All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[PwrdOn]

So why have our Asian allies been in a panic since the Afghan departure...anything to do with leaving friends hanging out with the wash?

Well as Kissinger said, the US doesn't have friends, only interests. Those "allies" exist for the sole purpose of giving us reasons to stir up **** with China, and to die in the place of Americans if and when the war does break out. And yeah these countries have all benefited economically from this arrangement, provided things stay relatively calm, but not so calm as to make people question why the American military presence is needed in the first place. But at the end of the day, America has a track record of abandoning its allies the minute it becomes politically expedient, and while the Japanese may believe that they are special and won't end up like the South Vietnamese, Kurds, or Afghans, I don't think many of them really want to end up in a scenario where that faith must be tested.

[4saken1]

Pa. Republicans vote to subpoena voter records and personal information in 2020 election probe



This is clearly an attempt to repeat the audit circus the GQP orchestrated in Arizona, all for the sake of perpetuating Trump's "Big Lie" about the election.

Not to mention suppress the vote. People knowing that their personal information will be accessible to mentally unstable GQP lawmakers will likely cause less of them to cast ballots in the next Election. Their next move would be to try to put actual names to as many votes cast for Biden as possible. If this is allowed to happen, I wouldn't be surprised if this information ended up in the hands of the Proud Boys and/or other far right hate groups.

[Tendrin]

Revisionism. In Trump's drawback the point was and was communicated to leaders especially in Asia that they would have to stand up their own resistance to China if the US was to help them do it.

https://www.lowyinstitute.org/public...atter-who-wins

Trump, master tactician, is the funniest thing I've heard all day.

[Mister Mets]

You also had the Chinese coming to the US and American's taking a sizable chunk of the gold rush profit before and after they processed, essentially making them slaves. Then you had the foreign miner tax ... GDP was stifled.

Each gold rush in the US increased inflation since our money was backed by precious minerals. With that in mind, the net result is a loss in GDP growth. The max being that 1.8% for that 10 year period. Other than a few lucky SOBs that found a vein first, it really only made the rich, more rich.

As for slavery, 80% of the nation’s gross national product was tied to slavery in the 1860s, which was slavery's peak. That 5-50% is a bunch of revisionist garbage.

The pre-Civil War South, produced well over half of all US export earnings with slave-grown cotton. Nothing else. By the 1840s ... the South grew 60% of the world's cotton while 70% was consumed by the British textile industry. The North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the South (textile factories, meat processing, insurance companies, shippers, cotton brokers, equipment manufacturing for tools, etc.). Mix that all together and you will see it damn well near 80% on the conservative side of things.

... Is that really one of the arguments going on here???

I thought the current talking point for returning to bygone eras was the 1950s post-WWII America?

Which is whole other nebulous can of worms ...

The link you provided is an economic historian suggesting that people exaggerate the economic value of slavery.

Coates’s numbers come from Cornell University historian Ed Baptist’s 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told. In a key passage in the book, Baptist purports to add up the total value of economic activity that derived from cotton production, which at $77 million made up about 5 percent of the estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States in 1836. Baptist then committed a fundamental accounting error. He proceeded to double and even triple count intermediate transactions involved in cotton production — things like land purchases for plantations, tools used for cotton production, transportation, insurance, and credit instruments used in each. Eventually that $77 million became $600 million in Baptist’s accounting, or almost half of the entire antebellum economy of the United States.

There’s a crucial problem with Baptist’s approach. The calculation of GDP, the main formulation of national accounts and a representation of the dollar amount of economic activity in a country in a given year, only incorporates the value of final goods and services produced. The rationale for doing so comes from accounting, as the price of the final good already incorporates intermediate transactions that go into its production and distribution. Baptist’s numbers are not only wrong — they reflect a basic unfamiliarity with the meaning and definition of GDP.

He specifically calls out the 80 percent argument as erroneous.

Not to be outdone by Baptist’s erroneous 50 percent estimate, Emory University historian Carol Anderson offered an even-higher figure from the eve of the Civil War itself. According to Anderson, “80 percent of the nation’s gross national product was tied to slavery” in 1860. Following Coates’s testimony using Baptist’s erroneous numbers for 1836, several historians began circulating this estimate from Anderson’s 2016 book White Rage as evidence of the growing influence of slavery on American capitalism in the late antebellum period.

Like Baptist’s book, it too derives from a fundamentally erroneous understanding of national accounts. Anderson’s footnote points to the late historian David Brion Davis’s foreword to a 2010 book on abolitionism. Davis makes a very different claim, however, in noting that the total value of slaves on the eve of the Civil War was equal to 80 percent of a single year’s gross national product (GNP). Anderson appears to have misread Davis’s data point and transformed it into a broader claim about slavery’s share of the entire economy.

While this figure is admittedly astounding and signifies the vast amount of wealth tied up in Southern slavery, Anderson mistakes it for the recurring yearly value of slave-produced economic output. She therefore commits the basic economic error of confusing stocks — by definition, a one-time measurement — and flows, which are measured over time. As we’ve already seen from Baptist’s example though, the actual percentage of GDP (or GNP) tied up in slavery was actually a small fraction of that amount.

[Tendrin]

More people need to read 'the American Slave Coast'.

