This year we celebrate the 90th anniversary of what is probably mankind's greatest ever invention.
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Wessie du Toit
@wessiedutoit
Writer. Interested in design, aesthetics, history. Weekly essays at thepathosofthings.substack.com
Wessie du Toit’s posts
What happened when Germany let people use the local train network for just 9 Euros per month:
The affairs of state should be handled in an anonymous suburban business park, between a Currys and a Pets At Home
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This image really gives you a sense that they understand the struggles of the average UK citizen doesn’t it?
I thought this was just click bait but no, the piece really is inviting us to feel contempt for guys who got forcibly drafted into an army, sent to the other side of the world and had their legs blown off.
The 20th century in a single image. twitter.com/AlvaroSilva190
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It blows my mind that Heinrich Schliemann, basically a classics hobbyist, not only managed to discover Troy when the scholars said it was impossible, but also just gave some of the jewellery to his wife.
The highest grossing film over the weekend wasn't Bond, it was a Chinese war film celebrating a victory against the US in the Korean war.
"People are willing to do almost anything other than read at length." Janan Ganesh on podcasts.
ft.com/content/348991
Has anyone made the argument that new atheism was a forerunner of woke? A lot of the new atheist schtick was arrogantly poking into people’s customary beliefs and identities and maligning them as the root of all evil
Blair 2001: We’ll bring democracy to the Middle East
Blair 2005: Globalisation is as inevitable as the seasons
Blair 2022: Best not criticise Qatar, it owns large parts of London
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Sir Tony Blair has said it is “not sensible” to criticise World Cup hosts Qatar, who invest heavily in the UK telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/2Wow, Terry Eagleton is pretty scathing about the fate of modern universities.
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"Germany’s transport system came under enormous strain... crowded platforms, packed trains with standing room only and passengers with frayed tempers."
This sounds like the British transport system under normal conditions.
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It was proposed for Bristol in 1793. The architect was called William Bridges funnily enough.
The European Commission admits higher cost of living will be permanent, says only solution is for people to use less energy.
thetimes.co.uk/article/will-a
Between 1927-1960, the British government used quotas to limit the number of American films shown in cinemas. Another world is possible!
Yale University collected an interest payment on a 375 year-old bond, originally issued to Dutch dike-builders in 1648.
ft.com/content/5631cc
If you’re British you need some good economic news right now, so I definitely won’t remind you that there’s been no real productivity growth since 2008, which is basically unprecedented since the industrial revolution.
The Whig portrayal of the Middle Ages as an unremitting nightmare is one of the most powerful myths in the modern understanding of history.
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More surprising claims about medieval England from Robert Tombs. Violent crime in the early 1300s (1 murder per 20 villages per year) compares favourably to South Africa or Detroit today; in the late 14thC the English had more leisure time than at any point until the 19thC.
More surprising claims about medieval England from Robert Tombs. Violent crime in the early 1300s (1 murder per 20 villages per year) compares favourably to South Africa or Detroit today; in the late 14thC the English had more leisure time than at any point until the 19thC.
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*Groans* ok then here we go.
If you are interested in artefacts and what they say about the world we live in, boy do I have the newsletter for you.
The era of cheap flights in Europe really does seem to be over. Tougher carbon-pricing rules (ETS) coming in from 2024-26. Then net zero by 2050, costing airlines an estimated €820 billion. "Demand destruction" is inevitable, and part of the plan.
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl
The paradox of Modernism is that it almost always looks better in nature.
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Just realised I never gave the source for this, here it is:
I try to note when I see something I associate with South Africa appearing in the UK. Yesterday it was people begging from cars waiting at traffic lights.
This man has a "hate incident" on his record after disagreeing with a campaigner about abortion, even though "police concluded his correspondence was 'very politely written', was not malicious and did not breach the law."
Parisian fashion in the Thermidor period (1794/5): nudity, animal skins, hipsters, and people dressing as guillotine victims. From Richard Sennett
Macron: stop viewing France through an American lens.
NYT: Woah that’s a little Trumpian don’t you think.
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Hard to be more provincial than the @nytimes suggesting to Emmanuel Macron that “his vocal complaints about the American media [are] a little Trumpian” & complaining of his lack of interviews with the NYT Paris bureau. Truly beyond satire at this point nytimes.com/2020/11/15/bus
Extraordinary: Mao Zedong knew Khrushchev couldn't swim, so he arranged their second meeting at a swimming pool, and lectured the Soviet leader while he struggled to stay afloat.
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Always fun when the third-to-last paragraph undermines the whole premise of the essay
newrepublic.com/article/165849
Next time he writes a book about all the ways the world is improving, Steven Pinker should include a graph showing the declining value of Damien Hirst's artworks
Re this Andrew Sullivan affair. To characterise a longing for order as fascist or even conservative misses the point, because insofar as the left tolerates disorder it is only as a necessary prequel to the next reordering.
