Tuesday, February 28, 2017
SN 1987A at 30
Monday, February 27, 2017
A Bit of Spring
Sunday, February 26, 2017
Bannon, the Tea Party, and the Big Misunderstanding
From an interesting summary of Steve Bannon's thought:
But what was their solution? Reaganism. Cut taxes, reduce regulation, or as Bannon recently put it, "Dismantle the administrative state." This, I think, is based on a misunderstanding of how the economy works. Many people seem to think that Wall Street bankers and the like only make billions because of "crony capitalism," so that attacking the government will attack the whole elite and its dominance of the country. I think that is simply wrong. Sure, some companies depend on their access to government aid, but not all. We had all sorts of inequality and plenty of very rich men in the 1890s, when the government was tiny by our standards. Tea Party people seem to want a world more like the 1950s, when the top income tax rate was 70-90%. So the way to bring down the elite is to raise taxes, not cut them, and also to empower unions.
I just don't understand the logic of hating the elite and then trying to bring them under control by cutting their taxes. To me, the only way to limit the immorality of capitalism is through the power of the state. The only way to achieve equality is by expanding the government, not cutting it. Maybe you hate the government so much that you can't see going that way. But if so, you have to resign yourself to an economy dominated by big business and billionaires.
Mr. Bannon’s views reflect a transformation of conservatism over the past decade or so. You can trace this transformation in the films he has made. His 2004 documentary, “In the Face of Evil,” is an orthodox tribute to the Republican Party hero Ronald Reagan. But “Generation Zero,” half a decade later, is a strange hybrid. The financial crash has intervened. Mr. Bannon’s film features predictable interviews with think-tank supply siders and free marketers fretting about big government. But new, less orthodox voices creep in, too, from the protectionist newscaster Lou Dobbs to the investment manager Barry Ritholtz. They question whether the free market is altogether free. Mr. Ritholtz says that the outcome of the financial crisis has been “socialism for the wealthy but capitalism for everybody else.”I read lots of stuff like this when the news was all about the Tea Party. People were protesting, as they saw it, both big government and big capitalism.
By 2014, Mr. Bannon’s own ideology had become centered on this distrust. He was saying such things about capitalism himself. “Think about it,” he said in a talk hosted by the Institute for Human Dignity. “Not one criminal charge has ever been brought to any bank executive associated with 2008 crisis.” He warned against “the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism,” by which he meant “a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people.” Capitalism, he said, ought to rest on a “Judeo-Christian” foundation.
But what was their solution? Reaganism. Cut taxes, reduce regulation, or as Bannon recently put it, "Dismantle the administrative state." This, I think, is based on a misunderstanding of how the economy works. Many people seem to think that Wall Street bankers and the like only make billions because of "crony capitalism," so that attacking the government will attack the whole elite and its dominance of the country. I think that is simply wrong. Sure, some companies depend on their access to government aid, but not all. We had all sorts of inequality and plenty of very rich men in the 1890s, when the government was tiny by our standards. Tea Party people seem to want a world more like the 1950s, when the top income tax rate was 70-90%. So the way to bring down the elite is to raise taxes, not cut them, and also to empower unions.
I just don't understand the logic of hating the elite and then trying to bring them under control by cutting their taxes. To me, the only way to limit the immorality of capitalism is through the power of the state. The only way to achieve equality is by expanding the government, not cutting it. Maybe you hate the government so much that you can't see going that way. But if so, you have to resign yourself to an economy dominated by big business and billionaires.
The Battle of Generations in America
If you’ve read or heard about Erie, Pennsylvania, since the election, it’s likely to be with framing as “declining Rust Belt city that illustrates the fears and dislocations that led to Trump.”This reminded me of a conversation I had with an old man in Renovo, Pennsylvania back in 1993. He was bemoaning the closing of a Cessna aircraft plant in nearby Lockhaven, and he said, "soon there's not going to be any jobs left." Even in their heyday big factories employed a small percentage of Americans, but they loom larger than life in the way many people of certain American generations imagined the economy. People under 50, who by and large do not remember a time when big factories dominated so many towns, don't see the economy in the same way.
