The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Calimac:

legionseagle @24: I didn't say that Gladstone's concern was for the cotton workers, but the cotton trade. However, it turns out that Gladstone was concerned about the cotton workers:

"Throughout the summer of 1862 Gladstone and his wife did their best to provide relief work on the Hawarden estate for cotton operatives who had been thrown out of employment. Gladstone's mind was full of their sufferings when he visited Newcastle-on-Tyne on 7 October, 1862, at the start of a triumphant political tour of the industrial North-East. He found himself hailed for the first time as the Parliamentary hero of the masses." - Philip Magnus, Gladstone: A Biography (Murray, 1954), p. 153.

As for Gladstone's motivations, another distinguished biographer discusses them thus:

"He was not in fact particularly pro-South. He was much more akin to a man of Massachusetts than to one of South Carolina. ... Gladstone at this stage had some anti-American prejudices of a type prevalent in England ... He regarded them as a crude and braggart people." - Roy Jenkins, Gladstone: A Biography (Random House, 1997), p. 238.

Jenkins goes on to note Gladstone's later apology, in which he claimed that he had been trying to be purely descriptive rather than advocatory: "Many who wished well to the Northern cause despaired of its success," quoth Gladstone. But Jenkins is skeptical of this as a retcon, and quotes John Bright at the time, as saying that Gladstone "is as unstable as water in some things; he is for union and freedom in Italy and for dissention and bondage in America." (ibid, p. 238-9)

Neither Magnus nor Jenkins, both immensely respected biographers of Gladstone, say much about the influence on Gladstone's thought of his family's financial history, either in this context or in discussing Gladstone's background. It is certainly possible that it had a place; I do not deny it though you respond as if I had; but if it was more than minimal I would appreciate reference to some equally distinguished scholars saying so, rather than taking the word of Some Pseudonymous Guy On The Internet.

legionseagle @9: Thank you for the quote. It's even wronger than you say.

First, any discussion of Gladstone's Southern sympathies should first consider the distress that the war caused the cotton trade in Liverpool, Gladstone's home town. That's so obvious that "inexplicable" is an inexplicable way to describe Gladstone's attitude.

I suspect the cotton trade loomed far larger in his mind than lingering sympathies for the slave trade or the sugar plantations, especially considering Gladstone's proto-Wilsonian attitudes towards world affairs in later life.

What's inexplicable is why Gladstone would go out publicly and stick his foot in his mouth on the subject when his colleagues the PM and Foreign Secretary, whose department this was, were keeping a studied neutrality with Northern leanings.

Second, British noble titles again. "Lord John Russell" is the correct way to refer to the guy only up to 1861. After that he was "Lord Russell" or "John, Lord Russell" or "Earl Russell" (any of these is correct, but "Lord John" no longer was). He is one of the few individuals in British history to be both Lord Firstname and Lord Lastname [actually Lord Title], but you can't be both at the same time.

Unfortunately, McPherson makes one small error of his own, that I caught. For some reason, he refers to Palmerston as "Viscount Henry Palmerston." This is an incorrect form. He's usually called "Lord Palmerston" or "Viscount Palmerston," either of which is correct and enough to identify him. You could write, "Henry, Viscount Palmerston" or (probably more correctly) "Henry John, Viscount Palmerston" a la "Alfred, Lord Tennyson," though in Palmerston's case hardly anyone ever does. Or various other longer forms. But putting his first name after the title is simply wrong, because in the terminology of British nobility that means something entirely different (and impossible with any term of rank higher than "Lord" or "Lady" anyway).

Seen the copy-edited version of Sarah Palin's resignation speech yet?

What are the odds that I would turn out to fall into neither of those categories?

I had seen that bit before, though I'd forgotten it. It's a good question he raises: would Hitlerian rhetoric have been effective in English? and some kind of answer might be interesting.

Hello, we're talking about old boots.

