conuly

Which yay! but it turned out it was the Broadway Newsies not the movie Newsies.

After watching it, I don't think I like it as much, though admittedly it has been quite a while since I've seen the original full-out. I should do that so I can compare properly.

(Also, historical note, while fictional characters who happen to be involved in based-on-a-true stories is one thing, I'm really uncomfortable with fictional characters who have real world parents/families. I didn't know until last night that I felt this way, but now I do! If we can prove a certain person didn't exist, they shouldn't be there.)

**********************

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The strange normality of life in a breakaway state

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7 Big Things That Are Smaller Than This Fatberg (Ew.)

Chicago’s Jail Is One of the County’s Biggest Mental Health Care Providers. Here’s a Look Inside.

Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?

Study: Coca-Cola Shaped China's Efforts To Fight Obesity

How Cartographers for the U.S. Military Inadvertently Created a House of Horrors in South Africa

How New York Separated Immigrant Families in the Smallpox Outbreak of 1901

To Avoid Trump's Sanctions, Countries Turn to Stone Age Bartering (Fascinating, though as a point of fact I believe that we've never identified any culture that uses widespread bartering. Bartering is what people use in societies with cash when they themselves don't have cash, not what societies without any money use.)

Two Towns Forged an Unlikely Bond. Now, ICE Is Severing the Connection

Rescued Migrants, at Sea for Weeks, Struggle to Reach a New Life

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

nodrog

I wuz gonna say, “Hey, Ancient Egypt!” - but your proviso rules that out. I don’t know, but I’d think the Last Days of the Roman Empire® would come close, when you consider the utterly debased coinage and the increasingly likely language barrier between you and your barbarian neighbor, who has no use for your lead slugs - er, coins. [“There Goes the Neighborhood!” - which, coincidentally, is the epitaph on Rodney Dangerfield’s headstone…]

From:

conuly

Thing is, as noted in the linked article (the second one, not the first one), use of barter at the end of the Roman Empire doesn't count because those people didn't traditionally use barter. They traditionally used money, they just couldn't depend on it anymore.

The question is not "did people ever use barter". Obviously they did or we'd be unlikely to have a word for it. The question is "is barter the precursor to money" and all signs point to no. People who have never had money don't barter. They use gifts, or oblique hinting, or communal property, and everything eventually gets sorted out, but nobody says "I'll trade you a pig for your ox" or "a carrot for your shirt" or the like. Adam Smith came up with that idea to explain the development of money, and lots of people believe that this is how it must have happened, but we've never found a society that functioned that way except in the edge case of "they used to have money, and now they don't". And if they used to have money then obviously they aren't a precursor to money.

From:

nodrog

But, wait a minute, how does

> Bartering is what people use in societies with cash
> when they themselves don't have cash

differ from

> They traditionally used money, they
> just couldn't depend on it anymore

? I mean, that business with the wheelbarrows of money in Wiemar Germany was still using the money. This may all be semantic hairsplitting, but I’m confused by your distinction, ’cuz I don’t see it.

From:

conuly

Bartering isn't the precursor to money. That's how it differs. Bartering is the successor to money.

There was almost certainly no bartering in the stone age, because as near as I can tell, the only people who barter are those who have a word for money.

Edited Date: 2019-01-11 09:27 am (UTC)

From:

nodrog

https://nodrog.dreamwidth.org/2382392.html

- and of course you recall the “New California” movement, which would have divided the state along a major demographic fault line. It was technically legal! - but then, so was the secession of the Southern States. A mere technicality, as it turned out…

From:

conuly

Yeah, but a slight distinction. After all, West Virginia still exists, and there's no reason they couldn't've been reabsorbed into Virginia proper after the war.

(On the subject of secession, next time upstate NY tries to secede from NYC, I say we darn well let them. It's not that I object to paying more in taxes than we get back, after all, that's how taxes work, but I really resent the fact that they pretend it's the other way around. This is why they keep wanting to secede, but sadly, cooler, wiser heads inevitably seem to prevail. Also, they're 80% of the reason the MTA is so underfunded.)

Edited Date: 2019-01-11 09:25 am (UTC)

From:

nodrog

I will quote “an anonymous correspondent” to my friend in Upstate NY and see what she says. If she’s survived lake effect. (Gawd.)

- She has a reasonably well-informed opinion on the subject, I just don’t recall what it is.

Edited Date: 2019-01-11 09:33 am (UTC)

From:

conuly

Go ahead, but the numbers don't lie. NYC really does pay more in state taxes than we get back. There's a lot of poverty upstate, I don't begrudge them the funding!

From:

nodrog

?input

Too cold currently for input. Surviving Siberian Midsummer weather.
Everything frozen, car not working. I HATE NYC with a passion, but without
the tax revenue from them, Upstate would die a faster slow death than it's
already dying. This is not due to taxation, but mismanagement of funds,
stupid people doing stupid things, and nepotism in small towns with small
minds. Wait until King Andy legalizes recreational ganja. Then things will
pick up Upstate, because we have good soil to grow the sh*t.

