Soriek
2mo ago
Pretty much just paraphrasing our founder:
“The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respected Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges”
-George Washington
OG approved.
Drawing Connections between Distant Events
One of the things I find most exciting about history is when I can find some underemphasized connection between seemingly unrelated things happening in far flung places. Here’s a few examples, widely ranging in how specific/general they are:
1: The Battle of the Shimonoseki Straits:
During the late Tokugawa Shogunate the rogue Chōshū clan started opening fire on western ships. This was after we had declared Japan officially open, so the US promptly sent a warship to battle the Chōshū and ultimately beat them into submission. What makes this interesting? It happened on July 16th, 1863, almost immediately after the Battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, meaning that Lincoln didn’t learn of two pivotal victories that July but rather three. The scope of the Civil War was simply so huge that we entirely forget America was even both fighting and winning against foreign powers at the exact same time.
2: Spanish Silver in Beijing:
A lot of people know the story of how Spain mined so much gold and silver in Mexico and Peru that it caused them to deal with inflation, and played a role in their repeated bankruptcies in the sixteenth century.
Less talked about is the impact of the Potosí mines on China. After setting up their colony in the Philippines, the Spanish started buying up Chinese goods in exchange for their limitless supply of Bolivian silver, which soon flooded into China and came to replace their own paper currency. This created a critical dependency on problems happening on the other side of the world; during the 30 years war Spain halted the distribution of silver so they could ensure they had enough to wage the war. China, which continued to buy imports with silver, rapidly found its money base dwindle, as well as their ability to pay the military to keep order. Unfortunately, at the same time they got hit with droughts, famines, and various other calamities. How serious was the fallout?
taxes and foreign trade were paid in silver. In ten years the peasants who constituted the largest tax base for the country became four times poorer than before.
There were peasant uprisings. Li Zicheng raided Beijing, the last Ming Emperor hanged himself in the Beihai Park and the Manchu were called in to support the Ming and crack down on the rebels. They did put down the rebels, but didn’t relinquish the power and established themselves as the new Qing empire.
3: Stalin’s Two Fronts:
Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 in a secret agreement with the Soviet Union, but the USSR itself didn’t invade until September 17th. Why the wait? The USSR was fighting a totally different war over with Japan. The Soviet military leadership was in disarray and Stalin made the remarkable choice of replacing the commander with a little known peasant officer named Georgy Zhukov whose career had shot up mostly as a result of the purges taking out other officers. Zhukov ended up being a military genuis and turned the conflict around at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. A ceasefire was settled on the 16th and the USSR invaded Poland the very next day. Stalin was obsessed with avoiding a two front war and the question remains, if they hadn’t won such a commanding upset in Khalkin Gol, can we be certain the USSR would have proceeded with the invasion in Poland?
On the other side, the ceasefire meant that the North Strike faction in the Japanese military finally lost out to the Spread South faction, who pushed for Japan to rapidly proceed into Southeast Asia, where conflict inevitably waited with British Malaya and American Philippines.
4: Ghana, Sumatra, and Salem:
Back in the day the Dutch controlled part of Ghana and was allied with the Ashanti Empire, while the British controlled another part of the country and was allied with the Fante Confederacy. Eventually, in a well meaning effort to standardize custom duties and create space between the two countries forts so as to avoid conflict, the Dutch and English swapped some land around. Suddenly the Dutch found themselves controlling land with Fante, who did not like being their subjects, or having to deal with the Ashanti, who had been their enemy forever. With conflict flaring up, what previously had been one of the most productive colonies in the Dutch Empire suddenly became a huge pain, leading to the Dutch ceding it to the English only a few years later.
This skirmish between two tribes of under a million people each led to a treaty with ripples from West Africa to Indonesia all the way to North America. In Ghana it led to three more Anglo-Ashanti Wars, finally resulting in the full English conquest of the Gold Coast, which would remain under British control until 1957, with Ghanian troops fighting for the British Empire in places as far flung as Ethiopia and Myanmar.
On the other side of the world, in exchange for taking the rest of the Gold Coast, England recognized the Netherlands’ full conquest of Sumatra in Indonesia, which led to a brutal three decade war of conquest, and finalized Dutch control over the entire Indonesian archipelago, which did not become independent until 1949. This particular conquest also had further repercussions for the global spice trade because Aceh was the world’s largest supplier of pepper.
In fact, there had been a multi-million dollar pepper trade between Aceh and, of all places, Salem, Massachusetts. This was such a relevant market that Andrew Jackson sent gunships not once but twice to Aceh to take vengeance on pirates raiding the pepper traders. With the Dutch asserting full control over the industry and continuously raising trade barriers, the experience of being at the whims of European trade restrictions in overseas markets helped build towards American policy makers’ promotion of the Open Door Policy and even overseas colonization.
If there are any other interesting connections across distance or time, share them here! I’m an avid collector.
Soriek
3mo ago
Ecuador
In the wake of the escape of a major cartel leader, accompanied by violent prison uprisings and a staff of newscasters being taken hostage on live TV, President Daniel Noboa has declared war on the cartels. A state of emergency has been stretched across the country and more than 1000 alleged gang members have been arrested. The cartels have responded in kind; a prosecutor investigating them was just assassinated right before i posted this even. Noboa has been not subtle at all that he’s hoping to copy El Salvador’s Bukele, so this is Bukele watchers’ opportunity to see what this looks like in a different country (assuming Noboa himself isn’t crooked, which is a big if).
