What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[The Brain]

Yellow fever is a disease now?

[Eddie Teach]

It is.

[Admiral Yi]

It's a fashion statement.

[Eddie Teach]

No, it's an actual disease, spread by mosquitoes.

I don't believe seeking Asian coochie is a symptom though.

[Razgovory]

Why did the "disease narrative" become the dominate explanation of the high turnover of slaves?

Is that a narrative?

It's what I was taught.

I am surprised you were taught much about it at all. In College?

I mean disease was a huge problem in the Carribean colonies but the horrific treatment of the enslaved people (and the very dangerous work they were doing) usually dominates any discussion of those colonies and how slavery went.

I think so.  It was close to 20 years ago.

[Caliga]

I thought the main killer in the colonial south was malaria, not yellow fever.  Many Africans have resistance to malaria on account of the sickle cell mutation, which meant that they tended to live longer than white indentured servants while working in fields overrun with disease-carrying mosquitoes.

[Zanza]

"I never understood wind," Trump said, according to Mediaite. "I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody. I know it is very expensive. They are made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none, but they are manufactured, tremendous — if you are into this — tremendous fumes and gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right?"

"So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint, fumes are spewing into the air, right spewing, whether it is China or Germany, is going into the air," the president added.

"A windmill will kill many bald eagles," he said, according to Mediate. "After a certain number, they make you turn the windmill off, that is true. By the way, they make you turn it off. And yet, if you killed one, they put you in jail. That is OK. But why is it OK for windmills to destroy the bird population?"

I find it interesting that he acknowledges that carbon footprint is relevant, even if he might have his facts slightly wrong...

[Syt]

I have a colleague who keeps explaining that wind mills create loads of CO2 when in operation. Granted, he's also afraid of WiFi radiation.

At least he's not talking about the Gigabytes of CO2 we radiate into space like an Austrian politician recently did.

[Malthus]

Yeah, but didn't they basically keep a sort of serfdom going with sharecropping arrangements and 'Jim Crow' laws for decades after slavery formally ended?

Well they didn't need Jim Crow laws for that. Sharecropping worked on both the black and white population. No slavery required. I mean northern industrialists and large landowners found few issues getting cheap labor for profitability and when the time came neither did the southern ones.

No doubt cotton could be harvested while paying a fair wage, but it was apparently very labour intensive, so stiffing the labour force directly boosted profits more than in other common industries, as the cost of labour was a big fraction of the cost of cotton production.

Well the South contained large numbers of uneducated people in a pretty primitive economy. It always would have been some kind of tenant relationship. Though the enormous economic disruption of the war certainly helped get

At least, this is the account I have heard as to why slavery was more attractive in the US South than elsewhere, such as the US North and Canada. 

Slavery would have been massively attractive to the North if they had thought about it a bit. As the South showed during the Civil War it is amazing how cheaply you can make manufactured goods using slave labor.

I think it is really complicated. Just going for a strict economic determinism I think obscures several issues. Especially when people start focusing on the cotton boom and its peculiarities for slavery's success. I mean slavery was already there and was already extremely successful and there was no reason it would not have continued to be so.

If there had been no successful slave system already in the place the cotton boom would still have happened without slavery. Likewise, with no cotton boom slavery would have continued to prosper. That is my view anyway.

The economic determinism argument goes something like this:

- Slavery existed as an institution all over the US and Canada.

- However, slavery took root in the US South and died out in Canada and the US North before the Civil War. Why?

- Northerners were just as racist as southerners by and large. The notion that Northerners were more moral and Southerners more morally corrupt flatters Northerners but is likely not true as an explanation.

- Makes more sense that slavery had some economic advantages in the South, free labour in the North, and that economic expediency tended to inform morality.

- The main differences were the types of crops grown: cotton was very labour intensive. It is true they can and did set slaves to all sorts of work, but large-scale agriculture seems to have done best with slavery.

... no doubt personalities had something to do with it (I already mentioned Simcoe's personal impact in Upper Canada). However, if the economics of the situation were not determinative, we are still faced with the problem of explaining why the institution died out on one place and throve in another.

[mongers]

"I never understood wind," Trump said, according to Mediaite. "I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody. I know it is very expensive. They are made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none, but they are manufactured, tremendous — if you are into this — tremendous fumes and gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right?"

"So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint, fumes are spewing into the air, right spewing, whether it is China or Germany, is going into the air," the president added.

"A windmill will kill many bald eagles," he said, according to Mediate. "After a certain number, they make you turn the windmill off, that is true. By the way, they make you turn it off. And yet, if you killed one, they put you in jail. That is OK. But why is it OK for windmills to destroy the bird population?"

I find it interesting that he acknowledges that carbon footprint is relevant, even if he might have his facts slightly wrong...

Zanza you're responding to a comedic made up quotes.   
Yes I know in all likelyhood it's real,  but I can't bring myself to believe that, so I'm in a state of denial about the extent of Trump lunacy.

[mongers]

It's very reassuring that he hasn't done anything stupid in the last 2 or 3 weeks the previous posts in this thread. 

Maybe he's learning to be presidential?

[dps]

- Northerners were just as racist as southerners by and large. The notion that Northerners were more moral and Southerners more morally corrupt flatters Northerners but is likely not true as an explanation.

Actually, I think that the possibility exists that Northerners were more moral and Southerners were more morally corrupt has some merit.

The idea that slavery was immoral already existed before the American Revolution, and it existed to at least some extent in all of the colonies.  And after independence, the default position of Southern leaders was that slavery was an evil institution that they would get rid of if they could do so without financially ruining themselves (whether or not this position was sincerely held is an open question), up until roughly after the end of the War of 1812.  After that, Southern opinion increasingly saw slavery as a positive.  Why that change occurred is an interesting question.  It's possible of course, that the South came to see slavery as a positive was simply because if was so economically important to them.  But it's also possible that it was due to the influence of John C. Calhoun and his ilk.

[Savonarola]

Donald Trump at his rally in Toledo last night:



"I'm going to tell you about the Nobel Peace Prize, I'll tell you about that. I made a deal, I saved a country, and I just heard that the head of that country is now getting the Nobel Peace Prize for saving the country. I said: 'What, did I have something do with it?' Yeah, but you know, that's the way it is. As long as we know, that's all that matters... I saved a big war, I've saved a couple of them."

[crazy canuck]

He wants everything Obama had

[Syt]

Trump wants to expand NATO into Middle East, suggests name "NATOME" ('NATO plus ME'), because he's 'good with names':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=RitJw-Lol9M&feature=emb_logo