There were six kids named "Ofwat" at my school.
The non-name names thing is odd. It has a vague feel of High Modernism - Gosplan, BuShips, BuPers, Sovnarkom etc.
At least they aren't in CamelCase, I suppose.
On the more general point, I think it would be a mistake to see this as "Thatcherism". The whole thing goes back to 2010, the year when everything started to go wrong - lunatic "austerity" policies brought in and continuing right up to the present day, with the results we are now seeing in terms of bits falling off schools.
At the root of this are Cameron and Osborne, both of whom now have very nice lives and will suffer no adverse consequences whatsoever. They brought in a culture that fundamentally lacked seriousness - they didn't actually see government as what it was, which is running a very large and complex organisation. They saw it as a politics game. And it is the original sin of current Conservative politics that they don't think of politics as a thing you do in order to do government; they think of government as a thing you do in order to do politics.
Thatcher's cabinet was a group of very mixed morality, but it's hard to think of many who were as lightweight and unserious as Johnson, or Gove, or Patel, or Braverman.
I don't understand what "austerity" means in current context. Bringing back utility fashion?
Ajay--what do you think caused that? The rise of financiers or what?
Fascinating comment!
Ajay--what do you think caused that? The rise of financiers or what?
Fascinating comment!
3: "austerity" means the fiscal policy of 2010 and after: very large and, as it turned out, permanent cuts in all areas of government spending. The claimed justification was that the 2008 recession had led to the government running up a lot of debt (true) and this needed to be addressed by cutting spending ("austerity") in order to eliminate the deficit. The result was a slow recovery from recession and lasting problems in pretty much every part of the public sector.
1. About 10% of the UK population came of age while Thatcher was PM. A fair number of them, maybe even a majority, have strong opinions about things labeled "Thatcherism." (Some pro-) On either side of that cohort, some probably do. But at a guess, I'd say that "Thatcherism" as a term is not salient to about 80% of the UK population.
2. Maybe, but not if they get hung upon the label, because those are the political battles of 40 years ago.
3. Because America took all the TLAs?
The Smiths are on the radio often here. I guess because no one younger listens to the radio?
8: also, to be honest, I'm not even sure that what's happened since 2010 is particularly Thatcherite.
Thatcherism was about reducing trade union power, centralising power from local government to Westminster, privatising services, deregulation and tax cuts. Whether you're pro or anti Thatcher, I think you'd agree that those are all important parts of it.
I don't think that the last 13 years have seen much movement in any of those directions. Privatisation? There haven't been many big privatisations (not much left to sell) and we're actually seeing reversal of rail privatisation. Deregulation? If anything, post-financial crisis, financial regulation has got tighter. Tax cuts? Taxes are actually slightly higher as a share of GDP than they were in 2000. Centralising power away from the local authorities I grant you, because local government budgets got cut first and deepest, but in things like free schools and NHS reform the government has seemed keener to shed power (probably because it allows them to shed responsibility). Trade union power? We've had more days lost to strikes last year than at any time since the 1980s.
And of course Thatcher was also a very strong believer in free trade, including the European Single Market, and Brexit was the biggest protectionist move made by any UK government since, probably, the 1930s.
2: AIUI the core problem was precisely privatisation and deregulation. The causality being
1. Privatized services are free from political interference (like austerity) so,
2. They are free to borrow against their monopoly revenues to
3. Invest in their infrastructure Pay themselves dividends and let the infrastructure rot.
Is this wrong? And how did austerity affect privatized utilities if they were in fact privatized?
I can't speak to Thatcherism, but Trumpism is a straightforward evolution of Reaganism. Republicans can get away with more than they used to, but even where the specific policies differ (trade and immigration, for instance) the overall gestalt is pure Reagan.
13: you're talking about a decline in quality in privatised services that used to be provided by governments?
First, I'm talking about a decline in quality in actual government services - schools and policing and so on. Different area.
Second, sure, there are some areas where privatised services have got worse - but it's not as pronounced as the effect of austerity on government service, and I'm not sure to what extent it can be traced to a more hands-off regulatory approach by the government.
