Links - 5th July 2021 (2)

When Your Safety Becomes My Danger (Ep. 432) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "LEVITT: The real idea is that not only did it make it harder to steal your car, but it was really, really visible and the thieves were supposed to see those Clubs. The hope was that if thieves could see the Club, they wouldn’t bother to break your window in the first place.
LEVITT: Now, that’s a great idea from the perspective of the person who doesn’t want their car stolen. But it turns out to not be such a great idea from the perspective of the neighbor of the person who has the Club. Because if you think about the decision that a potential auto thief looks at, they see a whole block of cars lined up and maybe there’s one car they want a little bit more than another one. But if it’s got a Club — well, it’s not like they go and say, “I don’t want to be an auto thief, I’m going to go work at McDonald’s instead.” They say, “Well, I’m going to steal the next car.” So, if it prevents my car from being stolen, it means that someone else’s car is more likely to be stolen. From a social perspective, the Club is no good. The Club is really just about how you transfer the risk that you bear onto your neighbors. And that’s what economists call a negative externality. That’s when a decision that I make has a negative impact on another person who doesn’t get to be part of that decision. My neighbors don’t get directly compensated when I buy the Club. They get directly hurt by the fact that the Club is shifting crime from me to them."
By this logic, crime prevention advice is immoral since you will never be able to get everyone to follow it. So we shouldn't try to prevent crime. This can apply on levels higher than an individual level too - if police patrol one neighbourhood more, criminals can just go to another one

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Have the Taliban changed? - "‘A young Talib sent me a message on WhatsApp and asked, could you please follow me on Twitter? It was of course a useful suggestion for my work. But what about their work? What are they doing on social media? What is the strategy now for Islamist fighters infamous for smashing televisions, and hanging cassette tapes from trees when they ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s? The world has changed. And the Taliban have too, at least when it comes to matters like this. So when journalists descended on the biggest ballroom in Qatar, for the start of historic Afghan talks, the Taliban media team was there too. All men, bearded and turbaned, young and old, carrying cameras, smartphones and tripods. There was one interaction which caused a little buzz on social media, this new generation with competing visions of a postwar future. A young Taliban supporter, Mohammed, who describes himself as a peace activist, made a beeline for the youngest member of the government's negotiating team, Khalid Noor. He's the 25 year old son of a very rich and powerful ex commander. Men they called warlords in Afghanistan. Mohammed confronted him with questions, insisting they speak in English. I wanted him to answer in English he told me later, because he was educated in the UK, and I wanted to see how educated he really was. And then there was Farhanaz [sp?]. She's a forthright female journalist who made a statement by wearing jeans to the opening ceremony. She stood squarely in front of a Taliban official with her head and smartphone held high to interview him about peace and women's rights. Another female Afghan reporter, in headscarf, bright tunic, white trainers, also conducted an interview face to face with their chief spokesman. He answered all their questions. But why did he lower his gaze? Why don't they look at us, the female journalist demanded? Well, Taleb explained it to me. The Holy Quran, he said, tells us to avert our gaze with young women. But sometimes when it's *necessary* for our cause, we can look more directly. I kept running into this media team. So one time we sat down to discuss social media. It's allowed within Islamic law, I was told. Social media on your mobile phone isn't permanent, they explained, you can turn off your phone and as they put it, it's not there anymore. By way of comparison, there are no photographs in their printed material. That's too permanent and thus unacceptable in their strict interpretation of Islam which forbids the making of imagery. But what about all those television interviews for a group which once hated television? Well, I was told live interviews are best, better than pre recorded. Since this new strategy was rather fluid, I  hasten to add that there was no consensus among clerics on some of these issues. It was a gray area, and it's easier to work in the gray they said, beyond the black and white'...
‘Coronavirus has supposedly disappeared from Yemen. At least that's what my friends tell me and clearly what many people now believe. There is no Corona here, one mine in the city of Thais [sp?] told me. He was doing some filming for me and I asked him to wear a face mask. My friend in Aden told me of the pressure she is put under not to wear a face covering. When she does wear one, the children on the street run after and tease her shouting Corona Corona... A friend of mine is fond of quoting an old Yemeni saying that I used to find morbid and strange. *Something*. Death will come tomorrow, she would casually say, but I have finally come to understand. Death is no stranger to Yemenis. And accepting it frees you from worrying about what's beyond your control and helps you to live each day as it comes’"

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Mozambique: the birth of a new conflict - "Even the powerful mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, a vocal long standing feminist, has found herself in trouble. In her successful reelection campaign earlier this year, Madam Hidalgo pledged to transform the city into a feminist capital, with plans for increased services in education and health care, specifically aimed at women and girls, along with robust support for victims of domestic violence. But now two of her deputy mayors, both of whom she'd personally supported, have been forced to resign within weeks of each other over allegations of sexual abuse"
Male feminists strike again!

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, US: the Covid Campaign - "‘Our coach was circumnavigating around about and I distinctly recall the sense of time slowing down as I watched another Belgian bus, which had just joined the roundabout, approaching from the right, and with ghastly inevitability, glide into our side. Luckily, brakes had been applied, and there were no injuries, just a lot of shrieking. What it was, was a brutal introduction to that hallowed rule of Continental driving - that priorite a droite. PAD. Priority to those coming from the right. There's a lot about priorite a droite when you take the French driving test, inevitably so, because it's completely illogical and against every instinct, and so has to be hammered hard into the brain of every learner, so that he or she never makes the mistake our coach driver made in 1970. It's shocking the first time you see it in action. A car, oblivious to the danger piling out in front of you from a side road or even an alley, forcing you on the main road to brake heavily. And if you hit him, or if the person behind you hits you, it's not his fault. It's yours. It doesn't take long before you're being very, very careful about streets on the right. Incidentally, I looked into the history of the PAD, and it goes back to the 1920s. Before that the rule was that the bigger road had right of way over the lesser road. But that proved dangerous, because often you couldn't tell which was the more important road. So in 1937 it was written into the French code de la route where, despite a lot of grumblings, it's been ever since.’"
Yet when you enter a roundabout in France you're told to give way

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, The King and Thais - "They no longer fear the monarchy as their parents do. They see no reason why they should. Since his accession to the throne four years ago, King Vajiralongkorn has amassed far more power than his father, taking personal control of military units and a vast sovereign wealth fund, and even rewriting parts of the Constitution. The protesters want an accountable monarchy with limits on its power and its spending. They cannot see why that's unreasonable. Just by demanding a conversation, they've shattered a powerful taboo. The government has no answer to this, except more threats, more arrests, more media censorship -  tactics from a different era. And they're not working’...
'Ordinary people may not think much in terms of geopolitics, but they seized the new opportunities abroad. In the 90s, when a new wave of immigrants started to leave China for the USA, the national TV sensation was a long series called a Beijing native in New York. It began with this line: if you love him, send him to New York, for it’s heaven. If you hate him, send him to New York too, for it's hell. Too many Chinese people. America held a contradictory sort of fascination, like it was magnetic'"

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Tensions in rural South Africa - "‘The EFF claims to speak for South Africa's marginalized impoverished black population, above all, for the unemployed. And it thrives on moments of racial tension, highlighting, you might say exploiting the very real divisions that still haunt this nation, a generation after the end of racial apartheid. ‘‘We are here to protest white arrogance and white supremacy’"

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Voting Early in the US Elections - "Seychelles has achieved global acclaim for ingeniously swapping foreign debt for promises to protect its unique marine environment. At the same time, it's a quite international ignominy for having the highest per capita rate of heroin addiction in the world. One in 20 Seychellois are hooked on the drug. Somewhat late in the day the outgoing administration started seriously to tackle the issue. But one of the greatest challenges facing the new government, the incoming party's leader told me: we'll be assuming power with no agreements of understanding with the country's drug dealers whose criminal activities, a tragically large local employer, represent a parallel economy, easily matching the size of the government's own annual budget. The difference between the Seychelles paradise portrayed in Sunday travel supplements and selfies and the troubled Republic I now know is stark. For many years and quite probably entwined with the drug trade to some extent, the dark history of political oppression, the murders, the torture and corruption were a sinister, yet unspoken shame carefully concealed to protect the country's tranquil public image. Tourists and tunafish are all there is... In Seychelles, everyone and no one is famous, such is its size. You might easily follow a secretary of state queuing at the supermarket checkout, buy the morning’s catch from a chart topping rapper or spot the evening TV news anchor in the rearview while waiting at one of the two traffic lights in the tiny capital Victoria. Everyone has a cousin in prison, an Auntie who owns a takeaway, a nephew enslaved to opiates, or a neighbor in a national sports team"

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, US election: Georgia, the new swing state? - "‘International assassination is a nasty business and the Islamic Republic of Iran stands accused. It targets critics and enemies anywhere in the world and has been implicated in attacks from Argentina to the Netherlands. Iranian nationals have been arrested in Belgium, Denmark, Germany and France, accused of plotting bombings or murder of Iranian dissidents living in Europe’"
It's only bad when Israel does it. When Israel is accused, they are guilty, but when Iran is accused, it's a Western Islamophobic plot

