Are typefaces political? The answer is yes. Think of the great Latin capitals found on Roman monuments. For instance, to take my local one, from the famous Monumentum Ancyranum, that great monument built in Ankara by Galatian admirers of Augustus, rediscovered in part by the Holy Roman Imperial Ambassador Busbecq in the 16th century, and finally uncovered and transcribed by the great German historian Theodor Mommsen in the 19th century:
RERVM × GESTARVM × DIVI × AVGVSTI × QVIBVS × ORBEM × TERRARVM × IMPERIO × POPVLI × ROM × SVBIECIT.
The things done by the god Augustus who subjected the entire earth to the empire of the Roman people.
Augustus is the most magnificent politician of all history. He more or less invented the astonishing fix whereby he took power in one direction while claiming to send it in another direction. Let me quote a bit more of the Res Gestae:
In my sixth and seventh consulships, when I had extinguished the flames of war, after receiving by universal consent the absolute control of affairs, I transferred the republic [res publica] from my own control [potestas] to the will of the senate and the Roman people. For this service on my part I was given the title of Augustus by decree of the senate. ... After that time I took precedence of all in rank [dignitas], but of power [potestas] I possessed no more than those who were my colleagues in any magistracy.
Augustus thereby solved the problem that had afflicted Julius Caesar – assassinated for taking the title of dictator
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Sans is good for captions and tables and blurbs, but not for body text for serious books. The serif font I chose and continue to use for IEA books (excellent and authoritative on all things free market) is Kepler: a cool name and even better looking than Times, new or old, IMHO. Totally agree with the final sentence: “We would be better off if we recognised that words should come with a bit of edge on ‘em.” Not only should, words always come with an edge.
A few of my socialist friends and family consider me to me ‘far right’, I consider this to be a badge of honour coming from Marxists, yet I always use a sans font, I prefer the simplicity and consider it easier to read.
Don’t worry guys if the prog left libs get their way we’ll all be forced to write Arabic before much longer.
No mention of the Kurrent font / script very widely used in German in the first half of the C.20th, apparently taught in schools. More difficult to read than Gothic.
I was always told that sans-serif should be used for headings but serif used for text as it was far easier to read.
Serifs are supposed to make it easier to read texts by serving as guiding bars for the eyes when reading a line. That’s why professionally typeset texts use them while dingbats who excel in Word and nothing else tend to avoid them.
Aside: Hitler specifically abolished the traditional German printed alphabet because “It’s really Jewish!” (“die Schwabacher Judenlettern”). But antifascists don’t care about such details: It’s German. Therefore, it must be Nazi stuff! Mini-scandals always happen in the German letftoid press (all MSM) when someone dares to use German letters for anything new in public.
Aside²: It’s not possible to render traditional German printing correctly in Unicode because the Unicode consortium has intentionally refused to add all the necessary characters. By strange coincidence, they also refused to add proper support for printed Japanese.
Some wars are really never supposed to end. Imagine we’d all stop hunting imaginary fascists, how many more actually sensible things we could do with all the additional time we now had available.
Suppose we follow the style of the Paris Metro – Guimard-Metropolitain. Government docs unreadble but stylish.
I wonder how replicable the psychologist’s research on satirical font really is?
Too esoteric (recondite, abstruse) for me on Sunday morning,
“Would you prefer if it if the Government were traditional, authoritative and knowledgeable? I think I would.”
On balance, I think I wouldn’t. I think it’s a good thing that the people who tend to want to be rule makers are a bit thick. Otherwise, we’d all be their slaves.
Imagine a track and trace app required, designed, built and implemented by traditional, authoritative and knowledgeable control freaks. No, thanks.
OK, so in theory the powers would be split between the legislative and the executive, but if you believe separation of powers is ever really a thing, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.
Happy Easter, all ❤️
Likewise.
I want political leaders to be competent at doing the jobs we choose to delegate to them. I don’t want to be “led”. The only guarantee is the continued vigilance and resistance of the people to state overreach. We need a change of mindset. Maybe this is starting to become more widespread.
Separation of powers is obviously a Potemkin-style installation if the executive is just some set of guys parliament delegated certain task to, that is, some set of guys who control a parliamentary majority.
The German Empire had separation of powers: The emperor appointed the chancellor who was the only proper empire government official. The legislative bodies where the council of the representatives of the governments of the German states (Bundesrat, federal council) and the Reichstag (parliament). The empire was divided into constituencies whose male residents above 25¹ voted for an MP. If no candidate got a majority of the votes, another vote was held to select one of the two candidates which had gotten the most votes of the first round.
There’s also a separation of powers in the USA, albeit a weaker one, because the president belongs to a political party and can usually count on the MPs of the same party for support.
¹ Active soldiers, inmates and people on benefits were excluded.
It seems as if the genuinely earnest, non-authoritative have no where to turn for fonts.
So please would DS switch to Times New Roman for the indulgence of its traditional, authorative and knowledgeable readership and also to different spacing after punctuation marks. Please?
I exert my personal power and responsibility to ease my reading of most websites, including Daily Sceptic. I switch to “Reader” view and then I control the font type and size. No need to wait for Daily Sceptic web-masters have their arguments with others about this issue.
Thanks for the tip RMS.
i just wish i knew how
Brilliant!
But the article is in a sans serif font. Does this prove that DS is a crypto-communist outfit after all??
Tis true, we demand an answer from Toby! Is DS doing ‘a Kaa’ on us? 🙂