Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Proto-Victorianism starts with John Wesley’s Methodist revival. Methodists were encouraged to stop drinking and whoring, and lead productive, Ned Flanders-ish lives. Young Methodists were often thoroughly embarrassed by their foul-mouthed, hard-drinking grandparents of the Ben Franklin generation.

As with any fashion, cutting-edge types pushed it farther, generation after generation, to the point where the apocryphal table legs were being called limbs and (?)Georgian furniture-legs being covered lest someone think of naked flesh.

* Why would Brits have any less contempt for our First Amendment than they do for our Second? After all, we got the latter from them, we made up the former on the spot.

* For the British, ‘Us’ meant the rulers of a God-given empire, ‘Them’ were the benighted subjects, suffering from loose morals, loose speech, and the demon drink. ‘Us’ launched missionaries to open soup kitchens and clinics, and to preach the best manners. Prohibition was the bridge too far.

* Most striking is how Jewish-Americans have gone from liberty to censorship.

And they have the most power in government, media, and academia.

And their influence went to UK too.

* Trollope’s novels are very G rated. Of course he was a Victorian writer, writing about middle and upper class Victorians. But he was far from idealizing these Victorians. His novels were generally about greedy and dishonest, petty and materialistic status-striving middle/upper class Victorians and their constant scheming for wealth and status.

* Simon from London: First they took our guns (starting with the fear of Anarchist terrorists post-WW1 – Churchill was partly to blame as I recall), then they took our voices. We never had US style free speech – always had draconian Libel laws – but until the 1990s there was a presumption of liberty. With New Labour enthroning Political Correctness as the State religion in 1997, this ceased and people stopped saying “It’s a free country, isn’t it?” – it plainly no longer is.

* There has been a very long tradition of ‘bawdiness’ and ‘earthiness’ in English literature that dates from at least the time of Chaucer, and is to be found in Shakespeare, various 17th century and 18th century authors, the American, Ben Franklin, was no exception, and perhaps has its continuation with such luminaries as Benny Hill, Bernard Manning, Viz Comic etc.
For one thing, Victorian times were an age of great hypocrisy in which ‘respectable’ gentlemen frequented prostitutes, secretly, on a massive scale. Just read the eye-watering statistics about the proportion of young women in London who were engaged in prostitution. Mrs Beeton, of cook book fame, was infected with syphilis by Mr Beeton, of which she died. That Victorian rogue ‘Walter’ recounts his innumerable escapades in his bragging volume ‘My Secret Life’. In the 18th century, James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson, is similarly forthright.
I think that a lot of Victorian prudery was related to religion, just as 1950s Italian or Irish prudery was related to catholicism. In fact, although, Georgian bawdiness is celebrated, that also was ‘officially’ a prudish society, as writings by magistrates, legislators etc of that time attest.
I think it was more of a case of ‘dual morality’, public and private.

The prints of the famed artist Hogarth are very much morality tales.

* How does the fact that people had sex in private refute the claim that they were reticent about sex in print?

* Victorianism in Britain was a reaction against the libertine Regency & Georgian period that preceded it. Lots of porn, whores, and gin. The next generations coming in (slowly) decided they didn’t want to be like that. Then future generations changed their minds.

History is just a sine wave. Up and down, ebb and flow. Reaction and counter-reaction. The pc censorship of tomorrow will be replaced by something more free-thinking in the future. But we may not be around to see it.

* In the late 17th century virtue had been made to appear ridiculous (see Congreve) but near the start of the 18th, Addison in The Spectator wrote, “I have repainted the batteries of ridicule.” Macaulay wrote, “So effectually did [Addison] retort on vice the mockery which had recently been directed against virtue, that, since his time, the open violation of decency has always been considered, amongst us, the sure mark of a fool.”

Richard Steele wrote of the following encounter with a young prostitute that over the course of a century affected men’s hearts.

