Thursday, March 27, 2025
Happy Election!
That is what a CBC radio host said to a political guest the other day at the end of an excerpt on the upcoming Canadian election.
And you know I think that Canadians are genuinely happy to have an opportunity to have this election.
Thursday, March 20, 2025
A medieval sketch from Novgorod
The usual writing medium in the Russian North during the 13th century was birch bark. One of the most important centers of the "Rus" people in that period was Novgorod, and the inhabitants generated a lot of commercial, religious, and perhaps personal documents. 
The image above comes from Live Science which often includes neat stuff.
Thanks to the vast supplies of birch trees there is a lot of work for archaeologists. I've never heard how this trove compares to the Cairo Geniza, but perhaps I'll look.
The explanation of this document is that it was written by a 13th-century boy named Onfim who got bored with his schoolwork and started drawing on some. See Wikipedia for more on Onfrim.
Sunday, March 16, 2025
Authoritarianism watch -- USA
In the last few months people have been debating with themselves whether the United States has lost its constitutional orderand is now in the hands of an authoritarian regime, a police state instead of a democracy. Lots of the discussion focuses on details of Trump and Musk's arbitrary and illegal actions and efforts to use the courts to restrain him.
Most people, I'd guess, have a hard time evaluating the significance of the various conflicts. I recommend two posts. First , from Talking Points Memo, a post by David Kurtz, one of the best people at this sterling source:
Columbia University Is Ground Zero For Trump ExtortionIf you still harbored any doubt that President Trump’s ongoing attack on Columbia University – a private institution – is drawn straight from the authoritarian playbook, then the latest development should be clarifying. The Trump administration – specifically the Department of Education, HHS, and GSA – sent a letter yesterday to Columbia attempting to extort an array of concessions in how the university is run before it may consider restoring some $400 million in frozen federal funding. Imposing an arbitrary March 20 deadline, the Trump administration demanded that Columbia complete a laundry list of internal restructurings, policy changes, and submissions to federal authority. Among the most alarming demands: put the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department in what it calls “academic receivership” for at least five years. If Columbia complies by the deadline, then and only then will the Trump administration “open a conversation about immediate and long-term structural reforms” at the university. If it’s not clear, it sure should be: Even if Columbia submits to this extortion letter, it doesn’t get federal funding restored. It merely sets itself up for a later round of bullying, exorbitant demands, and more extortion. The extortion letter came the same day DHS agents executed search warrants at the residences of two Columbia students. “According to the sources, it was part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on individuals it has described as espousing the views of Hamas and threatening the safety of Jewish students,” ABC News reported. This all transpired as Columbia graduate and pro-Palestinian protest leader Mahmoud Khalil remained in federal detention as the Trump administration attempts to deport him even though he’s a legal permanent resident. His lawyers amended their filings as they obtained new information about his detainment. In an interview with NPR, a top DHS official could not articulate what wrongdoing Khalil was being accused of.
support. But that is not us now. And that is certainly not the Republican half of us now.The second post is from Brad DeLong, on the attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil
: Extending the penumbra of some political rights to non-citizens, extending the umbra of full civil rights to non-citizens, tolerating assemblies that turn into disruptions, and siding with causes that wish they were a threat to national security—those are things that a confident nation proud of itself and its liberties is willing to
We see here the intention of the Trump Regime to shut down free speech and free thought, especially at universities. Their ambitions are vast.
Friday, March 14, 2025
Vikings and Vikings Valhalla
I am currently watching the Vikings and Vikings Valhalla, and I am enjoying them immensely. I don't know if I can rate them with the Korean series Mr. Sunshine an ironic title for a story about a radicalized young woman resisting the establishment in the period of the Russian-Japanese War, and her lover, a Korean emigrant to the United States who comes back to Korea as a US Marine and finds himself conflicted as to his identity: Korean or American?
Mr. Sunshine is so wonderful that even though I started out talking about Vikings etc. I find myself swept away by my memories of this wonderful Korean saga...