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Diwali in India during the pandemic - "‘A taxi driver in Milan called Claudio told me, Amsterdam was born that way, reminded me of an urban myth that cycling is simply part of the Dutch DNA. Actually, in the 1960s and 70s, the Dutch capital had some of the most dangerous roads in Europe. In 1971, more than 400 children were killed on them. *Marcia Something*, a young mum was one of the rebel leaders who rose up against the car centric city. Marcia joined hands with parents on street corners in a protest they called ‘Stop the child murder’. They fought hard for the type of infrastructure that enables everyone to cycle and now provides a model for governments across the globe...  Cycling also means I don't feel like a hypocrite. I can teach my four year old about climate change without contributing to the problem"
Apparently having kids doesn't lead to any carbon emissions

Adventure & Opportunity: Female Transatlantic Travellers | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Nobody would travel in steerage unless they had to. But then most of these people only going one way. They weren't planning to come back unless they were wealthy enough to make it into first or second class.’
‘But of course, some people did have to make that journey back very sadly if they were turned back by by immigration control.’
‘That's very true. And we forget about this, we hear about Ellis Island, which was the reception center in New York. And it is an island just off the island of Manhattan, where the first and second class passengers will be taken off by tender, or they will be, the ship will be brought alongside the the berth and they will be allowed off. But the third class passengers, if they wanted to enter America, they had to be processed through Ellis Island, which was a giant complex, staffed by immigration officials. And everyone’s papers had to be checked, their baggage had to be checked. They were also checked as well to make sure that they that they were healthy. If they had any communicable diseases, or if they appeared to be feeble or too old to work, they might be sent back. And this was of course, calamitous. Families might be separated... they would have invested everything they had in making this one great trip. On the other hand, if you did get through the process in Ellis Island, people have reported on you. You go through everything, you'd changed your money, you get a new, you get a little visa, you get given a name, your entry’ recorded. And then there is a door which says push for New York’"
Of course the liberals who love to quote the "Give me your tired" poem to criticise modern American immigration policy for not being open borders pretend that everyone was allowed in
Comment from elsewhere: "My personal favorite in regards to what I call English Lit Gaslighting 101, is the "give me your poor tired masses" that ignores the whole "“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” sentence that precedes it."

The Russian Revolution: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Whether we should think of October as a coup rather than a revolution.
‘Yeah. I don't see why we have to choose between the two. The Bolsheviks, after it had taken place, of course called it a revolution but they also called it in Russian, a *something*, which is usually translated as a coup. Because there was no doubt about it, that in order to get rid of Kerensky, they had to take military action. They had to eject him from the Winter Palace, proclaim that they had toppled him. But they also argued that they were the largest force now, in the Soviets. The Soviets were elected by the workers and the soldiers. And so to that extent, they were reflective of the, the movement of popular opinion in the country. So there was something in that. There wasn't enough in that, of course, because when it came to the Constituent Assembly elections in November, the Bolsheviks got at most a quarter of the popular vote, which is hardly a ringing endorsement. But there was a lot of support for the Bolsheviks in the October seizure of power. And that's why people say oh, it was a popular revolution. That's an exaggeration. But merely to say that it was a tiny little group of conspirators who launched an armed coup d'etat, that's an exaggeration too. It's, it's a mixture of the two. And certainly, when they came to power, they issued decrees that were a radical break, a revolutionary break with what had gone on before. They said, to the peasants, go get the land. They said, to the Germans and the Austrians, we're not gonna fight anymore. We want the war to be over. And, and we're not going to launch any offensive. They said to the owners of large scale industry, we want your factories, we want your plants. So that, there's another aspect of something that's more than just a seizure of power by a tiny clique’"

On fine dining

From subtle asian cooking:

"A Defense on Fine Dining:

TL;DR: It's not just small plates and expensive food.

 

This is addressed to no one in particular, but after noticing some disparaging comments regarding a recent post on a chef's miso glazed salmon I felt like I had to speak out. I'm by no means an expert, but I consider myself someone who's really into food and I've had the honour to try some pretty good places around the globe.

 

For some people, there seems to be this interesting idea that fine dining boils down to expensive plates of food with minuscule portions. "I would need ten plates of this to be full!" or "I can just go to AYCE!" or "I'd need a microscope to eat this"

 

But this is pretty far from what fine dining is and should be. It's about celebrating great ingredients and telling stories. It's about taking a bite of something and recalling a moment of your childhood, calibrated perfectly to evoke a feeling. Or it's about a taking you through a journey of the seasons to paint images in your mind of Autumn through food. In that way, it's art. Similar to going to a museum or attending a symphony -- but we don't see people ask why you go to a symphony or a concert when you can just play instruments at home.

 

Some people think that it's egregious to charge a lot of money for something without taking the time to understand how it gets to their plate. They don't know that a fisherman line caught a 50kg fish and took it to a fishmonger who's the third generation working there, who then trusts only a few chefs to be able to capture the wonder of that ingredient. They don't see that the chef has put in decades of his or her life to perfecting the techniques required to bring out the best in that dish. 

 

They don't know that the perfectly cooked morsels of chicken are from a chicken that was raised on the restaurant's own property. 

 

They don't see the chef working for countless years to perfect a fucking tamago -- a single piece in your progression of omakase. 

 

They may see ice cream on some pink ice. In fact, it's pickled watermelon kakigori with salted ricotta ice cream and a drizzle of olive oil, a culmination of a chef's training in Western and Asian cuisine actualized into a single dessert. 

 

Or they see a turnip, not realizing that a chef who's trained in multiple countries has decided to have it on his tasting menu since the inception of his restaurant, one of the best in the world for years because of the subtle way it changes throughout the seasons, and how to continue to iterate upon it to improve it. 

 

It kind of sucks. Some people see a tomato without realizing that it is a tomato of all tomatoes, infused with the smokiness of Japanese binchotan charcoal. Maybe they'll never know that a single bite of it transports your mind for a moment to the streets of Omoide Yokocho, where the inviting aroma of binchotan signals delicious bites are to be had all around. 

 

People have all sorts of vices: luxury brands, luxury vehicles, travel, hypebeast clothing, and much more. We all have things that we don't understand. 

 

But just because we don't understand something, it doesn't make it better or worse. It doesn't give us the right to judge someone else's passion. I don't judge people for paying $2000 for a bag, because if they can afford it and they truly enjoy it, why not? 

 

Thanks for reading through this slog of a post. I hope you appreciated my TED Talk. And for those of you who are on the fence about trying fine dining, it really is a wonderful thing! Don't let small plates stop you. After all, if you need 10 small plates, most tasting menus have at least 12 "

Links - 5th July 2021 (1)

Helen Fry On The Top-Secret Work Of MI9 | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Imagine that I'm a prisoner of war... how would MI9 help me escape?’
‘MI9 had a number of methods, one of which was the coded communication. So they would send coded letters into the camps with information or to expect special parcels which would have escape devices in them. And this is probably one of the things which has really been immortalized from MI9’s history. Although we may not have heard of MI9, we know about MI9 subconsciously because of the Q gadgets, and Ian Fleming immortalized them in his James Bond novels. But studying the original archives, it's incredible to find that it's not his imagination, that a lot of the exploding pens and goodness knows what else is actually in the MI9 files. And one of the biggest things that MI9 did was to send in the miniature compasses. And these could be hidden. They were hidden behind the buttons on uniforms, and they were screwed counter-intuitively, so the Germans never found them. But over 1.3 million of these manufactured and sent or used by Allied personnel, and all sorts of things could be smuggled into the camps in games, for example, because prisoners were allowed leisure activities. So these are sort of gifts to keep the prisoners amused. And one of the most famous was the chess set. And inside the night, it was specially lined, and it would have ink. So that was one way of sending ink into the camp. And actually, I've got another example, which is quite fascinating. Blankets to keep the prisoners warm in the winter. So MI9 would send him blankets. And the prisoners would know, often from a coded letter, that if you dipped that in particular liquid, or in a bucket of water, this dye would suddenly emerge and the pattern of a uniform that could be made into a German uniform for escape. So it's all this kind of bonkers stuff’"

