The Canadian national temper is a funny thing, riddled with contradictions. It is plainly an abstraction, and yet it does seem to have discernible traits. Some jokingly regard it as absurdly apologetic — a Canadian is someone who says “sorry” when he is jostled. Canadians are polite and amiable, pacifist by nature; they are the world’s peacekeepers. Canadians regard themselves as morally superior, especially with regard to Americans. Canadians are inwardly attracted to failure, as Margaret Atwood contended in Survival — Canadians have a will to lose as powerful as the American will to win. And so on.
Canada is a huge but under-populated country. The wind echoes in our ears. Much has been made in our literature of the hardiness and resilience necessary for existence in a punishing climate and of the harsh labor required to extract the benefits of a resource-based economy. Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush is an early classic detailing the rigors and challenges of domesticating an unforgiving milieu. Canadian fortitude is a national foundation myth.
David Solway, “The Canadian Mind: A Culture So Open, Its ‘Brains Fall Out'”, PJ Media, 2018-10-10.
February 23, 2021
QotD: Canadian myths
February 16, 2021
Reduce, re-use, recycle … reject
John Miltimore rounds up several recent stories about American cities backing away from their elaborate, expensive, and wasteful recycling programs. We’ve had three generations of kids brought up indoctrinated into the belief that recycling was not only a good idea, but that it had almost mystical qualities and that it was essential to “saving the world”. The economic facts strongly contradict that, and have always revealed the inefficiencies and outright waste produced by even the best-run municipal recycling programs.
China, perhaps the largest buyer of US recyclables, stopped accepting them in 2018. Other countries, such as Thailand and India, have increased imports, but not in sufficient tonnage to alleviate the mounting costs cities are facing.
“We are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now,” Fiona Ma, the treasurer of California, told the Times.
Cost is the key word. Like any activity or service, recycling is an economic activity. The dirty little secret is that the benefits of recycling have been dubious for some time.
“Recycling has been dysfunctional for a long time,” Mitch Hedlund, executive director of Recycle Across America, told The Times.
[…]
And then there are the energy and resources that go into recycling. How much water do Americans spend annually rinsing items that end up in a landfill? How much fuel is spent deploying fleets of barges and trucks across highways and oceans, carrying tons of garbage to be processed at facilities that belch their own emissions?
The data on this front is thin, and results on the environmental effectiveness of recycling vary based on the material being recycled. Yet all of this presumes the recyclables are not being cleaned and shipped only to be buried in a landfill, like so much of it is today. This, Mises would say, is planned chaos, the inevitable result of central planners making decisions instead of consumers through free markets.
Most market economists, Reed points out, “by nature, philosophy, and experience” a bunch skeptical of centrally planned schemes that supplant choice, were wise to the dynamics of recycling from the beginning.
In a 2004 episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit, they discussed recycling:
February 8, 2021
Why Everybody Disagrees on the Efficacy of the English Longbow – A Video Essay
SandRhoman History
Published 7 Feb 2021Everybody quarrels over the efficacy of the English longbow. Many historians, reenactors and history enthusiasts alike hold the view that arrows piercing armor is a myth. Some base this view on testing as was done for example by Tod from Tod’s workshop. Together with his team, he provided an invaluable data point for this debate. Others, such as traditionalist historians are often open to the possibility of arrows piercing armor, even though they are aware of actual testing of the longbow. In general, the efficacy of a weapon is much more complicated than its mere armor penetration value. So, in this video we’d like to shed light on the whole debate and explain why it is so hard to find common ground on this issue. This is why everybody disagrees on the efficacy of the English longbow.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sandrhomanhis…
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sandrhoman
Tod’s Video: ARROWS vs ARMOUR – Medieval Myth Busting https://youtu.be/DBxdTkddHaE
Tod’s playlist: MEDIEVAL MYTH BUSTING https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI…
Bibliography:
Rogers, C.J., The Efficacy of the English Longbow, 1998.
Devries, K., Medieval Military Technology, 1994.
