Quotulatiousness

August 11, 2024

Tears are still a powerful weapon for female politicians

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

Janice Fiamengo on the tactic available to — and resorted to frequently — only females in politics, turning on the waterworks to generate sympathy and support:

Recently, a friend sent me a news article that illustrates, in small, the world of Anglophone politics, in which notions of what is owed to women, who are understood to be far more sensitive and fragile than men, operate alongside stern interdictions against stating that women are in any manner unsuited for strenuous, high stress roles.

Last week, an ABC News report detailed years-old allegations against a former aide to Josh Shapiro, the Governor of Pennsylvania who was, at the time of the article, one of Kamala Harris’s touted VP possibilities (she has since chosen Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota). Shapiro’s former staffer, Mike Vereb, who resigned in 2023 over a sexual harassment allegation, is said to have brought a woman to tears in 2018 with threats made over the phone (“You will be less than nothing by the time Josh and I get done with you”, he is alleged to have said).

The woman, who runs an advocacy group, was left “weeping and in shock standing alone in a parking lot”. She did not report the alleged incident until she heard about the aide’s resignation five years later.

[…]

With the staffer long gone from Shapiro’s administration, the story had legs only because it was about a man who made a woman cry.

The problem is that women do cry rather frequently in politics. And complain. And perform their sensitivity to criticisms, monikers, crude jokes, the faux terror of J6, and bantering innuendo. Far too often such women make politics about them as women and about the trouble men allegedly cause them.

Such was the case with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who earned plaudits from feminists in 2012 for a fury-filled speech in the House of Representatives about sexism, in which she accused the opposition leader of misogyny for a number of statements he’d made that were not at all misogynistic, including that women were likely under-represented in Australian institutions of power because men were “more adapted to exercise authority”. Gillard also said she was “personally offended” (a more serious state of affairs, one assumes, than simply being “offended”) by the opposition leader’s contention that abortion was “the easy way out”. (The text of her speech is here.) “Julia Gillard’s Attack on Sexism Hailed as Turning Point for Australian Women” ran one enthusiastic headline. And perhaps it was, signaling the point at which women in politics stopped thinking they should accommodate themselves to the rigors of public life, and decided that politicians must instead accommodate themselves to the rigors of women’s demands.

Even seemingly tough-as-nails Hillary Clinton has been allowed to go from interview to interview revisiting the now years-old indignity of her election loss in 2016, like a once-popular debutante who can’t believe she didn’t make the cheerleading squad. No man would ever be given such a prolonged pity party. Having contended for years that it was misogyny that prevented her from beating Donald Trump, she more recently pointed her finger at female voters’ failures of confidence: “They left me [in the final days of the campaign] because they just couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect“, she explained in May, 2024. No one seems to have informed Clinton that nothing reveals her crippling unsuitability for leadership than her embarrassing refusal to stop feeling sorry for herself.

And she is, alas, far from unique. Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister of Scotland, sat and sobbed at last winter’s Covid-19 Inquiry in Edinburgh, deflecting critical questions about her government’s actions during the pandemic by proclaiming that she would carry the impact of them for as long as she lived. Forget the thousands of Scots who suffered or even died because of those decisions: the woman in charge was the one in need of compassion. Sturgeon had previously made a career of complaining about the sexism that allegedly put obstacles in the way of female politicians. Her focus on her own emotional discomfort at the Covid inquiry did more than any naysayers to indict the feminine style. How refreshing if either of these women could simply accept responsibility for their failures.

July 25, 2024

QotD: Why devolution has not worked in the United Kingdom

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Reading this Samizdata quote of the day got me thinking about why devolution in the UK has been a general disappointment and source of endless annoyance.

I remember when arguments were originally made for devolution, commentators would claim that devolution would work in the same way that the federal structure of the US works, or, for that matter, how the cantonal system works in Switzerland. By which they meant that if a state such as Zug in Switzerland or Wisconsin in the US tried a specific policy (encouraging cryptos, or enacting Workfare, to take two actual examples), that the perceived success or failure of these policies would be studied by other cantons and states. Hence the idea that devolution allows a sort of “laboratory experiment” of policy to take place. It creates a virtuous kind of competition. That’s the theory.

What seems to have happened is that since devolution in the UK, Scotland, Wales and to some extent, Northern Ireland, have competed with England in who can be the most statist, authoritarian and in general, be the biggest set of fools. Whether it is 20 mph speed limits spreading to many places and harsh lockdowns (Wales) or minimum pricing on booze and “snitching” on your own family for views about gender (Scotland), the Celtic fringe appears to be more interested in being more oppressive, rather than less. I cannot think of a single issue in which the devolved governments of the UK have been more liberal, and more respectful, of liberty under the rule of law. (Feel free to suggest where I am mistaken.)

One possible problem is that because the UK’s overall government holds considerable budgetary power, the devolved bits of the UK don’t face the consequences of feckless policy to the extent necessary to improve behaviour.

Even so, I don’t entirely know why the Scots and Welsh have taken this turn and I resist the temptation to engage in armchair culture guessing about why they tend to be more collectivist at present. It was not always thus. Wales has been a bastion of a kind of liberalism, fused to a certain degree with non-conformity in religion, and Scotland had both the non-conformist thing, and the whole “enlightment” (Smith, Hume, Ferguson, etc) element. At some point, however, that appears to have stopped. Wales became a hotbed of socialism in the 20th century, in part due to the rise of organised labour in heavy industry, and then the whole folklore – much of it sentimental bullshit – about the great achievements in healthcare of Nye Bevan. Scotland had its version of this, plus the resentments about Mrs Thatcher and the decline of Scotland as a manufacturing power.

