The article shows an interesting collection of different types of barbed wire with a name on each one. The article claims that different types of barbed wire allowed ranchers to tell at a glance if the land and animals belonged to them. Unfortunately, that theory is completely made up and wrong. The names on the barbed wire are the manufacturers not the ranchers. Different manufacturers produced different styles of wires due to patents and functionality reasons.
For instance, the first wire in the article is labeled "Kelly loose barb". That corresponds to the Michael Kelly patent [1]. The next name is Scutt, describing the improved barbed wire invented by H. B. Scutt [2].
Yes. The history of barbed wire is well known, and this article misses it.
For cattle operations, barbed wire is somewhat obsolete, anyway. There's a wire mesh called "King Ranch fencing".[1] No barbs, but strong enough to contain cattle. With fewer scrape marks, the leather is more valuable. No risk of animals caught in barbed wire. Less sagging wire.
"We don't fix fence, we build fence" - King Ranch slogan.
I have two 330' rolls of a similar Red Brand field fence I bought about 20 years ago, 660' total of it like the roll in the listing. I paid $75 for each 330' roll.
I think mine is the Monarch Field Fence roll with the graduated spacing beginning with 3" at the bottom. The same rolls sell for more than $300 each today according to that site.
Interesting that it has the Red Brand logo on a roll that doesn't use Red Brand's knotting. They do offer the same wire knot styles but the photo clearly shows a different style on that roll.
I prefer to buy US made wire products but with that said how would I know whether my supplier bought counterfeit rolls sold with domestic branding? The fact that they use a Red Brand photo front and center and then the other photos of their palletized rolls don't have any examples of rolls with the red top wire suggests they just "borrowed" the photo for the brand recognition it brings.
I can see how the price difference makes the Chinese knock-off very attractive for someone who is fencing a large area. I think as long as the strand gauges and wire strengths are similar I see no reason why the Chinese wire rolls would be an unattractive option. A fence serves to deter traffic (foot traffic from people or animal traffic on trails) from one plot to another and there are many different types of fencing materials that are effective. Here at home I have several types of fencing including chain link, barbed wire, field fence, cattle panels and polyethylene deer fence. It depends on the objective. On my own property I have one stretch of field fence (like the rolls in your post) that is decades old and in need of replacement. The cedar posts are old and loose, staples have fallen out and the fence material is largely vegetation-supported today. Once I remove all the birdshit hackberries, elm, privet, and cedar that has grown up over the decades, the wire will lay itself down and take a well-earned break.
I bought my rolls of wire to replace that stretch a long time ago and just haven't found the time to do it, yet. I'll get there one day.
Welcome to the effects of two decades of ZIRP with a Trumpflation cherry on top. Farm stuff, or really anything that isn't plastic consumer crap, has shot through the roof. Steel has practically become a precious metal. Imagine if all that monetary creation had at least been spent on infrastructure, rather than being mostly squandered on the Manhattan welfare program.
The CARES Act passed the Senate unanimously. If Trump caused inflation due to profligate spending, he did so with plenty of help from Democrats. He couldn't have stopped it even if he wanted to, that's far past the veto proof majority.
Sure, everyone got their loot on. But each of its parts came from somewhere, and the dynamic of dumping so much money towards PPP "loans" feels right in line with the past decades of Republican upper class welfare. To me it was those PPP "loans" that kicked off the price inflation for manufactured capital goods (if you didn't have something to take section 179 accelerated depreciation on, then your forgiven PPP loan would have been taxable income).
Being fiscally conservative in a way that gets no play in the mainstream political discourse, and given how much the current narrative is hanging the now-apparent price inflation on the current administration (including how the incompetent Democratic party is just going along with it!), I'd say it's worth coining a term that points to when that monetary inflation actually occurred. Despite what those benefiting from all of the monetary creation would have you believe, these effects have causes!
Apart from CARES there was also interest rates. I had been cautiously optimistic that Trump was actually going to buck the trend there and continue pulling up from ZIRP (hence the hate from the MSM). But nope, as soon as that line started to go down, it was printing press time. Rates are not under the control of the President directly, but there is obviously significant influence.
There's also the issue of anti-leadership paralyzing society (thus the economy) much more than it had to be. A little positive leadership would have given Trump a shoe-in second term from the war/crisis time boost, but the dude only knew how to continue with the spiteful divisive poor-me whinging from the campaign.
(Related to this subject, I'll give positive credit for the steel tariffs as something that needed to be done. It was yet another spike in prices, but that was really only revealing what ZIRP had already hollowed out)
in austria, the farms where i lived used electric wires with a weak current that you can feel but doesn't hurt. (i got buzzed at least once as a 7 year old trying to cross a fence). but i suppose on those huge ranches, getting electricity out there is probably not very practical.
That looks like normal dog fence and you barbwire the top for cattle.
It costs a lot so after spending that money it's normal [1] to put barbed wire on top. The 'dog' refers to the smaller spacing at the bottom.
[1] By normal that's what I've seen. Can't confirm it's more than 50%. You might not do it for internal fencing. - Picture of a bespoke cow with barb and dog fence - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ratters1968/16377626013
We don't barbwire ours because we have (miniature) goats.