Over the past six months, my wife Deb and I have presented a different take on the city, as briefly mentioned in this magazine piece and laid out in more detail in this web post and others collected here. We’ve been struck by the difference between older Erie—the people of our own generation, who had grown up expecting to work at the giant GE plant and are still devastated by its slow-motion shutdown—and younger Erie, people who never expected to work in big factories and are starting new businesses. This is an illustration of an old/young split we’ve seen across the country.
Some of the other disputes that divide us are even more about generational change. My children not only support gay and trans rights, they absolutely do not understand why these things might be controversial. At the moment the most famous young conservative in America is Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay man who often cross-dresses, at least on stage. Just a dozen years ago George W. Bush and Karl Rove got anti-gay marriage amendments put on state ballots across the country to bring "values voters" to the polls and boost Republicans. Things have changed fast since then, less because of people changing their minds than just old people dying and younger people coming of age.
Not that young Americans are united; they argue savagely among themselves. But the things they argue about are not the things older Americans argue about. They are passionate about, for example, the clash between free speech and freedom from harassment, and the implications of feminism for male-female relations. I suppose at base the economic argument is the same, but the tone of the argument between Occupy and the libertarians is quite different that what I listened to growing up.
It's going to be interesting to see how this unfolds.
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Jane and Louise Wilson
Friday, February 24, 2017
Seventeen Unknown Confederate Dead
Today I trained in and then in the afternoon retraced my steps back to the garage. I decided to walk from the other direction, so I got off the Metro in Silver Spring and marched up Georgia Avenue. Walking by a nice but not really very old looking church, I was startled to come across this monument.
That was the fight we now know as the Battle of Fort Stevens, part of Jubal Early's Raid on Washington. The monument surprised me because I consider myself something of an expert on the Battle of Fort Stevens. I studied the surviving part of the battlefield for the Park Service and even wrote a brochure about it, which you can read here. But I never knew about this monument. It is not at the Battleground Cemetery, a Federal creation, but in an ordinary churchyard.To the Memory ofSeventeenUnknownConfederate Dead
Who Fell in Front ofWashington, D.C.July 12, 1864By their Comrades
I consider this discovery recompense for all the trouble with my car.
Cycles of History
Peter Turchin:
So maybe there are patterns. But there is also variation. And to compare, as Turchin likes to, ancient and medieval empires with modern hegemonic states strikes me as silly.
Different groups have different degrees of cooperation .. cohesiveness and solidarity. .. Groups with high [cohesion] arise on .. frontier .. area where an imperial boundary coincides with a fault line between two [ethnic] communities .. places where between group competition is very intense. .. Only groups possessing high levels of [cohesion] can construct large empires. ..This sort of thinking is so unpopular among historians that only a non-historian like Turchin (a biologist) will write books like this today. I don't really know what to make of stuff like this. It is certainly true that empires rise and fall. It seems to me that there are, or were, things that happen to aging empires that made them vulnerable. But to think that the history of China since 200 BCE has been more or less than same as the history of Europe strikes me as silly. Charlemagne's empire was nothing like the Roman empire, and after that Europe saw no others. The Roman Empire held onto Greece and Asia Minor for more than a thousand years – we call them Byzantine, but they called themselves Romans – which makes mockery of all those inevitable fall theories.
Stability and internal peace bring prosperity, and prosperity causes population increase .. leads to overpopulation, .. causes lower wages, higher land rents, and falling per capital incomes. At first, low wages and high rents bring unparalleled wealth to the upper class, but as their numbers and appetites grow, they also begin to suffer from falling incomes. Declining standards of life breed discontent and strife. The elites turn to the state for employment and additional income and drive up its expenditures at the same time that the tax revenue declines. .. When the state’s finances collapse, it loses the control of the army and police. Freed from all restraints, strife among the elites escalates into civili war, while the discontent among the poor explodes into popular rebellions.