[…]

Maybe the “test lab” force of devolution will play a part in demonstrating that, as and when we get a Labour government for the whole of the UK, it will be a shitshow on a scale to put what has happened in the Celtic parts of the UK in the shade.

Johnathan Pearce, “Why has devolution not worked in a liberal direction?”, Samizdata, 2024-04-23.

July 16, 2024

Britain’s Tories – “It is hard to think of any political Party that has so relentlessly thrown away its political mandate”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lorenzo Warby considers a few of the early lessons that can be drawn from the British general election results:

I dislike the term “the deep state”. It mystifies what is much more straightforward, even bland: how metastasising bureaucracy is undermining the resilience of Western societies and their political systems.

The British Labour Party has won a massive Parliamentary majority in the House of Commons even though its total votes fell: from 10,269,051 in 2019 — 32.1% of total votes — to 9,704,655 in 2024 — 33.7% of total votes. Labour’s massive Parliamentary majority is not a product of enthusiasm for Labour, but the fracturing of the votes of its opponents.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) vote fell dramatically — from 1,242,380 votes in 2019 to 724,758 in 2024. This was largely a casualty of the SNP embracing the genderwoo of Transactivism. Outside some narrow urban enclaves, no one votes for “woke” but, given a genuine opportunity, folk will vote against it. As Scots have.

The Liberal Democrats did very well, as they have a regionally concentrated vote — which, this time, they targeted properly — and disgruntled (posh) Shire Tories will protest vote Lib-Dem. Clearly, lots did.

The Tories did so badly because their already low vote was further reduced by the Reform vote surge. The Reform vote represented voters punishing the Tories for their failure to do anything they had promised. As political scientist Matt Goodwin puts it:

    They failed to control our borders.

    They failed to lower legal immigration.

    They failed to cut taxes and the size of the state.

    They failed to take on woke, exposing our children to ideas with no basis in science.

    And they failed to level-up the left behind regions.

It is hard to think of any political Party that has so relentlessly thrown away its political mandate.

So, an angry, unhappy electorate (rightfully) punished two governing Parties (Tories and SNP) and has given Labour a massive majority, with little enthusiasm — almost two-thirds of voters voted for someone else — on a relatively low turnout.

There is, however, a deeper institutional issue underlying these results. Why are voters so disgruntled? Why did the Tories fail so spectacularly?

The answer to these questions is a mixture of how institutions have evolved, the development of media culture, the Anywhere-Somewhere divide and technocratic delusions.

Technocratic delusion

The technocratic delusion is multi-layered. It holds that governing is a managerial input-output problem, government bureaucracy simply implements policy, and that politics is not a motivation and coordination problem.

None of these presumptions are true, so technocratic politics fails. It does not connect to voters and does not understand, or grapple with, the actual institutional landscape.

The technocratic delusion is a way for clever people to be spectacularly clueless. Not the only such mechanism in the modern world.

June 27, 2024

The Toronto Star wants Ontario to adopt Scottish booze regulation (but ignore the failure)

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Wine — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Toronto Star always loves a good moral crusade, and if it also happens to fly in the face of whatever Premier Ford wants to do, then so much the better:

The Toronto Star is looking to Scotland to teach it how to reduce alcohol-related deaths. In an article titled “How Scotland started to kick its alcohol problem — and what Ontario could learn from it“, it pushes back on plans to liberalise Ontario’s state monopoly on alcohol retail, saying:

    Ontario officials say they are fulfilling a 2018 election promise to increase “choice and convenience for shoppers and support Ontario retailers, domestic producers and workers in the alcohol industry”.

    But Scotland has cut alcohol-related hospital admissions by 40 per cent and deaths by almost half. While in Ontario, alcohol-related admissions have risen by a third and deaths by almost half, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction.

How did Scotland supposedly achieve this public health miracle?

    The key part of Scotland’s landmark policy was aimed at reducing drinking by introducing minimum unit prices to make drinking more expensive.,/p>

Ontario already has minimum pricing and Scotland doesn’t have a state alcohol monopoly, so it is not obvious what lessons Ontarians are supposed to be learning, but put that to one side for a moment and consider the main claim.

Anyone who has been following events in Scotland knows that alcohol-specific deaths have risen since minimum pricing was introduced in 2018 and have generally risen since 2012 following a significant downturn in the years prior.

It is that drop between 2006 and 2012 that the Toronto Star must be referring to when it claims that deaths fell by “almost half” (actually a third). But the Scottish government didn’t pass any anti-alcohol legislation in those six years and it certainly didn’t have minimum pricing. The newspaper mentions that the drink-drive limit was cut, but that didn’t happen until 2014 and the evidence is clear that it had no effect on road accidents.

Since the Toronto Star doesn’t mention when the decline in alcohol-specific deaths took place, it is leading its readers to believe that it coincided with the introduction of minimum pricing and the lowering of the drink-drive limit. I call that lying.

It is strangely fitting that Canadians are being lied to about the “success” of Scotland’s alcohol strategy since the Scottish public were conned into accepting minimum pricing, in part, on the basis of lies told about the “success” of minimum pricing in Canada. The neo-temperance academic Tim Stockwell, who is quoted in the Star article, published a series of studies in the 2010s making some absurd claims about minimum pricing that were parroted by campaigners in the UK.