My guess is: substantially different. Ecuador is much bigger than El Salvador, both geographically and in terms of population, and the bad guys don’t all tattoo their gang membership right on their face. More to the point, MS-13’s brutality I think causes people to overestimate their capacity. In reality, they’re basically a highly murderous but relatively small time, impoverished extortion racket. They go up to a civilian or store or whatever and demand protection money. Fighting a transnational cartel is a completely different thing. The gangs in Ecuador are vastly better financed and armed, and we have only to look at Colombia to get a quick comparison of what it looks like trying to fight that with every variety of tough on crime policy there is. On the other hand, the cartels are very recently established in Ecuador, so maybe they don’t have the same kind of systematic, built up entrenchment of the criminal world.
Ecuador
New President Daniel Noboa has started things off with a huge focus on law and order in response to the rise of organized crime in recent years (“The murder rate quadrupled from 2018 to 2022, while last year became the most violent yet with 7,500 homicides in the country of about 18 million people.”) . He has begun by announcing a referendum on new policies dealing with crime:
The referendum would seek approval from voters on lengthening prison sentences for serious crimes like homicide and arms trafficking, among others, as well for Ecuador's military to eradicate international criminal groups operating in the country, according to Noboa's letter to the court.
Noboa has also now announced the construction of two new maximum security prisons, with a not-exactly subtle nod to Bukele’s policies over in El Salvador:
He said the buildings would be exactly the same as a prison built by El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who has led a controversial crackdown on gangs in his Central American country.
"The prisons will allow for the division, proper isolation of people," said the 36-year-old Noboa, who took office in November, speaking in a radio interview.
"For all the Bukele lovers, it is an identical prison," to those he has built, added Noboa.
To make even more room, Noboa says they will also deport over a thousand foreigners in prison back to the surrounding countries they came from (no word on those receiving countries feel about it). By design the new prisons will be on the coast, far away from the heart of the worst of the violence, in hopes it will make it harder for gangs to liberate their members.
Speaking of which, the leader of the notorious Los Choneros cartel was just liberated from prison by his fellow gang members. People are freaking out, probably understandably, and Noboa has declared a 60 day state of emergency for the leader to be found. Having only just come out of a prolonged state of emergency under Noboa’s predecessor Lasso, apparently it’s a state Ecuadorians must get used to. Given that the previous state of emergency gave the military powers of internal law enforcement, I guess it makes the whole referendum a little redundant.
The cartels have responded in kind with major prison uprisings holding over 130 prison staff hostage and ghastly footage of them breaking into a news broadcasting station and holding the staff hostage on live TV. President Noboa has now declared they are at war with the cartels and have detained hundreds of alleged gang members. It's been a really crazy few days.
Soriek
3mo ago
North Korea
Kim Jong Un says he no longer wants to reunify with South Korea:
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country would no longer pursue reconciliation with South Korea and called for rewriting the North’s constitution to eliminate the idea of shared statehood between the war-divided countries, state media said Tuesday.
The historic step to discard a decades-long pursuit of a peaceful unification, which was based on a sense of national homogeneity shared by both Koreas, comes amid heightened tensions where the pace of both Kim’s weapons development and the South’s military exercises with the United States have intensified in a tit-for-tat.
Not that all that much progress was happening towards reunification before, but still I guess its newsworthy.
North Korea has also sent its Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui to Russia to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In the west this has raised suspicions on North Korea provided more weaponry for Russia in the Ukraine conflict.
Soriek
3mo ago
Taiwan
Taiwan held their latest election on Saturday with China’s presence breathing down the nation’s neck. The ruling Democrat Progressive Party was running on the strongest pro-independence platform whereas the KMT (successor of the form Chiang Kai-Shek dictatorship ruling party) ran on conciliating with China and the Taiwanese Peoples Party (TPP) ran on ignoring the China issue and focusing on Taiwan (previously Foxconn billionaire owner Terry Gou was running an independent campaign on really conciliating with China, but he dropped out). Despite China repeatedly saying they would consider a DPP victory provocative, voters handed the Democrats their third victory in a row. This will elevate current Vice President Lai Ching-te to the Presidency.
However, they will lack a majority in Congress and in fact will only have 51 seats to KMT’s 52. The really interesting result was the previously marginal Taiwanese People’s Party actually doubling its share of the vote from the 2020 election all the way up to 26.45%, drawn mostly from the youth vote, which will earn the party 8 seats in the legislature. Needless to say DPP will have to work together with at least some members of TPP to get anything done, which isn’t a bad thing. TPP won’t likely have any interest in DPP’s pro independence agenda, but a lot of that it rhetorical anyway - the DPP hasn’t made any serious moves in the previous two terms to move towards independence in any real way.
The real question will be how China reacts. They were apparently futzing around and removing preferential tariffs from Taiwanese goods as the voting drew nearer, so more trade war-esque saber rattling is conceivable, along with the same song and dance they do of flying jets around to get everyone worked up. The other country China has been inching closer to conflict with, the Philippines, wished President Ching-Te a public congratulations, which of course has also infuriated China.
Soriek
3mo ago
Argentina
There was a huge general strike on Wednesday against Milei’s reforms featuring tens of thousands of workers, some sources claiming as many as a hundred thousand, and it lasted for 12 hours:
The stoppage began at midday, and banks, gas stations, public administration, public health officials and trash collection were operating on a limited basis. Airports remained open, although state-owned airline Aerolineas Argentinas canceled 267 flights and rescheduled others, disrupting travel plans for more than 17,000 passengers.
Public transportation workers went on strike at 7 p.m. in Buenos Aires and surrounding areas, but had operated normally during the daytime to facilitate protesters’ access to and from the plaza in front of Congress.
By Wednesday afternoon, tens of thousands of protesters had flooded in. Héctor Daer, CGT’s secretary general, told the crowd from atop a stage that Milei’s decree “destroys individual rights of workers, collective rights and seeks to eliminate the possibility of union action at a time in which we have great inequality in society.”
