Musings of a Canadian Slacker |
|
|
my thoughts, for what they are worth, on politics, history, military affairs, computer gaming..etc. Meryl Yourish A Small Victory Ghost of a Flea The Command Post WarBlog Argghhh!!! Gaming and such Penny Arcade Excessive Overkill news Call of Duty.org Goodfellas (NCR Elite Blog Mafia) Shenanigans Trudeaupia Inkless Wells Autonomous Source Bound By Gravity All Things Canadian Minority of One Ravishing Light Obsidian Tempest Highway 401 Blog The Phantom Observer Italics Mine Contact me E-mail me 
Archives 
|
Monday, December 13, 2004
Lately I've been thinking a bit about the process of history, partly because I have to write an essay over the next month for my class at Carleton, partly because I'd been reading this. Plus, of course, there is the recent death of Pierre Berton. Anyways, a phrase came to my mind that one would not normally associate with history. It was from Training Day, a rather brutal film about police corruption in Los Angeles. It's not what you know, Jake, it's what you can prove! That is fundamentally what historians have to deal with: not what the historian knows, but what the historian can prove. On a sidenote, I've had a couple of people I know in the real world ask me what history might have to say about the Iraq War, down the road. I usually don't say much..though I usually would like to quote General John Burgoyne: History, Sir, will lie! Sunday, December 12, 2004
I'm usually a fan of Paul Wells', but on this particular instance, I have to raise a minor point of order: It doesn't really constitute 'paradiplomacy' when the regional leader is also the leader of half the federal Opposition. Edmund Stoiber {German Link} is the Minister-President of Bavaria, but he is also leader of the CSU, which is half of the conservative coalition which opposed current Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schoeder in the last election. Indeed, Stoiber was the CDU-CSU candidate for Bundeskanzler. The argument may hold true about paradiplomacy, but in this case, the proper analogue would be a foreign leader meeting Stephen Harper, which we've seen as recently as this past month, when President Bush dropped by for a visit. |