Quotulatiousness

April 5, 2013

What to do when the law is wrong

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:49

J.D. Tuccille explains why he’s teaching his son to break the law:

In 1858, hundreds of residents of Oberlin and Wellington, Ohio — many of them students and faculty at Oberlin College — surrounded Wadsworth’s Hotel, in Wellington, in which law enforcement officers and slavehunters held a fugitive slave named John Price, under the authority of the Fugitive Slave Act. After a brief standoff, the armed crowd stormed the hotel and overpowered the captors. Price was freed and transported to safety in Canada [. . .] I know these details because my son recently borrowed from the library The Price of Freedom, a book about the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, as the incident is called (PDF). My wife and I used it as a starting point for telling our seven-year-old why we don’t expect him to obey the law — that laws and the governments that pass them are often evil. We expect him, instead, to stand up for his rights and those of others, and to do good, even if that means breaking the law.

Our insistence on putting right before the law isn’t a new position. I’ve always liked Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sentiment that “Good men must not obey the laws too well.” That’s a well-known quote, but it comes from a longer essay in which he wrote:

    Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living, and employments of the population, that commerce, education, and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people, if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting …

Rope of sand the law may be, but it can strangle unlucky people on the receiving end long before it perishes. John Price could well have ended up with not just the law, but a real rope, around his neck, just because he wanted to exercise the natural freedom to which he was entitled by birth as a sapient being.

John Price ended his life as a free man because he was willing to defy laws that said he was nothing but the property of other people, to be disposed of as they wished. He got a nice helping hand in maintaining his freedom from other people who were willing to not only defy laws that would compel them to collaborate in Price’s bondage, but to beat the hell out of government agents charged with enforcing those laws.

March 17, 2013

Debunking St. Patrick

Filed under: Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

In Slate, David Plotz separates the myth from what is known about the real St. Patrick:

Today we raise a glass of warm green beer to a fine fellow, the Irishman who didn’t rid the land of snakes, didn’t compare the Trinity to the shamrock, and wasn’t even Irish. St. Patrick, who died 1,507, 1,539, or 1,540 years ago today — depending on which unreliable source you want to believe — has been adorned with centuries of Irish blarney. Innumerable folk tales recount how he faced down kings, negotiated with God, tricked and slaughtered Ireland’s reptiles.

The facts about St. Patrick are few. Most derive from the two documents he probably wrote, the autobiographical Confession and the indignant Letter to a slave-taking marauder named Coroticus. Patrick was born in Britain, probably in Wales, around 385 A.D. His father was a Roman official. When Patrick was 16, seafaring raiders captured him, carried him to Ireland, and sold him into slavery. The Christian Patrick spent six lonely years herding sheep and, according to him, praying 100 times a day. In a dream, God told him to escape. He returned home, where he had another vision in which the Irish people begged him to return and minister to them: “We ask thee, boy, come and walk among us once more,” he recalls in the Confession. He studied for the priesthood in France, then made his way back to Ireland.

He spent his last 30 years there, baptizing pagans, ordaining priests, and founding churches and monasteries. His persuasive powers must have been astounding: Ireland fully converted to Christianity within 200 years and was the only country in Europe to Christianize peacefully. Patrick’s Christian conversion ended slavery, human sacrifice, and most intertribal warfare in Ireland. (He did not banish the snakes: Ireland never had any. Scholars now consider snakes a metaphor for the serpent of paganism. Nor did he invent the Shamrock Trinity. That was an 18th-century fabrication.)

December 26, 2012

“Quentin Tarantino finally comes of age as a filmmaker”

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:04

While I doubt I’ll catch this in the theatre, Kurt Loder makes this sound like an interesting film:

With Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino finally comes of age as a filmmaker. Tarantino’s brilliance as a writer and craftsman have always been clear. But even his last picture, the Holocaust revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds, was overwhelmed by his geeky obsession with vintage genres (in that case, old war movies). When he showed us a group of Jews huddled in a basement being shot through the floorboards above, but declined to go below and show them actually dying (it might have clouded the film’s comedy), he shortchanged the movie’s putative subject.

With Django, the director has brought off a perfect marriage of style and history. He has appropriated the universe of another beloved genre, the spaghetti western (in particular Sergio Corbucci’s brutal 1966 cult film, Django), and set within it an unsparing tale of American slavery. The movie is outrageously funny, but it’s also unflinchingly committed to a full exploration of the horrors of its subject. Where many movies about black bondage are diluted by liberal hankie-wringing, this one feels fueled by a black rage that still simmers today. It might be the most savage cinematic depiction of slavery ever made.