April 22, 2024

QotD: Before England could rely on the “wooden walls” of the Royal Navy

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

… given this general lack of geographical knowledge, try to imagine embarking on a voyage of discovery. To an extent, you might rely on the skill and experience of your mariners. For England in the mid-sixteenth century, however, these would not have been all that useful. It’s strange to think of England as not having been a nation of seafarers, but this was very much the case. Its merchants in 1550 might hop across the channel to Calais or Antwerp, or else hug the coastline down to Bordeaux or Spain. A handful had ventured further, to the eastern Mediterranean, but that was about it. Few, if any, had experience of sailing the open ocean. Even trade across the North Sea or to the Baltic was largely unknown – it was dominated by the German merchants of the Hanseatic League. Nor would England have had much to draw upon in the way of more military, naval experience. The seas for England were a traditional highway for invaders, not a defensive moat. After all, it had a land border with Scotland to the north, as well as a land border with France to the south, around the major trading port of Calais. Rather than relying on the “wooden walls” of its ships, as it would in the decades to come, the two bulwarks in 1550 were the major land forts at Calais and Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Anton Howes, “The House of Trade”, Age of Invention, 2019-11-13.

April 19, 2024

Humza Yousuf, the “Thug King of Scotland”

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

I don’t know what Scotland did to deserve Humza Yousuf as their first minister, but it must have been really bad:

Not what you were hoping for.

Assuming he doesn’t get removed by a leadership coup before voters sink the leaking Tory battleship, Sunak will be gone by January of 2025 at the latest. That just leaves Humza Yousuf, characterized by Morgoth as The Thug King of Scotland: a post-ideological, apolitical opportunist interested purely in power for its own sake and quite happy to use the absurd public morality of the despised rubes that he rules over to keep the wretches in their place.

And boy, does he despise them.

Yousuf first came to the Internet’s attention in 2020, when he was filmed ranting in the Scottish parliament about how disgustingly racist it was that most of the high public offices in a country with an overwhelmingly White population were occupied by presumptively racist White cavebeasts:

    The Lord President is white, the Lord Justice Clerk is white, every High Court judge is white, the Lord Advocate is white, the Solicitor General is white, the chief constable is white, every deputy chief constable is white, every assistant chief constable is white, the head of the Law Society is white, the head of the Faculty of Advocates is white and every prison governor is white.

    That is not the case only in justice. The chief medical officer is white, the chief nursing officer is white, the chief veterinary officer is white, the chief social work adviser is whiteand almost every trade union in the country is headed by white people. In the Scottish Government, every director general is white. Every chair of every public body is white. That is not good enough.

If you haven’t watched the video, you should. You need to hear the contempt dripping off of his tongue, the way he spits out the awful word “White” like bitter venom.

In the immediate aftermath of this angry foreigner’s tirade, a sane country would have immediately marched their ill-mannered guest out of parliament, stripped him of office and citizenship, thrown him on a rusty fishing vessel, hauled him up north of the Orkneys, tossed him into the North Sea wearing nothing but a life preserver, and sent him on his way with a cheery wave and a reminder to mind the orcas.

Instead, they gave him the keys to the kingdom.

But while the infamous White Speech might not have prevented his elevation to the highest office in the land – indeed, given the derangement of our elites, if anything it smoothed his ascent – it has come back to haunt him. Thin-skinned and insecure as he is, Yousuf’s first priority on taking office was to ram through a new hate speech law with which to prevent the contemptible White worms from critiquing him or his noble tribe of vape-shop owners, cabbies, and grooming gang pimps. The law was ridiculously broad and invasive: one could be reported for the criminal offence of hate speech merely for making a remark in the privacy of one’s home, around the dinner table, with no one present but one’s kith and kin.

The day that the bill was finally forced through the Scottish parliament, and predictably enough for anyone who glanced at the law and had a passing understanding of the Scottish national character, the Scottish people responded by DDoSing the police with a deluge of hate crime reports, a very large number of which were reporting Yousuf’s rant as a hate crime … which, apparently, under the strict interpretation of the new law, it certainly was, with the only thing standing between Yousuf and indictment under his own half-baked law being that his ill-considered harangue took place prior to the law being passed. Which hasn’t stopped the Scots from taking the piss and continuing to report him.

It turns out that the Scots really do not like a ban on bantz, not one bit, and respond to demands that they cease the bantz by cranking up the bantz. Yousuf, being a humourless Pakistani who is confused and angered by this entirely foreseeable reaction, has risen to the occasion with all the grace, poise, and wit you would expect. In an attempt to stem the savage tide of mockery, Yousuf has tried claiming that reporting his hate speech is hate speech (lulz); has ordered Scottish police to read verbatim a prewritten transcript defending him each time his hate speech is thrown back at him (because that doesn’t look ridiculous); and faked a hate crime against himself by having his house sprayed with graffiti (did anyone fall for this?).

The next Scottish general election is two years away. Whether Humza survives the interim as First Minister, and if so whether he is able to guide the “Scottish” “National” Party to victory, remains to be seen. I don’t fancy his chances. He is a cunning and ruthless brute, to be sure. But he is also clumsy, clueless, and very stupid. Yousuf’s popularity has already plummeted. I’m sure he can find ways to plummet further. I believe in you, Yousuf. You can do it!

April 8, 2024

“At the time of writing, the Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf edges J. K. Rowling in the battle for the inaugural title of Scotland’s Most Hateful Person”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage updates us on the mental gymnastics required to navigate Scotland’s new hate crime law:

To the surprise of many terminally online folks, J.K. Rowling is not the top offender under Scotland’s new hate crime law. That “honour” goes to Scotland’s current first minister, Humza Yousaf for a speech delivered several years ago.

