seangabb
Published 22 Oct 2021The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from the Western Roman Empire. It is the political entity within which the Christian faith was born, and the growth of the Church within the Empire, and its eventual establishment as the sole faith of the Empire, have left an indelible impression on all modern denominations. Its history, together with that of the ancient Greeks and the Jews, is our history. To understand how the Empire emerged from a great though finally dysfunctional republic, and how it was consolidated by its early rulers, is partly how we understand ourselves.
Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the achievement of the early Emperors. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.
More by Sean Gabb on the Ancient World: https://www.classicstuition.co.uk/
Learn Latin or Greek or both with him: https://www.udemy.com/user/sean-gabb/
His historical novels (under the pen name “Richard Blake”): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Blak…
June 18, 2022
The Early Emperors – Part 3: Tiberius, A Safe Pair of Hands
June 15, 2022
“Privacy” seems to be an archaic concept that doesn’t matter to the Canadian government
Michael Geist wonders why the Canadian government doesn’t seem to care at all about the privacy of Canadians:
Over the past several weeks, there have been several important privacy developments in Canada including troubling privacy practices at well-known organizations such as the CBC and Tim Hortons, a call from business organizations for privacy reform, the nomination of a new privacy commissioner with little privacy experience, and a decision by a Senate committee to effectively overrule the government on border privacy rules. These developments raise the puzzling question of why the federal government – led by Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, and Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez – are so indifferent to privacy, at best treating it as a low priority issue and at worst proposing dangerous measures or seemingly hoping to cash in on weak privacy laws in order to fund other policy priorities.
The privacy alarm bells have been ringing for weeks. For example, the Globe and Mail recently featured an important story on children’s privacy, working with Human Rights Watch and other media organizations to examine the privacy practices of dozens of online education platforms. The preliminary data suggests some major concerns in Canada, most notably with the CBC, whose CBC Kids platform is said to be “one of the most egregious cases in Canada and really all around the world”. The CBC responded that it “complies with relevant Canadian laws and regulations with regard to online privacy, and follows industry practices in audience analytics and privacy protection”. Yet that is the problem: Canada’s privacy laws are universally regarded as outdated and weak, thereby enabling privacy invasive practices with no consequences. Soon after, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada released findings in an investigation involving the Tim Hortons app tracking location data. First identified by then-National Post reporter James McLeod, the commissioner found privacy violations, yet Canadian privacy law does not include penalties for these violations.
Despite the obvious need for privacy reform – outgoing Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien reiterated the necessity for reform in his final speech as commissioner and business groups have made a similar call for privacy reform – the government seems indifferent to the issue. The nomination of Philippe Dufresne as the new privacy commissioner is a case in point. I don’t know Mr. Dufresne and I’m hoping that he proves to be a great commissioner. He certainly said many of the right things in his appearance before committee yesterday. However, the government’s choice is instructive. In choosing someone with no obvious privacy experience, the government sided instead with government managerial experience. Good managerial experience is valuable, but a career spent within government is not a training ground for pushing the policy envelope, pressuring governments to reform the law, and demanding that the private sector comply with it. The Dufresne choice signals that the government may be more comfortable with a well-managed agent of Parliament than with an agent of change.
June 10, 2022
The Early Roman Emperors – Part 1: Augustus
seangabb
Published 26 Sep 2021The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from the Western Roman Empire. It is the political entity within which the Christian faith was born, and the growth of the Church within the Empire, and its eventual establishment as the sole faith of the Empire, have left an indelible impression on all modern denominations. Its history, together with that of the ancient Greeks and the Jews, is our history. To understand how the Empire emerged from a great though finally dysfunctional republic, and how it was consolidated by its early rulers, is partly how we understand ourselves.
Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the achievement of the early Emperors. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.
