linkmeister@99, okay, good idea, I will! someone on the CBC was just bemoaning the lack of polling data outside of Quebec. I bet Nate could fix us right up.
tariqata@101, oh, I figured we are both affiliated with The University With the Name That Rhymes With Spork. I just wasn't sure that your dad was as well. And my union has struck in the past - out for five weeks in 1997, which was way before my time - but we're not going to do it again this next time, because we're all much too upset about this strike. Or so I hope.
But I think that there is every chance of this strike dragging out into January or even February, even though it makes everyone miserable (or everyone except the negotiators, apparently.)
tariquata@98, hello! I'm sure the strike will end someday and your paper will be due. I'm also sure that there is no way on earth that my union will strike next year, not even if management threatens a salary cut and taking away our parking spots. And if your dad's union is at the same institution, then I am deeply grateful that they didn't strike at the same time as that other union, because wow, that would have been an insoluble mess.
But I don't think that the province is likely to intervene, do you? It's hard to argue that university classes are "essential services" in the same sense as sanitation workers or nurses.
From my point of view - I work at a large Canadian public university that's been on strike for a month, and my own union is entering its bargaining period soon - the key issue in the budget speech other than the defunding of political parties was the denial of the right to strike to public employees. That certainly got Broadbent's attention as well: he's a labor guy.
It is a sign of Canada's robust political health that Iggy could be a viable candidate for national political office after having spent, essentially, his whole adult life in another country working as a university professor. Not that I support him, but it's still kind of great. Having the recent election require less than six weeks start to finish, with the only issue anyone noticed for the first three weeks being an argument over how public funding for the arts should be spent (Harper expressed some anti-gala sentiment that les francophones et les Quebecois took amiss) was another sign that this is a lucky country.
Now if only we had our own Nate Silver ...
The teaching story Abi started us off with - is it, strictly speaking, a koan? - reminded me of the plot of Sense and Sensibility, which is set in motion by the eldest son's failure to act on his generous impulse toward his widowed stepmother and half-sisters immediately, so that his rich wife arrives in time to persuade him to keep his inheritance entirely for them. Then the Dashwood sisters and their mother have to move to Devonshire or where-ever, and wacky hijinks ensue.
Jane Austen, secret Buddhist?
In Ontario, part of the required home study before they'll let you adopt a child is checking for CO and smoke detectors in the kitchen, near the furnace, and in the bedrooms. So CO poisoning is definitely part of people's consciousness here. Whereas a little to the south ...
In Mexico City, about ten years ago, the air got unusually bad one summer - bad even for Mexico City that is - and then one of the local volcanoes started belching CO among other gases. Mexico City is very high up so there's not a lot of O2 in the air anyway. A friend of mine was quite seriously hurt when, as she was driving along on the Periferica, a pigeon fainted in mid-air and hit her windshield on its way down, because there wasn't enough oxygen to keep a pigeon conscious in the air five meters about her head. Bystanders told her that the pigeon got up and flew away again, apparently unharmed. When the medics got there they told her they were seeing a lot of falling-bird-related injuries.
I'm a US citizen living in Toronto. I can tell you it's not just people of African descent here who are praying and hoping. It's all of us. I haven't seen so much good will here toward the US since 9/11.
Fragano @53, yes, I know, and should have said so, but they were the only illustrations that Stedman liked, and the only ones that ever get reprinted (usually anonymously.) Also, none of the other illustrators ever wrote poems worth mentioning - though they had a much better grasp of 3-point perspective than Blake ever did.
And then there's the post-US-Civil-War colony of secessionists in Brazil ...
Meanwhile, a little farther south, Scottish mercenaries were active in the 1770s fighting unsuccessfully against maroons (colonies of escaped slaves) on behalf of the Dutch in what is now Surinam. William Stedman, who captained one troop of mercenaries, wrote a best-selling memoir of his adventures. Who did the publisher hire to do the illustrations? William Blake.
Sometimes I think human history tends toward maximum weirdness. No alternate universes required.
Item one: My grandmother's parents' and uncle's immigration documents, simply framed, presented to me by my gran on my 40th birthday. They include photos, and my great-grandparents' solemn oath that they were not anarchists nor polygamists.
Item two: The beautiful Japanese knives that my partner gave me for Christmas, a few years ago.
Item three: The sampler stitched by a friend for me, with the phrase "the patriarchy drives me nuts!" on it.
One more mostly-lurker wishing you well, Teresa, and wishing strength, patience and a good sense of humor to you and yours as you get better.
This is a terrible way to find out how much this blog and its leaders matter to a lot of mostly quiet folks who follow it!
Dr. Science @ 14, thanks, I'll pass that along to Black Squirrel (unless someone else already has ...)
Here is an account of the arrest and mistreatment of my friend's brother, a young Minneapolis resident who was only trying to attend a concert. You might want to read the earlier post in Blacksquirrel's blog as well, for context. This happened on September 1-2.