Bane, M., “English Longbow Testing against various armor circa 1400”, 2006.
Soar, H., Gibbs, J., Jury, C., Stretton, M., Secrets of the English War Bow. Westholme, 2010, pp. 127–151.
Magier, Mariusz; Nowak, Adrian; et al., “Numerical Analysis of English Bows used in Battle of Crécy”. Problemy Techniki Uzbrojenia. 142 (2), 2017, 69–85.
January 27, 2021
Misunderstood Moments in History – The Spartan Myth
Invicta
Published 27 Oct 2017Start your 30 day free trial here: http://ow.ly/eCd230fiZ7Q
The Spartans are immortalized in history as super soldiers bred for war. However most of what we think we know about them is a lie. Today we will unmask the truth behind the Spartan Myth.
The Great Courses Plus is currently available to watch through a web browser to almost anyone in the world and optimized for the US market. The Great Courses Plus is currently working to both optimize the product globally and accept credit card payments globally.
Documentary Credits:
Research: Dr Roel Konijnendijk
Script: Invicta
Artwork: Milek J
Editing: Invicta
Music: Total War OST, SoundnoteDocumentary Bibliography:
Paul Anthony Cartledge, The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-heroes of Ancient Greece
Nigel Kennell, Spartans: A New History (2010)
S. Hodkinson, Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (2000)
J. Ducat, Spartan Education: Youth and Society in the Classical Period (2006)
S.M. Rusch, Sparta at War: Strategy, Tactics and Campaigns, 550-362 BC (2011)
E. Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (1969)
S. Hodkinson & I.M. Morris (eds.), Sparta in Modern Thought (2012)
January 7, 2021
QotD: Sneering at “the throwaway society”
These are not new truths, even if it took the Covid-19 pandemic to reveal them again. The throwaway age began because of public-health campaigns a century ago to control the spread of pathogens. Disposable products were celebrated for decades for promoting hygiene and saving everyone time and money. It wasn’t until the 1970s that they became symbols of decadent excess, and then only because of economic and ecological fallacies repeated so often that they became conventional wisdom.
In a strange turn of events, the most affluent society in history suddenly turned into a mass of neurotic hoarders. Sifting through garbage for valuables, an activity formerly associated with the most destitute inhabitants of Third World shantytowns, became a moral duty in American suburbs. Greens campaigned for “zero waste” and a “circular economy” in which disposable products would be outlawed. They confidently predicted that the throwaway society was doomed, but if they’d known anything about its history, they would have realized that it was created for very good reasons — and that it will endure long after their lamentations are forgotten.
John Tierney, “Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society”, City Journal, 2020-09-13.
December 31, 2020
QotD: The “noble savage” belief system
***When the ancestors of North America’s Indigenous peoples entered the New World some 16,000 years ago via Siberia, they hunted many of the mammals, reptiles, and birds, from the Arctic down to Tierra del Fuego. Mammoths, mastodons, and enormous ground-dwelling sloths, as well as giant bears, giant tortoises, and enormous teratorn birds with 16-foot wingspans — animals that had never had a chance to evolve in the presence of humans — were among the many species that disappeared from the Americas. Some medium-sized animals — such as horse, peccary, and antelope species — were also wiped out. But others survived: Bison and deer species, tree sloths, tapirs, jaguars, bear species, alligators, and big birds such as rheas and condors are, at least for the time being, still with us. The existence of these survivors, along with the relatively unspoiled forests, grasslands, and rivers seen by the first Europeans to enter the Americas, served to support the illusion that America’s first peoples had been maintaining what popular environmentalist David Suzuki calls a “sacred balance” with the natural world. Throughout history, however, humans killed animals that were tasty, numerous, and huntable. For kin-groups, staying alive meant making life-and-death cost-benefit calculations about where to send your berry-pickers and hunters. “Sacredness” had nothing to do with it.