One-third of the Scottish police are yet to receive any training on this sweeping new law. Amongst the rank-and-file, the spectre of threatening and abusive material seeping out of public performances such as plays creeps like sarin gas. Such forbidden filth threatens to mutate ordinary Scots into far-right zombies, parroting Andrew Tate’s pitiful jock philosophy.

Police have absorbed over 4,000 reports of hate crimes in the first 48 hours. Mercifully, many Scots are still evidently well-versed in the timeless Scottish art of taking the piss. At the time of writing, the Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf edges J. K. Rowling in the battle for the inaugural title of Scotland’s Most Hateful Person. Second prize, I believe, is a set of steak knives.

Not to worry, those coppers recently announced a new “proportional response strategy”. Police will no longer investigate crimes such as smashed windows, or run-of-the-mill thefts. This “new approach” to policing, which contravenes the very definition of policing, saves the rozzers 24,000 fewer investigations and 130,000 man-hours per year. That leaves plenty of time to investigate those unenlightened beings poxed with the false belief that women don’t have cocks.

Nobody has any idea what is going on. On the first day of the Scottish Unenlightenment, a Scottish National Party minister said J. K. Rowling’s gender-critical tweets could bring the coppers to her door.

On Twitter, J. K. Rowling had reeled off a string of photographs of trans people. She then called those biological men “men”.

Siobhian Brown, the SNP’s community safety minister, had claimed referring to a trans woman as a “he” would not break the new law. Later on, she said the police would decide whether such misgendering would count as a hate crime.

“It could be reported, and it could be investigated. Whether or not the police would think it was criminal is up to Police Scotland for that”, said Brown.

You could taste the acrid, small-town glee steaming from the repressive and literal minded. Rajan Barot, a former fraud prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, warned Rowling that her Twitter posts, many of which state that biological men are not and cannot become women, would most likely contravene the new law and advised her to delete them.

Police later confirmed the very rich and very visible author would not face prosecution for her stubborn grasp of biological reality — at least whilst the universe watched on in a state of unadulterated fremdschämen.

March 23, 2024

“At least they didn’t arrest the dog”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Andrew Doyle revisits the Nazi pug story as new Scottish blasphemy hate speech laws are about to come into force at the beginning of April:

If you’re deluded enough to suppose that human history works in a progressive linear fashion, the example of Scotland should swiftly change your mind. Once the home of the Enlightenment, the country has now veered into authoritarianism under the control of the SNP. The party’s new hate crime law will come into force on April Fools’ Day, and no-one in government is seemingly able to give examples of “crimes” that would be covered by this legislation that aren’t already criminal. When specifically asked on the BBC’s Newsnight whether “misgendering” would result in prosecution, SNP backbench Fulton MacGregor could only mutter: “Well, it depends on the circumstances”. How reassuring.

For all MacGregor’s “faith” that the law would be “properly” implemented, nonbelievers are right to be cautious. Vaguely worded legislation is bound to be exploited, and has been many times in the past. This is particularly the case when it comes to “hate speech”, a concept for which no adequate definition has ever been achieved. The best the Irish government could muster for their forthcoming hate crime bill is that hatred “means hatred”. In these times of slippery authoritarian wordplay, that’s about as specific as we can expect.

The Scottish police have claimed that they will not “target” comedians and actors under the new legislation, and yet at the same time have sworn to investigate every complaint. Thankfully, activists never make spurious complaints against their ideological opponents in the hope of seeing them silenced. Oh wait. They do. All the time.

[…]

So for all of the claims that our concerns about the new hate crime law are unfounded, and that the police would never prosecute anyone for a gag, we should remember that they already have. This legislation will simply make it easier for activists within and without the police force to weaponise the law against those deemed to be subversive. On the day of Meechan’s arrest, one police officer affirmed that he must be “an actual Nazi trying to inspire people to become Nazis”. The judge eventually agreed, in spite of the fact that after two years of investigation the police had uncovered no evidence of far-right sympathies.

Of course those who wish to criminalise dissent will not stop at comedians. They’ll also be keen to crack down on anyone who knows the difference between men and women and is willing to declare this esoteric knowledge out loud. Although it has become a cliché to cite George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in such circumstances, that is only because it is so apposite: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”.

I do not sincerely believe that the police will turn up at our Comedy Unleashed show next Monday. It seems unfathomable that we might see a kind of re-enactment of the closing scenes of The Blues Brothers, with police officers standing in the shadows of the club to monitor the show for heterodox content. But then, I would never have anticipated that in a free country someone who made a video mocking Nazis would end up with a criminal record. Of course our show will be offensive to those who choose to be offended. Such is the nature of comedy. The only way to avoid such a situation would be for the acts to stand on stage in total silence. And even then, someone might find this offensive to mutes.

March 6, 2024

You had me at “Cartchy tuns, exarserdray lollipops” and “a pasadise of sweet teats”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Charlie Stross checks in with a Willy Wonka-adjacent story from Glasgow that utterly failed to live up to the billing:

This is no longer in the current news cycle, but definitely needs to be filed under “stuff too insane for Charlie to make up”, or maybe “promising screwball comedy plot line to explore”, or even “perils of outsourcing creative media work to generative AI”.

So. Last weekend saw insane news-generating scenes in Glasgow around a public event aimed at children: Willy’s Chocolate Experience, a blatant attempt to cash in on Roald Dahl’s cautionary children’s tale, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Which is currently most prominently associated in the zeitgeist with a 2004 movie directed by Tim Burton, who probably needs no introduction, even to a cinematic illiterate like me. Although I gather a prequel movie (called, predictably, Wonka), came out in 2023.