The collapse of order brings .. famine, war, pestilence, and death. .. Population declines and wages increase, while rents decline. .. Fortunes of the upper classes hit bottom. .. Civil wars thin the ranks of the elites. .. Intra-elite competition subsides, allowing the restoration of order. Stability and internal peace bring prosperity, and another cycle begins.
So maybe there are patterns. But there is also variation. And to compare, as Turchin likes to, ancient and medieval empires with modern hegemonic states strikes me as silly.
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
The Seven Daughters of Trappist-1
The discovery of rocky planets around red dwarf star is also pretty cool, since they are the most common stars in the galaxy, especially our part; within 30 light years of the earth there are 250 red dwarf stars but only 20 in the same class as our sun. That's a lot of potential planets close enough for us to observe them directly.
It is amazing to me how quickly the discovery of planets around other stars has become routine. The first serious claim was not made until 1988, and that was very controversial; the first widely accepted claim was made in 1992. In the 25 years since the list has grown to more than 3,500 planets, and it gets longer every day.
Ancient California was a Violent Place
About 7 percent of the population at that time had evidence of forced traumas, whether they were shot by an arrow, stabbed or bludgeoned. For females it was 5 percent and for males it was 11 percent, a percentage of violent trauma not even reached during World War II.Two years ago another study that looked at more than 16,000 skeletons from across 5,000 years came up with similar numbers:
The data reveal that the most common type of violence over the millennia was so-called sharp-force trauma, caused by projectiles like arrows or atlatl darts, which appeared in 7.2% of the burials studied.Native California was an interesting place. It was about as densely populated as the east coast, but while Indians in the east were farmers, those in California relied entirely on hunting and gathering. There was no intensive agriculture, although there was management of the landscape to increase the yields of valuable plants, for example by controlled burning. The people lived mostly small groups that spoke at least 64 different languages from several different families. The obvious interpretation of the level of violence would be that population pressed against the limits that the land could support without farming, leading to constant clashes over valuable resources like fishing spots or productive nut groves. But of course it might have been religion or tribal hatreds or all sorts of other things.
Another 4.3% of the hunter-gatherers suffered apparent blunt-force trauma to the head, while just under 1% showed evidence of dismemberment, with limbs, scalps, or heads having been removed after death.
Donald Trump is Famous
If what Donald Trump really craves is attention, he is getting it:
Coverage of Mr. Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever. . . . The new president doesn’t simply dominate national and political news. During my week of attempted Trump abstinence, I noticed something deeper: He has taken up semipermanent residence on every outlet of any kind, political or not. He is no longer just the message. In many cases, he has become the medium, the ether through which all other stories flow. . . .The firm mediaQuant measures how much attention celebrities get in the news and on social media and then attaches a dollar figure to it, based on how much you would have to pay to get that much advertising.
All presidents are omnipresent. But it is likely that no living person in history has ever been as famous as Mr. Trump is right now. It’s possible that not even the most famous or infamous people of the recent or distant past — say, Barack Obama, Osama bin Laden, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali or Adolf Hitler — dominated media as thoroughly at their peak as Mr. Trump does now.
I’m hedging because there isn’t data to directly verify this declaration. (Of course, there are no media analytics to measure how many outlets were covering Hitler the day he invaded Poland.) But there is some pretty good circumstantial evidence.
In January, Mr. Trump broke mediaQuant’s records. In a single month, he received $817 million in coverage, higher than any single person has ever received in the four years that mediaQuant has been analyzing the media, according to Paul Senatori, the company’s chief analytics officer. For much of the past four years, Mr. Obama’s monthly earned media value hovered around $200 million to $500 million. The highest that Hillary Clinton got during the presidential campaign was $430 million, in July.Sigh.
