Well, my father knew well the Hong Kong flu of 1968-1969, but he is a virologist. Otherwise it wasn't on the radar of people when thinking of the 1960's.

Prior to Covid-19 history books hardly ever mentioned the flu pandemic when talking about the tumultuous year of 1968. These prior diseases fell into the category of "nasty flus". The last pandemic that history books or school books mentioned was the Spanish flu.

My son had as homework in history a question if he has experienced a historical event. He immediately answered the Covid-19 pandemic and, as a 12-year old, was happy that he had experience something really historic in his lifetime.

Nothing to argue about there.

A pandemic with number of deaths in the top ten in all of history and with the lockdowns, political turmoil and the economy depression, this is surely something for the history books.

You would want that? :wink: Those who rule make the decisions.

If people don't know much about economics, here is one of the best simple explanations of what is happening from Ray Dalio, founder of one of the largest hedge-funds. It isn't the economics taught in schools, but captures the present system quite well. At start the video starts from the very basics, but later goes to quite complicated issues like the effect of deleveraging. Dalio explains the system objectively and without sounding like a doomsday prophet (as many permabear commentators do). If people have 30 minutes to spare, worth wile watching.

Following the recent COVID-related drastic increase of America's sovereign debt, there are the newest neoliberal strategies: no austerity (so far), helicopter money instead, and even more dramatic political change. It looks like elites do not care about the debt anymore. (Biden even has proposed an additional 1.9 trillion $ of 'COVID' relief.) Neither debtors nor creditors think of re-paying or reimbursing of debts. With zero interest rates, the accelerating virtualization and dematerialization of money will continue to be the engine and source of the neoliberal financial system's power. It looks like the neoliberal corporate power 'outside' the state will resonate with the power of the state itself. — Number2018

Deficits don't matter. Now it's just official.

The Federal Reserve can buy the debt.. .as it has and now is the largest single owner of the debt. Naturally it all can be paid with a keystroke, hence the debts surely can be repaid. The US cannot default on it's own currency.

And with the new gospel is MMT, there isn't any danger with this as a) inflation becomes a problem in full employment, b) the government can control demand-pull inflation, basically the normal thing what happens to prices when demand is larger than supply and c) the whole thing doesn't affect the private sector and it's issuing of bonds. That's the line.

We all believe in the perpetual dominance of King Dollar, right? Nothing to shake that confidence here...

Why are you all still talking about Trump?

:roll:

How it has possibly gotten to this point is beyond me. — synthesis

I think that when the US basically defaulted on the Bretton Woods system, the people deciding it genuinely thought that it would be a temporary move, that the World wouldn't accept the USD having the status that it had. But nobody didn't want to rock the boat, so the US could get away with it. For the Saudi's opting to take the fiat Dollars was a smart decision: decades later the US did arrive to defend them from their neighbor in the North, who had captured Kuwait and with it had the largest oil reserves...for some months.

I also think that the Saudis, the Japanese and finally now the Chinese have been happy to use those dollars to buy assets in the US, hence the system has gone on. And of course American politicians, even having the hilarious hypocrite theater of "raising the debt ceiling" every once in a while, naturally will exploit the situation where they can recklessly spend without no limit.

(They still have those trillion plus, but now the largest owner of US debt is the Federal Reserve:)

It is rumored that the BoE never paid off their original debt from 1696. Wouldn't doubt it. — synthesis

Technically the debts are paid back. For example, the UK paid it's last debts from WW2 back to Canada and the US in 2006. From that time:

(BBC News, 29th December 2006) Britain will settle its World War II debts to the US and Canada when it pays two final instalments before the close of 2006, the Treasury has said. The payments of $83.25m (£42.5m) to the US and US$22.7m (£11.6m) to Canada are the last of 50 instalments since 1950.

The amount paid back is nearly double that loaned in 1945 and 1946. "This week we finally honour in full our commitments to the US and Canada for the support they gave us 60 years ago," said Treasury Minister Ed Balls. "It was vital support which helped Britain defeat Nazi Germany and secure peace and prosperity in the post-war period. We honour our commitments to them now as they honoured their commitments to us all those years ago," he added.

