Book review: Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins (2022)

It used to be said that the sun never set on the British empire, so widespread was its extent over the globe. This book takes a sweeping look at the practices of that empire and recounts the widespread brutality with which the British ruled its colonies, with massacres, torture, large internment camps, population displacement, starvation, solitary confinement, and other forms of oppression, to subdue the native populations in their many colonies in the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and also Ireland.

While the goal of such conquests was rapacious exploitation of the resources and people of the colonies to enrich the British back home, especially the elites, in order to gain public support it was dressed up in the soothing language of ‘liberal imperialism’, that the British were bringing civilization to the benighted people over whom they ruled. This led to the infamous idea of the ‘white mans’s burden’, promulgated by noted English writers and poets, that the British were actually paying a price in order to improve the lot of the people in the countries they ruled. The policy was riddled through and through with racist attitudes towards the colonial peoples, treating them as ‘savages’ who needed the ‘civilizing influence’ of the British to ‘bring them up’ to acceptable standards. These racist attitudes were not just based on color. For example, the people of Ireland were victims as well, violently put down when they tried to gain their independence.
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Who has the time?

The trial in the defamation case brought by E. Jena Carroll against serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) resumed today after a two day break because one of the jurors had worried that they had Covid. SSAT is in the courtroom.

I read that last night SSAT had posted 35 times about the trial on his social media site and it made me wonder how he finds the time to do all that. True, a social media post is not that long but his are pretty long. The ones I’ve read sound like stream-of-consciousness ramblings (who knew that SSAT was an aficionado of James Joyce?) that seem to lack any careful thought or even proofreading, so that reduces the time. But still it must have taken several hours.

More interestingly, who reads all of them? Journalists presumably who have drawn the short straw of having to monitor his every utterance. But apart from them, even the most ardent MAGA supporter must get weary of their phones dinging continuously with alerts about his repetitive posts. Do they read all of them?

It appears that SSAT took the stand and his testimony lasted just a few minutes, with Carroll’s attorney asking just two simple questions that elicited ‘Yes’ answers. It may be that she did not want to give SSAT the opportunity to make a speech.

The ‘Nones’ are now the single largest group

There is a new survey out that shows the continuing growth of those people who, when asked about their religious affiliation, reply ‘None’. What is significant in that they are now the single largest self-identified group, beating out Catholics and evangelicals Protestants.

When Americans are asked to check a box indicating their religious affiliation, 28% now check ‘none.’

A new study from Pew Research finds that the religiously unaffiliated – a group comprised of atheists, agnostic and those who say their religion is “nothing in particular” – is now the largest cohort in the U.S. They’re more prevalent among American adults than Catholics (23%) or evangelical Protestants (24%).

Back in 2007, Nones made up just 16% of Americans, but Pew’s new survey of more than 3,300 U.S. adults shows that number has now risen dramatically.
…

Most Nones believe in God or another higher power, but very few attend any kind of religious service.

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Bad day for Trump

The results of yesterday’s New Hampshire primary should be worrying for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT). Yes, he defeated Nikki Haley 54.5% to 43.3% and is still on course to win the Republican nomination. But the margin of victory is smaller than I expected and much smaller than I think SSAT would have liked. This is because SSAT is like an incumbent in the Republican party and to have nearly half the voters going against you should be worrying. By contrast, on the Democratic side, Joe Biden, who is an incumbent, won with 67% of the vote, even though he was not on the ballot and people had to actually write in his name. (Why his name was not on the ballot is due to esoteric internal Democratic party rule making.)
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More evidence, if you needed it, that Trump lacks any grace

It has log been obvious that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) is a sociopath with no concept of how to treat people as human beings. If you oppose him, he will attack you viciously. If you are nice to him, he will say nice things about you, although he will not do nice things for you. He is purely transactional in his relationships and if you switch from being a rival to a supporter, he will stop saying nasty things and say nice things. There are no principles involved at all.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the way he treated his rivals. Although he is not the president, right from the beginning he was like an incumbent when it came to seeking the Republican nomination. and hence he enjoyed a huge lead from the get-go and was never threatened by any of his rivals. He could have just coasted along knowing that they would drop out eventually and endorse him.
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Bye, bye Ron

I can’t say that I was surprised that Ron DeSantis dropped out of the Republican presidential race. Even before he ran, I wrote that he would be foolish to challenge serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) and that he would be better served by sitting this one out and campaigning hard for SSAT this time because, whether SSAT won or lost, 2028 would be an open race. He could then reap the rewards of MAGA cult loyalty in that race, rather than alienating them this year.

