The Myth Of Race

 General, History  No Responses »
Apr 162017
 

I am a racist.

I am prejudiced in favour of the human race.

Of course it is more common to find people who use the word race in reference to sub-divisions of humans, but you usually find that that as you look closer at each sub-division, it has less and less meaning. For instance, “white” in Europe is sub-divided into French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Birtish, English, Irish, Welsh, … And as you look closer at those sub-sub-divisions, they are also divided up. At the lowest level, there is “family” and “not family”.

The imperative to categorise people into “races” comes from a useful trait for problem solving, but if it doesn’t tell you anything useful, why categorise “race”? There are plenty of more useful categories to put people into.

This was kicked off by a sudden surge in the number of YouTube videos on DNA results that show up for me. Which of course showed the entirely predictable result that almost everyone is a mixture of different ancestors. And people are shocked, distressed, or annoyed about the fact that that their perceived racial identity is smaller than expected.

A DNA test for me will show no shocking results – I know with certainty that all my ancestors for well over 10,000 years were human. As a rough guess, 75% of my ancestors were from somewhere in northwest Europe, with 25% from all sorts of surprising places. The proportions may change, and the higher the proportion of surprising places, the more interesting a story some of my ancestors have to tell.

The Evil British Empire in India

 General, History  No Responses »
Feb 122017
 

Now this blog posting is not intended to defend the wrongs of colonialism; we all now accept that territorial expansion by conquest (except apparently Russia) is wrong. In fact it could be argued that Britain conquered India for commercial and not colonial reasons – for example no penal transportation to India occurred. Yes, British people went to live in India, but chiefly to do specific jobs – colonial administration, soldiering, or commercial activities.

Not mass migration.

We need to be wary of judging the past with the moral standards of today; it was not until the 20th century that conquest for territorial expansion was universally condemned. And the evils of the British Raj (and earlier) because it successfully conquered India; earlier (and there were many) attempts failed, although some were close. The very presence of islam within the Indian sub-continent is indicative of attempts to conquer.

And as for the notion that only the British Empire acted in evil ways in India, just take a look through the list of massacres in India; many of those listed had nothing to do with the British.

Does that excuse the excesses of British colonial rule? No of course it doesn’t.

But even if Europeans had not become involved with India, the evils of attempted conquest would still have occurred as they did occur before.

Who Do We Think We Are?

 History  No Responses »
Dec 092016
 

B84V1827t1-elderley-man-past-gravestonesGenealogy, and inspired by the TV programme: “Who Do You Think You Are?“.

Sometimes I feel that when we dive into family history, it is possible that we are distracted by the records we come across and ignore the records we do not find. Which is perfectly understandable – those who history does not record disappear.

And related to that is that we sometimes tend to concentrate on the more famous of our ancestors; it is noticeable that the programme “Who Do You Think You Are?” always seems to find an interesting ancestor. Some may be under the impression that it is because that the programme only researches the ancestry of the famous, but if you look back far enough into the ancestry of anyone you will find a famous ancestor and a good story.

Even me.

Yet in some ways the more interesting stories are those of the less famous – how the ordinary rank and file of our families survived day to day, because frankly the past was harsh and unforgiving.

The other thing is that family historian have an unrealistic belief in the historical record. That all marriages were happy, children were born in wedlock, and that there was no “hanky-panky” going on.

I recently scanned through the birth records of one person and was amused to see that of those with the same surname approximately a third had unmarried mothers (it showed the mother’s maiden name). Of course that was just one surname in one year, but there are other signs pointing the same way.

All of those concrete lines in our family tree are no more than the story that each of our families told the authorities which may or may not reflect reality. It is difficult to appreciate today, but there were perfectly reasonable reasons for concealing the true parentage of “illegitimate” children – a surprise legitimate sister is less of an embarrassment than a surprise “illegitimate” daughter.

 

Vim: The Ex Mode

 Computing, History  No Responses »
Oct 272016
 

I have recently been ‘entertaining’ myself with watching some videos on the vim editor which to the uninitiated is an extremely powerful if somewhat ‘unusual’ editor that is popular amongst Linux power users. One of the surprising things that came up was that apparently there are experienced vim users who are not aware of why the ex mode exists.

Or probably why the ex command exists.

In the dim and distant past (and in fact even longer than I’ve used Unix!), one of the possible ways of interacting with computers was with a printing terminal :-

On such a terminal, using a visual editor like vim (or it’s predecessor vi) would have been painful. Redrawing the screen would take a couple of minutes or more; imaging moving the cursor across from the beginning of the line to the end!

So it was common to use an alternative kind of editor – the line editor. The process of creating a file is somewhat clumsy :-

$ ex ~/Foo
"~/Foo" 1L, 4C
Entering Ex mode.  Type "visual" to go to Normal mode.
:p
Foo
:a
Bar
.
:p
Bar
:1
Foo
:write
:quit

Now for a quick explanation (although this is no tutorial on line editors!): The ex ~/Foo is the command given to start editing a pre-existing file called Foo in the ex editor. After the editor starts up, I enter the “p” command to print the current line. I then use the “a” command to append text after the first line, and enter a “.” on it’s own to finish adding lines. Again I use “p” to print the current line, and then “1” to print the first line.

Which is more than you’ll ever want to know about how to use ex, so why does it still exist?

The first reason is simply because it’s possible. It’s almost certainly fairly easy to support the ex mode with vim; after all the ex-mode is effectively the commands you get when you enter “:” within vim.

The next reason is that line editors were sometimes used within shell scripts to batch edit files, and somewhere out there is a shell script from hell that relies on ex to keep running.

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