“…This Impediment being in my Way… I could observe as exact Features as I had ever seen, the most agreeable Shape, the finest Neck and Bosom, in a Word, the whole Person of a Woman exquisitely Beautiful. She affected to allure me with a forced Wantonness in her Look and Air; but I saw it checked with Hunger and Cold: Her Eyes were wan and eager, her Dress thin and tawdry, her Mein genteel and childish. This strange Figure gave me much Anguish of Heart, and to avoid being seen with her I went away, but could not forbear giving her a Crown. The poor thing sighed, curtisied, and with a Blessing, expressed with the utmost Vehemence, turned from me.”

Johnson objected to any depiction of evil that made it more appealing than good.

These works or read and reread widely for a hundred and fifty years.

Sir Walter Scott’s novels sold extremely well for the time and made him a lot of money. The Bronte Sisters were steeped in his novels. He’s adorably proper. Incidentally, Scott wrote that a woman has as much right to say what passes in her house as her husband has. Take that, feminists.

* What you can and cannot say is much the same in both America and Britain. You won’t be prosecuted in the US for thought crime, but you might as well be considering the damage it may do you. You could lose your livelihood and never find satisfactory employment again. Many people would find that worse than prosecution. How much help was the First Amendment to James Watson?

The mistake is to think conduct is dictated by laws or courts. It isn’t. The media and entertainment industry have more power than judges and legislators.

* When I suggested to my undergraduate son that the UK might have been better off with no black immigration, his response was “Dad – you can’t say that !“.

* “You can’t say that” – funnily enough, that’s the title of Ken Livingstone’s memoirs. It’s meant to be ironic, supposedly indicating his penchant for uttering truths people didn’t want to hear. He was in fact one of the people most responsible for imposing PC on Britain.

* I (quickly) read the article, and was amused to find this little bon mot.

“It will not help you if someone is offended by some theory you spin after two or three glasses of wine at a dinner party, or if students decide to picket your lectures because they object to what you say about dinosaurs.”

Absurdly, Kinsley implies that the current threat to free expression on campus is from picketing fundamentalists who disagree with biology professors on the origin of the species.

Is he a complete idiot? Or is he willfully censoring his own thoughts to avoid the pc police-the very subject of the article in which the sentence occurs?

* I am guessing Victorianism was rooted in the growth of the British empire. If you are going to be the administrators of most of the globe, your upper middle-class needs to be sober and hard-working. Attitudes filtered down from there and to some extent up to the aristocracy, encouraged by Victoria and her husband Albert. Victorianism faded as the empire did.

This emphasis on the First Amendment is overrated. Government censorship here in the UK is non-existent. Attempts at honest discourse in America on immigration and race make you a target for social tarring and feathering. It is what you can freely discuss in open society without angry mobs barracking you that really counts. All the nonsense on safe spaces and white privilege which is all the rage in American colleges have made little impact here despite the efforts of local third rate academics.

* In Germany, you can be arrested for quite a time. This has been the case with Horst Mahler (11 years), Silvia Stolz (3 1/2 years), Ernst Zuendel (5 years), Guenter Deckert (5 years) as well as Axel Moeller (3 1/2 years).
Normally, sentences begin with fines, then come suspended sentences and jail is only the last resort.
Prominent figures are more apt to get longer jail time.
Even if Holocaust denial or antisemitism are the most prominent offenses, sentences rely mostly on a mixture of different offenses, e.g. disparaging of the state (don’t know how this would be called in Anglo-American law). Editors or Internet administrators are often sentenced because of things other people said and they have transmitted.

* “Most striking is how Jewish-Americans have gone from liberty to censorship.”

not very striking – in group out group strategy. 50+ years ago, when they were dismantling western christian culture and values, free speech was quite useful, now, with them in power it’s not so useful.

I think UK MSM is more likely to openly criticize and discuss immigration and israel.

As for “victorian’ values- probably a reaction to the decadance of the last georges – not to mention the gin craze and other societal corruption – as Peter Hitchens points out – Methodism saved the UK underclasses last time, next time, it might be Islam that even white brits turn to for structure, community, and discipline. Certainly doesn’t look like the CofE or any Christian group is willing to do that.

Steve:
Another ‘interesting’ aspect of the transition from decadence to Victorian values (which people here might belittle but – really are we a better society??) is racial – in India – prior to Victorian values – let’s just say a decade or so before the mutiny – british officers were intermarrying at a fairly high rate- afterwards, english women in particular put a stop to it.
I wish there were english women like that now.