Should we force, or encourage, parents to read this article in order to scare them? I think not.

Scaring people works on persuading people not to do things they mistakenly thought were OK. The article refers to a few cases of people who deliberately left the child in the car thinking that the kid would be OK there. Anybody under that delusion, yes, they should be forcefully informed they're wrong.

But the main subject of this article is people who were under no such delusion. They did not intend for a minute to leave the child there, and the instant they realized what they'd done, they moved to try to correct their mistake.

The memory expert is a useful character in this story, discussing why a mistake like this isn't something that can be fixed by scaring people or threatening them with jail. You don't forget things because you consciously or even subconsciously consider them unimportant, you forget them because that's how the mind works.

Unless you have never, ever in your life left your home or office forgetting to take something you meant to have, you cannot say that you could never do this.

The answer is to make it harder to forget. So ignore the frakking airbag, or better yet disable the passenger-side one, and keep a child too young to talk in the front seat.

This was an excellent article, vividly to the point. I'm glad I didn't remember it was by the author of the subway-violinist story, which was stupid to the point of inanity. Its misreading of the people who didn't stop and listen was as grotesque, if to far less consequence, as that of people who blame the parents in this article as callous killers.

Ursula L #3 makes the best point. There ought to be a technical fix to comply with regulations. But of course it can't be too invisible to the donor, because it needs to be seen that the Red Cross is getting the money.

For, of course, Abi is right. It would be perfectly possible for an unscrupulous seller to say they were donating this money, and then not do it. Such things actually happen, as I recall. And no way for the casual buyer to tell the difference between that and an actual honorable plan.

Moral lesson: Sometimes apparently inscrutable regulations actually are there for a reason. Again I think of Tom DeLay and his denunciation of onerous government regulations. But DeLay was in the pest control business. His employees were hauling dangerous chemicals around Houston. I'd bloody well hope he'd find government regulations to be onerous.

(Actually, what Buzz would have said was "Beam me up, Mike." I gotta keep this guys straight in my mind.)

I would not have had the faintest idea what "Buzz up!" means -- Buzz Aldrin opening his communicator and saying "Beam me up, Neil"? -- and I would seriously have thought that "Email" alone like that would mean "Send an email to us in response to this story." I'd have been highly irritated to find otherwise.

I'm with Mark Wise. I block ads because most of them move. Ads that don't move don't bother me.

At one job I was handed control of some local web pages, including a project status page on which tasks done were marked by little blinky check marks. The FIRST THING that I did was make those check marks STOP BLINKING.

The presidents who had (so far as I recall) served in no elected office prior to the presidency include three generals (Taylor, Grant, and Eisenhower) and three whose political experience was appointive (Arthur [prior to becoming VP], Taft, and Hoover).

Other presidents who were elected primarily for having been generals - Washington, Jackson, WH Harrison - had had political careers also, and the latter two had been losing candidates for president before being winning ones.

What Obama is not, as you note, is the first president to be the child of a foreign-born father. To borrow the Japanese term, he is not the first Nisei president.

What I believe he is, however, and this is probably in their clumsy way what the writers mean, is the first president whose foreign-born father did not settle permanently in the U.S.

I don't know about citizenship. Andrew Jackson's parents probably never even had to worry about it.

Obviously PNH has here assembled a whole bunch of people who don't laugh at his interest in Canadian politics. I'm another fan of the subject, and I don't even have any personal connections with that country beyond visits and some friends there.

I like the article that described Harper's behavior as a combination of Joe Clark, Richard Nixon, and the Emperor Nero. This is exactly the kind of arrogance that sank Clark's short-lived government in 1979. Clark eventually learned better, and was much less arrogant in later years. When will his successors get a clue?

(Clark's government lasted 66 days from call of Parliament to dissolution. If Harper's falls next week, his post-'06 election government will have been only 3 weeks. I can't find offhand how long the Meighen government lasted in 1926; he was PM for 88 days, but that includes the post-dissolution election campaign.)

