The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

Thoughtcast I was preparing for my talk at the Melbourne Unitarian Universalist Fellowship about the Peabody Sisters, three 19th century Unitarian women living in Boston and Salem who mixed in Transcendentalist circles, but are mainly known as the wives of important men, rather than significant figures in their own right who were at the founding (and even prefigured) Transcendentalism. This interview conducted by Jenny Attiyeh is with Megan Marshall, the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, and it gives a good flavour of the book.

The Human Subject. This rather gory podcast looks at The Prisoners Used for their Skin at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg prison (AKA ‘the Terrordome’) during the 1960s. Dermatologists at the University of Pennsylvania, led by Dr Albert Kligman, instituted a program where they would pay prisoners, the vast majority of whom were black and on remand, $1.00- $1.50 per day to subject themselves to experimentation. The prisoners were told that they were testing bubble-bath, but many of the experiments were funded by Dow Chemicals, but without their oversight. Kligman tested the effects of dioxin at concentrations 480 times the level recommended by Dow, and also experimented with depigmentation of black skin.

The Rest is History Episode 229 Portugal: Gold, Earthquakes and Brazil (Part 3) starts with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which destroyed 85% of the city and killed perhaps 50,000 people. Because Portugal was now under the Spanish crown, they were at war with the Dutch, and the Portuguese felt that the Spanish weren’t pulling their weight. Because of slavery in Brazil, huge wealth was pouring into Portugal. During the Napoleonic Wars, the British (with whom Portugal had always had a good relationship) gave escort to the Royal Family to Brazil, in exchange for opening Portuguese ports to British trade. (Huh. They were doing ‘deals’ back then too.) Wellington invaded Spain successfully, but withdrew in order to secure Lisbon. With the Royal Family ensconced in Brazil, it was becoming the metropole for Portugal- a strange turn of events. In 1821 the King returned to Portugal and was forced to sign the Constitution, and Brazil achieved independence.

I was so horrified by the Trump-Zelensky press conference that I spent the rest of the week listening to commentary about it, including The Rest is Politics (both UK and US editions), Fareed Zakaria on the NYT Ezra Klein Show with The Dark Heart of Trump’s Foreign Policy, Heather Cox Richardson, Ian Bremmer on GZERO, Matt Bevan on If You’re Listening, David Smith on the Guardian’s Full Story Podcast Trump v Zelenskyy and the 10 minute tirade that changed the world, and Simon Schama This is a day of massive historical importance (video)

I am very apprehensive.

The Coming Storm This second series petered out with Episode 8 The Last Election, which was just basically an interview between Gabriel Gatehouse, producer Lucy Proctor and Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Oxford University, in front of a live audience at the BBC’s Radio Theatre. It wasn’t really worth listening to. However, the program redeemed itself with Inauguration: A Bonus Episode where Trump’s picks for cabinet positions threw up many people that they had interviewed or come across earlier while exploring different conspiracy theories. They briefly discuss Kash Patel, but the majority of the episode is devoted to Robert Kennedy Jnr and the vast conspiracy theory he espouses that links the assassination of his uncle and father, vaccines, China, COVID and Anthony Fauci.

In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2 Episode 17 The Khmer Rouge’s New Vanguard isn’t quite as long as the very lengthy previous episode- far more manageable. Lachlan Peters returns to Cambodia, where the Workers Party of Kampuchea was working mainly through teachers at private schools. He starts with a meeting in 1960, attended by perhaps 30 people at the Phnom Penh Railway Station (I’ve been there!) where Saloth Sar, who was by now third in line for the leadership of the party, addressed the faithful with a peaceful, relevant speech. They were by now shedding the Vietnamese influence, and the students from France took a more prominent role, sidelining the veterans of the older communist struggle, who were more tolerant of Sihanouk for his anti-imperialism, and more aligned to the Vietnamese communists. The ‘old guard’ were despatched to the countryside to gain the affections of the rural peasantry. But communism was a hard sell. By 1960s Sihanouk’s father, who had taken over the throne to free Sihanouk up to stand for election, died so he put his mother in, and had himself made Head of State for life. This required a referendum, which passed with a yes vote of 99.8%. Sihanouk was popular, and getting money from China, Russia and the United States. In 1961 he relaxed the pressure internally because he was more involved with the conflict with Thailand for the first half of the year. In the second half of the year he turned his eye back to the communists, with an eye to the upcoming 1962 election. The party went into hiding, while the official Communist Party the Pracheachon were arrested. Tou Samouth, the party secretary of the clandestine party was murdered. Historians disagree whether Sihanouk’s supporter Lon Nol, or Saloth Sâr (Pol Pot) were behind the murder. Nonetheless, Sâr became acting secretary of the party in hiding. It’s hard to know when he changed from Saloth Sâr to Pol Pot. In 1963 there was a student riot at Siem Reap where anti-Sihanouk slogans were chanted. The Workers Party of Kampuchea held another congress near Central Market (I’ve been there too!) where Sâr was elected Party Secretary. In February 1962 Sihanouk published a list of 34 ‘known subversives, which included Saloth Sâr .