I have never met her family but I have met her; she's a very quiet, honest, gentle person, and I expect her brother is too. For what it's worth I can vouch that this is an honest account.
So that's one of those arrested who is not a violent protester - nor a protester at all.
Two more categories:
Those that are sold only in airports.
Those that are improved by translation.
Well, fuck.
Back in the early Reagan years I had a slot from two to five in the morning, one day a week, on a 10-watt FM station in a small midwestern town. This was a great opportunity to explore the record library, since I figured that nobody was listening anyhow. One night I dropped the needle on "Words You Can't Say" - and then I knew that nobody was listening, since the station didn't get shut down.
Farewell, George Carlin!
John A Arkansawyer@143: Nope, haven't even heard of it. What do you think of it?
Fragano Ledgister@145: Sorry about the misspelling.
I might, just possibly, have been referring to the Cristero War of the 1920s in Mexico - but that conflict was a lot shorter, somewhat more geographically limited, and less destructive than the Revolution.
And yes, most plantation slaves had a somewhat more varied diet than just manioc, depending on where and when we're looking at. On smaller Caribbean islands at points when the value of sugar was high and the value of slaves was relatively low, planters didn't see much economic advantage in allowing enslaved people to use up land on kitchen gardens. This changed as slaves became more expensive, after the British starting shutting down the slave trade ... but I'm guessing you know some of this. And have you really raised all those fruits and vegetables? Wow.
Heresiarch@133:
Thank you for the clarification. I still think that your narrative has two serious flaws.
First, you have the causation back-to-front at one point at least: enclosure and related "social changes" were not "incumbent upon" technological developments, but created the need for them. Enclosure was political, part of a long-term struggle by a small group of people to get and keep power. The Wikipedia article you cite obscures this through the use of the passive voice, but enclosure (and other political methods of emptying out land) didn't just happen, nor were these changes determined by the arrival of new technology. Rather, some people caused these transformations in living patterns to happen as part of a strategy to get control over British rural land and rural people. Once they had control of the land, they had to figure out what to do with it, which is where agricultural innovation came in. And of course the story is infinitely more complicated than that, but the basic outline there is just ... backward.
Second, if you look at what those early factory workers and their families actually ate - and this is true pretty much across the nineteenth century, across the industrialized world, and well into the twentieth in some places - most of their calories did not come from newly efficient versions of old crops, but from potatoes and sugar. And if you look at the major calorie sources of the people producing the sugar, and the people producing the cotton which the factories required, that's manioc (and a whole bunch of other stuff, because of the geographic range of plantation slavery, but manioc everywhere.) The story as you tell it here confuses correlation with causation, partly because it assumes static demography, economy, and level of engagement with global markets in the places in the world that did not urbanize and industrialize. Which is a whole other kettle of historiographic fish.
Frangano@135:
Yes, by "war" there I was referring to the Mexican Revolution.
And you're right, "coast" was the wrong word. I should have written "Atlantic world" but hesitated to use historians' jargon. Anyway, my intention was to include the cities in the eastern half of North America and in the British Isles that boomed in the initial decades of the industrial revolution - not just Liverpool etc. but also Pittsburgh and Toronto and so on.
Mary Aileen @129
Huh. That would make Heresiarch's argument so much weaker that it didn't occur to me that he might have meant that. Here's why: innovations like hay balers, threshers, barb wire, petroleum-based fertilizers and refrigerated shipping mostly come along well after the urbanization of the North Atlantic world had begun. Plus, they mainly supported food industries unrelated to the foods that fed the plantation slaves and factory workers of the industrial revolution; the technologies for producing, storing and transporting sugar, potatoes, and manioc changed relatively little between 1600 and 1900.
Now, you could make a case for refrigerated shipping calling a whole new political system into being in parts of the Americas - there wouldn't be banana republics without a banana industry, which was impossible with refrigerated shipping - but that's a far more contained example than the sweeping equation that Heresiarch is making, and somewhat more recent as well. Also refrigerated shipping was in my opinion necessary but not sufficient in the formation of the banana republics - US informal and formal imperialism was also part of that story. Still, that's the best case I can think of for changes in agricultural technology creating large-scale social change.
Sorry to go on at such length!
Heresiarch @127:
Well, you call it weakness, I call it a good time. Casual internet discussion of the big historical questions is a great way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon. So you said:
how can you even talk about the massive shift of humanity to the urban centers without understanding the technological changes in agriculture that made it possible to produce more food with less labor? It was that excess of labor that drove labor costs down and made factory-style production economically competitive, jumpstarting a whole suite of cultural and social changes. It's the biggest social, political, and cultural change in the history of the planet, and it was all due to a technological revolution.
Okay, so your historical narrative here is
1. Calorie-dense food becomes widely available, which causes
2. The formation of a workforce for factories, which causes
3. urbanization.