I’d love for Foucault to be cancelled just to see how quickly he’s embraced as a genius on the right.
Caught ten minutes of news this morning, a BBC presenter and a shadow minister casually agreeing that censorship is not happening fast enough. Unhappy about a comedian who told a "harmful" joke and, of course, Joe Rogan.
Wanted: a very wealthy collector who can buy the entire Western cannon of paintings and conserve them until a more deserving culture is found
theguardian.com/artanddesign/2
Amazing piece of design. Armoured Korean "turtle ships," thirteen of which held off a Japanese fleet of over 200 in the 1590s, under admiral Yi Sun-sin.
My guess is that sail ships, especially the enormous military ones with crews 1000 strong, represent the most complex set of skills, practices and technologies lost to modernity
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A ship taking in stores, 1818. Those ships could be huge! Watercolor by Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose day has been today.
I can't get my head around the idea that maybe one in twelve people who have ever lived are alive now.
Finally worked out why everyone’s laughing at that Rod Dreher intro
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The CCP's media outlets have been promoting the film, and a review website that criticised it, Deep Focus, has been censored.
Imagine being 14 years old and having to navigate your first sexual encounter in front of the Pope and the king of France.
This is insane. Modern economic growth (the graph where the line is flat for millennia then shoots up like a hockey stick in 1780-1860) had very little to do with expropriation. People have been looting each other's resources throughout history without *any* real growth
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Replying to @GeorgeMonbiot
Britain's wealth was largely - perhaps almost entirely - based on theft, backed by force and duplicity, from other nations. Those who controlled these flows of wealth, and themselves became immensely rich, translated their economic power into political power.
"United Kingdom"
- boring, factual
- lacks emotive content
- not actually united or a kingdom
"Perfidious Albion"
- weird, mythical
- surprising steampunk vibes
- sounds like you might carry a sword
Funny how companies used to be named after families, people and places and are now named with weird made-up words. Why did this happen?
The Royal Navy, for centuries Britain’s greatest geopolitical asset, was established in the 1540s with wealth looted from the dissolution of the monasteries, England’s most appalling episode of cultural vandalism.
Finally, I can give my opinion on Ayn Rand
An iconic work of deconstructivist architecture, and possibly the ugliest loft conversion in history.
One of my favourite British conventions is the idea that when you're hungover you somehow deserve a day of slobbing around doing nothing, as though getting drunk was noble and strenuous work
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Only a mandarin would say this so frankly, which is one of the benefits of having a mandarin class I guess.
English businessman Thomas Bentley records a discussion with Rousseau about his Unitarian faith:
Rousseau: “Why do you confine God within the walls of a house? Would it not be better to worship him under the canopy of heaven?”
Bentley: “Not in England, it rains too often.”
London: we'd really like some affordable housing, clean air, pedestrianised zones and community spaces.
City planners: How about another glass monstrosity which looks like something out of a sci-fi movie for teenagers?
Sometimes think we lose sight of the crazy position Europe has got itself into. Despite being one of the world’s richest regions it is militarily weak and expects the US to defend it, even as it remains dependant on China for trade and Russia for energy. Madness.
How much of Lenin’s politics can be explained by living with his mother in law for two decades
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"I don't feel like I'm living life to the full."
"Have you considered drinking by yourself in the afternoon?"
Over the last year or so I've noticed unsettling echoes of South Africa in British discourse. Both these issues – renaming public things for political reasons and women not being able to go out after dark – have been very prominent in South Africa throughout my life.
Me at Lidl, sobbing: you can’t just make things this cheap without sacrificing quality
Lidl: Here is the ham of pure bred Iberian pigs, who have roamed freely in oak forests devouring acorns, for 79p
James Lindsay apparently discovering Hegel is the worst possible start to 2021
If you think only 3k died in China, I have some tractor production numbers to show you.
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Most coronavirus deaths.
Italy: 6077
China: 3270
Spain: 2206
Iran: 1812
France: 860
US: 577
UK: 335
Netherlands: 214
Germany: 123
Switzerland: 117
South Korea: 111
Belgium: 88
Indonesia: 49
Japan: 42
Philippines: 33
Turkey: 30
Sweden: 25
Brazil: 25
Canada: 24
Denmark: 24
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Hang on, the claim about leisure time is actually even more surprising. “People took more leisure than at any time until the 1960s”(!)
I think the reason I'll never see masks as some benign or harmless thing is that they create a public culture in which people are reduced to vectors of disease.
I find it strange that conservatives can swoon at Scrutonian ideals of cherishing home but also disparage people who don't want to surrender their corner of England to high-speed railways and housing developments.
I’ve been baffled over the past year by the lack of discussion in the uk about France’s rightward drift. You’d think some people would be freaking out. Then again paying attention to Europe isn’t really our forte.
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Zemmourmania obscures the way all the energy in the French election is on the hard right, including LR’s Ciotti. The left is non-existent, the Macronian centre has positioned itself further right than any Tory.
