The Military/Industrial complex

[Toby]

You say you visited Texas. Did you visit any other parts of America? Were most of your contacts business related? And as for turning a coin....remember our founding documents were written by men who, while politicians, were also merchants. This is reflected in the business influence on our Constitution.

I loved it in Texas, because its not like here, ....I lived there with my wife and yeh we travelled to about 5 or 6 other states.. I enjoyed the big skies and the lightening storms, sat outside watching them roll in for hours, course when they arrived I ran for it!
To clarify, I enjoyed the work and had about 7 jobs While I was there. Thats the thing, if you wanna work its there and you can and I did. Did my own yard sale, all the customers were you know who, that was quite a humbling experience..Ran a T Shirt stall at a basketball tournament...Loved it. Chopped wood forever, loved that too, lots of yard work, enjoyed that, Cleaned carpets in Dallas at the Catholic school, Got an EPA in Refrigeration, laid wooden floors, resprayed bathrooms with one guy, not for me, but I tried it...Unfortunately things didn't work out in the relationship..hayho!

And as for the wine....in vino vertitas!!!

You think....lol... Hear we say,'he's on the wind up' (tongue in cheek)

[Parihaka]

You can always re-rail it by chipping in on something from page 1 or 2. ;-)

Doc doth make the mock

[Toby]

Look I am not saying the response was adequate by today's standards but it would not have occurred had not the blight occurred. It's a bit like arguing that the Black Death wasn't handled as well as it might have been; sure - wiping out fleas and rats would have helped but at the time nobody understood that. That does NOT mean that the Black Death was "man made" or "waiting to happen" it wasn't. The same for the Spanish flu epidemic etc; these have natural causes which the understanding of the time was not upto sufficiently alleviating; the reaction given historical hindsight could and should have been better but the cause was 'natural'.

Natural yes but driven by intense farming and too much reliance on one product to feed the masses. It was certainly manmade in terms of not diversifying enough to feed the working population. But yeh I agree with your point also that we're all clever after the event..Which is why I tried to explain the living conditions inflicted on the working population in Manchester. From near catastrophe came answers from engineers and scientists in the form of Infrastructure which is still in use today. I drove past a section of one today the"Thirlmere Aqueduct".

[Doktor]

Look I am not saying the response was adequate by today's standards but it would not have occurred had not the blight occurred. It's a bit like arguing that the Black Death wasn't handled as well as it might have been; sure - wiping out fleas and rats would have helped but at the time nobody understood that. That does NOT mean that the Black Death was "man made" or "waiting to happen" it wasn't. The same for the Spanish flu epidemic etc; these have natural causes which the understanding of the time was not upto sufficiently alleviating; the reaction given historical hindsight could and should have been better but the cause was 'natural'.

I am pretty sure you have some sort of excuse for the Bengal Famine, of 1943 as well.

The Crown didn't care for anyone outside London, hence it shrank.

[Doktor]

Doc doth make the mock

Shush

[Ironduke]

Look I am not saying the response was adequate by today's standards but it would not have occurred had not the blight occurred. It's a bit like arguing that the Black Death wasn't handled as well as it might have been; sure - wiping out fleas and rats would have helped but at the time nobody understood that. That does NOT mean that the Black Death was "man made" or "waiting to happen" it wasn't. The same for the Spanish flu epidemic etc; these have natural causes which the understanding of the time was not upto sufficiently alleviating; the reaction given historical hindsight could and should have been better but the cause was 'natural'.

I don't see how anyone can fail to see that Ireland was an agricultural colony, ruthlessly exploited for centuries, the Irish were basically slaves and allowed only a few hundred square feet for potatoes, while massive exports consisting of mountains of beef, dairy, and wheat continued on unabated to fill the pockets of lords and merchants - the barrels and crates of vast amounts of nutritious food, enough to feed Ireland several times over, were rolled and carried right past hundreds of thousands of emaciated skeletons starving to death just inches away on the very same dock.

I'm sorry - it was an act of outright cruelty and indifference. Ireland was a giant plantation and its population were mostly slaves. There were some loopholes to make it technically legal under British law, but they were slaves on a giant plantation nonetheless. What happened in the Ireland was not substantially different than the Holodomor in Ukraine in my book. And yet somehow America is to blame because the blight came from there?

[Parihaka]

Comparable land masses, comparable climate.
England population 53 million, Ireland population 4.5 million. That's not an accident of nature, it's deliberate policy.

[astralis]

pari,

Comparable land masses, comparable climate.
England population 53 million, Ireland population 4.5 million. That's not an accident of nature, it's deliberate policy.

not comparable history, though. England by the time of the Black Death probably already had triple the population of Ireland. similarly, London as an urban center was always significantly larger than anything comparable in Ireland.

of course the issue with British imperialism affected things, but not as much as is commonly portrayed. it's hard to say that British policies were significantly better from 1800-1850 (where the Irish population tripled) than they were in the 50 years beforehand or 50 years afterwards.

