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anonymous

The Homer Doctrine - 0 views

www.good.is/...the-homer-doctrine

politics geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 02 May 13 - Cached
  • For 20 years The Simpsons has satirized the banalities and foibles of American life. From Lisa's precocious insights to Bart's antics, the show emerged as Generation X's reply to Leave it to Beaver and The Brady Brunch.
  • Homer Simpson
  • embodies Americans' naïveté, excess, and basic decency.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • As an academic who studies U.S. foreign policy, I often think about what I learned from 1980s sitcoms whenever I go to conferences or review a book.
  • In the hands of many foreign policy specialists, William McKinley might as well be Perfect Stranger's clueless and spineless Larry Appleton, and Lyndon Johnson is BJ's corrupt and scheming Sherriff Lobo.
  • they were human beings who, like Homer Simpson, possessed a full range of foibles and noble characteristics.
  • The same is true of American foreign policy writ large. The range of American international relations over time should reflect the crass, naïve, ambitious, and good motivations behind policy crafted by people.
  • Inspired by The Simpsons, the Doctrine simply explains that even regrettable and downright bad episodes in American history are not products of a scheming Montgomery Burns-like imperialist, but are usually a result of Homer-esque laziness, naïveté, and bumbling good intentions.
  • Similar to individual Simpsons' episodes, the Homer Doctrine allows for very bad endings but also some happier conclusions. Mostly, it reminds me that foreign policy is a reflection of real life, and that historical interpretations of human actions and decisions should bear more resemblance to Homer's befuddled attempts at parenting than J.R. Ewing's machinations on Dallas.
  • Sandwiched between the civil war and the 20th century's dawn, the Spanish-American War reflects the Homer Doctrine's necessity.
  • Aghast at the news from Cuba, middle-class Americans organized and sent foodstuffs, supplies, and the Red Cross's Clara Barton to the island. Even with supplies and the Red Cross, the civil war made Barton's humanitarian task all but impossible. By the mid-1890s, middle-class Americans of all political stripes called for a "humanitarian intervention."
  • McKinley eventually opted for war, but he is not the Montgomery Burns many historians imagine. Like the 20th episode of the Simpsons 16th season, "Home Away from Homer," in which Homer accidentally drives Ned Flanders from Springfield by betraying his own principles and their friendship, McKinley lost control of events once war commenced.
  • Indeed, the lure of empire, geopolitical realities, and the president's racism and blindness to Filipino and Cuban nationalism resulted in America's temporary acquisition of an overseas empire.
  • Whether it is Ned Flanders, Cuba, or Afghanistan, the "Homer Doctrine" remains instructive. American foreign policymakers, from presidents to national security staffers, are guided by a complex mixture of idealism, naiveté, selfishness, and sometimes a zeal for donuts and Duff beer.
  • anonymous on 02 May 13
     
    "When it comes to American foreign policy, The Simpsons might just provide the lens we need to understand our own history."
anonymous

The 9/11 Anniversary and What Didn't Happen - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...iversary_and_what_didnt_happen