The last payments will be made on Friday, the final working day of the year.

The market price of a stock in no way changes the capital of a company and therefore has no effect on its solvency. — Benkei

Well, if the market cap of the company is collateral for any debt, it might be an issue. (I think mentioned this already)

Anyway,

This whole Gamestop event just shows that we are living quite similar times as in the 1920's. Then too speculators could gang up on stocks (and I'm talking of both the hedge funds and others) as there isn't much anymore of the New Deal era limitations/regulations in force.

And that this kind of issue gets so much focus tells again tells about these times...

Well, to say it is a tax is actually is one easy way to understand it, yet the phenomenon is actually far more complex. Who actually benefits isn't so easy to understand as with taxes. How it is measured also raises a bit of doubts as it is a highly politicized indicator, just like unemployment, and is tended to be represented to be far better than in reality by statistical methods.

Even if one isn't an investor, it's actually important to understand the possible perils in this economic situation and that things aren't going to go the way as before as we are in quite new territory. How deflation and a possible crack up boom will turn out is something we may see.

The FEDs 2% inflation target is like saying that we wish to confiscate all of your wealth...eventually (which is exactly what they have been doing for the last century). — synthesis

If inflation really would be 2% you get a return on your investment of over 2% + the interest paid on the debt, then you are the winner in this system. The positive effect of gearing works wonders. Yet with the lowest interest rates in known history of mankind ought to make people think where this all is going.

The powers at be have been thinking of an answer, and as dubbed in Davos, it's "The Great Reset" The term the Great Recet isn't invented by the critics, it's really the phrasing used for example by an IMF manager here (just to take one example).

One idea would be to float Special Drawing Rights (SDR) as a cryptocurrency, if trust in the present fiat-system is shaken. Of course the SDR's are made of a basket of current fiat-currencies, but anyway. Those in power through the present monetary system would stay in power through a new system.



They're not leaving the crisis to waste.

There hasn't been real economic growth in this country since the 60's. It's mostly debt, counterfeiting, and statistical gymnastics designed to make the majority think that what they are seeing with their own eyes is a phantasm. — synthesis

Well, you had a politician, Richard Nixon, declaring money isn't what it had used to be for thousands of years...and that was planned just for a temporary time.

Perhaps the debate should be just how stupid the idea of deflating/devaluing everyone to prosperity is. The real issue here is who gets the money first. Inflation is great only for those who buy an asset that doesn't devalue in price or can use the money before it loses value, but for savers it's a problem. An economy needs savings too.

In the Nordic countries (we are talking the era from the 50's to the 90's) usually it went like this: The export industry noticed that they had problems to compete in the global market. Hence they drove the market to devaluate the currency to gain an pricing advantage in their goods. Great, good times again! Unfortunately this made later also the imported resources more costly and finally the trade unions noticed that wages hadn't kept up with the prices and demanded higher wages. After costly strikes the employers were ready to raise wages and the situation was at the same as it was in the first place.

Then something changes: thanks to the deregulation of the financial sector the speculative bubble got so big that this model didn't work anymore. Low interest rates didn't cause inflation. Why?

Because once the bubble burst the banks simply didn't lend the money, which was poured into them. And by the 90's the labour movement wasn't anymore what it had been earlier. In the US the situation was even worse as there hardly is a labour movement to negotiate about the wages. Yet the money had to go somewhere and where it went was into asset inflation: to the stockmarket, to real estate again. Yet without the increase in wages etc. the influx of money didn't find it's way to the real economy. The system serves those who are rich, not the poor. Hence now we have a situation where the real economy and the financial realm are living in totally different worlds. Or it seems so.

Yet I don't think that this can go on perpetually. Sooner or later there is a system crisis. And likely now it's sooner than later.

(why do we think that perpetual inflation is good?

2008 was simply an interruption in the flow of money that caused all kinds of reciprocal havoc. Nothing that couldn't be fixed by pouring trillions into the system. — synthesis

And after trillions come quadrillions and quintillions. Do people think the future Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos is so much richer when he is a quadrillionaire and the US deficits are counted in quintillions of dollars?

