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David Fickling Profile picture
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11 Jan, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Was listening to @WesleyLivesay podcast on the rise of Mussolini while I did some housework.

One really telling thing is how important *impunity* was to the fascists' Proud Boys, the squadristi.
They weren't *that* numerous, but the reluctance of courts and police to punish their violence — even as they aggressively punished defensive counterviolence by socialists and anti-fascists — made it much more powerful.
Mussolini didn't seize power. He was handed power by a King who thought giving the fascists what they wanted when they marched on the capital was a better option than calling a state of siege and letting the influence of the left rise any further.
Generally I think people think too much about Germany 1933 and too little about Italy 1922, Thailand 2014, France 1799.

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More from @davidfickling

David Fickling Profile picture
11 Jan
Here's a rare piece of good news: Despite the tragic #SJ182 crash, air safety in Indonesia is rapidly improving.

The accident rate in 2018 and 2019 was *lower* than it was in the U.S. and EU:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Indonesia has a terrible reputation for air safety. Its carriers were banned from Europe from 2007 to 2018 because standards were felt to be so lax.

But why was the ban lifted in 2018? Because standards are now a lot better. Image
When aviation was deregulated in the late 1990s after the Asian financial crisis and fall of Suharto, a huge number of dodgy small airlines opened, with regulation too lax to handle the vast growth in air traffic.

The result was a series of well-publicized disasters. Image
Read 14 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
9 Jan
So much commentary on Trump bans from social media seems to ignore that this is literally the "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" exception to freedom of speech.
Of course Twitter and Facebook, as private actors, can do what they want on their platforms without it infringing freedom of speech.

But clearly in their "public square" rhetoric they take the approach of supporting as much speech as possible.
But all but the very fringiest conceptions of free speech have always supported restraints in the event of imminent risk to the safety of individuals.

And Trump has been using his social media accounts to foment a putsch.

What's hard to understand about this?
Read 5 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
2 Jan
We all know about how "Advance Australia Fair" was first performed in the middle of a outbreak of race riots, right?
As @LukeLPearson points out here, the cosmetic change of one word is pretty pathetic.

But we've genuinely forgotten the context in which the song was written: an outbreak of anti-Chinese violence in 1870s Sydney, which ultimately led to Federation.

Here's the Sydney Morning Herald's account of its first performance on St. Andrews Day, 30 November 1878:

trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/arti…
Read 21 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
30 Dec 20
Here's a story about how a ship-eating clam helped bring about the Industrial Revolution: Image
The naval shipworm Teredo Navalis is an under-appreciated marker of globalization.

It's a type of highly adapted clam that bores into waterlogged wood using the remnants of its shell as a rasping saw: Image
No one is really sure where in the world it originated, but it seems clear it's an early example of a marine invasive species.

Its marine wood diet suggests that it evolved among mangroves, but we first find written references in ancient Greece where mangroves were absent: Image
Read 37 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
15 Dec 20
One other thing I'd point out with regard to this analysis is that much of it is just driven by the current account surplus.

Throughout 2009-2018, China reinvested a consistent 4%-7% of its BoP surplus in BRI projects.
Before 2009 of course the destination of choice for BoP surplus funds was U.S. Treasuries. 2019 clearly does break that trend too at ~0.75% of the BoP surplus going into BRI projects.
But the decline in 2018 was really pretty much in line with the previous decade. In fact a higher share of the surplus went to BRI that year than in 2015, when 4x the dollar amount was invested.
Read 6 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
15 Dec 20
Am I the only one who finds some of these 1960s numbers just ... not credible?

You see the UK, Spain and Denmark in 1965 spending less than an hour, between both parents, for *all* daily childcare tasks.
That to me looks like sampling bias of some sort, or maybe survey response changes such as whether you consider making dinner to be "childcare" or not. Perhaps also something to do with the decline of domestic service?
I don't want to look like a feckless parent, but did the average parent in Denmark in 1965 really spend no more than ~10 minutes a day "washing, feeding, preparing food, putting to bed, supervising and playing with children"?
Read 4 tweets

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