Neil Price On How Vikings Viewed The World | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘When you get into the the 500s, we're into what historians have for many, many years, referred to as the migration period. It's when peoples are starting to move around in Europe, whether it's as refugees or as raiders, or as entire populations on the move, there's a lot of turbulence. And this has been characterized for a long time as the migration period crisis. There's something very, very disruptive going on in Europe. And no one has ever satisfactorily explained what it really depends on. It’s changes in the economy and the flows of trade, whether it's the kind of fallout of the disintegration of the Roman army. So you've got lots of previously employed mercenaries looking for trouble, or looking for cash, lots of different things that destabilize, basically. And those things are affecting Scandinavia as well. And we've known for a long time that there is a very big decline in Scandinavia in the early 500s. And you see this in lots of ways, the most dramatic is the abandonment of farms. There are literally thousands of farms that are just abandoned. They’re left, at this time. And if you look at the environmental record, you can also see that a lot of the land that had previously been cultivated, so places where people are growing crops, growing food, is now returning to woodland. So even, even the fields are empty, which kind of implies a decline in the population, that something really drastic is happening. And over the last couple of decades, there's another factor been added into that mix. And that's the sort of climate disaster for want of a better word. Seems to happen between about 536 and 540. At least two, maybe more, huge volcanoes that put so much debris and ash and sulfate aerosols and things into the atmosphere, that it partially blocks out the heat of the sun, which has huge effect on the potential for growing crops and things like that. And so you have this, this whole series of factors coming together to seriously impact Scandinavia. And one of the things that we're working on is the idea that anything up to 50% of the Scandinavian population dies… the kind of key to this for the Vikings, because bear in mind, this is 200 odd years before the Viking Age, is that the society that we know is the Vikings is the thing that slowly emerged from that wreckage of the 500s. You've got something very close to a social collapse. And then the process of rebuilding Scandinavia produce something different’"

The story of the Dambusters - HistoryExtra - "‘The story of 617 Squadron has joined that group of tales like King Arthur or Robin Hood, which defy all efforts at scholarly revision. Much that we think we know is wrong. Among many reasons, the 1955 Dambusters became most popular British war movie of all time, is that it portrayed a successful air attack, that seemed victimless, save for 53 dead among the wonderfully courageous young men who carried it out. It bore none of the moral baggage that's become associated with the offensive against Germany's cities. In reality, however, up to 1400 people perished in the biblical flood. The Möhne catastrophe, as Germans call it, unleashed by the Raiders, more civilian deaths than had been inflicted by any previous RAF attempt. It's fascinating that Guy Gibson afterwards reflected on easily about this, as his senior officers never did. He wrote, ‘the fact that people might drown and the calculus, no one likes mass slaughter, and we did not like being the authors of it’...
‘Nobody can wage a struggle for national for survival and keep completely clean hands. We make war as we can, rather than as we should’’

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, The fertiliser that blew up Beirut - ‘It seems like the energy demand of producing fertilizer has a huge cost to the earth. And I wondered, how do you justify its use?’
‘So if you look at global consumption of food, if you're not using a mineral fertilizer, you will actually produce half of the food that is produced currently, which means that you will need to increase the land area significantly. If you look at global greenhouse gas emissions, approximately a quarter comes from food production and land use change. And it's only one to two percentage that comes from fertilizer production. So actually, it's more important to ensure that we optimize fuel production on the existing land. And in order to do that mineral fertilizer is part of a solution.’…
‘I have memories of my great grandfather who died at 120, who had made my parents swear not to use this, to have this interference of chemicals be sprayed on our land for a very, very good reason. And that was to keep the land sacred because we don't own the land. The land does not belong to us. We belong to the land. And this is the belief that I grew up with and it's something very, very deeply emotional and, and important to me.’
‘Flores tells me this spiritual connection to the land is called tapu.’...
‘These fertilizers have made it possible for us to overpopulate the earth. Very simply put, without Haber-Bosch, we would have never had the food that we have to feed the population that we have now. The human population is still rising. And we're going to add another two or 3 billion people between now and the end of this century. And we're going to have to depend on Haber-Bosch to do it. That looks inevitable.’
‘So there is a lot of scientific studies that show that you will not be able to feed the population today on organic farming, because there is such a big yield gap. So you would then need to compensate by increasing the land area significantly.’...
‘I believe that every person is willing to do the best for the environment. But once he looks at the price in the supermarket, he chooses the cheapest. If you internalize the external costs, so make products that pollute more expensive, and subsidize the more sustainable farmers, that helps the consumer to make the choice for the more sustainable products.’"
"Sustainability" is only sustainable with subsidies. Environmentalism is a conceit - rich people virtue signalling and making poor people's lives worse

Are You a Maximizer or a Satisficer? (NSQ Ep. 14) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘I believe Barry Schwartz wrote about the fact that people tend to become more satisficers as they get older.’
‘Yeah, he did. He thinks that's why we get happier. Our standards go south.’
‘I think there's a different way of looking at that. It's not that you settle. I think it's about choosing to care less about things that matter less.’
‘Yeah, it's a little more Buddhist’...
‘Let's say one day you're riding to work on the subway or the bus. And you see someone sitting near you. Say, a middle aged woman. And she's reading, got her nose buried in this book, and she’s got her hair drawn back, and these thick glasses and right next to her, she's got a big tote bag filled with more books. What's more likely? That she is a librarian or a salesperson?’‘This is like a Danny Kahneman question... So I'm supposed to answer with base rates. So I have to think that there are I think more salespeople than there are librarians… And therefore, that person is more likely a salesperson, even though there's the salient cue, like books, librarian. Must be a librarian. So I'm gonna go with salesperson’...
‘There's a consensus in social science that what's typically done is the unstructured interview, which is like person walks in, you strike up a conversation. You're like, oh, I noticed you've got a Phillies hat on. Are you from Philadelphia? And then the conversation’s a random walk through topics and then all of a sudden an hour has gone by and the interview’s over. That's what most interviews probably are like in America and the consensus in social science is not only do they not add much predictive value to hiring the right person, but like, in many cases could detract value. In other words, if you hadn't interviewed the person at all, you would have been better off as an employer.’
‘Because you're basically building up an image, a projection based on kind of garbage.’
‘Well, I think the idea is this: you can come out of an hour long interaction with another human being with a really strong visceral and emotional liking or disliking for that person. And then you could overweight it, you could ignore things like, well, the resume is not so strong. And I don't know, the recommendations were iffy, but God we had this great conversation about the Phillies... A work sample. And I think there's like a mountain of research showing that unlike unstructured interviews, work samples where you're just like, hey, you're gonna have to do X, could you do a little X now? Let me see how it goes. Those are really good.’"
Ignoring "stereotypes" (base rates) reduces accuracy. The price of hewing to ideology

How Can We Get More Virtue and Less ‘Virtue Signaling’? (NSQ Ep. 17) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘There's another thing that determines human behavior, and that's friction. So I think for a lot of people going on social media, and tweeting or retweeting and like you don't even have to write anything anymore. All you have to do is retweet, it's just one button that you have to press. And that is frictionless. And I think that is why you get a lot of virtue signaling and maybe a little less virtue. Because imagine the comparison between tweeting and tutoring, right. It's like well, tutoring you have to do repeatedly. And when you're with them, it's a lot of energy. And that is actually what I would like to see more. More tutoring and less tweeting. But I think this friction thing is key. And therefore if we want to see more virtue, we have to make it more frictionless for people to actually do something about one of the many things that there are to care about... It's always going to be hard to make virtue as frictionless as virtue signaling. I mean, even Ben Franklin had this anecdote in his autobiography, like, fill a wheelbarrow with piles of paper and walk around the neighborhoods, that people think you're an industrious person. Like, that's easier than actually being industrious’...
‘Steven Spielberg… said, yeah, you know, my rabbi told me that when I give, you know, 10 million or 20 million here and there that you're supposed to not put your name on it, but I thought, look, my name has some leverage. And if I can give money, and then have the name attached, and make other people like me think, oh, I should also give money, then I'm going to do it. And I thought, what's better? That I look humble, or that I get more money raised for a cause that I care about? And I thought that was a fantastic argument, I really think he did out Maimonides Maimonides'...
'When you see in that big font, next to the major corporations and the well established philanthropic foundations anonymous, I honestly have to say like, that inspires me more than anything'...
‘I became an editor, because there are a lot more editing jobs than there are writing jobs.’
‘That is not intuitive, because you think that there's so much writing to edit, but then you only need one editor for 10 writers or something?’
‘Well, it's the jobs part that makes it real. In other words, like in the magazine world, editors are usually actual salaried jobs, which I was interested in. I wanted to be on the inside of something. Whereas in magazines, at least, a whole lot of the writing was freelance’"

How Do You Raise a “Likable” Kid? (NSQ Ep. 18) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "‘One of the predictors of both romantic and platonic relationships is homophily. In other words, that like likes like, so birds of a feather.’"