I understood that the labels were brand names, but I thought the article was saying that the ranchers deliberately used different brands of barb wire because it made it easy to distinguish their holdings. I don't know if they did.
Ranchers go to the local store and buy whatever barb wire is in stock. Whatever the owner of the store buys is what they get. There may be more than one store, the store may order from different manufactures, and the store may have more than one type in stock (with different marketing trying to convince you one is better than the other) - but in the end it is all what the store has in stock. I'm going to count the local Sears catalog (and others) as a local store for this discussion.
The important key is farmers don't consult with others to be intentionally different. (farmers will consult with each other but that is only to see what works for someone else to copy it - if a farmer has barbed wire that doesn't work they will replace it and tell the neighbors). They all have the same set of choices to work with.
Farmers also have no reason to care if their fence is different. They know where their land is (and often are leasing land that someone else built the fence). Barbed wire isn't something that a dishonest farmer would steel - it gets harder to work with after it has been put up once so a fresh roll is better.
This was interesting but I don't know if semiotics is a large part of the essay. I was hoping to get a deconstruction of barbed wire fence as a security measure in different parts of the world. My experience living in South Africa for a while was that to an American eye, barbed wire on top of a wall codes as "this neighborhood is unsafe". To a South African it codes as "this home is protected and safe" -- very different reactions. There were a few houses in my neighborhood in Cape Town that refused barbed wire, and I always respected them immensely and thought of them as sort of hold-overs from a less violent period in the country's history.
In SA, barbed wire is a good start. You’ve left off electric fence, cameras, manned boom gates and security company. And security WhatsApp groups. What am I missing? Some have guns or double layers of the above. Many live in security complexes inside the fenced off areas. Oh yes, burglar bars. And security alarm linked to the security company.
The above doesn’t always work. You need to ensure the gates can’t be crowbarred off. Happened to us a few times. The amount of IQ allocated to breaking in is amazing. Serious innovation on the criminal side. Think of your smartest friends very keen to get into your house and working together for years on how to do it.
Top recipe: you force some people to have a very shit life, selection based on race. Some lawlessness is naturally bred and in some cases encouraged. You then take away the rules that made it shit but you leave the economic, societal and mental damage of a polarised society. You start uplifting people but you mainly focus on a small group and do little to help most people. You allow education to go south because teachers are unionised and you want their votes. You demonstrate corruption at the highest levels and then dismantle the parts of the law meant to fight it. You let the economy grow too slowly because you’re so focused on cutting pieces of the pie for yourself that you forget to grow it. You let public health and policing go to waste, so only wealthy have access to good healthcare, education, security. You break the electricity generation capacity through corruption. Poverty never really gets fixed because a kid in a rural village has a massive hill to climb to be economically active. You also add other broken countries nearby so you end up with a lot of job seekers. Add some resentment of those people.
The kids who make it through all that to e.g. get a job in a bank are absolute heroes.
Great question. https://www.amazon.com/History-South-Africa-Fourth/dp/030018... is an excellent book that digs in on this and other topics about SA if you’re interested in learning more about this extremely complex question and country. As residents often say, it’s especially a heartbreak because the country has so much going for it.
America, except the natives you stole the land from and the black people you enslaved are one and the same, and Jim Crow didn't end until after the Soviet Union fell/Transformers aired, and you're on a continent that the West has a pathological inclination to exploit.
The righteous fury of those denied the dignity of land and agency burns a cultural brand into the skin of the body politic, an endemic disregard for the "rules-based order" that orders them to the back of the line (however it's said and whoever has the megaphone). The people who benefit, only willing to provide an an ounce of the pound of cure necessary, mask-and-hazmat-suit-up to weather the plague they wrought. It looks ridiculous because it is.
> to an American eye, barbed wire on top of a wall codes as "this neighborhood is unsafe". To a South African it codes as "this home is protected and safe" -- very different reactions
If the neighborhood is safe, the barbed wire would be unnecessary to make the home protected and safe. Not really sure why the distinction is necessary. In your South African's take, what happens when you leave the protected and safe property. To me that means you are stepping into an unsafe neighborhood.
You’ve definitely never lived in SA with that comment. Everywhere in the world security is just a feeling, but SA explores just how far feelings can be from reality quite often.
Everywhere in the world, security is a collective effort and a product of mutual trust. SA happens when a minority refuses to exchange disproportionate power for trust. Israel is another example.
In Australia I mostly see razor wire as "this is infrastructure". Ports, substations, machinery yards, dams, smelters, oil refineries, the back of police stations, hospitals, and that sort of thing.
Barbed wire isn't widely used for security anymore, so it's mostly just on farms, and around here it's usually supplemented by an electric fence. In fact, half our fences at home were just a single length of barbed wire at the top with regular fencing wire for everything else.
In my experience around Cape Town, it's both: High security (or more commonly electric fencing in affluent neighbourhoods) on a single house means the house is safe (or the owners are paranoid). High security on every house in the neighborhood means high crime rate in the neighborhood.
It also don't think crime stats went up much over the last decades in general (may be different in specific neighborhoods), but there is definitely more fear of safety that leads to more security.
