Wednesday: Hili dialogue

November 27, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“হাম্প ডে” in Assamese): Wednesday, November 27, 2024, and National Bavarian Cream Pie Day. This is a calorific pie filled with a mixture of whipped cream and custard.  I don’t have a pie picture, but here’s a Bismark filled with bavarian cream, It would be good for breakfast.

Tanis Coralee Leonhardi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Electric Guitar Day, Pie in the Face Day, National Craft Jerky Day, and What Do you Love About America Day.  (God bless us every one!)

I’ll be heading out to Poland tomorrow evening, and you can expect more photos of Hili, but until I get settled, posting will be light. I do my best.

Here’s Bill Gates getting a pie in the face (I wonder if it was a Bavarian Cream Pie?):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Well, Trump’s stupid plan to impose tariffs on goods from China and other countries is still in the offing.  It will hurt only the American consumers and retailers.  (Article archived here.)

President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Monday that he would impose tariffs on all products coming into the United States from Canada, Mexico and China on his first day in office, a move that would scramble global supply chains and impose heavy costs on companies that rely on doing business with some of the world’s largest economies.

In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump mentioned a caravan of migrants making its way to the United States from Mexico, and said he would use an executive order to levy a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico until drugs and migrants stopped coming over the border.

“This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” the president-elect wrote.

“Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve this long simmering problem,” he added. “We hereby demand that they use this power, and until such time that they do, it is time for them to pay a very big price!”

In a separate post, Mr. Trump also threatened an additional 10 percent tariff on all products from China, saying that the country was shipping illegal drugs to the United States.

“Representatives of China told me that they would institute their maximum penalty, that of death, for any drug dealers caught doing this but, unfortunately, they never followed through,” he said.

Taken together, the tariff threats were a dramatic ultimatum against the three largest trading partners of the United States, and a move that threatens to sow chaos in America’s diplomatic and economic relationships even before Mr. Trump sets foot in the White House.

There’s no call to hurt the American consumer because immigration is too high (and it surely can’t be that high coming from Canada!).  And the tariff on Chinese goods because they don’t kill drug dealers shipping to America? That seems an excuse for putting tariffs on Chinese goods to “help” American manufacturers. My dad was an economist, and used to lecture me that tariffs are never good for anybody. I think he was right.

*The Washington Post, however, reports that Mexico, the U.S.’s top trading partner, has vowed to retaliate if Trump hits the country with tariffs (article archived here).

Mexico’s president responded angrily Tuesday to President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to impose a 25 percent tariff on its products if the country didn’t curb the flow of irregular migrants and fentanyl, warning that the penalties would only wind up causing inflation and unemployment in the United States.

President Claudia Sheinbaum also made clear that Mexico would retaliate with its own tariffs if Trump went ahead with his plan.

“President Trump, it isn’t with threats or tariffs that we resolve the migratory phenomenon or the abuse of drugs in the United States,” Sheinbaum said at her morning news conference, reading a letter she had written to the incoming U.S. leader. “What’s needed to confront these great challenges is cooperation and understanding.”

Trump on Monday night said he would impose the 25 percent tariff on Mexico and Canada on his first day in office, to halt the “invasion” of drugs and migrants. He also vowed to introduce a 10 percent tariff on goods from China, the source of precursor chemicals to make fentanyl.

Canada’s leaders also reacted with dismay to Trump’s message. Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said in a statement that their country “places the highest priority on border security” and had worked closely with the United States to disrupt the flow of fentanyl.

Mexico is the top U.S. trading partner, and Canada is not far behind. If Trump imposes the tariffs, he would be violating the free-trade treaty that has bound together the three North American countries for decades, and led to an explosion of commerce and production lines that cross borders. More than $1.5 trillion worth of goods are exchanged annually among the three North American nations. Trade between the United States and China amounts to approximately $600 billion.