[GVChamp]

Some day, perhaps in my 50s, I might rent a backhoe and dig a hole near a river or lake near the Hudson Bay. Then build my own house from scratch with real materials. Stone, brick and mortar, oak, maple, etc. Collect the stone and wood myself, perhaps even mold and fire the bricks. I might pour concrete for the foundation and hire a local to help me with a handful of things, but that's about it. That's my dream.

There's something appealing about this, but it'd never fly in the US. We're mobile and shift quickly. The same neighborhoods went from solid working-class neighborhoods to blighted slums to gentrified places to overpriced yuppie nightmares within about 2 generations, and a lot of our suburbs are going to decline into slums in about a generation.
My family is going to end up with 3 generations in the same suburban household, but that's a huge exception. The median household moves every few years, so if you build a nice home, it's just going to get sold (and possibly demolished to build a McMansion) inside of 30 years. Which is sad, but that's America for you.

Just wait another 10 years when we have all those dead malls....

On the plus side, the younger Millennials are a lot less enamored with the McMansion, 3-car lifestyle than Gen X or the Boomers. Partly because most of us can't afford it, heh.
The downside is a lot of obsession with location, which leads to young people blowing thousands of dollars each month on rent for what are basically hovels in high-priced areas (San Fran, Chicago, etc). These kids would be a lot better off if they moved to, say, Buffalo, and try to incubate their own little hipster cultures there for 1/5 the rent.

[snapper]

I don't see how anyone can fail to see that Ireland was an agricultural colony, ruthlessly exploited for centuries, the Irish were basically slaves and allowed only a few hundred square feet for potatoes, while massive exports consisting of mountains of beef, dairy, and wheat continued on unabated to fill the pockets of lords and merchants - the barrels and crates of vast amounts of nutritious food, enough to feed Ireland several times over, were rolled and carried right past hundreds of thousands of emaciated skeletons starving to death just inches away on the very same dock.

I'm sorry - it was an act of outright cruelty and indifference. Ireland was a giant plantation and its population were mostly slaves. There were some loopholes to make it technically legal under British law, but they were slaves on a giant plantation nonetheless. What happened in the Ireland was not substantially different than the Holodomor in Ukraine in my book. And yet somehow America is to blame because the blight came from there?

I do not accept this - it makes no sense. You say they were "mostly slaves" when I presume you mean 'indentured tennants' which was the actual case. Well the two are not identical - many in England had lived under feudal landlords for a long time and in the Czarist Empire it was of course the rule until the commies. Now even if you accept that this indentured tenancy had similarities to slavery in the full blown sense (I mean they weren't shipped in to work or sold at slave markets) then what fool intentionally murders his workforce be they tenants or slaves? You need them to work the land - with slaves that's what you bought them for. The Irish famine was NOT an artificial event designed specifically to murder alot of Irish tennant farmers as arguably the Ukrainian Holodomor was or was the starvation of the Jews in the 1940s. It started with the blight which was not introduced by some evil English landlord to deliberately starve alot of Irish workers but spread as other agricultural diseases do. The only culture where the murder of the slave class was commonly practiced was in ancient Sparta due to the relatively low number of Spartiates compared to the subjugated Messenes. Otherwise it does not make sense.

I do not deny that more could have been done to alleviate the worst effect of this potato blight and perhaps by today's morality it would be just immoral that more was not done but this is a matter of historical and cultural relativity; what was right for the ancient Roman was not right for the ancient Celt and neither would be right for us today. For us to say "yes there should have been more done to alleviate the effects of the blight" is akin to us condemning the sacrifice of ancient Christians in the circuses of Rome. Doubtless both right through our eyes but then we can only see through our modern glasses whereas they could only see through the eyes of their standards.

Comparable land masses, comparable climate.
England population 53 million, Ireland population 4.5 million. That's not an accident of nature, it's deliberate policy.

There are also geological and weather differences most of the weather coming off the Atlantic tends to hit Ireland (and Western England) first so they get more rain and storms than say Kent and East Anglia.

[Albany Rifles]

Shush

Children!

[GVChamp]

Some quick googling says Britain has 4 times the arable land of Ireland, as percentage of total land. Isn't Ireland pretty hilly?

[astralis]

GVChamp,

These kids would be a lot better off if they moved to, say, Buffalo, and try to incubate their own little hipster cultures there for 1/5 the rent.

yes, there was a Don Quixote-ish article a while back about how hipsters should all move en masse to the Midwest and thus flip those red states...:-)

i suppose if Wichita or Buffalo suddenly beckoned with the prospect of churning out overnight millionaires or at least plentiful jobs I suspect then you might pull hipsters.

then there's also the issue of Chinese oligarchs (mostly West coast) or Russian oligarchs (mostly East coast) adding a not insignificant amount of inflation into those prime housing markets as well.

