A dull genus

Those derided Victorians, who looked upon every man as a potential husband, certainly extracted every ounce of interest from a dull genus.

Ethel Lina White - Some Must Watch (1933 - later filmed as The Spiral Staircase)

An interesting article from Quillette about a study which suggests society's view of males has soured.

“Depressing Study Finds Gender Stereotypes Haven’t Changed Since the 1980s,”proclaimed the New York magazine website the other day. The women’s site Bustle echoed the gloomy view: “Gender Stereotypes Just As Prevalent in 2016 As In The 1980s, New Study Finds, So Maybe Things Aren’t As Great As We’d Like To Believe.”

Yet a closer look at the study in question shows a far more complicated picture. While some beliefs about male and female traits and roles have indeed changed little since a similar survey in 1983, there has been a marked shift toward egalitarian attitudes on some important issues. There also seems to have been a marked shift toward more negative perceptions of men — which is arguably depressing, but probably not in the way the study’s authors and most of the commentators would like you to think...

Could stereotyping sometimes cause powerful women to be seen as kinder and more altruistic than powerful men? Recent research, such as the work of political scientists Deborah Jordan Brooks, Jennifer Lawless and Danny Hayes, suggests that today gender is more an asset than an obstacle for female politicians.

Yes, it’s likely that women who are perceived as too hard and cold are sometimes penalized because of societal expectations of female “niceness.” But surely, there are also times when the tendency to stereotype men as less understanding, warm, and capable of providing emotional support can result in unfairness to men. And some of that stereotyping is likely due not to patriarchy or lack of feminist progress, but do the direction feminism has taken in the last thirty years.

To my mind this has been going on for a very long time - certainly well before the eighties and particularly in popular entertainment. Remember The Likely Lads, a comedy about two idiot young men first broadcast in 1964? Or how about Laurel and Hardy?

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Osborne threatens Yorkshire with "Mancgatte"

George Osborne today unveiled his proposal to end Yorkshire's troublesome obsession with regional independence, by the construction of a huge road tunnel intended to "rub their noses in diversity."

Ostensibly designed to cut journey times between Yorkshire and the northwestern counties, the true objective of the massive project is to affirm the Chancellor's commitment to "ever-closer union" between the Roses.

The exact route is yet to be finally determined, but one aspect is already decided: "To save time, we shall be building a vast migrant camp at the same time as the Tunnel," said a spokesman for Number 11.

Opposing the plan, the leader of the United Keighley Independence Party commented, "The Chancellor is weaponising Lancastrians in order to wring financial concessions from wealthy Yorkshiremen. This is our last chance to stop the madness." In an apparent attempt to delay planning permission indefinitely, a UKIP party worker was caught this week planting Great Crested Newts in ponds and ditches across the area where digging is due to start.

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Duvets and daggers

In the Mail this week, a story about a man who kicked his lady in the stomach in a row about duvet-hogging. Initially he denied intent, "saying he put his leg up as she walked towards him."

(It was in a Viennese hotel some years ago that we first came across a double bed with two single duvets; I hadn't realised it was a crime prevention measure.)

The principle of criminal intent was established by the Elizabethan jurist Edward Coke as one of the two elements necessary to prove guilt.

Which brings me to an old story about a case supposedly heard in Cardiff Crown Court. A man had stabbed someone to death in a pub, and his defence was that he had held out the knife in a warning but self-protective gesture, and the other fellow had walked into it.

The judge leaned forward and asked, "What would you have done if he hadn't walked forward?"

The defendant replied "I'd have done that, wouldn't I?", miming a powerful jab with the blade.

One imagines the Rumpole-like scene in the cells below afterwards, the barrister saying, "What you have to understand, Taff, and you'll have plenty of time to muse on this, is..."


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Quote of the day

Peter Hitchens: I’d dispute the use of the word ‘libertarian’. No liberation is taking place. [...] All the enslavements of modern society, which offers nothing but work and money as we dwell in hutches amid an undifferentiated landscape of concrete, plastic and neon, are presented to their victims as liberation. Amidst all this, that is why drugs and drink may come to look like liberation too. 

http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-laura-perrins-interview-peter-hitchens-on-why-it-is-time-to-emigrate/


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Child labour in the Potteries

Sometimes even old cups and saucers have a slice of social history to relate. The above cup and saucer dates from round about 1840 and although unmarked is typical of wares made by the Hilditch and Hopwood pottery at Longton. It was made in part by child labour.

In Scriven's Report on Child Labour in the pottery industry in 1840, Richard Moreton – then aged 9 and working at Hilditch and Hopwood reported.