8 et seq: Setting aside what Thatcherism actually was, isn't Thatcher still salient as a political symbol?
(And if she isn't, fine, amend OP to read, IDK, "Tories are literally shitting on you.")
What I'm interested in is why the political cycle between parties seems to have lengthened so much starting with Thatcher. Before her, power alternated frequently. Starting with her, there have been three periods of 10-15 years of one party, usually being fairly electorally dominant except for its last few years. It's like the electorate is binging & purging.
I realize "random uncorrelated shit happening at different times since 1979" is probably the main answer but I'm curious if there are others.
15: Ok. I intended the OP to refer specifically to the utilities meltdown. Should have made that clearer.
Isn't the utilities thing at least partially because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
17 is an interesting question but I think it's based on a misconception. The same party being in office for more than ten years is fairly common, historically. Here's a list of "long-stay" parties that lasted at least ten years in government:
Conservative 2010-date (including five years in coalition; we've only had eight years of a Conservative-only government)
Labour 1997-2010
Conservative 1979-1997
Conservative 1951-1964
Conservative 1935-1945 (including five years of a wartime coalition)
Liberal 1905-1922 (including two years of a wartime coalition)
Conservative 1895-1905
Tory 1807-1830
Tory 1783-1806
Which 1721-1763
Out of the 123 years since 1900, "long-stay" governments have been in office for 84 of them, counting coalitions.
Or, to put it another way, there have been 31 general elections since 1900. Only 13 of them produced a change in governing party.
There are really only two periods where you have a succession of quick-change governments; the 1960s-70s, and the second half of the 19th century.
Ten years is not actually very long for a British political party to be in power. Elections tend to be about four years apart on average, so if you get re-elected once you're most of the way there.
21: I think Mossy's talking about the water companies constantly dumping sewage on to beaches?
We dump sewage on Ohio, but only if it rains.
And Kentucky, but that's busy collateral damage.
Just collateral damage. Stupid phone.
isn't Thatcher still salient as a political symbol?
It's interesting that in the US, Reagan has basically disappeared as a political symbol even as key parts of his program have advanced.
Republicans have repudiated Reagan's pretense of integrity and anti-racism.
Shitcrime island, not Shitecrime island
And it is the original sin of current Conservative politics that they don't think of politics as a thing you do in order to do government; they think of government as a thing you do in order to do politics.
In the US, this is a direct outgrowth of the realization that there's a much larger constituency for conservative rhetoric than for conservative policy.
The agencies with funny names are, well, government agencies that have autonomous authority, like the FCC or FTC or FAA or all kinds of acronyms beginning with F. The Of..ones date from utility privatisation and are the regulators for those industries (Office for...) again much like FCC, FERC, state PUCs or pick your poison. If something is called "English" it's because its domain of responsibility in Scotland or Wales is one of the things that was devolved, and therefore it had to have a name for the rest.
22: OK, that's helpful, but I notice those are literally never back-to-back until my lifetime. (OK, maybe the C-LD coalition makes it not back-to-back, but the Lib Dems didn't get much besides the AV referendum, right?)
Would you think something new is happening if the 2024 Labour government retains power for 10+ years?
Reagan has basically disappeared as a political symbol
I suppose you mean in speeches and so forth, but he's still everywhere in namesakes.
As for Labour they are 20 to 25 percentage points ahead, so there's not much to do other than keep punching the bruises and wait for election day, and the main preoccupation of half the political nation is whether Bernie woulda won, aka being butthurt about 2017 in whatever direction suits your faction.
The weird thing is that 30 has been true forever, the bit about "Tory men and Whig measures" goes back to the 1840s! So it doesn't necessarily explain recent changes.
It would be churlish to compare Thatcher to Hillary Clinton as a safe target for the lingering reflexes of sexism.
If you're wrong, you can be corrected. Churlishness isn't so easy to fix.
32: I notice those are literally never back-to-back until my lifetime.
They are, though. 1895-1905 and 1905-1922.