There has not been an economic crisis since the recession of the early 90's (and even that one was semi-bailed). I am talking about a proper depression (people jumping off of buildings, etc.). — synthesis

Forgetting the 2008 Financial Crisis and the recession? (Ah yes, I do see the small blip of the 1990's recession)

Guess last year the GDP growth was something like -3,5% in the US.

The gold standard is not directly related to fractional reserve banking, as you can have both. The gold standard only limits the primary currency, but banks and everyone can work with derived currencies just fine. But the gold standard does of course have an effect on the domestic money supply since it makes it much more apparent should virtual currencies run out of hand. — Echarmion

Which does represent a limit to a totally reckless monetary policy.

I think the best formulation of what would be close to a gold standard is to think of situation inside the Eurozone: with the Euro, the members states cannot prop up their export sector by devaluation and hence the euros end up in the best performing countries like Germany and make it difficult for weak countries like Greece, that were accustomed to devaluate their currencies to gain an advantage in selling their exports. Yet not that those countries (like Greece) which used extensively devaluation to prop up their industry, aren't the most prosperous ones. That the German Mark was for so long strong meant also that the Germans were prosperous.

My personal lay opinion (and this is just me soapboxing, I'm not addressing you personally) is that the power of monetary policy to affect actual production is often overstated. — Echarmion

I think many simply don't understand it. Especially the effects on the long term that what easy monetary policy does to a country. And in the economic circles the differences start from things like what is money.

You probably already know this and just misspoke, but it's not the "most risen" stocks that get bought more, it's the stocks with highest market capitalization — Pfhorrest

Yes, the index is most defined by the largest stocks that make it. Better to say it more clearly as you do. Also it should be mentioned that indexes are actively changed. That's why the DJIA, which just takes 30 stocks and doesn't use the weighted arithmetic mean, isn't a fair representation to overall stocks and people use the S&P 500 or the Russell 3000.

Still, just seven or so stocks of the S&P 500 make up 40% of the market cap of the index. And if you want to mimic the index, guess what seven stocks you have to buy?

It's not a philosophical or economical discussion. It's raw politics. — Benkei

Well, don't political issues have philosophical views behind them?

But I do agree:

When the US had it's Savings & Loans crisis in the 1980's, bankers went to jail and 1000 S&L banks went belly up. And the US then preached Japan to take similar action with it's banking crisis. When Wall Street had a similar crisis, the Secretary of the Treasury was a Wall Street banker, his former bank didn't fail, nobody went to jail and we are facing the unresolved problems of that time today. Yeah, it's about power.

Without FRL, the economy would collapse. For better or worse, FRL is a central engine of capitalism, as it facilitates investment and makes it cheaper (via inflation). — Echarmion

Yet in the US, just to give an example, the most rapid economic growth happened during the gold standard in the 19th Century.

Noone has any interest in popping the bubble because everyone stands to loose. — Echarmion

I disagree on the idea that everyone stands to lose. Popping the speculative bubble will get the economy over the issue and get back on a healthy track. It will be past, not something that will have an effect decades later, just as now with the 2008. If it is not let to burst, many people will lose from the current malaise while the richest that can get the cheap money will become more richer.

Those who benefit from the present system are the richest people and the vast majority of ordinary people suffer. This for example Yanis Varifoukas explained very well.

Free market mechanism, if it would be let to happen, would deal with the bursting of the bubble with a quick deflation and sharp recession that would give way then for a healthy recovery. What is now done, to patch the bubble and help zombie banks and corporations to limp on, leads to a similar anemic growth that Japan had. And likely will result sooner or later in an system crisis. Popping the bubble will simply lead to brief transfer of wealth. Sustaining the bubble will lead those that have caused the bubble to enrich themselves even more.

It's much like a pyramid scheme. Each person is willing to pay more than the last because the next will pay yet more, until they don't, then the pyramid collapses. The last tier lose but everyone before them wins. — Kenosha Kid

But the whole idea is that the pyramid scheme doesn't collapse, because central banks come to the rescue and push the prices back again into la-la-land prices.