The American Slave Coast tells the horrific story of how the slavery business in the United States made the reproductive labor of “breeding women” essential to the expansion of the nation. The book shows how slaves’ children, and their children’s children, were human savings accounts that were the basis of money and credit. This was so deeply embedded in the economy of the slave states that it could only be decommissioned by Emancipation, achieved through the bloodiest war in the history of the United States. The American Slave Coast is an alternative history of the United States that presents the slavery business, as well as familiar historical figures and events, in a revealing new light.

Folks really fail to grasp just how deeply wound into the economy slavery was, much of the time deliberately.

https://www.amazon.com/American-Slav.../dp/1613738935

[worstblogever]

So why have our Asian allies been in a panic since the Afghan departure...anything to do with leaving friends hanging out with the wash?

It's probably got a lot to do with the fact that Afghanistan is in Asia, and there's a whole new government with a history of supporting terrorism that is now in power in that country. That would be thanks to Donald Trump ignoring the non-Taliban government that rose to power for about two decades in favor of negotiating solely with and restoring the Taliban into place.

Go figure, he made them panic doing stuff like this all the time, like during his transition period absentmindedly acknowledging Taiwan to undercut decades of policy with China, or pulling joint military operations with South Korea, or meeting in person with Kim Jong Un while saluting a North Korean general.

NO IDEA why Asia could be in a panic over this, or anything else. It's almost like they just react to a stupid old man who kept pulling the levers of power all the time without understanding what they were actually for.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Not to mention suppress the vote. People knowing that their personal information will be accessible to mentally unstable GQP lawmakers will likely cause less of them to cast ballots in the next Election. Their next move would be to try to put actual names to as many votes cast for Biden as possible. If this is allowed to happen, I wouldn't be surprised if this information ended up in the hands of the Proud Boys and/or other far right hate groups.

Exactly. All the more reason this audit madness needs to be nipped in the bud, like immediately. Problem is, if Qpublicans don't get their way, they're sure to go crying to SCOTUS, that much seems inevitable should Dems raise a legal fight. Given the current right wing lean by the Justices, would they actually give their blessing to a scheme where the personal information, if not the actual safety and security of millions upon millions of Americans is put at risk by a political party collectively gone insane and hellbent on winning the next election at any cost? I honestly don't want to think that could happen, but I'd be foolish to dismiss that suspicion out of hand.

[PwrdOn]

Go figure, he made them panic doing stuff like this all the time, like during his transition period absentmindedly acknowledging Hong Kong to undercut decades of policy with China,

Come on, the title of that article specifically names Taiwan, not Hong Kong, as the source of the tension. Not to single you out or anything, but why is it that well-intentioned white people who are so shocked and appalled about the disintegration of freedom and democracy overseas can't bother to get the basic facts right, even when they're spelled out right there.

[worstblogever]

Come on, the title of that article specifically names Taiwan, not Hong Kong, as the source of the tension. Not to single you out or anything, but why is it that well-intentioned white people who are so shocked and appalled about the disintegration of freedom and democracy overseas can't bother to get the basic facts right, even when they're spelled out right there.

Oh, sorry. I posted the wrong name, because I was probably thinking of Hong Kong because of how how Trump promised China he would be silent when they had a violent totalitarian crackdown of protesters in Hong Kong in 2019, then a week later signed a bill drafted in the House to help them, but then started denying money aimed to help them.

The point remains. Trump was a deranged sociopath with no understanding of the world, and constantly was pulling levers without understanding what he was doing.

Like, just outside of Asia, for example, the time he had to be talked out of nuking a hurricane.

[Tendrin]

Like, just outside of Asia, for example, the time he had to be talked out of nuking a hurricane.

He'S A TaCtiCAl GEnIuS

[Gray Lensman]

Oh, sorry. I posted the wrong name, because I was probably thinking of Hong Kong because of how how Trump promised China he would be silent when they had a violent totalitarian crackdown of protesters in Hong Kong in 2019, then a week later signed a bill drafted in the House to help them, but then started denying money aimed to help them.

The point remains. Trump was a deranged sociopath with no understanding of the world, and constantly was pulling levers without understanding what he was doing.

Like, just outside of Asia, for example, the time he had to be talked out of nuking a hurricane.

Even when Trump stumbles into an occasional correct answer, he screws up on the follow through.

[Kirby101]

So why have our Asian allies been in a panic since the Afghan departure...anything to do with leaving friends hanging out with the wash?

Our Asian allies are not in a panic. They were when Trump was in. Asking a question about a false narrative doesn't deserve an answer.

I love how a Trumpers refuse to acknowledge that it was Trump who set the Afghan departure, and now we know he want to withdraw all troops on January 15th, without taking any Afghans. And that little matter of completely abandoning the Kurds.

It's like they ignore reality or something.

[Kirby101]

The link you provided is an economic historian suggesting that people exaggerate the economic value of slavery.



He specifically calls out the 80 percent argument as erroneous.

There is a lot of different calculations about slavery and the GDP, but one thing is clear, slavery was a much bigger part of the US GDP than the California Gold Rush. And I think the falseness of that statement is what is the point here.

[CaptainEurope]

Communists believe in Open Borders

Staring in Berlin Wall.

[Gray Lensman]

Staring in Berlin Wall.

The Libertarian Party believes in open borders - it's an official part of the party platform. Not sure about the Communist Party - the strawman communists that live in certain people's heads take whatever position that person wishes to argue against, but we should stick to actual people and organizations rather than imaginary target dummies.