Well, I think the viking saga is very satisfying. Professional medievalists who are experts in 9th century Northern Europe and especially Scandinavian culture will no doubt find lots of things to criticize, but I must say that the producers and writers have made a serious effort to recreate an interesting story about an interesting period: the building of viking kingdoms, and at the same time the conversion of the Scandinavians to Christianity. Here's what I liked: The beautiful cinematography, especially the dramatic land- and seascapes.
Horses and boats.
All the tools, costumes, furniture, buildings, etc. They were convincing
The great amount of care to create and develop characters who evolved over both series. This was quite an acccomplishment, given that IMDB lists for the first series 250 actors who had speaking roles and portrayed named characters.
The acting! The serious effsort to show what the conflict between Christians and Pagans might have been like. And more!
Wednesday, March 05, 2025
China Day at Muhlberger's World History
The most interesting posts I have read so far today are both about China, a world in itself.
Fun and wonder: China Talk brings you China's Best Music of 2024 . It's a small selection by Jake Newby, who writes on Chinese music in a substack, of what is a tiny sample of what is obviously a very diverse and energetic music scene. Well, with a population of 1.4 billion and millenia of musical cultural, you might expect some good stuff. Well, without a maniacal dictator who thinks that the routine cure for all social ills is killing, by the millions,anyone who steps out of line, or send them to work in the fields, a lot of good stufff is being produced. Note that even with a milder dictatorship "the authorities" still interfere.
But have fun with this, which shows that current Chinese musicians can do anything, in any genre.
Another perspective on Chinese culture is provided by Noah Smith in Is China inventing big important things? Noah has good ideas and writes well. You might want to follow him on
Tuesday, March 04, 2025
Trump will die
Further, March 16: Another discussion by experts on CBC 1's excellent The House with no reference to Trump's physical and mental health. In fact, the experts didn't know what to say on any aspect of the current crisis. This is where we are.
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
2025
Whether Trump wins or is stopped this year will forever be considered a turning point in American history.
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
The Lady of Kalymnos
If you want to see more, go to Greekreporter.com
The Decline and Fall of the Trump Regime? Already?
From Timothy Burke from 8 by 7:
I
’m on record as finding the whole debate about whether what is happening right now in the United States is fascism or conservatism or totalitarianism and so on as being fundamentally uninteresting, for roughly the same reason that I think squabbling about whether bombardment that is indifferent to civilians is genocide or not. You have to start with the basics: what is happening now is bad. What is happening now is worse. What is happening now seems likely to become even worse than worse. So if there is any position I disdain it is that this moment in America, in the Levant, in the world, is just par for the course, nothing new under the sun, a continuation of a status quo. What I am trying to evaluate now is not the comprehensive badness of the past year and the almost certainly comprehensive worse-ness of the year to come, but what is new here. Like most historians, I’ve been busy reaching for analogies, in part to just try and get everybody who is “waiting to see whether this is that bad” that it’s very bad. But analogies always fail when it comes to seeing what’s new. Right now, there are two things that I think are new. The first is that the intensity of Trumpism at the heart of a major global power that has so powerfully shaped the last century really seems like the death-knell of neoliberalism. Among other things, it’s revealing just how much the Democratic Party was intertwined with neoliberalism and the extent to which that is limiting its ability to serve as a meaningful opposition going forward. I don’t say this in the conventional sense of tossing off “neoliberalism” as an invective for all the things I don’t like. Perhaps not unlike many Democrats, I’d frankly prefer neoliberalism to Trumpism in part because I could imagine ways to move forward from neoliberalism to a better society without a disastrous collapse in between. The regulatory and managerial apparatus that neoliberalism rested upon is being completely demolished. That’s really different than in many cases of 20th Century authoritarianism that were either a strong reaction to social democracy or socialism or the threat thereof or were an outcome of a militarized elite seizing power in a state with very weak capacity and underdeveloped political institutions. This point leads to the second new wrinkle, which is more consequential. Right now Musk and his gang of teenage burglars are destroying the capacity of the federal state in a more or less indiscriminate way. I’m almost starting to believe that they might even blast their way through the Pentagon, though that seems unlikely in comparison to everything else. They’re doing that without the kind of long-standing economic crisis that someone like Javier Milei in Argentina has used for his justification. They’re not just radically cutting spending, they’re decomposing vast infrastructures of government, regulation and management that allowed the federal state to project its presence and authority while also holding up the national economy through direct and indirect subsidies.A lot of the motive here from the Bannonite wing of Trumpism seems to be hurting educated professionals as much as possible, whereas on the Muskian side, it seems to be annihilating the regulatory state. But what happens when they’ve finished demolishing the government entirely?