From:

conuly

(Though def don't tell your friend that, like most New Yorkers, I think 'upstate' begins at a location approximately two blocks north of the Bronx.)

Edited Date: 2019-01-11 09:34 am (UTC)

From:

nodrog

No, I quoted only the first. I can tell you this, she agrees with the poverty, but to her mind, the Deliverance-level yokels she sees there can do no better. Apparently all that separates them from, say, rural Georgia is the accent…

From:

delight

So I grew up in Manhattan but then my family moved to Westchester and then I moved to Albany for college ... my concept of upstate is ever-expanding!

(My mom lives about five blocks north from the Bronx.)

From:

marahmarie

Not to mention it's a different culture/way of life up there altogether, so I don't think we/they'd miss each other at all (they'd miss the funding from downstate, though, for sure).

From:

conuly

I'd let them back, honest! I just want the secession happy people to stop acting like they pay in more than we do. The very kindest thing I can say about that is it's incorrect.

From:

calimac

Changes in states' entities have to be approved both by the state and by a Congressional bill. Recent attempts to split California never got as far as the first stage, approval by the state. A previous attempt, back in 1860, actually was passed by the state and submitted to Congress but never taken up by it. (For reasons I can get into.)

The secession of the Southern States, on the other hand, was unilateral and never intended to be submitted for Congressional agreement. That puts it in an entirely different category.

West Virginia was a legal sleight of hand trick. It was approved on the state level by the rump unionist Virginia state government, which consisted mostly of people from what is now West Virginia.

From:

nodrog

Dr. Franklin: Oh, Mr. Dickinson, I'm surprised at you. You should know that rebellion is always legal in the first person, such as “our rebellion.” It is only in the third person, “their rebellion,” that it is illegal.

- 1776

[The right to secede at will was never subject to approval. It was built-in, codified in the States’ Constitutions. Taken for granted - until it was actually attempted. Oops.]

Edited Date: 2019-01-11 09:04 pm (UTC)

From:

calimac

Well, that's true of the American Revolution, which is what Dr Franklin is talking about. That was completely illegal by the laws of the existing jurisdiction (i.e. the British Empire), and was only rendered ex-post-facto legal by the peace treaty. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence is devoted to arguing that the illegal may sometimes be justified.

Similarly, the unilateral secession of the Southern States was illegal by the laws of the existing jurisdiction (the US federal union). New states could not be added without the agreement of the federal government, so it stands that old states could only be removed on the same basis.

This is also true on a practical basis. Remember that the first issue that arose between South Carolina and the federal government was the ownership of federal property within the state, viz. the forts in Charleston harbor. The state seized them without mutual agreement, and that is what generated a military response where otherwise the previous flailing inaction might have continued.

Not true that it was taken for granted until it was tried. Secession had been discussed and mooted twice before, in 1814-15 and 1832, and on both occasions the feds responded with a firm No, you can't do that.

I also question whether it was codified in the states' constitutions. Here is the South Carolina Constitution (with amendments) that was in force at the time of secession. Can you find anything in it specifying the right of secession? I've only browsed it, but I can't.

From:

nodrog

Now look, don't try to confuse an Internet discussion with facts. That never turns out well. ;-)

I learned what I know long ago, and history may have been rectified since then. Or, I might simply be (shh!) wrong. But truly, I believe I’m right on this, going back to Madison vs the Anti-Federalists. After the attempt by the British to hold them at bayonet-point, the States were determined not to allow it again - why “States’s militias” were formed, NOT under Federal control [%$#! you, Bobby Kennedy]. Washington DC would not be able to enforce by bullet, what was rejected by ballot… in theory. Again, practice turned out differently, but only by mischance, not design. The United States were just that, referred to in the plural.

From:

calimac

The states had always had militias, back to the time they were colonies. These were the principal armed forces in the early US, as the Founders were allergic to standing armies, having been the victims of the British one.

But since the militias were the initial responders to any need for federal armed forces, for that reason they were susceptible to being called up until federal control and authority. And that's specified in the US Constitution, in two places, including the famous "Commander in Chief" clause, in Article 2 Section 2.

True enough, as you say, that "United States" was originally plural. Up until the Civil War, which changed it. But that meant only that most people considered themselves primarily citizens of their state, and only secondarily of the US. It was on those grounds that people like RE Lee felt obliged to go with their states under secession, even though they didn't think secession was a good idea, and even though they'd personally sworn oaths of loyalty to the federal government. And it was the fact that they'd taken this position that caused people to realize that considering the states as plural was not, on the whole, a good idea.

But despite all of this, the idea that the federal government was supreme over the states was a live and widely held notion, by such figures as James Madison and Andrew Jackson. True enough that some disagreed, but it was a hot dispute, not a generally accepted position.

As for the Anti-Federalists, they divided into 1) those mollified by the Bill of Rights; 2) those who grudgingly accepted the Constitution anyway; 3) those who were defeated at the polls and wound up ranting in the wilderness.