Review: 'The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity' - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined
-
hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. Others looked at their neighbors and determined to live as differently as possible—a process that Graeber and Wengrow describe in detail with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Northern California, “puritans” who idealized thrift, simplicity, money, and work, in contrast to the ostentatious slaveholding chieftains of the Pacific Northwest. None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.
-
the authors’ most compelling instance of urban egalitarianism is undoubtedly Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that rivaled imperial Rome, its contemporary, for size and magnificence. After sliding toward authoritarianism, its people abruptly changed course, abandoning monument-building and human sacrifice for the construction of high-quality public housing. “Many citizens,” the authors write, “enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own.”
- ...8 more annotations...
Global Threat Tracker | ACLED - 0 views
National Identity Becoming More Inclusive in U.S., UK, France and Germany | Pew Researc... - 0 views
-
a new Pew Research Center survey finds that views about national identity in the U.S., France, Germany and the UK have become less restrictive and more inclusive in recent years. Compared with 2016 – when a wave of immigration to Europe and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the U.S. made immigration and diversity a major issue on both sides of the Atlantic – fewer now believe that to truly be American, French, German or British, a person must be born in the country, must be a Christian, has to embrace national customs, or has to speak the dominant language
-
Outside of France, more people say it’s a bigger problem for their country today to not see discrimination where it really does exist than for people to see discrimination where it really is not present.
-
a large majority think Muslims face discrimination.
- ...6 more annotations...
Lack of social mobility in UK risks fuelling populism, says Fiona Hill | Social mobilit... - 0 views
-
A lack of social mobility in Britain’s “left behind” communities risks fuelling populism and becoming a national security crisis, according to Fiona Hill, the coalminer’s daughter who became a top White House adviser.
-
Britain’s social divide is so wide that some communities feel like “another world” to the cities
-
class barriers today were still holding back people with regional accents
- ...3 more annotations...
Tunisie : Najla Bouden Romdhan nommée cheffe du gouvernement - 0 views
-
Née en 1958 à Kairouan, la nouvelle résidante de la Kasbah est professeure de l’enseignement supérieur à l’École nationale d’ingénieurs de Tunis, spécialisée en géosciences.
-
Elle occupe actuellement le poste de chargée de mise en œuvre des programmes de la Banque mondiale au ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur et des Sciences Recherche.
-
Najla Bouden Romdhan est la première femme à occuper le poste de cheffe du gouvernement dans l’histoire de la Tunisie.
1918 flu pandemic linked to rise of Nazi Party, paper reveals | The Independent | The I... - 0 views
-
“Influenza deaths themselves had a strong effect on the share of votes won by extremists, specifically the extremist national socialist party,”
-
“This holds even when we control for a city’s ethnic and religious makeup, regional unemployment, past right-wing voting, and other local characteristics assumed to drive the extremist vote share,”
-
While the Nazis benefited from the social dislocations of the 1918-20 pandemic, and more obviously the defeat in World War One, there was no such electoral boost for any other extremist parties.“The same patterns were not observable for the votes won by other extremist parties, such as the communists.”
- ...2 more annotations...
From Belfast to Beirut, A Tale of Elusive Peace | Newlines Magazine - 0 views
-
Power-sharing arrangements have been adopted to bridge the divisions in the two societies. The Good Friday Agreement and the Lebanese Constitution aim to provide a form of democracy that protects the minority community from the majority — or, in the case of Lebanon, any of the 18 religious groups from one another.
-
Lebanon has been without a government for almost a year since the devastating port blast in August 2020 and is facing an economic collapse. In Northern Ireland, a government was finally constituted last year after a three-year hiatus. The period covered almost the entirety of the Brexit negotiations, which will have a seismic effect on the future of the region.
-
Despite almost 25 years of a supposedly cross-community political system, Northern Ireland remains divided along Catholic nationalist and Protestant unionist lines
- ...14 more annotations...
Tunisian democracy in crisis after president ousts government | Reuters - 0 views
-
Tunisia faced its biggest crisis in a decade of democracy on Monday after President Kais Saied ousted the government and froze the activities of parliament, a move his foes labelled a coup that should be opposed on the street.
-
after a day of protests against the government and the biggest party in parliament, the moderate Islamist Ennahda, following a spike in COVID-19 cases and growing anger over chronic political dysfunction and economic malaise
-
huge crowds gathered in his support in Tunis and other cities, cheering, dancing and ululating while the military blocked off the parliament and state television station
- ...8 more annotations...
Vaccine refusal and the bargain of modernity | The Week - 0 views
-
the mistrust of expertise is not just caused by Trumpian disinformation and the occasional scientific misstep or accident. In the U.S., it is also the consequence of a society-wide failure to hold morally bankrupt elites who preside over massive expert systems like banking, investment, health care and yes, governance, accountable for their crimes and abuses
-
we must combine careful messaging with efforts to make the United States a more trustworthy society, in which the lords of our expert realms are not able to evade all responsibility for their misdeeds by throwing money at the right people
With Giorgia Meloni, Italy's Far-Right Makes a Play for Power - 0 views
-
Brothers of Italy’s rise shows it could potentially reach a broader electorate compared to the parties that in postwar Italy took the inheritance of the post-fascist tradition. Despite having enshrined strong anti-fascist principles in its postwar constitution, Italy still has a somehow ambivalent relationship with its fascist past, and several political parties and groups have been tied, more or less openly, to that tradition
-
Brothers of Italy still sports the flame symbol used by the Italian Social Movement in its logo.
-
Forza Italia is a shadow of its former self, and the League’s ambitions are severely reduced by Salvini’s disastrous record as deputy prime minister in 2018-2019. The political juncture makes Brothers of Italy appealing to conservative voters who are politically homeless.
- ...14 more annotations...
The Egregious Lie Americans Tell Themselves - 0 views
-
“I can’t believe in the richest country in the world. …” This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward.
-
The American commonwealth is shockingly impoverished.
-
American liberals and leftists tend to over-valorize the Western European model, but there is no doubt that the wealthy countries at the core of the EU have far more successfully mitigated the most extreme social inequalities and built systems for health and transportation that far outstrip anything in the U.S. Even in their poor urban suburbs or, say, the disinvested industrial north of France, you will find nothing like the squalor that we still permit—that we accept as ordinary—in the USA. Meanwhile, in our ever-declining adversary-of-convenience, the Moscow subway runs on time.
- ...5 more annotations...
« First
‹ Previous
101 - 120 of 365
Next ›
Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page