The Mexican and Canadian leaders emphasized that not only would their countries be hurt by the tariffs — U.S. businesses and consumers would, too. Canada supplied around 60 percent of American crude oil imports last year, the officials said. Sheinbaum noted that Mexico’s top exporters included U.S.-based automakers General Motors and Ford Motor Company, which have built sprawling modern production facilities around the country.

Trade war in the offing! Thie will do no good for anybody, and consumers, who voted for Trump largely because of the cost of living, are going to be hit with higher costs should the Orange Man follow through with his threats.  I’m not sure he will.

*In a prescient article in the Times of London two days before the election, Andrew Sullivan explained “Why Trump may be about to state the biggest comeback in American history.” (h/t Steve). This did not appear on his “Weekly Dish” site.

It may seem incomprehensible to many, but it is simply a matter of fact that this absurd man has dominated American politics and culture for nearly a decade, is more favourably viewed than ever, has survived two impeachments, multiple damning lawsuits, two assassination attempts and is now within spitting distance of the most astonishing comeback in American political history.

It is, in part, his demagogic genius. Say what you want, but he has campaigned with relentlessness, drama and gusto. The energy of this nearly 80-year-old may be a function of his mental illness, but it’s still impressive. His campaign has seen him in classic American imagery: glowering in court; having an assassin’s bullet graze his ear and somehow miss him; a peerless photo-op in an apron at a McDonald’s; a vast spectacle in Madison Square Garden; and a series of crystal-clear promises: Deport The Illegals; Cut Your Taxes; End the Wars.

. . . And Trump’s core instinct is what the Jesuits call in tune with the times. He has understood the one thing America’s elites have yet to come to terms with, and unlike them, he can speak it in English anyone can understand.

The American people are done with running the world as they have since 1945, done with de-facto open borders where the distinction between citizen and non-citizen has become moot, and done with being subjected to elite culture-war projects that border on what most normal people regard as insane.

Culturally, the Biden administration went full on in imposing a new regime of wokeness. They hired on the basis of race and sex — from the cabinet to every single department; they replaced biological sex with subjective gender, allowing boys to compete with girls in sports and children to undergo irreversible sex reassignment even before they had experienced puberty (even though they have stated such surgery should be reserved for adults). They saw all Latinos as a single, liberal racial bloc (and called them Latinx for trans inclusion!), and gays and trans as a single “queer” entity. And they regarded any opposition to these leftist moves as proof of bigotry. As woke leftists trashed the reputation of higher education in America, and veered into violence and grotesque antisemitism, the Biden administration seemed helpless.

In foreign policy, after a period of stability and no new wars under Trump, Americans saw Biden’s chaotic departure from Afghanistan, and then two protracted, open-ended military commitments in Ukraine and Gaza, which America seemed unable to direct, influence or control. And Americans also saw the same elite that had taken them into Iraq and Afghanistan make obvious preparations to defend Taiwan, an island a few hundred miles from China and 10,000 miles away from Kansas. Advantage: Trump.

Harris gets indicted, too:

Harris started strong, shutting down any internal opposition, putting on an impressive convention, and giving a superb speech and sharp debate. And then she stalled. She had nothing, it seemed, to say. Her inability or refusal to answer simple questions in plain English became cringe-worthy. Before July, almost every Democrat and legacy media institution knew she was a non-starter, a terrible campaigner, and a dreadful manager. Then they willed themselves into disbelieving it. But denial became hard to sustain when you’re looking at Harris’s slow car crash.

For me, the last straw was her CNN town hall. After a day off to prep, she still could not tell us what her first Congressional priority would be, what policies of the last four years she would change, how she would prevent illegal immigration, and why she was now in favour of building the wall she once called “stupid, useless, and a medieval vanity project”.

, , , , The Democrats also missed a critical new reality in American politics: it’s about class, not identity. The Biden-Harris messaging was directed to women, “queers”, African-Americans and “Latinx” people. Trump messaging was about how well working-class people did before Covid, and how they could prosper again. “Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you” was a potent message. And if the polling pans out, Trump could assemble the most multi-racial coalition since Nixon, winning record numbers of black, Latino, Muslim and gay votes.

