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Another busy week (is there any other kind?) and our intrepid podcasters cover it all: is The New York Times‘ 1619 Project the definitive (new) history of the United States? Spoiler alert: no. Hoover Institution and self-titled Grumpy Economist John Cochrane joins to discuss the possibility of a recession, and later, our own (well, by marriage) Seth Mandel (OK, he also edits The Washington Examiner Magazine) stops by to discuss the President’s uh, unusual language when discussing members of the Hebrew faith, and why Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar really do employ anti-Semitic tropes on a regular basis. Finally, should we all start eating plant-based “beef”? Our podcasters debate and their opinions may surprise you.
Music from this week’s show: All That Meat And No Potatoes by Louis Armstrong
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Fine. But what is the 1619 thesis, anyway? That slavery was a vile, reprehensible blight on U.S. history? Stipulated. Who disputes that? That it needs to be taught — and taught thoroughly — in our schools? Stipulated. Who disputes that? (And it is being taught there).
What exactly is the 1619 thesis?
The thesis is that White People and America suck.
From the New York Times:
They go on to explain that the project’s aim as “refram[ing] the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our country’s true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”
Basically, the claim is that when Europeans came to this country, considered themselves subjects of a divinely-instated monarch, and acted according to the judgements of said monarch, they were somehow engaged in activities which are quintessentially American.
So our challenge appears to be to argue that the proud royal subjects of a Mercantile Empire were something other than Americans.
I found Seth to be inconsistent in his discussion. He talked a lot about the 90s and 00s and only got to the modern DNC at the end, where he said things are different. Yes, that is the point. The 2019 version of the DNC flirts with BDS and is unable to condemn antisemitism in a resolution. Intersectionality and Marxist Identity Politics have changed the game. Rob made a good save near the end of the segment.
I have, indeed. But I’d also add: cannibalism! The idea that the North American continent was one big Burning Man camp out before Jamestown is childish left wing nonsense.
So now you’re a Native-American-Superiority denier too? Wow!
Look at this thread. China should not have been let into the WTO. It’s 50 mafia that want to keep being mafia. That is what the Chinese government is.
Expect progressives to deploy restrictions on “hate speech“ to suppress the story of what Native Americans were really like. (Compare “Islamophobia”.)
Some years ago, a left-wing anthropologist published a book about how thousands of accounts of cannibalism were all racist lies. But then archaeologists found traces of anthropophagy in human feces, settling the question.
Another story that has been suppressed is the fact that, while whites never waged a war of extermination against Native Americans — they just kept pushing them out of the way — various tribes waged such wars against each other; for example, the Sioux trying to exterminate the Pawnee (which played a role in the motion picture, The Revenant); or the Comanche, the Tonkawa.
@filmklassik — “But what is the 1619 thesis, anyway? That slavery was a vile, reprehensible blight on U.S. history? Stipulated. Who disputes that? That it needs to be taught — and taught thoroughly — in our schools? Stipulated.”
This is an example of how conservatives permit liberals to mark out the playing field, and establish the rules of the game.
Describing slavery as a “blight on U.S. history” makes as much sense as complaining that somebody put anchovies on your slice of an anchovy pizza: all the slices have anchovies on them.
Call it a blight on world history, if you will, recognizing that in this context “blight” means “norm”.
The true history of slavery, that should be taught in schools, is that it was everywhere, until Western Christianity literally took up arms against it.
Teach that every slave kidnapped from his home in Africa was kidnapped by Africans.
Teach that the Founding Fathers half-abolished slavery, but that the wave of emancipation rolling south after the Revolution stalled when it reached states where the slave population seemed too large to assimilate.