More by Sean Gabb on the Ancient World: https://www.classicstuition.co.uk/
Learn Latin or Greek or both with him: https://www.udemy.com/user/sean-gabb/
His historical novels (under the pen name “Richard Blake”): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Blak…
May 21, 2022
April 18, 2022
Republic to Empire: The Augustan Settlement
seangabb
Published 23 Mar 2021Here is the tenth lecture, which covers the Augustan Settlement and the ending of the Roman Republic. Discussion includes: the Constitutional Settlements, graphical representations of the old and new Roman Constitutions; opinions in Rome and the provinces of the new order; the legitimisation propaganda; the general success of the reign of Augustus.
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April 11, 2022
Republic to Empire: The Ides of March to Actium
seangabb
Published 13 Mar 2021In 120 BC, Rome was a republic with touches of democracy. A century later, it was a divine right military dictatorship. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
(more…)
April 7, 2022
Republic to Empire: The Triumph of Caesar
seangabb
Published 5 Mar 2021In 120 BC, Rome was a republic with touches of democracy. A century later, it was a divine right military dictatorship. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
(more…)
March 26, 2022
History of Rome in 15 Buildings 02. The Rostra
toldinstone
Published 2 Oct 2018This second episode of our History of Rome presents the Rostra, the speaking platform in the Roman Forum, as a key to understanding the turbulent world of the Late Republic. It focuses on the career of Cicero, Rome’s greatest orator, who was successively applauded and impaled on the Rostra.
If you enjoyed this video, you might be interested in my forthcoming book Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants: Frequently Asked Questions about the Ancient Greeks and Romans.
You can find a preview of the book here:
https://toldinstone.com/naked-statues…
If you’re so inclined, you can follow me elsewhere on the web:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…
https://www.instagram.com/toldinstone/To see the story and photo essay associated with this video, go to:
https://toldinstone.com/the-rostra/
Thanks for watching!
March 21, 2022
Republic to Empire: Sulla A Failed Reaction
seangabb
Published 10 Feb 2021In 120 BC, Rome was a republic with touches of democracy. A century later, it was a divine right military dictatorship. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
(more…)
February 28, 2022
Roman Republic to Empire 03 Inequality and Corruption
seangabb
Published 5 Feb 2021[Update 2023-03-02 – Dr. Gabb took down the original posts and re-uploaded them.]
Here is the third lecture, which describes the decay of the Roman Constitution as a result of changes in patterns of land tenure in Italy after the Second Punic War, and as a result of the flood of foreign money into Rome from military victories and war indemnities and bribes.
(more…)
February 24, 2022
I guess the “emergency” is technically over, question mark?
My original headline for this piece was
I can’t believe I’m writing this, but we need to depend on Canada’s Senate to turn down Trudeau’s Emergencies Act
Fortunately, perhaps because Mr. Trudeau realized he might lose the vote in the Senate, he announced earlier today that the government will relinquish the powers granted under the Emergencies Act. The province of Ontario is also rescinding the state of emergency. This makes much of what follows less immediately relevant, but I’m too lazy to delete it I feel it still has some informational value to offer:
I’ve never had much faith in our Senate — and given that most Prime Ministerial appointments to the upper house are given as rewards to former political backroom organizers, bagmen, and the occasional prominent citizen, the role of the Senate in daily life is virtually nil. Now, thanks to a provision of the Emergencies Act, our last chance of prying the undemocratic emergency powers Trudeau has claimed is to have the Senate vote against the use of the act. This is not how the upper house normally operates.
Even as it enables the government to take such far-reaching actions, the Emergencies Act provides safeguards against abuse. One such safety valve is that the government’s declaration of an emergency has to be approved, in short order, by both the House of Commons and the Senate in order to continue in force. In the Act’s words, “If a motion for confirmation of a declaration of emergency is negatived by either House of Parliament, the declaration, to the extent that it has not previously expired or been revoked, is revoked effective on the day of the negative vote.”