The Daily NYT ‘The Interview: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy is Done. Powerful Conservatives are Listening Well, as far as I am concerned, anyone who is a friend of J.D. Vance is an enemy of mine, and Vance talks very approvingly about Curtis Yarvin. He is a computer engineer who has “done his own research” to come up with an argument that, to quote The New York Times “the mainstream media and academia have been overrun by progressive groupthink and need to be dissolved. He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted and that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a monarchy run by what he’s called a CEO, which is basically his friendlier term for a dictator.” His way of arguing is repellent: he machine-guns out a scattershot of historical facts, any one of which could be unpicked if he gave you time. A repellent, slipshod, bombastic man.

In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2, Episode 2 Maoism and the Great Leap Forward 1949-1962 In this very long episode (2 hours 43 minutes) Lachlan takes us over to China where, after the Korean and Indo-China wars finished, the Chinese Communist Party could concentrate on local matters and the need to delineate ‘the people’ from ‘the enemy’. In 1953 a five year plan was initiated on the Stalinist model, where small farmers took over the land that had previously belonged to their landlords. In May 1958 Mao looked at the countryside, and after declaring the four pests (rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows) embarked upon the Great Leap Forward, later described as a ‘bubble of unreality’ which pushed the country towards starvation. The small farms, only recently given, were taken back into huge communal farms, with an emphasis on agricultural targets and communal eating. There was a push towards industrialization, with backyard furnaces slowly pillaging families’ household goods in the production of poor-quality steel. By 1959, famine had taken hold, prompting cannibalism and necrophagy and culminating in the death of perhaps 30-45 million people (no-one really knows). After Mao’s Minister of Defence criticized the Great Leap Forward, Mao rachetted it up even more to prove him wrong. It was not until 1962 that conditions improved. Meanwhile, the Sino/Soviet relationship had always been testy but initially Russia showed a readiness to co-operate militarily with the new Communist regime in China. However, Krushev’s denunciation of the ‘cult of personality’ after Stalin’s death was not taken well by Mao, who was curating a cult of personality of his own. Mao can be seen as either the 3rd or 4th Great Prophet of Communism after Marx (who identified the stages of communism and the importance of class), Lenin ( who introduced the concept of the ‘vanguard’ of the revolution), and maybe or maybe not Stalin (who created the centralized command economy). Mao wanted to use the nationalist cause combined with Confucian concepts of ‘right thinking’ and built on struggle and volunteerism. He had a fraught relationship with Krushev, who he believed had betrayed communism, and as the rift between the two countries increased, Soviet advisors returned to Russia and the promise of an atom bomb was withdrawn.

The Rest is History Episode 228 Portugal: The Golden Age of Discovery Part 2 The first episode finished with the reconquest of the Muslim ‘invaders’ of the Iberian Peninsula. This led a militant edge to Christian exploration outside the known world. The Portguese had ports all around the Cape of Good Hope, so they didn’t need Columbus. During the negotiations for the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Portuguese tricked the Spaniards by getting them to shift the line 1000 km that meant that Portugal got Brazil. Vasco da Gama was chosen to lead his expedition in search of India because he was a hard man. He rounded the Cape of Good Hope, turned right at Kenya and sailed for 23 days to get to Kerula. He reached Indian, Malaysia and Japan, and was very violent towards the Muslims. The Portuguese ’empire’ was more a series of nodes, and they were not very good at administration. By now the Portuguese throne had been inherited by a Spanish king, but Portugal retained its own identity.