It would be terrible if suddenly Tesla would be half of the price it is now or just the value of Toyota, just imagine all those debts where that stock price is the collateral to the debt. These absurdities simply become the new norm. The example that gives just tells how it really is a casino. Didn't the event when oil prices went negative show us that people aren't in the markets to do trades with actual barrels of oil?

The issue that just nags my mind is that this isn't knowledge that only few have. If the global bond market is over 100 trillion $ and the global equity market nearly as much, how much then do the central banks put into propping the markets up. With "only" 7 trillion $, for the stats see see recent trends, how much can more can the balance sheet be increased? And how much does the new administration plan to spend also. Trump ended with a +3 trillion budget deficit. What if the banks and the corporations need another bail-out if the market crashes? People happy to bail them out again?

Did people notice the spending?


Btw, the actual production of cars in 2019, notice where on the list the most valuable car company is:

Yanis Varifoukas described the phenomenon very well — fdrake

Thanks, that indeed is worth listening to.

Varifoukas describes very well why the 2008 Crisis never went away, but how the financial bubble was kept alive. We see how again this was done last year (with the V-shaped recovery of the stock market creating a "melt-up") He also explains well why savings and investment have been disconnected from each other. And in the end Varifoukas says an important thing: one cannot understand economics with one model, one economic school of thought. Better read both Marx and Hayek. One has to be eclectic. Have to say these are words of wisdom that in our polarization we tend to forget.

What isn't talked is the idea of MMT. And of course, Varifoukas makes similar (and correct) observations about what has happened (as many conservative commentators do also), the disagreement comes in what exactly to do. Where, who, how to invest etc.

Yes, Nemtsov was in the camp of being basically Pro-Ukrainian. And coming from the Yeltsin camp he was quite pro-Western, but only up to a point (as was Yeltsin himself).

Nemtsov was the only Russian politician who stood together with Ukrainians in the frosty Maidan of 2004 together with the then leaders, Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko. For some Ukrainian politicians, his engagement with this country was even too much. In 2005, Oleg Tyagnibok, then a little-known right-wing politician, proposed to the Verkhovna Rada a measure that would prevent Nemtsov from continuing to serve as an official adviser to the president, since this position would be tantamount to interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine. Nemtsov was among the first critics of the Minsk agreements as inoperative, and called for Ukraine to wall off the breakaway regions in the Donbas.

In short, the simple thing is that the Russian opposition towards Putin aren't stooges of the West and if (a big if) they do come into power after Putin, it won't be all dancing on roses for the West.

One result the Pandemic will have: no more huge passenger aircraft. Both the Boeing 747 and the Airbus 380 will cease or has ceased production. Just like with the Concorde, bye bye, Jumbo jet!

It may be that people will later look at awe at the luxury of the pre-Pandemic airline business.

Yes, I'm only speaking of the UK where free higher education was replaced first by low-cost education at the end of the century, then by high-cost education ten years ago, over a period when house prices inflated 200%. I think the trends in other countries should be compared, but then by virtue of being other countries, different factors will weigh in. — Kenosha Kid

I don't know so well the UK educational system to comment that.

However I could point some things about the housing prices. They haven't just inflated, the simply fact is that UK has had also huge and long enduring immigration boom. Yes, there has been asset inflation especially in a major city like London, but there are also quite understandable reasons for the prices to rise also. One million Polish immigrant workers coming to the UK alongside other EU immigrant do have an effect and building new homes likely hasn't kept pace with the demand. The obvious effect that this has is obvious: prices go up.

Old stats, but they do tell one reason:




Of course first Brexit and the Pandemic have diminished immigration to the UK. Yet here's the catch. If you think that housing prices coming down will be a good thing, think again. If the real estate market plummets, that will have huge consequences for the economy and employment (as houses in the UK aren't built by robots in China). A housing market crash means economic depression.

The fact is that when housing prices are cheap, few are buying and people who don't need to sell won't sell. And nobody is building.

Social media; apps like Tiktok are helping mobilize Russia's younger demographic against putin's regime. — The Opposite

Wasn't social media around during the Arab Spring? Russian youth have had the net for a long time.