The House of Commons approved the motion to confirm the government’s declaration of emergency on Monday. It is up to the Senate to consider it now. And so, it may be useful to review the principles that govern the role of this much misunderstood and often maligned institution.
The Senate is not a deus ex machina that can rescue us from bad government. The suggestion, put forward by some of the “freedom convoy” leaders, that a constitutional chimera made up of the Senate and the governor general could oust the federal government and redress whatever grievances they came to air was arrant nonsense. For the most part, the Senate’s role in the government of Canada is very limited, and rightly so.
Senators are not elected and, as a result, lack the legitimacy to oppose the will of the House of Commons, whose members (the MPs) are, and the cabinet, led by the prime minister, which is responsible to the House of Commons. When the cabinet proposes that a law should be enacted, and the House of Commons agrees, constitutional propriety (a “constitutional convention”, in the jargon) dictates that the Senate’s role is limited to, at most, making suggestions for improving this law while respecting its general principle.
[…]
Will the Senate act independently? I do not know; I am just a boring law professor, and this question is above my pay grade. But I would like to conclude with an observation about how either answer to this question should make us reflect on the attitude the current prime minister and his predecessor have taken to the Senate.
If the Senate defeats Mr. Trudeau’s government, it will be in part because he cut his ties with what used to be the Liberal caucus there, releasing existing Liberal senators and new appointees to act with greater independence (though, in fairness, senators were always somewhat more independent-minded than MPs; not having to get re-elected does that to one). What may have seen a cost-free symbolic gesture might yet turn out to have been quite consequential.
Conversely, if the Senate ends up siding with the government, this will in part be because there are fewer Conservative senators than one might have expected. The reason for that is that Stephen Harper simply stopped appointing senators, in a fit of pique over the failure of Senate reform plans. That was a dereliction of constitutional duty ― the prime minister must fill Senate vacancies as they arise. And now, if not Mr. Harper himself, then at least many of his erstwhile supporters may come to regret that he did not.
February 6, 2022
QotD: Marcus Tullius Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of the most gifted and successful politicians of his day. Unlike nearly all of his peers in the Roman Senate, his family had not been in Roman politics for generations on generations, but rather was new to it. Cicero’s family was a wealthy one, but hailed from the town of Arpinum, about 60 miles from Rome, making Cicero an outsider to elite Roman politics. He made his name as a legal advocate, rather than (in more typical Roman fashion) as a military man. He was the first of his family to enter the Roman Senate (making him a novus homo or “new man”) and was the first such new man to rise all the way to the consulship (the highest Roman office) in thirty years, which should give some sense of the magnitude of that achievement. Moreover, Cicero had managed to get elected in the first year he was eligible, which would have been a banner achievement even for a member of Rome’s traditional upper-class. During that consulship (63 B.C.), he further distinguished himself by foiling a planned coup centered around the influential figure of Catiline (L. Sergius Catilina).
Cicero was a key politician in the Late Republic, but it was his misfortune that his life was spent in an era where words meant less than weapons. He sided with Pompey against Caesar, but was granted clemency after Pompey’s defeat. He was not involved in Caesar’s assassination – he was still too much an outsider for some of the stuck-up Roman elitists who made up the conspiracy (though he correctly pointed out at the time that leaving Antony alive would be a fatal mistake). In the aftermath of the assassination, he identified (correctly) Antony as the key threat to the Republic and worked to discredit him politically in a devastating series of speeches named the Philippics (in honor of a similar set of speeches made by the Athenian Demosthenes against Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander). Cicero’s political assault on Antony succeeded – his reputation was ruined and his popularity in Rome never recovered – but it cost Cicero his life when Antony, in league with Octavian, moved into the capital and had Cicero murdered. Cicero’s literary legacy survived him, however, in part because it was useful for Augustus’ own political ends (e.g. Plut. Cic. 49.5-6).
