History Since 1984: A List of Stuff Part B

Why do I want a timeline for everything. Why am I planning, as I believe I have mentioned, to put all my particular timelines together into one Giganto-randa timeline?

Because I suspect putting it all together will reveal to me patterns I don't yet understand in how I see these things.

But for now, I just power forward. In yesterday's entry, Part A, I ended with an item from 2003: the deposition of Saddam Hussein. I pick up from there.

2004: The Orange Revolution in Ukraine topples a Russian stooge.

2005: The Provo IRA calls an end to its armed campaign in Northern Ireland.

2006: The creation of Wikileaks. An artifact of the digital era, Wikileaks was founded in Iceland by an organization called Sunshine Press, with the hope of pouring sunshine into some dark places. It would be led by Julian Assange.

2007: Subprime crisis afflicts the secondary mortgage markets, especially in the US. An unexpectedly large fraction of the mortgages originated in the preceding couple of years turned out to be VERY subprime.

2008: A global financial crisis, building up from the previous year's "subprime crisis," strikes banks beginning with Bear Stearns, which has to be sold at fire sale prices. Things go downhill from there.

2009: The creation of Bitcoin. The global financial crisis had brought to a new level a grassroots sense of distrust of traditional banking and the sovereignty-based currencies in which banks trade. Bitcoin offered something new, a currency inherently limited (in much the same way gold is), digital, decentralized, yet secure from tampering.

2010: The Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico explodes.

2011: Rebels, with U.S. assistance, overthrow Muammar Gadaffi's govt in Libya.

2012: Eurozone ministers agree on an expensive bailout of Greece.

2013: The elevation of an Argentine Cardinal to the title of Pope Francis.

2014: Scotland votes on the question of declaring independence from the United Kingdom. The "no" side wins a victory.

2015: Greece misses a payment to the IMF, as part of the deal developed in 2012 (see above). The furor this creates ends with Greece accepting a harsher set of terms than the original agreement, an "austerity" package.

2016: The Brexit vote in the UK. Brexit -- exit from the EU -- wins the vote. This causes many Scots -- who had largely voted "no," to say they wanted a do-over on their own secessionist vote two years before. They weren't aware when they voted that they would be choosing BETWEEN EU and UK. The no vote on their own secession was in the eyes of many a vote for both unions. Now? Sentiment may run in favor of joining the EU and letting the southerners exit from it by their own damned selves.

2017: A coup in Zimbabwe removes President Mugabe.

2018: US President Donald Trump this spring makes good on a 2016 campaign pledge to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

2019: Apple becomes the first $1 trillion corporation in the history of the world measured by market cap. It is not a "computer company" any longer -- whatever exactly that means nowadays -- since the invention of the iPhone it has become the world's leading telecom company, and that has been the catalyst for its breaking of the trillion dollar barrier.

2020: Julian Assange, co-founder of Wikileaks as mentioned above, is arrested by British authorities, originally with the idea of extradition to Sweden, but the U.S. soon enters the picture effectively bidding against Sweden to become the extradition destination.

2021: The EU and UK finally reach an accord on post-Brexit trade relations.

2022: The Russo-Ukraine crisis.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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