Linkmeister @48 has gotten some long and informative answers to the question about proroguing Parliament, but the one-line answer is: Only the Gov-Gen formally has that power, but most of her functions are carried out at the PM's behest. The question is, if he tries this blatantly anti-democratic move, will she balk?

Earl Cooley III @69: I don't know if Jim Broadbent is related to Ed Broadbent, but it is true that Leslie Nielsen's brother, who died recently, was a major Canadian politician.

Prince Aathan @15: Not so difficult a shot as it sounds. The car was moving slowly, and directly away from Oswald's position, so the trickiest part of aiming was the trees in the way. Now, a shot from the grassy knoll, which was somewhat in front but more to the right of the moving car, would have been more difficult.

John Mark Ockerbloom @31: I've read it. (Between Heaven and Hell by Peter Kreeft.) It consists mostly of Lewis lecturing the other two on the afterlife with a degree of pomposity that the earthly Lewis never quite achieved. My advice: Spare yourself. Hope that you die on a different day.

If you don't mind, I'd like to pre-empt a common misleading idea about Ishi here. When it's said that he "lived in a museum," apparently people sometimes get the idea that he was on permanent display in a living-history diorama or something like that, and the anthropologists get criticized for treating him as an exhibit.

That's not what happened. As Ishi did not want to go back to his wilderness life - as you point out, he was naked and starving; that's why he'd come out - there was the question of where he could go and what he could do in a modern society he knew nothing about.

So he went to live in a small custodian's apartment in the museum building and did some caretaker work. And he did what you might call ranger talks for museum visitors - demonstrating how to make bows and arrows, stuff like that - as well as describing his life and civilization for the anthropologists, as they were eager to learn and he wanted to tell them, as he knew very well this was the only way any of it would survive him.

Honoring veterans and noting the passage of time: For Veterans' Day in about 1946, my mother, then a high-school journalist, interviewed two of the last surviving Civil War veterans in Michigan.

In #40, for "Marilee @12", read "Marilee @37." n q.

Marilee @12: I know that. Really. My comment already assumed that knowledge. The "significance" I was referring to was the significance alluded to by Ken @7, namely the significance of the Obama campaign referring to "Manassas" rather than "Bull Run". They didn't do that to take a Southern perspective on the battle, they did it because Manassas is the name of the town that the rally was at.

Ken @7: I'm not sure the name is of all that much significance to tonight's rally. Bull Run is the creek. Manassas is the town. That's where the swing voters of northern Virginia whom Obama is hoping to reach live: in the town. Not in the creek.

But the fact that Obama picked that town and not one of the many other burgeoning towns in the area: yes, very symbolically interesting.

Cat @45 & Raphael @49: The Whigs of the 19th century US had no direct connection with the British Whigs, but they borrowed the name because they had something important in common. The 18th century British Whigs had been the party opposed to strong monarchial power*, and the American Whigs were a motley coalition of conflicting interest groups with only one thing in common: They all hated President Jackson.

Both Whigs and Democrats had pro- and anti-slavery wings, but when US politics re-sorted itself (roughly) on pro- vs anti-slavery lines in the mid 1850s, the bulk of northern Whigs wound up in the Republicans, though it took many of them several roundabout years to get there. The Republicans took the same spot in the party ecosystem, but they're not really the same party.

And today's Lib Dems in the UK have even less connection with their Whigs. Almost all remaining Whigs in the Liberal Party went Unionist in the 1886 split and ended up with the Conservatives. Today's Conservatives are descendants of both the Tories and the Whigs. The Lib Dems come from the 19th century Radicals. And the spiritual ancestors of the Labour Party - or what used to be the Labour Party; Blair re-invented them as thoroughly as Nixon did the Republicans - didn't have the vote back then.

*They favored aristocratic power instead, but I doubt the Americans were thinking of that.

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