Is Economic Growth the Wrong Goal? (Ep. 429) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "Even before Covid-19 crushed G.D.P.’s around the world, some people were calling for high-income countries to intentionally reduce their G.D.P.’s — to pursue what has been labeled “prosperity without growth.”
   HICKEL: “Degrowth” is specifically about actively scaling down resource use and energy use... Clearly the objective is to transition our economies to 100 percent renewable energy as quickly as possible. But research in ecological economics and in climate economics is quite clear that that can’t be done fast enough while we grow the economy at the same time. And the reason is because the more you grow the economy, the more energy it requires. And the more energy it requires, the more difficult it is to supply the energy with renewables."...
The downside of a constant growth strategy, Hickel says, is that it inevitably pushes up against what scientists call “planetary boundaries.”...
VAN DOORNINCK: I do think a lot of people are interested in reusing or recreating or recycling things. But right now, it’s quite difficult because it’s still cheaper to dig the mines and get all the raw materials from other parts of the world to the Netherlands. That’s cheaper for a producer than to actually recycle. So, we need this incentive to make recycling and reusing and recreating much more interesting for a producer than raw mining.One of the things that we need to do is completely change our tax system. Right now, we do have low taxes on primary resources and we have very high taxes on labor. And actually, the circular economy is very labor-intensive because all this reusing, recycling, you’re taking things apart and then making new things, is very labor-intensive. And so, I do think that by showing that using things again is not only saving the earth, but it’s also creating lots of employment...
DUBNER: So, Amsterdam could go to zero carbon emissions in five years. And that doesn’t affect at all what, let’s say, India or China do. So, I realize this is not your job, per se, but I am curious to know how Amsterdam feels, being a citizen of the world, but knowing that even if you achieve your solutions across the board, not just with climate and pollution, but sustainability, housing, reusing, etc., what part that may play in the global march toward those sort of solutions.
VAN DOORNINCK: Well, if you only wait for the others to start, then nobody will ever move. And I know that there’s many countries in the world and many cities in the world who really want to make change, also cities within the United States of America. So, I do think as a city who puts a huge ecological footprint on the world because we are a rich city, and we use enormous amounts of fossil fuels, and we use enormous amounts of consumer goods that pollute the world by its waste, but also by the way it’s being produced, we do have a responsibility."
Even clearer evidence that the fetish for renewables and environmentalism is also about destroying the economy and making people's lives worse by making things more expensive on purpose
Why is Malthusianism so seductive despite being repeatedly debunked? Maybe it dovetails with the Nietzschean death wish
Ironically the episode talks about the HDI, but ignores the fact that HDI correlates well with GDP
A true sign of late capitalism: when life is so good that you can think of how to make it worse because you're bored
Basically an admission that environmentalism is virtue signalling - the principle of the commons doesn't apply and you can only hope that others won't take you for a sucker

Links - 30th June 2021 (2)

Richard M Eaton On Indian History | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtraAlthough the word Sultan is an Arabic word, the kind of mystique of the Sultan drew upon much earlier Persian ideas of the Shah, or the Shāhanshāh, the King of Kings...by the time the Sultan idea reaches India, in the 12th and 13th centuries, it has already picked up these ancient Persian ideas of an of an absolute monarch, of the whole mystique of the crown, the scepter, the throne, the idea of a hereditary monarchy. The idea that the Shāhanshāh is the shadow of God, all of these ideas are then imported to North India, by way of these Turks. And it's very important to remember it seems to me here, that since the Sultan was identified, juxtaposed to the Caliph who was the religious authority, the Sultan did not necessarily convey the idea of Islamic power or Islamic authority, to quite the contrary, we have the idea of a Sultan as a ruler of all subjects, regardless of what their religion might happen to be...even non Muslims could claim the title of Sultan, which is exactly what does happen in India. We find in the 13th and 14th centuries, a number of states popping up in various parts of India, where the Hindu ruler would claim to be a Sultan. And that, it seems to me is rather dramatic proof or dramatic evidence that the word Sultan had been kind of drained from any explicit association with the Islamic religion and had come to mean simply a, the most powerful term that one could imagine for a ruler...
[On the Mughals] ‘Although they were a dynasty that had originated in Central Asia, although they had originated in, on land power, based on cavalry, when they come to India, what you really see with the Mughals is a merging of two different worlds. A Central Asian world where power is understood as something that is very mobile, mainly through cavalry, where wealth also is mobile, because these were, the Mughals have come from pastoral peoples who moved with their sheep and their goats and their horses and their camels. And wealth was understood as something which moved. And they come to India. And they encounter a world in which wealth was static, was stored up in temples, which were well endowed with, with land. A world that was agricultural and not pastoral, where wealth was understood in terms of grain. And so what the Mughals really represent is a merging of these two different worlds. A pastoral world of Central Asia where wealth was mobile, and an agricultural or agrarian world of India, where wealth was fixed…
Although we call them and they continually call it Muslim dynasty, in fact, they become more and more ethnically or at least culturally Rajput. They adopt Rajput style of self presentation, the way in which the Mughal Emperor, for example, presented himself before his people. Leans on symbols and notions of authority which come directly out of Rajput culture. For example, the tradition of presenting oneself at dawn as the sun is rising before one's population, it's called a darshana, where one is seated above the ground level, and the people are below. This is very much an Indian and more specifically Rajput political institution, which was simply taken over by the Mughals’"

Stella Dadzie On The Resistance Of Enslaved Women | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘One of the myths I think, that surrounds the enslavement of women, particularly in the context of the West Indies, is that men did all the hard labor. And one of the things that's emerged from revisiting plantation records, which were kept in quite a lot of detail. What we see is that on many of the large estates, particularly in Jamaica, but across the West Indies, women form the vast majority of the field gangs. So there's been lots of debates about why that was, it could be that women were seen to have more stamina, as opposed to physical strength. And that may well have been a factor. Certainly, in terms of the buying and selling prices of women, it's fairly evident that their labor was seen as equal, there was very little differential between the price of a man and the price of a woman. But I think one of the most important aspects is, you know, if you think about abolition, 1807, the actual source of the enslaved was cut off. Slavery itself continued, but the actual trade across the Atlantic ceased. And what that meant is that suddenly black women, for the first time in their history, perhaps, were being encouraged to breed'...
'Speaking about women who were kind of forced into close proximity with their oppressors, many enslaved women were forced into or entered into sexual relationships with their oppressors. And you have a very interesting take on this, because you suggested that it could be quite nuanced, and the experiences in those situations can't just be branded with one brush. How do you think that we should view those, those relationships or situations?’
‘Well, you know, if you, if your starting point is that survival is a form of resistance, then you can begin to understand those women who either bought into the role of the concubine or took advantage of the little power that they were given to, survive and live to tell the tale. And I think it's very easy, particularly through a sort of black nationalist lens, to try to present enslavement as one sided or one dimensional. It wasn't. And obviously, in a society where colorism was so entrenched, where the closer you were, in terms of your appearance to white, the more chance you had of being given a halfway decent survival rate. What you see is quite a lot of women, both black but, but also mixed race women, who not only had slaves themselves, if they managed to be freed, but who also were accused of quite significant brutality. Now, that's an uncomfortable truth. But it has to be placed in the context of the time, as does any violence that we talk about, because as I say in the book, when we talk about the violence that was meted out to slaves, that was by no means unique to the West Indies, and they were still putting people's heads on poles and disempowering them alive in the courts of British palaces. So, within that context, you know, the brutality was horrendous, but it wasn't unique. But yes, what you see is that women, women sometimes bought into that, and women are sometimes accused of perhaps trying too hard to emulate their white overseers and oppressors’"
Presumably collaborators with the Nazis were resisting by surviving

Jim Leary How Medieval People Moved Around The World | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘We probably forget nowadays, just how important pilgrimage was particularly in the, in the medieval period, in Britain, you would have had people going, you know, *something* entire households going out on pilgrimages at particular times of the year, you know, particular holy days, and it would have been a rather fun time, I mean, there is almost sort of a festival on, a festival feeling around some of these pilgrimage centers during Holy Days, and you would have gone with your, your household and perhaps some neighbors, and you would have made a nice day of it, or maybe a long, you know, longer than that. And, and it would have all been, you know, rather rather fun. Of course, there's a, there's a flip side of that, which is wherever you have, mobility is freedom, there's mobility as restriction. And so people were often forced to go on pilgrimages as penance for committing some crime, you know, adultery, or whatever it might be. So, you know, it wasn't always fun for everyone and others may have gone sort of, with, you know, with, with their sackcloth, on and or barefoot or whatever... We have the, the Statute of Winchester. 1285, which means, which restricts people moving around at nighttime, as a, you know, you might be caught by the nightwatch. And what are you doing up at this time? Because if you're not sleeping, then that means you're probably sleeping during the day and, and therefore very limited economic value to people. You know, so, so this restriction is a big, a big part of, restricting mobility is a big part of controlling the people’"
Strange. I thought the profit motive was the fault of capitalism

Elena Woodacre On Tudor Queens On Screen | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘One of the things that we can clearly see in terms of our interest in and perhaps our more recent interest in Queens on screen, and women in power in the early modern period, is our interest in women in power today... Now, that is obviously changes the way that we look back on the past and the way that we look at women and power and authority and governance in the past as well. But it also helps pique our interest as well. And we are whether we are doing it deliberately, deliberately or subconsciously, making those connections between women in power today and women in power then. The question is, because feminism and because that's part of our modern makeup, it's part of our modern landscape. It's part of our, we're picking it up by osmosis again, however you feel about it. And that goes into the films that we make as well. And one of the kind of dangers of that is that we are kind of turning the queens of the past into proto feminists, that we're looking to make the women of the past kind of demonstrate values and behaviors that resonate with us, but may not have been something that they could have identified... I mentioned how many dissertations I've had on Anne [Boleyn]. My former PhD supervisor, when, when she was teaching undergrads basically said, I will not have another dissertation on Elizabeth I. Leave her alone. Yeah, she's had enough.’"