This is not to say that the Indigenous peoples who migrated from Asia to the Americas were especially bloodthirsty (though Europeans typically reported that their hunting and fishing skills were excellent). In every known case where humans entered continents formerly uninhabited by our species, the bigger animals tended to disappear, since they provided the most sustenance per kill. The first humans to enter Australia some 70,000 years ago wiped out giant kangaroo species, rhino-sized marsupial herbivores, jaguar-sized marsupial carnivores, big flightless birds, and many other megafauna. The same thing would happen in Europe: After sapiens completed its occupation of that sub-continent some 30,000 years ago, the mammoths, woolly rhinos, giant deer, and lions they recorded in their cave paintings and carvings also disappeared.
Baz Edmeades, “The Myth of Harmonious Indigenous Conservationism”, Quillette, 2020-09-06.
December 16, 2020
QotD: Distorting the history of America’s “Gilded Age”
To some extent, during the late 1800s — a period historians call the “Gilded Age” — American politicians learned from the past. They had dabbled in federal subsidies from steamships to transcontinental railroads, and those experiments dismally failed. Politicians then turned to free markets as a better strategy for economic development. The world-dominating achievements of Cornelius Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, and Charles Schwab validated America’s unprecedented limited government. And when politicians sometimes veered off course later with government interventions for tariffs, high income taxes, anti-trust laws, and an effort to run a steel plant to make armor for war — the results again often hindered American economic progress. Free markets worked well; government intervention usually failed.
Why is it, then, that for so many years, most historians have been teaching the opposite lesson? They have made no distinction between political entrepreneurs, who tried to succeed through federal aid, and market entrepreneurs, who avoided subsidies and sought to create better products at lower prices. Instead, most historians have preached that many, if not all, entrepreneurs were “robber barons”. They did not enrich the U.S. with their investments; instead, they bilked the public and corrupted political and economic life in America. Therefore, government intervention in the economy was needed to save the country from these greedy businessmen.
Burton W. Folsum, “How the Myth of the ‘Robber Barons’ Began — and Why It Persists”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-09-21.
December 11, 2020
QotD: Airbrushing out the worst parts of “Lost Cause” mythology
Looking back, we can see that between 1865 and around 1914 the Union and the former South negotiated an imperfect but workable peace. The first step in that negotiation took place at Appomattox, when the Union troops accepting General Robert E. Lee’s surrender saluted the defeated and allowed them to retain their arms, treating them with the most punctilious military courtesy due to honorable foes.
Over the next few years, the Union Army reintegrated the Confederate military into itself. Confederate officers not charged with war crimes were generally able to retain rank and seniority; many served in the frontier wars of the next 35 years. Elements of Confederate uniform were adopted for Western service.
The political leaders of the revolt were not executed. Instead, they were spared to urge reconciliation, and generally did. By all historical precedent they were treated with shocking leniency. This paid off.
Of course, not all went smoothly. The Reconstruction of the South between 1863 and 1877 was badly bungled, creating resentments that linger to this day and – in the folk memory of Southerners – often overshadow the harms of the war itself. The condition of emancipated blacks remained dire.
But overall, the reintegration of the South went far better than it could have. Confederate nationalism was successfully reabsorbed into American nationalism. One of the prices of this adjustment was that Confederate heroes had to become American heroes. An early and continuing example of this was the reverence paid to Robert E. Lee by Unionists after the war; his qualities as a military leader were extolled and his opposition to full civil rights for black freedmen memory-holed.
Lee’s heroism and ascribed saintliness would layer become a central prop in “Lost Cause” romanticism, which portrayed the revolt as an honorable struggle for a Southern way of life while mostly airbrushing out – but sometimes, unforgiveably, defending – the institution of slavery. Even today, the “soft” airbrushing version of Lost Cause retains a significant hold on Southerners who would never dream of defending slavery.
Eric S. Raymond, “Unlearning history”, Armed and Dangerous, 2017-09-22.
December 7, 2020
Churchill and the Bengal Famine of 1943
In The Critic, Zareer Masani debunks a recent book’s claim that British PM Winston Churchill was responsible for the Bengal famine during the Second World War:
Prime Minister Winston Churchill greets Canadian PM William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1941.