Of course Sullivan hedges his bets by using “may” in the title, giving him a pass no matter who won, but in hindsight he can claim to have at least said that Trump had a chance. And he did. Too bad for us.

*Under pressure from the U.S., Israel has agreed to a cease-fire with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Times of Israel reports:

As Israel gears up to sign a US-brokered ceasefire with Lebanon, and by extension with the Hezbollah terror group, these are the key points of the deal that have been revealed so far, according to officials who have briefed the media.

The deal that would end the fighting on the northern front calls for an initial two-month ceasefire during which Israeli forces would withdraw from Lebanon, and Hezbollah would end its armed presence south of the Litani River, which is about 18 miles from the border with Israel.

As Israeli forces withdraw from southern Lebanon, the Lebanese army will deploy thousands of soldiers into these vacated areas, alongside the UN observer force that is already in place.

. . . . According to Israel’s Channel 12, there is no intention for Israel to set up a buffer area inside Lebanon, similar to the security zone that it occupied from 1982 until 2000. Troops will completely withdraw to the international border.

In addition, Lebanese civilians will be allowed to return to their homes in the southern Lebanon villages and towns they evacuated.

The TV report said that Lebanon has committed to overseeing all arms purchases and arms production in the country to ensure that nothing reaches Hezbollah.

Hezbollah has for years been smuggling in vast stockpiles of weapons from Iran and set up missile production factories.

The U.S. threatened to withhold military aid to Israel if it didn’t engage in this ceasefire. Note that Hezbollah is forbidden is for Hezbollah to fire rockets at Israel, to “regroup”, and to stop importing arms from Iran.  That isn’t such a great deal if Hezbollah continues firing oodles of missiles at Israel, as it has been doing since October 8 of last year. Once again the Biden administration is trying, through pressure, to run the war of the only democratic country in the Middle East. This deal, of course, will change come January.

*And we learn from the AP’s “oddities” section that the world’s oldest man just died:

For nearly nine months, John Alfred Tinniswood held the title of world’s oldest man, marking his 112th birthday during his reign.

His record-holding status ended Monday when Tinniswood died in a care home in northwest England near Liverpool, where he was born on Aug. 26, 1912, his family said in a statement.

Tinniswood attributed his longevity to “pure luck.”

“You either live long or you live short, and you can’t do much about it,” the retired accountant and great-grandfather told the Guinness World Records when he earned the title in April.

If there was any secret to it, though, he said moderation was key to a healthy life. He never smoked, rarely drank and followed no special diet, apart from having fish and chips every Friday.

“If you drink too much or you eat too much or you walk too much — if you do too much of anything — you’re going to suffer eventually,” Tinniswood said.

He took over the record when the previous record-holder, a 114-year-old Venezuelan, died last year.  Note his advice not to walk too much, and I heartily approve of having fish and chips once a week!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is enigmatic, but Malgorzata explains:
It’s an old saying I heard in my childhood:
Breakfast: eat yourself
Dinner: share with your friend
Supper: give away to your enemy.
It’s an idea that it’s healthiest to eat plenty in the evening, moderately in the middle of the day and nothing in the evening. So if you give your supper to your enemy he will be weaker and you will be stronger.
The dialogue:
Hili: What do we have for supper?
Andrzej: My grandmother used to say: Give your supper to your enemy.
Hili: That’s unwise.
In Polish:
Hili: Co mamy na kolację?
Ja: Moja babka mówiła: kolację oddaj wrogowi.
Hili: To nierozsądne.

*******************

From Cat Memes:

From Science Humor (blame Neil deGrasse Tyson!):

From Cole & Marmalade:

From Masih, who’s spearheading a campaign to document oppression of Iranian woman. Here an underage girl exposes her married karate teacher for coming on to her. I hope the guy is in trouble.

