#niall ferguson

[nicklloydnow]

“But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets. It’s a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?”

I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day—perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets?

(…)

A chronic “soft budget constraint” in the public sector, which was a key weakness of the Soviet system? I see a version of that in the U.S. deficits forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to exceed 5 percent of GDP for the foreseeable future, and to rise inexorably to 8.5 percent by 2054. The insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process? I see that too, despite the hype around the Biden administration’s “industrial policy.”

Economists keep promising us a productivity miracle from information technology, most recently AI. But the annual average growth rate of productivity in the U.S. nonfarm business sector has been stuck at just 1.5 percent since 2007, only marginally better than the dismal years 1973–1980.

(…)

We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker’s newly published report makes clear. As I read Wicker’s report—and I recommend you do the same—I kept thinking of what successive Soviet leaders said until the bitter end: that the Red Army was the biggest and therefore most lethal military in the world.

On paper, it was. But paper was what the Soviet bear turned out to be made of. It could not even win a war in Afghanistan, despite ten years of death and destruction. (Now, why does that sound familiar?)

On paper, the U.S. defense budget does indeed exceed those of all the other members of NATO put together. But what does that defense budget actually buy us? As Wicker argues, not nearly enough to contend with the “Coalition Against Democracy” that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have been aggressively building.

In Wicker’s words, “America’s military has a lack of modern equipment, a paucity of training and maintenance funding, and a massive infrastructure backlog. . . . it is stretched too thin and outfitted too poorly to meet all the missions assigned to it at a reasonable level of risk. Our adversaries recognize this, and it makes them more adventurous and aggressive.”

And, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the federal government will almost certainly spend more on debt service than on defense this year.

It gets worse.

According to the CBO, the share of gross domestic product going on interest payments on the federal debt will be double what we spend on national security by 2041, thanks partly to the fact that the rising cost of the debt will squeeze defense spending down from 3 percent of GDP this year to a projected 2.3 percent in 30 years’ time. This decline makes no sense at a time when the threats posed by the new Chinese-led Axis are manifestly growing.

Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.

(…)

Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. Leon Aron’s brilliant book Roads to the Temple shows just how wretched life in the 1980s had become.

(…)

In a letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda from 1990, for example, a reader decried the “ghastly and tragic. . . loss of morality by a huge number of people living within the borders of the USSR.” Symptoms of moral debility included apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching. The entire country, he wrote, was suffocating in a “miasma of bare-faced and ceaseless public lies and demagoguery.” By July 1988, 44 percent of people polled by Moskovskie novosti felt that theirs was an “unjust society.”

Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979.

It is now well known that younger Americans are suffering an epidemic of mental ill health—blamed by Jon Haidt and others on smartphones and social media—while older Americans are succumbing to “deaths of despair,” a phrase made famous by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. And while Case and Deaton focused on the surge in deaths of despair among white, middle-aged Americans—their work became the social-science complement to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy—more recent research shows that African Americans have caught up with their white contemporaries when it comes to overdose deaths. In 2022 alone, more Americans died of fentanyl overdoses than were killed in three major wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The recent data on American mortality are shocking. Life expectancy has declined in the past decade in a way we do not see in comparable developed countries. The main explanations, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, are a striking increase in deaths due to drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide, and a rise in various diseases associated with obesity. To be precise, between 1990 and 2017 drugs and alcohol were responsible for more than 1.3 million deaths among the working-age population (aged 25 to 64). Suicide accounted for 569,099 deaths—again of working-age Americans—over the same period. Metabolic and cardiac causes of death such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease also surged in tandem with obesity.

This reversal of life expectancy simply isn’t happening in other developed countries.

Peter Sterling and Michael L. Platt argue in a recent paper that this is because West European countries, along with the United Kingdom and Australia, do more to “provide communal assistance at every stage [of life], thus facilitating diverse paths forward and protecting individuals and families from despair.” In the United States, by contrast, “Every symptom of despair has been defined as a disorder or dysregulation within the individual. This incorrectly frames the problem, forcing individuals to grapple on their own,” they write. “It also emphasizes treatment by pharmacology, providing innumerable drugs for anxiety, depression, anger, psychosis, and obesity, plus new drugs to treat addictions to the old drugs.”

