J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 348

Lee McIntyre: "Cognitive scientists recommend using a "tr...

Lee McIntyre: "Cognitive scientists recommend using a "truth sandwich" to report lies: : ay the truth, then show the liar telling the lie, then fact check it. Otherwise the well known 'repetition effect' allows the news media to be used to amplify lies..."

Brian Stelter: "Journalists, 'you need to face something squarely: You're confronted with radical hacking of your own systems of operation. This requires radical rethinking of those systems' --@DanGillmor" https://medium.com/@dangillmor/dear-journalists-stop-letting-liars-use-your-platforms-as-loudspeakers-cc64c4024eeb

#shouldread

Eliana Johnson and Annie Karni: Nielsen becomes face of T...

Eliana Johnson and Annie Karni: Nielsen becomes face of Trump���s border separations: "Kelly���s status in the White House has changed in recent months, and he and the president are now seen as barely tolerating one another. According to four people close to Kelly, the former Marine general has largely yielded his role as the enforcer in the West Wing as his relationship with Trump has soured. While Kelly himself once believed he stood between Trump and chaos, he has told at least one person close to him that he may as well let the president do what he wants, even if it leads to impeachment���at least this chapter of American history would come to a close..."

#shouldread

Ten Years Ago at Grasping Reality: June 20, 2008

Sam Boyd Is a National Treasure: He reads Slate, so we don't have to poison our minds. And comments on William Saletan:

This is the same logic that people used to justify homeowners who didn't want to rent to minorities. That's just terrible, they clucked, but I wouldn't want to live in a world where the government told people who they could rent to. Well, as it turns out, that world is a lot better than the one it replaced...

It is a good point. Consider: William Saletan on contraception:

William Saletan, 2008: You bring your scrip to the pharmacy, and the guy at the counter says, "Sorry, we don't stock contraceptives." That's annoying and, in my view, stupid. But nobody's walling you in. Your burden consists of finding another pharmacy...

William Saletan on fair housing:

William Saletan, 1958: You go to the open house, and the real estate broker says, "Sorry, we don't sell to Negroes." That's annoying and, in my view, stupid. But nobody's walling you in. Your burden consists of finding another house to buy...

Is there a difference between these two? Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Stupidest Man Alive (William Saletan/Slate Edition): From Avedon Carol: "The Sideshow June 2008 Archive: You know, when William Saletan was complaining that pro-choice people never do anything to promote ways to reduce the need for abortion, I figured he'd just been hit on the head with an Acme anvil and got amnesia about the existence of organizations like Planned Parenthood. However, I see that His Lordship actually thinks it's no big deal if women can't get contraception, so I'm beginning to suspect that, his protestations to the contrary, Lord Saletan is actually a secret supporter of forced pregnancy..." Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Atlantic Monthly Death Spiral Watch (Marc Ambinder Edition): Outsourced to Publius of Obsidian Wings: "Marc Ambinder has been spending a lot of time lately defending John McCain. But this post on habeas was too much. Ambinder claims that 'on the question of what should be done to the Gitmo detainees, the candidates' rhetorical differences are greater than their policy differences.' That���s wrong. Really really wrong.... Ambinder is ignoring the fact that political rhetoric matters. McCain has adopted the worst sort of demagoguery on the habeas case. He claimed the decision was one of the worst in history. He also referred to writs of habeas corpus���one of the oldest civil liberty protections in Anglo-American law���as 'so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits.'..."

Meterror Impacts Once Again: And then there is the cross-section problem: we have what? 6000 cities each of roughly 100 square miles = 600,000 square miles of devastating impact cross section in a world of 200M square miles. That means only 1 out of 400 50M impacts will be "devastating" if we say that a 50 meter meteorite--2 megatons, Barringer crater-sized--hitting a city is our threshold for "devastating." So we are down to one devastating every 4,000,000 years--not the one every thousand years of the Atlantic Monthly's lead to Gregg Easterbrook's article...

Ask the Gemeinschaft: E. Roy Weintraub and Stephen Marglin Edition: Marglin's main line is that "The market undermines community because it replaces personal ties of economic necessity by impersonal market transactions..." I note in closing that the lead dust-jacket blurb for this volume was provided by the noted economist and social theorist Bianca Jagger (sic). Whatever was Harvard University Press thinking? I have always found it remarkable that Marglin cannot but assume that "personal ties of economic necessity" are a good thing. Whenever I hear somebody say that they wish I were bound to them by "personal ties of economic necessity," I think that what they really mean is:

I want a world where you don't get to eat unless I approve of what you are doing, so you will be very careful to do only things I approve of.