Cicero’s position as the most eloquent orator of the Latin language – and probably its best prose stylist – is largely uncontested. It was his speaking skills – honed in the courts – that made him so politically successful. He was also a prolific writer and a tremendous amount of his writings survive, including both legal and political speeches, private letters, handbooks on oratory, and a set of philosophical works. As anyone who has read Cicero can tell you, he also has a deserved reputation for pride and self-aggrandizement. While many of Cicero’s contemporaries and readers down to the modern era have been impressed by Cicero’s thinking and eloquence, I feel confident in asserting no one – alive or dead – will ever be more impressed by Cicero than Cicero was impressed by himself.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: A Trip Through Cicero (Natural Law)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-12-12.
February 2, 2022
Neil Young revives the PMRC
Jim Treacher invites you on a trip down memory lane to a time when musicians like Neil Young were [gasp!] against censorship:
If you’re Generation X or older, you might be getting flashbacks over this whole “Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan & Spotify” contretemps. On one side, we’ve got a popular public figure who’s expressing his thoughts and opinions, just as America’s Founding Fathers told us we get to do. On the other side, we’ve got a bunch of miserable old fuddy-duddies who want to shut down free speech because they believe it hurts people.
In other words, Neil Young just revived the PMRC.
If you don’t know what the PMRC was and you’re too lazy to google it, here’s the short version:
Back in the ’80s, a senator’s wife named Tipper Gore got sick of her kids listening to music she didn’t like, so she started an organization called the Parents Music Resource Center. The PMRC compiled a list of songs they found unacceptable, including “Darling Nikki” by Prince, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister, and “She Bop” by Cyndi Lauper. Then Tipper used her political connections to convince the Senate to hold hearings about this supposedly dangerous music.
A lot of Americans decided they liked what popular entertainers were saying, and a handful of busybodies tried to put a stop to it. “If we don’t want to listen to it, nobody should get to listen to it. We need to protect the helpless unwashed masses from themselves!”
Sound familiar?
But then this happened:
If you’ve got a half-hour to spare, you can watch Dee Snider’s entire Senate testimony here. By the time he was done, the PMRC had been exposed for the meddling, hypocritical clowns they were. Their brief moment of relevance was over, at the hands of a guy who looked like Bette Midler transitioning into a Wookie.
The PMRC did get a consolation prize, though: the “PARENTAL ADVISORY” sticker you can find on a lot of cassettes and CDs from the era. Y’know, the sticker that made kids want to listen to what was inside because their parents wouldn’t like it.
Over the next couple of decades, the PMRC ended up helping a lot of artists sell a lot of records. Like this one:
I remember seeing that CD cover for the first time and thinking, “Damn … this must be awesome.” And it was! If not for Tipper Gore, NWA might not have become superstars and Dr. Dre probably wouldn’t be a near-billionaire now.
January 7, 2022
Mark Steyn on the Potemkin Congress and the compliant media that enable the farce
With Mark doing a lot more screen time for GB News recently, he doesn’t have as much opportunity to set his thoughts down in written form, so this little paean to the Potemkin parliament at the heart of Washington DC is a rare treat:
As I said earlier, I find myself at odds with virtually the entire politico-media class in my reaction to the “storming” of the US Capitol … I was surprised that even politicians and pundits could utter all that eyewash about “the citadel of democracy” and “a light to the world” with a straight face. It’s a citadel of crap, and the lights went out long ago: ask anyone who needs that $600 “relief”.
I despise the United States Congress, and not merely for the weeks I had to spend there during the Clinton impeachment trial: My contempt pre-dates that circus. It dates to the moment I first realized, as a recent arrival to this land, that when Dick Durbin or some such is giving some overwrought speech on a burning issue he is speaking to an entirely empty chamber — because there are no debates, because most of these over-entouraged Emirs of Incumbistan are entirely incapable of debate: See, inter alia, Ed Markey.