Photo from Library and Archives Canada (reference number C-047565) via Wikimedia Commons.
A favourite trope of the current Black Lives Madness and its left-liberal white apologists has been the alleged infamy of Britain’s most cherished hero, Winston Churchill, charged with everything from mere racism to actual genocide. The worst accusation is that of deliberately starving four million Bengalis to death in the famine of 1943.
The famine took place at the height of World War Two, with the Japanese already occupying Burma and invading the British Indian province of Bengal, bombing its capital, Calcutta, and patrolling its coast with submarines.
The famine raged for about six months, from the summer of 1943 until the end of that year, and estimates of its victims range from half a million upwards, depending on whether one includes its indirect and long-term effects. Most famine experts agree that famines can be caused by both nature and human agency, but never by any single individual. So how has a 67-year-old British prime minister in poor health, 5,000 miles away, fighting near-annihilation in a world war, come to be charged with causing such a cataclysmic disaster?
The attempt to lay this at Churchill’s door stems from a sensationalist book by a Bengali-American journalist called Madhusree Mukerjee. As its title, Churchill’s Secret War, indicates, it was a largely conspiracist attempt to pin responsibility on distant Churchill for undoubted mistakes on the ground in Bengal.
The actual evidence shows that Churchill believed, based on the information he had been getting, that there was no food supply shortage in Bengal, but a demand problem caused by local mismanagement of the distribution system. Ironically, his view found unexpected support in a 2010 exchange between Mukerjee and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, the world’s foremost expert on famine in India.
Commenting in the New York Times, Sen said of Mukerjee, that “she seems satisfied with little information” and that her data came from only two rice research stations, and those in only two out of 27 districts in Bengal. “The analysis I made,” countered Sen, “using data from all districts … indicated that food availability in 1943 (the famine year) was significantly higher than in 1941 (when there was no famine) … There was indeed a substantial shortfall compared with demand, hugely enhanced in a war economy … but that is quite different from a shortfall of supply compared with supply in previous years … Mukerjee seems to miss this crucial distinction, and in her single-minded … attempt to nail down Churchill, she ends up absolving British imperial policy of confusion and callousness.”
November 29, 2020
An unusually sympathetic biography of George III
Andrew Roberts reviews a new biography of King George III for The Critic:
King George III in his coronation robes.
Portrait by Allan Ramsay (1713-1784), original in the Art Gallery of South Australia via Wikimedia Commons.
Over the past six years, Penguin have been publishing their excellent Monarchs series in which a leading historian writes a 30,000-word book on a king or queen from Athelstan to Elizabeth II. There are now 45 of them (including David Horspool on Oliver Cromwell, who sneaks in despite the monarchical rubric, and Jonathan Keates who reasonably enough lumped William III and Queen Mary together). These extended essays are attractively produced, can be read in a couple of hours, and many are true gems, from historians such as Tom Holland, John Guy, Tim Blanning, Norman Davies, Roger Knight, Jane Ridley, Richard Davenport-Hines, David Cannadine — you get the idea.
Now Professor Jeremy Black gives us a full-throated defence of the monarch who is only really generally known as the king who went insane and who lost the American colonies, and who now prances around in the camp-yet-sinister show-stopping song in Hamilton: The Musical. “When considering George III’s mistakes,” Black argues, persuasively, “it is important to assess the parameters of the possible and to consider comparisons.” With his expertise in eighteenth-century European history, Black is able to place George III in the wider context of contemporary monarchs such as Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, Louis XVI and Napoleon.
“In contradiction to the Whig and American image of George as a tyrant, or at least a would-be tyrant,” Black states, “he had a strong conviction of the value of limited monarchy and was a willing student of the lessons of the Glorious Revolution and the subsequent Revolution Settlement.”
Black brilliantly demolishes the paranoiac Whig view of George as trying to accrete powers to himself unconstitutionally. The George who emerges is a far more attractive figure than the Whig historians depicted, let alone Thomas Jefferson with his 28 histrionic and inaccurate accusations against George in the Declaration of Independence, and especially Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hilarious but profoundly historically incorrect caricature.