I don't like that world, much.

Perhaps the most ironic thing about Marglin's rants against associative gesellschaft... is that Stephen Marglin has spent his life... in a gemeinschaft: for forty years he has been a tenured professor in Harvard's economics department. Few positions in the world today offer a life more embedded in a structured traditional community than his. The gemeinschaft that is the professional community of Ivy League economists in which Marglin has been embedded for the past forty years has not treated him with "reciprocity, altruism, and mutual obligation" but has... done what gemeinschaften traditionally do to corral their deviant members and to discourage others from imitating them..... But it seems to have had no effect on Marglin's thinking, none at all, for reasons I do not understand...

Ten Years Ago at Grasping Reality: June 19, 2008

Reported Deaths and Injuries from Meteorite Impact: "As of March 2008, the Near-Earth Asteroid with the highest probability of impact within the next 100 years is 2007 VK184, with a Torino scale of 1..."

Another Absolutely Beautiful Free Place in America...: There are few things finer than sitting outside the garth of Lora the Highly-Eccentric--Vikingsholm on Emerald Bay in Lake Tahoe--reading Guy Gavriel Kay's The Last Light of the Sun...

June 18, 2008: Ten Years Ago at Grasping Reality

Atlantic Monthly Death Spiral Watch (Outsourced to the Poor Man Edition): If the Atlantic Monthly survives the new media hurricane in any form whatsoever, it will be because it maintains and strengthens its reputation as a good filter of information.... The Poor Man explains, slowly and patiently and politely, why publishing Gregg Easterbrook is the road to destruction....

Easterbrook cilps 5 words from page 2 of this report as evidence that the NAS was cautioning against making any policy decisions. Seventy pages later, in a chapter titled ���Recommendations���, you find this:

Despite the great uncertainties, greenhouse warming is a potential threat sufficient to justify action now.

Ten pages of immediate policy recommendations follow. Again, this report came out 15 years ago...

Does anybody think Howell Raines ever had any business being a journalist?: Perhaps the Strangest Article I Have Read, Ever (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?): Howell Raines on Jim Romanesko.... There are, I think, only three "facts" I did not already know--and I don't know much about Jim Romanesko or Poynter:

Poynter pays Jim Romanesko $170K a year.
Jim Romanesko turned down an offer to jump to Brill's Content five years ago.
awker's "readers tend to speak of Romenesko more as a historical figure than a must-read. 'I don���t feel obligated to check it daily since a lot of the news doesn���t directly relate to me,' says a young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper.... 'Romenesko... provides a great top-line summary for a dying industry--an invaluable tool for that master���s thesis 20 years from now on the fall of paper'..."

And, of course, this third is not a "fact." Howell Raines has no magic surveillance machine with which he takes the pulse of what Gawker's readers say. And we all know how worthless is Howell Raines's ability to find one reporter who--anonymously--will serve as a sock puppet and do Howell Raines's bidding by saying that Jim Romanesko is a has-been about to be consumed by the monster he created. It would be something--but not much--if the "young New York-based reporter at a major newspaper" were willing to be named. It would be considerably more if Howell Raines had made some effort to demonstrate that the views of his sock puppet were in any sense representative or influential....

Let Me Distract Myself By Thinking About Something Less Depressing than Trump. Let Me Think About... L. Cornelius Sulla!

(Late) Weekend Reading: The opening of Cicero���s Pro Roscio Amerino, According to Stephen Saylors Roman Blood. I would pay serious money for a Saylor translation of the whole thing, with stage directions and audience catcalls. Just saying:

Cicero stepped forward to the podium, cleared his throat and coughed. A wave of skepticism ran through the crowd. A botched opening was a bad sign. At the accuser���s bench Gaius Erucius made a great show of smacking his lips and staring up at the sky.

Cicero cleared his throat and began again. His voice was unsteady and slightly hoarse:

Judges of the court: You must be wondering why, of all the distinguished citizens and eminent orators seated about you, it is I who have risen to address you���.