A lovely view of the Carina Nebula, 8,500 light-years from Earth:

The Carina Nebula

— Space view (@allabtgalaxy.bsky.social) 2024-11-26T17:40:53.806Z

From Malcolm. I may have posted this before, but it’s awesome. I thin the movie may be “Psycho.”

From NY Congressman Ritchie Torres, my latest Democratic hero:

A solicitous crow. Some people answer it. But it looks like a magpie to me. . .

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted. This Czech girl died in the camp at about fourteen.

27 November 1929 | A Czech Jewish girl, Hana Neuschulová, was born in Ústí nad Labem.She was deported to Auschwitz from Theresienstadt ghetto on 6 September 1943. She did not survive.

— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2024-11-27T09:00:03.339Z

Three posts from Dr. Cobb. The first two begin a thread started by Hope Jahren, author of Lab Girl:

OK, so I am living in Iceland 🇮🇸 right now and some major shit went down yesterday that I have to tell you about. 🧵

— Hope Jahren (@realhopejahren.bsky.social) 2024-11-26T13:32:00.024Z

There's this cat named Diego that lives in a Walmart on the west side of Reykjavik.

— Hope Jahren (@realhopejahren.bsky.social) 2024-11-26T13:36:03.847Z

A variety of wasps. The one at the lower right is one I don’t know.

Just some wasps 😏

— Matt Bertone (@bertonemyia.bsky.social) 2024-11-26T16:12:38.321Z

67 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. The energy of this nearly 80-year-old may be a function of his mental illness, but it’s still impressive.

    I stopped reading at this point. What mental illness? However much you dislike Trump or his positions, he clearly is not mentally ill.

      1. They are personality disorders, and moral failings, not mental illnesses.
        Confusing the two is very common.

        D.A.
        NYC

          1. Frink, they are in the DSM in order that psychiatrists can bill insurance for the consultation when they assess a person and find no psychiatric illness except that he’s a creep. Every bill needs a diagnosis. The psychiatrist can’t be expected to provide the assessment service for free just because he finds the person isn’t mentally ill. So a shrink can put down Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or Authority-Defiant Disorder, on the bill and everyone is happy. NPD, or “dark triad” are “things” we recognize, but they aren’t diseases. They don’t reduce culpability for crimes. “Never hang a half-wit” doesn’t apply.

            These people are bad, not mad, as the psychiatrists taught us in school, or “moral imbeciles”. I don’t think it’s helpful to let someone off the hook for bad behaviour by saying he is mentally ill when he’s not, and it’s therefore not entirely his fault, when it is.

            (I realize that under determinism the molecules in our brains don’t care whether or not someone “blames” us for being a jerk. But as a rule of thumb, if you think someone has a personality disorder, it’s the job of the voters to decide if he’s fit for office, not a psychiatrist. And this would be a relevant consideration in applying the 25th Amendment, as I understand it. The 25th is for mental incapacity, not to provide cover for a coup d’état.)

          2. ” …they are in the DSM in order that psychiatrists can bill insurance for the consultation when they assess a person…”

            The DSM-5 is not just about billing. It is about the formalization of medical and psychiatric disorders. Schizophrenia and Major Depression are also in the DSM-5. Would you argue that these are not mental “illnesses”?

            “These people are bad, not mad, as the psychiatrists taught us in school…”

            Has anyone argued that Trump is clinically insane? That was not The Frink’s argument. He was defending the notion that Trump suffers from a mental illness. The difference between a “mental illness” and a “psychiatric disorder” is technical, fleeting, and essentially a distinction without a difference. These terms are used as equivocal, or as nearly equivocal as to make no difference, in the literature ubiquitously.

            ” I don’t think it’s helpful to let someone off the hook for bad behaviour by saying he is mentally ill when he’s not, and it’s therefore not entirely his fault, when it is.”

