Pepper sprayed for public safety.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I told a story in Louisville (which isn't really the South but they think they are). The story was about a woman working out a grudge against her Ex. I'm telling it and the audience is loving the story, until I say "I was afraid she'd stop this grudge march to the sea. After that no one laughed at all. Yankees cannot bring it up. although, at the time, I owned a condo in Savannah, so you'd think I'd get some slack?

One of my college roommates called it The War Of Northern Aggression.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

WWII changed everything. Developed countries could no longer survive wars against each other. Even the wealthiest and most powerful people cannot avoid the risk of complete destruction. This more than anything is why there has been peace in Europe since 1945. (The developed countries instead have fought by proxy elsewhere.)

When you read about what the Thirty Years War did to Germany, it was much the same.

[Gattigap]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

One of my college roommates called it The War Of Northern Aggression.

Most of my college roommates did.

Except for my freshman year roommate. He was black, so the decision was understandable.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

When you read about what the Thirty Years War did to Germany, it was much the same.

Or the First World War

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

Related thoughts from Krugman.

Also, read what I said. I said Paul and the author were wrong about the implications of the thought experiment. I said nothing about it's desirability or feasibility.

I also said that the author threw out a lot of coockoo "Austrian" asides about money.

Of course monetary circulation can go on forever. IF people continue to believe the "green paper" can be passed along to someone else as a form of exchange. IF people believe that green paper will continue to hold value.

I can't foresee any situation in which dollars would drop to Weimar Germany valuation levels. I agree with you that we are not likely to see hyperinflation as a result of current easing. Where I start to question the efficacy of the Fed's moves is when I consider this formula:

Easing + Continued Lack of Employment = ?

High unemployment is a new normal. The majority of jobs here being of a low wage service sector variety is a new normal. Easing will make the debt burden held by many Americans a bit more manageable. But a guy who has no wage, or one that can barely pay the rent, let alone help him pay down some of the debts holding back his non-health care related consumption (the absence of which is what holds back our economy) isn't getting much benefit from the policy.

We're going to see a strange thing in a few years: An economy in which easing has shrunk debts, but not managed to increase available employment in living-wage jobs.* I don't know what that will look like exactly, but it will be odd.
_______
* To increase wages, you have to fix health care. (We can argue Obamacare does this or doesn't, but one thing is certain: Its effects, good or bad, won't be felt for at least another five years.)

To increase the number of jobs available, you need to create demand. You also need to increase economic activity involving human workers. This is happening in manufacturing and energy right now. But even the rosiest forecasts predict only one or two million new jobs accruing from a resurgence in those industries. And as those green shoots emerge, they are offset by job losses accruing from implementation of human-replacing technologies everywhere else.

You might say easing alone will lead to business investment which leads to more workers. I disagree. I see business owners doing what I am: Shaving costs and pocketing the "efficiency-created margin."

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by Adder

Or the First World War

It's really not even close. Not by any standard -- number of military deaths was much higher, despite the incredible brutality of WWI. Number of civilian deaths was vastly higher. And destruction was infinitely higher, particularly of wealth and industrial base (the things that hurt the people in power).

What was WWI's "Dresden"? And Dresden was just one of many cities flattened by the airwar.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

It's really not even close. Not by any standard -- number of military deaths was much higher, despite the incredible brutality of WWI. Number of civilian deaths was vastly higher. And destruction was infinitely higher, particularly of wealth and industrial base (the things that hurt the people in power).

What was WWI's "Dresden"? And Dresden was just one of many cities flattened by the airwar.

WWI wasn't close UNLESS you're looking at Russia, where the devastation was vast and the war triggered the Revolution, in which just as many more died, or consider the Spanish Flu pandemic, since that flu took almost as many lives as all of WWII and many think it started on the battlefield and in the camps. Of course, there's also the Armenian genocide and the relocations and displacements in the Balkans and Greece.

