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I will start this posting, having written the rest of it already and therefore possessing foreknowledge of what it contains, with a warning to easily offended Christians. This posting contains ideas that may offend easily offended Christians. So, if you are an easily offended Christian and sincerely do not wish to be offended yet again, best to stop reading now.
Christians are perfectly free to be offended by my anti-Christianity, just so long as they realise that I am likewise disgusted by many of the things they keep on proclaiming, mostly with no objections from me, both for its barbarity and for its contempt for normal standards of truth-seeking or logical argument. The offence is mutual.
Okay. Today being Good Friday, I have taken it upon myself to give the talk at my last Friday of the month meeting. Getting another speaker at such a time, and then perhaps having to soothe him or her because only three other people showed up, is more bother than the looks-bad factor of me doing the talk myself. (I did the same on the last Friday of December 2004, which happened also to be New Year’s Eve. That went okay.)
And since it is Good Friday, I will be talking about Pain: its history; how that history might explain why Christianity, and in particular the crucifixion story, has done so well down the centuries; the fact that recently pain has abated for lots of lucky people in lucky countries like mine, and the fact that this might do something to explain the recent decline of Christianity in lucky countries. Christianity thrives in adversity, but wilts in comfort, not least physical comfort, which is why completely wiping out Christianity has proved so hard. Communism tried, but the more you torment Christians the more like Christ they feel. Meanwhile Communism, lacking a story that makes any sense for those unfortunates caught up in its numerous failures, is itself rapidly crumbling, not least at the hands of Christians.
Most histories of pain seem to be histories of pain relief, which is understandable. But what effect on life generally did the prevalence of pain have, in all the centuries when pain was prevalent? And what has been the effect of the recent and remarkable abatement of the pain, for millions upon millions of fortunate people, like me, and very probably, you too, for decade after decade? → Continue reading: Some Good Friday thoughts from an atheist about pain and its history
I was delighted by the first What If? book. So I eagerly purchased its successor volume, More What If?, when I also came across that in a remainder shop.
I buy lots of books in remainder shops – my intellectual efforts beiong heavily influenced by chance purchases – and often only read them months or years later. So it has been with More What If? I am now, finally, reading it. Not in any particular order. Just dipping at random, in among reading and writing other stuff. (This posting is not a review, merely some speculative reactions to this follow-up book, but here is a review, which includes a contents list.)
And the more I dip, the more convinced I am of the extreme efficacy and vividness of this particular way of writing about the past. Reviewers like the one linked to above can get rather blasé, because they know all this stuff anyway. (As he says in his first paragraph, the professional historians all have what-if conversations when doing their degrees.) But for the rest of us, this is a truly terrific way to learn history, because it brings it so alive. Suddenly, the uncertainty and unpredictability of what it was actually like living in what is now the past but was then the present is brought fascinatingly to life. Regular history tells you what happened, one damn happening after another, but it often neglects to tell you which happenings mattered most, and why. The What If? formula cuts down on the number of happenings, but explains in great detail how important each selected happening was, by telling you not only what else happened because of it, but also what would have happened had the happening itself not happened, or happened differently. → Continue reading: More What If?
To strengthen defence, cut taxes and balance the budget is very difficult.
Ronald Reagan managed the first two tasks, but failed in the third. President Bush made no effort to control nondefence spending in his first term and is only now trying to do so – we shall see how how well he does (he does not have President Reagan’s defence of the Democrats being in control of the House of Representatives)
However, it is not impossible to achieve all three tasks. Perhaps the most important example in history is that of the Emperor Anastasius.
When Anastasius became Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire in 491 AD (the Senate allowed the choice of Emperor to rest with the Empress Ariadne) the Western Roman Empire had already collapsed. Here and there (such as in the Province of Britian) there were local leaders who continued to fight against the Germanic peoples, but the vast majority of the old empire in the west was under various Germanic kings.
The Eastern Roman Empire (which evolved into what we call the Byzantine Empire) was not in a good state. As with the Western Empire taxes were crushing, and yet the treasury was empty and the defences of the Empire were falling apart.