(Because sooner or later the folks behind “House of Illuminati Ltd” will wise up and delete the website, here’s a handy link to how it looked on February 24th via archive.org.)

INDULGE IN A CHOCOLATE FANTASY LIKE NEVER BEFORE – CAPTURE THE ENCHANTMENT ™!

Tickets to Willys Chocolate Experience™ are on sale now!

The event was advertised with amazing, almost hallucinogenic, graphics that were clearly AI generated, and equally clearly not proofread because Stable Diffusion utterly sucks at writing English captions, as opposed to word salad offering enticements such as Catgacating • live performances • Cartchy tuns, exarserdray lollipops, a pasadise of sweet teats.* And tickets were on sale for a mere £35 per child!

Anyway, it hit the news (and not in a good way) and the event was terminated on day one after the police were called. Here’s The Guardian‘s coverage:

    The event publicity promised giant mushrooms, candy canes and chocolate fountains, along with special audio and visual effects, all narrated by dancing Oompa-Loompas — the tiny, orange men who power Wonka’s chocolate factory in the Roald Dahl book which inspired the prequel film.

    But instead, when eager families turned up to the address in Whiteinch, an industrial area of Glasgow, they discovered a sparsely decorated warehouse with a scattering of plastic props, a small bouncy castle and some backdrops pinned against the walls.

Anyway, since the near-riot and hasty shutdown of the event, things have … recomplicated? I think that’s the diplomatic way to phrase it.

February 18, 2024

QotD: British meals – sauces

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Here also we may mention the special sauces which are so regularly served with each kind of roast meat as to be almost an integral part of the dish. Hot roast beef is almost invariably served with horseradish sauce, a very hot, rather sweet sauce made of grated horseradish, sugar, vinegar and cream. With roast pork goes apple sauce, which is made of apples stewed with sugar and beaten up into a froth. With mutton or lamb there usually goes mint sauce, which is made of chopped mint, sugar and vinegar. Mutton is frequently eaten with redcurrant jelly, which is also served with hare and with venison. A roast fowl is always accompanied by bread sauce, which is made of the crumb of white bread and milk flavoured with onions, and is always served hot. It will be seen that British sauces have the tendency to be sweet, and some of the pickles that are eaten with cold meat are almost as sweet as jam. The British are great eaters of pickles, partly because the predilection for large joints means that in a British household there is a good deal of cold meat to finish up. In using up scraps of food they are not so imaginative as the peoples of some other countries, and British stews and “made-up dishes” – rissoles and the like – are not particularly distinguished. There are, however, two or three kinds of pie or meat-pudding which are peculiar to Britain and are good enough to be worth mentioning. One is steak-and-kidney pudding, which is made of chopped beef-steak and sheep’s kidney, encased in suet crust and steamed in a basin. Another is toad-in-the-hole, which is made of sausage embedded in a batter of milk, flour and eggs basked in the oven. There is also the humble cottage pie, which is simply minced beef or mutton, flavoured with onions, covered with a layer of mashed potatoes and baked until the potatoes are a nice brown. And finally there is the famous Scottish haggis, in which liver, oatmeal, onions and other ingredients are minced up and cooked inside the stomach of a sheep.

George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)

November 9, 2023

Defending a stateless society: the Estonian way

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Friedman responded to a criticism of his views from Brad DeLong. Unfortunately, the criticism was written about a decade before David saw it, so he posted his response on his own Substack instead:

English version of the Estonian Defence League’s home page as of 2023-11-08.
https://www.kaitseliit.ee/en

Back in 2013 I came across a piece by Brad DeLong critical of my views. It argued that there were good reasons why anarcho-capitalist ideas did not appear until the nineteenth century, reasons illustrated by how badly a stateless society had worked in the Highlands of Scotland in the 17th century. I wrote a response and posted it to his blog, then waited for it to appear.

I eventually discovered what I should have realized earlier — that his post had been made nine years earlier. It is not surprising that my comment did not appear. The issues are no less interesting now than they were then, so here is my response:

Your argument rejecting a stateless order on the evidence of the Scottish Highlands is no more convincing than would be a similar argument claiming that Nazi Germany or Pol Pot’s Cambodia shows how bad a society where law is enforced by the state must be. The existence of societies without state law enforcement that work badly — I do not know enough about the Scottish Highlands to judge how accurate your account is — is no more evidence against anarchy than the existence of societies with state law enforcement that work badly is against the alternative to anarchy.

To make your case, you have to show that societies without state law enforcement have consistently worked worse than otherwise similar societies with it. For a little evidence against that claim I offer the contrast between Iceland and Norway in the tenth and eleventh centuries or northern Somalia pre-1960 when, despite some intervention by the British, it was in essence a stateless society, and the situation in the same areas after the British and Italians set up the nation of Somalia, imposing a nation state on a stateless society. You can find short accounts of both those cases, as well as references and a more general discussion of historical feud societies, in my Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. A late draft is webbed.

So far as the claim that the idea of societies where law enforcement is private is a recent invention, that is almost the opposite of the truth. The nation state as we know it today is a relatively recent development. For historical evidence, I recommend Seeing Like a State by James Scott, who offers a perceptive account of the ways in which societies had to be changed in order that states could rule them.

As best I can tell, most existing legal systems developed out of systems where law enforcement was private — whether, as you would presumably argue, improving on those systems or not is hard to tell. That is clearly true of, at least, Anglo-American common law, Jewish law and Islamic law, and I think Roman law as well. For details again see my book.