            I am not sure why you argue that mental illness lets people “off the hook”. Millions of people world-wide suffer from Major Depression which is clearly regarded as a mental illness, and many or most of them are successfully treated. I am no expert in the legal defense of crimes committed by people with major depression, but I do not know of any successful defenses based on that diagnosis. Perhaps these are a few, but this is not an argument.

            Trump clearly suffers from pernicious narcissism, and IS a congenital and pathological liar. The difference between a psychological disorder and mental illness is often, if not always, defined by the ability to prescribe a viable treatment plan. That there is no treatment plan for Narcissistic Personality Disorder does not make him devoid of mental illness, it merely makes his condition untreatable and makes him more dangerous.

            I, for one, am hopeful that Trump’s policies with regards to Israel will be very helpful. But this is the same guy who:

            1) took wild and explosive umbrage with Netanyahu for congratulating Biden on his win of the 2020 election

            2) Told the King of Jordan that he would make a deal to give the West Bank back to Jordan [https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-offered-west-bank-to-jordan-king-thought-was-having-heart-attack-report/]

            Defending Trump against the charge that he is not suffering a mental illness borders on sophistry, imho. And we haven’t even mentioned his cognitive decline, which is measurable and noted by multiple psychiatrists.

  2. Wow. Will you look at the quality of that photograph of Pluto? Amazing engineering accomplishments in our lifetime since my childhood when all we had were the black and white discovery photos of what appeared to be simply a fast moving star.

    Btw, I recommend the book, “ Chasing New Horizons” by mission PI Alan Stern for a look at the career-long, (30 year) effort to carry off this mission to visit Pluto successfully. He includes the science, engineering, and political challenges and some interesting photos of the mission team on Earth so we can watch them age over the years.

  3. Happy Lancashire Day! According to Wikipedia, it was on this day in 1295 that the county of Lancashire in north-west England first sent representatives to Parliament.

  4. “It’s an idea that it’s healthiest to eat plenty in the evening,”

    I think you mean “morning”.

    Love the kitten watching Psycho.

  6. I worry about the threatened trade wars under President Trump. I don’t know if they will actually take place, but just the bravado and threats have the potential to destabilize markets.

    Ritchie Torres is very supportive of the Jews and of Israel. He and Senator Fetterman of Pennsylvania are both stalwart, and rare, politicians who are unequivocal in their support.

    The cease-fire in Lebanon will almost certainly be temporary, unless the (weak) Lebanese government can curb Hezbollah’s ambitions long-term—which is doubtful. Yes, the U.S. probably forced the cease-fire by threatening Israel (how ironic, but I’m used to it by now), but a break in the fighting in the north may reduce the burden on Israel’s military while it lasts. I don’t know if it will have any direct impact on the war in Gaza; that depends in large part on how Iran interprets conditions in the region.

  7. Trump is going on about tariffs until Mexico and Canada do something about fentanyl. I googled it. 47,800 lbs from Mexico in 2023-2024. 46 lbs from Canada in the same time period. That is not internet noise, that is from a US gov’t website.
    I’m willing to bet way more comes from the US into Canada (the pipeline starts at Mexico and goes north) and multiply that by 10 because we are 1/10th the US population.

    1. Fully agree about the fentanyl (although I didn’t have any stats).

      Trump also said that both countries need to rein in the illegal migrants. Almost all are coming across the Mexican border, in the millions.

      I went looking for statistics for crossings from Canada and found 23,721 in fiscal 2024. It is a significant jump over previous years but still hardly deserving a 25% tariff.

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2024/11/26/trump-border-crossings-fentanyl-tariffs-data/#

  8. There are two species of crow in the UK, the Carrion Crow all black and the Hooded Crow black and white. The crow shown is a Hooded Crow found in Scotland and Ireland. The Carrion Crow is restricted to England.

  9. Comment by Greg Mayer

    The talking crow looks like a hooded crow, except the non-black feathers look very white, not greyish as in a hooded crow. Magpies are slimmer and, when seen close up like this, the black is actually dark blue.