The Regency Era, Everything You Wanted to Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "[Jane Austen’s] also known for not writing about what she didn't know. So famously, she doesn't have any scenes where there are just men in the room, because she'd never, she would never know what how men would talk to each other, when there's no women present. So there's a real legitimacy there. But it makes it a very limited view. So it's confined to the upper classes, and the sort of upper middle classes. It’s to domestic concerns, to the female experience. And then we can see these glimpses of darker corners of the Regency world, she doesn't really delve into that reality of poverty and infant mortality and disease and war and all of this. And that's a conscious decision on her part, she doesn't want to make things up, and she doesn't want to dwell on misery… it is a great starting point. But it's important to remember that they are fiction, and her stories are the product of a woman's imagination, and they're also designed to appeal to people, and, and to sell books, essentially, and among a particular type of audience, and I think that can get lost in the fandom that surrounds her. And one thing I would say is that I would recommend anyway is to if you're interested in Austen, to really read her letters as well as her fiction, because you actually get a better sense of the reality of her life and what it was to be a woman of her class in that time. And she's got a really wicked sense of humor. So she's making jokes about going into London and being seduced into a life of sex work by brothel keeper. And she jokes about a woman having a miscarriage because her husband is so ugly, and it's just this side is wicked, really side of Austin that is completely sanitized and polished, and never made it into the novel. So it's best to see that side of her that's probably not deemed fit for public consumption."

Stephen Bourne On Black Britons In WW2 | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘How much racism did black people encounter during the Second World War? And what kind of reception did they get from the, from the wider British public?’
‘I would say, as I've said in the book, on the whole, although there were racist attitudes, some of them quite virulent… for the duration of the war, the British people, with some exceptions, embraced the West Indians and the West Africans that came to this country to support them in wartime, because they, most of them would be in uniform. And that really helped break down the barriers. The same thing happened when the thousands and thousands of African American GIs came to this country and were treated appallingly by the American military. They were segregated, the British didn't like that. I mean, you see, we didn't segregate in the armed services. I'm not saying the armed services were always perfect. The RAF, for example, would not recruit men of color, until 1941... But once black people were in uniform, or were seen to be doing war work, whether it be air raid warden, or stretcher bearer, they were respected, I think, on the whole.’
‘Now, as you as you just mentioned, you write in the book, that the arrival in Britain of tens of thousands of American GIs had a sort of quite an impact on the experiences of black people in Britain. I just wanted to go into a little bit more detail on that, please.’
‘The African Americans. Well they brought, the Americans, the American military, brought with them their racist practices. As I say they were segregated. And a lot of the British people try to protect them and support them, and some of the black West Indians and, and others. Black British people, were very supportive of them. And so you had instances where there was friction, I think it was in 1944, the famous battle of Bamber Bridge. And that involved a lot of friction between the white American military police and the black Americans who are going to the local village pub, and integrating and making friends. And it caused a lot of friction that the white military police did not approve, and it ended up in violence, terrible situations. And there were examples of that. They, of course, the Americans, at that time had outlawed or had always outlawed mixed marriages that, you know, in Britain, we did not do that. We did not outlaw mixed marriages. So black and white could marry. It may not have been socially acceptable in some quarters, but it was not outlawed. But in America, it was. So if a white woman was seen with an African American GI, it could cause all sorts of problems. But what I discovered in the course of the research, was that I think it was 1942. You had instances where white American GIs would see a Jamaican or Trinidadian walking along Oxford Street with a white girlfriend and they would literally cross over the road and punch him. Assault him. And it got to such a level of violence towards non-black-Americans. Like black British or or Caribbean or African men, servicemen that they, the government almost introduced a little badge, a Union Jack badge for black British, Caribbean origin, West African servicemen and women to wear so that white American GI could differentiate. And if they saw them wearing this little Union Jack badge, they knew it was hands off. They didn't introduce it, but it got that close’"
Americans imposing their cultural context on the whole world is not new. But this is a new nadir

History Of Medicine: Everything You Wanted To Know - HistoryExtra - "‘As vaccination becomes an accepted practice, slowly in the 19th century, states start to want to make people get vaccinated, and that immediately creates anti vaccination movements. So there were in the middle of the 19th century, British working class anti vaccination movements that just didn't want the state ruling their bodies. Very like today, and a lot of conflict about whether or not they could resist. And it's a template for I think where we are today, in terms of people arguing that the state should not have the right to inject something into their bodies… The humoral system lasted for about two millennia. And I think one of the appealing parts about it is that it's pretty simple in some ways, like I just explained it. You can have a much more complicated explanation. But the way it worked, it sort of fit with lived experience pretty well. It explained, for example, that women are colder and wetter than men, they don't burn off their food as well. And because they don't burn off their food as well, they have to menstruate, that's going to get rid of that extra stuff. But we know that very skinny dancers, for example, might not menstruate. Why is that? Well, they're doing so much exercise that they're burning that off, and that's why they don't menstruate. So it seemed to work with lived experience. I think if you have a head cold and you're blowing your nose all the time, you can't think right. Well, that's phlegm, isn't it? You know, that's what you're blowing out into your hankie. It fits with how people lived in their bodies, and seemed to have a lot of explanatory power...
Many women were pregnant or lactating for a lot of their adult lives. And so they didn't menstruate nearly as often, and they were undernourished. And we know that that can also make women not menstruate. So our modern kind of every 28 days, you know, alleged regularity was probably not what premodern women experienced, was probably much sort of relatively rarer occurrence.’...
‘When did magic stop being considered medicinal?’
‘Ah, that's a lovely question. And of course, it all depends on what you mean by magic, right? I mean, if you think of magic as hidden causes, which is what it was usually meant to mean in an earlier time period, you know, it's still magical today. I can't explain to you how a CAT scan machine works, I might be in one and get scanned, but I can't tell you how it takes a picture of my insides, or, placebo effect. You know, the placebo effect works for many people, for some things. You know, we could consider that sort of magical. We have another explanation. It's psychological. But you could consider it magical. So it really depends on what you count as magical. But broadly speaking, I would say late 18th, early 19th century if I had to pick a time, but I think there are practices that probably continue that nobody around them maybe thought were magical, but they still did them. One of my favorite examples is actually from Bristol, which is, a woman in the 18th century who wore her doctor's prescription on a little piece of paper on a string around her neck. She didn’t get filled, she just thought that it had these magical properties. And it's just really small scale, but it tells you a lot about how ordinary people might have understood the power of the written word’"
Of course, all the feminists who mock men for not thinking that 28 day calendars are period calendars imagine that all women have 28 day cycles, and that women's periods are as regular as the cycles of the moon - even with modern standards of nutrition

Critical Race Theory and Hotels

The most ridiculous apologetics for Critical Race Theory (CRT) I've seen:

This isn’t hard : WhitePeopleTwitter

"I'm going to see if I can explain it a different way:

Imagine a guy who hates disabled people builds a hotel, so he bans all disabled people, and builds it in such a way as to specifically make access difficult for them. Years later he sells the hotel to a new owner who has no problem with disabled people. So you have a hotel where the owner has no problem with the disabled, and neither do any of the staff... however due to the actions of the previous owner, the hotel is still built in such a way that it doesn't accommodate them (no disabled parking, no ramps, no extra considerations, etc.) So although the people currently running it are not actively discriminating, they are operating a system designed to discriminate, and need to fix it even if they aren't to blame for it.

It's the same with racism. The discriminatory practices of the past still have ramifications today, and even if we aren't to blame for them we must recognize them."

(while the reddit thread was about systemic racism, I saw at least 2 shares of a screenshot on Facebook calling it "Critical Race Theory for kindergartners")

Amusingly, there're some people in the thread who point out that this is comparing black people to disabled people.

But anyway, even Vox admits that CRT is against colorblindness, objectivity, and neutrality.

If you don't want to believe Vox, believe Crossroads, Directions and A New Critical Race Theory, where "thirty-one CRT scholars present their views on the ideas and methods of CRT, its role in academia and in the culture at large, and its past, present, and future", which states that:

"Critical race theorists assert that both the procedures and the substance of American law are structured to maintain white privilege. The neutrality and objectivity of the law are not just unattainable ideals; they are harmful actions that obscure the law's role in protecting white supremacy."

So in reality,

Imagine a guy 100 years ago who hated disabled people built a hotel, so he banned all disabled people, and built it in such a way as to specifically make access difficult for them.

Years later, his son who had no problem with disabled people retrofitted the hotel to remove the barriers.

Then, the son of the original guy sold it to someone else who retrofitted it again to make it even easier for disabled people.

So you have a hotel where the owner has no problem with the disabled, and neither do any of the staff... however due to the actions of the original owner (and lots of bad publicity over what happened 100 years ago, much of it pretending that things are equally bad today), people still think the hotel is built in such a way that it doesn't accommodate them.

And people claim that because a person in a wheelchair wheeling himself up a ramp gets more tired and takes longer than an able-bodied person who can go up a few steps, this means the hotel doesn't accommodate disabled people.