geopolitics 9_11

shared by anonymous on 20 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Yet in spite of the failed attack in Denmark and all the 9/11 retrospection, perhaps the most interesting thing about the 9/11 anniversary in 2010, at least from an analytical perspective, was what did not happen. For the first time, the al Qaeda core leadership did not issue a flurry of slick, media-savvy statements to mark the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. And the single statement they did release was not nearly as polished or pointed as past anniversary messages. This has caused us to pause, reflect and wonder if the al Qaeda leadership is losing its place at the ideological forefront of the jihadist cause.
  • When it comes to anniversaries, al Qaeda has not always seized upon them as opportunities for attacks, but it has long seen them as tempting propaganda opportunities.
  • Another consideration is topical relevance. Al-Zawahiri’s 2010 message was actually rather bland, uninspiring and little more than a rehash of several points the group has made in the past. There were no stirring and inspirational calls to action, no new threats to the West, and no real meaningful discussion of the 9/11 anniversary beyond the message title.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • There could be a number of possible explanations for the lapse.
  • The first could be that the group is observing a period of radio silence in expectation of a large attack.
  • It is also possible that the floods that have ravaged Pakistan this summer could have displaced the al Qaeda leadership or the As-Sahab crew.
  • The best explanation for the decline in As-Sahab’s propaganda efforts may be the increase in the number of strikes by U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) inside Pakistan in areas along the Afghan border since August 2008.
  • Now, perhaps in a few days or a few weeks, As-Sahab will return to releasing a flurry of slick, high-quality messages as it has done in years past. Maybe fresh videos of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri will appear that will present new ideas, vault them back into prominence in jihadist discourse and motivate their intended audience to action. But we may be witnessing, instead, the eclipse of the al Qaeda core leadership on the ideological battlefield.
  • anonymous on 20 Sep 10
     
    "Sept. 11, 2010, the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, was a day of solemn ceremony, remembrance and reflection. It was also a time to consider the U.S. reaction to the attack nine years ago, including the national effort to destroy al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in order to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks. Of course, part of the U.S. reaction to 9/11 was the decision to invade Afghanistan, and the 9/11 anniversary also provided a time to consider how the United States is now trying to end its Afghanistan campaign so that it can concentrate on more pressing matters elsewhere. " By Scott Stewart at StratFor on September 16, 2010.
anonymous

America's "Natural Aristocracy" and the Triumph of Elite Reason - 0 views

www.3quarksdaily.com/...e-triumph-of-elite-reason.html

politics criticalthinking history

shared by anonymous on 20 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Who should rule America, the revolutionary and Constitution-writing generations of American leaders asked? Should it be an aristocratic elite bred to rule by the best families of the land? Or should it be direct representatives of the people whose knowledge of statecraft might be slight but who were reflective of the popular will?
  • America needed an aristocracy, they reasoned, but let it be a natural one drawn from the ranks of people like them, those whom in their conceit they decided were the best and the brightest. And so the concept of a “natural aristocracy” was born.
  • to the Federalists matters of government were quite different: government was a ‘complicated science, and requires abilities and knowledge, of a variety of subjects, to understand it.’ Only if the respected and worthy lent their natural intellectual abilities and their natural social influence to political authority could governmental order be maintained.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • That they worship in the temple of merit only obscures the fact that they are an elite convinced of their divinity like every other.
  • Forty years have passed since I was told to pay attention to early American history, and I finally understand why, petticoats and Pilgrims aside, it was such good advice. For it was their great concern about who should rule America that should now become ours.
  • anonymous on 20 Sep 10
     
    "Who should rule America, the revolutionary and Constitution-writing generations of American leaders asked? Should it be an aristocratic elite bred to rule by the best families of the land? Or should it be direct representatives of the people whose knowledge of statecraft might be slight but who were reflective of the popular will?" By Michael Blim at 3 Quarks Daily on September 20, 2010.
anonymous

A Geopolitical Journey, Part 1: The Traveler - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...itical_journey_part_1_traveler