But there were lots of wars that took as large a percentage of the population as WWII took of Germany, and, indeed, Russia, the Balkans, Yugoslavia, and some of the Asian countries where fighting was very fierce likely saw higher death tolls than Germany. And many cities have been wiped off the face of the earth by war. Not that uncommon through history. Dresden is still there. WWII was horrific. But to be shocked by the carnage after what happened in all the prior wars is kind of like being shocked when Mitt Romney lies under oath.

I suspect the biggest reason for peace in Europe after WWII was the presence of the cold war and the nuclear threat that could be triggered. Maybe the EU and economic integration helps now.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

WWI wasn't close UNLESS you're looking at Russia, where the devastation was vast and the war triggered the Revolution, in which just as many more died, or consider the Spanish Flu pandemic, since that flu took almost as many lives as all of WWII and many think it started on the battlefield and in the camps. Of course, there's also the Armenian genocide and the relocations and displacements in the Balkans and Greece.

But there were lots of wars that took as large a percentage of the population as WWII took of Germany, and, indeed, Russia, the Balkans, Yugoslavia, and some of the Asian countries where fighting was very fierce likely saw higher death tolls than Germany. And many cities have been wiped off the face of the earth by war. Not that uncommon through history. Dresden is still there. WWII was horrific. But to be shocked by the carnage after what happened in all the prior wars is kind of like being shocked when Mitt Romney lies under oath.

Without doing lots of research now, I'm pretty certain you are wrong about this. Russia lost more than 20 million people in WWII, which I believe is many times the number dead in WWI. And, again, it's not just the deaths but the complete destruction of cities that set WWII apart. Beyond that, I'd have a lot of trouble tying the Armenian genocide and other Soviet atrocities to WWI.

But, I'm ready to move on. Because I now know that all tragedies of this sort are What God Intended. Right?

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

But, I'm ready to move on. Because I now know that all tragedies of this sort are What God Intended. Right?

Has anyone considered just who Mourdock might be worshipping?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

Without doing lots of research now, I'm pretty certain you are wrong about this. Russia lost more than 20 million people in WWII, which I believe is many times the number dead in WWI. And, again, it's not just the deaths but the complete destruction of cities that set WWII apart. Beyond that, I'd have a lot of trouble tying the Armenian genocide and other Soviet atrocities to WWI.

Agree with what you say setting WWI and WWII apart, but I would repeat what I said about the Thirty Years War. Here is C.V. Wedgwood, quoted by Ta-Nahesi Coates:

...Tales were told of the sack of Kempten by the imperialists, of Landsberg by the Swedes, of Calw by the Bavarians, which froze the blood, The imperialist had slaughtered children in the cellars thrown the women of the upper windows of the houses and boiled a housewife in her own cauldron, The Swedes had sprinkled gunpowder on their prisoners and set fire to their clothes, the Bavarians under Werth had shut the citizens into Calw, fired the walls, trained guns on the gates and shot at the people as they tried to escape the flames.


The stories were exaggerations but based on the increasing and now general barbarity of the war. In sober fact, civilian prisoners were led off in halters to die of exposure by the wayside, children kidnapped and held to ransom, priests tied under the wagons to crawl on all fours like dogs until they dropped, burghers and peasants imprisoned, starved and tortured for their concealed wealth to the uttermost of human endurance with uttermost of human ingenuity.,


The more rapid and widespread movements of the troops in the last six years had increased the ravages of plague and hunger beyond all bound and uprooted the population of Central Germany from the soil, turning them into a fluctuating mass of fugitives....The desertion was temporary, and those of those who fled, many drifted back again, but in the meantime economic life came to a standstill, and some who went as wealthy burghers returned to the charred ruins of their homes with nothing but the rags they wore...


The gentry, in the efforts to maintain their comforts, renounced their established dutiers and left their homes for the towns, or fell back on the olf profession of robbery and raided the passing traveler as in days of old. In Moravia, government officals and local landowners allied themselves with wandering marauders and shared the booty.

