I’m still waiting for the trickle down effect. It’ll happen!

@gopher, Stop with the irrelevant anecdotes.

I will be more clear.

Do you support Trump's policy in relation to Canada as you have described it. This is a yes or no question.

You question was whether I supported anything that Trump did. The answer would obviously be "yes" for the reasons that I articulated. Saying that I opposed everything that any politician did would be insane.

As for Canada, I am kind of ambivalent. In general, I would support Quebec Separatism in the abstract as I would support Scottish Separatism and most saliently Catalan Separatism. I am not so sure about Kurdish Separatism. I guess I support Tibetan Separatism and ex post support Bengali Separatism.

Also btw, the Greek roommate of one of my friends in college told me that "anecdote" means "unwritten" and can definitionally only exist as verbal stories. Nothing written down or communicated through writing qualifies as an "anecdote".

I believe that the original sense would be closer to “unpublished” than “unwritten,” i.e. previously undisclosed (anekdotos). In any event, the English “anecdote” has long since acquired the meaning of a short narrative, whether written or spoken.

My statement is correct as written.

You can not answer all the questions you want. I have since clarified the original question and now you say you are ambivalent about something you just wrote ad nauseam about.

Procopius (c.490/507- c.560s) “also left a ‘Secret History’ [Anecdota, i.e. ‘unpublished things’, not ‘anecdotes’], probably written c. 550 and published after his death, which was a massive attack on the character of Justinian and his wife Theodora.”

https://origin.web.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/procop-anec.asp

@ubercacher...I can write lengthy analysis of any number of things that I do not have strong opinions on. There is only a weak correlation between those two things. I can recognize things which I am observing without being particularly invested in them. I believe that I have answered every question that I am aware of you having asked me.

@North Sea...Again, read the things that I actually write. The statement that I wrote is correct as written, and even if it was somehow inaccurate, you are virtually incapable of disproving my statement.

I think we can pretty fairly draw our conclusions from the fact that gopher's coyly hinted at a "revisionist" attitude towards the causes of the Civil War and the merits of American involvement in the war against Nazi Germany. Attempting to get them to put forth their actual beliefs is futile, as Sartre would tell you.

Lmao at tariffs being the real root cause of the civil war. Lost cause nonsense

I dunno, I don't reckon powers simply go to war over single issues, dig down a little and you'd find multiple issues at play in almost any conflagration. The assertion that tarries played a part in causing the US civil war seems like a reasonable assertion to me, at the very least it played a role.

The historical narrative of causes of war on the other hand, seems to me to be one that consistently simplifies quite complex situations which cause Nations to go to war. I have as neaky suspicion that this is done to induce the general population into a more easily repeatable version of historical events that suits a national agenda.

Regarding current day tariffs, my personal thoughts on the matter is that these are being placed to address resources issues, as opposed to economic issues. Meaning geoploitiaclly it seems to rhyme more strongly with the US securing its strategic position vis-a-vis material/goods/manufacturing, than it does with a 'Trump is an idiot - throws an economic grenade for shits and giggles' narrative that is being pushed by the media.

I take gopher's view here, Trump isn't an idiot. In fact he's quite remarkably consolidated power unto himself in unprecedented speed. Now you can (and should) argue about whether or not this is a good or bad thing, but what it does show is a high level of realpolitik.

"...a "revisionist" attitude towards...the merits of American involvement in the war against Nazi Germany"

Huh? Nazi Germany declared war on the US. That the UK was at war with Germany prior to the US being at war with Germany and very actively tried to involve the US in their preexisting war with Germany is a pretty widely accepted fact. The entire point of my mentioning the British efforts in this regard was that the contemporaneous analysis of their intelligence service on how to manipulate specific, identifiable members of Congress leaned heavily into arguments about tariff and trade policy rooted in sectional differences, which is demonstrably true. And that was 80 years after the Civil War began.

And just for added educational value, the head of the America First Committee was Robert Wood, who had been the Quartermaster General of the American Expeditionary Force ie. the second highest ranking American army officer in France during World War One after Pershing and the equivalent of Erich Ludendorff within the US Army. To claim that he was a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer is slanderous of a man who very much did his fighting of foreign wars. And the phrase "America First" in this context comes from the name that Woodrow Wilson gave to his foreign and security policy prior to the Zimmerman Telegram, which was of course a crisis generated by British Intelligence in order to draw the US into the First World War.

I will just repeat that the analysis I offer on the American Civil War is what Lord Palmerston and William Gladstone viewed to be the self-evident interpretation of events at the time. As an additional fact, Gladstone's father had been the largest slaveholder in the English-speaking world, and his fortune expanded considerably through the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. A peaceful ending of slavery in the US would have had to follow the British model, and the results of that system would have likely made slaveholding Southern planters quite a bit wealthier. The North and the South had been experiencing increasing degrees of conflict on a widening range of issues for several decades leading up to the Civil War. Those issues largely came down to the scope of federal government power and range of activity. That such differing and irreconcilable attitudes could reasonably be driven by the regionally asymmetric burden of the underlying tax structure hardly seems hard to fathom to me. There was a day (and a year and a decade) before Lincoln won a national election as a regional candidate with 40% of the vote who ran a campaign explicitly targeted against one of the three major regions of the country that simultaneously advocated significantly expanding the powers of a federal government that would then be in the hands of a leader and party adversarial to a third of the country. The "crisis that was" seems pretty archetypal for producing a secessionist movement to me but it still happened within an underlying context of suspicion and near constant friction.

