One of the most frustrating things about discussions of the US judicial system is that they always seem to be about abortion. This is, of course, an incredibly important issue. But the courts oversee so much more than that one aspect of life in the United States. The intense feelings involved in that one issue serve to conceal the true significance of Trump’s judges.
Trump loves to trumpet his success in selecting Judges, but what’s often ignored is the way that the judges he is picking will constrain not just his agenda, but everybody else’s as well. For decades to come. In today’s video, we attempt to demystify the issue a bit, and delve in to one of the most successful lobbying groups of the 21st century, the Federalist Society.
This morning I was struck by another one of the reasons that the British Empire still has such a positive reputation (in some circles). When we focus on the British interaction with a group of people, we tend to focus on the end. It’s the struggle for independence that matters for the national stories of all the formerly subjugated countries. Of course, these stories are still in living memory for many, which also contributes to their popularity. But beyond that, nobody wants to look like a victim. Newly independent countries understandably want to focus on their victorious heroes rather than their defeated and brutalized ancestors from centuries past.
The British certainly committed many atrocities as their empire fell apart. Jallianwalla Bagh and the suppression of the Mau Mau are just two instances that leap to mind. But the more popular image is one of haplessness. The humiliation of Suez, the pretentious pointlessness of Mountbatten. The things that Britain is most blamed for at the end, like the Israel Palestine situation, and horrors of Indian partition, are stories about British neglect and poverty, not British greed and destruction. You can almost (not quite) find yourself pitying the British as their carefully crafted systems of control fall apart.
If you look at the other end of the Imperial story, there is nothing British to sympathize with. In country after country we see the people who live there struggle and fail, against differing degrees of brutality, as universally hypocritical Englishmen proclaim their civilizing values and cash their checks. Today’s video attempts to surface just one of those hundreds (thousands?) of stories, by telling the neglected tale of the British subjugation of Egypt.
My second Egypt video is taking longer than I thought, so for today’s video we’re going pure response. Late last week, and affable comedy channel entitled Awaken with JP dived deep into the Coronavirus Conspiracy waters with a video called: “What It’s Like to Believe Everything the Media Tells You“. It’s a very cleverly executed video, that never mentions the Coronavirus in it’s meta-data, and carefully approaches the topic in a comedic, sarcastic way, that’s really hard to pin down as misinformation.
When you watch it carefully though, it becomes clear that the underpinnings of the video are deeply conspiratorial. It indulges in, and furthers a range of strategies the Trump campaign is currently using to explain away the president’s responsibility for the crisis. JP has been rewarded for this well crafted piece of media. It’s been seen over 3 million times, instantly becoming the third most popular video on his over five year old channel. I’m a little jealous of course, but I think it’s also worth calling him to account. Which is what today’s video attempts to do.
History can seem predictable sometimes. We know how it turned out, so we assume that the countries that are powerful today had somewhat predictable paths to power. Sure, there were ups and downs, but the countries we’ve come to expect to have done well, did well. No surprises there. The story of Egypt’s 19th century provides a counterpoint to that complacency. There was a lot about its story that was quite similar to the stories of the Japanese and German world-beaters we are more familiar with. In the 1830s, an African country was, quite successfully, intervening in Europe. If a few things had gone differently, Egypt might have ended up as one of the world’s great powers.
It all went wrong of course. And the British had a lot to do with this. But too some extent, it was also just bad luck. There was nothing to guarantee that Japan or Germany would be successful countries. There wasn’t even anything guaranteeing that the United States would have been as successful an experiment as it has been. It’s all much more up in the air than we might think. This is a little terrifying, but also a little exciting. Today’s video on Egypt talks about what could have been.
This one was kind of a journey. Attacking PragerU’s dumb mistakes, as I did in the last video, is not a difficult project. Many have done so already. What’s a lot more difficult, is reckoning with the valid points that Prager makes. The British Empire was tremendously influential, and it is responsible for the spread of representative institutions all over the world. Prager is absolutely right about that.
The larger problem is reconciling these two things we know about the British Empire:
A: It left the world some decent institutions and…
B: The British Empire inflicted massive suffering on the world, on a scale that dwarfs anything that came before, and Britain’s poorly managed reign ended with the multi-decade apocalypse we know as the two world wars.