* There is a scene in the movie “Amazing Grace” where William Wilberforce is chopping wood to vent some anger. He yells while chopping about ending slavery and “reformation of manners”. It was the Evangelical/Low Church movement and rising Middle Class that Wilberforce was part of demanding better behavior especially by the elites. Victorianism was a bottom up movement. Remember after Farmer George III, his son the Regent and George IV was a glutton, probably fathered several bastard kids, and tried to divorce his wife, and William IV had 10 bastard kids. In a sense it was your typical younger generation revolting against what they saw as the excesses of the parents in this case.

* The decorated faces and dials of English grandfather clocks of the 1840′s can easily be dated by the preponderance of religious themes. Apparently there was a huge religious revival at that time, that had a lot to do with the sexual puritanism of the Victorian age, an age in which every other woman in London was a prostitute and venereal diseases like syphilis were rife.

The story goes that Welsh miners of the valleys were tribal savages until they were civilized by Methodism, and gave up drinking beer in favor of choir practice.

* Victorian values started at the top of society, with the monarchy, specifically Queen Victoria, and trickled down from there. Victoria’s ascension to the throne in 1837 marked a sharp contrast from her philandering, libertine predecessors, the various King Georges, (I-IV, with George IV being the most scandalously indiscreet with his love affairs, which were covered in the British newspapers of the day). The new moral code that centered around the court of Victoria spread downwards, to the aristocrats, gentry, and rising middle-class, who then started “moral improvement campaigns” aimed at the lower orders.

* That Victorian rogue ‘Walter’ recounts his innumerable escapades in his bragging volume ‘My Secret Life’.

* By the standards of today, every sexual encounter ‘Walter’ ever had was a rape, except for the ones that he paid for.

* I think freedom of speech has benefitted a lot from the media (especially newspapers) being powerful. for both practical and cultural reasons, U.S. newspapers tend to support free speech, so for many years, there was a bipartisan set of powers in the U.S. who were very strongly in favor of very broad free speech rights.

The people who supported pornography or communism or anarchism or naziism or blasphemy were always a very small fraction of the support for free speech–mostly it was people who didn’t want the state deciding who’d be allowed to say what.

*

This lecture is the best history of the right to bear arms in Britain, the philosophies behind that right, and the gradual loss of that right that I’ve encountered. Lots of citations.

* I think part of the problem in discussing “Victorianism” this way is that the discussion of taboos is too broad.

#1 – One element is clearly sexual morality. That ebbs and flows for various reasons and to my mind it clearly has something to do with how women are treated. I can recall a number of women relatives who remembered the tail end of the “Victorian Era” (which I think was dismantled more by WW1 than anything else.) For the poster who said that this sort of thing waxes and wanes, I agree. You go from periods where sexuality is oppressive and hypocritical, to periods where it is libertine and decadent, and then back again. Of course either position has its excesses and that fuels the opposite.

#2 – Another element has to do with shibboleths of equality, and in particular, racial equality. But this is no longer equality in the MLK “I have a dream” sense. That totem, which was earlier expressed in terms of NT Christianity (see Harriett Beecher Stowe) is a basic belief of modern secularism, even though it is completely deracinated from its religious roots. But it is enforced with the same amount of absolutism.

Yet the argument is not really about equality in terms of the a priori absolute concept (although you can still get in trouble for that.) It is really about the pesky inequality of results, and no one can really do anything about that. If everyone is equal fundamentally, but there is clear inequality in results, and, moreover, on racial and gender grounds, then it must follow that there’s something wrong that needs to be fixed. At least we are no longer talking about overturning the “means of production”, instead, it’s all about the phlogiston of sexism and racism.

#3 – Still another aspect has to do with political values. Any nationalism in Europe is squashed, because of the first half of the 20th Century. Really, that has more to do with German speech limits than anything else. But, yes, it also has to do with what political posture we are supposed to be supporting with regard to Israel, and the Million Muslim March.