So although the hotel accommodates disabled people, disabled activists are still trying to get more concessions (as well as for the current hotel owner to buy them off with pecuniary and non-pecuniary compensation.

It's the same with racism. The discriminatory practices of the past are still invoked for political benefit today, and even if there is nothing wrong we are still told that there is.

Links - 30th June 2021 (1)

JFK: The Path To Power | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘It's clear that voters take to this guy. There's something about him even as a young politician, that voters just like. There is a certain reticence, a certain shyness, but also a charisma and a charm that comes through even in these halting speeches. And it may be notable that female voters in particular, even in that first race in 1946, are drawn to his candidacy and he gets a lot of support from female voters...
[On his being a womanizer] I think it becomes reckless, at least to a degree... something that we see in John F. Kennedy from an early age. A deep interest in, in girls and women. And he I think, is taught by, maybe that's the wrong word. His father strongly says to both of his older sons, to Joe Jr, and to Jack in effect, I expect you to follow in my footsteps here, to view women as objects to be conquered. And, you know, Joe, when the boys were young, Joe would even bring mistresses home, which must have been so confusing to them, to see their father bring a woman into the house, who's not their mother, who's also there. That must have been confusing. And I say that not to excuse what goes on because if I'm going to argue on the one hand that Jack Kennedy is his own man, when it comes to politics, and his career, he could certainly also be his own man when it comes to how to treat women. So I can't have it both ways. But the father's example, certainly, certainly, certainly matters.’"

Toussaint Louverture's Extraordinary Life | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Prior to the revolution, and after he had been emancipated... he himself, briefly was a slave owner? And should that in any way affect our judgment of him?’ ‘One of the few documents that have survived indeed, from the, I think it's the early, it's either the late 1770s, or the early 1780s, is exactly a kind of title deed, which shows that for a relatively brief period of time, Toussaint Louverture owned, or at least, managed about a dozen slaves. It's also come to light recently, or at least a possible fact has come to light that one of them may have been someone called Jacques Dessaline, who actually went on to become one of the great generals of the of the Saint Domingue revolution, and after Toussaint died, he becomes one of the leaders of the new Haitian Republic. So and Toussaint always had a rather complicated relationship with this. I mean, of course, this would have certainly have added to the complexity of their relationship. If, if it turned out to be true, that Toussaint had for a brief moment, owned him as a slave. I think, I don't know that it should necessarily change our view of Toussaint himself, because I think he was, as I say, part of a structure in pre revolutionary Saint Domingue, where slavery was not just the norm, but it was the only form of, it was the only mode of production, the only form of social relations that were imagined. And so if you wanted, if he Toussaint wanted to move forward, this was the only way in which he could advance his own interests. I guess the question that one should ask that point is how did he treat his slaves?... by the time of the Revolution, and when Toussaint becomes a leading figure in the revolution in the 1790s, there is no evidence that his slave ownership is something that is held against him by his his loyal and devoted followers'...
‘What were, as far as we know, Toussaint’s views on race and racial equality?’
‘Well, I think what's really interesting about him on that front is that he is not someone who, to use contemporary language, he's not really interested in identity politics. He's not someone who defines himself primarily, through with ethnicity. He's someone who believes that ethnicity matters only, insofar as it is needed to underline the importance of equality. So he’s a republican. He’s a classical republican in that sense. And, and I suppose, ultimately, I mean, if it doesn't sound too paradoxical, his view was that race should not matter. His view was that what he wanted to do was to build a political community in which people treated each other as human beings, as human beings who possess certain basic rights, and those rights had to be upheld for everybody. And that's, and so race only comes into the picture, when those rights are being infringed upon’"
Of course, only white people get judged harshly by SJWs

Ken Follett’s Anglo-Saxon adventure - HistoryExtra - "‘Talking about the end of the 10th century, beginning of the 11th century, true England is being ruled as a single country, theoretically. And, but this is a relatively new thing. It certainly hasn't settled down. And quite what people, how people identified is not clear to me. I'm not sure that we have a real concept of England until we get to the 16th century. And then Shakespeare, of course, articulates it with his usual verve and brilliance. But I don't recall, before that I don't recall any, anything much about, you know, we are English, England is our country, and all that. So, I think at this time, people probably still identified more with their county, or city or region, or even just the hundred in which their village was located. It's a, it's a jolly interesting question. I think, you know, what if, what would, what would those dark ages Anglo-Saxons say now, if you said to them, what group do you belong to? But I don't think there's yet any evidence that they say England.’...
‘A young Norman woman called Emma of Normandy, came to England and married the king, married, Ethelred, Ethelred the unræd. She was, she was, I think, 18 when she married him, and she appears in the book... Emma was a very interesting woman, she married Ethelred when, when he died, she married the next king of England, who was Canute. And then one of her children was Edward the Confessor, who was the next king of England. So there was a Norman woman who was absolutely at the heart of English politics for a very long period of time. And I would guess, was extremely powerful. I mean, you can't, you know, it's not very likely that somebody who lived that life was a shrinking violet, I imagine ,that I certainly imagine her as being a woman of power and influence in the English court. So it's, she is an example of how, despite the rhetoric of the time, which is all about women being inferior, and overemotional and feeble, and all that, despite all that sort of thing, even in the Dark Ages, women could become very powerful people... I suspect it, basically it has always been acceptable, because we are constantly reading about princesses and countesses, abesses, you know, the nun who was ruler of a convent might be extremely rich and, and employ many people and have tremendous influence in in the area, which she owned or the convent owned, but she certainly had the rights of ownership. So, and it was commonplace, I think every, when a Lord, when a nobleman went to war, somebody had to mind the shop. And most of the time that would have been his wife. That would be who he trusted, that would be who knew the territory, who knew who the reliable people were and who the dishonest people were, and all that sort of thing. So I, it seems to me that, that women have, have always played that kind of role, even though it wasn't always acknowledged...
By this point, slavery had died out in Normandy, pretty much. That there might have been a few slaves left, but it was very uncommon by this time, if not completely stamped out. And in England, it was commonplace and and if we're to believe the Domesday Book, 10% of the English population was slaves. That's a big percentage, and it's a proper slave society. And, and the Normans were past that stage. Probably. This is something that historians speculate about, but it seems plausible to me. The church was against slavery, not on human rights grounds, but because slaves are always used for prostitution. And the church was certainly against that’"

Kate Summerscale On A 1930s Ghost Hunt | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘We don't really think of the 20th century as a type of paranormal activity and the supernatural because it seems too modern for that almost. What can you tell us about the world of paranormal investigation in the 1930s, and why the 30s was such a key time for this?’
‘Well, there was a huge rise in spiritualism after the First World War, which was a belief that the dead could communicate with the living, principally through seances. And at the same time, there was a kind of parallel science of the spiritual and the people who worked in Psychical Research, the ghost hunters, some of them were very serious about really finding scientific explanations for paranormal events. And there was a lot of overlap between the Psychical Research and psychoanalysis, for example. All these sort of experimental sciences that were partly to do with physics in some cases, and partly to do with psychology. So there was a lot of sort of fringe work, and they were all sort of equally mistrusted and fascinating to the public. And the newspapers were full of reports about experiments in telepathy and astral projection, and fortune telling, and astrology. And so it was, it was a fringe science, but very much aspiring to be a science, and taken seriously by many, including the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle. And Sir Oliver Lodge, who was a great pioneer of radio waves. And I suppose it was a time when there was, people started to have radios in their homes, when most people did, and telephones and even televisions, and all of these devices had some kind of almost supernatural quality to the way you could, your voice could be disembodied and transported across continents. And so there was some sort of plausibility to the idea that the ghosts might exist and we just hadn't discovered the method of transmission, the way in which the dead were able to speak to us and convey their messages.’"

Medieval turning points - HistoryExtra - "‘Historical periods are made by historians… some historians have argued quite powerfully that Gregory the Great, he's not really part of the medieval world. He's really part of the kind of antique world, kind of prolongation of the ancient world, which is called late antiquity. And that's because his mindset is really still Imperial. He still thinks in terms of Roman Empire'...
‘What is the difference between the late antique and the and the early medieval? What's what's the, how did the mindsets alter?’...
‘Different historians will give you different answers to that. And I think lots of it really depends where you're looking at Gregory from, so I think it makes a lot of sense to look at Gregory from the perspective of you know, of Christian Rome, the kinds of the Rome of Constantine the Great and so on thinking forwards. If you are looking at him backwards, it becomes more early medieval. He really sits on the cusp, okay, he can be thought of as both… it's really about his conceptual frame of reference… his missions to the English is critical part of that. The English were not, the people he thought of as English, were not really in the Empire anymore… the person who actually receives the mission... probably wouldn't have thought of themselves as English at all... Gregory the Great by sending missions to the English actually kind of promotes and to some extent, creates an English identity’...
‘The distinction we need to make those between societies with slaves and slave societies... medieval Europe is not a slave society. In that, while there are kind of people who are chattel slaves, especially by the way, I might add, women. So women seem to have been disproportionately affected by this kind of slaving. That is not the main form that unfreedom takes. In most of Europe, most people were unfree to some extent, but it was a very fluid concept, and they weren't, they were not slaves in the sense of which you've been talking about.’"