���Indeed,��� Erucius muttered under his breath. There was scattered laughter from the crowd. Cicero pressed on:

Certainly I cannot be compared to them in age or ability or authority. Certainly they believe, no less than I, that an unjust charge concocted by utmost villainy has been leveled at an innocent man and must be repelled. Thus they show themselves here in visible fulfillment of their duty to the truth, but they remain silent���due to the inclement conditions of the day.

Here he raised his hand as if to catch a raindrop from the clear blue sky���and at the same time seemed to be gesturing toward the equestrian statue of Sulla. Among the judges there was an uneasy shuffling of chairs. Erucius, who was inspecting his fingernails, did not see. Cicero cleared his throat again. His voice returned, stronger and louder than before. The quavering vanished:

Am I so much bolder than these silent men? Or more devoted to justice? I think not. Or so very eager to hear my own voice in the Forum, and to be praised for speaking out? No, not if a better orator could earn that praise by speaking better words. What, then, has impelled me, rather than a more important man, to undertake the defense of Sextus Roscius of Ameria?

The reason is this: If any one of these fine orators had risen to speak in this court, and uttered words of a political nature���inevitable in a case such as this���then he would undoubtedly find people reading much more into his words than was actually there. Rumors would begin. Suspicions would be aroused. Such is the stature of these established men that nothing they say goes unremarked, and no implication in their speeches goes undebated.

I, on the other hand, can say everything that demands to be said in this case, without fear of adverse attention or untoward controversy. That is because I have not yet begun a public career; no one knows me. If I should speak out of turn, if I should let slip some embarrassing indiscretion, no one will even notice, or if they do, they will pardon the lapse on the grounds of my youth and inexperience���though I use the word pardon rather loosely, since actual pardons and the free judicial inquiry they require have of late been abolished by the state.

There was more rustling of chairs. Erucius looked up from his nails, wrinkled his nose, and gazed into the middle distance, as if he had just discerned an alarming plume of smoke on the air.

So you see, I was not singled out and chosen because I was the most gifted orator.

Cicero smiled to ask the crowd���s indulgence.

No, I was simply the person left over when all others had stepped aside. I was the man who could plead with the least danger. No one can say that I was chosen so that Sextus Roscius would have the best possible defense. I was chosen simply so that he would have any defense at all.

You may ask: What is this fear and terror that drives away the best of the advocates and leaves Sextus Roscius with only a rank beginner to defend his very life? To hear Erucius speak, you would never guess there was any peril at all, since he has deliberately avoided naming his true employer or mentioning that secret person���s vicious motives for bringing my client to trial.

What person? What motives? Let me explain.

The estate of the late, murdered Sextus Roscius���which by any ordinary course of events should now be the property of his son and heir���embraces farms and properties exceeding six million sesterces in value. Six million sesterces! That is a considerable fortune, amassed over a long and productive lifetime. Yet this entire estate was purchased by a certain young man, presumably at public auction, for the astonishing sum of two thousand sesterces.

Quite a bargain!

The thrifty young buyer was Lucius Cornelius Chrysogonus���I see the very mention of his name causes a stir in this place, and why not? He is an exceptionally powerful man.

The alleged seller of this property, representing the interests of the state, was the valiant and illustrious Lucius Sulla, whose name I mention with all due respect.

At this point a soft hissing filled the square like a rain of mist on hot stones, as men turned to one another and whispered behind their hands. Capito clutched at Glaucia���s shoulder and croaked into his ear. All about me nobles in the gallery crossed their arms and exchanged grim glances. Two elderly Metelli on my right nodded knowingly to each other. Gaius Erucius, whose plump jowls had abruptly turned scarlet at the mention of Chrysogonus, gripped a young slave by the neck, spat an order at him, and sent him fleeing from the square.

Let me be frank. It is Chrysogonus who has engineered these charges against my client. With no legal justification whatsoever, Chrysogonus has seized the property of an innocent man. Unable to enjoy his stolen goods to the fullest, since their rightful owner still lives and breathes, he asks you, the judges of this court, to alleviate his anxiety by doing away with my client. Only then can he squander the fortunes of the late Sextus Roscius with all the carefree dissipation he aspires to.

Does this seem right to you, Judges? Is it decent? Is it just? In opposition let me put forward my own demands, which I think you will find more modest and more reasonable:

First: Let this villain Chrysogonus be satisfied with seizing our wealth and property. Let him refrain from demanding our lifeblood as well!...

(Late) Monday Smackdown: No, Ron Unz Does Not Tell It Straight. Why do You Ask?

