Group items tagged

But both the leader and his American supporters were caught off-guard by the size of the demonstrations.

When the leader tried to use the force of his military to calm the situation, the United States issued ambiguous statements, indicating support for the leader’s desire to establish law and order on the one hand while at the same time insisting that the march of democracy must continue, and that the use of force could not be a solution to the country’s problems.

The country I am speaking of is not Egypt in 2011 but Iran in 1979.

What we see is that while Mubarak is gone, the military regime in which he served has dramatically increased its power. This isn’t incompatible with democratic reform. Organizing elections, political parties and candidates is not something that can be done quickly. If the military is sincere in its intentions, it will have to do these things. The problem is that if the military is insincere it will do exactly the same things. Six months is a long time, passions can subside and promises can be forgotten.

Power rests with the regime, not with the crowds. In our view, the crowds never had nearly as much power as many have claimed.

In a genuine revolution, the police and military cannot contain the crowds. In Egypt, the military chose not to confront the demonstrators, not because the military itself was split, but because it agreed with the demonstrators’ core demand: getting rid of Mubarak. And since the military was the essence of the Egyptian regime, it is odd to consider this a revolution.

With geopolitical opportunities presenting themselves on all of its borders, Turkey, having been out of the great power game for some 90-odd years, could afford some experimentation. In this geopolitical testing phase, Turkey could spread itself relatively far and wide in trying to reclaim influence, all under the Davutoglu-coined “zero problems with neighbors” strategy.

Whether Ankara is ready or not, the Middle East is accelerating Turkey’s rise.

The troubles in northern Japan, for example, are beginning to ripple through global supply chains, creating bottlenecks and shortages in dozens of industries. The way globalization increases economic efficiency is by leveraging the advantages of scale and specialization. Yet the bigger and more concentrated production becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes to disruption.

more attention must be paid to the extra risks that come with all the advantages of modern life. There may be a significant cost involved in preventing low-probability disasters, or having sufficient infrastructure to deal with them when they cannot be prevented.

The problem with this category is (1) the vagueness of its terms, and (2) lack of specific examples.

Rand's attempt to use the issue of volition versus determinism to analye literature again demonstrates the futility of viewing literature through this particular prism.

even if genetics is not determinate or even fundamentally specially insightful, it will at least sharpen the discussions, and move scholars away from arguments of rhetorical excess.

The “demic diffusion” model to some extent seems to play into this, where simple demographic population growth due to the ability of farmers to extract more calories per unit of land allowed them to “swamp” the hunter-gatherers.

the major problem with these models is that they downplay by understandable omission the higher order social complexity of institutions and identities which characterize humans.

Russia’s the largest exporter of raw commodities in the world. China’s the largest importer of raw commodities in the world. It seems that it should already be a very robust trading relationship between the two, but there’s not. Until now, most of the public and even private debate between the two, the negotiations of a natural gas deal, have focused on price.

The Chinese want to pay no more than about $100, $150 per thousand cubic meters, which they say is the domestic price of natural gas in their country, and they’re right. The Russians say they will accept nothing less than the European price, which is $350-$400 per thousand cubic meters, which is what they say they charge all their other customers, which is also right.

First, the Shanghai Corporation Organization, the SCO, issued a joint statement during its meeting in Kazakhstan regarding the Western plans for a missile defense system saying that any system that would threaten international security is opposed by the organization. Second, the Czech government also announced today that it would oppose any sort of a U.S. plan that was of minimal nature, essentially pulling Prague out of the U.S. plans for a ballistic missile defense system in central Europe.

But what is somewhat interesting about the statement is that it is the first time that Beijing has really publicly weighed in on the issue.

Newspapers and defense journals along the Pacific Rim and elsewhere are replete with foreign speculation on the future activities of a more internationally active and aggressive Chinese navy, to say nothing of more sober discussions of the constraints and limitations facing potential Chinese naval ambitions with a single carrier (for now) and no history or culture of carrier operations.