I think, to be honest, the data set here is so small that it doesn't really bear analysis. There have only been ten long-stay governments since Walpole. Two of them were back to back in the early 20th century, now we've had three more back-to-back. I don't think that's a very meaningful trend.
What's more interesting, I think, is what happened in the late 1800s. The governing party back then was literally flipflopping every few years. From 1835 to 1900 we had seventeen changes of governing party. Often the same chap coming back in again. It went Disraeli-Gladstone-Disraeli-Gladstone-Cecil-Gladstone-Cecil-Gladstone - for more than thirty years, if you were the British Prime Minister, either you were no more than four years away from losing your job to William Gladstone, or you actually were William Gladstone.
isn't Thatcher still salient as a political symbol
Depends on your definition of salient. Within the Conservative party, yes, I would definitely think so - because the average party member is 65 (and mad as a hatter). In the nation in general?
Well, she doesn't come up a lot in political speeches as far as I know, on either side. She stopped being PM a third of a century ago, remember. A lot of the population doesn't even remember her.
It would be churlish to compare Thatcher to Hillary Clinton as a safe target for the lingering reflexes of sexism
If I were a lingering sexist and I wanted a good example of why the weaker sex should never be allowed anywhere near political power, there's at least one more recent prime minister whom I would pick as a better example than Thatcher.
What's really interesting is how although the iconography survived, its content was pretty much replaced by that of her post-prime ministership. Having walked off the stage leaving the Montreal Protocol and the Single European Act behind her as massive achievements, she then spent the rest of her life egging people on who wanted to destroy them, and basically succeeded in having herself remembered as a socially heartless jingo robot (both by people who think this is good and by ones who think it is bad).
I mean, there was absolutely plenty of social heartlessness, if not as much jingoism as later retconned.
Reagan's program of integrity and anti-racism? The Reagan who started his campaign for President talking about states rights at the Neshoba county fair, right where the Freedom Summer murders of civil rights activists happened in 1964? The Reagan who made up stories about welfare queens and "strapping young bucks" abusing food stamps? Reagan was trash, start to finish, and it shocks me how much of that has been forgotten.
28: Never kind, I missed "pretense". In my defense I'm home sick, and not super coherent. Please consider my berating retracted, or at least redirected to an appropriate target.
Hope you feel better soon. Did you get the rona?
I wouldn't be surprised, but I tested negative this morning. OTOH the test I used expired a couple of months ago.
I think I had a cold last week. I wrote it off as allergies, but in retrospect, I think a cold is more likely. There's something going around.
I just had a cold (mostly better today though). No fever and negative for covid though. Probably got it from RWM, though with a kinda long delay where she was basically better by the time I started getting sick.
From an LAT column just yesterday:
Reagan attracted voters by vowing to wipe the Rumford Act off the books. But once in office he really never tried. Give him credit for that much.
No, I absolutely do not think I have to hand it to Reagan for opting not to invest political capital into re-legalizing housing segregation in fucking 1967!
I think even "pretense" is pushing it, at least for 1966 Reagan:
Gov.-Elect Ronald Reagan says he will ask the legislature early next year to repeal the Rumford Open Housing Act because it interferes with the rights of individuals to dispose of their property as they see fit. In a series of campaign speeches, Reagan deplored racial bigotry but said prejudice could not be prevented by law.He said all persons in a free society have a "basic and cherished right" to do as they please with their property. If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so, Reagan said, even though such prejudice is morally wrong.
Reagan denounced the Rumford Act which outlaws racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing as an attempt "to give one segment of our population rights at expense of the basic rights of all our citizens."
The Republican governor-elect's stand on the Rumford Act may have won him the "white backlash" vote and probably cost him much of the Negro vote.
Reagan just shoveled money at his voters. I don't know if my dad was a huge fan or not, but it was a bunch more money after the tax cuts.
There's a lot of people on the left who want to mistake being more vocal about being a little bit racist as somehow worse than being super racist. The US used to be more racist and that includes Republican politicians. Even Trump is noticeably less racist than the average white American from 1990. Interracial marriage didn't hit an approval rating of 50% until the mid-90s.