I am a free speech absolutist, and if you don’t like a speech,rebut it, or ignore it. But the fact is the social order at any time is only tolerant of free speech if that free speech is marginal and doesn’t threaten the preferred agendas of the elites. I doubt if it has ever been otherwise.

* Notice the way the German – and hence EU – political class is currently bullying and threatening Poland over various changes the Polish government has made to state broadcasters etc – which are, in fact, totally within the remit of a sovereign, independent democratically elected government – whilst the German government is now totally shamelessly censoring the internet speech freedom of German citizens.

* The 18th century was a response to the 17th century, which was puritanical in the most extreme sense, almost comically so at times.

Come the 19th, it was becoming clear that giving that much licence was simply allowing men to prey on women and children (and often other men), and there seems to have been a concentrated effort, starting with the public schools, to clean things up.

* There wasn’t a single pendulum swing in the 20th century, but a couple. During the Roaring 20′s and continuing until the early 30s, there were some somewhat risque films made in Hollywood containing nudity, etc. (though these were mild by modern standards) – this prompted the “Hays Code” which basically made all Hollywood studio films G rated from the mid-30s until the early ’60s. Actually the Hays Code also forbade some strange things having nothing to do with sex – for example, “picturizing in an unfavorable light another country’s religion, history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry”. For a while, this prevented the making of any films critical of the Nazis. Starting in the ’60s the pendulum swung the other way.

Some of the other commenters made apt observations – all of American (indeed world) history consists of pendulum swings between more and less (public) prudery. In terms of what went on behind closed doors, that is more constant (once humanity stops having sex there will be no more humanity, therefore sex has existed everywhere and at all times) but in some eras it was more possible to discuss or display sexuality or nudity openly than in others.

Right around the time of the Revolution, France was an American ally and a number of the Founding Fathers lived in France on diplomatic missions, so there was a certain fashion for French things. In France at that time (in a tradition that continues until today – see Straus-Kahn) certain members of the upper classes considered themselves to be “libertines” – they did not consider themselves to be bound by the teachings of the Church or bourgeois morality or the prospect of punishment in the afterlife, so that they lived by sort of a hippie motto – “if it feels good, do it”. This rubbed off on certain Americans such as Aaron Burr.

* Good catch that shows what a liar Kinsley is. Has there ever been even one student demonstration against the teaching of evolution? Compare that to the hundreds of incidents where professors are picketed or forced to resign, lectures are disrupted, speakers are disinvited, etc. because they violate some leftist trope (for example suggesting that you have a free speech right to wear Halloween costumes that might micro-offend someone else). But Kinsley picks for his example a supposed Christian hot button. Either he is being deeply insincere or else is engaging in projection (a common leftist fault).

* I agree that a legally entrenched freedom of speech, valuable though it is, is insufficient when public opinion is hostile to open discussion. Conversely, official censorship without public support can become a joke or a rallying point. George Bernard Shaw had great fun at the expense of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, whose approval was required before a play could be staged. In our own day, Jean Raspail has brought out a reprint of Le Camp des saints with a new index of passages that violate the various antidefamation laws that have been enacted since 1973. The French laws are not retroactive.

* Some might say that, if the right of free speech needs to be set down in writing, it’s already too late. Once most people don’t believe in free speech, and we need to rely on a judicial elite to protect it from popular attacks, it’s only a matter of time until that right is abolished completely.

* The Weimar Constitution (1919-33) had oodles of written rights-more than the American.

And then it didn’t.

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

I would have thought Kinsley would have remembered that.

* Weimar also had hate speech laws:

As Alan Borovoy, Canada’s leading civil libertarian, put it: “Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law. Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech. And, in the opinion of the leading Jewish organization of that era, no more than 10 per cent of the cases were mishandled by the authorities. As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.” Inevitably, the Nazi party exploited the restrictions on “free speech” in order to boost its appeal. In 1925, the state of Bavaria issued an order banning Adolf Hitler from making any public speeches. The Nazis responded by distributing a drawing of their leader with his mouth gagged and the caption, “Of 2,000 million people in the world, one alone is forbidden to speak in Germany.”