In which context, I am curious as to whether you regard yourself as a believer in the Whig theory of history, which views it as a story of continual progress, implying that “institutions A were replaced by institutions B” can be taken as clear evidence of the superiority of the latter.

And From the Real World

In chapter 56 of the third edition of The Machinery of Freedom I discussed how a stateless society might defend against an aggressive state, which I regard as the hardest problem for such a society. One of the possibilities I raise is having people voluntarily train and equip themselves for warfare for the fun (and patriotism) of it, as people now engage in paintball, medieval combat in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and various other military hobbies.

A correspondent sent me a real world example of that approach — the Estonian Defense League, civilian volunteers trained in the skills of insurgency. They refer to it as “military sport”. Competitions almost every week.

Estonia’s army of 6000 would not have much chance against a Russian invasion but the Estonians believe, with the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan in mind, that a large number of trained and armed insurgents could make an invasion expensive. The underlying principle, reflected in a Poul Anderson science fiction story1 and one of my small collection of economics jokes,2 is that to stop someone from doing something you do not have to make it impossible, just unprofitable. You can leverage his rationality.

Estonia has a population of 1.3 million. The league has 16,000 volunteers. Scale the number up to the population of the U.S. and you get a militia of about four million, roughly twice the manpower of the U.S. armed forces, active and reserve combined. The League is considered within the area of government of the Ministry of Defense, which presumably provides its weaponry; in an anarchist equivalent the volunteers would have to provide their own or get them by voluntary donation. But the largest cost, the labor, would be free.

Switzerland has a much larger military, staffed by universal compulsory service, but there are also private military associations that conduct voluntary training in between required military drills. Members pay a small fee that helps fund the association and use their issued arms and equipment for the drills.

    1. The story is “Margin of Profit“. I discuss it in an essay for a work in progress, a book or web page containing works of short literature with interesting economics in them.

    2. Two men encountered a hungry bear. One turned to run. “It’s hopeless,” the other told him, “you can’t outrun a bear.” “No,” he replied, “But I might be able to outrun you.”

October 14, 2023

A Jacobite spy for Bonnie Prince Charlie

Filed under: Britain, Business, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes talks about the career of John Holker of Manchester, cloth manufacturer, who joined the army of Prince Charles Edward Stewart in 1745, and eventually became an expert in industrial espionage:

Prince Charles Edward Stuart, 1720 – 1788. Eldest Son of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart.
Portrait by Allan Ramsay, National Galleries Scotland via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve lately been reading about one of history’s greatest spies — not a James Bond-like agent with licence to kill, but a master of industrial espionage, John Holker.1

Holker was originally from Manchester, in Lancashire, where he was a skilled cloth manufacturer in the early eighteenth century, his specialty being calendering — a finishing process to give cloth a kind of sheen or glazed effect. But Holker was also a Catholic and a Jacobite — a believer in the claim of the Catholic descendants of the deposed king James II to be the rightful rulers of Great Britain, instead of the Hanoverian George I and George II who had only succeeded to the throne because they were Protestants. In 1745 James II’s grandson Charles, also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie — likely the “Bonnie” who lies over the ocean in the famous song — landed in the Scottish Highlands and raised the royal standard. Charles’s uprising defeated the British troops stationed in Scotland, captured Edinburgh, and then marched down the west coast of England, capturing Carlisle and entering Lancashire.

To Holker, who had been born in the same year as the last Jacobite rebellion in 1719, the arrival of Charles in Manchester must have seemed like a once-in-a-generation opportunity. He and his business partner instantly joined Charles’s troops and he was appointed a lieutenant. But Manchester was the last place to provide many eager volunteers for the uprising, and when Charles reached Derby he lost heart and turned around. Holker and his business partner ended up being left to garrison Carlisle as Charles and his force retreated into Scotland to hunker down, and they were soon captured by the British troops sent to quash the uprising. They were then, as officers, sent to Newgate prison in London to sit with their legs bound in irons and await trial and certain execution.

But they never made it to trial. In the first demonstration of Holker’s extraordinary talent for espionage, they escaped. Holker had been allowed visitors in prison, so had drawn on London’s crypto-Jacobite circle to smuggle in files, ropes, and information about the prison and its surroundings. They managed to file through the leg-irons and window bars, climbed up the gutters onto the prison roof, and then used planks from the cell’s tabletop to cross onto the roof of a nearby house. In the event, they disturbed a dog guarding the house, and so Holker hid in a water-butt and became separated from the others. He eventually found refuge at a crypto-Jacobite’s house, then escaped into the countryside before managing to make his way to France.

In France, Holker joined his fellow veterans of the failed uprising of ‘45, becoming a lieutenant in a Jacobite regiment of the French army. He fought for the French in the Austrian Netherlands — present-day Belgium — against the Hapsburgs, the Hanoverians, the Dutch, and the British. Even more extraordinary, however, was that when Bonnie Prince Charlie wanted to go in secret to England in 1750, it was Holker who went with him as his sole companion and guide. Although Charles failed to persuade his supporters in England to rise up in rebellion on their own, Holker managed to get the prince secretly and safely to London and back.

By the time Holker reached his early thirties he had been an industrialist, rebel, prisoner, fugitive, soldier, undercover agent, and even spy-catcher: he successfully identified a spy for the British in Charles’s circle, even if Charles failed to heed his warning. But in 1751 Holker’s career took yet another turn when he was recruited by the French government as an industrial spymaster.