(…)

The mass self-destruction of Americans captured in the phrase deaths of despair for years has been ringing a faint bell in my head. This week I remembered where I had seen it before: in late Soviet and post–Soviet Russia. While male life expectancy improved in all Western countries in the late twentieth century, in the Soviet Union it began to decline after 1965, rallied briefly in the mid-1980s, and then fell off a cliff in the early 1990s, slumping again after the 1998 financial crisis. The death rate among Russian men aged 35 to 44, for example, more than doubled between 1989 and 1994.

The explanation is as clear as Stolichnaya. In July 1994, two Russian scholars, Alexander Nemtsov and Vladimir Shkolnikov, published an article in the national daily newspaper Izvestia with the memorable title “To Live or to Drink?” Nemtsov and Shkolnikov demonstrated (in the words of a recent review article) “an almost perfect negative linear relationship between these two indicators.” All they were missing was a sequel—“To Live or to Smoke?”—as lung cancer was the other big reason Soviet men died young. A culture of binge drinking and chain-smoking was facilitated by the dirt-cheap prices of cigarettes under the Soviet regime and the dirt-cheap prices of alcohol after the collapse of communism.

The statistics are as shocking as the scenes I remember witnessing in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which made even my native Glasgow seem abstemious. An analysis of 25,000 autopsies conducted in Siberia in 1990–2004 showed that 21 percent of adult male deaths due to cardiovascular disease involved lethal or near-lethal levels of ethanol in the blood. Smoking accounted for a staggering 26 percent of all male deaths in Russia in 2001. Suicides among men aged 50 to 54 reached 140 per 100,000 population in 1994—compared with 39.2 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic American men aged 45 to 54 in 2015. In other words, Case and Deaton’s deaths of despair are a kind of pale imitation of the Russian version 20 to 40 years ago.

The self-destruction of homo sovieticus was worse. And yet is not the resemblance to the self-destruction of homo americanus the really striking thing?

Of course, the two healthcare systems look superficially quite different. The Soviet system was just under-resourced. At the heart of the American healthcare disaster, by contrast, is a huge mismatch between expenditure—which is internationally unrivaled relative to GDP—and outcomes, which are terrible. But, like the Soviet system as a whole, the U.S. healthcare system has evolved so that a whole bunch of vested interests can extract rents. The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy, brilliantly parodied by South Park in a recent episode—is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles.

Meanwhile, as in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.

In the Soviet Union, the great lies were that the Party and the state existed to serve the interests of the workers and peasants, and that the United States and its allies were imperialists little better than the Nazis had been in “the great Patriotic War.” The truth was that the nomenklatura (i.e., the elite members) of the Party had rapidly formed a new class with its own often hereditary privileges, consigning the workers and peasants to poverty and servitude, while Stalin, who had started World War II on the same side as Hitler, utterly failed to foresee the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and then became the most brutal imperialist in his own right.

The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.”

In reality, policies to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI “officers.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.”

As for the current direction of U.S. foreign policy, it is not so much to help other countries defend themselves as to egg on others to fight our adversaries as proxies without supplying them with sufficient weaponry to stand much chance of winning. This strategy—most visible in Ukraine—makes some sense for the United States, which discovered in the “global war on terror” that its much-vaunted military could not defeat even the ragtag Taliban after twenty years of effort. But believing American blandishments may ultimately doom Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to follow South Vietnam and Afghanistan into oblivion.

(…)

To see the extent of the gulf that now separates the American nomenklatura from the workers and peasants, consider the findings of a Rasmussen poll from last September, which sought to distinguish the attitudes of the Ivy Leaguers from ordinary Americans. The poll defined the former as “those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile,” and having attended “Ivy League schools or other elite private schools, including Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago.”