* I’ve learned some self-control from Steve Sailer. He never responds to criticism with contempt or sarcasm. He just calmly keeps making his points and tries to be intriguing. I guess this shows up in the handful of comments I’ve seen him make on MR or the NYT.

* Written constitutions full of wonderful sounding rights are a dime a dozen. The Soviet Constitution and the Chinese Constitution are full of them, not to mention just about every other chicken sh-t dictatorship. Written constitutions are so great that many of these countries adopt new ones every few years – China is on its 12th constitution since 1911, including four (plus revisions) under the Communists. And the unwritten British constitution is worth 100x more than any of them. It is much better to have rule of law without a constitution than to have a constitution without rule of law.

* Government censorship in the UK is enforced by the police and by judges who openly disdain the Common Law. Judges like Shamim Qureshi who were appointed specifically to mock, demoralize, and terrorize ordinary Englishmen and Englishwomen:

“[I]n March 2015 [Bristol Crown Court Judge Shamim Qureshi] ordered hardline Christian preacher Mike Overd to pay a £200 fine and pay £250 compensation* after the former paratrooper quoted offensive passages from the Bible concerning homosexuality in public.”

In England and Scotland for more than a decade, any Christian who reads the Bible aloud in Hyde Park or any public place has been liable to be taken in custody for the crime of “hardline preaching.” Now, to ensure conviction, he may be tried by a Sharia Tribunal judge who moonlights as a Crown Court Judge and rules without regard for the Common Law or the British Constitution.

*Plus £1200 “costs,” according to other stories about the incident. After a public outcry Overd’s appeal from Muslim Judge Qureshi’s abusive ruling was allowed by English Judge David Ticehurst in December 2015, but not for legal error– only on the grounds that the CPS had not adduced sufficient evidence to support the conviction. In other words, Ticehurst ruled that Qureshi convicted Overd without evidence.

* The Judge Qureshi who convicted Overd also works as a Sharia judge for the most hate-filled Muslim Sharia court (“arbitration tribunal”) in England, by special permission of the government. The government is grinding the faces of Englishmen into the dirt by appointing Sharia judges to mock them from benches which once supported the backsides of men like Lord Coke, and reinforcing the Muslim subjection of women by appointing fiendish Sharia-law judges to Crown judgeships so the women will have nowhere to turn for justice.

* Ironically by most accounts, it was George III who was the most faithful to his wife, with hardly a breath of scandal in that area, and had a stable fairly happy marriage. Why his children turned out as badly as they did is astounding. Of course, he was also the one who went mad towards the end of his life, but you can’t have everything.

But that is correct regarding Geo.’s I, II, and IV; they more or less tried to bugger everything that moved or breathed in feminine clothing, some more successful than others.

* I just happen to be reading Little Women right now, published in 1868. I’m enjoying it far more than I thought I would, but it’s probably too girly for most of the guys here. The characters are real people and they draw me in to their lives and hearts. The setting sounds fairly close to how my grandmother (b. 1895) lived when she was a girl, with servants for the middle class and plenty of sewing all the time.

(Aside from my main point. How has the decline of sewing skills affected modern women? Have we become collectively less detailed and more impatient? Has the disappearance of household servants made up for it?)

Okay, main point. Little Women is basically taking a works salvation point of view for the characters’ lives. Being good means doing good, and doing good requires strenuous effort, force of will, and constant mortification. Oh, there’s mention of God’s grace, but the emphasis is all on our possible (or impossible) goodness. If they do anything bad, there’s plenty of guilt and deliberate good deed-doing to make up for it. Isn’t this the essence of Victorianism and the beginnings of modern liberalism? Believing that we can make people be good enough for their own salvation?

* Women outmarrying is far worse for a tribe than men outmarrying. Do you think Obama would be so anti-white if he had had a healthy masculine white father figure guiding him? His grandpa doesn’t really count.

* So who would star in the Hollywood version of Twelve Years a Whore?

As for the origins of Victorianism, I don’t think it should be considered separately from the grand sweep of history. There was a gradual increase in wholesomeness and a gradual improvement in manners from at least the Dark Ages until 1914. There’s been a gradual decline in these things since then. The Victorian era was more wholesome than the 18th century, but I think that the 18th century was more wholesome than the 17th, which was more wholesome than the 16th, which was more wholesome than the 15th, etc. Chaucer, Francois Villon and Rabelais were all very raunchy.