They’ve already discovered that they can’t easily restore capacity when it turns out they blew up something of vital and immediate importance like the workforce attending to the nuclear arsenal and the maintenance of dangerous waste sites connected to nuclear weapons. I think they’re going to find that if they were hoping to direct future contracts to their own businesses or the businesses of allies, they might have accidentally trashed the basic mechanisms for awarding contracts, signing contracts, and having the security of contract for the bottom-line of the contracting party. Even if Musk’s little gopher squad have established cut-outs that let them illegally drain money from the Treasury to deposit in a bank account for SpaceX, that’s not anything like a sustainable pipeline for long-term corruption. If they were hoping to find ways to create a new client elite, they’ve already destroyed a lot of what they might offer to people willing to bend the knee and take a lifetime job in an authoritarian bureaucracy. Perhaps more startling from the vantage point of the analogies already in play, it’s no longer clear to me how they’re going to govern at all from Washington. They had a vast warehouse full of carrots and they’ve dumped gasoline and a match on most of them already. They have a fair number of sticks, but that’s not enough to hold practical authority over a nation this big and (formerly) wealthy—assuming the sticks even agree to be used in such a manner. They’re even getting rid of prosecutors, FBI agents, IRS agents and others who would have known how to be sticks if they were tasked with doing so. It’s one thing for small authoritarian states with a long history of casualized abuse of power to just murder, torture and imprison anybody who looks the wrong way at them and another to do that in the U.S. This is not to say that they won’t be trying very soon to act in precisely that way, but they’ve already cut into their own capacity for doing so. That’s what seems different. I can’t really think of a state with a tremendous amount of power that has turned in a sharply authoritarian direction and elected to voluntarily cripple itself. I can think of states that have done that by accident because they were so incompetent and corrupt, but that also was often a move from a weak semi-democratic state to a weak authoritarian one, not a move from the most powerful country on the planet deliberately destroying its own power for reasons of ideological purity. (Though corruption and incompetence are of course part of the mix as well.) In an odd way, this might be one source of hope in this dark moment. If a number of state governments retain their authority and administrative coherence, they might be able to capitalize on the retreating tide of federal power. If Trump is going to ignore the courts, even the Supreme Court, then state governors and legislatures might feel empowered to do the same while buoying up what the federal government is trying to sink and ignoring any commands from Washington to the contrary. In a year that is already overflowing with constitutional crises, that move would just be one more stone on a towering pile. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more The News: Yes, It's True. Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe Timothy Burke Feb 19 READ IN APP I’m on record as finding the whole debate about whether what is happening right now in the United States is fascism or conservatism or totalitarianism and so on as being fundamentally uninteresting, for roughly the same reason that I think squabbling about whether bombardment that is indifferent to civilians is genocide or not. You have to start with the basics: what is happening now is bad. What is happening now is worse. What is happening now seems likely to become even worse than worse. So if there is any position I disdain it is that this moment in America, in the Levant, in the world, is just par for the course, nothing new under the sun, a continuation of a status quo. What I am trying to evaluate now is not the comprehensive badness of the past year and the almost certainly comprehensive worse-ness of the year to come, but what is new here. Like most historians, I’ve been busy reaching for analogies, in part to just try and get everybody who is “waiting to see whether this is that bad” that it’s very bad. But analogies always fail when it comes to seeing what’s new. Right now, there are two things that I think are new. The first is that the intensity of Trumpism at the heart of a major global power that has so powerfully shaped the last century really seems like the death-knell of neoliberalism. Among other things, it’s revealing just how much the Democratic Party was intertwined