What events accelerated the move towards the coming American Civil War?

The United States prior to the Civil War was a nation of two countries that straddled the slavery divide. Expansion westward in the era of Manifest Destiny exasperated the differences. Between 1812 and 1861 (the antebellum period) the nation wrestled with slavery. The Northern and Southern economies were following two different pathways with the latter  very much reliant on slavery for their agricultural (especially cotton) cultivation. The North was evolving into an industrialized economy to eventually rival Western Europe. It took an anti-slavery position that y clashed with base in the South.

On March 3rd, 1820 the Missouri Compromise banned all slavery north of  36°30′ . Missouri was admitted into the Union as a slave state while Maiine gained entrance as a free state. The 1831 Nat Turner Slave rebellion highlighted tensions in Virginia leading to more brutal slave laws in the South.

A national split was further highlighted by the Wilmot Proviso of 1846 (which passed in the House but failed in the Senate). Its intention was to ensure that slavery was not permitted into the territory captured from Mexico.

In 1850 another compromise granted admission to California into the Union but also introduced strict anti-fugitive slave law that angered the pro-abolitionist North. The anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe further inflamed Northern opposition to slavery.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (ill-conceived with hindsight) gave permission to the settlers in these territories to choose on a local level whether they wished to permit slavery. The end result of such a reality was regional conflict best epitomized by the phrase ‘Bleeding Kansas’.

Then in 1857 the US Supreme Court ruled on the infamous Dred Scott decision that effectively invalidated the citizenship protection for Blacks. Congress could not ban slavery in their territories.

Sentiments on both sides festered when in 1859 an abolitionist by the name of John Brown attacked an armory in Harpers Ferry. The intent was to ignite a slave revolt. The attack was put down by the marines and Brown was later hanged but the hostility between North and South was reaching a high point.

In November 1860 Abraham Lincoln won the Presidential election on a platform that took a hard line against slavery. For many in the South the writing was on the wall. South Carolina seceded in December 1860 from the Union. They were soon followed by six other Southern States - Mississippi, Florida, Alabama; Georgia, Louisiana and Texas.

The Confederacy was formed in February of 1861 with Jefferson Davis as its first President, Two months later the US Civil War began with the Southern attack on Fort Sumter. Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee would join the other Confederate states  within a further two months of the war’s beginning. Maryland and Kentucky had slave populations but chose to remain in the Union.

Cold War Vibrations

 Did Turkey consider invading and occupying Greece after World War II?

No. The British had a strong presence in Greece that they maintained from late 1944 to 1947 as a consequence of the Greek Civil War that followed the withdrawal of Axis forces from the country. The rebel ELAS troops (the military wing of the Communists National Liberation Front - EAM) had backing from Tito’s Yugoslavia and were extremely battle hardened. Although they stood in opposition to the Greek government, a Turkish invasion would not be tolerated by all sides. After 1947, the Greek government was further strengthened militarily by equipment and supplies coming from the United States as part of the Truman Doctrine. The Greek Civil War itself would last until 1949.

Worth noting is that in 1945 Turkey had to tread very carefully as her relationship with the Soviet Union was strained as a result of the Turkish straits crisis. It was this crisis that would encourage Turkey to eventually join NATO.

Why didn't Joseph Stalin suffer a fate similar to Benito Mussolini or Nicolae Ceaușescu?

He died in 1953 at a time when the Soviet Union was on the upswing in terms of international power. It was also basking in the glory of victory in WWII with the nation having amassed a huge sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Neither Mussolini nor Ceaușescu had such a legacy to protect them (whether it was justified in the case of Stalin is another question altogether).

In addition both Stalin’s cult of personality and his suppression of opposition voices was far more widespread and effective than that of the other two. He knew how to play the ruthlessness card very well and did so frequently.

Did Mao Zedong have any dangerous aspects to his personality?

