'Nother Solent

Why raggy pages?

Offspring A recently received a gift edition hardback book. "It's very nice," she said, "but I think they didn't make it right. The pages are all raggy at the edges."

"They do that with posh books sometimes," I said.

"Why?"

"Ah," I said, "the answer to that is, um, is a terrifying yet exciting Mystery of Adulthood that will be revealed to you in a secret ceremony on your eighteenth birthday."

So I have a few years to find out. Why is it posh to have the edges of the pages uncut? Is it meant to suggest handmade paper?

Gary Farber writes:

Understanding that the following are not your words, but wuzname's, but since you did praise them:

[Here Gary quotes this post from "God Save the Queen" (the blog, not the national anthem) which I commented on here. Gary's words are in normal type; Mr GSTQ's in italics. What a lot of quotes-within-quotes I seem to be having.]

"1 - full colonisation (America, Australia);

2 - partial colonisation (South Africa, Algeria);

3 - prolonged imperial rule (over a century, say) without settlement
(India, Phillipines, Sri Lanka, Indonesia);

4 - brief imperial rule (a few decades only) without settlement (Nigeria,
Egypt, Burma);

5 - no European rule (Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Thailand).

The correlation between present-day democracy and the level of colonial/
imperial experience is striking. Countries in category 1 are overwhelmingly
free. Categories 2 and 3 are mostly free."

[Back to Gary's opinion now:]

One -- meaning "me" -- feels a need to note that this "overwhelmingly free"
experience didn't work out too well for many of the already-there inhabitants nor their descendants, in category one, nor did matters do much better, until the last few seconds of history (comparatively speaking) in category 2.

It seems at least worth noting in passing.

I liked the calm understatement of the last line. Any extended treatment of the subject of empire that does not give full weight to the fact that human beings do not want to be ruled by foreigners is worth very little. Yet there is no inconsistency between thinking conquest a bad activity and observing that it may, through the diffusion of improved technology, institutions or ideas, have good consequences for the descendants of those conquered. May have. In the worst cases the conquered didn't leave any descendants.

The wheel makes some strange turns. The descendants of Africans captured by slavers and taken to servitude in America are on average better off than the descendants of their neighbours who evaded capture. Arguably some of that differential was caused by the devastating effects of the slave trade*, but that does not make the observation invalid.

*I'm trying and failing to remember/Google a quote about regions of Africa where no white man had ever been being convulsed and blighted by slave-taking wars.

Semiskinned semi-skins

the increasingly strange A L Kennedy. Here's an excerpt. Rob's bits are in ordinary type, Alison K's in italics:

...Only 3 sentences in and we already have Tony Blair slithering, words being put in his mouth, "demonic" foreign policies and describing people as "evil enough to provoke spontaneous vomiting in small children". Way to build a solid platform of rational argument, Alison.

Now, like many British citizens, I'd rather not think about our ghastly leader, but Bush is rather harder to blot out. It's that whole terror thing. I've been waking up screaming since I was five, so I find I am slightly susceptible to terror. Not the $60bn-earmarked-for-next-year, civil-rights-dissolving, Orange Alert type of terror - I mean real terror.

Aha, you mean the murdering-3000-people-in-one-morning type of terror?

And it's not as if the genuine terror of Bush is hard to notice.

No, I thought that wouldn't be the sort of terror you meant.

Within hours of coming into office, he'd started approving oil exploration in national parks, cutting support for disadvantaged children, raising the levels of arsenic in drinking water...

The man can change the chemistry of drinking water? 

Sorry for my unexpected absence

since Thursday. First one offspring was sick, then the other. Not very sick, which is a relief, and probably not the same sick, which is also a relief as we're going camping the day after tomorrow. But enough to put me all at sixes and sevens.