Why do people go to jail for thought crime in Europe, but not in America? The answer has nothing to do with the US Constitution or with any other kind of law. People can be so naive sometimes. Words on paper are nothing compared with political necessity. The US Constitution says that declaring war is the Congress’s prerogative. No one in power cares.

The population of the average European country is still much more homogenous than the US population. A more homogenous people are more likely to unite against their rulers. So the rulers give them a shorter leash. As European countries become less homogenous through immigration, their elites will feel more secure, so eventually they may allow US-style freedom of speech. Not until then though. It’s simple divide and conquer.

* “This belief that people in Europe getting arrested for writing stuff is mostly superstition – ”

That would be news to this woman:

British woman arrested for FaceBook post

Or this guy:

Paul Weston arrested for quoting Winston Churchill

Or any number of other people, as you can readily find from a simple Google search.

People in Europe getting arrested for writing stuff is far from a superstition – it is an increasingly common occurrence.

* Interesting that John Osborne’s name comes up in thread concerning censorship and the British literary tradition.

In 1968, the then British Labour government of Harold Wilson, decided at a stroke, to abolish all theatrical censorship – a tradition that stretched back hundreds of years and involved an arcane outfit called ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Office’, in order to show its ‘good solid progressive ie left wing credentials’. Note how these days parties of the left wish to re-introduce censorship, particularly of pornography, since these days the ‘feminist’ wing of leftist parties has the upper hand, and all appeals to ‘progressive artistic freedom’ have largely vanished.

Anyhow, one Kenneth Tynan, dramatist and critic, and incidentally the man who deliberately distinguished himself by slipping in the word ‘fuck’ live on British television (pre Sex Pistols), decided to capitalize on the abolition of theatrical censorship by mischievously producing, rather bizzarely to modern sensibilities, the first total ‘nude revue’, Oh! Calcutta! ie a theatrical production of some rather lame sketches, songs, jokes etc with the USP that the actors were totally naked. As I recall luminaries of the day such as John Lennon contributed sketches.
To modern tastes, a reading of the show seems rather dated and trite.

Nevertheless, the show, in the West End stage was a massive mega hit – mainly due to its appeal to the rain coater crowd rather than its intrinsic merits.
Naturally, the success of Oh! Calcutta! prompted imitator after imitator ‘nude reviews’ each one being even less distinguished and staler than the last one, the whole ‘shocking’ concept had just degenerated into rather seedy dirty-old-man pleasing formulaic absurdity.
John Osborne was commissioned by a British paper to write, in all seriousness, a critical review of the latest flaccid offering. His review, the entirety of it, was typically pithy, cruelly honest and short, sharp and straight to the point.

‘Oh no!’, he wrote, ‘not another row of limp dicks!’

* John Osborne was one of the “Angry Young Men” of the 1950′s to early 1960′s British theater and film. And Tony Richardson, the husband of Vanessa Redgrave and father of Natasha Richardson, directed Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” when it opened in the theater and the film later. Another “angry young man” was Alan Sillitoe who wrote both the novel and short story and screenplays for “Saturday Night Sunday Morning” (starring Albert Finney) and “Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (starring Tom Courtenay and directed by Tony Richardson). I haven’t seen “Loneliness” since the 1960′s, but I remember that movie made a very big impact on me at the time.

* “Movies like breakfast at tiffany’s will probably be edited for ‘sensitivity’ in the near future…”

My God! The original movie was already a “bowdlerized” version of the book. I saw the movie first when I was relatively young and later the book when I was much older. I was astounded by how “dark” the book was compared to the light-hearted movie. If they edit the movie any more, you’ll wind up with cotton candy. I am astounded by how juvenile our tastes have become.

* I heard Nixon watched Deep Throat three times. He wanted to get it down Pat.

* I like the story about Prince Edward and his mistress from 1877 to June 1880, the actress Lillie Langtree. The Prince once complained to her, “I’ve spent enough on you to build a battleship.”