One fact to notice is that actually the Russian Opposition to Putin aren't actually very Pro-Western, or at least aren't politically correct when viewed from the West. It shows the distrust or suspicion Russians do have towards the West. Nemtsov had been a deputy prime minister during the Yeltsin years and an outspoke critic of Putin, while Navalnyi I think hasn't held office. Yet I think both Navalny (and the late Nemtsov) are obvious signs that there truly is an opposition towards Putin and Russians don't fear so much the government. Soviet times have gone and Putin cannot rule like a Soviet leader.

(Navalnyi and his wife with the late Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered in 2015)

At least Alexei Navalny was against the banning of Trump on Twitter.

Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny on Saturday criticized Twitter for banning US President Donald Trump from the social platform following Wednesday's attack at the US Capitol in Washington, DC.

In a Twitter thread, Navalny said he thinks the ban is "an unacceptable act of censorship. - This precedent will be exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech around the world. In Russia as well. Every time when they need to silence someone, they will say: 'this is just common practice, even Trump got blocked on Twitter,'" Navalny wrote. "

Where do you think this is heading? Will (can) putin ever be removed? — The Opposite

Of course, but I'm not so sure about it. Yet quite high numbers of arrested.

Remember Belarus? The mass demonstrations there? For what I know, Lukashenka is still President.


You see, there's a pattern. Russians do have protested against Putin for a long time.
Moscow protests in 2019:


Moscow protests in 2016:


Demonstrators in Russia mourn and protest the death of Boris Nemtsov 2015:

Who remembers Boris Nemtsov?

Moscow protests after Putin's re-election 2011:


And there may be many large demonstrations against Putin that I miss here.

So what's new now? Russians will try to copy Americans?

Or that the US doesn't have Agent Trumpov in the White House to praise Vlad, but this guy below?

That would be a realistic concern were it not for the philosophically solid constitutional basis of the party... and the blood oath! — counterpunch

:grin:

Ah, the blood oath! How didn't I come to think of that? How silly of me. :up:

Who sits opposite and why? — counterpunch

Who sits in the Science Party I would ask.

The way I see it there would be leftists, centrists, conservatives, greens in that party. Likely that party would break up into factions that oppose each other, even if they all say that science is important.

And yet what we see in the UK data is the opposite: birth rate is highest where the mother either has a middle-management position or does not need to work full time, and lowest where women are unemployed or employed full-time in dead-end jobs. - It was generally the middle classes who had the least children — Kenosha Kid

The enlargement of the middle class has been the real factor as when you talk about a demographic transition, the timescale is far longer than we usually use.

What I think we're seeing is that the middle- and lower-middle class couples are reducing the number of children to one, because they can only afford to school and house one child. — Kenosha Kid

Here I think both I and you have to be careful on just what the reasons are as it's a complex issue. If this would be the (only) case, then countries with free education and housing programs would have different statistics, but I'm not so sure they have. Lifestyle changes are important too. (Isn't there a heated debate in various anti-natalism threads, for example?)

Well let's say you run a business and you need to recruit, but your recruitment pool has contracted. This means that the probability of a potential employee choosing you over a competitor will shrink unless you offer more financial incentives to join your business. The same number of recruitments, but at more cost to the company, or else fewer recruitments. — Kenosha Kid

The market mechanism ought to handle these kind of difficulties. Or then you use migrant labor as the UK did, which had political consequences in the form of a Brexit vote.

Ok, so you saying that they are talking about different things then? — ChatteringMonkey

To different audiences, I would say.

We can see this phenomenon quite well even today. What people say publicly and what they say behind closed doors is different. That doesn't mean that they are dishonest, but simply understand that the two are different. There are enough people that eagerly take anything publicly said and portray it in the worst possible light to promote their own agenda.

Thank you? :wink:

One example is the cost of education in a capitalist society. There will exist a gradation from those for whom the expense is negligible to those for whom the expense is prohibitive.

Another is cost of housing. In some European countries, and my own is contemplating this, the idea of buying your own home in your own lifetime has been dispensed with, replaced instead by the idea of passing your debt on to future generations who might pay it off in theirs. — Kenosha Kid

Fertility rates have plunged also in countries with free education and adequate housing. The most important reason is that with prosperity and women joining the workforce people don't need offspring to take care of themselves when they are older. More affluent people have had far less children than poorer people for a very long time. And that the fertility rate has dropped also in non-Christian and non-Western countries tells quite well how universal this demographic transition is. Only the poorest countries have high fertility rates.