As best as I can tell it seems to have gone okay, no economic calamity of police brutality that jumps out in the papers, but you can definitely expect more if any of his reforms make it through Congress. Speaking of which, Milei’s omnibus bill made it out of their equivalent of a congressional committee, which was its first hurdle, so it can now be voted on. But many members of JxC have reservations over different sections. Milei has moderated on a few details, including postponing the privatization of the state oil company YPF (this was a a campaign pledged of his but on polls privatization of the State Owned Enterprises in general is very unpopular, so many a reasonable point to moderate on). His dueling executive decree is tied up with like a bazillion lawsuits rn so that’s not moving any quicker than the legislative process.
How much do we actually know about Bronze Age morality?
This is an honest question from someone who doesn’t know a ton about the era.
People here and elsewhere sometimes point out that the Bronze Age Mindset is a bit of a LARP, its followers mostly white collar workers idealizing an unrealistic world they would hate if they inhabited. It’s hard to take people seriously whose main experience with conflict is arguing on Twitter when they exalt the warlike morality of the Iliad or the Odyssey.
My question is: were the actual people writing the Odyssey and the Iliad also LARPing? These are books portraying the height of the Bronze Age civilizations by people who emphatically did not live in them, but rather in their ruins. Today we’re apparently Tanner Greer-maxing because I’m quoting another piece of his to you: “How I Taught the Iliad to Chinese Teenagers.”
I spend about 15 minutes outlining what we know about Mycenaean civilization through archaeological discoveries: the grandeur of their palaces, how they fought, their role in an entire ecosystem of Near Eastern civilizations. But most of all I focus on the mystery of their fall, the “Bronze Age Collapse” that littered the Greek isles with Mycenaean ruins, ruins that would have towered over the humble abodes of “Dark Age” Greece (pictures of Dark Age archaeological finds are included in the slides to drive home this point).
I then have students read Book IV.35-62. Here Hera declares that in exchange for the destruction of Troy, she will allow Zeus to destroy Argos, Sparta, and Mycenae without complaint. These three cities were devastated in the Bronze Age collapse. This gives us another way to think about the Iliad. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a popular genre with high schoolers. But if you actually lived in a post-apocalyptic setting… what would your fiction be about?
Homer’s Greeks lived in the ruins of a golden age. They had forgotten how to write and read, but they still remembered a time when the Aegean was full of great cities, wealthy kings, and enormous armies. The Iliad portrayed that golden world as it was imagined hundreds of years later—and explained why this golden age was no more. It is a true piece of post-apocalyptic fiction.
Do we expect the illiterate, post-apocalyptic Greeks to be the same morally and socially as their highly advanced ancestors? Can we be confident their portrayal of those societies is how the ancients would have portrayed themselves, or could they just be later cultures trying to insert themselves and their customs into that time period? I imagine ancient Greece was a more violent place than modernity, but the portrayal of its inhabitants as people who killed, looted, and enslaved without a second thought - was this really how they felt back then? Or was this the tribal, warlike peoples who came after them back-projecting their contemporary values onto the golden age? When I look up ancient literature in the Bronze Age I don’t see anything from Greece - how much do we really know about these people, how they felt, and what they thought?
Soriek
3mo ago
Guatemala
After many months of tricks to keep anti-corruption President Elect Bernaldo Arévalo from taking office, including fully suspending his political party, the man has finally entered the National Palace. It took up till the last minute, a nine hour last legislative holdout from the establishment that reportedly involved such high level strategies as literally blocking the Congressional floor with a chain. I’ve mentioned it before but Arévalo is the son of Juan José Arévalo Bermejo, Guatemala’s first democratically elected leader, so for him to finally take the stage against an increasingly brazenly anti-democratic establishment has symbolic significance.
So, now that he’s here, what next? He wants to fight crime, pursue antitrust policies, lower drug prices, clean up the waterways (which are estimated to be over 90% polluted), control migration to keep the US (which backed him throughout all of the attempts to disqualify him) happy, and of course fight corruption. Much of this will be very difficult with a legislative minority, but there’s at least some stuff he can do on his flagship anti-corruption agenda via the executive office itself:
The opposition to Arévalo was so intense because he promised to continue the unfinished business of the CICIG anti-corruption commission, shuttered after it revealed graft at a massive scale, implicating everyone from politicians and business elites to unions to religious and university leaders…
Arévalo’s ability to effect structural change will hinge on three key fronts: reforms of the government contracting system at the heart of a slew of corruption scandals; the recovery of the Attorney General’s Office; and nominations to the high courts.
Contracting reforms may offer Arévalo the best chance to deliver concrete quality-of-life improvements. If he manages to make spending more transparent and more efficient, especially on infrastructure and health, the public will see better roads and more medicines on hospital shelves before the year is out. Greater private investment may also pour into the country.
The other two fronts are thornier. The Attorney General’s Office is controlled by Consuelo Porras, sanctioned by the U.S. for “significant corruption.” (She denies wrongdoing.) Her second tenure as Attorney General (2022-26) has produced a stream of decisions that have undermined anti-corruption investigations. Guatemala’s Odebrecht prosecutions are a case study of impunity; the prosecutors who sent corrupt officials to jail were themselves imprisoned or forced to leave the country.
Arévalo does not have the constitutional authority to remove her but insists he will ask her to resign immediately. He may succeed by starving her of resources. If she does resign, Arévalo will likely have to pick her replacement from the other five candidates approved by a commission in 2022, a list that includes relatively clean choices.
Meanwhile, the court system is scheduled for major changes in 2024, on the order of 250 new judicial appointments, including all 13 Supreme Court seats. This is a major opportunity for reform, but nominations come from the National Lawyers’ Guild, itself beset by corruption allegations, and must go through Congress.
