'Nother Solent

Sorry I've been too busy

to post recently. Hope to be back soon.

Blimey, that was boring. Unfortunately MI6 would be after me if I tried to tell you the truth about

News? You want news as well?

Sorry. There isn't any. The Times front page today was about fat kids. That's the modern equivalent of "Two of the clock and all's well."

I will now blame myself for every awful thing that does happen.

"Nanoscale replicators already exist."

Our other debate was on nanotechnology. Kent Peterson does not agree with JEM's views as expressed in the second half of this email.

Mr Peterson writes:

Nanoscale replicators already exist. The surface of this planet is thoroughly infested with them, the oceans are soggy with their gunk, and their byproducts have effected permanent changes to the climate. They accomplish surprising tasks in timeframes of a few days. That reference to geological timescales is just completely wrong.

The existing models are not necessarily the only way to build nanoreplicators - radically different styles with designs focused on accomplishing specific tasks instead of reproduction may be (probably are) possible; no one knows because no one's had reason or ability to try yet - but they do prove the basic concept can be done, and if nothing else, modifications to the existing plans with specific goals in mind will yield surprising results.

[Because this email was fairly short I left it on the main blog. Why, oh why, does Blogger oblige me to manually remove every line break if I try to post some emails? It happens for about 40% of the emails I get. If the answer is at all complicated, kindly regard the question as rhetorical.]

Strange to think

that when Johnson was writing there would have been nothing unusual about meeting people who remembered being a slave.

Regular readers will be aware that several of my regular correspondents have been continuing a debate here on what factor killed slavery - was it moral decisions, or economic and technological developments?

I have three emails from readers that I think you will enjoy. However, as these mega-debates can rather break up the flow of the blog, I have dug out the password to my old Tripod website and re-invented it as "Natalie Solent Extra." It now has a page called

http://nataliesolent.tripod.com/whatkilledslavery.html

Some sample paragraphs to tempt you in.

ARC writes:

France and Britain were not the areas worst affected by the black death even in Europe, still less in the world. Italy and the Byzantine empire were worse affected in Europe. That they had more and larger cities at that time may have been a factor. Another was the greater speed and volume of maritime communications in the Mediterranean; it's a commonplace of epidemiology that epidemics tend to strike hard along lines of communication.

JEM writes (under a most apt title):

Excepting Blitzkrieg-like situations--Germany's invasions of Poland, France, etc., Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, and similar events-- what seems to decide the outcome of longer wars--at least conventional ones--is ultimately the relative economic strength of the two sides.

In the case of the American Civil War, in these terms the Confederacy really hadn't a chance against the North. And despite what "Time on the Cross" may say, an important part of this was due to slavery, as we can show ...

And Jim Miller writes:

So it [manumission] was rare, but not as rare as winning a lottery. And, since it was cumulative, over 20 years, assuming the 1850 rate is typical, a little less than one percent would have gained freedom, either through grants or their own work.

"Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man."

Via Mitch Townsend in Chicago Boyz I found this astonishing story from close to a hundred years ago, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. My eyes slid past the part where Mitch Townsend said it was a piece of fiction, so at first I thought it was fact. It is not, but it is still a fascinating document. The author was James Weldon Johnson, a major figure in the Harlem Rennaissance.

Even before I reached the note at the end saying it was a work of fiction, I began to feel that too much happened to the narrator to be entirely plausible, and too much of it seemed illustrated to make political points - albeit political points that desperately needed to be made. James Weldon Johnson was field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and I assume that his work was written to advance that organisation's work. I don't know whether the Autobiography was initially presented as fact; but a great deal of fiction of that era was written in the first person and there would have been nothing unusual about something called "Autobiography of ..." being understood by all to be fiction.

Never mind. The Edwardian conventions (such as the treatment of the narrator's courtship, his marriage, and the eventual death of his wife) add to the interest. I found myself seeing the scenes described with three pairs of eyes, those of the narrator (a fair-skinned black man who could "pass" as white, at a time when almost imperceptible distinctions of skin colour regularly blighted lives), those of the author (an educated and politically aware black man writing at the nadir of black fortunes between the US Civil War and the Civil Rights movement) and my own.

While on the subject of that book, I would like to highlight a quote from it that is far from being the most important topic discussed, yet did grab my attention because of its prescience.

As yet, the Negroes themselves do not fully appreciate these old slave songs. The educated classes are rather ashamed of them, and prefer to sing hymns from books. This feeling is natural; they are still too close to the conditions under which the songs were produced; but the day will come when this slave music will be the most treasured heritage of the American Negro.