Holker’s chief task was to steal British textile technologies.

    1. Unless otherwise stated, I’ve drawn much of my information on Holker and the industries that the French attempted to copy from John R. Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer: Britain and France in the 18th Century (Taylor & Francis, 2017), particularly chapter 3.

October 8, 2023

Richard Blair’s memories of his father, George Orwell

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

Jonathon Van Maren contacted Richard Horatio Blair, the adopted son of George Orwell to discuss his memories of his famous father:

“My story starts on the 14th of May, 1944, when I was adopted by Eric Arthur Blair and his wife Eileen,” he told me. “This was during the Second World War. He’d been wanting a child for several years because he felt, rightly or wrongly, that he was unable to have children himself. I think this was compounded slightly by the fact that Eileen — my mother — was not very well herself, and in fact when I was ten months old, in March of 1945, she went to the hospital in Newcastle, which was the area where she was born and had gone to school. She went into a nursing home and died very soon after being anesthetized to have a hysterectomy. She probably had cancer, was very anemic, and simply had a heart attack on the operating table and died.”

The adoption had come about when Eileen was told by her sister-in-law, Dr. Gwen Shaughnessy, that she knew of a pregnant woman whose husband was off fighting. Orwell and Eileen adopted Richard when he was only three weeks old, and Orwell ensured that he alone would be known as Richard’s father by burning the names of the birth parents from the birth certificate with a cigarette. Richard would never know Eileen, as she died a mere nine months after the adoption took place, leaving the little boy and Orwell to fend for themselves. Some of Orwell’s friends suggested that perhaps he turn Richard over to someone else, but Orwell was having none of it. “I’ve got my son now, I’m not going to give him over,” Blair recalled. Blair even remembers Orwell “changing my nappy and feeding me after my mother died.”

“Meanwhile, my father had been asked to go to Germany at the end of the war by his friend, a gentleman by the name of David Astor of the Astor family,” Blair told me.

    He was the proprietor of a newspaper called The Observer, and he asked my father — they had met during the war and become friends — to go to Germany after the war to observe what was happening, and it was while he was in Paris that he got a telegram telling him that Eileen, my mother, had died. He had to rush back and attend to the funeral and funeral arrangements. He decided the best thing he could do would be to go back to Germany and continue his war report, so that’s what he did. I was placed in the hands of relatives and friends to be looked after. I was cared for from that period onward by a nanny.

    In 1946, he had decided to give up his reviews and extra work, because by now he had published his first major book, Animal Farm, which gave him enough resources to think about what to do next. And he had in his mind by then that he wanted to write what turned out to be 1984, and he decided to take the invitation of his friend David Astor to go to a remote island off the west coast of Scotland called Jura. He went up for a holiday and spent a couple of weeks there in the early part of 1946, came back, and announced that he would like to move out of London to this island of Jura and rent a farmhouse called Barnhill. A few weeks later I joined him with my nanny at the farmhouse, a place he had indicated to a friend was a very ‘un-get-at-able’ place.

Indeed it was. To reach the remote Hebridean island from London, “you had to take a train and several ferries, and then a taxi from the top part of the island, and then for the last five miles you had to walk,” Blair recalled. At first, it was Richard, Orwell, and his nanny, Susie Watson. This didn’t last long: Watson clashed with Orwell’s younger sister Avril and returned to London. “From that point on,” Blair told me, “I was cared for by my father’s sister Avril, and that continued well past when he died in 1950.” In the meantime, Blair still had a few precious years with his ailing father, who was trying to balance his fear of passing on his tuberculosis to his son with wanting to be an involved father. “He was really hands-on in a way that was really unusual for that era,” Blair told one interviewer.

In fact, he was so hands-on that he even worried about Richard’s television consumption, which is perhaps not surprising from someone who was so concerned about how people absorbed information — but Richard was, at this point, a very small child. “As a father he was completely devoted to me,” Blair told me. “He was terribly worried about my emotional development simply because he had TV, and he was very concerned that the views [on TV] might be passed on to me.” Blair still bears a scar on his temple from balancing on a chair while “watching him make a wooden toy for me”. He fell off the chair, cracked his head, and was bustled down to the village for a few stitches in the enormous gash on his forehead. “There’s a groove in the bone,” he ruefully told one interviewer. But there were no tests in those days, and so his head was sewn shut and he was sent back home again.

August 5, 2023

The Anglo-Scottish “Debatable Lands”

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

In the visible portion of this post on the history of the Debatable Lands, Ed West considers the differences between national heartlands and the borders:

Border regions tend to be different, something I thought about during the summer before Brexit when we underwent a mammoth trip across five of those six countries (we never got around to Luxembourg, for which apologies). The journey from Alsace to Baden-Württemberg, or Liguria to Provence, brings home how nationality is often a matter of gradations and unnatural boundaries imposed on the whims of bureaucrats in distant capitals – often more alien than supposed foreigners across the border.

But once you leave that tunnel, things are different; there is no ambiguity between Calais and Dover, only ocean. You’re either in England or France. The same is not true of England’s northern frontier, Britain’s great zone of ambiguity, and in particular the area between Carlisle and Langholm which has historically been known as the “Debatable Land” – the subject of Graham Robb’s book.

Robb, an Anglo-Scot who mostly writes about France, moved back to this part of Britain in the 2010s, and describes it with his characteristic style of history, personal narrative and social commentary.

The border people are a unique subset of the English nation, being the last to undergo the pacification of government. Until the Union of Crowns in 1603, the region’s unusual position outside the orbit of either London and Edinburgh helped create a culture that was clannish and marked by violent feuds and cattle rustling.