Instead, Black portrays a monarch with “a strong religious faith, a passion for hunting and an interest in art, architecture, music, astronomy and exploration”. He was a Renaissance man with an Enlightenment viewpoint, although Black also lists his failings, which were obstinacy, self-righteousness and a certain amount of priggishness when young. Black calls him a “fogey”. These were hardly cardinal sins, and a world away from the lust for dictatorship of which he has been accused.
Jeremy Black — who is fast becoming a national treasure in his own right, having written well over 100 books — takes a refreshingly unmodish stance towards George (as you might have guessed from listing hunting amongst the king’s attributes). “His qualities are easier to understand for those who prize commitment, duty, and integrity,” he concludes, “than in a modern age when scorn and satire, even hatred of the nation’s history, are often prominent.”
October 27, 2020
America’s “brutal system of slavery [was] unlike anything that had existed in the world before”
I missed this article by Kay S. Hymowitz when it was published by City Journal a couple of weeks back:
Auction at Richmond. (1834)
“Five hundred thousand strokes for freedom ; a series of anti-slavery tracts, of which half a million are now first issued by the friends of the Negro.” by Armistead, Wilson, 1819?-1868 and “Picture of slavery in the United States of America. ” by Bourne, George, 1780-1845
New York Public Library via Wikimedia Commons.
… slavery was a mundane fact in most human civilizations, neither questioned nor much thought about. It appeared in the earliest settlements of Sumer, Babylonia, China, and Egypt, and it continues in many parts of the world to this day. Far from grappling with whether slavery should be legal, the code of Hammurabi, civilization’s first known legal text, simply defines appropriate punishments for recalcitrant slaves (cutting off their ears) or those who help them escape (death). Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament take for granted the existence of slaves. Slavery was so firmly established in ancient Greece that Plato could not imagine his ideal Republic without them, though he rejected the idea of individual ownership in favor of state control. As for Rome, well, Spartacus, anyone?
In the ancient world, slaves were almost always captives from the era’s endless wars of conquest. They were forced to do all the heavy labor required for building and sustaining cities and towns: clearing forests; building roads, temples, and palaces; digging and transporting stone; hoeing fields; rowing galley ships; and marching to almost-certain death in the front line of battle. Women (and often enough boy) slaves had the task of servicing the sexual appetites of their masters. None of that changed with the arrival of a new millennium. Gaelic tribes took advantage of the fall of the Roman Empire to raid the west coast of England and Wales for strong bodies; one belonged to a 16-year-old later anointed St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. “In the slavery business, no tribe was fiercer or more feared than the Irish,” writes Thomas Cahill in How the Irish Saved Civilization.
Today, of course, the immorality of slave-owning is as clear as day. But in the premodern world, no neat division existed between evil slaveowners and their innocent victims. Once the Vikings arrived in their longboats in the 700s, the Irish enslavers found themselves the enslaved. Slavery became the commanding height of the Viking economy; Norsemen raided coastal villages across Europe and brought their captives to Dublin, which became one of the largest slave markets of the time. The Vikings thought of their slaves as more like cattle than people; the unlucky victims had to sleep alongside the domestic animals, according to the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. Norsemen rounded up captured Irish men and women to settle the desolate landscape of Iceland; scientists have found Irish DNA in present-day Icelanders, a legacy of that time. The Slavic tribes in Eastern Europe were an especially fertile supplier for Viking slave traders as well as for Muslim dealers from Spain: their Latin name gave us the word slave. Slavs were evidently not deterred by the misery they must have suffered; when Viking power waned by the twelfth century, the Slavs turned around and enslaved Vikings as well as Greeks.