But my prediction that he would fail was based on strategic reasoning. What I had not anticipated was that he would be such a lousy campaigner, so wooden and anti-charismatic on the stump, and have nothing really to offer. His easy re-election victory for governor of Florida seemed to make him think that being ‘anti-woke’ (whatever the hell that means) was his path to victory on the national stage. While that may have been of a somewhat catchy slogan, in terms of policies, it only translates into some culture war issues, such as banning books and fighting over bathroom access for transgender students that he carried to extremes, that may have excited some people but really did not have relevance to most people. Furthermore, carrying his anti-woke crusade into a fight with the Disney corporation, the state’s biggest employer, tended to alienate the business community.
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More evidence that SSAT is losing it

There has been considerable speculation that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT)’s repeated verbal flubs are not just because he is casual with the truth, saying wrong things if it serves to advance his narrative, but that he actually is losing his grip on reality. As evidence of this, here is a clip of him during a rambling speech he gave at a rally in New Hampshire which holds it primary election on Tuesday and where Nikki Haley is challenging him.

He is clearly confusing Haley with Nancy Pelosi who was speaker on January 6th, 2021. He is not making an off-the-cuff aside where verbal slips can happen. This was clearly part of a planned attack on Haley and yet he spoke as if he did not know that she has never been in Congress.

Also, why would he offer whoever 10,000 troops to quell the riot if, as he keeps saying, there was no riot at all and those people were merely patriotic citizens who were just peacefully demonstrating and visiting the Capitol building? Furthermore, there is no evidence that he ever made such an offer of troops and his own secretary of defense, who should know, directly refuted it when testifying under oath..

Ardent MAGAnauts may not care about the mounting evidence of SSAT’s cognitive decline but I suspect that these kinds of things will continue to be a steady drip, drip that will take a toll on those who are now supporting him but have some misgivings. Even Nikki Haley has used this to start musing about SSAT’s mental competence.

“They’re saying he got confused, that he was talking about something else, he’s talking about Nancy Pelosi,” she continued. “He mentioned me multiple times in that scenario. The concern I have is — I’m not saying anything derogatory — but when you’re dealing with the pressures of the presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this. We can’t.”

Let’s see if any other Republicans start talking about SSAT’s mental state.

Anti-abortionist zealots seek kinder, gentler image

For decades, the goal of the anti-abortion forces was to overturn the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court precedent that said that women had a constitutional right to get an abortion subject to certain limits. Anti-abortion zealots felt that those limits were too lax. They wanted a total ban on abortions and with the overturn of Roe, much more restrictive bans could be enacted by state legislatures. Indeed many legislatures in red states had already drafted those bills and were just waiting for the opportunity to pass them.

And it played out just as expected with red states across the nation passing sweeping legislation that made getting abortions all but impossible in those states. What was unexpected (at least by me) was the widespread backlash that this provoked all across the nation. As is often the case, it is only when a right is taken away that people realize how much they value it. It turns out that a majority of people, while they may not go all the way with unlimited abortion access at any time during the pregnancy, were highly uncomfortable with either total bans or with restrictions that made it far too onerous to obtain. As a result, we saw popular referenda overturning such restrictive laws even in deep red states.

So now the anti-abortion forces that for so long had been on the offensive, now find themselves on the defensive and are seeking to promote the idea that. they are not zealots who want to criminalize women who seek abortions and the doctors who provide them. They now seek to project a kindler, gentler image.
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Film review: Downfall: The Case Against Boeing (2022)

A recent post of mine discussed how the airline manufacturing company Boeing, despite having had a well-earned reputation for producing quality safe aircraft, suddenly in 2018 and 2019 had two crashes within five months of its new 737 Max planes that resulted in everyone on board being killed. The subsequent inquiry into what happened revealed that Boeing had been in decline for some time, especially after the merger with defense contractor McDonaldMcDonnell Douglas, when the shoddy practices of defense contractors and the drive for company profits to boost shareholder value and executive compensation became the main focus, as a 2019 article by Andrew Cockburn revealed that I linked to.

In a comment to that post, Sunday Afternoon pointed me to this documentary that looked at the results of the subsequent inquiry into what went wrong. What it reveals is infuriating about how Boeing executives ignored all warning signs that they were putting a dangerous plane into circulation and not giving pilots the training they needed to deal with its new features.
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Trump’s strange behavior in court

In the defamation case against him, serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) was so disruptive during the testimony of E. Jean Carroll that it clearly exasperated the federal district judge Lewis Kaplan, so much so that he admonished him.

When Carroll first took the stand, Trump could be seen whispering to his lead attorney, Alina Habba. He sat with slightly hunched shoulders as Carroll testified.

As Carroll spoke, Trump complained audibly and appeared to double down on defamatory denials, her lawyer said during a morning break in the proceedings.

“Mr Trump has been sitting at the back table and has been loudly saying things throughout Ms Carroll’s testimony,” said attorney Shawn Crowley.

“It’s loud enough for us to hear it,” Crowley said, so “I imagine it’s loud enough for the jury to hear it.”
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