And if you don't understand that then you won't understand anything about what's happening in politics right now, which is that voters of color are increasingly move towards the Republican party (especially lower-education male voters) and race is becoming less salient politically as education and gender become more important.
That change may be happening, but lower-education men of color are pretty low-propensity voters, even if you exclude Black who aren't really changing I think.
Even Trump is noticeably less racist than the average white American from 1990.
This really doesn't square with my memories of 1990--even accounting for the societal shifts since then--but I'm willing to believe that my memories might be off. Trump comes off as less overtly racist than 1990s-era Jesse Helms, but not by much and that isn't really clearing much of a bar.
Certainly, no white people I knew were opposed to interracial marriage except the ones who were widely considered racist.
But, thinking about people who were the age Trump is now in the 1990s, 54 might be right. The elderly were hella racist pretty much across the board.
52: Certainly I wasn't fooled. But I swear to you, there was a time in US politics when the president of the United States -- even a nutty, evil Republican one -- would have been ashamed of playing footsie with actual-real-no-kidding-swastika-waving Nazis. Even the Klan in those days tended to disavow Nazis.
I propose that there is an identifiable distinction between President Reagan's* Neshoba County Fair or Bitburg and Trump's "good people on both sides" or "stand back and stand by."
Are these distinctions sufficiently small as to be undetectable by reasonable people? Maybe! But I truly believe that Trump brings something new to the table -- and that his fans recognize this and see Trump as a break with the past, including the affable Reagan past.
Reagan was a genial dunce.
*I grant that Governor Reagan was a different critter, but that was also a different time.
Since the kids around here apparently never heard the Kenny Rogers song about Ruby, I suppose the "genial dunce" reference is going to go entirely over their heads.
Trump comes off as less overtly racist than 1990s-era Jesse Helms, but not by much
I don't think this is right (not that it can be objectively measured). Trump is crasser in general, which makes his relatively overt racisms read very loudly. But Helms was out-loud racist all day, every day, on every possible topic. The expression may have averaged more genteel, but the quantity and quality were both much greater. Wasn't it Helms who hummed "Dixie" to make his Black colleague cry?
I guess I'd put it this way: Trump, like most men his age*, has a racist worldview. Helms and his ilk had racial animus. They wanted to use their power to make the lives of Black people worse. Even allowing for the fact that Trump didn't want to do much with power other than enrich himself and make himself look powerful, I don't think that was a top goal of his. He delegated to horrible people with racial animus, and he attracted white supremacists who accurately identified him as someone who was OK with them, but all that would've been even more true of Pres. Helms (shudder).
*I was going to qualify that, but frankly there's enough colorism even among Black men of that age that I don't think it's super-useful to exclude them. It's a cohort raised in a deeply racist society that was fully adult before any substantial changes had come to pass
61: I'm currently reading Bring the War Home (on dq's recommendation from a while back) and one of its arguments is that the White Power movement became disillusioned with the New Right once Reagan got into office and that played into their decision to pivot to a revolutionary stance and active opposition to the government. I haven't gotten to the part yet where she spells out her evidence for this so I don't know strong it really is, but in general the book does support the idea that open racism was becoming less mainstream in that era.
Everyone was afraid their grandfather was going to say something really racist in public.
Even the Klan in those days tended to disavow Nazis.
Publicly, yes, but another of Belew's arguments is that behind the scenes the fourth/fifth Klan (she rejects this traditional distinction too) worked closely with various neo-Nazi movements and people like the Aryan Nations to build a nationwide paramilitary movement that they would later deploy in a way that preserved secrecy and deniability. (It's a really interesting book!)
I think 61 is more or less completely correct.
I think we smart politics followers are so accustomed to the "dog whistle" concept that we simply reject the idea that there's any difference between unintentionally coded language, dog whistles, whistles, and klaxons.
