Iowa was a disaster. But I was there. And I think there’s a little more to the story. Today’s (very close to the deadline!) video tells the tale…
If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click where to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.
Video Transcript after the jump…
I am writing this from Des Moines, Iowa on a very frustrating morning for the Democratic party. The Iowa Caucus reporting system has fallen into a complete shambles, and what was supposed to be the hopeful launch of the process of nominating the Democratic candidate for President has dissolved into chaos, recrimination, and accusations of fraud. It’s a tremendous shit show, and it’s outrageous that a full 16 hours or so after the end of the process we have no idea what actually occurred. It’s easy to get discouraged. But with today’s video I argue that we shouldn’t.
Donald Trump has a lot of levers of power to lean on, and it’s possible that the Democrats will never get their acts together. But Trump will still be Trump. Today’s video lays out why that may be all that matters for this November’s election.
If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click where to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.
Video Transcript after the jump…
I can’t believe people don’t spend more time talking about the 666 Fifth Avenue bribe (alleged). It’s one of the most perplexing things to me in US politics. The general impression seems to be that it’s kind of funny?! The President’s son-in-law got an absurd bail out on a losing real estate deal, to the tune of over a billion dollars, and the consequences appear to be nil. When he was trying to get the money from China it was rightly condemned, but now that he got the money from Qatar, through Canada, it’s somehow OK? It’s just a thing that happened? As I point out in today’s video, I think Joe Biden and the political culture that he exemplifies has a lot to do with this…
If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click where to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.
Video Transcript after the jump…
The times they are a’changing! Maybe it’s just turning 40, but I really do think US politics and society are undergoing a bit of a sea change. Nobody can argue that the past three years have been fun. On the other hand, I think that, so far, this period of transition is infinitely less bruising than the one the country went through in the 1970s and 1980s. In today’s video I try to knit the New Deal and Reagan eras into a single narrative of progress and change. It is punctuated with Joker level chaos of course.
I really do believe that 2020 presents an opportunity to help the country move on to its next cycle of growth and progress. I have no idea who would best represent and shape that change. But I do know that whoever gets elected in November, even if it’s Donald Trump, will have that opportunity. I’d really rather it wasn’t Donald Trump. Today’s video sets out my general attitude to US history and the 2020 election. It’s useful viewing if you want to know my biases before this year of election madness.
If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click where to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.
Video Transcript after the jump…
One of the most standard right-wing rhetorical poses of the past four years has been “This is how you got Trump.” Whether it’s progressive snowflakes on university campuses, some egregious example of left-leaning media bias, or some new frontier in trans rights, many conservative commentators have regretfully observed, “you see this is why people opted for Trump, even though he’s gross…” etc. etc. There may even be some truth to these observations. There’s certainly a diverse and well-financed range of media sources constantly telling right-leaning people that they are embattled and without a voice.
What there is little appreciation of, is that the reverse is almost certainly true as well. If the perceived liberal lean of politics and society had a serious backlash in the form of Trump, what might Trump’s dominance of our political and media spheres be doing? Right-wing brand commentators love pointing to “Trump Derangement Syndrome”(TDS), the supposedly irrational hatred the majority of the country feels for the President. What they are not thinking through is how powerful that sentiment is, and the potential it has to warp the country much, much further away from the “conservative” principles they profess to cherish. Today’s video attempts to think more seriously about the consequences of TDS, and also launches my 2020 US election coverage!
If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click where to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.
Video Transcript after the jump…
I feel like the broader arc of Trump’s Iran policy has been ignored recently. The incredibly flashy and violent gyrations of escalation have gotten a lot of coverage, but there isn’t enough emphasis on why we’re here. Sure, I suppose it’s fun to get bogged down on the question of whether or not assassinating the general of a country we are not at war with is a good idea, but we’re kind of missing the forest for the trees. No matter what you think of the Soleimani killing, we should be more focused on how we got here. And that’s what I try to do today with this video. I attempt to evaluate Trump’s “Maximum Pressure” policy against Iran, and I find it wanting.
If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click where to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.
Video Transcript after the jump…
Ahhh, the Royals… I have successfully avoided reading a single story on the current Meghan Markle / Ginger Prince scandal, but I think I have gotten the gist from twitter. Putting Markle in the thumbnail was obviously a desperate bid for clicks, but it’s also got a tangential relation to the topic of today’s video, beyond the fact that the Royals are briefly discussed at the end of it. As I understand it, Ginger Prince was allowed to marry an American actress because it was seen as good for the institution, modernizing and a helpful way to appeal to new markets. Now the institution is shocked that the changes they hoped were cosmetic might yield more significant changes.
This story is obviously a very specialized thing, but I have a hunch that it’s emblematic of an emerging theme for the United Kingdom over the next half century or so. From free trade agreements, to military commitments and positions on international incidents, the British will continue to make changes that look small and clever in the short run, but end up changing things more than they’d like in the medium to long term. Like the Queen of England this week, the British people will find themselves grumbling as they acquiesce to new arrangements they did not foresee, and would not have chosen had they known they were coming.
If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click where to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.
Video Transcript after the jump…
The later 20th century was not a big focus of my book, Avoiding the British Empire. I date the end of the British world system to 1914, and the beginning of World War I. The time after than is mostly one of decline. But it had peaks, and the period after 2016 will be seen as a new valley. One of the things that I did study intensely in writing the book was the distinction between “informal” and “formal” empire. The informal empire of financial power was as important, or perhaps more important than all the red bits on the map that were formally controlled by the British Empire.
If you look at it that way, then it’s clear that the European Union represented a new informal empire for Britain. Which makes throwing it away with Brexit quite nuts. I take a more in depth look at this in today’s video.
If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click where to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.
Video Transcript after the jump…
I may have gone a bit overboard with today’s video. It packs what I’ve learned from the three books on Tunisia I have read over the past month into one video, and it may be a bit overstuffed. Even given that, I can already see the angry comments talking about everything I’ve missed. Tunisia has an incredibly complex and lengthy history that led to the successful country it is today. I hope I’ve done it a bit of justice with this video!
Happy New Year!
If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click where to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.
Video Transcript after the jump…
Believe it or not, today’s video deals with a surprisingly persistent piece of conventional wisdom. I honestly couldn’t tell you where I picked it up, maybe Niall Ferguson, but it’s something I unthinkingly believed for decades. The idea is that countries that were colonized by the British were better off than those colonized by the French, because of superior British institutions, or better management or whatever. I hardly thought about this old assumption in my two years researching the British Empire. Serious books of history don’t try to make this claim. But once the vids started coming out, it started cropping up in the comments.
This is one of the most fun things about studying history. If you build up a base of knowledge, you can occasionally get these sudden “Ah-Hah!” moments when you realize that something you’ve always believed is unmitigated balderdash. Today’s video wrote itself with very little prompting. If you have a cursory knowledge of the history of the countries in each of the Empires before and after colonization, it becomes clear how silly this old story is. And with this video, I get to make it clear to everybody else too… I love my job.
If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click where to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.
Video Transcript after the jump…