Quotulatiousness

July 22, 2018

Trump and Putin … with all this smoke, there has to be a smoking gun, right?

Filed under: Media, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh pours cold water on the still-smouldering hopes of the “smoking gun” enthusiasts:

If the president can be found guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors” that is another thing, but that would require courtroom-worthy evidence of action, as opposed to indications of presidential doctrine or feeling or even strong hints of compromised personal interest. Trump did behave in Helsinki like someone who is beholden to Russia, or who is anxious for a rapprochement with Putin’s state. Yet he was, and this could not have come as a surprise, quick to try reversing himself later — emphasizing how tough he has been with Russia and how tough he is prepared to continue to be. Grrr!

Since I’m not on a diet of television news, I tend to interpret this as Trumpian “leadership” technique. They are the actions of someone who is convinced that anything can be accomplished by means of erratic emotional style and business-literature verbal tactics. These include cheap personal praise for negotiating opponents, which has become a perfectly foreseeable theme of Trump as a diplomat. (The tactical corollary is that very popular or highly esteemed people are especially vulnerable to outbursts of surprise criticism, and that has been a feature of Trump, too.)

It does not really cost the United States anything for Trump to praise Putin as skilled and strong (as a tyrant, he has been effective at maintaining domestic moral legitimacy, even if judged by the cost in shed blood) or to portray Kim Jong Un as a young man coping with terrible responsibilities. (Trump’s distaste for NATO is more dangerous as rhetoric, but did the other member nations forget for a while that political legitimacy within the United States is a prerequisite for the organization’s existence? If in the long run we devote a little more attention to the necessary housekeeping, Trump may have done the world a service.)

[…] The midterm congressional elections will be held with a long-forgotten fact re-emerging in the American popular consciousness: that much of the president’s power to set foreign policy and foul up trade is actually the property of Congress, and could be reclaimed after a century of careless delegation.

Perhaps some Americans are beginning to consider that it does not matter most whether you are with the good guys in the Trump/anti-Trump drama. Which is not to say you do not want to be one of the good guys. But the opportunity for American millennials, considered as a generation on the cusp of electoral dominance, is not just to kick Trump out, but to renovate the presidency so that the republic can survive having an unsuitable or even compromised person as president. Everybody got that? Are we good? Eyes on the ball, people.

Austro-Hungarian Artillery – Choctaw Code Talkers I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 21 Jul 2018

Debunking the “King Cotton” school of history

Filed under: Economics, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the current issue of Reason, Dierdre McCloskey discusses the claim that America became rich only or primarily due to exploitation of slave labour in the south:

Map showing which areas of the United States did and did not allow slavery between January 1861 to February 4 1861. On February 4 1861, the Confederate States of America was created. Territories and states which had not specifically banned slavery are colored red/pink.
Map by Golbez, via Wikimedia Commons.

In his second inaugural, Abraham Lincoln declared that “if God wills that [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk…as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”

It is a noble sentiment. Yet the economic idea implied — that exploitation made us rich — is mistaken. Slavery made a few Southerners rich; a few Northerners, too. But it was ingenuity and innovation that enriched Americans generally, including at last the descendants of the slaves.

It’s hard to dispel the idea embedded in Lincoln’s poetry. TeachUSHistory.org assumes “that northern finance made the Cotton Kingdom possible” because “northern factories required that cotton.” The idea underlies recent books of a new King Cotton school of history: Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (Harvard University Press), Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf), and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books).

The rise of capitalism depended, the King Cottoners claim, on the making of cotton cloth in Manchester, England, and Manchester, New Hampshire. The raw cotton, they say, could come only from the South. The growing of cotton, in turn, is said to have depended on slavery. The conclusion — just as our good friends on the left have been saying all these years — is that capitalism was conceived in sin, the sin of slavery.

Yet each step in the logic of the King Cotton historians is mistaken. The enrichment of the modern world did not depend on cotton textiles. Cotton mills, true, were pioneers of some industrial techniques, techniques applied to wool and linen as well. And many other techniques, in iron making and engineering and mining and farming, had nothing to do with cotton. Britain in 1790 and the U.S. in 1860 were not nation-sized cotton mills.

Nor is it true that if a supply chain is interrupted there are no possible substitutes. Such is the theory behind strategic bombing, as of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Yet only in the short run is it “necessary” for a good to come from a particular region by a particular route. A missing link can be replaced, as in fact it was during the blockade of raw cotton from the South during the war. British and other European manufacturers turned to Egypt to provide some of what the South could not.

“Now We Are Free” – Bagpipe cover (Gladiator theme) | The Snake Charmer

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

TheSnakeCharmer
Published on 20 Nov 2016

My take on this beautiful Gladiator theme song “Now we are free” with Bagpipes!
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From the comments: “Vignesh babu – Play at 0.75x and enjoy it and thank me later”.

QotD: A touching naivety

Filed under: Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the typical “Progressive” continues to imagine the state to exist in the same way that a four-year old child imagines Santa Claus to exist: as a super-human force for good that possesses a supernatural capacity for pursuing and achieving that good. There is, in practice, no epistemological difference between the belief of many children that dusk on December 24th causes reindeer to fly and the belief of many adults that minimum-wage legislation causes the incomes of all low-skilled workers to rise. Higher-skilled workers, and the labor unions that represent them – as well as some firms that use fewer low-skilled workers than are used by their competitors – are only too happy to promote this juvenile fantasy.

Don Boudreaux, “Bonus Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-09-04.

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