Related, 63 focuses on the comparison between Trump & Helms, but of course one was president and the other was not. Reagan, for all his racism and dog whistling, treated Helms as a bit of an embarrassment. I don't know/care what he felt in his heart, but he knew that the way Helms talked was not how the White House should sound. So even though Trump is IMO distinctly less racist than Helms was, he's more openly racist than Reagan was.
In all this, probably worth nothing that the whole Twitter thing makes it impossible to compare: we simply don't have that kind of real time record of any other President's thoughts*. So we all read every racist thought that floated through DJT's head as he watched Fox, and all we can do is try to deduce what the equivalent would've been from Reagan or Thatcher or Helms or whoever else.
*saw an excellent tweet the other day, that Nixon's tapes is 50% the most racist, sexist, vile shit, and the other half is "didja ever notice the other side of the pillow is cooler when you flip it, why is that?" And illustrated with an actual excerpt about whether or not women these days curse. Anyway, the Nixon tapes aren't really comparable to Trump's tweets, although they give you a hint.
there was a time in US politics when the president of the United States -- even a nutty, evil Republican one -- would have been ashamed of playing footsie with actual-real-no-kidding-swastika-waving Nazis
I agree but would propose this to be more aesthetic - large swathes of the adult population had participated in the war against Nazis, and almost the whole population agreed they were The Enemy and The Worst - than a policy-based revulsion. Even the far-far right hesitated to identify the Nazism, except a very few people.
BTW, going back to whether Reagan is still a touchstone: he was right up until 2016, when Trump utterly eclipsed him. Reaganism was little more than shibboleth, but he was still the guy you had to evoke to be a R in good standing--who else would it be, one of the Bushes?. But by 2016 he was old news in every sense, he was associated with too many actual policies modern Rs dislike, and obviously a huge chunk of voters DGAF. That may be an underrated factor in Trump's takeover of the party: it was kind of a husk in terms of emotional salience, and thus very easy to remake in his very bright image.
I think Bush 2 had a ranch where he did performative yard work to invoke Reagan. Better than cheating at golf.
another of Belew's arguments is that behind the scenes the fourth/fifth Klan (she rejects this traditional distinction too) worked closely with various neo-Nazi movements and people like the Aryan Nations to build a nationwide paramilitary movement that they would later deploy in a way that preserved secrecy and deniability
This makes clear sense to me, having read a lot of Neiwert back in the day. But my other thought is that the Klan was effectively subsumed by those other movements. By 1993, the Klan was yesterday's news, and I can't think of any substantial moments since then that they seemed more relevant than militias, AN, Proud Boys, etc.
I mean, basically, Nazi cosplay grew more appealing than "Birth of a Nation" cosplay, for incredibly obvious reasons.
But my other thought is that the Klan was effectively subsumed by those other movements.
Yes, this is implicit in Belew's argument, and the historical evidence does seem to bear it out. It's interesting to read the early chapters and see how public and vocal the Klan was even in the late seventies. People would wear Klan robes to court and stuff!
(I say "the Klan" but by that point it was actually a bunch of splinter groups that sprung up in response to the successful infiltration and demotivation of the third Klan in the late '60s by the authorities.)
Trump in particular doesn't really care about anything as much as whether you like him personally, say nice things about him personally, and show loyalty to him personally. So he likes Nazis who say nice things about him, he like Black people who say nice things about him, he likes communists who say nice things about him, he likes criminals who say nice things about him, he likes anyone who says nice things about him. It's a bad personality trait, but it's not being driven by being more racist than Helms, it's that he doesn't have many ideological principles and really likes it when people are on his side.
If Blazing Saddles is accurate, they would wear Klan robes to seek government employment.
Helms, by contrast, didn't like Nazis because they're un-American and bad PR for racism, not because they're too racist for him.
There was nobody who owned a major media platform who blamed the Jews for stuff, so Helms was probably oppressed by his standards.
But like look at the actual policies that Helms supported. He literally worked on a segregationist campaign! He was against Black people voting at all! He was against integration!
I remember him. He was my senator, briefly.