Above all, this transition has happened irrelevantly of a country being socialist or capitalist. (Here's the Soviet/Russian Total fertility rate)

This doesn't bode well for capitalism, which requires a) consumers, and b) a worker resource that is much larger than its needs (to drive down wages and job security). — Kenosha Kid

I don't think this a problem for capitalism, the private ownership of industry, but for the monetary system and the financial system. Also it's an obstacle for a pay-as-you-go social welfare system that would need to function correctly a growing population. If the younger generations are smaller than previous ones means simply that more of that capital is inherited by them. (This naturally doesn't go equally.)

Yeah ok, but I don't think Montaigne is saying that only to clean up his image, I think he means it, or at least it seems like he does to me. — ChatteringMonkey

If he was a mediator between the Protestants and the Catholics, he surely meant it.

Yet I think that many politicians could honestly agree with Montaigne and then when engaged in politics follow the advice of Machiavelli.

Seem you didn't get my point.

No, it’s awesome because the Democrats spent a lot of time dismissing their activity and feigned outrage whenever it was suggested to bring in the national guard.

Maybe you missed that way over there in Wherever, Europe. — NOS4A2

No. I didn't.

What you think is awesome is just the clear evidence of the simple partisanship on this issue, just as in anything else. If you think that this obvious "partisanship" is awesome, that the moral outrage is only saved for the supporters or so-called supporters of the other side, I don't understand you.

I noticed it when Obama came into power and when he continued the "War on Terror" just as Bush and immediately the critics of the Bush administration fell silent and started to 'understand' the new administrations continued actions (with even enlarging the drone strike program). It's evident on both sides and this is why this cancer isn't going to go away. The simple reason is the partisanship. If you have moral outrage when one side does it and find reasons to defend exactly similar action when done by "your" side, you simply lack morals altogether.

Are you assuming that all these people think identically? — synthesis

Well, It's you who started with generalization like the progressives being hell bent of canceling conservative thinking all-together.

My point was that when one side thinks that they can cancel the other side's thinking, this likely has the opposite effect.

It will be interesting to watch the progressives in America as they seem Hell-bent on canceling conservative thinking all-together. — synthesis

Or at least some conservatives and especially Trump supporters (who I don't think actually are conservatives) themselves think so.

Of course this is nonsense. You think that leftism would go away if conservatives would be Hell-bent on cancelling leftist thinking all-together?

It's the opposite that happens.

This is awesome. — NOS4A2

Why do you think it's awesome?

Seems you're happy that riots are now the ordinary thing in Weimar US.

Oh, I forgot, you live in Canada.

Then the soldiers were virtually discarded after Pelosi’s fantasies were proven stupid. — NOS4A2

Actually not.

To have soldiers filling inside the halls of the Capitol was a deliberate photo op to show response after the security had been breached so disastrously. Notice that all the fiercest pictures of heightened security are shown after something has already happened (just like the photo of the troops at the Lincoln memorial). Once the photo-op had been done, then soldier can be moved a far normal area where soldiers are stationed in an urban environment. That they could run quickly into the building from the parking garage (or something) doesn't matter at all.

The staging of soldiers (not the two definitions of staging here) inside the Capitol is similar window dressing as putting an armed guard or tank at a busy intersection or next to a tourist attraction. The major reason is to show people that "security has been raised".

It's an excellent definition of liberalism. For my part I might replace "freedom" with "welfare", but the basic theme seems undeniable, given basic rational concerns of coherence and consistency. — Banno

Yet doesn't Shklar also note in "Liberalism of Fear" that:

No form of liberalism has any business telling the citizenry to pursue happiness or even to define that wholly elusive condition

Because replacing freedom with "welfare" seems quite a specific agenda, if telling to pursue happiness is something that Shklar rejects as unwanted interference from the powers at be.

usually Machiavelli is dismissed because of some moral evaluation, he is bad/immoral because of this and that. But that is usually not all that convincing because he is not really making normative claims, he sticks to a-moral description and prediction. She tries to make an argument on his terms, i.e that his description and the conclusions he draws from them are not really realistic... if she succeeds is another matter, but it's at least an argument that is aimed at the right place. — ChatteringMonkey

We simply shouldn't forget that even ages ago people understood to whom you are talking defines the message.