The standard approach is to pick one narrative and run with it. The viewpoint you choose often coincides with the left or right political marketing segment you choose to fall into. What I try to do with today’s video is reconcile the two, which involves diving in and attempting to sort out my own feelings about freedom, history, and life in general. I’m not sure it’s entirely successful. Let me know how you think I did.
The Prager U video on the British Empire has a lot of issues, but I think it also vindicates my decision to deal with the empire as a multi-part series. Today’s video goes through a lot of the assumptions and foolishness in the video, but Prager’s biggest mistake is probably trying to tell this epic, world-altering story in such a short form. There wasn’t much agreement on what the British Empire was, and what it represented at the time, and there isn’t much more now. I’ve now got over a dozen videos that attempt to put forward an argument about the British Empire. Prager’s attempt to sum it all up in just five and a half minutes looks deeply silly by comparison.
This has been one of the most requested videos since I launched the British Empire series last fall. I hope you enjoy it!
Futures Markets are a lot more interesting than you’d think. They are a key piece of financial infrastructure, that helped us build the modern world. If you’re interested, William Cronon’s book, “Nature’s Metropolis” is fascinating on the way that futures markets freed farmers and other economic actors from the tyranny of uncertainty and time. On Monday we got a rare, frightening look at what can happen when a futures market breaks. In this video we lay out why US oil prices fell into the -30s on Monday April 20th.
Despite what much of the business press has told you, this price fall wasn’t just a financial oddity. If certain things don’t happen, these prices risk becoming a monthly occurrence. As the Coronavirus depression proceeds, we are likely to see further examples of financial machinery breaking down. Get a preview by watching today’s video.
One of the saddest things about running a channel focused on geopolitics is realizing just how little the US government actually knows about the world beyond our borders. It’s not just the Trump administration, this problem is universal. At the beginning of April, the Trumpsters doubled down on their Venezuela policy, taking a number of steps to intimidate the Maduro government. Many critics complained about the timing, questioning whether this was the right moment to use military resources in this way. But as far as I have seen, nobody attacked the ridiculous premise at the center of the new policy.
By indicting Maduro as a drug trafficker in the US, and then initiating military exercises focused on his country, Trump’s Venezuela guy, Elliott Abrams, and the rest are trying to draw a direct parallel with Panama, a country the US invaded successfully in 1989. What’s obvious to anybody with a map, but not to anybody discussing Venezuela policy in Washington DC, is that Panama is a very, very different country from Venezuela. Today’s video lays out the simple facts.
If you’re like me, you probably find the Transportation Security Administration deeply irritating. But it’s also an institution whose time may have come. Back in the old days of ship travel, and even into the early decades of air travel, things were not as easy and seamless as they were in 2019. A cursory health examination was once a routine part of any long journey. There’s a distinct chance we may be returning to that era. I’ve certainly been somebody who has chafed at restrictions on travel in the past. Some of you might react to today’s video with indignation. It’s certainly not a very “More Freedom” thing to suggest that somewhat more strict restrictions on travel might be necessary.
But it’s not actually all that unprecedented or strange. A big part of building state capacity in the 19th century was around issues of public health. The modern state was, in part, built around sacrificing liberty in the name of sanitation and disease mitigation. The thing was government was almost too successful at this. People have forgotten how important the public health function was. I am grateful to the Prelinger archives for the clip I used in this video. If you are interested, you can check out the video description on YouTube for a link. It shows just how normal heightened public health procedures were at our ports and airports, not all that long ago…
In the month since everybody woke up to what a disaster the Coronavirus pandemic is, it’s been interesting watching people use it as an excuse to push the same things they were already pushing. Conservatives, Socialists, Environmentalists and Nationalists, all of them are eager to tell you that this confirms everything they have been saying all along, and proves that their particular policy priorities should be enacted immediately. Some of them may be right. But one of the most important Washington, DC lobbies is looking a little silly right now. The Military Industrial Complex, that monstrosity that gets close to a trillion dollars a year to keep us safe… did nothing to stop the greatest calamity to befall the homeland since the war of 1812.
But this hasn’t stopped them from pretending that they are still relevant after this extraordinary failure. In alliance with a Trump administration that is desperate to find another scapegoat, they are calling for a deepening of the “New Cold War” against China. They seem to believe that China is “winning” the pandemic somehow. China had what looks like a competent public health response after all, and now it’s flying stuff all over the world to help other countries. Well today’s video is here to tell you that that suspicion is ridiculous. China is not winning this thing. In fact, they are likely to end up the biggest losers.