* * * * *

The fugitives who fled from the south after Nordlingen died of plague, hunger and exhaustion in the refugee camp at Frankfort or the overcrowded hospitals of Saxony; seven thousand were expelled from the cantons of Zurich because there was neither food no room for them, at Hanau the gates were closed against them, at Strasbourg they lay thick in the streets through the frosts of winter, so that by day the citizens stepped over their bodies, and by night lay awake listening to the groans of the sick and starving until the magistrates forcibly drove them out, thirty thousand of them.


The Jesuits here and there fought manfully against the overwhelming distress; after the burning and desertion of Eichstatt they sought out the children who were hiding in the cellars, killing and eating rats, and carried them off to care for and educate them; at Hagenau they managed feed the poor out of their stores until the French troops raided their granary and took charge of the grain for the Army.


By the irony of fate the wine harvest of 1634, which should have been excellent, was trampled down by fugitives, and invaders after Nordlingen; that of 635 suffered a like fate, and in the winter, from Wuttemberg to Lorraine, there raged the worst famine of many years.


At Calw the pastor saw a woman gnawing on the raw flesh of a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens were also feeding. In Alsace the bodies of criminals were torn from the gallows and devoured; in the whole Rhineland they watched the graveyards against marauders who sold the flesh of the newly buried for food; at Zweibrucken a woman confessed to having eater her child. Acorns, goats' skins, grass, were all cooked in Alsace; cats, dogs, and rats were sold in the market at Worms.


In Fulda and Coburg and near Frankfort and the great refugee camp, men went in terror of being killed and eaten by those maddened by hunger...

TNC prompted me to read Wedgwood -- the book is very good....

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Agree with what you say setting WWI and WWII apart, but I would repeat what I said about the Thirty Years War. Here is C.V. Wedgwood, quoted by Ta-Nahesi Coates:



TNC prompted me to read Wedgwood -- the book is very good....

I have the Wedgwood book, haven't read it yet but thanks for the recommendation. Have read other stuff about the 30 years war, but long ago. But my reaction to this is, essentially -- yeah, they slaughtered a lot of poor people. But the people making decisions about whether to go to war didn't suffer too much (and not nearly enough). The churches and lords kept their lands and saw no threat to their way of life.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

I try to take Glenn Greenwald with a grain of salt, but still: This is disturbing.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I try to take Glenn Greenwald with a grain of salt, but still: This is disturbing.

I always take him with a mountain of salt. As always, it's hard to tell whether his hysterics are justified.

A primary reason for opposing the acquisition of abusive powers and civil liberties erosions is that they virtually always become permanent,

Hm. They do? That seems hard to square with half a century's progress on speech rights, for example. Sexual and reproductive rights? And what of "enhanced interrogation techniques?" Gone now, no (at least unless Mitt gets elected)?

Regardless, we start with a questionable assertion presented as undisputed. Not a good beginning.

They're writing down their process and setting up a database. Does that make something "permanent?" I don't know.

I supposed I should go read the WP piece for the actual facts.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I try to take Glenn Greenwald with a grain of salt, but still: This is disturbing.

That is creepy. Starts to feel like something Robert Heinlein would have written.

[taxwonk]

Originally Posted by Sidd Finch

It's really not even close. Not by any standard -- number of military deaths was much higher, despite the incredible brutality of WWI. Number of civilian deaths was vastly higher. And destruction was infinitely higher, particularly of wealth and industrial base (the things that hurt the people in power).

What was WWI's "Dresden"? And Dresden was just one of many cities flattened by the airwar.

Dresden represented a qualitative difference. That particular campaign was aimed largely at the civilian and refugee populations with the identified aim of driving a wedge between the people and the government. That wedge should be familiar; the Brits taught it to the Jews in Palestine. The Arabs learned it from the Jews. It is now one of the primary aims of most military and paramilitary actions.