That was written in 1912.

Perfect, in its way.

I commended this post by the American Expatriate over at B-BBC. Here I'd like to take a moment to admire the one comment it has garnered so far.

1 Comments:


Anonymous said...

Too bad for the fetus-humpers' argument that there's no such thing as a "partial-birth abortion." It's called a D&X, and contrary to what the anti-choice crowd says, it's only ever done in the case of a severely deformed baby that wouldn't survive, such as an anencephalic one. And, contrary to the right's opinion that all women who have abortions are chyuld-hatin' sluts who go get scrapes as easily as they order takeout (I guess that includes their own womenfolk), any woman who has remained pregnant well into the ninth month obviously wanted a baby.

But, oh, that's right...gotta keep that sucker on life support at taxpayer expense for 20+ years until it expires on its own, because "GAWWWWWWD IS TEH AUUUUUTHOR OF LYYYYUFFFF!!!" Even if it doesn't have a brain. Well, I guess it could always go to work for NewsMax or WingNutDaily or something...

6:46 PM

Admit it. This one is a perfect ten.

• It has the bizarre ("fetus-humpers'");
• the illogical (five points for every reason why "any woman who has remained pregnant well into the ninth month obviously wanted a baby" might not always be true and extra points for reasons that are usually advanced by pro-choice activists);
• the you-people-all-think generalization ("the right's opinion that all women who...");
• the CAPITAL LETTERS often REPEEEEATED for subtle effect;
• it features Disproof By I Don't Like Your Accent, in its even more refined version, Disproof By I Think I Wouldn't Like Your Accent If I Knew What It Sounded Like;
• it has the off-target abuse, denouncing the ignorant religiosity of a man who has said, "when it comes to a divine being, I myself am a skeptic";
• it has that elusive quality of irrelevance that marks the best internet discourse. Scott wrote about US legal history, our unknown hero saw "abortion" in there somewhere and let rip with a Pavlovian howl about the proper terminology for partial-birth abortion.
  
• After all that it didn't even bother to explain what "D&X" was. (Dilation & Extraction, if you're interested.)
  
• It even - oh, be still my beating heart, it even has the mention of WingNuts.
  
• It employed all the aforementioned techniques in an apparent attempt to persuade right wingers and opponents of abortion to change their minds.

I had better not say

what this piece from Dash Riprock is actually about. If you need to know you already do.

And so, our Eye wandered towards new projects. After sitting on the sidelines for a while, most of us were flush with new ideas, bubbling with excitement over the possibilities. After all, with unlimited funds, absolute control of the world media and every government on earth dancing like puppets on our strings, the problem was thinking up something we couldn't do.

We had gone through all the usual standbys - plagues, earthquakes, financial catastrophes - and were actually starting to get bored again when some guy in the back, who later turned out to be Brother Damien (sorry - "Dammann") just said quietly "cartoons." Well, you can imagine how well that went down with the other Brothers (I think the Velociraptor almost choked on his braised Christian baby shank), but eventually the room quieted down, and Damien laid out his plan.

Incidentally, guys, where's my cheque? I've given up on the satrapy now but I do need something to cover my expenses.

You lucky people.

Via Britblog Roundup I found "Liberty? You have no idea how lucky you are," a post from perfect.co.uk deconstructing Tony Blair's article in the Observer.

The prime minister also seems to believe that liberty is a zero-sum game: you can’t have more of it, you can only shift it around. In his view, it’s all about achieving the right ‘balance’.

Waiting for a good time to speak.

Certain European newspapers have put their British counterparts to shame by publishing The Cartoons. But the European Union, as represented by Freedom, Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini, true to form, appeases.

It was 'unwise' for European papers to republish the cartoons just three days after the victory of the militant Islamist group Hamas in Palestinian elections and following recent remarks about Israel and the Holocaust by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But don't get the impression that Mr Frattini is not in favour of free speech, no sir! In fact we learn that:

The former Italian foreign minister also made an impassioned plea for the right to free speech and expression, saying they were non-negotiable.

All Mr Frattini wishes to negotiate about is when would be a good time to exercise this non-negotiable right. We mustn't recklessly do it within days or months of anyone on earth doing anything fanatical.

EU Serf says that when free speech is threatened, that's when you must most defend it, stupid.

Surely the time when freedom to discuss the threat to our way of life from extremists is most important is when the threat seems to be growing. It is precisely because the Iranian President is a psychopath and The Palestinian Government is a group of terrorists, that this issue of free speech is so important.