It’s not just that Mr. Trump’s coverage beats anyone else’s. He is now beating pretty much everyone else put together. Mr. Senatori recently added up the coverage value of 1,000 of the world’s best known figures, excluding Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump. The list includes Mrs. Clinton, who in January got $200 million in coverage, Tom Brady ($38 million), Kim Kardashian ($36 million), and Vladimir V. Putin ($30 million), all the way down to the 1,000th most-mentioned celebrity in mediaQuant’s database, the actress Madeleine Stowe ($1,001).
The coverage those 1,000 people garnered last month totaled $721 million. In other words, Mr. Trump gets about $100 million more in coverage than the next 1,000 famous people put together.
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Rembrandt: Drawings
Subconscious Counting
I do crossword puzzles; I've been doing them for 30 years. These days the only ones I like are the Saturday puzzles from the Times, which are 1) hard and 2) not full of puns, a way of thinking I cannot comprehend, which makes it impossible for me to do British puzzles. I only read newspapers online these days, but I like to do crosswords on paper. So I do them out of books.
I got a new such book this Christmas and have been working my way through. I was just marveling at the strange way my brain knows instantly if a word or phrase I think of will fit the space I see. I can make this calculation without being able to tell you how many letters are in the word or how many spaces are in the row. I just know right away if a word or phrase will fit, and these instincts are never wrong. I recently did this with NAVALENGAGEMENT, so I can do it for 15 letters.
I have no idea how. Since I don't know the number, I can only guess that some automatic module in my mind takes my visual memory of how the word looks written out and lines it up with the blocks I see on the page.
I don't really feel that it is me doing this at all; it just happens, without my having anything to say about it.
I got a new such book this Christmas and have been working my way through. I was just marveling at the strange way my brain knows instantly if a word or phrase I think of will fit the space I see. I can make this calculation without being able to tell you how many letters are in the word or how many spaces are in the row. I just know right away if a word or phrase will fit, and these instincts are never wrong. I recently did this with NAVALENGAGEMENT, so I can do it for 15 letters.
I have no idea how. Since I don't know the number, I can only guess that some automatic module in my mind takes my visual memory of how the word looks written out and lines it up with the blocks I see on the page.
I don't really feel that it is me doing this at all; it just happens, without my having anything to say about it.
Too Self-Conscious
Here's a thought:
The Heimlich maneuver, in the nearly 50 years since Dr. Henry Heimlich established its protocol, has been credited with saving many lives. But not, perhaps, as many as it might have. The maneuver, otherwise so wonderfully simple to execute, has a marked flaw: It requires that choking victims, before anything can be done to help them, first alert other people to the fact that they are choking. And some people, it turns out, are extremely reluctant to do so. “Sometimes,” Dr. Heimlich noted, bemoaning how easily human nature can become a threat to human life, “a victim of choking becomes embarrassed by his predicament and succeeds in getting up and leaving the area unnoticed.” If no one happens upon him, “he will die or suffer permanent brain damage within seconds.”
Something bad is happening; don’t let other people see it; you will embarrass yourself, and them: It’s an impulse that is thoroughly counterproductive and also incredibly easy to understand. Self-consciousness is a powerful thing. And there are, after all, even in the most frantic and fearful of moments, so many things that will seem preferable to making a scene.
Household Production and Economic Growth
One problem with trying to estimate long-term economic growth is that our statistics measure only part of what people do:
Economist Vincent Geloso finds that accounting for the loss of household production reduces 19th- and 20th-century economic growth by a substantial amount. But his numbers are just guesses, no matter how much effort people put into them; we just don't have any rigorous way to value things for which people don't get paid. Geloso thinks this is important because if you make that correction the "glorious decades" of postwar economic growth are less glorious, and the slow growth of our own period less strange.
In the past (say before 1950), labor force participation was quite low (relative to today) by virtue of large family sizes and most married women not working. However, when they were at-home, these married women produced something. That something was simply not included in our national accounts. When they entered the labor force, they produced less of that something. However, since it had never been measured, we never subtracted that something from the actual output generated from their increased participation.I think this is an important point. The homemakers of my youth were considered unemployed by the government, but they made all kinds of stuff. Besides cooking and cleaning they sewed clothes, raised vegetables, tended sick children, and more. Consider: if you clean your own house, that doesn't show up in economic statistics, but hiring a maid does. Nothing is being produced that wasn't there before, but the GDP has grown. Plus recent economic growth has been accompanied by millions of people leaving the countryside for the cities, and city people have fewer opportunities for off-the-books production like gardening and home canning.
