Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "TED"
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Jonathan,
Only half right. America has some things to be proud of in its relations with China. First of all, America's relations with China started out as a straight and honest trader. I have heard it said that there were 13 ships from South Carolina in the port of Canton on the day the Declaration of Independence was signed. Your original China Clippers. They weren't selling opium, as the English were later to do, nor slaves. Just straight, honest commerce, cotton for tea and silver mainly.
Later, in the nineteenth century, as Britain, Germany and France were destroying China on straight imperialist grounds -- teaching the lesson that Japan learned and copied with even greater viciousness -- the United States, for the most part, stood to one side, honestly, and perhaps somewhat stupidly, interested in teaching Christianity while sometimes, though not often enough, opposing the very principle of imperialism.
Despite its fine principles, the United States managed to get itself involved in the Opium Wars on the wrong side, which is a damn shame since unlike Europe they had sound principles. Teddy Roosevelt did one small, though perhaps insufficient, thing to try to rectify the damage. While the European powers imposed huge indemnities on the defeated Chinese after the Boxer Rebellion, the Americans returned half of their share of the ill-gotten money as grants -- to found Yenching College, the basis of today's world-class BeiDa, University of Beijing.
America's largely good record continues with Nixon, with the excellent elder Bush, and then with Clinton and Obama. Only the ignorant thug Trump has spoiled America's record, carrying out a record of simple juvenile delinquency, the cost of which we do not know.
Kevin Rudd's sketch here is completely sound and is what we shall have to try to reconstruct once this ugly Trump interlude ends. There are difficulties no doubt, rights of investors, America's imagined loss of "intellectual property," (this consists mostly of us showing them how to make the stuff we want to buy using their cheap labor and high rate of savings) and what-not. These are minor.
The big problems are that Navarro is a lunatic, Lighthizer a fine mind from the sixteenth century, and Trump a sad blundering halfwit. The good news is, the Chinese are grown-ups and can make allowances for these obvious facts. The sad news is that right now China is taking advantage of them. They are very busily making friends and commercial alliances around the world, some at America's expense, and all of it brought about by the Trump farce force at work.
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IWashMyOwnBrain Thanks.
There's one other side effect to ll of this: just when the Sicilian Mafia had pretty much accomplished its long-term goal, getting all its kids into law school or medicine, and going at least as legit as everybody else, along come the bloody Russians.
So we haven't gotten rid of the Mafia the good ol' fashioned way, by including the best and getting rid of the worst. (Bill Gates calls it "revise and extend.") Instead we've still got it, only it speaks Russian now instead of Sicilian.
My Sicilian in-laws, on the other hand, are doing fine. Suddenly their grandparents turn out to have been from Milan, and my nephews win scholarships to private schools.
Milan, take note. Not even half-measures like maybe Rome, or quarter measures like Naples. I had them checked out by my local Sicilian "investor": They are from the next village over from Castello Gondolfo of "Godfather" fame. My connected friend says of their people "They are not of us, but they were never against us. They are good people." Reassuring. I guess...
Cheers,
-dlj.
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