Ethiopia & Somalia
Most people here likely know, but Somalia is a divided country. The northern, formerly British administered section is a breakaway state that has been functionally independent since the Somali Democratic Republic collapsed in 91. Nobody recognizes Somaliland, and Somalia proper claims the whole territory, but really only governs the fractious and unstable southern part, formerly administered by the Italians. Somaliland is much more functional and has no interest in reuniting with its anarchic former partner, but any country making direct diplomatic or trade deals with Somaliland is highly controversial, especially in Africa where many other nation states also have secessionist groups or provinces.
So imagine the outrage now that Ethiopia has signed a memorandum of understanding recognizing Somaliland and giving them a stake in an Ethiopia airline if the latter country grants them use of one of the Somali ports and military bases. Obviously this is a little dicey for Ethiopia considering they are always dealing with secessionist groups, including with ethnic Somalis in their eastern Ogaden region. However, the deal fulfills their longstanding goal of regaining their landlocked country a path to the ocean, lost after the secession of Eritrea. Abiy has been talking about the whole path to the ocean thing for a while and his neighbors interpreted it as him signaling willingness to invade them to gain that path, so honestly this is probably the best possible outcome.
However, Somalia is of course furious about it and has categorically rejected the deal (isn’t there somebody you forgot to ask?) Ethiopia has not exactly been building good will with its neighbors lately, recently failing to establish a deal on water use over their GERD dam with Egypt and Sudan, so it’ll be interesting to see what the coming months bring.
Soriek
3mo ago
Mexico
Mexico has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against gun manufacturers in the United States for aiding and abetting the cartels. Noa a circuit court has actually upheld their suit.
Mexico, in an attempt to challenge the reach of that law, sued six manufacturers in 2021, including Smith & Wesson, Glock and Ruger. It contended that the companies should be held liable for the trafficking of a half-million guns across the border a year, some of which were used in murders.
In September 2022, a Federal District Court judge threw out the suit, ruling that the law prohibits legal action brought by foreign governments.
But Judge William J. Kayatta Jr., an Obama appointee who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, writing for a unanimous majority, revived the lawsuit. The ruling said that plaintiffs had made a “plausible” argument that their case was “statutorily exempt” from the immunity shield…
About 70 to 90 percent of guns trafficked in Mexico originated in the United States, according to Everytown Law, the legal arm of the gun control group founded by the former mayor of New York Michael R. Bloomberg.
Previous suits to hold manufacturers responsible for gun violence have all fallen flat, so it’s a pretty major milestone that this is being heard at all, though it does seem unfair to Mexico if their own laws are being completely circumvented. The ruling will certainly be appealed now.
Because Anglos have tended to establish the world’s wealthier major states, mass immigration to them if open borders should exist is inevitable. These other peoples are unlikely to have a particularly great fondness for libertarianism, and so will slowly dismantle it as soon as they get the vote (just as happened, to some extent, in the US from the 19th century onwards).
One of Alex Nowrasteh's hobby horses is that we don't have a ton of evidence this is true, partially because it doesn't just matter how immigrants vote; it matters how the native population changes their own votes in response to immigration. America's government stayed unrecognizably small during our largest period of mass immigration in the 19th century. The period of 1921 to 1968 when America had its most restrictive immigration laws (and was 90%+ white and building a common national identity) also had the largest expansions of the government and the welfare state: the Great Society and the New Deal. After we reopened our borders government spending and union participation went back down, whether because xenophobic people don't like welfare going to foreigners, or language barriers make unionization harder, or maybe they're not related at all - point is more government doesn't necessarily follow from more immigrants.
Soriek
3mo ago
Yemen
The United States and the United Kingdom started launching attacks against Houthi targets in Yemen last week in response to the Houthi attacks against their ships. On Tuesday they struck for a third time, reportedly targeting a cache of anti-ship missiles.
According to a U.S. Central Command statement, the overnight strike destroyed four Houthi ballistic missiles that were prepared to launch and presented an imminent threat to merchant and U.S. Navy ships in the region. The Houthi attack on the Zografia occurred later Tuesday and involved an anti-ship ballistic missile, the statement said, adding that the ship continued its Red Sea transit.
This latest exchange suggested there has been no let-up in Houthi attacks on shipping in the region, despite the massive U.S. and British assault on the group on Friday, bombing more than 60 targets in 28 locations using warship- and submarine-launched Tomahawk missiles and fighter jets.
Within days it seems like we’re already on the precipice of another crisis situation for Yemen. The Houthis haven’t built up (or been able to build up) any capacity during their time in governance and 2/3rds of the country still depends on aid. Humanitarian organizations have had to suspend operations and 23 aid org have now said that if the conflict escalates they will be unable to provide the aid that keeps the population alive. Houthis have continued to attack commercial shipping anyway, so expect things to continue to worsen.
Soriek
3mo ago
Iraq
Well, we’ve all been following Iranian militias firing on American servicemen and vice versa in Iraq. Now everyone is getting in on the fun. Iran has launched airstrikes on Iraq and Syria The situation has strangely reversed a bit with Iran now retaliating against the ISIS terrorist attack that killed over a hundred of their civilians by launching airstrikes: “at what it claimed were Israeli “spy headquarters” near the U.S. Consulate in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil, and at targets linked to the extremist group Islamic State in northern Syria.” The latter target of course being in retaliation for the ISIS -claimed terrorist attack that killed over a hundred Iranian civilians.
Turkey decided to get into the action too by…also bombing Iraq and Syria, though they’re strafing for Kurdish militias in retaliation for the Kurdish PKK attack on a Turkish base last month. Iraq is understandably not thrilled about any of this (how does Syria feel? Who’s to say?), recalling their ambassador from Iran and calling their attacks an infringement upon Iraqi sovereignty. Presumably they’re not thrilled with Turkey either but they never had any kind of working relationship before (this is not Turkey’s first random attacks into Iraqi soil).