Anastasius fought many wars, both against invaders and against domestic rebels (mostly Chalcedonian Christians who objected to his austere Monophysite variety of Christianity – although I am not claiming that all Monophysites were austere, and it should also be remembered that Anastasius did not tend to persecute other sorts of Christians – not even Arians, the religion of the most of the barbarian rulers in the West and a religion whose doctrines were further from the “one divine nature of Christ-God” of the Monophysites, than were the “two natures of Jesus” view of the Chalcedonians from which the vast majority of modern Christians get their doctrines), and yet he greatly reduced taxes. Anastasius abolished the “chrysargyon” (a major tax on the urban population) and reduced the “capitatio” – one of the great taxes on the peasantry. → Continue reading: The Emperor Anastasius and the city of Philadelphia
For the last several weeks I have been watching with growing pleasure, every Monday night from 8 pm to 9 pm, two episodes at a time, one of those Channel 5 TV series that tend to pass without much comment or many claims of significance, called Massive Engines.
Last night saw the airing of the final two episodes, number 9 about massive pumps, and number 10 and finally, about the massive jet engines that enable modern airliners to ply their trade. The presenter was Chris Barrie, who is probably best know for comedy-of-embarrassment characterisations like Rimmer in Red Dwarf, or Brittas in The Brittas Empire, and in Massive Engines there are occasional Rimmer/Brittas style, self-send-up moments of leaden humour. The impression you get is that Barrie is not as sure as he would like to be that he is keeping his audience’s attention.
For myself, I absolutely do not think Barrie need have worried. Whenever, which was most of the time, he forgot about being comical and concentrated on explaining the whys and wherefores of his various massive engines, often while himself operating them and with every sign of knowing pretty much what he was doing, I was held, and fascinated.
I learned all kinds of things I never knew. For instance, in the last show, about aircraft engines, I learned that on an early aircraft engine, not only did the propeller rotate, but the cylinders also, firmly attached to the same bit of the engine as the propeller, and rotating along with the propeller. To keep them cool. Amazing. Well, you probably knew that, but I had no idea. You probably also know that whereas petrol engines work with regular explosions, diesel engines (names after a German bloke called Diesel) do not feature externally induced explosions. The pressure caused by the cylinder coming back up again is enough to set fire to the next lot of fuel. Well, I sort of vaguely did know that. But now I know it a little better.
In general, throughout the run of the show, Barrie’s quick and clear explanations of the principles behind all the mechanisms he was describing were, well, amazingly quick, and amazingly clear.
The only episode which I found a bit weak was the one about motorbikes, which featured rather too much footage of Barrie trundling about rather pointlessly on a motorbike, in between the serious explanatory stuff. The trouble with motorbikes is that frankly, they are not massive. They got as big as they will ever be many decades ago, and anyway, the point of them is speed, plain and simple, rather than speed (or anything else for that matter) achieved through massiveness.
That episode aside, all the engines on show got steadily bigger and more effective throughout their history. They are not necessarily massive any more. The pumps, for instances, that shift water hither and thither used to be a lot bigger, when they were steam engines, than they are now, now that they are diesel or electrical engines or whatever. But a good few of the engines Barrie talked about with such enthusiasm are huge right now, and getting ever huger.
The earth moving kit they now use is unbelievably huge, as was proved with a trip to a massive open cast coal mine in Germany, where there were also earth-shifting lorries with wheels the size of terrace houses. The machines used to dig tunnels are now as massive as they have ever been. As are those aircraft engines of course.
I expected the airplane episode with which the show ended to be a commercial for the Airbus A380, but actually it was a commercial for the Rolls Royce Trent Alphabetsoup engine. No Airbuses were mentioned, but a Boeing was, the two engine 777, which is apparently almost as huge as the four engine 747.
I recall no mention whatsoever of the wickedness of massive engines from the environmental point of view, which was most refreshing. On the contrary, massive engines got massive because they were used, again and again, to solve massive environmental problems, such as the environmental mess that the London sewage system had become towards the end of the nineteenth century, or the massive problem of travelling vast distances across the damn environment, most especially the sea. (There was an episode devoted to massive ships.) The entire show was a continuous hymn of praise to the God of the Technical Fix. You have a problem? Building a massive engine to solve it.
I cannot claim to remember all the technical details that were laid out before me on Massive Engines, but when they were being laid out I recall very, very clearly that they did make perfect sense, at the time. Had I written the stuff down, I am confident that only my own handwriting would have then stopped it making perfect sense now.
What I am really saying is, if I come across DVDs of this show at a suitably miserly price, I would definitely consider buying them, and watching the whole show again, repeating the quick and clear explanations and fast forwarding through the motorbike trundling.
As a potential interester of intelligent and intellectual curious children, boys especially of course, these shows would, I feel sure, prove excellent.
And Chris Barrie’s Rimmerisms might even help from that point of view. By the end, even I was enjoying the rest of it so much that I found myself smiling instead of wincing when Barrie started up yet another massive engine not with a “right let’s start this thing up”, but instead by shouting rather self-consciously: “let’s rock”. Very embarrassing dad. But when you really like the serious work that someone is doing, you can put up with mannerisms and foolishnesses that would drive you insane if it was just another pointless idiot doing them. And when they are gone, you even find you miss them.
So, an outstanding show, and particular proof of the value of having lots of different TV channels, allowing lots of different points of view besides the official one, which as far as massive engines is concerned is now that massive engines are, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst, just plain evil.
The Duel
John Lukacs
Ticknor & Fields, New York 1994
Five Days in London: May 1940
John Lukacs
Yale Univ. Press 1999
We buried Winston Churchill forty years ago. Sixty five years ago, come May, he faced, for us, the greatest crisis of our history. BBC’s Radio 4 commemorated his death with a fine, hour-long recall of his funeral and the crisis of 1940 with a gripping drama, Playing for Time – Three Days in May 1940. I do not know whether the author of the play, Robin Glendinning, owed anything to the books noticed here, but to me they seem to autheticate it. Another Radio 4 programme, Churchill’s Roar, very perceptively analysed the voice that spoke the words that still move us.
The World’s Debt to Britain
To put it no higher, the world is fortunate that, for a whole year, from June 1940 to June 1941, Britain had a government that did not capitulate to or compromise with Hitler. The situation during that year looked barely a stalemate. The Axis Powers now completely dominated Europe. Italy was an ally, Spain was friendly and the USSR no threat (the only person Stalin ever trusted was Hitler). Germany had absorbed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938, then in less than a year’s war had overrun and partitioned Poland, occupied Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg, and completed her conquest of Western Europe by knocking out France. The Balkans represented no problem.
Although it may have been the result of miscalculation and misfortune that for a year Britain “stood alone”, it turned out to be the right thing to do. And more than calculation stood behind the decision: it felt the right thing to do. But what could Britain hope for? The Dominions (except for Southern Ireland, still officially one of them, whose government played its ignoble role, excused by its history, until the very end) were loyal and contributed men and arms. The United States was sympathetic but strongly isolationist: to win the Presidential Election in 1940, Roosevelt felt he had to promise to keep out of the war. There was little Britain could do but protect herself and trounce Hitler’s jackal-ally Italy in Ethiopia, Somaliland and North Africa – and hope that Hitler would make some mistake.
The Inevitable Parallel: Napoleon and Hitler
The parallel between Britain’s struggle against Napoleon and that against Hitler hardly needs to be drawn, but if there is any lesson in history, surely it is here. Napoleon retains his high reputation, gained from victory in a dozen battles; Hitler never commanded in the field, yet subjugated Europe more thoroughly. Both underestimated Britain in both her power and persistence, Hitler the more excusably. Napoleon abandoned the attempt to invade, and did not in person try to eject Britain from Spain and Portugal; in combination, a fatal error. Hitler postponed his invasion attempt, half-hoping the fruit would drop into his hand, also a fatal error. → Continue reading: Finest Hour, Last Gasp – or both?
Even if we take only two nations, the United States and the United Kingdom, this question is complex.
If we take the old John Dewey definition of liberty (at least the definition of liberty that John Dewey tended to use in his youth – as he got older he became a more interesting man), the answer is ‘right now’. Never before have average incomes been higher, most people can buy more things (and so on) than people could in the past.
However, for those of us who reject the Pragmatist soft-left FDR ‘freedom from want’ definition of liberty or freedom (no, I am not going to go into possible differences between ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’) more thinking is required.
First the United States.
Slavery may be against natural law (if there is such a thing) as even the Romans accepted (although slavery was not against ‘the law of all nations’ or Roman law itself), and it may be (as authorities for centuries have claimed – for an American example see Salmon P. Chase) against the principles of the English Common Law, but it certainly was not against the statute law of many States.
So if we define (as libertarians do) liberty as the non-violation of a person or their goods by another person or group of persons (‘the nonaggression principle’) then the United States was more of a free country after the slaves were freed than before. So the United States after 1865 (not in the first years of the Republic) is at its most free.
Government taxes and regulations actually decline after the Civil War (or War between the States, or War of Northern Aggression – or whatever you want to call it), and statism does not seem to rise again till after the Interstate Commerce Commission of 1887 (it is pity that a good free market man like Grover Cleveland was responsible for that – but he thought of himself as using federal regulation to ward off worse regulation by individual States, a rather Madison style move that did not work out well in the end).
Oddly enough the Jim Crow laws in the South were not fully underway by the mid 1880’s either (although they were on the cards – it depends which State one is talking about). So the early 1880’s would seem (for all their faults) were about the peak of liberty for the nation as a whole. The trade tax (or ‘tariff’ if you prefer) was increased in 1890 and ‘antitrust’ came in the same year, and Jim Crow got worse and worse. → Continue reading: When was liberty at its peak?
Today, while wandering along beside the Thames, I came across a plaque, which said the following:
LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOHN BY, ROYAL ENGINEERS
FOUNDER OF OTTAWA, CAPITAL OF CANADA
John By was born near this place and baptised in the church of St. Mary-at-Lambeth, August 10, 1779. After a distinguished career in Canada and in the Peninsular War, he was called out of retirement in 1826 and sent to Canada to build the Rideau Canal waterway. A defence project, the waterway would extend 200 kilometres from the Ottawa River to Lake Ontario. It penetrated uncharted lakes and rivers, virgin forest, rock, and swamp attended by the horrors of introduced malaria. This outstanding engineering feat, which required the construction of 47 stone masonry locks and 23 dams, was opened May 30, 1832. Now a heritage treasure, it remains in use as a recreational waterway.
John By retired to Frant, East Sussex, where he died February 1, 1836.
Erected 1997 by The Historical Society of Ottawa.
You learn something new every day, if you keep your eyes open and your brain open.
A camera helps too. Photographs of where I was in London, and of the plaque itself, and further linkage, here.
December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbour attack.
The image says it all.
I have just begun reading Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made The Modern Word, and I know that it will be a finisher, so to speak. Here is his description of how the British Empire got started:
In December 1663 a Welshman called Henry Morgan sailed five hundred miles across the Caribbean to mount a spectacular raid on a Spanish outpost called Gran Grenada, to the north of Lago de Nicaragua. The aim of the expedition was simple: to find and steal Spanish gold – or any other movable property. When Morgan and his men got to Gran Grenada, as the Governor of Jamaica reported in a despatch to London, ‘[They] fired a volley, overturned eighteen great guns . . . took the serjeant-major’s house wherein were all their arms and ammunition, secured in the great Church 300 of the best men prisoners . . . plundered for 16 hours, discharged the prisoners, sunk all the boats and so came away.’ It was the beginning of one of the seventeenth century’s most extraordinary smash-and-grab sprees.
It should never be forgotten that this was how the British Empire began: in a maelstrom of seaborne violence and theft. It was not conceived by self-conscious imperialists, aiming to establish English rule over foreign lands, or colonists hoping to build a new life overseas. Morgan and his fellow ‘buccaneers’ were thieves, trying to steal the proceeds of someone else’s Empire.
The buccaneers called themselves the ‘Brethren of the Coast’ and had a complex system of profit-sharing, including insurance policies for injury. Essentially, however, they were engaged in organized crime. When Morgan led another raid against the Spanish town of Portobelo in Panama, in 1668, he came back with so much plunder – in all, a quarter of a million pieces of eight – that the coins became legal tender in Jamaica. That amounted to £60,000 from just one raid. The English government not only winked at Morgan’s activity; it positively encouraged him. Viewed from London, buccaneering was a low-budget way of waging war against England’s principal European foe, Spain. In effect, the Crown licensed the pirates as ‘privateers’, legalizing their operations in return for a share of the proceeds. Morgan’s career was a classic example of the way the British Empire started out, using enterprising freelances as much as official forces.
For a more respectful, and proudly Welsh, view of Morgan’s place in history, try this. And see also this posting here, early last year, about the TV show Ferguson did after writing his book.
Last Friday, on another blog, I did a link-to/short-comment-on piece, linking to and commenting on this report. It was about Chinese students lying about their qualifications in order to get into British Universities.
Harry Hutton (esteemed writer of this hugely entertaining and clearly much frequented blog) added the following very interesting comment to my posting:
It’s a big problem with the IELTS exam in mainland China – people turn up to do tests for other people. They also come in with live mobile phones, to record the script. But there is zero cheating in Hong Kong. I don’t know why this big difference, but it is so.
Cards on the table, I do not know why there is this big different either. And never having been to – or for that matter anywhere near – Hong Kong, or mainland China, I am a lot less qualified even to guess than Harry Hutton is.
However, I choose to offer a guess nevertheless.
Hong Kong has been a rampantly capitalistic economy for the last half century, and rampantly capitalistic economies make people more honest. → Continue reading: How capitalism grows human capital as well – the example of Hong Kong
I recommend this posting at the highly recommendable Social Affairs Unit blog, by Anthony Glees, about Christopher Hill, John Roper and Robin Pearson. (SAU Director Michael Mosbacher, who is presumably the one who recruits the writers for this blog, is doing a remarkable job with this blog, I think.)
The stuff about Christopher Hill interested me particularly. What a vile man. I knew that he was a bolshevik, but I had not realised how vile a bolshevik and how much damage he did to the cause of civilisation.
The vile Hill wrote many highly regarded works of academic scholarship. This little bit from Glees’ posting throws a different light on the sort of academic that he was:
One of Hill’s unsavoury measures (showing his interest in Britain’s academic culture) was his proposal to dismiss for “political reasons” (Hill’s own words) all White Russian university teachers in the UK and replace them by Soviet citizens to be nominated by the Russians themselves (that little phrase, “for political reasons” is chilling). Hill wanted Churchill and Stalin to agree to this at the Potsdam Conference in 1945.
While googling for more about Anthony Glees, I came across this 1999 BBC report, which included this quote, from another of the vile academics whom Glees writes about, Robin Pearson of Hull University:
“This was all 20 years ago and I’d rather it all went away.”
I just bet you would, matey.
It is a pity that Glees had to promise the vile Hill to keep quiet about what the vile Hill told him about his (the vile Hill’s) bolshevistic activities until he, the vile Hill, died. But then again, the vile Hill had to die knowing that his full vileness would in due course fully emerge. That is justice of a sort, although not nearly enough of course.
Treating these people as badly as they really deserve seems difficult these days, but it is important to make them squirm a little, and to die in the knowledge that their support for barbarism has been thoroughly revealed and stands a fair chance of being the only thing about them that will be lastingly remembered. Well done Professor Glees.
(And again, well done Michael Mosbacher for getting him to write for the SAU blog.)
Today is the 150th anniversary of that glorious cock-up known as The Charge of the Light Brigade.
The charge, which was part of the Battle of Balaklava, was one of those iconic moments in British military history due more to the works of Alfred Tennyson than the actual importance of the incident itself, which was really little more than a footnote in the overall conduct of the Crimean War. Yet at the time many newspapers accorded the charge of the Light Brigade far more significance than it was really due (and they also tended to gloss over the rather more successful actions of both the Heavy Brigade under Lord Lucan and the magnificent Chasseurs D’Afrique under General D’Allonville).
The charge was regarded as a great military blunder, and certainly it was not what Lord Raglan actually intended to happen when he issued the orders, nor what Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade’s commander, wanted to execute (he is alleged to have quipped “Here goes the last of the Brudenells”, his family name, upon receiving the order), but in point of fact, the charge largely disrupted the astonished Russian forces at the end of the valley. As military blunders go, it was a fairly effective one and the overall battle was more or less a draw (though Russian attempts to take Balaklava failed, so it could be argued that it was a net allied victory).
Also in the news is the redeployment of the Black Watch mechanised battlegroup into the American zone of operations in Iraq. The fact this unremarkable operational movement of forces within Iraq has caused apoplexy in media and political circles shows that 150 years on, the pundits back home are just as clueless about military affairs as they ever were.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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