The bean cliché never comes up in the text of the column, though actual beans — soybeans — are part of the discussion, which created the temptation to use a bean cliché in the headline.
His decision to go it alone, rather than making common cause with longstanding allies, was ill advised, and his tit-for-tat trade war has caused significant pain for many Americans.... But Mr. Trump was right to argue that China has engaged in unfair competition. The question is whether he can win significant concessions....This is a surprising amount of support for Trump from the NYT. Mr. Trump was right...
The failure of previous administrations to hold China to account on [currency manipulation] has passed beyond remedy.... The looming risk... is that Mr. Trump will accept a deal that allows him to claim a superficial triumph without forcing China to make enduring changes.Trump is the one who's willing to walk away from deals, and though the NYT doesn't give recognition to that strength of his, the NYT is showing some support. How about if you, NYT, don't attack him when he does walk away from a deal? You have the power to remove some of the pressure to claim "a superficial triumph." Stop undermining him. Give him half the support you gave the "previous adminstration[]," which escapes even getting named as you mildly observe its "failure."
In particular, the United States should reject any Chinese offer to guarantee large-scale purchases of American agricultural products like soybeans or energy products like liquid natural gas — indeed, guaranteed purchases of any kind....Now, about that cliché — trading X for a hill of beans. First, the cliché is especially bad because we have the soybeans, so if X equals "the Future" and we trade, we get the Future, which would make it a great deal, and that's not what you mean to say.
But put that problem aside. And put aside the problem of using clichés generally. I disapprove, but I'm not going to harp on that. You're trying to use a cliché, but you've got the wrong bean cliché. You trade X for a handful of beans. It's from the "Jack and the Beanstalk" story. The "hill of beans" cliché is doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Use "handful" when referring to a trade and "hill" when you're just looking at something that's supposed to be big and judging it to be small.
I don't know where "hill of beans" got started. According to The Farmer's Almanac the phrase "not worth a bean" was around as far back as 1297. A bean is worth even less than a hill of beans, so it's odd that "not worth a hill of beans" developed later, "around 1863," when "'a hill of' was often inserted into phrases to emphasize their meaning." I get the sense that "beans" was a euphemism for "shit." I'm seeing (in the OED):
1874 Hotten's Slang Dict. (rev. ed.) 171 Full of beans, arrogant, purseproud. A person whom sudden prosperity has made offensive and conceited, is said to be too ‘full of beans’. Originally stable slang.Anyway, "doesn't amount to a hill of beans" was a well-worn colloquialism when Humphrey Bogart deployed it in World War II in the name of personal sacrifice for the greater good:
By the way, in "Jack and the Beanstalk," Jack is a fool who is tricked into selling his family's cow for a handful of beans he's told are magic. But in the story the beans actually do turn out to be magic, and in the end his family gets rich. So there's good reason to shy away from the "handful of beans" cliché.
Indeed, Trump often looks like the hero in this story, seeming to be a fool, and our story-addled minds may fall into believing things will work out great for him in the end. Jack was vindicated, after all.
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44 comments:
Re: Hill of beans and Casablanca.
Is this the start of a beautiful relationship between Trump and NYT?
(If so, I’m shocked, shocked!)
Magic beans remind of the Green New Deal.
Jack trades his cow for the promise of a plant — a green plant — that will serve all his ongoing needs.
Trump is King of the Hill of Beans.
"And maybe the problems of two people don't amount to a hill of bean. But... this is our hill, and these are our beans."
Maybe "hill of beans" is meant to invoke a "mess of pottage".
The problem that then New York Times has with the inevitable pain that will be involved in weaning ourselves of of the reliance on products built by dirt cheap slave labor coming out of China, like steel, is that when the pain is handed out, Democrats want to be in complete control.
That’s why Democrats worked with the Chinese to tightly focus sanctions on Trump supporting areas. But that’s not collusion because Mueller isn’t investigating it.
It is just possible that the New York Times was watching CNN and said to themselves “Is this what we’ve become?” But that would assume that the Gray Lady has a sense of shame.
Wasn't the NYT right about ethanol in gasoline?
I'm shocked, shocked, to find these words in the NYT, "But Mr. Trump was right to argue that China has engaged in unfair competition."
There is now theory that the "Jack and the beanstalk" story may be 5000 years old.
Jack and the Beanstalk was traced back to the split between Western and Eastern Indo-European languages more than 5,000 years ago and a tale called The Smith and the Devil appears to be more than 6,000 years old.
Aunty Trump beat me to it...
What the article didn't say was that China tried to influence the outcome of the 2018 mid-term election in favor of Democrats using soybeans.
It was understood on all sides that China initiated its embargo on the purchase of US soybeans just prior to the election to target and put pressure on Republican members of congress in favor of their Democrat opponents.