Like I think people are mistaking a decrease in *patriotism* among Republicans for an increase in *racism*. It's true that in the past Conservatives hated Nazis for being German, Putin for being Russian, and some of them hated Confederates for being traitors, and nowadays they hate Liberals more than they hate Russians.
ajay your 2 is a great succinct statement of wtaf is up with the tories but i continue to wonder at the links if any between thatcherite privatisation & hostility to govt'l solutions to any collective problem ("there is no such thing as society" etc) & later openness to cameron-osborne austerity hollowing out the remaining state capacity resulting in, e.g., the nightmarish water quality situation in the u.k. seems like cameron-osborne were pushing on an open door...
*I grant that Governor Reagan was a different critter, but that was also a different time.
A time for choosing, if you will.
teo! can't say i'm *glad* your reading what is ultimately a v disturbing book but completely agree it is super interesting. & alarming.
there was an annual outbreak of klan graffiti & agitation generally in the east (sf) bay suburban community where i grew up in the 1970s through to the v early 1980s. was likely mostly not formal klan members (altho there were some) but rather mostly fellow travelers involved in other horrific right wing groups, all cooperating as belew describes. deep deep strong links to all the var evangelical christian churches in town (family of best friend from middle school on was deeply into one if the crazier churches in a competitive bracket of crazy,), none that i ever knew of to the mormons & i got to know a lot of them pretty well (best friend up to early teens was mormon) or catholics (didn't know as much, mostly the hs football player whose parents were from portugal & who inexplicably maintained a v socially odd crush on me all through 4 epically tedious years).
& bc we spent so much time in berkeley, oakland & sf making music, plus the unitarian-peacenik parental situation, at the same time i was getting a pretty up close & personal view of extreme right wing pathologies, i also knew a bunch of people in var stages of (dis)entanglement with the extreme left and/or var non-christian cults.
ahhh the rich eco system of post-1960s sf bay area!
83: You likely know, but Alameda County elected a Klan official to Sheriff in 1926. (DA Earl Warren put him away for corruption.)
Positive Covid test. That's my first one -- I thought I was invincible but I've been vinced.
There was a very good (and disturbing) episode of Ezra Klein's podcast where Nicole Hemmer interviewed Kathleen Belew.* I have not yet read either of their books.
*I don't seem to listen to that podcast unless there are guests interviewing guests.
I guess I'd put it this way: Trump, like most men his age*, has a racist worldview. Helms and his ilk had racial animus. They wanted to use their power to make the lives of Black people worse. Even allowing for the fact that Trump didn't want to do much with power other than enrich himself and make himself look powerful, I don't think that was a top goal of his. He delegated to horrible people with racial animus, and he attracted white supremacists who accurately identified him as someone who was OK with them, but all that would've been even more true of Pres. Helms (shudder).
FWIW, I think Trump has actual racist animus. He is 95% self-obsessed, but he does think that immigrants are sub-human and would like them to cease existing. He wasn't going to be pro-active about it unless someone like Stephen Miller was pulling the strings, but he himself does want harm to come towards immigrants.
But not, fortunately, a HIPAA violation.
Preoccupied and dedicated to the preservation of the motion of hips.
Lousy, but not more than what I'd call the flu (even if it probably wasn't the real flu).
He was no Jesse Helms but Trump in the 80s-90s was much more racist than the average bear white guy of his generation.
Should be 70s-90s, he was sued by the Feds for racial discrimination in housing and don't forget the full page ad he took out calling for the death penalty for the Central Park 5. Does no one remember this?
Calling for the death penalty before they were proven innocent is one thing, but I don't think he's stopped.
I failed the covid test twice, and so did RWM. Now granted the tests had technically expired and maybe they were wrong, but no fever so I'm pretty sure this one wasn't covid.
I agree that 80s-90s Trump was very racist, but the median white man of his generation was shockingly racist, I'd buy that Trump wasn't that far off from average. I'm sure loads of people wrote racist letters to the editor about the CP5.
I didn't take my covid test pass/fail, because if I want to get into graduate covid, I'll need a letter grade.
I didn't take my covid test pass/fail, because if I want to get into graduate covid, I'll need a letter grade.