Some early reviewers have expressed dismay about the movie’s extensive deployment of the word “nigger.” (“It’s a nigger on a horse,” says one marveling cretin as a black man rides by on his mount.) It’s hard to know what to say about such a reaction, except to point out that, hey, it’s a movie about slavery.

November 15, 2012

Human trafficking in the US

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Lewis Andrews explains how immigration reform will also help to combat the scourge of human trafficking:

Restrictive immigration policies have long been associated with a variety of economic problems including the diminished availability of foreign business and scientific talent, the inability to fill low-skilled agricultural and service jobs typically scorned by legal residents, and reduced access to the kind of entrepreneurial enthusiasm characteristic of those willing to risk their futures in another country.

Only recently has it become clear how restrictive immigration laws also produce harmful social consequences, particularly when it comes to the age-old scourge of human trafficking — the use of force and fraud to supply cheap labor and sexual services.

To understand these consequences, it is important to appreciate just how lucrative a branch of organized crime the modern slave trade has become. Efficient transportation, technological advances in both farming and factory work, and advances in communication have all combined to make the use of forced labor very cheap by historical measures.

Free the Slaves, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, has calculated the return on the cost of an enslaved field worker in 1850s Alabama at just 5 percent, whereas today a trafficked farmhand can yield the owner anywhere from double digits to 800 percent. Similarly, an imprisoned prostitute shuttled around the boroughs of New York City in a van by a driver scheduling appointments on his cell phone can service as many as 40 customers in a single shift. As one researcher coldly but accurately put it, “People are a good commodity as they do not easily perish, but they can be transported over long distances and can be re-used and re-sold.”

The result, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, is that 2.5 million victims, approximately 80 percent female and 50 percent under the age of 18, are being trafficked around the world at any given time. In 2005 the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, estimated the annual revenues from this “industry” at $32 billion, or $13,000 per victim.

September 14, 2012

The Bob Dylan interview within the Bob Dylan interview

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

I haven’t read Rolling Stone for decades, so I don’t know if this interview is typical of their house style these days:

Dylan talks about his new album, a bit about his apparent belief that the soul of a dead Hell’s Angel named Bobby Zimmerman (Dylan’s own birth name) took over his body in the 1960s (really, and I can’t explain it either), Dylan’s annoyance with people who attack him for using lines from other poets in his songs, and many other interesting things.

But around 10 percent of the interview is dedicated to a bizarre performance from interlocutor Mikal Gilmore seeming desperate to get Bob Dylan to say that he thinks criticism of Barack Obama is based on racism, say he voted for Obama, or say he really likes Obama.

Dylan leads into it with an impassioned and intelligent discussion of how the stain of slavery shapes this nation. “This country is just too fucked up about color….People at each others throats because they are of a different color. It’s the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back — or any neighborhood back….It’s a country founded on the backs of slaves….If slavery had been given up in a more peaceful way, America would be far ahead today.”

This gives Gilmore his hook: didn’t Obama change all that? And isn’t it so that people who don’t like him don’t like him because of race? Gilmore takes five different swings at getting Dylan to agree. Some of Dylan’s responses: “They did the same thing to Bush, didn’t they? They did the same thing to Clinton, too, and Jimmy Carter before that….Eisenhower was accused of being un-American. And wasn’t Nixon a socialist? Look what he did in China. They’ll say bad things about the next guy too.” On Gilmore’s fourth attempt, Dylan just resorts to: “Do you want me to repeat what I just said, word for word? What are you talking about? People loved the guy when he was elected. So what are we talking about? People changing their minds?”

October 13, 2011

The 14th Amendment, a history

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

July 29, 2011

“This is the first global human rights legislation. How can people not know about it?”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Law, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:54

I’m ashamed to say that this was news to me:

Monday, August 1, is a holiday in Canada. Everyone knows that. But what is the name of the holiday?

[. . .]

It is “Emancipation Day.”

You’re scratching your head, aren’t you? Don’t be embarrassed. Be angry — angry that you have been denied a truly majestic story all Canadians should know and cherish.

On August 1, 1834, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire. “Emancipation Day” has been celebrated ever since in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and elsewhere.

[. . .]

In 1793, a free black man named Peter Martin – who had served with Butler’s Rangers in the American Revolution – told the legislature of the abduction of Chloe Cooley, a black slave who had been bound, gagged, thrown in a boat, and taken to the United States for sale. Simcoe seized the opportunity and moved to immediately abolish slavery.

