I had almost completed this post several hours ago, but got sidetracked and haven’t gotten back to it. Sorry. Here ya go:
- Richland County prevails in Green Diamond lawsuit — Talk about a blast from the past.
- Quidditch Cup coming to Columbia in 2016 — Yeahhh. A bunch of people running around on the ground with brooms between their legs, pretending to be flying wizards. Yeahhhh…
- NFL ‘Deflategate’ Saga Continues With Both Sides Back In Federal Court — Speaking of people playing silly games, this is an actual federal case, in real, grownup court, about whether someone adequately inflated a ball.
- How the Brat Pack got its name — and spoiled celebrity journalism forever — As silly as this topic may seem, it’s actually a fairly interesting pop culture piece. Reading it helped me catch up a bit on trends, since at the time we had three kids and our fourth on the way, I was starting a new job as news editor in Wichita, and I was a little too busy to concern myself with the existence of something called a “Brat Pack.”
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The Green Diamond project would have been an ecological disaster for the Congaree river. And when the place flooded, as it certainly will, sooner or later, guess who will be stuck with the clean-up? Hint: The developers will have taken the money and left by then.
So does Cayce have to kick in to cover a portion of Richland County’s legal costs? Seems appropriate to me.
I am all for rational municipal annexation, but this example is/was worse than the Town of Lexington’s gerrymandering efforts.
“Richland County is not the ‘involuntary guarantor of the property owner’s gamble that he could develop the land as he wished despite the existing regulatory structure.’
Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/news/local/article30868194.html#storylink=cpy
Indeed!
Yes. But are we gonna just leave those people to drown in the flood? If it’s nat’l aid they get, it’s still us.
Well, I think what happened was that FEMA, the feds, were like, that’s a flood zone, and Richland was like, you cannot build in a flood zone, and the developers go, “taking”–but the court was like, “nuh unh, dummies! Nice try. Just because the government won’t let you do something you couldn’t do before and which would endanger life and property, doesn’t mean you’ve been took. “
At least that’s my technical analysis…
And the sad news this post missed, because it happened shortly after I wrote it, is Jimmy Carter’s cancer…
I suppose it is sad, but since Jimmy has made it to 90, far older than any sibling or parent of his did, not too sad. I like Carter, of course, and believe he got a raw deal on his Presidency’s reputation, but he has certainly had a full life!
Is it really catching up on trends when the trend occurred thirty years ago?
That’s why I feel the need to catch up. If it were happening today, I wouldn’t feel the pressure to catch up. Some other things I feel the need to catch up on:
— European history, from the medieval through modern times. And I’m talking about something a bit deeper and wider than remembering the sequence of English monarchs. I’m shocked sometimes at things I don’t know and should in this area. The 19th century, recent as it is, is particularly hard for me to get a grasp on.
— Napoleon, just to zero in on a narrower aspect of the above. While I know a bit more than Bill and Ted’s description of him as a “short, dead dude,” I ought to know a lot more about the forces that shaped him, and the ways in which he shaped the world around him.
— Classical literature. At least I should have read a good translation of the Iliad, and perhaps enough of the Odyssey to take me beyond Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” or those Italian movies with Spanish subtitles that I used to pay the equivalent of two cents to see when I was a kid in Ecuador. Which is an interesting filter, but not the same as the original. Ideally, I’d read them in the original Greek, but I’m at peace with the fact that that is not going to happen…
— The First World War, and its worldwide implications, including in the Mideast. I’m ashamed to say I still haven’t finished The Guns of August, which I began with such fanfare back before our trip to Thailand. (My problem: It’s downhill after that magnificent first chapter, which set the scene — and taught me some interesting things about that 19th-century European history I refer to above.)
There’s a LOT I need to catch up on, more than I’ll ever get to, without even touching on the present day…
And to get a little closer to the present day…
I feel the need to know more about the roots of the Vietnam War, and how it developed in real time. Which is REALLY hard to get at around the political filters.
When I was a kid, I felt deprived because my teachers never got around to WWII — so I made a point of reading up on it myself, a LOT. There’s still a lot I don’t know and am surprised to learn, but I think I have a better grasp of the broad strokes than I do of any other conflict in history.