Hey, what’s $300 BILLION or $400 BILLION a year between
friendsideologically opposite adversaries?What an astonishingly useless guest Cochrane was. He wouldn’t even answer the spectacularly fat softball question about what two economic reforms he’d like to see. To the extent that Cochrane is affiliated with the once-great, now lame CATO Institute, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
Seth Mandel was hardly any better than Cochrane. Hey Seth – the Democrat Party’s official party line is anti-Semitic, anti-Israel. Al Sharpton will AGAIN be invited to speak at the Democrat National Convention. I suppose in Seth’s defense, Sharpton isn’t just an anti-Semite whose incitement to riot resulted in the murder of a half dozen or so Jews. Sharpton is also a convicted racist slanderer and a federal income tax cheat.
The Democrat Party is anti-Israel and anti-Semite. Trump is 1oo% justified in criticizing American Jews for voting Democrat. I have no idea what Seth Mandel’s excuse is.
If leftism is more important than your religion. How can you be a Jew? From what I know about the old testament, G-d is the main character.
Some Native Americans ate each other and some Native Americans were chill. Tribes differed wildly from one another. To be fair to the Algonquin people, sometimes in the Canadian winter, it was either cannibalism or everybody dies.
@roblong Cattle are meant to be lean? The cattle in barns and feedlots are not natural animals. They’ve been bred and croosbred in a crude form of genetic engineering to grow fast and grow fat, because that’s how people like them. If the preference shifts to leaner meat then producers can easily shift to meet that demand.
I’ve seen this trope bubbling up lately even amongst conservatives that meat is uniquely bad for the environment. The studies that show an excessively negative carbon footprint are remarkably poorly done. They intentionally leave out a few important details. Most consequentially the studies usually do not include the amount of carbon absorbed by feed grain as it is grown. About 45% of a corn plant, ears and all, is carbon whisked out of the atmosphere, which is rarely counted. Also duplicitously omitted is the fact that a considerable amount of corn is double used for ethanol and feed. About 40% of the corn yield in a year goes to ethanol another 40% directly to feed. The 40% used for ethanol produces a byproduct called gluten or distillers grains that is then fed to livestock. The cracked kernels and screenings not suitable for industrial uses are also fed. I’ve never seen a study either on ethanol or on the carbon footprint of livestock that takes this double usage into account. The dangers of methane as a greenhouse gas are often misused to scare people as well. Global warming literature will mention that methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon siting its effect as 32, 84, or 102 times that of carbon dioxide. Not often mentioned is that methane decays much more quickly than carbon dioxide and is measured in parts per billion rather than parts per million. The highest estimates for methane’s contribution to global warming rest at around 17%. 60% of which can be attributed to manmade causes and 50% of that fraction has to do with livestock. So 5% then. which is not nothing, but not really something either. When you look into it just a bit you see that global warming is used as a stalking horse to push an anti-meat agenda. I’m glad these guys can see through it, but I’m not confident the average consumer can.
About fake meat. There are two kinds. Lab grown meat which is incredibly cash and resource intensive. Its not really close to being ready for consumption and still costs a fortune for the protein goo that the cells need to eat as they form on the lattice. The other kind of fake meat is just ground up plants with chemicals added that make it taste like meat. These could be cost effective and taste roughly the same if overseasoned enough to kill a weird bitterness that sometimes lingers. I think the same people who are early adopters may turn against it as “artificial” when they learn the chemical processes necessary to manufacture it.
Your mistake is assuming that there’s even an ounce of self-awareness here. There isn’t. They don’t think of themselves as religionists. They think of themselves as secular. But they are religionists.
Of course, that’s what American citizens have been trying to say!
Uh, remember Department of Commerce v. New York or were you too busy making fun of Wilbur Ross back on June 27, 2019?
“For purposes of reapportionment, the Census counts all persons (including non-citizens), including those too young to vote. However, in terms of the number of voters per district or per state, the share of the voting-age population that is non-citizen is also relevant. In 2000, some 7.6 percent of the nation’s adult population (18 and over) were non-citizen, higher than the 6.6 percent of the total population. … the more than 18 million non-citizens in the 2000 Census were equal to nearly 29 congressional seats. … In 2000, half of all non-citizens lived in just three states and almost 70 percent live in just six states.