Why would anybody claim that Holocaust denier David Irving was the defendant rather than the plaintiff in Irving v. Penguin Books and Lipstadt? I mean, that's what the case is called. And the plaintiff's name does come first. And why would anybody claim that David Irving lost his "fine central London home" because "Jewish movie producers and corporate executives" funded a lawsuit and he had been "forced to defend himself without benefit of legal counsel"?

Ron Unz has long been my poster child for the point that being mentally quick does not mean that you are smart, or intelligent, or wise. Turning your smartness to find reasons not to mark your beliefs to market but rather to justify prejudices you got from God-knows-where is no way to go through life, son.

Here is where Unz picks up and propagates the false neo-Nazi line that Holocaust denier David Irving was not the plaintiff but the defendant in Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt: Ron Unz: The Remarkable Historiography of David Irving: "Irving is an individual of uncommonly strong scholarly integrity....is unwillingness to dissemble or pay lip-service to various widely-worshiped cultural totems eventually provoked an outpouring of vilification by a swarm of ideological fanatics drawn from a particular ethnic persuasion...

...In 1993, Deborah Lipstadt, a rather ignorant and fanatic professor of Theology and Holocaust Studies (or perhaps ���Holocaust Theology���) ferociously attacked him.... This development eventually sparked a rancorous lawsuit in 1998, which resulted in a celebrated 2000 libel trial held in British Court. That legal battle was certainly a David-and-Goliath affair, with wealthy Jewish movie producers and corporate executives providing a huge war-chest of $13 million to Lipstadt���s side, allowing her to fund a veritable army of 40 researchers and legal experts, captained by one of Britain���s most successful Jewish divorce lawyers.

By contrast, Irving, being an impecunious historian, was forced to defend himself without benefit of legal counsel.

In real life unlike in fable, the Goliaths of this world are almost invariably triumphant, and this case was no exception, with Irving being driven into personal bankruptcy, resulting in the loss of his fine central London home. But seen from the longer perspective of history, I think the victory of his tormenters was a remarkably Pyrrhic one....

Their spittle-flecked outrage... despite such massive financial and human resource... came up almost entirely empty.... They only managed to find a couple of dozen rather minor alleged errors of fact or interpretation, most of these ambiguous or disputed. And the worst they discovered after reading every page of the many linear meters of Irving���s personal diaries was that he had once composed a short ���racially insensitive��� ditty for his infant daughter.... Thus, they seemingly admitted that Irving���s enormous corpus of historical texts was perhaps 99.9% accurate. I think this silence of ���the dog that didn���t bark��� echoes with thunderclap volume...

Does Unz think anybody except other neo-fascists will credit him when he pretends that Irving was the defendent rather than the plaintiff in Irving v. Penguin and Lipstadt? That the Lipstadt-Penuin defense was funded not by Penguin Books but by "wealthy Jewish movie producers and corporate executives"? That the lawsuit was not mysteriously "sparked" by some complicated process but rather filed by Irving in an attempt to get Lipstadt's book censored (and pulped) and get some money out of Penguin?

Justice Gray refused to censor (and pulp) Lipstadt's book and refused to order Penguin to pay damages to Irving because he concluded that Liptadt and Penguin had shown that her claims that Irving had deliberate misrepresented the evidence to conform to his ideological viewpoints were substantially true, hence Irving was not libeled:

The evidence supports the following propositions:

that the shooting of the Jews in the East was systematic and directed from Berlin
with the knowledge and approval of Hitler;
that there were gas chambers at several of the Operation Reinhard camps and
that (as Irving during the trial admitted) hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed in them and
that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz,
where hundreds of thousands more Jews were gassed to death.

It follows that it is my conclusion that Irving's denials of these propositions were contrary to the evidence....

Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence....

Therefore the defence of justification succeeds...

But, then, I remember Ron from his days as an undergraduate as a big booster of Ho Chi Minh and the cruel, racist, inefficient, and rather Stalinist pre-Doi Moi Communist Party of Vietnam.

And from the trial transcript:

Day 14 Transcript: Holocaust Denial on Trial | Holocaust Denial on Trial:

[Mr Rampton]:��Nine months old in September 1994. ���Jessica is turning into a fine little lady. She sits very upright on an ordinary chair. Her strong back muscles, a product of our regular walks in my arms to the bank, etc., I am sure. On those walks we sing the binkety-bankety-bong song. There are two other poems in which she stars:

My name is baby Jessica.