Asked if they would favor “rationing of gas, meat, and electricity” to fight climate change, 89 percent of Ivy Leaguers said yes, as against 28 percent of regular people. Asked if they would personally pay $500 more in taxes and higher costs to fight climate change, 75 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said yes, versus 25 percent of everyone else. “Teachers should decide what students are taught, as opposed to parents” was a statement with which 71 percent of the Ivy Leaguers agreed, nearly double the share of average citizens. “Does the U.S. provide too much individual freedom?” More than half of Ivy Leaguers said yes; just 15 percent of ordinary mortals did. The elite were roughly twice as fond as everyone else of members of Congress, journalists, union leaders, and lawyers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 88 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said their personal finances were improving, as opposed to one in five of the general population.

A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents—sorry, I mean deplorables? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid. And, while I make no claims to legal expertise, I think I recognize Soviet justice when I see—in a New York courtroom—the legal system being abused in the hope not just of imprisoning but also of discrediting the leader of the political opposition.

(…)

We can tell ourselves that our many contemporary pathologies are the results of outside forces waging a multi-decade campaign of subversion. They have undoubtedly tried, just as the CIA tried its best to subvert Soviet rule in the Cold War.

Yet we also need to contemplate the possibility that we have done this to ourselves—just as the Soviets did many of the same things to themselves. It was a common liberal worry during the Cold War that we might end up becoming as ruthless, secretive, and unaccountable as the Soviets because of the exigencies of the nuclear arms race. Little did anyone suspect that we would end up becoming as degenerate as the Soviets, and tacitly give up on winning the cold war now underway.

I still cling to the hope that we can avoid losing Cold War II—that the economic, demographic, and social pathologies that afflict all one-party communist regimes will ultimately doom Xi’s “China Dream.” But the higher the toll rises of deaths of despair—and the wider the gap grows between America’s nomenklatura and everyone else—the less confident I feel that our own homegrown pathologies will be slower-acting.

Are we the Soviets? Look around you.”

[deadpresidents]

Tangentially presidential, but do you have recommendations for biographies of Clarence Thomas and/or Henry Kissinger?

I don't have any suggestions for books about Thomas, but I can recommend a bunch on Kissinger. I think it's especially important to read different books about Kissinger to get a more balanced viewpoint because many books about him tend to be slanted in one direction or the other -- more so than most historical figures, in my opinion. He just tends to inspire particularly strong opinions, so here are a few books on him that I've found interesting:

•The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (BOOK | KINDLE) by Barry Gewen •Kissinger (BOOK | KINDLE) by Walter Isaacson •Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist (BOOK | KINDLE) by Niall Ferguson •Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy (BOOK | KINDLE) by Martin Indyk •Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman (BOOK | KINDLE) by Greg Grandin

There are also some really good dual biographies about Kissinger and Nixon and their foreign policy: •Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (BOOK | KINDLE) by Robert Dallek •The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (BOOK | KINDLE) by Gary J. Bass •The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (BOOK | KINDLE) by Seymour M. Hersh •Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross

And I want to also mention these two books, which are heavier reads but really important studies about the international impact of the Nixon/Kissinger foreign policy (and a helpful reminder about American complicity in the overthrow and death of democratically-elected Chilean President Salvador Allende) : •Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile (BOOK | KINDLE) by Lubna Z. Qureshi •Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (BOOK | KINDLE) by Roham Alvandi

[holodrome]

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour  politician Denis Healey that 'when the British Empire finally sank  beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two  monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the  expression "Fuck off".

- Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

[radiofreederry]

[dipnotski]

Niall Ferguson – Colossus (2024)

İkinci Dünya Savaşı sonrasında dünyanın son resmî imparatorluğu kendisine tabi topluluklara özgürlük vererek emperyal konumundan feragat etmek zorunda kaldı. Artık “üzerinde güneş batmayan ülke” nitelemesini sürdürecek ne gücü ne de takati kalmıştı. Büyük Britanya’dan doğan güç boşluğu ve Sovyetleri Birliği’nin hızlı yükselişi karşısında Amerika Birleşik Devletleri, yeni bir emperyal güç olarak…

[preacherpollard]

What's Next?