Slavery was a normal state of affairs well beyond the territory we now call Europe. The Mayans had slaves; the Aztecs harnessed the labor of captives to build their temples and then serve as human sacrifices at the altars they had helped construct. The ancient Near East and Asia Minor were chockfull of slaves, mostly from East Africa. According to eminent slavery scholar Orlando Patterson, East Africa was plundered for human chattel as far back as 1580 BC. Muhammad called for compassion for the enslaved, but that didn’t stop his followers from expanding their search for chattel beyond the east coast into the interior of Africa, where the trade flourished for many centuries before those first West Africans arrived in Jamestown. Throughout that time, African kings and merchants grew rich from capturing and selling the millions of African slaves sent through the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean to Persians and Ottomans.
From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the North African Barbary coast was a hub for “white slavery.” This episode was relatively short-lived in the global history of slavery, but one with overlooked impact on Western culture. Around 1619, just as the first Africans were being sailed from the African coast to Jamestown, Algerian and Tunisian pirates, or “corsairs” as they were known, were using their boats to raid seaside villages on the Mediterranean and Atlantic for slaves who happened in this case to be white. In 1631, Ottoman pirates sacked Baltimore on the southern coast of Ireland, capturing and enslaving the villagers. Around the same time, Iceland was raided by Barbary corsairs who took hundreds of prisoners, selling them into lifetime bondage.
October 25, 2020
The Crimes of Madame Delphine LaLaurie: The Truth Behind the Legends
Atun-Shei Films
Published 16 Dec 2019Madame Delphine LaLaurie, New Orleans’ most reviled serial killer, has become world famous thanks to American Horror Story and the wildly popular French Quarter ghost tour industry. The story of this deranged socialite who tortured, mutilated, and murdered her slaves has lost none of its horrifying bite, and the supposedly haunted mansion where her home once stood has become a major tourist attraction. Despite its popularity (or perhaps because of it), this story is steeped in legend and folklore. Most online sources about LaLaurie’s crimes are outdated, wrong, or both. In this video I attempt to separate the truth from the myth, and tell a purely historical account of the crimes of Delphine LaLaurie.
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September 27, 2020
CHECKMATE, LINCOLNITES! Confederate DESTROYS Yankee with FACTS and LOGIC
Atun-Shei Films
Published 23 May 2019Checkmate, Lincolnites! Debunking the three or four arguments Neo-Confederates always make when they talk about the Civil War.
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#CheckmateLincolnites #CivilWar #AmericanHistory
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QotD: The persuasive power of the newspapers
Or, as we might put it, the reason the left doesn’t sweep the board with the votes of the proletariat is because large numbers of the proletariat think the left either don’t represent them, or are aware that the left are nuts.
Tim Worstall, “This Will Be An Interesting Test – Geordie Greig To Daily Mail Editor”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-06-08.
September 25, 2020
QotD: “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!” [“Let them eat cake!”]
In the original French, the Queen allegedly said, Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!, which doesn’t quite translate to “let them eat cake.” Brioche is sweet, eggy bread that tastes only vaguely like cake. The translated English word “cake” made Marie Antoinette seem even haughtier than in French. But it’s beside the point, since Marie Antoinette never uttered “let them eat cake” in any language. There is no historical evidence that she ever uttered that phrase. The story is pure invention. It’s a historical legend that rivals the myth of Nero “fiddling” while Rome burned. And yet this outlandish fabrication has shaped our image of Marie Antoinette for more than two centuries.
Compared to other historical falsehoods, this legend is easy to trace to its source. It was the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In book six of his Confessions, written in 1767, Rousseau wrote of a “great princess” who had, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied with those words cited above, Qu’ils mangent de la brioche! Was Rousseau referring to Marie Antoinette? This is impossible. When he wrote that passage, Marie Antoinette was still a girl living at the Habsburg court in Vienna (under her original name, Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna). Rousseau’s story was entirely made up, probably borrowed from another source. And while his book wasn’t published till 1782, this was still seven years before the French Revolution began. In fact, the first time someone (spuriously) put the words “let them eat cake” in Marie Antoinette’s mouth was a half-century later, in a book published by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, Les Guêpes.
Matthew Fraser, “Marie Antoinette: Figure of Myth, Magnet for Lies”, Quillette, 2020-06-24.