So far I have only gotten "C"s
HIPPA is the Hippopotamus Inoculation and Pandemic Protection Act. That's the law mandating vaccination for Hippopotamidae species and protecting the privacy of humans who contract Covid from contact with weird semiaquatic mammals.
Similarly, COPPA is the California Optimized Pangolin Privacy Act. That state has expanded protections to include peculiar terrestrial mammals.
100: How many people spent $85,000 (in 2023 dollars, $214,500) to rant about how "roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods"?
104: You can't argue he didn't count those pennies, either.
How many people lent money to Musk to buy Twitter or purchased that much stock in Truth Social?
You will be shocked to learn, Moby, that the Truth Social thing was actually a grift, with the scuzzy sponsors of the SPAC and a bunch of investment banks making money flipping stock to whatever combination of MAGAs and crazed day-traders from /r/wallstreetbets they could find; only their complete inability to follow the rules (also a shock!) has prevented it from paying off.
106: Trump never takes equity risks in ventures anymore, remember? He just negotiates licensing fees.
They're still getting people to put real money into it. It's not like a NYT add is worth anything on the resale market either.
Keep in mind that we're talking about a guy who decorated his clubhouse with fake Time Magazine covers about him. He certainly likes to see his name and image in the papers more than the average guy, and at various points in his life has had some money to throw around.
I stayed in his casino once. He's decorated worse.
||
Proud Boy leader Tarrio gets 22 years in federal prison for conspiring to Jan 6 from a distance! It's beautiful.
|>
I went back and looked at the actual add and weirdly there's no picture of him and it doesn't say his name large. It's just a plain text add. I wonder if there's rules about that? Seems out of character.
His signature in the lower right is fairly large, IMO. If in that year the pages were 13.5" wide (the narrowest it got before 2007), then it was about 2.75" wide and 1.3" tall, not counting the printed signature below it.
He sure has had a crazy life. Wonder what keeps him busy these days.
87: Yeah, I thought about distinguishing between his feelings about Blacks vs immigrants--I think the animus towards the latter is much more clear. Obviously his whole thing with the Central Park 5 is super racist, but I don't think that it was even slightly out of the mainstream of white opinion for its time/place, and I don't think he's spent much of the last 30 years trying to make life worse for Black people generally.
85:I thought I was invincible but I've been vinced.
This. I was so used to testing negative, that when I glanced at my initial (very clearly) positive test, I read it as yet another negative. There really was an element of disbelief. And now that I have continued to linger (yes still*) my belief in my innate healthiness has been shaken.
*My last two tests have in fact looked positive but under examination in very good light there is a very faint sample line. Also having a slight fever today and general shittiness on and off for the last week--but it is hard to separate whether it is illness or just how it feels to be a slug hanging around the house reading a massive Hungarian novel (vols II & III of the Transylvanian Trilogy) and watching US Open/Bojack Horseman for the 2nd time.
Bazz fazz. Hopefully, others will be less vinced than I.
It's been a long time for you, hasn't it? Hope you clear it soon.
Yeah, first positive 8/18. If you talked to me between 8/22 to 8/26 I would have told you it was a quick bout and that I was all better...
And this course, is unfortunately quite similar* to that of one family member who is now basically disabled from long Covid so not being too happy about it. But certainly easier to deal with in retirement than if I were still working.
*Although they did not get Paxlovid so did not have the little respite in the middle.
117: I mean he famously didn't want to rent his buildings to black people and he was mad that there were Black people working at his casinos. But the whole question here is how unusual that level of racism was at the time. And I'm arguing that people forget how common that level of racism was, and also that there used to be a lot of people (even in power!) who were just way way more racist.
I would venture it was (a) pretty common as an underlying opinion, more than today and (b) pretty uncommon to let it all hang out to that extent, less than today.
118: That's a good recommendation for the rest of Banffy's trilogy. I'm still immersed in the weird world of The Dragon Griaule but may soon return to Belle Époque Hungary.
I hope you have a full recovery!