The second secession crisis (the first one originating in the South after New England tried to secede over their economic interests being harmed by the War of 1812) is un-controversially viewed as being entirely about tariff policy. Once Southern members bolted from the US Congress in 1861, the remaining rump of northern congressmen immediately jacked up the tariff and passed the Morrill Land Grant College Act, the Homestead Act and chartered the transcontinental railroads which all involved giving away massive amounts of federal land in precisely the ways that Southern politicians had objected to for decades. Again the asymmetries of tariff collection makes the conflicting views of giving away federal land pretty easy to understand.

Since my thesis was present at the beginning, it cannot be termed "revisionist"; that which came later is by definition more "revisionist". And again, while I did not stay a history major, I was trained as a proto-historian by arguably the preeminent historian of American slavery. I am likely more knowledgeable about the history and realities of slavery as it existed in America than most people here, and nothing I am writing here is based in ignorance of the things that you believe that you know.

While there is a reasonable, "it was all about slavery" argument, that thesis essentially has to build a case that the changes to slavery in the 1820s in response to Denmark Vesey so thoroughly transformed slavery as an institution that it became something unrecognizable from what had existed before and thus gave rise to meaningfully different attitudes towards slavery on the part of northerners. However, I have never heard anyone make that argument in the wild. There was an escalating sectional conflict leading into the Civil War that was broadening over ever more issues rather and narrowing into ever fewer, more focused ones.

Ultimately, it does not trouble me to be alone in being right, and you are certainly entitled to choose to be wrong. :oP

@kaner: No-one here is arguing that Trump is "throwing an economic grenade for shits and giggles." It is clear that he is aiming to re-shore production in some way. What is being questioned is whether he is going about it intelligently.

Before any solutions you first have to identify the problem. The problem is that China currently manufactures about 33% of the world's goods while accounting for 12-13% of consumption. Their share of manufacturing is set to grow even higher under current conditions. This large trade imbalance creates instability across the global system. That is essentially the problem.

So how to address it? I would say that ideally the U.S. should recognize its complicity in choosing to outsource manufacturing at the expense of the American worker, but let's leave that aside for now. Biden tried to re-shore some advanced manufacturing through a mixture of trade restrictions on China, primarily on semiconductors, along with tax policy and subsidies in the form of the CHIPS and Science Act. He worked to get significant allies in the semiconductor supply chain to buy in, including the Netherlands and Japan. To me this was good, well-considered policy.

Trump has chosen to address the U.S. manufacturing deficit primarily through tariffs. As uber pointed out, if you want to take this approach, the U.S. should co-ordinate with other countries to impose tariffs on China in order to gradually move production away. You should be clear about what kind of manufacturing you are targeting, moreover. Instead, Trump seems to believe that a U.S. trade deficit with any other country is a problem, and he does not seem to care about what kind of manufacturing gets re-shored. He therefore imposed unilateral tariffs designed to redress the U.S. trade deficit with every country, including tariffs on traditional allies, without regard to existing free trade agreements. This has generated a widespread negative backlash that leaves the U.S. in a weakened position to deal with the primary issue of China, in my view. I do not find this policy particularly wise.

This of course is separate from the question of whether Trump's domestic consolidation of power is deserving of admiration. History is filled with examples of leaders who consolidated personal power at the expense of the national good. I personally put Trump in that category, and I find it indicative of social decline that someone so venal and corrupt has been elected twice. I fail to see how having such a view is somehow indicative of being manipulated by Trump, as gopher has said. Why would he not manipulate me to have a positive view of him instead.

@gopher: I am happy to have discussions if there is a degree of intellectual honesty. On even a minor point such as the original meaning of "anecdote," you seem unable to admit error, however. You instead cling to the technical point that the "statement is correct as written," which I assume means that the Greek roommate of your college friend did in fact tell you that. Obviously I do not dispute it. For the sake of a credible discussion, it would be much better to acknowledge that by putting forward the statement you were endorsing it, that the Greek roommate was mistaken, and simply move on.

This is absolutely lost cause nonsense as Nopetapus and Orange pointed out. All the economic arguments go back to slavery. All the states rights arguments go back to slavery. The South's secession documents all mention slavery as a (or the) primary reason for secession. Gopher pointed out previously that the North had an economic stake in slavery as well as the South. While true this actually helps my point, which is that despite those economic reasons the most radical elements in the North were violently opposed to slavery on moral grounds. This opposition is explicitly why all Southern states seceded. The economic factors had an effect, but they simply were not as big as the desperate fear of new free states being added to the Union.

On another note, I will continue to ignore any appeals to authority from gopher, or anyone else for that matter. Nobody cares who you knew as an undergraduate.