geopolitics reflections

shared by anonymous on 08 Nov 10 - Cached
  • I try to keep my writing impersonal. My ideas are my own, of course, but I prefer to keep myself out of it for three reasons.
  • First, I’m far less interesting than my writings are.
  • Second, the world is also far more interesting than my writings and me, and pretending otherwise is narcissism.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Finally, while I founded STRATFOR, I am today only part of it.
  • Geopolitics should be impersonal, yet the way we encounter the world is always personal. Andre Malraux once said that we all leave our countries in very national ways. A Korean visiting Paris sees it differently than an American. The personal is the eccentric core of geopolitics.
  • I travel to sample the political fault lines in the world, and I have done this all my life. This is an odd preference, but there might be some others who share it. Traveling geopolitically is not complex, but it does take some thought.
  • It assumes that the political life of humans is shaped by the place in which they live and that the political patterns are frequently recurring because of the persistence of nations and the permanence of geography.
  • I begin my travels by always re-reading histories and novels from the region. I avoid anything produced by a think tank, preferring old poems and legends.
  • Reading literature can be the best preparation for a discussion of a county’s budget deficit.
  • It is inconceivable to me that Russia, alive and unrestrained, would not seek to return to what it once was. The frontiers of Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union had reasons for being where they were, and in my mind, Russia would inevitably seek to return to its borders. This has nothing to do with leaders or policies. There is no New World Order, only the old one replaying itself in infinitely varying detail, like a kaleidoscope.
  • Our trip now is to countries within and near the Black Sea basin, so the geopolitical “theme” of the trip (yes, my trips have geopolitical themes, which my children find odd for some reason) is the Russian re-emergence as viewed by its western and southwestern neighbors:
  • I want to see the degree to which my sense of what will happen and their sense of what will happen diverge.
  • Romania, Ukraine, Moldova and even southern Poland cannot be understood without understanding the role the Carpathians play in uniting them and dividing them.
  • I want to understand whether this time will be different and to find out whether the Poles realize that in order for things to be different the Poles themselves must be different, since the plain is not going to stop being flat.
  • Walking a mountain path in the Carpathians in November, where bandits move about today as they did centuries ago, teaches me why this region will never be completely tamed or easily captured.
  • Nothing taught me more about American power and history than taking that trip and watching the vast traffic in grain and steel move up and down the river. It taught me why Andrew Jackson fought at New Orleans and why he wanted Texas to rebel against Mexico. It explained to me why Mark Twain, in many ways, understood America more deeply than anyone.
  • Political leaders think in terms of policies and options. Geopolitics teaches us to think in terms of constraints and limits.
  • According to geopolitics, political leaders are trapped by impersonal forces and have few options in the long run. Yet, in meeting with men and women who have achieved power in their country, the temptation is to be caught up in their belief in what they are going to do. There is a danger of being caught up in their passion and confidence.
  • There is also the danger of being so dogmatic about geopolitics that ignoring their vision blinds me to possibilities that I haven’t thought of or that can’t simply be explained geopolitically.
  • The direct quote can be the most misleading thing in the world.
  • I am not looking for the pithy quote, but for the complex insight that never quite reduces itself to a sentence or two.
  • There is another part of geopolitical travel that is perhaps the most valuable: walking the streets of a city. Geopolitics affect every level of society, shaping life and culture. Walking the streets, if you know what to look for, can tell you a great deal.
  • If a Montblanc store is next to a Gucci shop, you are in the wrong place.
  • All of this should be done unobtrusively. Take along clothes that are a bit shabby. Buy a pair of shoes there, scuff them up and wear them. Don’t speak. The people can smell foreigners and will change their behavior when they sense them. Blend in and absorb. At the end of a few days you will understand the effects of the world on these people.
  • There are three things the geopolitical traveler must do.
  • He must go to places and force himself to see the geography that shapes everything. He must meet with what leaders he can find who will talk to him in all parts of society, listening and talking but reserving a part of his mind for the impersonal reality of the world. Finally, he must walk the streets. He won’t have time to meet the schoolteachers, bank tellers, government employees and auto repairmen who are the substance of a society. Nor will they be comfortable talking to a foreigner. But geopolitics teaches that you should ignore what people say and watch what they do.
  • anonymous on 08 Nov 10
     
    "Editor's note: This is the first installment in a series of special reports that Dr. Friedman will write over the next few weeks as he travels to Turkey, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Poland. In this series, he will share his observations of the geopolitical imperatives in each country and conclude with reflections on his journey as a whole and options for the United States. " By George Friedman at StratFor on November 8, 2010.
anonymous

America's Epidemic of Enlightened Racism - 0 views

www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/...epidemic-of-enlightened-racism