123: When I picked up the book from the library I thought it was just Vol II and was dismayed to see it was over 800 pages, but it was 2 & 3 together.
Speaking of the book I was going to mention in a comment here a bit of an odd mathematical thing that comes up as a minor subplot.
One character becomes immersed in developing a scheme to better math and science by changing to base 12. In the description it seems to me there is either an error (either inadvertent or deliberate by the author) or maybe a mistranslation.
"...in the old value of one hundred there are one hundred and forty-four units, in a thousand three thousand and thirty six units,
I 've tried to come up with something where 3036 makes sense (it is 253 x 12 for instance) but can think of nothing. Surely it was meant to be 1768. Maybe later in the book it will be revealed as an error by the character (who does seem a bit unhinged with regard to it).
Good catch! I do wonder what will become of it.
I wrote about an Estonian novel that was in my blog's backlog (backblog?), so maybe that will clear the mental space for Central European historical fiction and I can pick up the Banffy again before I have completely forgotten who everyone is.
https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/09/07/der-verruckte-des-zaren-by-jaan-kross/
I got the first book in *his* trilogy as Kindle reading for my summer bike tour, but then most of July failed to be summer and I chose not to bike and camp in 50-degree weather with daily downpours. So Kross will spend a little more time in TBR-land.
124: 1728, not 1768, he mathsplained.
3036 is two touchtyping errors, most likely by a qwerty typist who has typed millions of words but types nubmers infrequently. "2" to "x" to "1" requires one finger to travel the maximum possilbe distance, increasing risk of error. Author typed 12, then down to x, then back up but one digit off to type 23, then back to x, then back up and stuttering on the first digit of 12.
12 x 23 x 11 = 3036
12 x 12 x 12 = 1728
Reminds me of the story of the mysterious batch of cuneiform tablets that had weird near-repitions that no one coud decipher. After decades of failed explanations, an archeololgist suspected they were looking at nubmers, not words, and showed it to someone in the math department, who immediately thought he recognized a base 12 multiplication table, but wasn't quite sure becasue a few lines seemd to be something else. After more years of working on the problem, they concluded they had a base 12 multiplication table with seeral errors in it, perhaps the final exam of a mediocre student.
The number 3036 doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry. Weak.
126: oops, yes of course. 1728... embarrassing.
I found a copy online of the book in Hungarian and it is 3036 there, so not a translation error.
127: In searching to see if it had significance, I came across the concept of Angel Numbers.
3036:
your angels are signaling that now is the time to start manifesting your dreams. Believe in yourself and the power of the universe to turn your desires into reality
or
If you see angel number 3036, the message relates to the field of creativity and hobbies and says that Very soon you will have an opportunity to make money on your hobby.
or ... [many more interpretations omitted]
It seems we have an Angel Number Authoritative Interpretation Gap.
Reminds me of the story of the mysterious batch of cuneiform tablets that had weird near-repitions that no one coud decipher. After decades of failed explanations, an archeololgist suspected they were looking at nubmers, not words, and showed it to someone in the math department, who immediately thought he recognized a base 12 multiplication table, but wasn't quite sure becasue a few lines seemd to be something else. After more years of working on the problem, they concluded they had a base 12 multiplication table with seeral errors in it, perhaps the final exam of a mediocre student.
That is great.
And this course, is unfortunately quite similar* to that of one family member who is now basically disabled from long Covid so not being too happy about it.
Yikes. I know someone (in her 40s) who had a mild case of COVID early in the summer which has lingered for months in a really unfortunate way.
129.last. Knock on wood, but just today I am feeling much better. Like about how I felt two Fridays ago, so we'll see...
Mistake in 128 particularly embarrassing given the famous Ramanujan-Hard story.
I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."
I recall being a bit freaked out for some unfathomable reason when I saw a license plate RNA666 many years ago. And looking at the Angel Number sites, they just plow right ahead with blandly interpreting 666 (some acknowledge the more well known aspect).
Are "angel numbers" anything more than something someone came up with to farm Google searches for random numbers and generated a bunch of text on each number with bad AI?
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