‘I am a figure maker for William Moreton [Richard’s father], I work by the piece and can make 40 dozen (480) small figures a day: I get 1d for ten dozen, that is about two shillings [10 pence] a week.’

So little Richard Moreton did not work for Hilditch and Hopwood, but for his father William who subcontracted figure making to his 9 year old son.

The 'figures' little Richard made in such vast quantities may have been something like the lilac coloured sprig mouldings on the above cup and saucer. The sprig mouldings were made from soft coloured clay rather like Plasticine. Richard would press them out of the clay using moulds, carefully remove them, then either he or someone else would stick them to the cup or saucer with liquid clay before firing.

These are not high class items of bone china; they were intended for middle class markets to be brought out the china cabinet for genteel afternoon tea parties.

Also from Scriven's report

employments of families

13) The processes being such as to admit of the employment of whole families father, mother, and some two, three, or more children - their united earnings are sometimes £3. or £4. per week: but, proverbially improvident, and adopting the adage,- "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof", they squander the proceeds of their labour in gaudy dress, or at the skittle-ground and ale-house; so that, when overtaken by illness or other casualty, and thrown for a few days out of work, they resort to their masters for a loan, or to the parish workhouse for relief.

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Tahiti: new biohazard laboratory opened

Friday, 4 March 2016: Tahiti News announces the opening of a new high-biosafety laboratory at the Malardé Institute in Pape'ete.(1)

This is to help deal with the increased risk of infectious diseases that have spread to and from the Pacific region, such as Chikungunya (2), Zika (3) - which was first discovered in Uganda in 1947 (4), dengue (5), H1N1 influenza (6).

An earlier article from FranceTV (7) explains that highly dangerous diseases need to be handled in very safe facilities, which up till now did not exist in French Polynesia. Previously samples would have had to be sent to other laboratories abroad, which cost precious time.

The new lab on Tahiti is equipped to NSB3 containment standard. This is not the highest category - level 4 is for very high risk pathogens such Ebola, Lassa, Marburg etc and "other agents with unknown risks of pathogenicity and transmission" (8).

The top biosafety rating includes germ warfare research facilities such as the UK's Porton Down, listed on Wikipedia (9). One obvious reason why the "space suit" level 4 isn't appropriate for Tahiti is the risk of destructive tropical storms like the Category 5 Cyclone Winston that crashed into Fiji last month, killing 43 people (10).

French Polynesia is 2,100 miles further east but is still not immune: in 2010 Cyclone Oli hit Tahiti with gusts up to 120 mph (11), and in 1997 Cyclone Osea wrecked 95% of the infrastructure of Maupiti, 200 miles NW of the main island (12). So we needn't worry about an Andromeda Strain-type (13) accidental plague weapon release: it's not that kind of operation.
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(1)  http://www.tahitinews.co/inauguration-dun-laboratoire-de-haute-securite-biologique/
(2) http://www.cdc.gov/chikungunya/geo/ - very widespread globally
(3) http://www.cdc.gov/zika/geo/ - also spreading via  mosquito in Samoa and Tonga, for example
(4) https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/03/03/zika-connection-microcephaly-guillain-barre-hard-prove/
(5) http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yellowbook/2016/infectious-diseases-related-to-travel/dengue - throughout S E Asia and the western Pacific
(6) http://www.gleamviz.org/2009/09/ - spread around the world by air travel in months
(7) http://la1ere.francetvinfo.fr/polynesie/tahiti/installation-d-un-laboratoire-de-haute-securite-biologique-l-institut-malarde-197064.html - dateline 9 Oct 2014, updated 25 Feb 2016
(8) http://www.labmanager.com/lab-health-and-safety/2010/12/biosafety-levels-1-2-3-4?fw1pk=2#.VtrtvX2LSt9
(9) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_level_4
(10) http://fijione.tv/43-dead-after-tc-winston/
(11) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Oli#Tahiti_2
(13) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain

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Ancient Rome and modern Liberty

A connected set of stories from Roman history shows that freedom means nothing without economic independence and civil rights.

Professor Mary Beard's “SPQR”[i] takes as its starting-point the failed Catiline Conspiracy in 63 B.C. Cicero, then one of the two Consuls, ordered the immediate execution without trial of a group of co-conspirators, and was hailed as Father of the Fatherland for saving the city from bloody revolution.

But this action helped him to his own downfall. On his last day in office, two of his rivals prevented him from giving the customary valedictory speech on the grounds that he himself had not allowed the accused Catalinarians to speak before condemning them. Some years later (58 B.C.) the Roman people voted to exile anyone who executed without trial and Cicero left Rome ahead of another vote specifically naming him.