Basically all the cool kids are launching attacks in Iraq, a country that is really only marginally connected to the actual Israeli-Palestinian war by virtue of the fact that the different powers all have some degree of presence here as well. Rough hand to draw.
Soriek
2mo ago
Much appreciated!
It's a combination of the news and personal knowledge / connections. I'll pick a country I've been following and read as many articles across as many outlets as possible till I feel like I understand what's going on, then combine it with personal knowledge of the history of the area via books or wikipedia or whatnot. I've also lived in quite a few different countries so know some of their issues from a more personal lens; can talk to my friends about what things look like on the ground.
What do you think of Napoleon's Legacy?
I, an amateur to the Napoleonic wars, wandered away from Ridley Scott's Napoleon feeling more or less pleased with my night. By terrible mistake I related to a friend who loves the Emperor that I enjoyed the movie, and was informed that the entire film was a piece of British propaganda. I objected that the British were hardly in the movie at all, only to be explained that the things Scott chose to highlight or ignore mostly followed the contours of the British perspective on the conflict. For instance, Waterloo is emphasized because the British played a decisive role, even though Napoleon stood no real chance of victory during his return, whereas the larger Battle of Leipzig which really ended Napoleon's bid for domination wasn't even mentioned because the British weren't there. And of course what about the fact that Napoleon only ever declared war twice while Britain was actively funding other countries to oppose France, and so on and so on.
My friend's counter-narrative of perfidious Albion being the real villain behind the Napoleonic wars is likely no more straightforwardly true than the narrative that France alone was at fault, but it's a helpful reminder that even today there remain vastly diverging perspectives on the immense impact of the man, the myth, and the legend of Napoleon Bonaparte.
For instance, there's also of course his political reforms, which are the part I found myself missing the most in the movie, even though they would have been impractical to include. A while back Scott touched upon a study by Daron Acemoglu claiming that long run growth was much higher in the areas that Napoleon conquered, due to him abolishing guilds, monopolies, and other rent seeking institutions. Rebuttals included people arguing that Acemoglu et al forgot to control for access to coal, after which you supposedly see no impact from Napoleonic conquest remaining.
Or military reforms. Was Napoleon a genius for coming up with military reforms like how to mobilize national resources and break armies down into self-sustaining units that could live on the land and rely less on supply trains? I've heard people argue these were really mostly Ancien Regime ideas crafted after their loss in the Seven Years War. Napoleon only took advantage of the flux of the revolution to be the one to ram them through.
And what about Republicanism and liberalism in general? Did he hasten them along by spreading their ideas farther and faster than they ever would on their own, or did he doom them for decades by encouraging the conservative monarchs to see liberals as a threat to be immediately stamped out, rather than a nuissance that could be tolerated?
So how do you feel about Napoleon's legacy? Was he an expansionist warmonger or a peacemaker driven to conflict by other powers? Was he a brilliant military reformer or mostly an opportunist riding off others' inventions? Did he leave a legacy of economic and political dynamism or barely make a dent? What's your take?
Soriek
3mo ago
Indonesia
The fourth largest country in the world will be holding their own election soon. Ruling President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) has been highly popular but is term limited out. The election will be down to three candidates: Ganjar Pranowo and Anies Baswedan, respectively the Governors of Centrals Java and Jakarta, and the overwhelming favorite to win: Jokowi’s 72 year old Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto.
Originally Jokowi and Prabowo were each others’ opponents in the 2019 election, during which they both said extremely bitter things about each other and Prabowo refused to concede, leading to riots by his supporters. Still, he got a place in the cabinet and now has the full institutional support of the establishment behind him.
This is in part due to the extremely clientistic and patronage based nature of Indonesian democracy. Jokowi was actually originally elected as an anti-corruption reformer and his victory was considered a watershed moment for the first ascension of a non-member of the traditional elite. However, ultimately instead of buck the system he just cemented it further, but with his friends and family on top; for his support of Prabowo, Jakowi’s son has been made the running mate and presumptive Vice President. His son actually isn’t old enough yet to legally run, but luckily it was ruled to be kosher by the Constitutional Court’s Chief Justice, who happens to be Jokowi’s brother-in-law. Oh, and I did I mention that Prabowo is actually the son-in-law of Suharto, Indonesia’s 32 year military dictator? And he has the checkered past to go with it:
As defense minister, Prabowo is trying to cultivate a softer public image. But the ex-military man and former son-in-law of Suharto stands widely accused of overseeing abductions of pro-democracy activists and masterminding atrocities in the then province of East Timor, which occurred in the late 1990s. In an interview with Radio Australia, former U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Robert Gelbard described Prabowo as “somebody who is perhaps the greatest violator of human rights in contemporary times among the Indonesian military.” [he was banned for entering the United States for a long time because of his record]
In his prior presidential campaigns, Prabowo portrayed himself as an populist strongman, vilified minority groups with divisive rhetoric, and pushed to eliminate some regional and local elections in Indonesia. Prabowo has close ties throughout the armed forces and has presented himself as a leader out of Indonesia’s autocratic and dynastic past; he could well shatter Indonesian democracy and govern like a Javanese authoritarian populist as president.
So while this is technically the sixth election since the collapse of military rule, the whole thing gives off a vaguely undemocratic flavor. To connect to the theme of how China has been dealing with the governments on Taiwan and the Philippines, Jokowi has tried to balance between the United States and China and court investment from the latter. Essentially every candidate running is more China skeptical but Prabowo will likely have to walk that balance as well, though can expect him to deepen security ties with the United States even further.