with neoliberalism and the extent to which that is limiting its ability to serve as a meaningful opposition going forward. I don’t say this in the conventional sense of tossing off “neoliberalism” as an invective for all the things I don’t like. Perhaps not unlike many Democrats, I’d frankly prefer neoliberalism to Trumpism in part because I could imagine ways to move forward from neoliberalism to a better society without a disastrous collapse in between. The regulatory and managerial apparatus that neoliberalism rested upon is being completely demolished. That’s really different than in many cases of 20th Century authoritarianism that were either a strong reaction to social democracy or socialism or the threat thereof or were an outcome of a militarized elite seizing power in a state with very weak capacity and underdeveloped political institutions. This point leads to the second new wrinkle, which is more consequential. Right now Musk and his gang of teenage burglars are destroying the capacity of the federal state in a more or less indiscriminate way. I’m almost starting to believe that they might even blast their way through the Pentagon, though that seems unlikely in comparison to everything else. They’re doing that without the kind of long-standing economic crisis that someone like Javier Milei in Argentina has used for his justification. They’re not just radically cutting spending, they’re decomposing vast infrastructures of government, regulation and management that allowed the federal state to project its presence and authority while also holding up the national economy through direct and indirect subsidies. A lot of the motive here from the Bannonite wing of Trumpism seems to be hurting educated professionals as much as possible, whereas on the Muskian side, it seems to be annihilating the regulatory state. But what happens when they’ve finished demolishing the government entirely? They’ve already discovered that they can’t easily restore capacity when it turns out they blew up something of vital and immediate importance like the workforce attending to the nuclear arsenal and the maintenance of dangerous waste sites connected to nuclear wea I think they’re going to find that if they were hoping to direct future contracts to their own businesses or the businesses of allies, they might have accidentally trashed the basic mechanisms for awarding contracts, signing contracts, and having the security of contract for the bottom-line of the contracting party. Even if Musk’s little gopher squad have established cut-outs that let them illegally drain money from the Treasury to deposit in a bank account for SpaceX, that’s not anything like a sustainable pipeline for long-term corruption. If they were hoping to find ways to create a new client elite, they’ve already destroyed a lot of what they might offer to people willing to bend the knee and take a lifetime job in an authoritarian bureaucracy. Perhaps more startling from the vantage point of the analogies already in play, it’s no longer clear to me how they’re going to govern at all from Washington. They had a vast warehouse full of carrots and they’ve dumped gasoline and a match on most of them already. They have a fair number of sticks, but that’s not enough to hold practical authority over a nation this big and (formerly) wealthy—assuming the sticks even agree to be used in such a manner. They’re even getting rid of prosecutors, FBI agents, IRS agents and others who would have known how to be sticks if they were tasked with doing so. It’s one thing for small authoritarian states with a long history of casualized abuse of power to just murder, torture and imprison anybody who looks the wrong way at them and another to do that in the U.S. This is not to say that they won’t be trying very soon to act in precisely that way, but they’ve already cut into their own capacity for doing so. That’s what seems different. I can’t really think of a state with a tremendous amount of power that has turned in a sharply authoritarian direction and elected to voluntarily cripple itself. I can think of states that have done that by accident because they were so incompetent and corrupt, but that also was often a move from a weak semi-democratic state to a weak authoritarian one, not a move from the most powerful country on the planet deliberately destroying its own power for reasons of ideological purity. (Though corruption and incompetence are of course part of the mix as well.) In an odd way, this might be one source of hope in this dark moment. If a number of state governments retain their authority and administrative coherence, they might be able to capitalize on the retreating tide of federal power. If Trump is going to ignore the courts, even