That version of the story comes up a lot. But it doesn't fit the facts. Chronology makes the story a whole lot more complex. The major agricultural innovations of which you speak are the invention of manioc, sugar, potatoes, and corn (in diminishing order of importance.) Obviously, this happens well before the minor urbanization of the 18th c. in Europe, the grander urbanization of the 19th c. in North America and western Europe, and then the really impressive urbanization of the 20th c. in Africa, the Americas (except for the anglophone bits) and Asia. And most of those urbanizations preceded the advent of industrialization (if you mean to take large-scale water- or steam-powered factory production of textiles as the marker for industrialization, which most but not all historians do) by decades or centuries. Or in some cases (Nairobi, Mexico City, Rio) they were obviously not caused directly by it.
But let's say you didn't mean the technological innovation of the those calorie-dense, labor-saving (except for sugar) crops. Let's say you meant the technological innovations that made those foods widely available to potential factory workers in the bits of the world that industrialized - and, just as importantly, made them available to the enslaved plantation laborers who produced the raw materials required by the new factories, which is where manioc enters the story. You have a good point - industrialization did depend on a new labor force, who did depend on these "new" foods. But I can't think of what technological change caused those laborers and those foodstuffs to become more widely available. Instead, the key causes were military, political, and economic.
Workers in the British Isles, for example, were pulled into expanding cities of the Atlantic coast because they were pushed out of the countryside by the enclosure of common fields by aristocrats, and the English land grab in Ireland. Switching to a diet based in sugar and potatoes made them less likely to starve or riot, and more available as factory workers when the factories appeared. But that change in diet did not create Manchester in the 19th century, it just made Manchester slightly less awful.
Or take the big Mexican cities - Mexico City above all, but also Los Angeles, Monterrey, Torreon, Chicago. There the population boom happened stunningly fast, but it happened as a consequence of the Mexican revolution. Mexico City, for example, had a fluctuating population throughout the 1880-1910 period, peaking at about 100,000. Then the war came, and the city's population grew to nearly a million by 1930. The destruction of the war in the countryside that pulled people into the cities was made possible by trains, more than any other technology, but then trains were hardly an innovation in 1911, even in Mexico, and trains didn't cause the war itself.
Again, I'm not saying that technology, and the choices people make about what to adopt and adapt in new technology, are irrelevant to history - not at all! But we shouldn't ascribe agency, or causal force, to technological change. Our past, and our present, are more complicated than that.
Bill Higgins @99, Patrick Neilsen Hayden @117, Heresiarch @119:
My earlier post was a great example of hamfisted use of new(ish) technology - by me, I mean - caused by poor understanding of the social context - my own poor understanding, I mean. Which is to say that I shouldn't have cut-and-pasted my notes on LB straight out of my livejournal entry, because they meant something different there than they meant here. Can I, with apologies, try to write out more clearly and less flippantly what I hoped the people I usually talk with on LJ understood me to mean, the first time around?
Those people know I'm a historian specializing in 20th-century Mexico, and an occasional political activist, and so I am very interested in the causes of abrupt political and social change. (How and why human things change is the central concern of all historians, really.) I'm not especially interested in technological change for its own sake, but I'm not dismissive of it either. Sometimes technological change creates other kinds of change; more often - in my opinion, and some historians disagree - it reflects underlying economic, social, and/or cultural changes. And imo "technological choice" does not ever (well, hardly ever) by itself determine a political outcome.
[Footnote: There's a pretty good article by Jill Lepore on this argument among historians in the latest New Yorker. Or if you wanted specific examples of how cultural change creates or thwarts technological change, look at Jeff Pilcher's book, Que Vivan las Tamales, on the history of Mexican food and in particular the uses of the blender and refrigerator.]
So that background and set of interests, in the context of a long sporadic conversation among my friends-list friends on lj about politics and the national security state, was what prompted my post to lj about LB. When I wrote "gizmo-worship," I did not actually mean that Doctorow does too much info-dumping. I *liked* all the the "specific detail about particular technology." My complaint was that the level of complexity and thought that went into the technological detail was not sustained in showing how the technology related to the creation of a political movement. Does one cause the other? How? Which way do the arrows of causation point?
That aspect of LB reminded me a bit of some thetoric from the last US presidential campaign, in which the interwebs was going to get Dean elected, you remember? As it turned out, yes, new forms of communication did make a huge impact in the US political process - but not in a simple, predictable, or monocausal way. Real life turned out to be a lot more weird and unpredictable the plot of Dean's campaign, or of LB.
So, anyway, I wasn't really complaining about the technology info-dumping at all. I was wishing that everything else in the novel could have been as well-thought-out, well-researched, sophisticated and surprising as the parts about the gizmos.
My apologies for not writing this all out in the first place. I hope this is clearer and less disagreeable. And my thanks, Patrick, for sending out the ARC in the first place. (I passed it on to a college-age friend, and will be interested to see what she makes of it.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 21 |
Total: 21 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Lola Raincoat:
Show all comments by Lola Raincoat.