Links - 27th June 2020

Food And War | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘You refer to Indians and Native Americans in the book’...
‘I think we're in a moment where the words we use are changing… It's still common in some circles to use Indian and I do it myself. It's a term that Native Americans used at the time to refer to themselves. But I think we're living in an era where everyone is just thinking quite carefully about the language that we use’...
‘I'm used to thinking of this idea of hangriness, this sensation of being hungry and angry at the same time. And it's useful to remind ourselves that that's a very modern idea. People in the past expected to go hungry. They expected to go without food. It didn't make them angry in the same way because hunger was part and parcel of everyday life. But during the Revolutionary War, you also had people who refused food, who destroyed animals, who destroyed crops, because that was a more powerful action than accepting foodstuffs from an enemy.’"
Apparently it's good historiography to use anachronistic terms to appease modern sensibilities

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Made in space - "‘There's been some really cool studies have been carried out that show if you give plants more UVB light, they actually make more flavors. So you can enhance the flavor of your herbs and your leafy crops by giving specific light diets to those plants’...
‘In the absence of gravity, plants will actually key in on other sensory systems. And so this is really fascinating. So on Earth, gravity is the main stimulus for plants. The shoots grow up, the roots grow down and they orient on gravity. You take a plant, you turn it on its side, it will reorient, the roots will bend to grow down and the shoots will bend to grow up.’
‘Gosh, I though that has to do with light’...
‘Yeah, you can do all of that in the dark. And the plants still perceive that with no problem… plants are really amazing because they're very plastic in their growth. And so if you take that signal away, their secondary sensory systems, the ones that maybe are still there but aren't quite as important, things like light or maybe nutrients or airflow become really important'"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Massive job cuts at HSBC - "‘Viktor Orban is well known for his hostility to immigration and particularly non European immigration. Is there a sympathy for what the British government is trying to do?’
‘I think there's a political sympathy in terms of sovereignty, reclaiming sovereignty, you know, slogans like this. But in terms of just how to fill jobs, obviously, it's been a big problem. The exodus of the labor force from Hungary, from Poland, from the Baltic states, from Romania. The countries here are hoping some of these people will come back here. Those I speak to and I was talking to people in secondary schools last week, are still pretty much planning to leave. On the other hand, there has been this huge bonanza, really, of all the money sent home. Hungry gets something like 2.5% of its GDP from the EU cohesion funds, but it gets 3.5% from the money sent home from Hungarians working in Britain, Austria and Germany.’
‘And for young people, Nick in Central Europe, are there other more attractive countries to go and work than the UK?’
‘It's difficult to measure what's more attractive. I think one of the things that people have liked about Britain in particular is they feel there's a fair work environment. They're expected to work hard, but the pay is reasonable, certainly compared, two or three times what they would get here in Hungary. And so there is this sort of, almost a love affair with Britain or certainly a positive feeling towards Britain, with why there's been such a disappointment about Brexit and why they would be reluctant to move to another country to find work in future.’"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Coronavirus infects the markets - "‘A new phrase entered the British lexicon this week, in what can only be described as a Twitter storm in a teacup. The row began to brew when the new British Chancellor Rishi Sunak posted a photo of himself in front of a huge bag of Yorkshire tea. Note controversial in that you might think. Not least because he is a Yorkshire MP, but you'd be wrong. Politics and tea proved an inflammatory mix. For those on the left triggered by the idea that the tea makers might be backing a party responsible for years of cuts to public spending. The keyboard warriors of Twitter weren't afraid to express that anger on social media directly at Yorkshire tea’...
‘So you're shouting at tea. Okay, this needs a bit of explanation. Yorkshire is famous for liking a good strong cup of tea, and there's a brand of tea called Yorkshire tea. Given that the Yorkshire climate isn't quite like that of the hillsides of Assam, it's not actually grown there, but it said to be a blend that offers a suitably Yorkshire taste. To Yorkshiremen, that's code for: it’s tea that you can stand a spoon up in. We don't do delicate infusions. We like a proper brew. And the brand is like the people. Down to earth, straight talking, and doesn't take itself too seriously. So when Rishi Sunak, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer posted a picture on Twitter with a giant bag of Yorkshire Tea, there was a clear message. I am a man of the people. The problem was, not everyone likes the Tories and some assume that Yorkshire tea had done a deal and was endorsing the Conservative Party. They hadn't. A couple of years ago, Labour's Jeremy Corbyn had also posed with a giant bag of Yorkshire tea. Again, Yorkshire tea had nothing to do with it… One implacable critic, was a woman called Sue. She was furious, and she tweeted repeatedly and at length and nothing the tweeters of Yorkshire tea could do would calm her down, which led to this line. Sue, you're shouting at tea. Suddenly the