    GCM

    1. More corvids at WEIT, please.
      Never enough corvids. WEIT is very duck heavy and we all know why. 🙂

      D.A.
      NYC
      Corvid Appreciation Society

  10. I think I spotted an error: what purports to be the Carina Nebula is surely a painting by Salvador Dali.

  11. The Canadian border is an irritant to the Americans over drugs and people smuggling that didn’t used to be one. It is now because of policies that the Liberal Government has bragged about: permission to decriminalize hard drugs granted to some provinces and eye-watering levels of legal immigration of people who see Canada as a stepping stone to the U.S., along with a careless approach to asylum. Quantities of both drugs and migrants are being smuggled into the U.S. (and guns come the other way) by gangs operating on Indian Reserves where the Government studiously avoids enforcing Canadian law for fear of derailing reconciliation, the Prime Minister’s singular hope for a legacy. This is down to multiple Canadian policy failures that Donald Trump is eager to bully Justin Trudeau over, a man he personally detests — “What? Are you still here?” — pour encourager les autres as the National Post puts it. Canada is not supposed to be a problem for the American President.

    People-smuggling at the northern border is organized by gangs. Migrants can’t just wade across the river in broad daylight. That means they have more of an incentive to avoid detection and can pay for the smuggling service, thus more likely to be bad actors with financing, not people just wanting to harvest lettuce off the books. Having to divert Border Patrol resources to the long Canadian border will make the Americans very grumpy. “We’re doing all we can,” is not an answer President Trump will want to hear.

    Both the Canadian dollar and the Mexican peso dropped on the word “tariffs”. If sustained, this will make our exports to the U.S. cheaper for the American industries and consumers who buy them, substantially negating the impact of the tariffs on both us and them. (It will make our imports from the U.S. more expensive even if we don’t impose retaliatory tariffs, which will hurt American exporters and tourist operators.) Canada has learned its lesson from the NAFTA renegotiations during Trump 1.0 that Mexico is not to be trusted and is already looking for ways to help President-Elect Trump get a win out of trade by high-sticking Mexico. Yes, we hope he doesn’t impose a 25% tariff on all the rocks and trees we sell to them, but the smart financial advice is he probably won’t. Kicking his two biggest (by far) trading partners in the slats will hurt special interests in a highly integrated business economy as well as the common good.

    I don’t think Donald Trump is a nut case. He just plays one on television. You don’t make the biggest comeback in U.S. electoral history by being mentally ill. We just need to figure out what he needs a win on, and give him that. If he thinks we’re free riders, it’s going to cost us. Doesn’t matter if it’s “fair” or not.

  12. ” . . . this absurd man . . . is now within spitting distance of the most astonishing comeback in American political history.”

    I won’t be surprised if Sullivan bestows the moniker “Towering Trump” on the relentlessly persevering Donald.

    Re: Sullivan popping his bill about Putin being the “Tiny Tsar” in another of his commentaries recently posted here. (Trump’s “Little Rocket Man” comes to mind.) What has Putin’s height possibly to do with anything? What would Sullivan have Putin do about the matter? Is it that he simply can’t resist getting in a good gratuitous dig at someone? As a good Catholic of the One True Church will he be praying for a miracle resulting in Putin’s elevatory redemption? By what percent taller (Sullivan’s height?) would Putin have to be that it would never occur to Sullivan to thusly comment? Would he thereby feel cheated out of his fatuous alliterative piffle? (Were Putin Trump’s height would he be the “Towering Tsar”?) Would Sullivan say that if Putin subscribed to every jot and tittle of Sullivan’s world view? Would Sullivan give any credit to Putin’s cognitive and analytical powers as compared to, say, Biden’s, or Harris’s for that matter?

    Any issue with, say, Zelenskyy’s height, which appears approximately the same as Putin’s? (How about Sergei Lavrov’s? Sullivan would have to be-“little” him on some other basis.)

