Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 151 posts

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#61

Post by darkpuma »

ben_w wrote: post #36
coldtea wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only because we easily dismiss the evil perpetuated in the colonies, push those things under the rag, and revise history to rewrite Hitler as the only evil in the world. It's understandable to some degree. After all, Churchill and colonialists just enslaved and killed inferior third world peoples (who cares about them), while Nazi Germany occupied and killed westerners...

What I find most curious is that exactly one of the groups the Nazis systematically slaughtered went from being widely regarded as an acceptable target for racist degradation to being given a country, despite ~2,000 years of being treated as literally the servants of Satan, while the other groups the Nazis targeted only gradually gained equal rights. What’s up with that? I wish we could give every disadvantaged group…

This is perhaps most apparent with the Romani, who were targeted for extermination by the Nazis and are still hated today by a great many Europeans. It's always surprising to me how many Europeans chime in whenever this point is raised with "Well actually..." defenses for why their prejudice against Romani is justified.

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#62

Post by walshemj »

Aloha wrote: post #37

Churchill was no saint, I don't think any sane person anyone would elevate him to such - but he's no war criminal - and no villain to most. Churchill was a nationalist, an unreformed victorian, an imperialist - and yes, a racist too. The Bengal famine of 1943 was 1.5m deaths, this in the midst of a war that killed 85m people. I'd also point out that in the context of India - a country which in 1943 had around 400m pe…

Well Gallipoli wasn't helped by the royal navy running in like a badly trained spaniel instead of waiting for the planned combined operations attack.

Also Kemal Ataturk was the best commander the Turks had

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#63

Post by mturmon »

crazygringo wrote: post #33
BlackJack wrote: post #23

The article says: "Thanks to Churchill’s personal decisions, more than 3 million Bengalis died of hunger in a 1943 famine. Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles, meant for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs. “The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious” than that of “sturdy Greek…

Fascinating thanks, I never knew about this, so I became curious about the causes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Debate_a... It certainly seems like an area of controversy, but is it so clear cut that it was Churchill's fault? It seems like the main takeaways are: > Academic consensus generally follows the FEE account, as formulated by A. Sen (1977) and A. Sen (1981a), in describing the Bengal f…

Your quoted excerpt intrigued me. The quoted scholar is none other than Amartya Sen, the Bengali economist and intellectual (Nobel prize in Economics, now at Harvard).

Born in 1933, Sen was 10 years old at the time of the famine and witnessed it firsthand. He later investigated the cause of the famine and published articles and finally a book on it. This research led to the notion (simplifying here) that famines have a key component that is distributional in nature - that economic or social conditions (like income inequality) can cause a relatively small food shock to turn into a famine. This is what he found in Bengal.

Sen's essays in NYRB (https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/amartya-sen/) are excellent. The Mukherjee book (source [3] in the GP comment) placing blame for the Bengal famine on Churchill received a mixed review by another author (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/12/23/did-churchill-le...).

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#64

Post by pjc50 »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #39
ummonk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California has prop 13 which results in property taxes not keeping up with assessments.

To be fair, just because the marginal house sells for more doesn't mean that providing local services is commensurately more expensive.

It does however mean that house prices for staff are more expensive, so they need to be paid correspondingly more, and staff costs are a very large fraction of the cost of services.

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#65

Post by thereisnospork »

ColanR wrote: post #54
rcpt wrote: post #22

You may not like what he said around WW2 but anyone who recently moved to the Bay Area will love his take on landlords, from 1909: > Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other pe…

What about the benefit of actual living quarters for the tenants? Who besides a landlord is going to rent 4 walls and a roof to someone who needs it? Seems similar to saying that hotel owners 'contribute nothing to the general welfare'.

Well the landlord's contribution is maintenance and matchmaking. The problem is that the fair economic value of maintenance and matchmaking, plus construction (labor, materials, design, oversight, etc.) when amortized monthly is far less than the average SF rent of 2-4 thousand dollars a month.

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#67

Post by malshe »

Aloha wrote: post #37

Churchill was no saint, I don't think any sane person anyone would elevate him to such - but he's no war criminal - and no villain to most. Churchill was a nationalist, an unreformed victorian, an imperialist - and yes, a racist too. The Bengal famine of 1943 was 1.5m deaths, this in the midst of a war that killed 85m people. I'd also point out that in the context of India - a country which in 1943 had around 400m pe…

"I'd also point out that in the context of India - a country which in 1943 had around 400m people living in it - in other words .375% of the total population."

When you want to trivialize the death of 1.5 million people, it's better to use even larger denominator like the population of the entire world.

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#68

Post by ColanR »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #59
ColanR wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the benefit of actual living quarters for the tenants? Who besides a landlord is going to rent 4 walls and a roof to someone who needs it? Seems similar to saying that hotel owners 'contribute nothing to the general welfare'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing

That's just a case where the government is the landlord.

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#69

Post by ColanR »

thereisnospork wrote: post #65
ColanR wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the benefit of actual living quarters for the tenants? Who besides a landlord is going to rent 4 walls and a roof to someone who needs it? Seems similar to saying that hotel owners 'contribute nothing to the general welfare'.

Well the landlord's contribution is maintenance and matchmaking. The problem is that the fair economic value of maintenance and matchmaking, plus construction (labor, materials, design, oversight, etc.) when amortized monthly is far less than the average SF rent of 2-4 thousand dollars a month.

Isn't the problem in SF that the wages have gone up hugely for a small subset of the population?

If that's the case, then the landlord is just following a standard negotiation tactic [1], since this is their livlihood.

[1] https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/dont-leave-mon...

Re: The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain

#70

Post by landryraccoon »

ColanR wrote: post #54
rcpt wrote: post #22

You may not like what he said around WW2 but anyone who recently moved to the Bay Area will love his take on landlords, from 1909: > Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other pe…

What about the benefit of actual living quarters for the tenants? Who besides a landlord is going to rent 4 walls and a roof to someone who needs it? Seems similar to saying that hotel owners 'contribute nothing to the general welfare'.

> What about the benefit of actual living quarters for the tenants?

Would you argue that patents and copyright should last infinitely long because the world is richer forever due to the one solitary act of the inventor?

Landlords hold a monopoly over the land they own as much as copyright holders own a monopoly on the IP they own. I think it's quite reasonable to ask if that monopoly deserves to be forever. I agree with you that someone who develops property deserves to be rewarded - but maybe not an infinite reward?

Post reply on HN