Argentina
Milei has rapidly kicked into high gear, firing 5000 employees hired last year and signing a massive deregulation package via a “Decree of Necessity and Urgency”. The DNU contains 300 separate reforms on regulations and initiates the privatization of several government ministries, here’s a taste:
Prepare all state-owned companies to be privatized
Authorize the shareholder control of Aerolineas Argentinas to be partly or completely transferred to private parties
Deregulate satellite Internet services to allow SpaceX’s Starlink to operate in Argentina
Eliminate price controls on prepaid healthcare plans
Eliminate the monopoly of tourism agencies to deregulate the sector
Repeal the current Rent Law that limits price increases in a bid to normalize the real estate market
Repeal the current Land Law that limits ownership of land by foreigners in a bid to promote investments
Scrap the current Supply Law that allows the government to set minimum and maximum prices and profit margins for goods and services of private companies
Eliminate the Economy Ministry’s price observatory to “avoid the persecution of companies”
He's also proposed some other interesting, less libertarian ideas, like a cap and trade system, and has left the welfare system much less touched than everything else (he actually doubled payments, though my understanding is this will make them more or less the same following the recent devaluation). There are apparently some questions about whether the massive DNU is even legal, but it’ll only be overturned in both chambers of Congress vote to reject it, though stuff can and will also be challenged in courts. Since Milei’s own party is a small minority, his ability to push any legislation through Congress depends on almost all of the center right Juntos por el Cambio working together with him. Many of them have reservations botyh about him and about this omnibus, so between the legal battles and legislative holdouts it’s far from given that this will become actual policy. The IMF is apparently into it though, so if passed maybe it would raise the chances they’ll give Argentina another loan, probably necessary if they actually want to dollarize.
Milei had promised retaliation against protests that interfered with traffic, but fortunately the protests seem to have happened without major clash between law enforcement and civilians. Now that Milei has unveiled more sweeping measures, unions are discussing nationwide strikes.
Soriek
2mo ago
If there wasn't a standalone place there might have been more engagement on my posts, but I think there would have been less reason for other people to feel like they also had a dedicated place to contribute their own posts. This was borne out after the transition; submissions-other-than-mine did go up a fair amount after making the independent thread, though ofc they're still low. More to the point, I don't like how bitter the culture war thread has become and didn't want every attempt to talk foreign policy to get overwhelmed with the customary hobby horses of complaining about immigrants or the perfidious deep state.
Ethiopia & Somalia
A follow up to last week’s post about Somaliland trading Ethiopian access to their ports for Ethiopia recognizing them as a country (and giving them a stake in an Ethiopian airline, but the diplomatic coup is really what they wanted). The current Somali President Abdi has stayed in power in excess of term limits and recently got some terrible press for civilian deaths in a conflict between the government and a dissident group, so this treaty is a bit of a hail mary to keep himself in power/good graces. Is it working? Surprisingly hard to say.
There have been big (peaceful thus far) protests in Somaliland and the country seems divided about whether they support or oppose the deal, ironically because people are divided about whether it boosts sovereignty by getting foreign recognition, or compromises sovereignty by letting foreign troops use their land. The Defense Minister has actually now resigned in protest over stationing Ethiopian troops on Somali(land) soil. It sounds like there’s also some dispute over the territory belonging to his clan, or at least them perceiving that it belongs to them, so there could well be issues in the future even if he didn’t get his veto over the policy now.
Somalia proper is of course furious with Ethiopia, recalling their ambassador and demanding arbitration in both the United Nations and African Union. This is all complicated by the fact that, as covered previously here, Ethiopia has not exactly been building good region relations anywhere else lately either. Their new dam threatens the water supply of both Egypt and Sudan, and Egypt has already come out publicly supporting Somalia’s position in the conflict. It may not end there either.
Eritrea and Egypt will also be concerned with Ethiopia’s having a major naval presence in the strategic Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, observers say.
And in Djibouti, which charges Ethiopia about $1.5 billion a year to use its ports, observers say that the loss of such income could lead to instability for President Ismail Omar Guelleh, who has benefited from that cash inflow during his more than two decades in office.
Given that the Red Sea is already highly chaotic right now, this really isn’t an ideal time to make things even more complicated. Mercifully, it would probably take a long time for any of this to move forward anyway, and a treaty hasn’t actually even been finalized; all Ethiopia and Somaliland have now is a memorandum of understanding.
Has the Beinoff Homelessness and Housing Initiative Report been discussed yet here? You can read the report here, an executive summary here, and a transcript of the report being discussed on the Ezra Klein Show here.
Released in June, it’s a statewide study on homelessness in California, the largest of its kind in some thirty years. It’s built on “nearly 3,200 participants, selected intentionally to provide a representative sample, and weighted data to provide statewide estimates. To augment survey responses, we recruited 365 participants to participate in in-depth interviews”. No question as to the state of focus: California is just over a tenth of the American population but nearly a third of its homeless population and nearly half of the unsheltered homeless population.
Approximately one in five participants (19%) entered homelessness from an institution (such as a prison or prolonged jail stay); 49% from a housing situation in which participants didn’t have their name on a lease or mortgage (non-leaseholder), and 32% from a housing situation where they had their name on a lease or mortgage (leaseholder)...Leaseholders reported a median of 10 days notice that they were going to lose their housing, while non-leaseholders reported a median of one day.
Other takeaways are that contra claims that homeless populations are traveling to California for warm weather or social services, 90% of interviewed participants said they were from California (and 75% from the same county they were homeless in), and backed it up with various details about their hometowns and whatnot. This also aligns with the finding that only about a third of the homeless even sought out government services, suggesting that most people are not taking advantage of whatever unique government services for the homeless California offers (which aren't good anyway). This overall makes some common sense imo - if you’re so broke you don’t have somewhere to live then your options for travel are likely limited as well.
The paper is interesting as a resource in its own right, but I think it’s most useful combined with the claims made in a book referenced in the Ezra Klein discussion of the report: “Homelessness is a Housing Problem.”