Soybean farmers in the American heartland largely stood by President Donald Trump in this year's midterm elections, despite the economic pain inflicted on many of them by an ongoing trade war with China. But while only a handful of farm belt House districts flipped from red to blue, Democrats narrowed the margin of victory in what have been reliably Republican strongholds, according to a CNBC analysis. And that shift to the left could give Democrats a head start as the 2020 political cycle gets underway.
6000 years? That’s about the time that Global Warming fanatics believe that the Earth was created, so that’s pretty damned old.
Be it big or be it small, Trump does it right or not at all.
China is a fascist country behaving like renegade in diverse areas such as US higher education, claiming sovereignty over international waters, hacking, cheating, and general IP theft. At the minimum, it should be recognized as an extremely aggressive fascist power adverse to US interests. Companies that put supply chains in China should be scorned by consumers . The US should strive to minimize all business with China. I'm sure the country will be fine without Chinese poisoned dog food and motorcycle batteries that don't work and plastic crap for children cluttering up yard sales. Lets be honest about what we are dealing with here.
Speaking of incredibly bad and stupid cliches and analysis, I read this piece a while back - https://theamericanscholar.org/heres-the-beef-with-chicken-from-china/
The author is trying to scare us about how evil Trump allowed China to import potentially unsafe chicken. And then you read his bloviating and realize that Trump managed to open the Chinese market to US Beef imports in exchange for chicken imports with "two important restrictions are in place. One, the Chinese can export only cooked chicken. Two, the cooked chicken cannot originate in China but must come from Chile, Canada, or oddly enough, the United States." I.e. he basically opened up the market in China for Beef for NOTHING in exchange.
I read that article and said, wow, Trump is really really good.
Let's be multi-lateral means Let's do nothing.
"Before machine planting, many vegetables were planted in groups of four to six seeds. This group of seeds was called a hill.
The purpose of planting in hills was to make it easier for the young sprouts to push up through the soil.Together, five or six can break the dry crust of the soil, where one might not be able to. Also, much of the home grown seeds did not germinate, so planting five or six together assured that a couple would grow.
In a large field of many millions, one hill didn't amount to much, therefore a hill of beans was worth just about zero."
Politics ain't beanbag.
the economic pain inflicted on many of them by ... China. ... Democrats narrowed the margin of victory in what have been reliably Republican strongholds, according to a CNBC analysis. And that shift to the left could give Democrats a head start as the 2020 political cycle gets underway.
And none dare call it collusion.
The NYTimes is the enemy of the country.
That’s why Democrats worked with the Chinese to tightly focus sanctions on Trump supporting areas. But that’s not collusion because Mueller isn’t investigating it.
Do you have any evidence for this steaming pile of bullshit? It was inevitable that if Trump foolishly imposed tariffs on the Chinese (without the cooperation of our allies), the Chinese would impose tariffs on the American products which would hurt most. And we sold a shit load of soybeans to China. There are also plenty of other sources for soybeans.
Trump, and Trump alone, is responsible for the pain inflicted on the heartland.
Your conspiracy theory is ridiculous.
Hating Trump is the NYT product now. It colors articles written by Ivy League grads who haven't studied history or journalistic ethics but who know everything. Besides hating Tump, their job is to clean up after sloppy Democrats who give away the game.
The paper's first and only female executive editor, who was fired publicly in 2014 for not being a Nice Woman, has written a book that has dropped from view (after pushback from the luminaries at Buzzfeed!) In it she said this of her successor and the paper's 2016 election coverage:
“Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” Abramson writes, adding that she believes the same is true of the Washington Post. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”
She's a lifelong New York leftist, but nobody wants to hear from her. She has become a former person.
here in iowa, we don't have many of hills of beans, but every fall we have LOTS (and LOTS!) of hills of corns (and, some of beans)... They're worth A LOT!
i believe the Actual saying is:
not worth a hill of beans in a hand basket
But experts say the changes are significant — even if they don’t quite match Trump’s bloviating. “It’s a substantially different agreement than NAFTA,” Richard Miles, director of the US-Mexico Futures Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tells me.. - Vox
LOL.
Trump, and Trump alone, is responsible for the pain inflicted on the heartland.
Who was responsible for the decimation of heaving industry in the Midwest? Basically your point of view is that we should just allow China to keep dumping steel onto the US market. Remember when Obama was lamenting his lack of a magic wand? How much economic pain has been caused by Chinese dumping of steel into the US through, for example, Canada and Mexico?
I can’t find the news article where I read that Canada was getting input from the Democrats on targeting their tariffs, for example imposing a yogurt tariff that was tightly focused on a single factory in Paul Ryan’s district, maybe they thought of going after Mitch McConnell’s state with the tariffs on bourbon themselves. But you can see by the text of the sanctions that it reeks of involvement by Democrat politicos.