I have got a pretty dressica,

but now it is in a messica

and, more scurrilously, when half breed children are wheeled past��� and then you go into italics:

I am a baby Aryan,

not Jewish or sectarian.

I have no plans to

marry an ape or a Rastafarian���?

[Mr Irving]:��Yes.

[Mr Rampton]:��Racist, Mr Irving? Anti-Semitic Mr Irving, yes?

[Mr Irving]:��I do not think so.

[Mr Rampton]:��Teaching your little child this kind of poison?

[Mr Irving]:��Do you think that a nine month old can understand words spoken in English or any other language?

[Mr Rampton]:��I will tell you something, Mr Irving, when I was six-months old, I said, ���Pussy sits in the apple tree until she thinks it is time for tea���?

MR JUSTICE GRAY:����You were very precocious!

MR RAMPTON:����I was, but then I burned out at two!

[Mr Irving]:��Yes. Perhaps I should set this in its context. The scurrilous magazine ���Searchlight��� (about which we will, no doubt, hear more) had just published a photograph of myself and Jessica and her mother, who is very blond and very beautiful, and it had sneered at us as being the ���perfect Aryan family���.

[Mr Rampton]:��They did not write this, you did?

A.��[Mr Irving]:��Yes, but this is my little private response to this rather nasty sneer ���-

[Mr Rampton]:��You wrote this on 17th September.

[Mr Irving]:��Please do not interrupt me. This is my private response to this rather nasty smear by this magazine which has been giving me trouble ever since I had the man arrested for breaking into my house 30 years earlier when he called my family a ���perfect Aryan family��� in a public magazine. So I sit with my infant child on my lap, humming a little song to her about us being a perfect Aryan. Do any other words upset you?

[Mr Rampton]:��What?

[Mr Irving]:��Do any other words in the poem upset you apart from the ���Aryan���.

[Mr Rampton]:��No, no. It is the contrast. The poor little child has been taught a racist ���-

[Mr Irving]:��Poor little child! She is a very happy child.

[Mr Rampton]:����� ditty by her perverted racist father.

[Mr Irving]:��Have you ever read Edward Lear or Hilliard Belloch?

[Mr Rampton]:��They have not brought a libel action complaining of being called a racist, Mr Irving. You have ���-

[Mr Irving]:��I do not know if they have brought libel actions or not.

[Mr Rampton]:��Mr Irving, you sued because you said we called you a racist and an extremist?

[Mr Irving]:��Yes, but I am not a racist.

[Mr Rampton]:��Mr Irving, look at the words on the page...

#moralresponsibility
#shouldread

Imprisonment by Malthus and "Negative Liberty": Outtake from Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century

At the start of the Long 20th Century John Stuart Mill, Britain���s leading economist, leading moral philosopher, and one of its leading imperialists and rulers of the empire as a former India Office bureaucrat, was putting the finishing touches on the final edition of the book that people then looked to to learn economics: Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications to Moral Philosophy. His book and his thought gave due attention and place to the 1730-1870 era of the British Industrial Revolution. Yet in the year 1870 he looked out on what he saw as a poor and miserable world. ���Hitherto���, he wrote, looking at the world and at the Great Britain and Ireland of his day:

it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day���s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes...

Denser populations, more and richer plutocrats, a larger middle class���those were all the fruits Mill saw of the 1730-1870 Industrial Revolution. Humans in 1870 were still, he saw as he looked at his world and his country, under the harrow of Malthus: There were few resources, too fertile a population, and too slow technological progress for the world to be anything other than constantly near the edge of famine.

Whatever possibilities for a better world existed in the womb of better technology were stillborn because of greater human numbers and the resource scarcity thereby generated. One word in Mill���s paragraph stands out: imprisonment. The world Mill saw was not just a world of drudgery���where humans had to work long and tiring hours at crafts and tasks that came nowhere near to being sufficiently interesting to engage the full brainpower of an East African Plains Ape. The world Mill saw was not just a world in which most people were close to the edge of being desperately hungry, and were justifiably anxious about where their 2000 calories a day were going to come from next year���or net week. The world Mill saw was not just a world of low literacy���where most could only access the collective human store of knowledge, ideas, and entertainments partially and slowly. It was a world in which humanity was imprisoned: not free, in a dungeon, chained and fettered.