[Ironduke]

There's something appealing about this, but it'd never fly in the US. We're mobile and shift quickly. The same neighborhoods went from solid working-class neighborhoods to blighted slums to gentrified places to overpriced yuppie nightmares within about 2 generations, and a lot of our suburbs are going to decline into slums in about a generation.
My family is going to end up with 3 generations in the same suburban household, but that's a huge exception. The median household moves every few years, so if you build a nice home, it's just going to get sold (and possibly demolished to build a McMansion) inside of 30 years. Which is sad, but that's America for you.

Just wait another 10 years when we have all those dead malls....

On the plus side, the younger Millennials are a lot less enamored with the McMansion, 3-car lifestyle than Gen X or the Boomers. Partly because most of us can't afford it, heh.
The downside is a lot of obsession with location, which leads to young people blowing thousands of dollars each month on rent for what are basically hovels in high-priced areas (San Fran, Chicago, etc). These kids would be a lot better off if they moved to, say, Buffalo, and try to incubate their own little hipster cultures there for 1/5 the rent.

You're preaching to the choir a bit here ;-), I'm extremely mobile and can shift quicker than most. I live only in central urban areas - and I don't go in for expensive gentrified apartments either. I have very low overhead and few possessions - I prefer liquidity and mobility. I don't own anything I wouldn't donate to charity or give away, in order than I can quickly shift/move on the turn of a dime. I live in areas where I can simply walk outside and in minutes be at a bar, theater, museum, beach, etc., located right next to major transportation links such as light rails, city buses, intercity buses, airports, trains. I also use bicycle sharing programs where you pay a yearly fee and undock and re-dock bikes to get around, and Uber/Lyft as a last resort. I live in places like apartment hotels and rooming houses for a few hundred dollars a month, instead of $2000-$3000/month apartments.

The idea regarding the Hudson Bay house is that after a lifetime of mobility, liquidity, and shifting around, is to go back to the land and revert in my last years of life to an existence that was normal most of human history, live the way our ancestors did - small farm with vegetable gardens, fishing, and hunting and gathering. I don't have a crystal ball - but I'm predicting the Hudson Bay will be quite habitable and temperate in 20 years, due to continued climate change, and that I can acquire land ahead of time for very little money.

I also predict the suburbs will become increasingly ghettoized. Most homes there were poorly built - and being absolutely dependent on having to drive everywhere to do anything is not economically optimal.

[Ironduke]

I do not accept this - it makes no sense. You say they were "mostly slaves" when I presume you mean 'indentured tennants' which was the actual case. Well the two are not identical - many in England had lived under feudal landlords for a long time and in the Czarist Empire it was of course the rule until the commies. Now even if you accept that this indentured tenancy had similarities to slavery in the full blown sense (I mean they weren't shipped in to work or sold at slave markets) then what fool intentionally murders his workforce be they tenants or slaves? You need them to work the land - with slaves that's what you bought them for. The Irish famine was NOT an artificial event designed specifically to murder alot of Irish tennant farmers as arguably the Ukrainian Holodomor was or was the starvation of the Jews in the 1940s. It started with the blight which was not introduced by some evil English landlord to deliberately starve alot of Irish workers but spread as other agricultural diseases do. The only culture where the murder of the slave class was commonly practiced was in ancient Sparta due to the relatively low number of Spartiates compared to the subjugated Messenes. Otherwise it does not make sense.

I do not deny that more could have been done to alleviate the worst effect of this potato blight and perhaps by today's morality it would be just immoral that more was not done but this is a matter of historical and cultural relativity; what was right for the ancient Roman was not right for the ancient Celt and neither would be right for us today. For us to say "yes there should have been more done to alleviate the effects of the blight" is akin to us condemning the sacrifice of ancient Christians in the circuses of Rome. Doubtless both right through our eyes but then we can only see through our modern glasses whereas they could only see through the eyes of their standards.

I never said they were intentionally murdered - they died as an indirect result of gross indifference and greed. The export of luxurious foodstuffs, highly profitable beef, cheese, and butter of Ireland continue unabated despite widespread starvation. A small portion of this export could have been easily diverted to save the lives of most of those who died in Ireland - instead they were loaded onto ships to be sold for pounds and guineas in England - they were not meant for people who might only have a single copper coin to their name.

The majority of Irish who were dependent on a poverty food had no other options they could afford, nor were they offered the rich abundance of what their island produced. Nobody chooses to become dependent on a poverty food. Poverty foods are eaten when every other choice is not available. The lack of other foodstuffs in Ireland at this time, despite their massive locally abundant production, was a result of human greed and indifference.

You can call it indentured tenancy, sharecropping, serfdom or whatever you prefer - all of these are simply different shades of slavery.