I agree that the perception, (and implied acknowledgment) of violence is a very interesting factor — and I would not be surprised if the very act of building a lot of visible security features near a building overall increases the rate of some sorts of crime.
That said, you’re a little out of date on SA - violent crime across the country was relatively stable for a decade or two, but since 2021, violent crimes across SA have spiked, and now even Cape Town is in the 20 most dangerous towns in the world, and in the top 10 murder / capita towns in the world.
Murder rates are now around half of what it was 30 years ago, while at the same time security around homes went up significantly (and most new developments are security estates). The increase in murder rate over the last 3 years is not significant on that scale.
Yeah, to me the headline is just completely wrong and misleading.
None of this has anything to do with semiotics. I was expecting the exact same thing as you -- semiotics would be about what does seeing barbed wire in specific spaces/contexts mean to different groups of people?
What are its associations with prisons, compounds, neighborhoods, safety, security, the state, private security, militarization, crime, farming, cattle, trespassing, the American West, freedom to roam, and so forth? When you see barbed wire, does it make you feel safe or nervous or scared? How does that change if it's in a residential neighborhood vs. around a military base?
Your experience in South Africa is a perfect example -- thanks for sharing.
I think you’re reading a bit too much into this. Reasons for barbed or not vary. (or broken bottles laid in concrete on top of a wall, which is something else you’ll see in SA) I don’t think houses necessarily refuse barbed wire. They just have other security controls.
Not related to TFA but the word "semiotics" to me is very evocative of this set of academic subjects in the 70s that were just kind of shelved. Right along with cybernetics or women's lib. Here in Guatemala there was a used book fair and in the English section they had a book for 80 cents about cybernetics, which I've neglected to read, but now think I ought to read soon :)
Also networks, Bucky Fullerism, Eastern philosophy, mind maps, UNIX and chaos theory gaining momentum, etc. They seem somewhat dated now, but in a way they've diffused through our culture so extensively that they're just part of the background and nobody raises an eyebrow at them anymore. The 70s had a zeal for cool ideas that we just don't have anymore.
In the early 00s I lived in the Washington DC suburbs, and saw first hand how all the old Kremlinologists and Russia specialists were being pensioned off and retired. I'd attend yard sales and there'd be stacks of books about Russian culture, politics, literature, everything. Pashto was hot, and Pushkin was not.
Today, they need Kremlinologists and Russian speakers all over again.
I don't think Deleuze and Guattari actually talk about it directly, but barbed wire seems like a perfect example of a technology that turns smooth space into striated space. Basically smooth spaces are vast and open, like the sea or the great plains, whereas striated spaces are ones organized, put under a grid, etc.
This is a big deal with fish passage restoration. Rectangular farmland led to dykes that straitened out streams and rivers. Straight waterways flow faster and wash away sediment. This makes it harder for fish to swim upstream while leaving fewer places to rest and spawn. There is a fair amount of restoration work going on in the PNW to try and undo this, and the results I've seen have been promising.
Yeah -- if you knew whose fence you were connected to then you could identify the line and to whom you would be ringing when you connected your phone to it.
I read an article a long time ago that drew a direct correlation between the need to contain/separate livestock in the American West and the battlefields of World War I.
Basically, as settlers moved westward, they needed to contain their livestock as well as separate sheep and cows. Sheep apparently eat grass down to the ground whereas cows don't, thus sheep would deprive cows of food.
So, barbed wire was developed for this purpose and the military saw the utility of it as well. Fast-forward to WWI and the vast battlefields there and needing an inexpensive way to slow enemy advances on foot. This led to the development of tanks to overcome the barbed wire obstacles. Machine guns also became more useful as a way to spray large areas when attacking troops were held up by the obstacles.
If the author is reading this, you really should check out the barbed wire exhibits at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City [1] and the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum in LaCrosse, KS [2]. Next-level.
Barbed wire fence is a great example of technology that was originally meant for capitalist ends - specifically, to allow for the slicing up of a commons for private use - eventually employed to literally rip apart people.
Not just people but wildlife and plenty of them. Since the American Cheetah went extinct ~10,000 years ago, Pronghorns ("American Antelope") have probably not known a worse enemy than barbed wire across the American West which is rarely laid out in such way that allow Pronghorns to duck under safely.
To better put it, I'll just quote from The Monkey Wrench Gang by Eddward Abbey:
“Who invented barbed wire anyhow?” Hayduke asked. “It was a man named J. F. Glidden done it; took out his patent back in 1874.” An immediate success, that barbwire. Now the antelope die by the thousands, the bighorn sheep perish by the hundreds every winter from Alberta down to Arizona, because fencing cuts off their escape from blizzard and drought. And coyotes too, and golden eagles, and peasant soldiers on the coils of concertina wire, victims of the same fat evil the wide world over, hang dead on the barbed and tetanous steel"
For instance, the first wire in the article is labeled "Kelly loose barb". That corresponds to the Michael Kelly patent [1]. The next name is Scutt, describing the improved barbed wire invented by H. B. Scutt [2].
[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US283614A [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US195239A