    Would Sullivan be hard-pressed, when first meeting Abraham Lincoln, to resist calling him an “ape” and being disdainful of Lincoln’s backwoods (on the surface) rube demeanor and folksy wisdom and tales (as the urbane Edwin Stanton did, but who later as Lincoln’s secretary of war was in awe and greatly respectful of Lincoln, and completely and inconsolably distraught with grief upon Lincoln’s assassination?

    Is Sullivan ever prone to self-examination and epistemological humility?

    (Even one of my demi-heroes, Christopher Hitchens, apparently couldn’t help himself, referring to Putin as “piggy-eyed” and Mother Teresa as “a thieving Albanian dwarf.” After all, during a debate Hitchens did say that “Civility is overrated.” Or is it that incivility is underrated? As he said, “We’re half a chromosome away from a chimpanzee, and it shows.” From what I’ve seen during my time on this mortal coil, I certainly agree with that.)

    In this allegedly enlightened 21st century (short-) heightism and ageism remain two apparently acceptable biases.

  14. I hope you have a trouble-free flight to Poland and get plenty of cat cuddles at Andrzej and Malgorzata’s. Weather permitting, choosing to fly on the holiday (as opposed to before or after) was probably smart. Enjoy your visit.

  16. Roger Lambert is my new hero and I’m glad he has the time and patience to thoughtfully engage with Trumpers while they’re taking their victory lap.

  17. I don’t regard this as definitive (by any means). However, the pro-Gaza types regard the recent Israel/Lebanon/Hezbollah deal as a big win for Israel. Certainly, if (big if) Hezbollah end up withdrawing behind the Litani river, Israel will have achieved a key goal. What everyone notices, is that Israel can now focus on Gaza.

    If the above analysis is correct (big if), the shift in public opinion in Lebanon must be credited. Apparently, Lebanese public opinion is very anti-Hezbollah and Hezbollah knows it.

    For the record, I am not Lebanese, but I do have close ties to Lebanon (my family used to live there).

  18. The tariff question is a good one (in my opinion).

    No less that Abraham Lincoln was a strong advocate of the tariff. Quote from him “Give us a protective tariff, and we shall have the greatest nation on earth”. Indeed, as President, he enforced the Morrill tariff (which had very high rates).

    ‘Free trade’ has a quite mixed reputation. Quote from Bowring (a British official) “Jesus Christ is free trade and free trade is Jesus Christ”. He supported all sorts of attacks on China to impose the importation of Opium.

    It is worth noting, that S. America generally adopted the ‘free trade’ idea and N. America did not. It is not entirely correct to ascribe the greater success of N. America to protectionism (there are plenty of other historical differences between S. America and N. America). However, trade policy and the relative success of each region, supports protectionism, not ‘free trade’.

    After WWII the US favored lowering tariffs. The motivation was politics (the Cold War), not economics.

    In more modern times, elected Democrats have favored tariffs, while the Democratic rank-and-file has been more in favor of ‘free trade” (think cheap iPhones). The reverse has been true of Republicans. Elected Republicans favored ‘free trade’, while the rank-and-file has been much more protectionist.

    From roughly 1990 to 2005 (2008 if you include McCain) both parties leaned towards ‘free trade’. Since then, both parties have moved towards protectionism.

    However, all of the above (while true) is mostly irrelevant. Future American trade policy will be mostly an afterthought with respect to our relationship with China. To state this bluntly, China policy will drive trade policy. It doesn’t matter who is president or what party wins the White House. China is the only issue worth talking about.

  19. I think tariffs on Chinese goods will be a sensible policy. It is not just about mass production under appalling working conditions that floods the world with cheap goods. It is about a hostile, evil superpower that wants to dominate the world. China nurtured the crazy de-facto nuclear power North Korea, destroyed the democracy in Hong Kong, wants to do the same in Taiwan, makes a lot of trouble in Africa, and helps Russia destroy Ukraine. Should the West finance all this? (And yes, Western consumers will suffer without the cheap Chinese goods. Nothing is free.)

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