The attention on the Varyag is, in many ways, misplaced. China is historically a land power. Its biggest security challenges remain at home, across a vast territory that will continue to require large expenditures for manpower, equipment and transportation. China’s historical flirtation with a navy that travels far beyond its immediate neighborhood has been limited. Even the famous voyages of Zheng He could be called frivolous, rather than a serious attempt to dominate seas around the world or even the region.

Unlike neighboring Japan, China’s attempts to build up a navy to counter European influence proved ineffective, and the emergent Japanese navy defeated the Chinese fleet.

The ability to move more cargo along these routes will strengthen the United States’ position relative to Pakistan in their upcoming summit.

During the past year, Russia has been cooperating more with the United States on security issues in Afghanistan, particularly by expanding the use of supply routes to Afghanistan that go through Central Asia.

In 2009, as much as 90 percent of NATO supplies shipped via surface routes to Afghanistan were transported along supply lines through Pakistani territory.

You can find fault with the Tea Party’s prescription for balancing the budget—most economists do—but if they hadn’t come to Washington last year, Congress would have waited for a real bond crisis, five or 10 years from now, to create its super committee.

We will know, at the close of the next round of negotiations, which game the Tea Party has been playing: Balance the Budget or Kill the King.

The object of the game, as each leader described it, was about how best to divide the pain of closing the deficit, in the same way a family sits down to a pile of bills on the kitchen table.

It's called Theory of Knowledge, and it's offered at 2,307 schools worldwide as part of the IB Diploma Program.

For the record, I'm not convinced the IB Diploma Program is a good thing. It doesn't really solve any of the problems with public schools, it shares the frustrating focus on standardized testing and password-guessing instead of real learning, etc. But I think Theory of Knowledge is a huge opportunity to spread the ideas of rationality.

There isn't much in the way of standards for a curriculum, and in the entire last semester we covered less content than I learn from any given top-level LessWrong post.

The written evidence, such as it is, demonstrates no very great arguing skill on Rand's part. Quite the contrary, Rand, when she deigns to offer any sort of arguments at all, produces rather poor ones, afflicted with yawning gaps and blistering equivocations.

Inability of individuals to evaluate the quality of arguments made on behalf of conclusions they agree with.Intimidation tacticsSelection of debating opponentsReliance on explicit articulation of viewsAvoidance of empirical tests in favor of verbalism

For all China’s economic might, it’s worth remembering that it remains a) quite poor in per-capita terms and b) governed by an opaque, corrupt, oligarchic, anti-democratic single party apparatus that, for all the  dazzle of its economic accomplishments in recent decades, continues to immiserate large swathes of its population through internal migration controls, currency manipulation and, you know, large-scale denial of basic human rights.

I think it’s a bit too easy to let the U.S. off the hook, both in terms of the economics and the politics.

There really is a serious infrastructure problem in the United States, though, and not all of it can be explained by the fact that our infrastructure is old. Part of it can, to be sure. One of the advantages of developing late and/or having your entire continent reduced to rubble after the initial round of industrialization has run its course is that you’re allowed/forced to build new stuff rather than trying to upgrade/repurpose old stuff.

Since World War II, a new class of war has emerged that we might call humanitarian wars — wars in which the combatants claim to be fighting neither for their national interest nor to impose any ideology, but rather to prevent inordinate human suffering.

In humanitarian wars, the intervention is designed both to be neutral and to protect potential victims on one side.

That no one intervened to prevent or stop these atrocities was seen as a moral failure. According to this ideology, the international community has an obligation to prevent such slaughter.

In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning [3]" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president [4] (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.

a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. "They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs," says Taber, "and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they're hearing."

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 authorizing military intervention specifically prohibits ground-troop involvement for occupation, but by definition leaves open the possibility of ground forces being used for some undefined purpose.

First, the Libyan intervention has no clear leader.

The common element in these developments is that they are against what Israel has to come to expect of Egypt.

On the domestic front, SCAF is well aware of the popular sentiment toward the Palestinians and Israel and is therefore adjusting its behavior accordingly.

Lost in the coverage is the fact that Greece constitutes 2.5 percent of Eurozone GDP and Eurozone member states’ direct exposure to Greece is manageable.

Eurozone member states have proven highly flexible in their handling of the crisis.