Economist Vincent Geloso finds that accounting for the loss of household production reduces 19th- and 20th-century economic growth by a substantial amount. But his numbers are just guesses, no matter how much effort people put into them; we just don't have any rigorous way to value things for which people don't get paid. Geloso thinks this is important because if you make that correction the "glorious decades" of postwar economic growth are less glorious, and the slow growth of our own period less strange.
Monday, February 20, 2017
Terracotta Cult Scene
H.R. McMaster
Of all things I expected from the Trump administration, naming the most interesting living American general as his National Security Adviser had to be at the bottom of the list. H.R. McMaster is both an important military historian and a successful field commander, plus he has repeatedly gotten in trouble for his forceful criticism of the Army brass and indeed the whole culture of the U.S. military. It's certainly a bold choice. If what Trump wanted was to grab some attention in a positive or at least potentially positive way, well, he certainly got mine.
Will McMaster be a good National Security Adviser? I have no idea. It may be that he lacks the political skills necessary to survive in such a job. It may be that circumstances in the White House right now are such that nobody could shine in that role. But I have confidence that McMaster will give serious, thoughtful, well-informed advice, and that he will not try to drag us into crazy wars, which is frankly the main thing I am looking for right now. Because Trump's own views seem to be all over the map on war and foreign intervention, I worry that he could be steered into a stupid war by bad advice. I don't think McMaster will give that kind of advice. So far as I can tell the difference between McMaster and his predecessor Flynn is night and day on every important question. What sort of president appoints both of them?
McMaster's reputation outside the military rests largely on Dereliction of Duty, a book that grew out of his dissertation and severely criticizes the military leadership for not resisting Lyndon Johnson's approach to the Vietnam War. If presented with the same sort of choice, will McMaster take a stand against a government he serves in? I wonder.
First, to study war as the best means of preventing it.
–H.R. McMaster, Veterans' Day speech at Georgetown University, 2014
Coal Miners in America
This chart is just for miners, and there are plenty of other people who work in the coal industry, but miners are the largest category and the overall numbers have followed a similar trend.
It seems strange to me that we are so focused on coal these days, given that even by a broad definition that includes power plant workers there are only 175,000 jobs in the whole American coal industry, 0.12% of total employment. Why not give a little attention to waiters or nurses?
Taxes, Economic Growth, and the Vast Sweep of History
A bit of Paul Krugman:
This has been much on my mind lately. Maybe, I have been thinking, the middle-class economy of the 20th century was mainly a product of vast techno-socio-environmental forces, and all the sound and fury of politics was window dressing. Not entirely; a glance at North Korea will show you that. But the economy is evolving in similar ways across the whole planet, and I have a sense that we are in the grip of gigantic forces we cannot control and barely understand.
Personally I dislike some of the changes taking place, especially ever-increasing inequality and the disappearance of middle class jobs you can get without years of post-secondary education. I would like to think that some combination of actions by our government would reverse those trends. But I am not at all sure. I worry that in economic terms the 20th century was a dream time born of technological and organizational changes, when we had just the right amount of automation to make workers productive but so much as to displace them completely, and just the right amount of bureaucracy to create lots of jobs but not enough to halt all progress.
I do think politics matters; even if everything is constrained by these vast, impersonal forces, we can still make things more or less pleasant. But I suspect that the transformation so many long for, from Sanders leftists to Trump nationalists, is simply beyond our power.
