Media Freaks Out Because Rick Perry Said that Fossil Fuels Provide Energy to Poor Countries, Which Allows Them to Light the Streets, Which Reduces Crime

Yup-- they're freaking out about this.

The fact that this is all 100% true of course does not even begin to faze them.

"I just got back from Africa, I’m going to finish up with this, because I think I heard a lady say there are people dying. Let me tell you where people are dying, is in Africa, because of the lack of energy they have there. And it’s going to take fossil fuels to push power out into those villages in Africa, where a young girl told me to my face, ‘one of the reasons that electricity is so important to me is not only because I’m not going to have to try to read by the light of a fire and have those fumes literally killing people.’ But also from the standpoint of sexual assault. When the lights are on, when you have light that shines, the righteousness, if you will, on those types of acts. So from the standpoint of how you really affect people’s lives, fossil fuels is going to play a role in that. I happen to think it’s going to play a positive role."

Okay, let me clue these ignorant savages in.

A couple of years ago I got interested in "the night" as a subject, and I read a couple of interesting books. One was Evening's Empire: The History of Night and the other was At Day's Close: Night in Times Past.

I also read another book on the coming of lights -- gas and then electric city lighting -- but I forget what that one was called. It has a light bulb as its cover image, though.

Fascinating subject.

I don't know where I'm getting these particular facts from, but it's from one of those books, and maybe several of them.

The entire point of city lighting was to reduce crime. There was literally no other reason for the illumination of cities. Stuff like "It lets people shop until later in the day" was not the reason for city lighting -- it was only a side-effect of it. When later cities would propose night illumination, keeping the markets open later might be mentioned as another benefit, but the first two cities (London and Paris -- I forget the order) to pay the big costs for city lighting did it as a crime-prevention measure.

Unlighted cities were dangerous -- not only is night generally dark, but it's especially dark in cities where six or even eight story buildings (remember, this is pre-elevator and pre-steel-framing) would block out even starlight and cast deep shadows. Plus, add in the obscuring effect of so many chimneys pumping dark smoke into the air.

People generally were not even allowed out in the streets at night. There were strict curfews. Often, only doctors attending to a patient in need of immediate help were permitted out at night, or those whose jobs had to be performed at night (like the nightsoil gatherers). Any others would be arrested.

When people did go "abroad at night" (as they called it), they usually had to hire a linkboy (a torch-bearer) to light their way. Sometimes these linkboys were in cahoots with street-gangs and would lead the person who hired them into an alley to be robbed.

There were all sorts of laws designed to reduce muggings and murders at night, like the outlawing of wearing any kind of hood or anything that could disguise your face in shadows at night.

Before gas lighting, Paris, I think, tried to combat the dangerous darkness of nighttime by mandating that every single person who had a window facing the street must keep candles lit in the window all through the night -- a fairly expensive proposition for people, as candles, even the cheap tallow ones, were pretty expensive. Especially burning four or five of them per night. (And think about having to wake-up multiple times to light a fresh candles, after the old ones had burned down.)

They passed this law to provide at least some feeble illumination at night. And if you can imagine how weak the light of a candle in a window of a house is as far as lighting up the street, and yet still tried to enforce this law to combat the darkness, that tells you how serious they took the idea that urban darkness equals violent crime.

When London and Paris began putting in gas lines to feed gas-burning streetlights, this massive expense was undertaken solely for the purpose of fighting crime.

So yeah -- the media is really, really smart, and knows everything about all things, and you should definitely join in in their gleefully ignorant mockery of someone who's actually just gotten back from a part of the world without electric lighting, relaying the complaints of the locals about the hazards of a world with no reliable, cheap light at night.

Read a fucking book once in a while, you pig-ignorant, snaggle-toothed giggling Low-T retard savages.

posted by Ace at 05:05 PM

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