Sunday, April 20, 2008

Comment Elsewhere: Corporate Death Penalty

In response to Elle, phd's discussion of the use and abandonment of illegal immigrant workers I wrote:
I'm a believer in the death penalty -- for corporations. In a case like this, the operations and assets of the corporation should be seized and liquidated (except for brand names, which should be abandoned forever to the dustheap of history), and the operating officers of the company (at least three or four levels down the chain of command) barred from working in the same industry for a period of no less than five years (more, if it's warranted).

It's the only way to get their attention.

P.S. We had a lovely short seder, with chicken soup and matzoballs, old-fashioned charoseth and lots of nice energy. Tonight I make the traditional "Soup-Chicken Gumbo" with Passover Puffs. We blew through a dozen eggs yesterday, and if I do any dessert baking, we'll easily do the same today. Happy Pesach, y'all!

Friday, April 11, 2008

Book Meme

I was tagged by Michael over at American Presidents Blog. Oddly, I think this is the first time I've been tagged by this, one of the oldest tag-memes in the blogosphere. The rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Looking around, it turns out, coincidentally, that the nearest book is Nathan Miller, Star-Spangled Men: America's Ten Worst Presidents (Scribner, 1998), which I had out in honor of HNN's latest Bush-rating poll.

The passage in question is
When the regular Republicans nominated Grant for a second term in 1872, the reformers, unable to stomach him for another four years, broke ranks and chose Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, as the candidate of the Liberal Republican party. Despite Greeley's antislavery record, the Democrats also nominated him with the forlorn hope of avoiding four more years of Grant. A Greeley victory was thought unlikely, but about six weeks before the election the nation was rocked by the Crédit Mobilier scandal, which should have improved his chances.

As a bonus, I've got to attach the two sentences prior to this
"It looks as though the Republican party is going to the dogs," said former senator James W. Grimes of Iowa. "It has become corrupt and I believe that it is today the [most] corrupt and debauched political party that ever existed."


If he only knew.....

I don't tag people, but if anyone happens to read this and look at the 123rd page of the nearest book and finds something worthwhile, by all means post it!

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Quotations from Tosh #3: Richard Cobb

"I have never understood history other than in terms of human relationships; and I have attempted to judge individuals in their own terms and from what they say about themselves, in their own language. Most interesting of all, to me, is the individual unrelated to any group, the man, the girl, or the old woman alone in the city, the person who eats alone, though in company, who lives in a furnished room, who receives no mail, who has no visible occupation, and who spends much time wandering the streets. For, apart from everlasting problem of violence, the principal one that faces a historian like myself is that of loneliness, especially loneliness in the urban context." -- Richard Cobb, "Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian," A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 39.

"In history, intellectual debate can so often be a cover for over-simplification, lack of experience, insufficient culture, lack of involvement and of sympathy, and the impetus to compare and to generalize in cases where comparisons and generalizations are either irrelevant or positively misleading. Why, one wonders, when reading certain sections of Past and Present, why do historians spend so much time arguing, imposing definitions, proposing 'models', when they could be getting on with their research?" -- Richard Cobb, "Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian," A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 40.

"To speak and to write in French is to acquire a second personality and to express oneself not only in another gear, but in a manner other than in one's first. I do not say the same things in French as I do in English, because I am not the same person. For nine years I dispensed with my initial nationality almost entirely, and without any great feeling of deprivation." -- Richard Cobb, "Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian," A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 40.

"I can only speak from experience; and history is experience. One becomes a certain sort of historian because one is a certain sort of person." -- Richard Cobb, "Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian," A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 42.

"The historian should, above all, be endlessly inquisitive and prying, constantly attempting to force the privacy of others, and to cross the frontiers of class, nationality, generation, period, and sex. His principal aim is to make the dead live." -- Richard Cobb, "Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian," A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (1969), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 44.