Kansas, dominated by conservative true believers, implemented sharp tax cuts with the promise that these cuts would jump-start rapid growth; they didn’t, and caused a budget crisis instead. Last week Kansas legislators threw in the towel and passed a big tax hike.All the evidence seems to be that within the Overton window of American politics, nothing the government does has much of an effect on economic growth. Raising taxes, cutting taxes, passing regulations, repealing them –so far as I can see none of it has much impact on the big economic numbers. Maybe the details matter in particular industries and particular cities, but the economy as a whole just seems to rumble on, hearing its own drummer.
At the same time Kansas was turning hard right, California’s newly dominant Democratic majority raised taxes. Conservatives declared it “economic suicide” — but the state is in fact doing fine.
This has been much on my mind lately. Maybe, I have been thinking, the middle-class economy of the 20th century was mainly a product of vast techno-socio-environmental forces, and all the sound and fury of politics was window dressing. Not entirely; a glance at North Korea will show you that. But the economy is evolving in similar ways across the whole planet, and I have a sense that we are in the grip of gigantic forces we cannot control and barely understand.
Personally I dislike some of the changes taking place, especially ever-increasing inequality and the disappearance of middle class jobs you can get without years of post-secondary education. I would like to think that some combination of actions by our government would reverse those trends. But I am not at all sure. I worry that in economic terms the 20th century was a dream time born of technological and organizational changes, when we had just the right amount of automation to make workers productive but so much as to displace them completely, and just the right amount of bureaucracy to create lots of jobs but not enough to halt all progress.
I do think politics matters; even if everything is constrained by these vast, impersonal forces, we can still make things more or less pleasant. But I suspect that the transformation so many long for, from Sanders leftists to Trump nationalists, is simply beyond our power.
Politics and Identity
Just noting this teaser from the Post front page:
And that is something we ought to think about long and hard. We are using politics, and especially the presidential election, to get validation for ourselves and our views of the world, regardless of what kind of effect that has on the government and how it is run.
Many of President Trump’s backers said his victory changed their lives — that they felt their views were respected and in the majority.The new president hasn't actually done much – which is not really a crack at him, I don't think it's a good idea for presidents to run up a list of accomplishments in the first 100 days – and anyway that doesn't matter to his biggest backers. Just by winning, he made them feel better about themselves and their place in the country.
And that is something we ought to think about long and hard. We are using politics, and especially the presidential election, to get validation for ourselves and our views of the world, regardless of what kind of effect that has on the government and how it is run.
Sunday, February 19, 2017
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Minol Araki
Bureaucrats and Eggs
Why do Americans refrigerate their eggs, while Europeans leave them out on the counter?
Mostly, it’s about washing. In the U.S., egg producers with 3,000 or more laying hens must wash their eggs. Methods include using soap, enzymes or chlorine.Sometimes you have to wonder.
The idea is to control salmonella, a potentially fatal bacteria that can cling to eggs. The Centers for Disease control estimates that salmonella causes about 1.2 million illnesses a year, resulting in 450 deaths — though not all of those cases are traced to eggs.
The bacteria can be passed through the porous shell to the inside of the egg from material on the outside, though in rarer cases it can infect the ovaries of a chicken and infect the eggs from the inside. . . .
But — and here is the big piece of the puzzle — washing the eggs also cleans off a thin, protective cuticle devised by nature to protect bacteria from getting inside the egg in the first place. (The cuticle also helps keep moisture in the egg.)
With the cuticle gone, it is essential — and, in the United States, the law — that eggs stay chilled from the moment they are washed until you are ready to cook them. Japan also standardized a system of egg washing and refrigeration after a serious salmonella outbreak in the 1990s.
In Europe and Britain, the opposite is true. European Union regulations prohibit the washing of eggs. The idea is that preserving the protective cuticle is more important than washing the gunk off.
Friday, February 17, 2017
Cagots
Fascinating story from southwestern France:
We seem determined to hate and despise somebody.
The other point I would make about the cagots is that their oppression was ended by that bogeyman of so many leftists, the Enlightenment state. It was the same people who built the insane asylums and prisons and closed down the rowdy popular festivals who put an end to the persecution of cagots and all those other groups, so that we now read about them with bewildered fascination.