… the presence of non-citizens caused a total of nine seats to change hands. Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin each lost a seat that they had prior to the 2000 Census while Montana, Kentucky and Utah each failed to gain a seat they other wise would have gained, but for the presences non-citizens in other states. … (in the year 2000 it was estimated that) 40 to 45 percent of non-citizens are (were) illegal aliens. … it has the same effect on presidential elections because the apportionment of the Electoral College. … It is very important to understand that the states that lost a seat due to the presence of non-citizens in other states are not declining in population.”
Those nine states all voted for Trump. Thus, Trump probably should have earned several more electoral votes. This article mentions the 2000 census. The 2010 census statistics are probably even worse.
https://cis.org/Testimony/Impact-NonCitizens-Congressional-Apportionment
No one else noticed or is upset about this sort of stuff?
…
I believe that slavery have been outlawed in all countries.
“…slavery is now abolished de jure in all countries…”
Mauritania was apparently the last country to outlaw slavery in 2007. The adjacent area of Western Sahara, who is apparently run by no one, apparently outlawed slavery in 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom
Sorry but this makes no sense whatsoever. You’re coming at this from an intellectual, fact-based perspective which is a big mistake. So put down the laser pointer and the history book and step away from the white board for a moment.
Let me tell you about the people in charge of educating our children in elementary and high school, and about those in charge of history and humanities departments in college and graduate school, and about the vast majority of Millennials and those in Generation Z.
Here we go.
Where race is concerned …
They. Don’t. Care. About. Facts.
(They can’t even “hear” facts.)
They. Care. Only. About. Dogma.
”Woke” dogma.
Critical Race Theory is their religion. It is their religion. So where race is concerned, they do not respond to facts at all, but only to their own feelings.
So you have about as much chance of “reaching” these social justice religionists through appeals to logic as you do of converting an evangelical Christian to atheism.
It can’t happen.
I’m not saying reaching them through logic and discourse is difficult, mind you. Not for a minute do I think it’s difficult. Oh, no…
It is impossible.
Not all countries are law-abiding.
From Deutsche Welle:
“Illegal” does not equate to “nonexistent.” Somebody tell the gun-grabbers.
“…in 2018, there were 403,000 people living in condition of modern slavery in the United States.”
That seems to be more than any other country except for India, China, and Russia.
Brazil, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, and France also seem to have high numbers.
However, none of these countries are located in Rob’s specified region of Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century#Statistics
…
“In China, an estimated 3,388,400 people are victims of modern slavery (0.25% of the population)…” The US rate appears to be only about half of that.
“North Korea is a number one offender … with 4.37% of the population living in modern slavery.”
https://www.oxygen.com/very-real/6-countries-where-slavery-still-exists
…
“58% of people in slavery are living in just five countries: India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan.”
North Korea, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Uzbekistan are also not located in Africa.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/05/31/the-countries-with-the-most-people-living-in-slavery-infographic/
The Comanche affected to be offended by the Tonkawas’ cultural habit of munching on slain enemies: torture, murder, gang rape were OK but they drew the line at cannibalism.
Why is the title “Casserole Of Mystery” when the photo is clearly “Somethingburger Of Mystery”?
are you going to burnin man next week?
the grumpy economist is always a wonderful guest. you can never have too much grumpy economist
judicial watch and tom fitton do excellent work
in other words, slavery is a black market in Africa?
what is ‘modern slavery’?
Maybe they give it a different name so they can be less upset and maybe believe they don’t have to do anything about something that’s happening now, rather than something that happened hundreds of years ago?
Well put. My sentiment exactly.
That’s what I heard too. The Comanche were among the cruelest of all Native tribes but they were so effective at war that they actually got the whites to give them some decent ranch land and the whites were too scared to break the treaty.
I didn’t think Seth Mandel did any better.
Now, Zefram Cochrane, THAT would be a great guest!