Gary Pollard There has been some controversy in recent years over what the Bible teaches about our new life. While I don’t believe these are disagreements worth splitting over, some aspects — particularly the ones most commonly known — have done some damage. In popular culture (esp. various forms of entertainment media) and within the church, we commonly refer to the next life as “heaven”. The…

[so-idialed-9]

"Tell Simon Cowell to go fuck himself. Team 1D." -Fin Power, vocalist/guitarist for Stone

Edit - here's a link to the TT

Takeaways -

People aren't as afraid of Simon tanking them - his power is fading

Simon's recruitment isn't going well, per the article

He's recruiting someone already with a record deal and years of performing - which matches what former X Factor contestants and industry people have said for years about how things happened with X Factor, Modest, and Syco, lending credibility to other aspects of their stories

- Katie Waissel, X Factor contestant, said she had been touring and making albums and doing collaborations, and when Simon recruited her she said no repeatedly. She said he sent people to her recording sessions to pressure her, then suddenly her other deals went bad, her own lawyer who it turned out shared an office with Modest's team pressured her to sign with Simon as written which turned out to be a horrible deal for her

Fuck Simon Cowell

[didhewinkback]

simon cowell saying the only regret he has with one direction is that he doesn't own the name and the boys do... that man has no shame, just blatantly evil as hell

[apureniallsource]

ewbof: Fun pro am today. Game time now 👊🏽🏙️ @dubaidcgolf

[landhinlove]

Hello! Recently got into reading about the horribleness that is Syco and Modest and all those involved, and how Jedward and Rebecca Ferguson were tweeting about it, saying they've got info on 1D's contracts and basically fighting the system, but that was in 2021.. do you know if anything has happened after that, or if anything good has come from it? Thank you!

hello!! Tbh I’m not sure if anything has come from it, but I know that Rebecca Ferguson is still very active about it. But from what I know nothing major has happened yet

Butttt with the whole Simon Cowell thing where he was blatantly talking about hyper controlling bands (specifically 1d) - Ashton Irwin’s response to Simon Cowell recently, the 1D boys unfollowing Simon, and also Little Mix being openly against him for a while has brought a lot of attention to it which tends to help spur things on

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour politician Denis Healey that 'when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression "Fuck off".

- Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World    

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

In April 1933, Einstein discovered that the new German government had passed laws barring Jews from holding any official positions, including teaching at universities.[129] Historian Gerald Holton describes how, with "virtually no audible protest being raised by their colleagues", thousands of Jewish scientists were suddenly forced to give up their university positions and their names were removed from the rolls of institutions where they were employed.[131] A month later, Einstein's works were among those targeted by the German Student Union in the Nazi book burnings, with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaiming, "Jewish intellectualism is dead."[129] One German magazine included him in a list of enemies of the German regime with the phrase, "not yet hanged", offering a $5,000 bounty on his head.[129][132] In a subsequent letter to physicist and friend Max Born, who had already emigrated from Germany to England, Einstein wrote, "... I must confess that the degree of their brutality and cowardice came as something of a surprise."[129] After moving to the US, he described the book burnings as a "spontaneous emotional outburst" by those who "shun popular enlightenment", and "more than anything else in the world, fear the influence of men of intellectual independence".[133]

A quote from the Wikipedia page of German-American Jewish scientist, Albert Einstein.

What's notable here is how academics and intellectuals raised almost no protest to the systematic purging of Jews from universities in Germany. This is because, as historian Niall Ferguson has noted, that German academics had been promulgating the intellectual basis of Nazism during the 1920's (and probably beforehand).

What we can see here is that rather than defending the dignity and liberty of the individual, academics and intellectuals were the first in line to accept, permit, and collaborate with tyranny. They believed and invented lies. They turned a blind eye to mounting crimes against humanity.

When we look at today's college campuses and see a rising sea of hatred against Jewish students; when we see thousands of non-Jewish students showing little to no concern whatsoever for the rise in antisemitic hatred; when we see academics who glorify Jew-hating mass murderers, we should not be surprised.

What has been is what will be.