Didn't notice this book being published last year. "These are the facts; [women] are simply stronger than men at every stage of life."
You won't believe my bold new vision to lead the country!
Is it Thatcherism?
Well, uhh, how did you guess?!
I think this captures the nature of state authority in the west more generally. Great at enforcing trivial regulations, helpless in the face of chaos and disorder.
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I was once denied entrance to the Library of Congress because my library card was expired.
Why did no one think of this solution earlier
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Vladimir Putin is an unashamed imperialist and chauvinist and progressives should condemn him to the dustbin of history.
Love this country. How many Brits were about to choose “terrible” or “bad” and then thought hmm actually let’s not get carried away now
Baudrillard’s point about facts being rendered irrelevant by interpretive models seems amazingly prophetic now
Traditional retail is going extinct: amazingly, 83% of the UK's department stores closed down between 2016-2021.
Some of the phrases that entered the English language from William Tyndale's pioneering 16th century translation of the bible.
It feels like we’re slipping into a world where “safety” is the highest public good. Something deeply depressing about this.
“Individualism, the self unconstrained by society, leads to the coarser servitude of constraint by nature. Every road from Rousseau leads to Sade.” Camille Paglia
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The faux naivety of the whole "school me in all the ways I'm contemptible" thing is truly cringeworthy
I looked into the work of Judith Katz, the consultant behind the notorious “aspects of white culture” chart, and discovered that the current anti-racism discourse has important roots in the therapeutic trends of the 1970s. For :
Fascinating and absurd recollections by Barbara Ehrenreich, explaining how her concept of the “professional managerial class” came from her own attempts to bring together working and middle class leftists
dissentmagazine.org/online_article
This is so frustrating. If we want to increase trust, it helps to know how/why diversity decreases it. That requires willingness to consider the data which says that diversity decreases trust (inc willingness to pay tax), not vilifying anyone who mentions it
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This.
"Diversity reduces trust" is a politically correct way of saying "I don't like people of other races."
It's saying "My distrust of people of other races, and that of my political allies, is perfectly natural." twitter.com/jbouie/status/
This anecdote captures so many of China's problems.
thetimes.co.uk/article/presid
"An interest in war is somehow conflated with approval for it." Margaret MacMillan on modern academe's bizarre revulsion against studying military history.
This has always struck me as the strangest prejudice, as though oncologists must like cancer.
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl
I like this quote because it hints at something many philosophers don't like to admit: ideas they present as novel and revolutionary may have struck earlier people as too obvious to be worth discussing
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Terry Eagleton: “Though evidence is hard to come by, it is difficult to read Shakespeare without the feeling that he was almost certainly familiar with the writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Derrida”.
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Because we would need to test for antibodies, rather than the virus itself, to discover past infection?
You’re not truly famous unless your arrival somewhere is a macroeconomic event.
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"Beyoncé is responsible for the extra upside surprise this month. It’s quite astonishing for a single event." ft.com/content/abc431
Decline of humanities across many "advanced" societies (and no, it's not just about enrolment numbers) is strong evidence that we are living in something of a dark age.
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The decline in liberal arts degrees bodes well for society on almost every dimension.
College students now know that majoring in Book Club won’t get you a great job. This is progress.
This series of Ansel Adams photographs is wonderful
theguardian.com/artanddesign/g
We have become enraged at our own historicity – the fact that we are historical beings existing at a particular moment in time. This is ultimately because we now long to be free to invent everything about ourselves.
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Would it be easier if we just cancelled history? It seems to be causing an awful lot of trouble.
For this week's newsletter I wrote about the private members' club Soho House, the doomed dream of the creative industries, and how creativity was absorbed into lifestyle consumerism.
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According to the article the guy is now worried he won't be able to volunteer at his local school. This is really sinister stuff.
What I don't understand about this is, how can not having children avert the apocalypse when surely, by most standards, not having children *is* the apocalypse
Amazing to think the world's 2nd, 3rd, and 4th largest economies – China, Japan, Germany – were all utterly devastated in 1945
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We’re so far beyond logical consistency these days I don’t know what it implies.
New piece on substack: trying to appreciate how insanely transformative the railway was, and how it laid the foundations for our world today.
Johnson describes Putin as “irrational.” Others are calling him insane, deranged, delusional, etc. Why this urge to portray dictators as crazy people? Is it because we need to see our interests as the only rational, sane ones?
"When Queen Marie Antoinette was asked by Louis XI to curb her personal expenditure on clothing and jewellery as public criticism of royal indulgence swelled... the queen replied that to do so would put 200 shops out of business."
Countries that depend on Russian and Ukrainian wheat:
thetimes.co.uk/article/food-c
I keep encountering people who think the point of social distancing is so that *they* don't catch the virus, and finding it irrational because they're not in a risky demographic. It seems the idea of being a potential link in a chain is difficult to grasp.