But the fact that they might as well be orating in front of the bathroom mirror isn’t why I despise it. It’s that the American media go along with the racket, and there’s only the one pool camera with the fixed tight shot so that you can’t see the joint is deserted and the guy is talking to himself. The wanker press is so protective of its politicians that it’s happy to give the impression that a boob like Markey is Cromwell in the Long Parliament …
That leads easily to the next stage of decay — for why would a Potemkin parliament not degenerate further into a pseudo-legislature? The Covid “relief” bill is 5,593 pages. There is no such thing as a 5,593-page “law” — because no legislator could read it and grasp it. For purposes of comparison, the Government of India Act, which in 1935 was the longest piece of legislation ever drafted in British law and which provided for the government of what are now India, Pakistan and Burma, is 326 pages.
Oh, I’m sure paragons of republican virtue will object that no Indian or Burmese citizen-representatives were involved in that piece of imperial imposition. Well, no American citizen-representatives were involved in the Covid “relief” bill. The legislation was drafted not by legislators, nor by civil servants, nor even by staffers or interns. Instead, a zillion lobbyists wrote their particular carve-outs, and then it got stitched together by some clerk playing the role of Baron von Frankenstein. The “legislators” voted it into law unread, and indeed even unseen, as the Congressional photocopier proved unable to print it: It was a bill without corporeal form, but the yes-men yessed it into law anyway.
Whatever that is, it’s not a republic. As beacons to the world go, stick it where the beacon don’t shine … Whatever Sudan and Chad and Waziristan need, it’s not the US Congress.
October 7, 2021
Alberta’s pantomime election to nominate a Senate candidate that Trudeau can ignore with great relish
In the latest NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh discusses the apparently ongoing non-binding election for Alberta’s next Senate seat:
The prestige of Trudeau’s Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments must be maintained at all hazards, which is why the Prime Minister’s Office undertook, a little surprisingly, to provide our Ryan Tumilty with an official response to Alberta’s Senate election. The board, says the voice of the PMO, “evaluates candidates based on public, merit-based criteria”; it was not deemed necessary to finish the sentence with “… unlike the demented, bloodthirsty populace of Alberta, who will presumably just vote for the candidate who can devour the most tar sand at a COVID party.”
For our part, NP Platformed has always been a tad frustrated that smaller political groupings don’t welcome Alberta Senate elections as a chance for a low-stakes, low-cost electoral push toward the limelight. Now that federal and provincial Conservative parties are united, for the moment, 2021’s Senate election has not been accompanied even by the quiet campaigning or the minuscule media attention that the first four elections involved. It is probably to be expected that the three Conservative Party of Canada candidates on the Senate ballot will accumulate enough semi-automatic votes to be nominated.
The Liberals and New Democrats, on an official level, stayed further away from the Senate election process than ever. Duncan Kinney, a totally-independent-from-the-NDP left-wing journalist and fellow of the Broadbent Institute, is appearing on the ballot as part of a sort of none-of-the-above campaign. His entire platform is “this Senate election is illegitimate and stupid, but wouldn’t it be amusing if I won anyhow?” (We’ll take the bait: yes, it would!)
And the People’s party has taken the opportunity to pick three official nominees. If you ask us, the Mad Max party absolutely ought to have hung onto some of what it spent on the federal election and devoted the funds to making a big splash in this one. The TV networks and newspapers would ululate with helpful rage if some PPC creature topped the Senate ballot. Heck, Maxime Bernier has always been able to personally attract big crowds in Alberta. If he had planned ahead and squatted here for six months to meet the residency requirement, he could have run in the Senate election himself.
His proxies probably won’t get anywhere, but we’ll see. There really is an opportunity for a bit of chaos here, since anyone who can break into the top three on this ballot would become an Alberta “senator-in-waiting”. Some of the independent candidates, including former Slave Lake mayor Karina Pillay and former Alberta finance minister Doug Horner, have name recognition that could count for a lot in a low-turnout vote.