The piece argues that housing costs are the primary driving factor behind homelessness. For those who claim that homelessness is mostly a reflection of insanity and addiction, researchers point out that those things are frequently worse in other states with less severe homeless problems (correlations available in the hyperlink).
For instance, West Virginia has worse poverty, mental health, and substance abuse, but has a homeless problem vastly less bad than California's (0.09% vs 0.4%). The only thing California performs worse than West Virginia on is, predictably, housing costs. Or why does San Francisco, with a poverty rate of 11.4%, have such a worse homelessness problem (0.95%) than much poorer cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans, all of which have poverty rates more than twice as high around 23% and homelessness rates around only 0.27%? The clearest answer is the most straightforward: San Francisco is simply twice as expensive to live in (a studio apartment in SF is little over $2k vs a little over 1k for the other three cities). This also lines up with the survey responses, with 89% of respondents saying housing costs were a barrier to them finding housing.
This doesn’t necessarily mean those mental health and addiction aren’t highly important here are as well, but that there may be a demographic of fairly low functioning people who are able to take care of themselves, just barely, at low costs, but are simply unable to under heavier financial burdens. Jerusalem Demsas compares this to a game of musical chairs: as you take away chairs one by one steadily the slower and weaker kids will find themselves without a place to sit. But if you don’t have enough chairs / are going through a severe housing shortage, of course you’re gonna have a worse chairlessness problem then elsewhere, even if their kids are slower and weaker.
And once you’re out, it can be very hard to get back on your feet. Your credit history is gonna be terrible, as is your appearance. Maybe you live in your car for a while but then it gets impounded because you have nowhere legal to park it and can’t pay for the tickets. Then you’ve lost your shelter as well as your ability to go to a job. From there you’re really in the streets, which is scary - some people may take uppers due to fear of being asleep in public where people can hurt you or steal from you, and thus pick up addictions. Things spiral very fast from bad to worse.
Taken together, these suggest early intervention and a clear policy prescription to build more housing and do what can be done to lower costs - not because every disheveled person on the street is a fresh-faced suburban homeowner waiting to happen, but specifically the opposite - that every poor or unstable person living on the cusp of not being able to afford where they stay bears the risk that it’ll be much harder for them to bounce back from a fall than to sustain where they are.
Interested to hear what other people thought.
Soriek
4mo ago
Yemen and the Red Sea
The Houthis have kept up their fight against Israel and managed to actually inconvenience everyone. Consistent attacks in the Red Sea have made merchant ships cautious about the shipping route, and have even encouraged vessels to take vastly longer routes all the way around the African coast. The costs for everything being shipped have, unfortunately, risen accordingly for consumers:
Keuhne+Nagel, a global logistics giant, said Wednesday that 103 container ships have diverted around Africa, a figure it expects to increase. Some oil tanker owners have also insisted on options in their charters to avoid the southern Red Sea, while BP Plc and Equinor ASA have also shied away from the area.
The combined market capitalization of the firms within the Solactive Global Shipping Index rose to almost $190 billion on Wednesday. On Dec. 12 it stood at $166.2 billion.
It isn’t entirely obvious that this is really going to boost profits for shipping companies however:
For shipping owners, the development both gives and takes away: Clients will be forced to pay up for higher rates, but shippers will also have to absorb higher fuel costs. Tanker and liquid petroleum gas shippers look best placed since capacity utilization is tight and trouble at another major canal—the one in Panama—has already given them a huge boost in bargaining power.
Brent oil prices rose around 1% on Tuesday, according to Refinitiv data. Shares of A.P. Moller-Maersk, a top global container shipper, were down over 3%. Shares of Dorian LPG, a major LPG shipper, were up nearly 2%.
The United States has of course taken this very seriously and vowed to protect any ships that need to move through the Suez canal, and have quickly assembled a multinational force to try to combat the situation:
On Monday, the Pentagon said it was establishing a security operation to protect seaborne traffic from ballistic missiles and drone attacks launched by the Houthi groups in Yemen. The effort, called Operation Prosperity Guardian, will include the U.K., Bahrain, France, Norway and other countries.
US warships have already been sent in, but so far it doesn’t seem to have arrested the trend of merchant vessels diverting their routes, so maybe it isn’t enough security for them. On the other hand, energy markets have not responded drastically, largely due to existing surpluses muting the urgency of the situation somewhat:
Oil and refined-product flows have more than halved from September levels, according to commodities-data firm Kpler. LNG traders and shipbrokers said Wednesday that more tankers carrying the supercooled fuel were diverting to avoid the Red Sea…
But thus far the response of energy markets to the disruption has been muted compared with dramatic moves in prices sparked by some other past outbreaks of violence in the Middle East.
Benchmark Brent crude futures edged up 1.3%, surpassing $80 a barrel for the first time since late November and extending gains over the past week to 8%. Natural-gas futures rose 1.9% in the U.S. to $2.54 per million British thermal units, and 3.8% in northwest Europe to 33.80 euros a megawatt-hour…
One reason for the muted response to the dramatic situation, say traders and analysts, is that crude and gas markets happen to be swimming in surplus supplies, dulling the effect of longer journey times. The U.S., Guyana and Brazil are all pumping record volumes of oil, the International Energy Agency said this month, while Iranian exports of crude have surged this year.
And although more than 8% of the world’s oil supplies have shuttled through the Red Sea on average so far this year, the stretch of water is less of a chokepoint than the Strait of Hormuz to the east. The attacks have clustered around Bab el-Mandeb, at the southern end of the Red Sea.
Does our fiction say anything about our society?