She replied, “And you’ve spent enough in me to float one.”

* “Richard Spencer describes being ‘arrested’ in Hungary and it amounted to little more than sitting in a processing room for a little while.”

From news reports:
Police forced the hotel to cancel the reservations for guests, put pressure on the governments of France and Russia to ban speakers from arriving in the country, and ordered the venue to break their contract with the National Policy Institute. . .

Even more incredibly, one of the American organizers of the conference was actually arrested at the airport, detained overnight (without communication of the charges), and then deported. . .

Around 60 police officers in a dozen police vehicles converged on the Clock House Cafe in Buda late on Friday evening and took the names and passport numbers of everyone in attendance. Only Spencer and another unnamed American associate were arrested and taken away. . .

So, no big deal? Picked up by armed police, taken to the station and held for a few hours–who wouldn’t laugh that off? Hardly enough to discourage you from speaking your mind, right?

* He actually spend the entire weekend in a detention centre together with the unnamed American attendee. It was not explained to them what the offense was, though they were ordered to sign a magyar document apparently containing a detailed explanation of their offense against the Hungarian state. They were carded of to the airport in handcuffs on monday, then released.

* One of the many reasons that Napoleon has such a complicated legacy—as opposed to say another game changer named Hitler—-is that his Napoleonic Code was so dang beloved by everyone he conquered. He basically conquered a people, swept all their confusing, contradictory laws away, set up a very clear legal code to replace it, and walked away. And the people found that a very clear, very orderly legal code, where every law was spelled out, and there was no harkening to tradition or common law or previous interpretations–well, this was much beloved. Today most European nation-states have some form of the Napoleonic Code in force.

* A Belgian court sentenced controversial French comedian Dieudonné Wednesday to two months in jail for incitement to hatred over alleged racist and anti-Semitic comments he made during a show in Belgium.

* Lenny Bruce pretended to be queer in order to get out of the Navy. (Interestingly, this was just after the war ended.)

It wouldn’t work today. They’d promote him instead!

* Sexual libertinism and freedom of speech don’t go together. They’re entirely separate issues. And as Huxley predicted, the likelihood is that the more sexual freedom you have the less political freedom you have. Unlimited pornography, and zero freedom of speech.

I’m not sure how this played out in the past. The Victorians may have been reticent about sex but did they have more freedom of speech than in the debauched Regency period, or less? I’m guessing they had more, due to the rise of the popular press.

* Newspapers are much bigger in Britain than they are in the US.

A big difference is that most UK newspapers are right-of-center (and, even if not literal tabloids, very tabloid-ish by US standards). US newspapers are almost uniformly very left-wing (except for the Wall Street Journal, which might as well be) and marketed as “prestige” publications, read by influential people.

So from a leftist’s perspective, US newspapers quite literally “speak truth to power,” while UK newspapers speak nonsense to nobodies.

And thus a proportionately much smaller industry is able to exert much greater influence.

* Another subtle form of government censorship in the UK exists because it is illegal to report the names of plaintiffs in sexual offense trials, or to give any information that would identify them in media reports, or presumably on any publicly available media such as the Internet.

The absurdity of these reasonable-sounding law came to light about three years ago when a very well-known soap opera actor was put on trial for allegedly raping a six-year-old girl and continuing to rape her for several years afterwards late at night while he was drunk.

What the British public could not understand was how he had access to the child and where where the parents.

What the press could not report was that the plaintiff was a close relative of the defendant and that one of the main witnesses for the prosecution was his ex-wife who had been in bitter divorce proceedings. However the press could not report the identity of the wife, because that would make the identify of the child rather obvious.

The prosecution seemed to be particularly vindictive, because had the actor also been charged with incest, then his name too would have been placed under reporting restrictions.

The jury eventually found the defendant not guilty, possibly because medical evidence showed that the girl was still a virgin at the time of the trial, although the judge instructed the jury that the virginity of the girl should not be regarded as favorable to the defense. (Whatever!).

However, although there was considerable controversy over why the Crown Prosecution Service had ever allowed this case to come to court, it could never be properly discussed in the media after the case was over, because, you have guessed it, that would identify the plaintiff.