When he came back, he found that his house had been razed to the ground and a temple to Liberty meaningfully set up in its place, blocking a rebuild:

“By building and consecrating the temple on the former house of then-exiled Cicero, Clodius ensured that the land was legally uninhabitable. Upon his return, Cicero successfully argued that the consecration was invalid and thus managed to reclaim the land and destroy the temple.”[ii]

The politics then was as murky as now: Cicero had accused Clodius of being involved in the conspiracy, even though the latter had sided with him during the crisis; and a thirty-something Julius Caesar had suggested the unusual step of imprisoning the suspected rebels instead of killing them - was this a matter of legal principle, or a ploy to keep alive secret allies? 

Cicero died in 43 B.C. at the behest of someone else he came to oppose, Mark Antony, and his head and hands were set up in the Forum as another visual political statement. 

 But when and why was “Libertas” made a goddess?

Her first temple in Rome was built long before, in 238 B.C.[iii] – not the “Iuppiter Libertas”[iv] of which the Emperor Augustus boasted[v], but instead (it is said[vi]) by Tiberius Gracchus. The “tiny”[vii] edifice stood somewhere on the Aventine Hill by the River Tiber, perhaps next to the temple of Juno Queen (and near those of Flora, Ceres and the Moon)[viii], as shown in the images below (please ignore the yellow indicator on the latter):

Temple of Juno (large); Temple of Libertas said to be nearby

Image: http://www.maquettes-historiques.net/page18aa7.html

Map, showing temples in the neighbourhood

http://www.rome.wiebekoo.nl/ROMA%20ANTICA/Muren%20van%20Rome/images/portaTrigemina02.jpg

Roman coin, said to be of "Jupiter and Libertas" - possibly not the first temple
Image: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/356699232963738814/

This building, too, had a point. Tiberius Gracchus had given Italian agricultural labourers rights to land and hence an entitlement to military service. He was hated by the rich land owners, who saw the reforms as a threat to their wealth and power and as undermining their use of slave labour on their estates. On the other hand he was understandably very popular with the plebs, and the Liberty temple nailed his colours to the mast.

He, too, was killed:

“The senate failed in an attempt to bar him from standing again, but a group of enraged senators, led by his hostile cousin Scipio Nasica, charged into an election rally of Tiberius', broke it up and, alas, clubbed him to death.”(ix)

Perhaps “enraged” is not the right word here: it sounds like a sort of mitigation on the grounds of passion. A better term should be found for the coldly organised violence of plutocrats.

Professor Beard says that Rome’s history is relevant to us today, and surely it is. A powerful elite outsourcing work to cheaper labour , depriving their fellow citizens of access to the means of production and so eating away at their personal independence; the leader of the moment using public panic to ride roughshod over the due process of law; belated calls for the former “saviour of the nation” to be held to account, but coming from political enemies who may have their own shadowy agendas; show-democracy giving way to a succession of tyrants.

“Nihil sub sole novum”: there is nothing new under the sun. 

CODA: 

There is another resemblance between Catiline and Tiberius Gracchus: both enlisted the support of peasant farmers:

"Promoting his policy of debt relief, Catiline initially also rallied many of the poor to his banner along with a large portion of Sulla’s veterans. Debt had never been greater than in 63 BC since the previous decades of war had led to an era of economic downturn across the Italian countryside. Numerous plebeian farmers lost their farms and were forced to move to the city, where they swelled the numbers of the urban poor. Sulla's veterans were in bad economic straits as well. Desiring to regain their fortunes, they were prepared to march to war under the banner of the "next" Sulla. Thus, many of the plebs eagerly flocked to Catiline and supported him in the hope of the absolution of their debts."

Debt, recession, discontent among the lower orders, populist politicians, reactionary fat-cats backed by the Establishment, calls for debt relief... Very modern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Catilinarian_conspiracy

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[i] “SPQR: A history of Ancient Rome”, Profile Books (2016)

[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertas

[iii] http://www.britannica.com/topic/Libertas-Roman-religion

[iv] http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Europe/Italy/Lazio/Roma/Rome/_Texts/PLATOP*/Jupiter_Libertas.html

[v] http://www.loebclassics.com/view/augustus-res_gestae/1924/pb_LCL152.375.xml

[vi] See note [ii]

[vii] http://www.maquettes-historiques.net/P18A.html

[viii] http://www.rome.wiebekoo.nl/ROMA%20ANTICA/Muren%20van%20Rome/images/portaTrigemina02.jpg

[ix] http://www.roman-empire.net/republic/tib-gracchus.html

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