Claudio Saunt On The Dispossession Of Native Americans | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘The stated reason… was that this was the actually the best thing for the victims of the policy. of the subjects of the policy, that if, if they were not moved, they would not survive. And they had these metaphors that they repeated over and over again, that Indians, indigenous Americans were like, a bank of sand on the ocean shore being worn away by the waves, or, similarly, they said, they were like a mountain of snow in the sun melting away, and if they weren't moved, that they were just going to vanish and disappear. So it was done for their own good... You know, if you if you take them at at their word, sure, you might believe that but if you if you listen to the folks who were the who were the victims of the policy, they that they pushed back… they insisted we are not vanishing, they said we, we are in fact thriving... the best demographic evidence available suggests that the populations, indigenous populations, though clearly they had declined. But by the 1820s, 1830s, the populations were largely stable, if not actually increasing’"
So much for the myth of Native American genocide

Black radical: William Monroe Trotter | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Some of his methods sound surprisingly modern. Can you tell us how you protested the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation?’...
‘Trotter was really somebody who believed in mass protest. So that meant getting as many people as you could to confront seats of power… he stages protests in Boston, he, you know, confronts the mayor of Boston at the time, Boston was known as a pretty puritanical city, in terms of banning lots of things. So they would ban you know, one play because the woman showed her ankles on the stage, all these sorts of things. And so Trotter was pointing out if anything should be banned is this film, which has sort of racial and political repercussions, and this sort of led to countless protests at the theaters in Boston. Eventually the mayor did end up staying the showing of the film, and other cities across the United States followed suit, but Trotter, what made him distinct was his focus on the fact that this was a lie, right? That the way the film portrayed black people had no basis in fact, whereas other people who argued against the film, namely the NAACP, argued that well, it was an opinion, right. You know, censorship should probably happen, but why don't we just find another film by black people to counter the truth of this film, and Trotter very astutely pointed out that there is no basis for saying the Klan is a good organization, and that that's the way the film should be attacked, not as a work of art that is being censored but as a work of propaganda that was leading to further racial violence and political division.’"
The First Amendment wasn't always that powerful, it seems

Ancient Wisdom With Neil Oliver | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘The human race has been through the same sort of problems again, and again, and again, you know, human populations have been invaded by strangers, or they in turn, have invaded the neighbors. They've had wars, they've had outbreaks of pestilence and plague, you know, they've had tyrannies, they've had benign kingship, they've had democracies, the whole thing just keeps on coming around and around and around. If you don't pay attention to history, it can be even more stressful, because you might think that what's happening to us in the 21st century is unique, and especially bad. If you look back at history, you see it, it's happened to people before us many, many, many times. And I feel that if you look back at other times, and see how people coped with situations, there's just a reassurance to be had from knowing there is nothing new. Our species has been dealing with the same big challenges again, and again and again. And here we are... We have conquered so many diseases. We have lifted billions of people out of poverty. Here in much of Western Europe, we have lived in what is by comparison to others, a very tolerant and peaceful society. And yet, even given all of those incredible gifts, so many people it seems to me are depressed, are on antidepressants and beta blockers, and they're finding it hard to cope with a daily reality’"
Yet, humans like to feel special. So this might not be comforting after all

Vincent Brown On Tacky's Slave Revolt | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "1761. And it was at the time Jamaica, Britain's most profitable, most militarily significant, and best politically connected colony in the Americas. One often thinks of the 13 British colonies in North America that broke away from the British Empire and the American Revolution, without remembering that on the eve of the revolution, Britain actually had 26 colonies in America. And by far, the most profitable and politically significant of them were those colonies in the Caribbean, with Jamaica being foremost among them. So this revolt by enslaved Africans, at the very heart of the British Empire in America was a serious event. And it also occurred during the Seven Years War"

Links - 28th June 2021 (2) (Mulan)

The Mulan 2020 Remake Is Basically Jamie Oliver’s Egg Fried Rice With Chilli Jam And No 'Wok Hei' - "The 1998 Mulan movie was groundbreaking in its feminist message and all-Asian characters.  The art style also set it apart from other Disney classics by referencing Chinese ink painting. Pale green backgrounds and snow-capped cliffs were used to create a poetic setting for Mulan’s quest. In Chinese painting, waterfalls and cliffs overshadow human figures to depict that self is found in the larger context of nature or society as opposed to individualism. This underlying philosophy cradles Mulan’s risk in impersonating a man for a bigger ideal—to help her father protect China.   According to its IMDb page, the animated film was largely written and directed by Westerners. Yet, it showcased enough understanding of Eastern philosophy and aesthetics to enchant viewers from the East and West alike. The 2020 remake, however, falls apart on all levels."
Given that the 1998 version is well received despite being largely made by white people suggests that the insistence on yellow people doing everything is cynical identity politics

 Meme - "Remove beloved and iconic songs to make more "serious" adaptation of original Chinese ballad"
"Produce movie with 4 white screenwriters, a white director, and a white costume designer"
"Turn Mulan from ordinary girl who proves herself with her wits and hardwork to a witch with mystical oriental powers"
"The movie gets roasted to hell and back by both Eastern and Western audiences"
Plus this uses the clown in makeup meme but with Mulan makeup stills

Facebook - "This Mulan remake has unbelievably terrible writing. Who the fuck is gonna believe an Asian father would hug his child, let alone apologize to them?"

Why China Hates Disney's 'Mulan' Has Nothing to Do With Politics - "Even though Disney bent over backwards to create a live-action “Mulan” that would appeal to China, disgruntled Chinese viewers have dubbed it “the worst ‘Mulan’ in history,” saying that it feels “wooden” and offensively inauthentic... Numerous viewers across all platforms slammed the new “Mulan” as being worse than another blockbuster that tried and failed to work both sides of the Pacific. “Even ‘The Great Wall’ is better than this,” one wrote. “After watching ‘Mulan,’ I want to apologize to [‘Great Wall’ director] Zhang Yimou and [its star] Jing Tian.”The most fundamental flaw, most felt, was that Disney’s new heroine starts out from childhood already equipped with superhero-like abilities, thanks to her extraordinary reserves of “qi,” the force that she cultivates and controls to excel as a fighter.Turning her into a superhero removes Mulan’s everywoman appeal, and leaves her with no room to grow as a character, huge swathes of Chinese viewers said.“It feels that this Mulan was born with eight-pack abs,” one wrote. “She has no shortcomings — and even small shortcomings can be overcome immediately. She’s lost the complexity of the animated version of the character, who is both a cute little girl and a powerful heroine. She has no process of gradual growth.”.. Surprisingly perhaps, many viewers have a nostalgia-tinged fondness in China for Disney’s 1998 animation. A good number bemoaned the loss of the animated film’s songs, humor and the dragon character Mushu... Disney’s new “Mulan” was initially celebrated in the West for being a landmark for Asian-American representation, thanks to its all-Asian cast. Yet many of the elements seemingly included to boost its authenticity have fallen flat with their target mainland audience.One viewer wrote that the script’s constant repetition of the terms “loyal, brave, and true” felt like “a Google Translate take on Chinese.”“The whole film is just shouting empty slogans. Where are these qualities even reflected in the film?” he asked, questioning the logic, for instance, of why Mulan simply throws away all of her protective armor in the middle of a battle. The choice is obviously nonsensical, but it is also highly unfilial, since the garb is a treasured heirloom from her father... In the wake of other films like “Crazy Rich Asians” and Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell” that were hailed as milestones for Asians in the U.S., but which failed to resonate in China, “Mulan” is most revealing entry  yet in Hollywood’s rolodex of unsteady attempts to bridge the cultural gap between the mainland and the West."
Presumably the Chinese are sexist for not liking "strong female characters"

Disney’s Mulan hit with bad reviews in China as pirated copies circulate online ahead of theatrical release - "“It’s like that feeling when you go to a Western Chinese restaurant and have a pretty weird Chinese meal,” one user said of the new Mulan on Q&A site Zhihu... “It’s a Western film with a Chinese backdrop,” one Zhihu user said. Others added that Mulan’s chi is essentially treated the same as the Force in Star Wars... Other Chinese viewers also complained about some of the characters’ make-up, saying it reflects Western stereotypes of China rather than being a reflection of actual Chinese culture... “I don’t regret my $35 spent,” wrote one Douban user, possibly referencing the price in Canada or Australia. The reviewer gave the film four stars out of five. “It depicts a lot of beautiful Chinese scenery and has bright colours.”... Some reviewers characterise Liu’s Mulan as wooden. The criticism is also shared in China, where many film-goers like Liu for her elegance and beauty rather than her acting."