That is how things were back at the start of the long twentieth century.

As an aside, this observation by founding libertarian Mill makes me think that most libertarians today who draw heavily on the Oxford inaugural lecture of Isaiah Berlin (1958): Two Concepts of Liberty https://tinyurl.com/dl20180618g, with its claim that ���negative��� and ���positive��� liberty are in ���direct conflict���, fundamentally misconstrue the libertarian project���or, at least, have no warrant to call themselves intellectual descendants and comrades of John Stuart Mill, and fail at some fundamental level to grasp what Mill thought the libertarian project was. Berlin���s definition that ���I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity��� the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others������ is one in which Mill���s use of the word imprisonment makes no sense at all...

June 17, 2008: Ten Years Ago at Grasping Reality

Smackdown Watch: Beauty, Accessibility, Crowding, Expense: Barbara Ehrenreich's basic problem, I think, is that she doesn't like beautiful places that are crowded, especially crowded with the wrong people���recall her dismissal of Maine's beautiful (and accessible! and affordable!) Old Orchard Beach as a "rinky-dink blue-collar resort." But here is Robert Waldmann to perform the smackdown...

Journalistic institutions that have less than zero quality control: we are looking at you, Atlantic: The Atlantic Monthly Death Spiral Watch (Gregg Easterbrook Asteroid Devastation Edition)_: Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? The Atlantic Monthly features Gregg Easterbook, who writes: "The Sky Is Falling: The odds that a potentially devastating space rock will hit Earth this century may be as high as one in 10. So why isn���t NASA trying harder to prevent catastrophe?..." If the odds that a devastating space rock will hit the earth in a century are one in ten, then the chances that we have gone... one millennium without a DSR hitting the earth are 0.35... two millennia without a DSR hitting the earth are 0.12... four millennia without a DSR hitting the earth are 0.014... It's possible a devastating space rock hit the earth between eight and four millennia ago and we know nothing about it���but it's not terribly likely. It's very hard for me to believe that a devastating space rock has hit the earth since 3000 BC. We have Tunguska.... If you started out with a 50-50 prior probability that Gregg Easterbrook knows what he is talking about, your posterior probability that the lead of his Atlantic article is better than birdcage liner given no rock since 2000 BC is 0.0138. But we start with a lower probability than that, don't we? Gregg Easterbrook has a history.... If the Atlantic published an article by Gregg Easterbrook every month, we would have to wait 41 years before there was a 50-50 chance that even one of the Easterbrook articles was right...

#hoisted
#tenyearsagoongaspingreality

Note to Self: Apropos of Misapplied History..., (Early) M...

Note to Self: Apropos of Misapplied History..., (Early) Monday (Self?) Smackdown: Baiae and LA as Causes of Republican Downfall? Seriously?, and The Fall of the Roman Republic; Plutarch on what I regard as a key moment in norm-breaking���perhaps the most key moment besides Sulla's first coup and his march on Rome:

[Publius Cornelius Scipio] Nasica demanded that the consul should come to the rescue of the state and put down the tyrant. The consul replied with mildness that he would resort to no violence and would put no citizen to death without a trial; if, however, the people, under persuasion or compulsion from Tiberius, should vote anything that was unlawful, he would not regard this vote as binding. Thereupon Nasica sprang to his feet... and set out for the Capitol.... The attendants of the senators carried clubs and staves which they had brought from home; but the senators themselves seized the fragments and legs of the benches that were shattered by the crowd in its flight.... Tiberius [Sempronius Gracchus] himself turned to fly.... But he stumbled and fell.... As he strove to rise to his feet, he received his first blow, as everybody admits, from Publius Satyreius, one of his [Tribunal] colleagues, who smote him on the head with the leg of a bench; to the second blow claim was made by Lucius Rufus, who plumed himself upon it as upon some noble deed. And of the rest more than three hundred were slain by blows from sticks and stones, but not one by the sword.

This is said to have been the first sedition at Rome, since the abolition of royal power, to end in bloodshed and the death of citizens; the rest though neither trifling nor raised for trifling objects, were settled by mutual concessions, the nobles yielding from fear of the multitude, and the people out of respect for the senate. And it was thought that even on this occasion Tiberius would have given way without difficulty had persuasion been brought to bear upon him, and would have yielded still more easily if his assailants had not resorted to wounds and bloodshed...

#shouldread
#ancienthistory
#normbreaking