The academics who have promulgated anti-Jewish hatred (or stood by and allowed it to spread) today are betraying the same spirit as the German academics who allowed German Jews to be purged and threatened with death by the Nazi regime. And, like the German academics of the 20's and 30's, they believe that their betrayal of justice and liberty are all in the public's best interests.

Of course, they have been wise enough to change their official scapegoat from the Jews to "Israel".

But the net result is the same: Jews-- no matter how great their achievements, like those of Einstein-- are being purged from academic spaces and polite society, once again, to virtually no protest from their peers.

[dipnotski]

Niall Ferguson – Kıyamet (2023)

Felaketleri tahmin etmek işin doğası gereği zor hatta kimi zaman imkansızdır. Depremler, orman yangınları, mali krizler ve savaşlar gibi salgın hastalıklar da normal dağılım göstermez; bir sonraki felaketi öngörmemize yardımcı olacak bir tarih döngüsü yoktur. Ancak felaket gelip çattığında, Vezüv patladığında Romalıların ya da Kara Ölüm vurduğunda Orta Çağ İtalyanlarının olduğundan daha…

[lisbeth-kk]

May Prompts (18) Blanket

The Luckiest Girl in the World (chapter 18)

Summary: Molly gifts Rosie something the teen never thought she'd get her hands on.

Eighteen Years Old

Molly got me concert tickets to Niall Horan on my eighteenth birthday. I was over the moon. Since I was ten, I’d considered myself a Directioner, and the year I turned thirteen, I had my first celebrity crush. Harry Styles, one of the One Direction members, was destined to be my boyfriend someday in the future, no questions asked.

I got over it. Eventually. When Molly accompanied me to one of their last concerts before they split up, it was more important to sing along and enjoy the music than to pine for the darkhaired young Brit.

Niall, who was a previous member of One Direction, had sold out all his concerts in the UK, and I and my two friends, Leyla and Clare, had tried but failed to get tickets. And now, I suddenly had three of them in my hands.

“Molly! I don’t know how to thank you enough,” I exclaimed and hugged her hard and long. “How did you…”

“Shush now. I have my…sources,” Molly said and winked at me. “Give the girls a call and tell them the good news.”

***

Papa tried to insist that one of uncle Myc’s chauffeurs could drive us to the O2, where the concert was to be held, but Dad and I managed to make him see sense.

“I ride the tube almost every day, Papa. The Jubilee Line will take us straight to North Greenwich station, and then we’re practically there. We can’t always make use of uncle’s privileges, you know. It would be embarrassing and attract too much attention as well if three ordinary girls turned up in a…”

“Nothing ordinary about…” Papa interrupted me, while Dad interrupted Papa with a stern voice calling his name, and that was the end of it.

***

Molly had procured us with great Inner Circle tickets and early entry. It must’ve cost her a fortune, and I kept wondering who this source of hers was. (Not that I didn’t have my suspicions.)

With money my grandparents had gifted me, I bought merch. A t-shirt, a few bracelets and a key lanyard.

The concert was brilliant, and luckily, we were already on our way out of the venue when a group of girls started to fight amongst each other over a signed poster of Niall. It got ugly quite quickly. A nail file was put to good use, blood flooded, and hysterical teenagers were running to the tube station.

My phone vibrated in the back pocket of my jeans. A text.

Walk to the parking lot by the Aurora Tower. I will have a car waiting for the three of you. UM.

Clare had started to get a bit freaked out by the crowd pushing on us, and she sighed relieved when I told her and Leyla that we should walk in the opposite direction to be picked up by my uncle, Anthea or just a driver.

“Your uncle is just brilliant, Ro,” Leyla stated. “How did he know? This just happened minutes ago. I’m sure it hasn’t reached the news yet.”

“Not the ordinary news,” I agreed without elaborating further.

When I spotted the car, another text arrived.

Ferguson will be driving you. He already knows Ms. Aldershot and Ms. Carson’s addresses. I hope you had a good time. UM.

Thanks, uncle Myc. You’re a star! Or brilliant as L & C called you. Pick a choice. xx

(Today's prompt is used metaphorically)

@calaisreno @totallysilvergirl @keirgreeneyes @helloliriels @raina-at

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