He had several. Like most dictators he likely had strong psychopathic traits that pandered to a sense of narcissism. You don’t carry out the destructive and genocidal policies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution without a full and unquestioned sense of your own moral superiority and the disdain of the other. The fact that he is lauded by so many is a classic case of using the cult of personality to pull the wool over people’s eyes.

Why didn't any country except Russia have an empire after World War II?

The question is based on a false assumption. Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands still had empires after WWII. However over the next three decades following the war these would be drastically reduced in size as the cost of administration (both economically and militarily) would prove to be burdensome for the respective powers. Soviet Hegemony over its included states and satellite nations would continue for the duration of the Cold War (1945–1991). However with the demise of its economy and a weakening military grip on its holdings this too would fall by the wayside.

How long does it take for a rising power to become a super power in history?

Super power status is a rarity. The US and the Soviet Union reached the status after WWII and China may still do so in the future. In the 19th century one could argue that Britain and to a lesser extent the French scaled the height but in reality virtually every rising power never reaches the summit. Balance of power checks, internal conflict and the twists and turns of history take care of this. For a nation to reach superpower status many ducks have to line up in a row nothing is predetermined based on the original trajectory of growth.

Reflections LXXI - History Highligted

 It is only natural that the brave Persian people should seek to overthrow the yoke of a belief system enforced on them by conquest. This sits at their heart of the rebellion against the Islamist overlords.

I seek a world where many of the so-called cultural acting elites can return to their role as court jesters and entertainers rather than political know-it-alls.

The flaw in Laissez-Faire Free Enterprise is that there is no built in safe guard that the market can invoke to protect themselves from the cutthroat monopolist. This is why it inevitably relies on the mechanism of good government. Unfortunately the latter has become all too scarce.

The doctrine of the welfare state will ultimately crumble as it is predicated on human decency and contentment. Both of these are easily steamrolled by greed.

It is a sad quirk of history that the only time the Indian sub-continent was united under a single authority was during the British Raj.

It astounds me as to how few people are aware of how close Fascism is to Socialism in terms of economics. Benito Mussolini and Oswald Mosley were at one point socialists. Peron oscillated between the two. So did many Nazis including the Strasser brothers and Goebbels. At their core they are both statist and advocate for coercion based politics.

There is no group more vilified by social engineers in the contemporary than Asian Americans  whose obvious success in the modern milieu dispels the cherished myth of a fundamentally  rigged white dominated system.

Reflections LXX - Saturday Hurrah

 If the Jew didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him as failed ideas and evil need a scapegoat to redirect attention away from their lack of success. The Jew, is the convenient other for all types of charlatans, of which there is no short supply.

The great Hegelian lie is that history has an endpoint . This is no more true than the intended directionality of natural selection . Cause and effect shreds such a simplification.

A deep concern is not that we may never learn the truth but that so many people have no desire or need to ever want to find it.

A person whose sole motivation is pleasure in the afterlife will likely do great harm to themselves in their present life, as they chase a reward for goodness instead of acting with moral intent for the righteous act in and of itself.

It's difficult to not take seriously the notion that the success of the American Revolution wasn’t so much a patriotic victory but a move by the British to minimize their losses.

One can always rely on mathematics to find a safe way of hiding a model from criticism if the evidence in its support is lacking.

The devil is always in the quality and validity of the assumptions.

The success of the British Empire lay with its ability to delegate. It therefore made great use of local networks of administration, designated ‘poobahs’, foreign mercenaries and regional businessmen. The failure of the Mongol empire outside China itself  (with the Yuan dynasty) is that it never came to terms with this idea.