Facebook - "when a cast that includes Harvey Fierstien, Lea Salonga, Eddie Murphy, and Donny Osmond, accompanied by the songs of Matthew Wilder and David Zippel, tells the story of Chinese people  more effectively than one with an all Asian cast, then some very bad choices were made.Mulan (2020) fails as both a cultural and fictional film.As a storytelling medium, it fails because of many reasons.From a technical perspective, the pacing is all over the place; with long, dragging shots of people crossing the room, but quick cuts of shots necessary for establishing the story such as Mulan’s left-behind comb. It’s clear that this film prioritized which shots were pretty as opposed to which shots were important or moved the story forward.The writing of this film is some of the laziest I’ve seen in these Disney revivals. Everything is needlessly spoonfed to the viewer, almost condescendingly... There is no Phoenix in Chinese mythology. There IS an immortal bird called Fenghuang, but it’s not a firebird that dies in a fire and resurrects from the ashes, but rather a bird that signals a new emperor or a new era. Not a phoenix that rises from the ashes. The phoenix as a bird that resurrects is a Western concept, so the Emperor telling Mulan to get up mid-battle and “rise like a phoenix from the ashes” makes zero sense, then have Mulan sprout eagle wings while charging at Bori Khan in what the director probably deemed to be a good cinematic idea... From the first scene of this version, Mulan is shown to be a martial arts prodigy, so her joining the army in her father’s stead is not only an expected and predictable move, but rather disappointing because there is no growth for her from that point on.Mulan as a character here has little to no stakes in the matter... In this telling of the Ballad of Mulan, the titular character is really just a lens to take us through the landscape of Ancient China as imagined by Niki Caro. From the beginning of the film, they have made it clear that they want the main themes to be “Loyal, Brave, and True” (which are engraved on Mulan’s father’s sword). Whether these concepts are effectively executed throughout the film is a different story.What does it mean to be “true”? In this film, it means to admit to being a woman, because only then can you unlock and control your chi. In this telling of Mulan, she willingly admits to being a woman beacuse it makes her a better fighter. Yes. Let that idiocy sink in for a minute. We good? Good, because the movie is not.The confrontation of Mulan and the witch Xian Lang is meant to bring out the theme of “true” because everytime Xian Lang and Mulan meet, there is an exchange about how they are both alike. Alike in what sense? Could it be the power they each have? Their uncontrollable chi? No. They are alike because they are women. Groundbreaking. Xian Lang tells Mulan she will fail because she is not true to herself, so she removes her armor and charges into battle without any gear. The logic went out the window here, but it made for a nice poster for the movie... For a film that droned on to spoonfeed its audience, it failed to effectively talk about the four virtues it harped on about, we were not taken through Mulan’s character’s journey, it is still unclear what womanhood and manhood have to do with anything, and we’re even farther from the ballad than the 1998 animated film.“Dishonor on you, dishonor on your cow” (Mulan, 1998)"
Feminist script-writing = no character development

Faceboo - "I've already explained to a few people in my life why I, someone whose livelihood depends on Asian representation in the arts, am actively boycotting Mulan...
Firstly, and perhaps the most important one—Mulan was filmed partly in Xinjiang, the same place that currently holds the "largest network of concentration camps seen since the Holocaust". In the credits, Disney thanks the people responsible for the modern-day ethnic cleansing happening in China... The production team? It's completely white. Yes, in our 2020. Even the animated version from 1998, literally my birth year, did better than this and had a Chinese screenwriter onboard (thank you Rita Hsiao!)... I don't know how a creative team can so exhaustively re-envision a Chinese tale into something so incredibly.. /white/. "Chi" suddenly becomes gendered (as opposed to something EVERYONE HAS). Mulan's hair is worn down and in a Eurocentric style to denote femininity, even though the same hairstyle in Chinese culture would denote madness or grieving. The FBI motto is engraved onto Mulan's sword"
Apparently having an Asian cast isn't enough - the high level crew need to be Asian too

Everything You Wanted To Know About The Legends Of King Arthur

Everything You Wanted To Know About The Legends Of King Arthur | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"‘Was the Anglo Saxon expansion as violent as depicted in Arthurian legend? So Harrison's talking about these Germanic peoples who were thought or considered by some to have come in and and occupy something of a vacuum in the, in the aftermath of the Romano British period.’...

‘It's now an enormous and unresolved debate among experts in the post Roman, early medieval period. The problem is the dramatic contrast between the literary evidence and the archaeological. In the literary evidence, there is absolute unanimity among the sources on both sides, the native British and the Anglo Saxon, that the Anglo Saxon occupation was an extremely violent and traumatic event or series of events, with massacres, the storming of fortresses and the widespread displacement of people. And the linguistic evidence also backs that up because large areas of the island change quite rapidly from speaking a form of Welsh or the Roman Latin to speaking English with very few loanwords in English from the Welsh, suggesting the two people simply don't mix. But in archaeology, there's very little trace of violence, and farming systems, field systems, estate boundaries seem to carry on very much unaltered from one age to the next. And so at present most archaeologists are arguing for a slow and peaceful occupation by limited numbers of Anglo Saxon incomers. And the historians are still faced with texts that tell them the exact opposite. So we're a really interesting situation of an unresolved problem at the moment. And as yet, I can't see a way out of it.’...

‘What, if any of the Arthurian story can we be fairly certain of as fact?’

‘Just one thing, and that's the Battle of Mount Baden… because of a near contemporary text. The list of complaints against current kings of the British by a man called Guilders, which mentions the battle and mentions the battle because it anchors the time at which Guilders himself was born. So this battle is a historic fact, the real problem is that we're still not certain if there was a historical Arthur actually linked to it and he won it. We haven't yet found a credible contender to win it instead of Arthur. But it's the one point at which history and the early Arthurian story connect.’...

‘What is a hero for one generation is not a hero, for for the generation coming after that. So what tends to happen as you go through literary history is that once famous heroes undergo a process that we call epic degeneration. They decline. This you see throughout Arthurian literature. For instance, Gawain, who we might think of as one of the great knights, and is certainly an exemplar of heroism. In the earliest romances by *something*, becomes in the later romances, something of a womanizer and a traitor. It's the same with Lancelot. I've mentioned Lancelot as being one of the great knights being driven to greatness by love of the Queen. But in the Quest of the Holy Grail, he is the person who cannot achieve the Grail quest. And he is eclipsed by his son who is spiritually pure. So I would say maybe Galahad the knight I just mentioned is the only knight in the Arthurian legend who cannot be said to decline in any way because he is taken up to heaven. And that's the end of him’

‘Okay. Do you think it's fair to say that Arthur himself is a victim of epic degeneration during the course of these stories?’

‘Yes, he is. I think you could perfectly well say that. In the chronicle tradition, he is the great conquering King. And what you see in the later romnances is that his role as much more passive. And in Chretien’s late and unfinished romance, which is the story of the Grail, Arthur is even shown as nodding off. He falls asleep as he’s, as he presides over the round table.’...

‘You're an expert in magic and things like that. You've studied it a lot. Does the place of Merlin and the things he gets up to, does that inform us much about attitudes to to magic in this period?’

‘Yes, because the image of Merlin changes constantly. There is no doubt that medieval scholars had a real problem with Merlin, because on the one hand, officially, magic is not something which respectable people do. There's no such thing as a respectable wizard, or magic. That is, a series of apparently superhuman acts carried out with supernatural power by human beings must be the work of the devil, because otherwise the person would be a saint and the Act would be a miracle and powered by God. But Merlin is clearly regarded as a good thing, by the Arthurian tradition. And so medieval authors bent themselves and the story into all sorts of shapes, trying to keep Merlin respectable.’...

‘Why do you think the stories of Arthur still resonate today?’...

‘Well, I think partly Arthur represents a moment of sort of imaginary greatness of Britain. You know, when Britannia ruled the waves and so on. If you wanted to think of a king who conquered, who unified not only Britain, but went out to conquer most of Europe, then of course, you have a fine, you have a fine model there in King Arthur. I think the Arthurian romances offer a very different kind of interest. And it's the taste for adventure. Which isn't, which isn't really to do with, with prowess or control, it's often to do with, with finding your destiny. Discovering what fate has in store for you. Whether an adventure or a chance moment is going to lead you to destiny. Those are different kinds of impulses. But the reason we like them is that they obviously answer to the human interest.’...

‘Another appeal of the legend is that there are so many colorful characters involved in it. Both female and male, of very different kind, that they can provide a galaxy of different plot situations and relationships between them. Arthur has so many satellites orbiting him. And even in the Middle Ages, people took different attitudes the same characters who could be treated as extremely attractive in some stories and extremely unattractive in others. But also Arthur is so variable in his own nature. One extreme, he is the Butch hero of the Historia Britonnia, who can single handedly bump off 960 Saxons in one day. At the other extreme, he becomes Tennyson's put upon wimp. He can be mixed up with the most elevated kind of religion, or the most sordid kind of domestic sexual intrigue. He can be a Welsh hero, a British hero, or an English hero, or even for that matter, a Breton one. Arthur is infinitely malleable, while at the same time retaining the central core of associations, geography, characteristics and companions that give you a sense of solid tradition.’"