My teachers didn’t get to it because they didn’t really think of it as history. To them, it JUST HAPPENED — like, say, the events of the 90s to me. Sometimes there was stuff about it at the very end of a history book — which I devoured on my own (I had a very strong feeling growing up that I had just missed the defining events of the century, and I felt compelled to make up for it) — but the class never got that far in the book.
As for Vietnam — the events that shaped it happened when I was too young to grok what was going on. And since it has shaped political attitudes regarding our use of military power ever since, I feel like there’s always more that I can learn about it. Which I think is a healthier attitude than that of far too many people, who seem to think they know all they need to know about it.
“I feel like there’s always more that I can learn about it. Which I think is a healthier attitude than that of far too many people, who seem to think they know all they need to know about it.”
It will be interesting to see if this journey to discovery leads you to a new perspective or just solidifies your already held beliefs. When you enter the process with strong biases in the first place, it would be easy to reject alternative views more quickly. Maybe start with the writings of people on the extreme opposite side and immerse yourself in those.
I don’t know that I have strong feelings, beyond a weariness with the reflexive antiwar position, in which I have been “immersed” as you say for most of my life — so much so that I am well familiar with its flaws. I would guess that I’ve probably been exposed to the antiwar position about 10 times as much as to any arguments defending our involvement. Actually, probably much more than that.
But since I can’t accept that position that so many find comfortable, where am I? I don’t know.
The original, fundamental strategic reason for our involvement is sound: containment of communist expansion, particularly of Soviet influence (and one of the things I’d like to understand better is the nature of the Soviet relationship). Containment as a strategy was something respected across the political spectrum. For instance, we had the interesting phenomenon 12 years ago of liberals holding up containment as a better approach to Saddam than invasion. There’s a lot to be said for it.
Containment fully justified our early involvement. That is, it justified sending advisers and materiel and some degree of support to the South Vietnamese.
But then there’s the escalation, and that’s where it gets problematic. Should we have committed such a huge force to a conflict that we were not committed to win? And in saying that, I’m not saying it the way Rambo did with his, “Do we get to win this time?” I mean that the doctrine of containment was something that contained us as well as our adversaries. As I paraphrased a historian, Alan Brinkley, in a 2003 column:
See, we never intended to try to win that war. We may have won every major battle, but in the Cold War context, we were never going to do something like drive on and take Hanoi. The possibility of any aggressive moves by us escalating to going toe-to-toe in nuclear combat with the Rooskies held us back. So we were reactive. We were trying to maintain a status quo — the independence of the South — not achieve strategic victory. Because during the Cold War, that was unthinkable.
So… should we have foreseen that trying to maintain the status quo against an enemy absolutely committed to victory was futile, unless we were prepared to stay there at that level more or less permanently? Because, while the shorthand on the war is that we “lost,” what really happened was that we left once our presence there was not politically sustainable at home — and as soon as we did, the North ignored the peace accords and rolled right over the South. You kinda have to be there to lose, and we were not.
We DID lose, however, in the sense that we did not in the end achieve our strategic goal of containment — even though we never lost on the battlefield.
So… bottom line, what do I think of our involvement in Vietnam? It’s complicated, and I could stand to know a lot more about how our decisions were made, step by step.
I don’t know what’s so complicated. The purpose of our involvement was to prevent the fall of South Vietnam to prevent Comminism from spreading. Remember the falling dominoes theory? The premise was flawed obviously. The only dominoes that fell were colored red.
I believe that at that point “trends” become “history”?
” Yeahhh. A bunch of people running around on the ground with brooms between their legs, pretending to be flying wizards. Yeahhhh…”
You better check your muggle privilege before posting such inflammatory statements.
That’s not how privilege works–it would be his wizard privilege, for scoffing at muggles’ playing Quidditch.
POSTWAR: A History of Europe Since 1945-Tony Judt
America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975-George Herring
Both excellent.
Thanks, Bill.
And, Judt even asserts the importance of,The Beatles!