(The way I've been encouraging myself to read fiction again is by convincing myself it's anthropology/history/a window into culture)
Tanner Greer once authored a piece called "On the Tolkienic Hero," arguing that while history is littered with heroes who had no distrust of power and who conciously sought out their quest, J.R.R. Tolkien popularized the notion of a hero as a character whose very goodness is that they don't want power, that they will only shoulder power as a temporary burden. Nowadays we see this trope everywhere in the most popular form of writing: Young Adult fiction, from Harry Potter to Hunger Games to Star Wars. In a piece in City Journal Greer explores the implications of this - what could a culture that produces these kind of myths tell us about our society?
Greer has also written at length in the past about how he feels that modern Americans have lost agency as the country moved from self employed, locally-governed settler communities towards our current era of vast corporations and vast bureaucracy. His thesis here is that we see this expressed in our fiction - the modern, powerless YA protaganist raging against the machine is symptomatic of a society where people feel themselves to be at the whims of distant and impersonal forces:
As unconscious illustrations of common beliefs about authority, fate, and morality, [French Fairy Tales] offered a rare window into the ancien regime as the common man experienced it. The fairy realm of the French peasant mirrored his lived reality. His was a vicious and empty moral order, where personal destiny depended on the arbitrary whims of the powerful...
like the fairy tales of old, [American] escapist yarns can escape only so far. Their imagery and plotting are irrevocably tied to our society...these fictional narratives share a set of attitudes and convictions about the nature of authority, power, and responsibility. They provide a window into the moral economy of the twenty-first century’s overmanaged meritocrats...
The defining feature of the YA fictional society: powerful, inscrutable authorities with a mysterious and obsessive interest in the protagonist. Sometimes the hidden hands of this hidden world are benign. More often, they do evil. But the intentions behind these spying eyes do not much matter. Be they vile or kind, they inevitably create the kind of protagonist about whom twenty-first century America loves to read: a young hero defined by her frustration with, or outright hostility toward, every system of authority that she encounters...
It is not just twenty-first-century teenagers who feel buffeted by forces beyond their control...one-third of Americans now find themselves employed by corporations made impersonal by their scale. The decisions that determine the daily rounds of the office drone are made in faraway boardrooms—rooms, one might say, “where adults discuss things out of earshot.” What decides the destiny of Western man? Credit scores he has only intermittent access to. Regulations he has not read. HR codes he had no part in writing...
The modern-day fairy tale is not at peace with HR. Our fairy realm’s preoccupation with the problems of the micromanaged life resonates. Its paranoia reflects a culture that has lost faith in its own ruling class. The YA novel’s adolescent attitude toward authority speaks to the experiences of the many millions shaken by their own impotence. The mania for dystopia is a literary sensation custom-made for the frustrations of our age.
Counterarguments:
1. Women's Liberation
In general when Greer talks about missing a past where people had more autonomy, he's really talking about men, and I think it's right to say that men are more likely to be disillusioned by modenity than women. The society that created these modern myths is one where women finally gained the right to have a voice, get a mortgage, start a business, etc, and Greer himself points out that most YA authors, protaganists, and readers are women. Should we see the portrayal of the teen girl protaganist finding empowerment against an oppressive society as just a story of the time, articulating a struggle many women went through in the last century? (Remember that even authors writing about young people are often from a previous generation and have lived through more cultural change).
Counterpoint: the female YA protaganists don't seem that different from the males in terms of their position in society. This might be just because more male protaganists are written by women and so also embody themes that women have lived through. On the other hand, compare modern "Tolkienic" women protaganists to heroines written by women authors in a different age, like Scarlett O'Hara of Gone With the Wind, Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables. All of these characters to me feel much more self-confident in their rank or purpose. Also, their much more sexist and heirarchical societies are not portrayed as particularly dystopian or oppressive, even with those books do grapple with themes of patriarchy.
2. Fiction written by commoners rather than elites
For a long time most great literature was created by a privledged elite class - of course they weren't going to portray their society as oppressive, they were the ones doing the oppressing! Elizabeth Bennet and Scarlett O'hara are literally from wealthy landowner families, of course they don't question their (relative) empowerment. Nowadays anyone can take a stab at writing fiction, so of course you're going to have more perspectives from people who don't feel particularly powerful and whose relation to society has been more subservient.
Counterpoint: Not all empowered female protaganists from that era were from wealthy backgrounds - Jane Eyre and Anne Shirley were orphans. Counter-counterpoint - their authors kinda were, Lucy Maud Montgomery was from a political elite family in Canada and Charlotte Brontë was at least relatively privledged, if not a giga-elite, so maybe their perspectives still don't incorporate the common person on the street.
3. ? Insert yours
Despite the counterpoints I listed to my own arguments, I think the answer is likely a combination of all of the above - late stage capitalism and advanced bureaucracy means we are now governed by vast, distant forces, but also fiction is increasingly created by women and normal people whose historical experience of being treated like second class citizens are going to bleed into the art we create.
FWIW we did find a ton of chemical weapons, if not nukes:
In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Not that this was a surprise. Part of why our intelligence said Iraq had chemical weapons was because we knew they did, since we had exported them a bunch of chem precursors, missile fab equipment, and instructions on how to use them during the Iraq-Iran War. Why didn't we make more noise about it after the invasion, I'm not sure. Maybe it just looked bad on us, no nukes and a bunch of American soldiers injured from weapons that practically had Made in America stickers on them.
Hey sorry, I’ve been pretty slammed the past few weeks and haven’t had time to really sit down and grind these out, they take a while.
I do have to admit my enthusiasm has been waning a little lately, here and on forum in general. I’ve never been really into the culture war side of things, but I like the userbase here and noticed a lot of people like to talk foreign policy, so this was an attempt to create a central place for that kind of discussion. The hope was for TT to develop into something more community driven / self-sustaining without me, if users were into it. But after nine months it looks likely we won’t reach that; I think last week had zero posts and today has one. Which is fine, if people’s interests just lie elsewhere, not every swing is a hit.
More options
Context Copy link