Maybe Mueller should look into it. Oh wait, his mandate was only to look into Republicans!
Also if a single American can be hurt by fighting back, we should just bend over and take all of the pain caused by Chinese currency manipulation, because that economic pain is just diffused across flyover country.
Blue cities like Chicago and New York keep making money wherever the goods are produced.
Forget it, Jake; it's the NYT.
Just a matter of minor housekeeping post-actual-news.
Nobody much will notice a concession, and few will assume it is anything but simply another attack.
The machine will use anything as ammo, even good news, and even a concession.
And as I have indeed harped on, to excess most certainly, you cannot argue with this machine, because it is a machine. Abramson the ex-editor cannot, Althouse cannot, none of us can, and its pointless to argue it even in our minds, because the whole thing is the impersonal working of a machine. It is meant for a purpose which has nothing to do with any point that can be argued. And there is no-one there to be persuaded by argument. Certainly not the NYT's editor-in-chief. He too is just another bit of the machine.
It makes as much sense to argue with an artillery barrage. The only thing that can be done is to shoot back.
Your only options are to "persuade" whomever is calling the shots in re the NYTs editorial line, which is the same as for the MSMs as a whole, the owners of their owners. That or organize the funds to create an equal and opposite system.
That headline sums up perfectly what happens when you dumb down the schools for two or three generations.
Jack got his magic beans, but then went on to commit trespass, theft, and murder. Later this week CNN & MSNBC will argue he did this for Trump and Trump is trying to cover it up.
I doubt this situation has much to do with dumbing down the schools. Very few people, relatively, read the NYT. The role of the NYT within the machine is specialized.
If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the Chinese trade deal as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a trade deal by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. YOU SHALL NOT CRUCIFY MANKIND UPON A CROSS OF BEANS!
Jack and the Beanstalk was traced back to the split between Western and Eastern Indo-European languages more than 5,000 years ago and a tale called The Smith and the Devil appears to be more than 6,000 years old.
I'd heard that too, and was just thinking that the Jack and the Beanstalk story in particular (there are lots of Jack stories, for instance) possibly reflects the time (perhaps that many millennia back) when pastorialism (living by herding animals) was in tension with agriculture (living by growing plants) — and peoples (such as the ancient Israelites… — but that's another story) were settling down, foregoing large herds (or at least the habit of wandering with them), and taking up the plow.
Magnifying the effects of China’s sanctions by making a big deal out of 40 farm bankruptcies out of 2.2 million farms, not even a rounding error, seems to be a kind of collusion with China. Kind of like when Obama begged Putin to go easy on him before the election so that he could pay him back after the election, on an OPEN MIC. None dare call it collusion.
What is this “Trump, and Trump alone, is responsible for the pain inflicted on the heartland.” but an attempt to amplify the effects of China’s move in a trade dispute because you think it will help the Democrats? None dare call it collusion.
Those hills of beans come from the icky part of the country, the part we hate. Where’s our cut?
This is a surprising amount of support for Trump from the NYT. Mr. Trump was right..
Unobserved by the Never-Trumpers, he's been right a lot.
@Aunty Trump, does anyone have a figure for the average number of farms that failed during the eight years of Obama's Presidency? Just thought I'd ask. Somehow I get the impression that the number is way more than forty.
Obama takes a glancing blow the same day the Socialist 3 (AOC, Tlaib, Omar) take their own shots.
Where is Goldfinger to remind us what the third time is?
https://www.fb.org/market-intel/farm-bankruptcies-in-2018-the-truth-is-out-there
Yeah, there was a spike under Obama and it has been pretty flat since. They way they get a crisis out of these numbers is to focus on a very small number nationally, of farms in the upper midwest which came in at something like 40 higher than average out of maybe hundreds of thousands of farms in the region.
Anybody with a rudimentary grasp of statistics knows that there are variations across data sets that are probably due to random noise and that it you seize on one anomolous area because you think it proves your point, you are being dishonest.
Of course it all has to do with the strategy of amplifying the pain of Chinese and Canadian tariffs in order to benefit Democrats. But Trump paid some hookers to pee on a bed Obama had slept on, so it’s not really collusion.
The NYT claims that the "looming risk . . . is that Mr. Trump will accept a deal that allows him to claim a superficial triumph without forcing China to make enduring changes." Why is this a risk, indeed a looming one? So far as I can tell from the article, it's a looming risk because Trump is always assumed to do the wrong thing, and this would be a wrong thing to do. So it looms. I'm pretty sure that if Trump doesn't achieve a "superficial triumph", the NYT will claim his negotiations have failed.
Has SNL ever done a cold open based on an NYT article? If not, why not? I think it would be hilarious.
"....our story-addled minds..."
Please, please, please, speak just for yourself, and not for others.
In other news, what a crappy paper the NYT has turned out to be these days. Sad!
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