New List #7 - 50 Key Developments in Science prior to 1850

 In chronological order (more-or-less)

1. Science of Agriculture (Irrigation, Plant and Animal Domestication).
2. Greek's develop the concept of the Atom.
3. Euclidean Geometry and the Mathematics of Conics.
4. Aristotle formalize logic.
5. Greeks conceptualize the concepts of change and motion.
6. Birth of Diagnostic Medicine - Hippocrates
7. Determination of the circumference of the Earth, distance to the moon and the distance to the sun.
8. Law of the Lever
9. Archimedes and the concept of buoyancy
10. Arabs expand work on Optics.
11. Madgeburg Experiment - Concept of the vacuum.
12. Copernicus and the Heliocentric revolution
13. Brahe and the changing heavens
14. Invention of the Telescope (First Refracting then Reflecting)
15. Galileo and the Birth of the Experimental Method - Inertia + Free Fall + Simple Harmonic Motion + Projectile Motion
16. Mineral Science develops under Agricola.
17. Vesalius and Modern Anatomy/Physiology
18. Kepler's Three Laws
19. Newton's Law of Universal Gravitiation
20. Newton and the Dispersion of White Light
21. Paracelsus and the Field of Toxicology
22. Newtonian Synthesis of Terrestrial and Cosmological Science
23. Newton's Three Laws of Motion - concepts of Impulse, Momentum, Action + Force.
24. Invention of the Calculus (Differential/Integral)
25. Invention of the Microscope
26. Birth of Cartesian Geometry. Synthesis of Trigonometry and Algebra.
27. Pascal's work on Pressure.
28. Mathematics of Probability
29. Fermat's Principle
30. Vector Algenra (and Calculus)
31. Foucault's Pendulum (Rotation of the Earth)
32. Comet Periodicity
33. William Harvey and the Circulatory System
34. Linneaus and the Taxonomic Classification system
35. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and oxygen as the driver for combustion (extension on the work of Priestly).
36. Huygens Wave Theory
37. Cell Theory
38. Mathematics of Differential Equations (Laplace, Euler etc)
39. Benjamin Franklin's work on distinct charge
40. Dalton and the Early Periodic Table
41. Bernoulli and Fluid Mechanics
42. Buffon and advances in Natural Science
43. Hutton - Modern Geology and Gradualism
44. Cuvier and Catastrophism
45. Jenner and the rise of Immunization Theory
46. Volta and the first electric battery
47. Charles Coulomb and the Electrostatic Force.
48. Sadi Carnot and the Ideal Heat Engine
49. Oersted discovers magnetic fields around current carrying conductors
50. Weather Patterns - Coriolis Effect.

New Lists # 6 - Top 10 Biggest overachievers in the World Cup (since 1950)

 1. Croatia 2018

2. Bulgaria 1994

3. South Korea 2002

4. Turkey 2002

5, Cameroon - 1990

6.West Germany 1954 - Actually won the World Cup against the more fancied Hungarians

7. Morocco - 2022

8. Uruguay 1950 - Took the title after a comeback win against Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro.

9. Sweden 1994

10. Belgium 1986

Reflections LXIX - Tabulating Thought

 Sometimes I think that the story of history is a tale of recovery from bad ideas implemented.

Every leader given enough time will come crashing down from their pedestal.

The function of bureaucracy in the modern state is to protect the power structure from radical change and thereby circumvent reform. Democracy is the illusion sold to the public that the change is possible.

The best way to violate people’s rights, and do so with their consent, is to rebrand it under the labels of safety and security. The Covid lockdowns typified this.

The greatest apocalyptic threat isn’t war, famine or disease but the embrace of bad ideas by the population who have been coerced to forgo common sense.

Marvel Comics consistently blurred the line between Science and Magic in its narratives (look at the origin stories of Spider-Man and the mythical basis of Thor). Over time the distinction became indecipherable7 until the writers were given no choice but to rescue themselves with alternative universes. By that time it was too late. Credibility had collapsed.

The fertile ground for Islamism in the west is the post modernist platform that has elevated indifference into the zeitgeist of the liberal democracies.

The agenda of the elites has always been about the control of information. Artificial Intelligence is merely the latest phase in the application of this philosophy.

Christianity would never have enjoyed the success it has had without its skillful manipulation of pagan iconography.