the Supreme Court, then state governors and legislatures might feel empowered to do the same while buoying up what the federal government is trying to sink and ignoring any commands from Washington to the contrary. In a year that is already overflowing with constitutional crises, that move would just be one more stone on a towering pile. That would be a way to make the point about why authoritarians have hitherto elected not to void their own power, real and potential. When you’re setting yourself up as a tyrant, you generally expect to have to project your power ubiquitously rather than in capricious and enfeebled ways, to dispense benefits as well as punishments, to tie people to you in ways they will be reluctant to sever. We may need a new word meaning “dictatorship whose first move is to achieve dicklessness” to describe the system that Musk and Trump are trying to create right now. That would be a way to make the point about why authoritarians have hitherto elected not to void their own power, real and potential. When you’re setting yourself up as a tyrant, you generally expect to have to project your power ubiquitously rather than in capricious and enfeebled ways, to dispense benefits as well as punishments, to tie people to you in ways they will be reluctant to sever. We may need a new word meaning “dictatorship whose first move is to achieve dicklessness” to describe the system that Musk and Trump are trying to create right now.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Apocalypse Now: Literally
Timothy Burke offers us a truly terrifying explanation of what Trumpism and related apocaliptic movements realy mean.
The gentle beginning:,
READ IN APP
I keep circling around the cluster of people involved in Trump Administration’s programmatic disassembly of constitutional government in the United States, pacing like a zoo animal in a cage. What are they thinking? How conscious are they of their motives? What do they represent?And it gets much worse...I try to remember a point I’ve made many times before about governments and leaders, that almost no leader is himself or herself the pivot on which all decisions turn, that the visible leader in a political coalition like like the tip of an iceberg, representing some vaster structure hidden below the water.
Perhaps even, as the phrase goes, a deep state. Or a deep strata of society, a formation embedded across a whole geology, that suddenly erupts into the surface of the earth. American Presidents normally are just the titular heads of an assemblage of ambitious public servants and elected officials who frequently share some social connections and some loose ideological priors, somewhat like the C-suite of a corporation where the CEO speaks for a cluster of executives who’ve risen through the company and some recruited new executives whose experience elsewhere has been deemed useful or generative. (On which point, once again: the CEO is not a king except in a few rare cases of smaller privately-held companies that are led by the scion of a particular family. Maybe.)
Trump’s first administration had him as the unhappy CEO of a cluster of Republican-affiliated leaders with business experience, military experience, administrative experience and experience in electoral politics, a different cluster than the one that had risen through service in the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II presidencies. He was unhappy because his assemblage wanted to domesticate his wild impulses and careless gestures, to yoke him to something like a coherent strategic vision of governance and some degree of continuity with past Republican policy initiatives. In the end, Trump won out by attrition and began to summon an entirely new assemblage to his side, recruited first and foremost for their servility to his personal authority and impulses and secondly for the extremism of their vision, for advocacy of post-constitutional executive power.
Those people are still with him today. To that assemblage he has now added a few more representatives of other extremist lineages, most notably Steve Bannon’s “populists” and some advocates of Christian nationalist theocracy. And a new assemblage has added itself to Trumpism—or perhaps believes that it has added Trumpism to itself, namely the Big Tech billionaires club defined by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and associates. That this new assemblage is unstable and volatile is already very much on display—it is hard to believe that it can survive four years without a night of the long knives within the coalition—but at least for the moment it also is fueling the destruction of a long-standing constitutional republic’s basic administrative and procedural infrastructure.
