive light, which clearly pains the teeny-bopper Trudeau fan club that composes a large part of the Canadian media. Ted Campbell sees the trip as a series of wasted opportunities to begin healing the breach between India and Canada:

I’ve taken my time in commenting on the prime minister’s trip to India. To say that I’m very disappointed is to put it mildly … I’m disappointed and a little embarrassed to be a Canadian. But the Trudeaus playing “Mr Dressup and Family” in exotic locations on the taxpayers’ dime isn’t the problem. We have, in fact, a serious problem as far as India is concerned and we, Canada, one of India’s oldest and firmest friends is in danger of being seen as an adversary. That’s a problem and it is, in my mind, a HUGE problem for Canada.

As Vishnu Prakash, former Indian envoy to Canada, told Indian news site The Print on Monday, ““Over the years, the Canadian political establishment, across the spectrum (whether it is the NDP, Conservatives or Liberals) has been mollycoddling Khalistani elements. Under the Trudeau government, this has increased. He had himself appeared on a Khalistani platform in Toronto in April last year.” It, the “mollycoddling Khalistani elements,” has been going on since at least the 1980s, back when Indira Ghandi’s government cracked down (1984) and nearly provoked a civil war and even in 1985 when Air India flight 182 was bombed, almost certainly an attack organized by Canadians, in Canada, as retaliation. Then the governments of the day spent 20 years and over $100 million on an investigation that retired Supreme Court Justice John Major described as a “cascading series of errors” by the government, writ large, including, especially, the RCMP and CSIS. India was not impressed.

India was less impressed when Canadian political parties began to actively court the Canadian the entire Indo-Canadian community but failed to condemn Sikh separatism. Canadians, including Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrétien, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau have “explained,” correctly, that people are allowed to support unpopular causes here in Canada, so long as they don’t break our laws, but India, not unreasonably, given Canada’s own history of separatist violence, would like something more. But the Sikh vote is active and “efficient” and all parties want it and that seems, to India, anyway, to mean turning a blind eye to the (disputed) fact assertion that the Khalistan independence movement is centred in and funded from Canada … Prime Minister Trudeau made thing worse, according to The Hindu, when “On April 30, [2017] Mr. Trudeau addressed a parade for ‘Khalsa Day’, which included floats glorifying Sikh militant leaders Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, Amreek Singh and former General Shahbeg Singh who were killed in the siege of the Golden Temple and Operation Bluestar in June 1984.” That act appears to have crossed a line, leading to what the whole world is now interpreting as a major diplomatic snub […]

The big issue is not the rather gentlemanly snub of Justin Trudeau by India’s highest officials; our prime minister appears more interested in having an all expenses paid vacation with his family than in doing the nation’s business in any event; the real issue is the Canadian political actions that made it politically necessary for Prime Minister Modi to administer that snub at all.

What Canada needs to do now is repair relations with India, and that may require Prime Minister Trudeau to look very, very closely at any ties any of his ministers may have with the Khalistan independence movement, he says there are none, and either making them sever all ties with separatists or severing them from the Liberal cabinet, caucus and even the Party. Andrew Scheer needs to do the same with the Conservatives and Jagmeet Singh needs to speak out for national unity ~ if it’s good for Canada then it’s good for India, too. On this issue, at least, politics should indeed, stop at the water’s edge.

Of course, when you allow things like this to happen, diplomacy becomes a much trickier profession than normal:

In Britain, the Daily Mail published the comments from a lot of Indians who have been offended by Trudeau’s choices of clothing on the visit so far:

Justin Trudeau has been ridiculed on social media by Indians for his ‘tacky’ and over the top outfit choices while on his first visit to their nation as Prime Minister.

While many praised his clothing during the first two days of his trip, patience was wearing thin by the time he attended a Bollywood gala on Tuesday night, before the tide turned against him on Wednesday.

Ministers, authors, journalists and ordinary Indians lined up to mock him on Wednesday, saying his wardrobe was ‘fake and annoying’.

Perhaps taking note of the criticism, the Canadian leader donned a suit on Thursday as he visited Jama Masjid, one of India’s largest mosques.

Leading the criticism was Omar Abdullah, former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, who tweeted on Wednesday saying Trudeau’s preening was ‘all just a bit much.’

‘We Indians do not dress like this every day sir, not even in Bollywood.’

Bhaavna Arora, a bestselling Indian author, also chimed in, accusing Trudeau of wearing ‘fancy dress’ and saying she found it ‘fake and annoying’.

Shekhar Gupta, founder of Indian newspaper The Print also mocked the Canadian Prime Minister, accusing him of ‘running a week-long “election campaign” in India in fancy dress.’

February 19, 2018

Why the Pith Helmet?

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Major Sven Gaming
Published on 14 Apr 2017

Anyone love the old Zulu movie staring Michael Caine?

I do, but why did the British wear these awesome hats? Well watch and you will find out…

And a link to more info on these wonderful Helmets. http://www.throughouthistory.com/?p=3153

February 18, 2018

How WWI Got Women to Start Wearing Bras

Filed under: Business, History, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Today I Found Out
Published on 3 Oct 2016

In this video:

Corsets dominated the undergarments of wealthier women in the Western world for centuries, until WWI. So how did the war help popularize the bra? In a word, or two words in this case: metal shortage. The making of corsets required quite a bit of metal. Thus, in 1917, the U.S. War Industries Board asked American women to help their “men win the war” by not wearing or buying corsets.

Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.p…

December 31, 2017

The Sopwith Snipe – WW1 Pilot’s Gear I THE GREAT WAR Special

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 30 Dec 2017

Play Warthunder For Free:
https://warthunder.com/play4free?r=greatwar

Indy takes a look at the Sopwith Snipe and meets Trevor who shows us the typical gear of a WW1 pilot.

A contrarian view of hijabs, niqabs, and burqas

Filed under: History, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Western views of full-coverage clothing, including hijabs, niqabs, and burqas, may be concealing a hidden benefit to those who choose to wear such clothes voluntarily:

Hijabs, niqabs, and burqas — different sorts of coverings worn by Islamic women — are divisive apparel in the West, associated with patriarchal oppression, cultural outsiders, and even suicide bombers. Yet few accounts actually discuss the experiences of the women wearing the veils, and the freedom and anonymity coverings can afford if worn voluntarily.

Born in Pakistan and educated in America, Rafia Zakaria is the author of Veil, a new book which explores the history and shifting meanings of female coverings in Islamic countries and Western secular society. In a wide-ranging conversation, she talks with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie about the theological underpinnings of veils, their use as a means of controlling female sexuality, and how they have become markers of socio-economic status and virtue signaling.

Veils present a particular conflict for Western feminists. On the one hand, veils — especially burqas — are emblematic of regimes that are particularly oppressive to women. Feminists and others have moved to ban the wearing of veils in public in the name of female empowerment. But if a Muslim women wants to wear one, is she endorsing patriarchy and setting back the women’s rights movement or simply owning her own choices, especially in a culture that might itself be anti-Islamic?

November 8, 2017

Why Don’t Country Flags Use The Color Purple?

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

After Skool
Published on 17 Oct 2017

For centuries purple dye was worth more than gold. The dye used to produce purple fabric came from a sea snail that only lived off the shores of modern day Lebanon. Because it was so rare, purple became associated with royalty. This is the reason you don’t see purple on country flags. It was just too expensive to produce.

Sometimes the simplest questions have extraordinary answers.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress