Timothy Burke summarizes one aspect of Graeber and Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything"

Timothy Burke writes an extensive thought piece on Substack on how Trumpism is possible (Thanks to Brad DeLong for alerting me to this). Burke covers a lot of territory with reference to Graeber and Wendrow's The Dawn of Everything. I'm quoting what Burke has to say about this provocative book in hopes some of my readers will be inspired top read it (or Ibn Khaldun for that matter).

I think we’ve gone beyond reductionist paradigms that saw all such interactions as conquest, imitation, or appropriation, or that were alwaylot s defined by the unequal relationship between cores and peripheries. I like the synthesis proposed recently by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything where they argue that societies within some kind of contact zone sometimes reshape themselves as an answer to another society they’ve encountered, that they amplify or rework their systems and practices as a kind of commentary upon and contrast to a neighbor. For example, in the book, they argue that indigenous societies in Eastern North America intensified their own ideas about economic behavior, political freedom, and social cohesion as a response to their encounter with Western Europeans and their dislike of some aspects of Western European institutions and behavior.

It’s an approach that has some problems. It seems to put us back in the space of a “Tylorian” idea of relatively fixed and separable cultures that are a single coherent text that can be read for a few core ideas that shape everything else (or the Geertzian revision of that concept in looking for ‘thick descriptions’ that read into those opaque underlying cores), rather than think of cultures as having fuzzy boundaries, internal pluralism and contradiction, and considerable dynamism over time. But Graeber and Wengrow do point out that as societies reshape themselves as commentaries upon contrasting neighbors, they push some of their members who don’t care for the redefinition into those fuzzy boundaries and provoke forms of internal pluralism and dissent against such reshaping. There’s also the challenge of how to “read” the text of past societies, especially ones we know so little about: I love the idea of seeing practices, movements, material signs as embodied, experienced forms of political and social philosophy that are as sophisticated or complex as the written texts we normally fall back on, but there’s an inescapable hubris involved in doing that reading from the perspective of our present moment and the ways we read towards a kind of simplistic universalism.

What worries me in the context of thinking about Trump through Graeber and Wengrow’s perspective, however, is that they have a strong tendency to read away from domination, tyranny, violence and empire. That is, they want to restore contingency and variety to premodern human history, and to unshackle it from any form of teleology whatsoever. I’m with them on that goal: centralized states, agriculture, empires and a whole host of other political, economic and social forms have not been one-way inventions that automatically remake societies forever once they first appear. There’s a tremendous amount of evidence that societies switch in and out of sedentary agriculture, foraging, and pastoralism, between urbanism that is not controlled by a central state, centralized administrative states that are not empires or kingdoms, highly hierarchical societies that have no single head or ruler, and so on—that these are not fixed or linear sorts of choices. They also point out that none of these systems are necessarily applicable to whole “societies”—that there are communities where one part of the population lives within one kind of system and the other lives a different way, that are distinct while still living right alongside one another. But Graeber and Wengrow consequently take little interest in past societies which have developed highly regimented agriculture, brutal forms of labor servility, economies and social systems predicated on raiding and conquest, or are ruled by kings and emperors. They are so driven to show that none of this is inevitable or as common as many established perceptions might have it that they don’t really say much about the cases where it absolutely does happen. centralized monarchy next door or disdain the harsh servility of people forced to grow crops, there might also be societies (or at least some portion of societies) that dislike what they take to be the disorder, openness or pluralism of their neighbors and shape themselves to communicate that antipathy.

And here’s where I find myself on the edge of a thought that is a bit outside the comfort zone of a lot of contemporary history and anthropology. It’s pretty common in premodern world history to find that people living in one region who see themselves as the enemies—and victims—of some neighboring society tend to develop exaggeratedly negative caricatures of their antagonists, to see them as the opposite of everything that is good and right. The difference between that and modern forms of alterity is about power and totalization—the people If there are societies that decide that they really don’t like the who have been made into Europe’s “others” have been forced in various ways to live with that remaking. Whereas in a premodern context, it didn’t matter very much to the Scythians if the Greeks imagined them to be barbarians: the Greeks had no power to force that on the Scythians in their home territories and neither group let it get in the way of the practical business they wanted to conduct in the northern Black Sea.

So far, so good. The thought that is outside the comfort zone is that if we follow Graeber and Wengrow into thinking that some societies embed a critique of their neighbors within their own embodied institutions and practices, in an almost-dialectical kind of relationship, then perhaps sometimes some societies embrace and incorporate the negative “othering” of their neighbors to become more fearful enemies.

Contemporary historians are usually dedicated to rescuing past societies that have been depicted in negative ways by sedentary, literate neighbors from the stereotypes contained in the texts that the 19th Century imperial scholars of Western universities read as they learned more languages and developed a more universal perspective on global history. So historians look again at Scandinavian societies in the era of “Viking” raids, at waves of pastoralists moving out of central and east-central Asia up to and beyond the Mongols, at histories characterized as episodes of conquest and imperialism like the formation of the Zulu state under Shaka, and they’ve tried to shake them loose from a lot of preconceptions, to detail the complexity and heterogeneity of those societies and to offer more nuanced explanations of their raids, their conquests, their movements.

But I do wonder whether in some of those histories, there are also episodes of groups—not whole societies, sometimes just military units or raiding bands—who acquired a fairly sophisticated understanding of what their targets and enemies thought about them and decided to play it up to the hilt, to become the goblins and ghouls of a neighboring imaginary. And this maybe goes in more ways than the Western histories of the 19th Century often wrote it—say, various Crusades sacking Jerusalem, Constantinople, Zadar, Ma’aara and Nicaea with grotesque brutality, or more potently, in the savagery of European imperial conquest at precisely that moment. (Clifton Crais’ forthcoming The Killing Age I think will put that front and center of its account.)

So not so much “negative dialectics” in any sense but “negative emulation”, a decision to become the monsters that others believe you to be, to get the better of them.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this thought when I loop back to Trump. If it’s correct to imagine that at times, some groups or societies in conflict with others elect to embody the worst ways they are imagined, the question is whether that’s a short-term or limited performance or whether it gets incorporated into the deepest reservoirs of personhood and consciousness, whether it suffuses everything. That is often what we see as the violence of alterity, that the people who are forcibly made “other” find they can never get away from what the dominant group or people think of them. But if my outside-the-conventional thought has anything to it, and it’s true that sometimes groups and societies agentively “otherize” themselves, choose to inhabit some aspect of their enemies’ negative vision, what happens if that choice becomes so fully inhabited that it is no longer remembered as a positional gambit or situational performance?

I think there are two basic answers. One I’d take from the Muslim scholar and philosopher ibn Khaldun, who described a historical cycle in which pastoralists raid strong sedentary societies and as those societies fall pray to indolence, corruption and internal conflicts, the raiders overwhelm them and become their new ruling elite. At which point they begin to transform towards the institutional and cultural world that they defeated and the cycle starts over. It doesn’t do to take the most simplistic version of this vision at face value but there’s certainly a number of examples in premodern world history that have some resemblance to this dynamic. And in some of those cases, you could also say that the new rulers imported some of their own ideas and culture into the societies they now ruled—but the important thing is that inasmuch as they had internalized ideas of themselves as the fearsome enemy prowling in the wilderness, those ideas melted away once they came in from the cold.

The other answer is that negative emulation, if it exists at all as I’ve described it here, is a disfiguring trap, that it chains the aspiring monsters to a cycle of outrages and violations that don’t even come from them in the first place, that it makes the emulator into nothing more than that imaginative space that’s been reserved for them by enemies, hopelessly inauthentic and perpetually reactive. The monsters might even exterminate their enemies but they’ll be forced to resurrect them over and over again because they’re nothing except the nightmare of another culture, another society, another group now. I think a little about what the journalist George Anastasia has written about the decline of Italian organized crime, the “Mafia”, in part because as the oldest generation of mobsters went to jail, the younger Mafia members found themselves increasingly imitating the characters they saw up on screen in The Godfather, Goodfellas and The Sopranos. Many younger mobsters weren’t anything any more but “The Mafia” and as such, they had no autonomy or authenticity, no direction but to live into that representation, and were for that reason increasingly easy for law enforcement to deal with.

If Trump and Trumpism are negative emulators in this sense, people who’ve elected to become the terrors of people they have hated, I suspect their future is going to be more consistent with the latter of these two scenarios. Which means, unfortunately, we will be stuck in here with our monsters, who no longer have any sense of who they were or what they wanted before they chose to be what we most feared, until they exhaust themselves in some fashion. I hope if so that that the air can just go out of their bubble rather than the monsters chasing the full horror of their persona to its most nightmarish ends.

Words of Wisdom from Frank Zappa and Steve Vai

I was idly paging through YouTube shorts when I ran across this piece of an interview with the musician Steve Vai (who I don't know from Adam). Vai reports on something he learned from Frank Zappa.

It ends with a very hard-hitting observation.

See for yourself!

I recently spent two weeks in Patrick County, Virginia.

The county is at the heart of Appalachia and part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Appalachia means to me a very poor region, one of the areas LBJ wanted to fix with his Great Society policy. There has been progress since. The roads are in good shape and most people have internet connectivity. But most people, I hear, are still are poor.

Patrick County has interesting features. There are very few straight roads; most of the roads snake around between cliffs that rise up on one side and fall away on the other. Not too many fields, and few domesticated animals living in them.

Not too many houses!

The county, besides being isolated by topography, looks like a social island. There is perhaps one and only one fast-food outlet. Not that you will go hungry.There are what you might call mom and pop restaurants, But no McDonald’s, no Tim Horton's, no Wendy’s. There is good food in some of them. And some of the venues host music time and again.

What made the greatest impression on me was the Blue Ridge Mountains. On the way back to the North I was fascinated by the mountains to the point that I dreamed about them all night long.

IMAGE: one view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Some good stuff from the earlier days of this blog -- and other people's blogs

I spent much of a recent morning looking at earlier parts of this blog and I found myself surprised at the quality of the material. I don't say this to brag, but simply because I found lots of stuff that I had forgotten.

Good stuff.

Two instances:

I quoted George Orwell who argued in 1940 that people who wondered how Hitler had become so popular in Germany should contemplate the sacrifices Hitler demanded or offered his followers. This was, said Orwell, made Fascisim more attractive than Socialism or Capitalism which merely promised an easier life. I thought of current Fascism and wondered and how applicable this analysis might be.

Here's a little more detail (it's from Greaeme Wood in the Atlantic in early 2015):

In reviewing Mein Kampf in March 1940, George Orwell confessed that he had “never been able to dislike Hitler”; something about the man projected an underdog quality, even when his goals were cowardly or loathsome. “If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.” The Islamic State’s partisans have much the same allure. They believe that they are personally involved in struggles beyond their own lives, and that merely to be swept up in the drama, on the side of righteousness, is a privilege and a pleasure—especially when it is also a burden.

Fascism, Orwell continued, is psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life … Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet … We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

Second, I rediscovered my old friend Will McLean. Will died all too young but not before making a significant contribution to the re-enactment of the Middle Ages. Will was a member of the SCA but not a typical one. He was more like a pioneer than the usual person who joins the SCA today, who learns the about the "Middle Ages as they should have been" as they become part of it. Will was always one to go back to the source material rather than follow some contemporary who had done a pretty good job. I reprinted a number of his more interesting posts from his blog A Commonplace Book in mine.

That's just two of the things you might stumble across looking at my blog. And that doesn't count original material by me -- for instance some of the insights I acquired while teaching Crusade and Jihad at Nipissing University. I had to think very intensely about what was important about these phenomena, and what my students could be expected to learn.

This process, familiar to all sorts of teachers taught me a lot.

For instance:

There were plenty of religious rivalries before 1096, and a great many were Christian v Christian and Muslim v Muslim. Like Syria or Iraq today.

Or

Crusader motivation

In a famous eyewitness account of the taking of Jerusalem in 1099, the crusading chaplain Raymond of Aguilers described a bloodbath at the Temple Mount (drawing, as has often been pointed out, on the Book of Revelations):

It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses. These are small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious services are ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much, at least, that in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to the knees and bridle reins.. Indeed it was a just and splendid judgment of God that in this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it suffered so long from their blasphemies. The city was filled with corpses and blood.... Now that the city was taken, it was well worth all of our previous labors and hardships to see the devotion of the pilgrims at the holy sepulcher. How they rejoiced and exulted and sang a new song to the Lord! For their hearts offered prayers of praise to God, victorious and triumphant, which cannot be told in words. A new day, new joy, me and perpetual gladness, the consummation of our labor and devotion, drew forth from all new words and new songs. This day, I say, will be famous in all future ages, for it turned our labors and sorrows into joy and exultation; this day, I say, marks the justification of all Christianity, the humiliation of paganism, and the renewal of our faith. "This is the day which the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it," for on this day the Lord revealed himself to his people and blessed them.

This passage relates to two questions that often come up in studying history, but particularly the history of the Crusades (or for that matter, jihad). The first might be the question of sincerity. Did so-and-so undertake this project, or conquer this country, or start this war because he sincerely believed in his stated ideals? I find this as a historical question somewhat uninteresting. Every observer has his or her views as to how human nature works in general and in particular cases, say for instance, how kings and emperors act. It is hard to convince people to change their mind on this issue. So arguments about sincerity don't go very far unless you clearly define what you are talking about -- and people generally don't. Part of the problem is terminology, especially the use of the word "religion." Often when people talk about "religion" they are talking about a creed or set of beliefs that someone else really (or doesn't really) believes in. Or they may mean a set of rules that members of a given religion are supposed to follow. But both beliefs and rules are usually discussed in terms of formal definitions laid down by higher authorities in well-defined religious organizations. If you look in detail about what individuals say they believe or how they actually act, you may well find that these individual "believers" or "followers" not to have the same "religion" as the great authorities. If a theologian says that Christianity believes thus, or a scholar says that Islam demands thus, it is trivially easy to find Christians or Muslims who do not believe or do those things. In any big-name religion, the greatest and most respected authorities only speak for one stream of a very diverse tradition. And if ordinary people attached to that tradition claim to be obedient followers, the outside observer may often find that they don't realize how far they are from literal adherence to proclamations of their leaders; or do realize, and have good reasons of their own for their particular interpretation of what the religion means.

Which brings us to the second question, which might be put this way: "Were the Crusades really about religion? What does holy war have to do with the teachings of Jesus?" My answer to these questions is, yes they were about religion (if you just want a war that were plenty closer to hand in 11th- century Europe) -- but what was that religion like? What was its actual content? Christianity in most varieties is a lot more than the teachings of Jesus. Put aside for the moment the vast diversity of the Bible, which makes it possible to find justification for almost anything in it, especially if you use sophisticated symbolic interpretation. More important, I think, is that even Christians with little or no firsthand knowledge of the Bible have strong opinions about what Christianity is. When we are talking about the motivations of Crusaders it is probably more useful to think about the individuals who trekked across the Balkans and Anatolia and how they acted, rather than what Pope Urban II said at Clermont (important as that might be in other contexts). When we are talking about the religion that led men to Jerusalem and helped produce the slaughter there, Raymond of Aguilers’s version of Christianity is as important as that of any Pope, or of Augustine of Hippo, if not more so.

So yes, this blog has hidden treasures. And some of those treasures are links to other blogs. Note that the most recent post in Will's Commonplace Book is ten years old, but there is plenty to learn from it, today or whatever day you are reading this.

Brad deLong on AI and H.P. Lovecraft

I am very impressed by Brad DeLong's essay Shoggoths among us. I've been going through my inbox, and except for all the great astrophysics material, this discussion of the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and the Singularity was by far the best. When I was in university (ca 1970), I like my fannish friends read H.P. Lovecraft. We all read as much SF and fantasy as we could get our hands on. Young readers today probably can't imagine how little of such material there was. I was not impressed by Lovecraft (except for At the Mountains of Madness .) Too creepy.

But Brad got more out of it. One result is this sensible (!) essay on AI, modernity, democracy, autocracy, and industrial revolutions.,

/p And monsters.

Highly recommended.

Good books

Brad deLong loves Peter S. Beagle's Folk of the AirFolk, which he called, back in 2021, "a fantasy novel of Berkeley and of the Society for Creative Anachronism."

Charlie Angus reflects on what he learned at a Juno Beach Commemoration some years ago

Here's what he said. This in particularly touched me:

At a beautiful ceremony in the vast Canadian cemetery at Bretteville-sur-Laize, young schoolchildren read out a poem in French to Canada's dead: "We are the children you never had. We are your children — the children of liberty." There wasn't a dry eye in the crowd as they read.

And here's the music. https://youtu.be/ii79Yoxf3Uw

Heaven

Is Canada heaven?

Not likely ... except some days I get a glimpse...

Take my recent visit to a medical laboratory for some blood-tests. The lab was clean; the staff was organized and polite; there was no traffic jam, inside or out.

And I didn't have to pay anything!

The Dutch -- more interesting than you think

The Netherlands is a much-admired country, a modern success story. But the success story of today is based on a long history of prominence, remarkable for what is really a very small region.

In the 17th century the Netherlands had a competitive position in world trade, a healthy domestic environment in an era of plague, and some of the best painters of all time who served to document it all. Thus the painting above of a Dutch raid on England, one of their chief rivals.

Most of the famous and attractive paintings of this time are portraits of real people in their public settings. Can you say "Rembrant"? One of his most famous paintings is The Night Watch a group portrait of a civic militia. These were upper-class but not noble men who were a key part of the politics of the Netherlands (and especially Holland and the city of Amsterdam).

A modern take on the painting is the song "The Night Watch" by the eccentric progressive rock (?) group King Crimson. Another example of the public/personal element of the art of this era is this striking self-portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi. No, she's not Dutch, but I can't resist this assertion of her right as a woman not just to paint, but to represent, embody Painting.

Things were not always happy in the Netherlands. The best example of this is the death of Johan de Witt. He was the long-time leader of republicans who was opposed by a royal interest led by the House of Orange. After 20 years, his regime found itself at war with all its rivals, especially France and England. In this overheated atmosphere, De Witt was stabbed by a would-be assassin and his brother Cornelis was arrested, tortured and exiled. Johan had resigned and was planning to leave town with his brother when he was attacked by a mob that tore him apart -- and according to a famous story their livers were eaten. The mob attack illustrated by Pieter Frits: https://dutchreview.com/wp-content/uploads/Moord_op_de_gebroeders_De_Witt_door_Pieter_Frits_1627-1708-2.jpg

My reaction to this is not a dark day in Dutch history, though it is that. Rather HEY, IT'S THE 17TH CENTURY! A final point is that Johan was also an important mathematician in a century full of important mathematicians. a href="https://smarthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/593683-1458214692.jpg">

My review of Daniel Baloup's L’Homme armé from the Medieval Review

Baloup, Daniel. L’Homme armé: expériences de la guerre et du combat en Castille au XVe siècle. Madrid: Casa de Velaázquez, 2022. Pp. 309. €35.00 (pb). ISBN: 978-84-9096-361-6.

Reviewed by Steven Muhlberger

Nipissing University

steve.muhlberger@gmail.com

Daniel Baloup has written a massive book that seeks to reconstruct the place of warfare in the culture of Castile during the fifteenth century and to show how people of different types took part in it. His approach is more like a reference work than a monograph. The title is somewhat deceptive. Contemporary sources and modern scholars both have used “man-at-arms” to designate one type of warrior. Baloup is far more inclusive. He takes as his subject all types of warriors and others who were affected by war. Baloup does not neglect any of them. His self-set task is to create an “anthropology of the Castilian wars of the 15th century.”

L’Homme armé is divided into two parts, which are further divided into six substantial chapters.

Part one (two chapters) is “Thinking and writing on war” and is a survey of the literary sources and the writers and theoreticians who devoted themselves to the subject. B. places the writings of such people in their social and military contexts. Not many of these writers are well known but in some cases we have a rather full portrait. Chapter I, 1 is devoted to the case of Lope Garcia de Salazar, a prolific chronicler who has much to say about warriors, war and politics.

Most of the writers cited by B. do not provide us with as much material as Lope Garcia de Salazar, but the historians, clerical writers, and biographers, taken together, provide a more extensive picture of what warriors thought and shared with each other than one might have expected.

Chapter 2 is a detailed discussion of the historiographical characteristics of noble-written chronicles.

Chapter 3 explores, rather briefly, women's involvement in war. I was rather surprised that more was not said about the role of women in romance literature who might be relevant to the themes of the book.

Chapter 4 is concerned with the role of clergy (rather, of prelates) in war. B. begins with canonical legislation that restricted the participation of prelates and progresses to a long description of fifteenth-century prelates actually commanding troops and fighting. This is one of the longest and most interesting sections of the book.

Part two has four chapters on “The Culture of war and warlike practice.” I was particularly impressed by Chapter 5, “The Army in the shadows,” which gives a rather full survey of the communal militias that took on a particular importance because of their participation in the many wars foreign and domestic in and around Castile. The activities of the “commons” are often underrated by military historians. B. does better than most in bringing them out of the shadows. Similarly B. gives us a good amount of attention to clerics who not only preached and theorized about war but fought on the battlefield. I noticed too that B. seldom uses the word “chivalry.“ This a defensible position since chivalry means so many things that one can get lost in its complexities. More relevant to his subject are such characterizations of how nobles were motivated and gained renown: by service (to the land and the king) or by noble descent or personal reputation. These values could easily come into conflict, and such conflicts shaped life in fifteenth-century Castile.

Various readers will come to this book for different reasons. Specialists in the history of the fifteenth century may find it to be a useful reference tool; beside the analytical material in the body of the text, there is a very large bibliography and indices of personal and place-names. Researchers whose main interest is not warfare in Castile but other topics such as chivalry, the literature of war, or the evolution of nobility, who wish to make wide comparative studies and include Castilian manifestations of their subjects, may find Baloup a valuable guide. Certainly the “anthropological” approach adopted by Baloup gives readers the opportunity to construct a fuller picture of war in Castile and warfare in general during the fifteenth century.

More Spectacular Astronomy from Phil Plait

Read about it here.

Remember Ukraine?

When Trump is destroying the American Constitution and the world economy, it's all too easy to forget Ukraine and its vital place in the current moment. Catherine Merridale has not forgotten and >has written an essay on Ukraine past and Ukraine now. Her historical survey ends rather optomistically:

It is all the more impressive, then, that Ukraine’s citizens, knowing their past, should seek and find paths out of it. This outcome was not guaranteed in 1991, the time of the country’s independence. The young state was divided along multiple deep faults. In some regions — the Donbas in particular — allegiance to Russia remained high, Russian-speakers dominated (resenting the imposition of the Ukrainian language in schools), and Soviet political traditions endured. Ukrainian-speaking cities like Lviv might have seemed foreign, even sinister, if you came from the East. A political culture steeped in corruption — again inherited from Soviet times — brought Kyiv into disrepute. But all that changed in 2014. The loss of Crimea played a part, uniting people in outrage, but the mass of citizens had made their choice already months before. Whatever their land used to be (and whatever their own ethnic origins), the Maidan protesters agreed. They wanted a new country and they’d all call it Ukraine. Their novel form of nationhood demands no mist-wreathed past. To focus on pre-history is to sink into a trance. Since Putin’s long essay appeared, I have caught myself checking the dates of the medieval Grand Duchy of Volhynia and laughed at the absurdity. Independence and democracy are concepts that address the present, not the legacies of hate. Kyiv has asked for patriotic service, true, but only on behalf of a free, confident community. Addressing the liberal West, President Zelensky’s call is for democracies to think and act; the courage that Ukraine has shown has put NATO to shame. But Ukraine is bilingual so it speaks to Russia, too. Though Putin’s clique blocks out the sound, one day it will get through. A peaceful state, and democratic, sworn to heal old wounds? ‘Everything is Ukraine.’ It shouldn’t need another war for that to resonate.

IMAGE: St Vladimir's Ortthodox Cathedral, Windsor, Ontario ;

The single scariest thing I have read on the Internet

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQZTzgqNPJhnFntClMkXlnQgCQc

Two thoughtful posts about the current crisis

Let mw recommend Timothy Burke's Academia: No Lessons From History and Umair Haque's Trump Just Nuked the Economy, or, America is a Submerging Market Now.

Not the saame old stuff.

Lumberjacks

A fascinating topic and a fascinating story.

Two statistics: 1,000,000,000/8,000,000,000

I drew attention last year to the fact that 1,000,000,000 Indians were eligible to vote in the recent elections in that country. (And it seems to have been a reasonably honest election as things go these days.) It is generally accepted that the human population is about 8 billion.

I don't quite know what to think about this, but it seems to be worth thinking about.

IMAGE: If your serious about democracy, you have to work hard to make it real.

Happy Election!

That is what a CBC radio host said to a political guest the other day at the end of an excerpt on the upcoming Canadian election.

And you know I think that Canadians are genuinely happy to have an opportunity to have this election.

A medieval sketch from Novgorod

The usual writing medium in the Russian North during the 13th century was birch bark. One of the most important centers of the "Rus" people in that period was Novgorod, and the inhabitants generated a lot of commercial, religious, and perhaps personal documents.

Thanks to the vast supplies of birch trees there is a lot of work for archaeologists. I've never heard how this trove compares to the Cairo Geniza, but perhaps I'll look.

The image above comes from Live Science which often includes neat stuff.

The explanation of this document is that it was written by a 13th-century boy named Onfim who got bored with his schoolwork and started drawing on some. See Wikipedia for more on Onfrim.