As I pace mentally and try to apprehend what this coalition really wants, how it really thinks, what its aims are, I keep coming back to a repeated theme. I’ve already argued that the base of political support for this group wants to see that existing infrastructure blown six ways to Sunday, that at least some of them represent a millenarian yearning for the old world to fall so that some new world, whose nature is as yet unknown, might rise from its ashes. I now think that this might also accurately describe most or all of the people who hold power in Washington right now, that they also are millenarians, though not all of the same kind as their supporters. And perhaps some of them are something bleaker: nihilists who want to negate everything and have no hope of a new world to follow.
Tuesday, February 04, 2025
The destruction of the United States
I have been thinking about Trump's attack on Canada. It's a dangerous stuation and requires clear thinking and determination on our part.
But there is something worse happening: the destruction of law enforcement in the United States, which threatens the destruction of the United States of America. I have been worried (to say the least) about this. Now two observers spell it out: David Kurtz of TPM and Timothy Snyder at Substack
Sunday, February 02, 2025
A 19th century tragedy
I was looking at a geneology of the Taffes, an Irish family from which my mother was descended. It was probably compiled by my aunt, Marie Hyle, when she was in high school in Ohio in the late 30s.
It includes this story of Patrick Taffe, who came from County Clare, Ireland to Ohio in about 1881. Here's what the Hyles remembered of him.
He came to Dayton and was employed at the Brownell Boiler Works. While working, he cut his finger and infection set in. Three days later as he was lying on a couch, having his wound dressed, he died.This would not happen today unless your country' infrastructure has been destroyed by bombs and missles, IMAGE: The Brownelle plant in Dayton (probably from a catalogue).
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Do you know the Cairo Geniza? Let's have some positive content in this blog
I thought I knew about the Cairo Geniza but I have had my eyes opened to the
richness of this amazing collection of medieval writings by the book
The Illustrated Cairo Genizah
>
by Nick Posegay and Melonie Schmierer-Lee.
https://www.academia.edu/124354176/The_Illustrated_Cairo_Genizah?
This project says a lot about the positive potential of the human spirit. Nice
to have such a reminder.
Such as:
What is the Cairo Geniza? Why is it important?
The authors explain:
Almost one thousand years ago, the Jews of Old Cairo began to place their worn-out books and scrolls into a hidden storage room – a genizah – of their synagogue. Over the years, they added all sorts of writings to the pile, sacred and secular texts alike. When the chamber was emptied at the end of the 19th century, it held hundreds of thousands of paper and parchment fragments. Now known as the ‘Cairo Genizah’, it has become one of the most important sources of knowledge for the history of the Middle East and the Mediterranean world. This book offers the first illustrated introduction to the unique collections of Cairo Genizah manuscripts at Cambridge University Library. Join Genizah experts Nick Posegay and Melonie Schmierer-Lee as they take you on a journey of discovery through more than 125 years of research at the University of Cambridge, showcasing over 300 stunning, full-colour manuscript images across 12 thematic chapters. From ancient Bibles to medieval magic and Renaissance printing presses, 'The Illustrated Cairo Genizah' reveals the forgotten stories of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities at the centre of a millennium of world history.They have posted a free sample at Academic.edu. > Have a look. You may be stunned, like I was.<p></b>
This is one result of an amazing multi-generational scholarly project that's been going on since the 19th century. This should remind us that there are an uncountable number of similar projects out there, mostly the product of people who, given their expertise, are paid very little and receive the appropriate appreciation only in a limited circle -- if even there. If it weren't for Academia.edu and Medievalists.net you might not have heard of this one.
Academics are getting smarter. Lots of them now realize that "ordinary people" are a big audience for their work, if it's appropriately packaged and priced. The genius scholars and publishers have managed to price this book at $60 US. Compare this to other academic books with less demanding technical and personnell requirements published in PDF versions at $120.
We hear a lot about the evils of too few rich people trying to control the half of global wealth they don't already control. This is a very bad, even evil situation. But there have been good things accomplished by rich people, even people who might be considered evil in general and acting from dubious motives when they did something worthwhile. For instance Andrew Carnegie didn't make his name as a great philanthropist, but he built a lot of public libraries, which I and my neighbors have benefitted from for many years.