Notably the undergraduate academic advisor gopher mentions, Barbara Fields, very much believes the root cause of the civil war was slavery and not tariffs. Not sure why they brought her up given she very much believed slavery was the root cause and that tariffs were just a symptom (because of how it related to slavery)

Did I make any "states rights" arguments? That I have had in person conversations with the real experts here is not an appeal to authority but merely a statement that I have had these conversations with experts as opposed to them being idiosyncratic. An appeal to authority would be, "this expert agrees with me; therefore, I am right."

The root weakness of the "it's turtle all the way down" arguments are that the frictions and conflicts between the North and South were escalating and widening to take in ever more issues. Slavery was not new. One has to lay out a case in which slavery becomes more and more important to the North and then explain why the conflict kept broadening into more and more different issues. There are points to be made about the spread of evangelical theology across northern society and about the Fugitive Slave Law increasing polarization, but the conflict was escalating before those events. There was a Secession Crisis during the Madison Administration which that implicitly about trade policy. There was a second quasi-Secession Crisis during the Jackson Administration that was explicitly about trade policy. Bother were strongly sectional in nature.

As time goes on, the North and the South were having arguments at dagger points over public education and nearly every foreign policy controversy.

Also, as a counter-point, the political leaders in the North quite vociferously denied that the Civil War was about slavery as it was beginning, and when offered a potential constitutional protection for slavery, the South still wanted to leave.

The US literally went to war with Japan because the Empire of Japan launched simultaneous attacks against Pearl Harbor and the US air bases on Luzon. Both of which were at the time unprecedented technological feats that the US military through nearly impossible. However, the US had cut off Japan's supplies of oil (including from Mexico and Venezuela) and was in the process of transferring our entire fleet of strategic bombers from the US mainland to The Philippines precisely in order to be able to bomb Tokyo. And that was after having deployed much of our fleet to forward positioning in Hawaii in order to threaten Japan, after Japan took possession of bases in French Indochina from the Vichy regime. The in process deployment of our bombers seems to have actually been the cause of the Japanese preemptive attack.

The US aircraft carriers survived the attack because the "training mission" they were supposedly on was a cover story to ferry intercept fighters to Wake Island, which was too far for them to fly from Hawaii. The US codebreakers had read cables between Tokyo and the Japanese Embassy in DC to learn that Japanese diplomats had been given a high priority directive to learn both the schedule for deploying the bombers and whether they would be taking the longer southern route via Australia or would be cutting through the Japanese controlled central Pacific. Fighters based at Wake Island were deemed necessary to provide escort cover for the strategic bombers migration and eventual resupply.

Ironically, the British were extremely paranoid about war with Japan to the point that it along with their anxieties about Canadian reliability post-Chanak drove much of Chamberlin's strategic thinking at Munich. The Japanese would have likely gotten more oil out of Malaya and the East Indies via purchase from the British and Dutch had they not invaded.

But even that takes things to another level. Hitler is documented to have spoken extensively at the drop of the proverbial hat about the Chanak Crisis with anyone he could trap in a social setting. During his last conversation with the British ambassador to Berlin in the closing days before his invasion of Poland, he threatened that Chamberlin's government would fall if he tried to interfere in Germany's conflict with Poland just as his brother had lost a leadership challenge in 1922 as a result of Chanak. If anyone is ever on Jeopardy, Austen Chamberlin is the British Conservative Party leader who lost his position in 1922 to birth The 1922 Committee that now controls such leadership challenges.

So really World War Two is all Canada's fault. You know, with their beady little eyes and their flapping heads so full of lies. :oP

And Barbara Fields also believes that slavery fundamentally changed in nature after the 1820s due to Southern response to the Denmark Vesey Slave Revolt as mentioned above.

I'm not going to get into all that, but I trust people who've been online for a while know when they're being gish galloped.

In broad summary, though, we have the typical neo-Confederal apologia that southern rejection of the Corwin Amendment represented a rejection of slavery as a war aim. Gopher avoids mentioning that the reason the amendment was rejected was because it was compatible with the Republican platform to ban slavery in US territories (this is the platform that gopher characterizes as "explicitly targeted against one of the three regions of the country").

I won't even touch the whole conspiracy theory around advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack. As is usual with this style of argument, every particular has at least one fundamental flaw. This is why the conspiracy theory is structured so none of the pillars of the case have any relationship to the others: so that they can all be dumped with minimal effort onto a forum.

Re: the paragraph on the training mission:

Lol lmao even. This was already downhill and you bringing up Pearl Harbor jumped this argument off the cliff.

Why did we start a new thread on this? There was a good thread started.

In a Chinese history book,we note that the main reason causing civil war in the US is whether to free the slaves.
The north wants more workers(free slaves) but the south needs farming(don't).
Tariff seems to be 2nd reason and it dosn't cause the war directly.

About now Trump's tariff policy:you may see this-https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1ZW411g7w1?spm_id_from=333.788.recommend_more_video.1&vd_source=b5beae040b55da2e74daf8137b36975e (2 man disagree with the idea.)
And in another hand a lot of US citizens agree with the idea.
Who's major?Any surveys on this?