mood shifted and those five words framed the online storm in a way that captured the truth and made it funny. Sue was shouting at Tea. Within minutes people were planning t shirts with the phrase on it. Yorkshire tea had won. British Twitter is in many ways a distillation of British character. Humour is the British solution to embarrassment. It is also the great leveler, the way we build rapport and the way we win arguments. No one admires you for being rich. They will always admire you for being a good laugh. So if you want to sum up why the tweet worked, it's down to three things. Yorkshire tea was trying its best to be reasonable. It was not condescending or pompous. And it was funny. Poor Sue was caught committing the crime of taking a photo of some teabags, too seriously’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Julius Caesar - "Julius Caesar could be the ultimate case study for the view that history is made by great men. He extended the borders of Roman power to the English Channel, introduced political reforms that echo down to the present day, and left accounts of it all that are considered high points of the Latin literature...
‘He became a god but not a king... for most of us nowadays, you think, well, a God's a bit higher up than a king. So how did that work?’
‘In the Roman world King is much worse than God. King is, there are such things as living gods. You could see them around in different parts of the Empire in the Greek east. They were used to having monarchs who were also divine, as was Cleopatra. But King was a completely different thing because the whole sort of legend, the whole myth about Rome was that it had been founded as a kingdom, Romulus was a king. But then the Kings had been expelled and the Republic was born through the ancestor of Brutus who had killed the last king. Rome could never have a king again. And the big mistake that, one of the mistakes that Caesar seems to have made is not just to take on some of the attributes of a God, but to take on the attributes of a king. So he was given the honor of being at official ceremonies, being able to wear the old ceremonial clothing of a king: a purple cloak, long red boots, a laurel wreath, which incidentally he liked, because it covered his baldness. But he had all these features that looked as if he was aspiring to kingship… perhaps the last and the most well known, the moment when we hit our Shakespearean play, is the Lupercalia, the fertility festival where three times Mark Antony tries to put a diadem on his head, which is a laurel wreath with white ribbons in it, a sign of monarchy. And three times Caesar refused it because the crowd are crying out against it’"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Valladolid Debate - "‘How did you get to grab this land? You went there as a conquistador, there weren’t many of you. Did you have a piece of paper from the king? What was going on?
‘Essentially, you had a piece of paper from the king, it goes back to Columbus, discovering the land... by right of discovery, the Spanish crown go to the Pope. And in 1493, the Pope gives them a papal bull called inter caetera. And that grants them the land on the right, on condition they evangelize it. And this is important for understanding the encomienda because a lot of what the Spanish do in this period is about evangelization and proving they're doing that. But in practice on the ground, you need a contract from the crown giving you the right to either explore or to conquer or to settle. And there are slightly different kinds of contracts from the crown.’
‘The Pope claims authority over all the land in the world that is not christianized. He owns it and you have to get his permission to move in it.’
‘Not literally owns it, though that is how they behave… it comes into the Valladolid debates, there's a big debate about the right what's called dominion, the right to rule in your own lands. The Pope doesn't claim to have the complete secular right of Dominion, the right to rule everywhere, but he claims to have the right to tell people where they can go and teach the faith. And then there are big debates about the ways it's legitimate to do that. Can you use force or not?… from 1513. To legitimate the conquest you turn up with a with a copy of the requirement… and you read it out, and it says, basically, here's a potted history of the world according to Christianity. God gave the world to the Pope, the pope gave it to the Spanish, the Spanish have given the right to come here to me. Would you accept that and agree to listen to the faith? And if you don't, then we're allowed to make war on you. Now, of course, this is a joke. Often they didn't even understand you... Bartolomé de Las Casas said he didn't know whether to laugh or cry about the requirement, but this was enough to get the thing going. It was considered to be enough, considered to be a legitimating act, something that made your conquest legal, you were actually supposed to do it in front of a notary, someone supposed to write down that you'd fulfilled this requirement'"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Hildegard of Bingen - "Her sense of authorship was overwhelming. And that is why even today, she is like, she is the patron saint of the Die Grünen, the greens in Germany, she is considered to be someone who is impacted on thinking about the environment, you can go to any sort of really, really worthy bakery in Germany and you get Hildegard wort [sp?] which is wholemeal"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Evolution of Horses - "Bigger animals are easier to take out and with climate change, bigger animals are more susceptible to extinction. They evolve more slowly, broadly speaking. So horses are fascinating. The fact that they're still around, that they've survived despite all the odds, think about all the big mammals that went extinct in the ice ages. Horses just sneaked by."