A final point inspired by this book, though I've had it before. Egypt is an important and creative country which should be known for more than their early expertise in piling stone blocks --though they were awfully good at that. When the Crusaders showed up in Egypt in the 13th century, they were hicks from the sticks (even though the Europeans had gotten pretty good at handling stone blocks by then). And in general, imagine what we might know if other cultures had a custom like the Genizah.Go, have a look. You'll thank me.
Wednesday, January 08, 2025
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Stupid commentary on Canada as "the 51st state"-- the sad state of journalism
I am disgusted with the stupid commentary on Trump's malicious teasing on Canada
as the 51st state.
I am almost willing -- ALMOST WILLING -- to cut the American commentators a break. After all, Canada is a big country with lots of regional variations. But really, guys and gals, how can you not know that CANADA IS A BIG COUNTRY WITH LOTS OF REGIONAL VARIATION? It's right next door! You don't have to go to Addis Ababa to figure out what's going on. (On the other hand, if you go to Toronto you might meet some interesting and intelligent Ethiopians who can give you a clue).
But the Canadian commentators are equally lame. They should be pointing out to their audiences some basic facts that make this 51st state nonsense ridiculous on the face of it--if anyone bothered to look at said face. For instance:
Canada is made up of 10 provinces and 3 territories. Somebody is going to bundle these into one state?
Canadian provinces have important constitutional powers. Do you think any of them would be willing to give them up?
Quebec -- Quebeckers can barely tolerate being one of ten provinces,the French-speaking one, the rest being basically English-speaking. Francophone Quebeckers can barely tolerate being outnumbered as is. It doesn't take much to imagine how unpopular this idea would be.
Regional cultural differences--say Alberta v Ontario. HA HA HA HA HA.
It's sad, sad, sad, sad that such basic issues hardly come up.
Charlie Angus should be Prime Minister of Canada--see why I say this
I have been steering away from commentary on the march of fascism around the world because there is plenty of reportage on specific events and policy arguments. I don't comment unless I think something is really important but not getting the appropriate attention.
Well, here is something that people interested in US-Canadian relations, Trump's tariff threats and Canadian reactions, and the perfidy of the Conservative Party, federally and provincially. If think you are not directly affected by any of these issues, you may be wrong.
The best and smartest account of these issues is a speech by Charlie Angus, the New Democratic Party MP for Timmins-James Bay. This is a huge electoral district with hardly any people. If you look at a map you can see how it might be an atypical district. Put in the fact that mining is important and that indigenous people are a big factor. It's a place where a serious, intelligent odd-ball (compared to usual politicians) can be elected. The speech can be seen here the Meidas Touch channel on YouTube; you can see an interview with Charlie here/a>.
Friday, December 13, 2024
Astounding fact -- or rather projection -- imagine Ethiopia with twice the population of Russia
At Foreign Policy Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that Putin's concern with Russia's projected depopulation is an import factor in his motivation for his invasion of Ukraine. In making their argument they site this astounding "fact" (which admittedly is a projection):
Today, Russia defines its national security by the size of its population, not the extent of its landmass. Putin understands that, in the world of tomorrow, Russia will be a territorial giant and population dwarf. Russia’s population will not only be much smaller than the populations of India, China, or the United States but also one-half of Ethiopia’s and one-third of Nigeria’s. For Putin, this population decline translates into an irreversible loss of power. As he stated in 2020, “Russia’s destiny and its historic prospects depend on how numerous we will be.”/I'm used to thinking of Nigeria as a big deal because of its population, but the idea that a future Ethiopia may be twice the population of Russia astounds me (but not my wife who says "they [the Russians] all live in St. Petersburg [and the rest of Russia is empty]."
I will definitly have to pay more attention to Ethiopia.
Image: a crowd in Ethiopia
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