It was a radical, audacious move. And it was too much. Wealthy slaveowners in the legislature resisted and Simcoe was forced to compromise: Existing slaves would be denied their freedom but the importation of slaves would stop and the children of slaves would be freed when they reached age 25. In effect, slavery would slowly vanish.

It was not the sweeping victory Simcoe wanted. But it was the abolitionists’ first legislative victory anywhere in the British Empire.

June 29, 2011

“Yes, of course, there is racism in Canada”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:24

Publius has a go at a silly speech by Senator Don Oliver on the idea that black Canadians need to “rise up and address the deep racism in this country that keeps them out of positions of power”:

Yes, of course, there is racism in Canada. As there is where ever different racial groups are present. Some portion of the humanity will always insist on thinking in tribal terms. Of all the countries in the world where such attitudes are least persistent it is in Canada. Senator Oliver then goes onto make this utterly absurd statement:

     Oliver blames Canada’s experience with slavery for much of the black community’s inability to support each other and for the stereotypes old-stock Canadians continue to show.

    “It really flows from the days of slavery . . . because of the slave mentality,” he explained, when someone got ahead, they would get dragged down by the group.

The overwhelming majority of Canadians don’t even know slavery existed in this country. The Senator even alludes to this in the interview. So you’re influenced by something you thought happened elsewhere? To say nothing of the risible notion that old-stock Canadians are more bigoted than newer group. Seriously? Groups that spent generations slaughtering each other over trivial differences in physical appearance, religious beliefs and language are suppose to show up in Canada and have no problem with blacks? Is the Senator aware of the Indian caste system? Is he aware of the prejudice shown in many Caribbean countries for darker blacks by lighter skinned blacks? There is likely more systematic racism, if we can call it that, in Jamaica than Canada.

[. . .]

The vast majority of Canadian blacks, or their parents, emigrated to Canada in the last forty years. They came here like most Canadians and there ancestors were never held as slaves on Canadian soil. Many of those who came to Canada before 1970 did so to escape the systematic racism of the American South. While this country was hardly a picture of tolerance by modern standards, it was far preferable to what else was on offer.

June 5, 2011

Surely this “cure” is worse than the “disease”?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Middle East, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

John Perry Barlow retweeted a link to this Kuwait Times post:

A female political activist and former parliamentary candidate has recommended the introduction of legislation to legalize the provision of enslaved female concubines for Muslim men in Kuwait in a bid, she says, to protect those men from committing adultery or corruption.

The activist, Salwa Al-Mutairi, suggested apparently seriously in a video broadcast online that she had been informed by some clerics that affluent Muslim men who fear being seduced or tempted into immoral behavior by the beauty of their female servants, or even of those servants ‘casting spells’ on them, would be better to purchase women from an ‘enslaved maid’ agency for sexual purposes.

She suggested that special offices could be set up to provide concubines in the same way as domestic staff recruitment agencies currently provide housemaids.

December 30, 2010

Cartographic explanation for the order of secession

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:20

A fascinating NYT post looks at one of the most influential maps of the US Civil War period:

The 1860 Census was the last time the federal government took a count of the South’s vast slave population. Several months later, the United States Coast Survey — arguably the most important scientific agency in the nation at the time — issued two maps of slavery that drew on the Census data, the first of Virginia and the second of Southern states as a whole. Though many Americans knew that dependence on slave labor varied throughout the South, these maps uniquely captured the complexity of the institution and struck a chord with a public hungry for information about the rebellion.

The map uses what was then a new technique in statistical cartography: Each county not only displays its slave population numerically, but is shaded (the darker the shading, the higher the number of slaves) to visualize the concentration of slavery across the region. The counties along the Mississippi River and in coastal South Carolina are almost black, while Kentucky and the Appalachians are nearly white.

H/T to Walter Olson for the link.

August 12, 2010

If you search for “James Buchanan worst president ever” you get 1,550,000 hits

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:47

But in spite of that, he’s still getting a dollar coin minted in his honour:

The 15th coin in the presidential $1 coin program honors President James Buchanan. It features an image of the president with the inscriptions “James Buchanan”, “In God We Trust”, “15th President” and “1857-1861.”

The reverse side of the coin shows the Statue of Liberty. The ceremonial launch and coin exchange will take place at Wheatland, the former president’s home.

About the only thing that might make this a good idea is if the value is pegged to the pre-Civil War dollar.

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