Lots more material on the cagots in the Hawkins article and at wikipedia.
One day in 1721 a carpenter called Miguel Legaret sat down with his son in the church of Biarritz. Jean de Lartigue, Guilhaume Veillet, and Pierre Dalbarade, all municipal councillors, took exception to their choice of seats. They called the Legarets ‘capots’, and as they forcibly tried to move them a fight broke out. Both parties complained to the bailliage, and all except Dalbarade, who was syndic of the parish, were arrested. On the 6th March 1722, the councillors were sentenced to kneel at the door of the church after mass and make public apology. They appealed on the grounds that the younger Legaret had used excessive violence, and that they had been righteously enforcing a 1596 arrêt forbidding ‘gots’ , ‘capots’ and ‘gahets’ from mixing with others or moving from their designated seats in church.Who were these cagots? Its an amazing story. They were a persecuted group found in southwestern France and northwestern Spain, forced to live at the edge of towns and villages, forbidden from touching food in markets, excluded from most professions, denied all political rights. They could not marry non-cagots. People said they stank, that they lacked earlobes, that they were all lepers (they were not). They are first attested in records from around 1000 and well documented from the 13th century; from 1288 to the 1600s laws against them were enacted in hundreds of towns and villages. But they were not an ethnic group; they looked exactly like everyone else. They did not have their own dialect, but spoke that of whatever region they lived in. They were all perfectly orthodox Catholics. Nobody knew where they came from, who their ancestors were, or how they ended up despised. We still don't know. So far as we can tell, they were despised because they were cagots, and cagots were basically just people who were despised. As Daniel Hawkins puts it in this paper,
After an investigation, on the 9th July 1723 the Parlement of Bordeaux acquitted the younger Legaret and fined the councillors. The court also specified heavy fines or corporal punishment for anyone under its jurisdiction who used the insults ‘descendants of the race of Giezy’, or ‘Agots, Cagots, gahets or ladres’. Alleged cagots were to be allowed in all public assemblies, municipal offices, educational institutions and the same galleries as others in church. They were to be treated as other inhabitants without any distinction. To ensure the ruling was obeyed, the deputy of the procureur général in Ustaritz was ordered to travel to Biarritz one Sunday every month. A copy of the arrêt was sent to all the parishes under the court’s jurisdiction with orders that it should be affixed to the church doors and read aloud.
The ruling in favour of the cagots was met with general protest, as told by the procureur général in a statement to Montesquieu, the presiding judge of the Parlement, on January 19th, 1724. Saint-Martin, the royal sergeant, had gone to Biarritz accompanied by two ‘archers’ to fix the arrêt to the church door. They were met by a ‘mutinous’ and ‘tumultuous’ crowd. Men waited in the square and the cemetery, urging a large number of women to block their way. The women prevented them from reading or posting the arrêt and threatened to overwhelm them with ‘quicklime, salt, ashes and whale oil’. Saint-Martin thought that some might have been men dressed as women. Nobody would help him despite his pleas to the crowd. Feeling afraid and in danger, he and his ‘archers’ retreated without completing their task.
They did not differ from their neighbours in language, ethnicity or religion, but throughout their history they were associated with carpentry and leprosy. In the sixteenth century they accounted for perhaps two per cent of the local population.It's a remarkably pure example of our baneful habit of singling out groups to hate. When there are no ethnic or religious divisions, we invent some other distinction. And there were such groups throughout western Europe: the Caqueaux of Brittany, the Colliberts of Poitou, the Maquefas of Valencia, Vaqueiros of Asturias and the Cascarots of the Basque country.
We seem determined to hate and despise somebody.
The other point I would make about the cagots is that their oppression was ended by that bogeyman of so many leftists, the Enlightenment state. It was the same people who built the insane asylums and prisons and closed down the rowdy popular festivals who put an end to the persecution of cagots and all those other groups, so that we now read about them with bewildered fascination.
Lots more material on the cagots in the Hawkins article and at wikipedia.
Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building, Chicago, by Louis Sullivan