Among the notorious Borderer clans were the Scotts, Burns and Irvines north of the border, and Fenwicks, Millburns, Charltons and Musgraves on the English side, while some could be found on both, among them the Halls, Nixons and Grahams. Many of these clans were outlaws and some were lawmen; others were both or either, depending on circumstances.

This proto-Wild West produced many characters, and among the famous border reivers of legend were men such as Archie Fire-the-Braes, Buggerback, Davy the Lady, Jok Pott the Bastard, Wynkyng Will, Nebless [noseless] Clem, Fingerless Well and Dog Dyntle [penis] Elliot.

“Debatable Land” most likely comes from batten, common land where livestock could be pastured, and it was this pastoral economy which shaped their psychology: the importance of honour, and a reputation for violence and revenge, as a deterrent against predators.

Violence was so common on the border that there sprung a tradition whereby truces were arranged in return for “blackmail”, a tribute to border chiefs, from the Middle English male, tribute; only in the nineteenth century did this come to mean any sort of extortion.

Another of the Borderers’ contributions to our language is “bereaved”, which is how you felt after the reivers had raided your land (it usually meant to have lost property rather than a loved one). Other local terms were less successful in spreading, such as “scumfishing”, which meant “surrounding a pele tower with a smouldering heap of damp straw and smoking out its inhabitants”, as Robb put it.

Border folk relied heavily on the protection of their clan, and so “for a reiver, the greatest disgrace was not excommunication but ostracism: if a man failed to keep his word, one of his gloves or a picture of his face was stuck on the end of a spear or a sword and paraded around at public meetings. This ‘bauchling’ was considered a punishment worse than death.”

Both the kings of England and Scotland regarded them as a nuisance. In 1525, the Archbishop of Glasgow excommunicated the reivers en masse; Parliamentary decrees issued by authorities in England and Scotland between 1537 and 1551 stated that “all Englishmen and Scottishmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy, all and every such person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock … without any redress to be made for same”.

In the 1580s the border area remained “verie ticklie and dangerous”. One adviser even urged Elizabeth I to build another Roman wall because he believed the “Romaynes” had built theirs to defend themselves “from the dayly and daungereous incurtyons of the valyaunte barbarous Scottyshe nation”.

June 11, 2023

Minimum alcohol pricing fails utterly in reducing “problem” drinking, but it’s aces for padding the state’s coffers

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Christopher Snowden counts coup on Scotland’s utterly failed “minimum pricing model” for alcohol which has cost Scots additional hundreds of millions of pounds for no discernable improvement in any measurable:

This study was published yesterday and got no attention whatsoever from the media despite it being written by a team in Sheffield who used to get blanket coverage for their every pronouncement. What changed? Well, they used to produce models showing that minimum alcohol pricing would work and now they’ve produced a study showing that their model didn’t work.

    The results above suggest the introduction of MUP in Scotland did not lead to a decline in the proportion of adult drinkers consuming alcohol at harmful levels. It also did not lead to any change in the types of alcoholic beverage consumed by this group, their drinking patterns, the extent to which they consumed alcohol while on their own or the prevalence of harmful drinking in key subgroups.

Oof! So much for the “exquisitely targeted” policy of minimum pricing being an “almost perfect alcohol policy because it targets cheap booze bought by very heavy drinkers“.

After building your entire reputation on modelling minimum pricing, it must have been painful for them to write this …

    … the lack of evidence for a decline in the prevalence of harmful drinking arising from MUP is contrary to model-based evidence that informed the introduction of the policy.

Hey-ho. I guess the model was garbage, as I said from the start. Never mind. It’s only cost drinkers in Scotland a few hundred million pounds. Will the Supreme Court be taking another look at that court case that was won off the back of an incorrect model?

    The lack of change in the prevalence of harmful drinking may arise for several reasons. First, people drinking at harmful levels may be less responsive to price changes than lighter drinkers.

You don’t say! If only someone had mentioned this earlier!

    Previous qualitative research and studies of purchasing behaviour among people with alcohol dependence (i.e. a group that comprises approximately 20% of those drinking harmfully in the United Kingdom and thus 1% of the overall population) supports this view. However, the very large price increases imposed by MUP on people drinking harmfully, their inability to switch to cheaper products and clear evidence of successful policy implementation and compliance, mean their price responsiveness would need to be extremely low to negate any impact on consumption.

But it is extremely low! I explained this over a decade ago when I took the model to task for making the plainly daft assumption that heavy drinkers are more price sensitive than moderate drinkers. I wrote:

    “The model assumes that minimum pricing will have more effect on the consumption patterns of heavy drinkers than on moderate drinkers because heavy drinkers are more price-sensitive. This is a convenient belief since it is heavy drinkers who cause and suffer the most alcohol-related harm, but can we really assume that someone with an alcohol dependency is more likely to be deterred by price rises than a more casual consumer? The SAPM model says that they are, and yet there is ample evidence to support the common sense view that heavy drinkers and alcoholics are less price-sensitive than the general population (eg. Gallet, 2007; Wagenaar, 2009). Indeed, research has shown that price elasticity for the heaviest drinkers is ‘not significantly different from zero’ — they will, in other words, purchase alcohol at almost any cost.”

You don’t need an encyclopaedic knowledge of the price elasticity literature to work this out. For most people, it falls under the umbrella of the bleeding obvious. Here we are 11 years later and the penny still hasn’t quite dropped at Sheffield, but we’re getting closer.

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