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Philosophy of Solitude - "‘Solitude isn't simply being alone. It's an active achievement, a distinctive condition of experience in which one can still the voices of society in the mind, and that allows a form of authentic experience. And that might be keeping company with oneself or it might be an experience of nature or of God.’
‘Are you distinguishing... solitude from loneliness or solitary confinement?’
‘Absolutely. So I think solitude, that is not simply being alone. You might be alone and not be in solitude if you're spending all your time thinking about society or engaging with social questions. I think solitude is normally something chosen. But it might be that if one were in solitary confinement, one might be able to, nevertheless choose that inner experience’...
‘One of the thinkers associated with the Desert Fathers was St John Cassian. What was his approach to solitude?’
‘So he's one of the amazing thinkers of this, this early movement that that John was describing. And one of the things that I love in his description of conferences that he had with many of these Hermit Desert Fathers, in fact, there were also a number of desert mothers but he doesn't discuss them, but we know about them from other sources. Erm, and he describes this amazing story of particularly one of them, another man named John, who had gone into the desert as a hermit and actually the Greek word, our word hermit comes from the Greek for wilderness or desert, and then discovered that in the desert alone, actually he was more preoccupied, both with providing for his material needs and actually with mulling over things that had been said to him, people would come into the desert to kind of marvel at his spiritual achievement and then he would be all puffed up with pride. And so he goes back into a community and actually says, in the community, I'm better able to achieve contemplation because my material needs are provided. And in fact, I'm more humbled. So paradoxically, the solitude of contemplation is better achieved in the monastic community than alone in the desert hermitage… paradoxically, if you become completely isolated, you might inflate yourself, you inflate your ego in a way potentially. That's a kind of danger, recurrent danger of that kind of spiritual practice. And living in a kind of community actually tempers that and allows us to keep the ego in its check so that particularly for religious idea you can be in communion with God.’"

Best of Today - Monday's business with Dominic O'connell - BBC Sounds - "'We did this groundbreaking research that looked at unemployment, precarious work, and the correlation between mental health. And I have to say that the finding is really a bit of a wake up call. Because we can see with the young black men and women, there's a fifth, 58% more likely to be first of all unemployed, at 47% more likely to be in precarious work. And so you can see there that the way it's compounded these racial penalties that are locking people out. And then I guess the third aspect was, is that in this precarious work, there's a greater likelihood that you have mental health issues'...
‘That'll be a very good case you make there for positive discrimination’"
Sounds like they didn't consider which issue the causation goes
I'm sure this will improve minorities' employment prospects

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Monday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "‘What happened in 2010, was a consequence of Facebook's push to create its own operating system. They had this thing called platform and they invited other software developers to create apps that ran on Facebook, because it felt that the whole world would be run on Facebook. And in order to do that, they had to give information of the users to these outsiders, and they were very generous and doing this. And 2010 was the moment they really gave a lot of the data away, because they wanted to push something called Instant personalization, where you would light on someone's website, not Facebook's but all your Facebook world will be there with you. Now in order to do that, when you show up at the website or sign up for an app from one of these developers, they would get not only your information, but the information about all your friends. Things like your friends’ relationship status, their political status, their likes. And what we learned is if someone knows your likes, they would know a lot about you. And so there are certain amount of likes they know more about you. One researcher found than your spouse knows about you’...
[On Mark Zuckerberg] Sometimes you'll ask him something, and he'll give you that which Andrew Bosworth, known as Boz, one of his most loyal lieutenants describes it as Sauron’s Gaze. Basically he could freeze everything in the room. You know, while that those eyes just bear into you, and it seems he's not blinking."