It's not just that Machiavelli isn't making normative claims, it's to whom he is talking. And so is with Montaigne, a politician of his era. I just reason that someone that says " it was more efficient for a self-made ruler to govern cruelly or leniently, and had decided that, on the whole, cruelty worked best." simply isn't talking to the greater public or making a portrayal of himself.

Montaigne published his Essay to record "some traits of my character and of my humours." Or the way the net puts it:

Montaigne's stated goal in his book is to describe himself with utter frankness and honesty ("bonne foi"). The insight into human nature provided by his essays, for which they are so widely read, is merely a by-product of his introspection. Though the implications of his essays were profound and far-reaching, he did not intend or suspect that his work would garner much attention outside of his inner circle, prefacing his essays with, "I am myself the matter of this book; you would be unreasonable to suspend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject."

It's obvious when someone is basically cleaning his image, he would say as Shklar referred "that
the sight of cruelty instantly filled him with revulsion." Montaigne lived during the brutal Wars of Religion in France and being a politician during that time, a courtier of Charles IX among other jobs, a king that allowed the cruel massacre of St Bartholomew's Day, is the era that affected Montaigne's experiences. Montaigne, it should be noted, tried to be a moderator between Catholics and Protestants. But his essay wasn't written as advice to Charles IX or his successor.

There has been in recent years a considerable literature on Machiavelli, most of
it admiring his most ‘realistic’ pages. I have tried to present the views of those
who rejected him, not because they were moved by religious or moral illusions,
but because they were more realistic, had read Plato’s remarks about dirty hands
more carefully, and were more honest.

More honest, more realistic, when there has been in "recent years a considerable literature on Machiavelli, most of it admiring his most ‘realistic’ pages". :brow:

I think that still Judith is hitting Niccolo...or others of saying something positive about him.

Interesting. I wonder if it is the media, internet and social media which have created this environment or just the politicisation of everything? When you put it like that, I probably should have just avoided this thread altogether. — Judaka

Probably.

The headline was a give away, but then sometimes (if rarely) someone can make a genuine inquiry. (I just pity the philosophy beginner who has read Ayn Rand and then comes to the forum and asks what people think of her. For some reason, the Rand rant isn't viewed as misogynist even if otherwise sex, gender and race are so dear to many these times.)

Good luck trying to avoid this disease. Because it's coming to be present everywhere. I guess the next in line will be the STEM-fields.

Why bother to argue in detail about what people say when you have the easy tool of character assassination? Not worth even talking about then.

Shklar's great knowledge of the Enlightenment contrasts Machiavelli to Montaigne and Montesquieu. — Banno

How would Machiavelli know about Enlightenment? For a philosopher who built her career in Post-WW2 American academics in one of the most famous Ivy League Universities, it's obviously a more easier task.

Basically, Machiavelli wrote The Prince for basically a ruling Mafioso.

So what kind of instructions and guidelines would Pablo Escobar or the current leaders of the Mexican drug cartels value in their reality in which they live? Would Shklar be useful to them for practical guidelines in their day-to-day work? Both Pablo and Judith lived in the same time, so it would have been theoretically possible.

Basically my point here is that we never should take a philosopher out of his time, place and context when we look at what he says. Or at least the author should remind the reader that when and where a philosopher lived and how different were those circumstances. In fact when the circumstances are noted, then truly revolutionary or groundbreaking thinking can be found. Machiavelli or Hobbes come to mind when people compare them to later philosophers, but whenever Machiavelli is referred to I come a bit critical. Niccolo is a low bar in my view to paint as the bad guy and to take an intellectual whack at him.

(And anyway, a good politician should never admit reading or even knowing anything about Machiavelli. It's such an obvious and typical way to attack and smear someone as being Machiavellian.)

Sorry. Error in writing. Thanks for the correction. Put it better.