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • the summary dismissal of the column – without substantive rebuttals to claims that are so racist as to seem to be beneath public discourse – means that he can play the role of victim of political correctness gone amok.
  • Derbyshire claims that his ideas are backed up by “methodological inquiries in the human sciences,” and includes links to sites that provide all the negative sociological data about black people you’d ever need to justify your fear of them, including the claim that “blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.”
  • So he can cast himself as someone who had the courage to tell it like it is – with all the sociological data backing him up – only to be punished for this by the reactionary hypocrites who control the public discourse.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • Once again, he can tell himself, those quick to cry “racism” have prevented an honest conversation about race.
  • If Derbyshire were a lone crank, none of it would matter much. But he’s not.
  • they see them selves as advocates of a sort of enlightened racism that doesn’t shrink from calling a spade a spade but isn’t inherently unjust.
  • Enlightened racism is meant to escape accusations of being racist in the pejorative sense via two avenues: the first is the appeal to data I have just described. The second is a loophole to the effect that exceptions are to be made for individuals.
  • They could care less about skin color, they say; it really is the content of people’s characters that concerns them, and that content really does suffer more in blacks than whites.
  • Because they are so widespread and aim to restore the respectability of interracial contempt, these attempts at an enlightened racism deserve a rebuttal. Especially in light of the fact that those who hold such views often see themselves as the champions of reasons over sentiment, when in fact their views are deeply irrational.
  • First, a history of slavery, segregation, and (yes) racism, means that African American communities suffer from some social problems at higher rates than whites.
  • But that doesn’t change the fact that the majority of black people – statistically, and not just based on politically correct fuzzy thinking – are employed, not on welfare, have no criminal record, and so on and so forth.
  • So the kind of thinking that enlightened racists see as their way of staring a hard reality right in the face turns out to be just a silly rationalization using weak statistical differences.
  • In other words, one’s chances of being a victim of violent crime is already so low, that even accounting  for higher crime rates among African Americans, one’s chance of being a victim of violent crime by an African American remains very low.
  • The argument that Derbyshire and those like him make is that we are justified in treating an entire population as a threat – in essentially shunning them in the most degrading way – because one’s chances of being harmed by any given member of that population, while very low, is not quite as low as one’s chances of being harmed by the general population.
  • It’s an argument that starts out with sociological data and quickly collapses to reveal the obvious underlying motivation: unenlightened racism of the coarsest variety.
  • Second, there is the issue of character: because this, after all, is what really motivates these attempts at establishing an enlightened racism that gives individuals the benefit of the doubt while acknowledging the truth about general cultural differences.
  • I think it suffices to respond in the following way: people tend to mistake their discomfort with the cultural differences of a group with that group’s inferiority. (They also tend to conflate their political and economic advantages with psychological superiority).
  • If they respond with sociological data about education and birth rates and all the rest, we only have to respond that like crime rates, they’re exactly the sort of consequences one would expect from a history of oppression and even then fail to justify racist stereotypes.
  • The fact is, that where we pick a white person or black person at random, the same truths hold: they very likely have a high school diploma, and probably do not have a bachelor’s degree. They’re probably employed and not on welfare. They’ve probably never been to prison, and they almost certainly are not going to harm you. These are the broad statistical truths that simply do not vary enough between races to justify the usual stereotypes.
  • So here is the hard truth that advocates of enlightened racism need to face: their sociological data and ideas about black character, intelligence and morality are post-hoc rationalizations of their discomfort with average cultural differences between whites and blacks.
  • The fact that they have black friends and political heroes, or give individuals the benefit of the doubt as long as they are “well-socialized” and “intelligent” just means that they can suppress that discomfort if the cultural differences are themselves lessened to a tolerable degree.
  • And so they need to disabuse themselves of the idea that true, unenlightened racism is a term very narrowly defined: that it requires a personal hatred of individual black people based on their skin color despite evidence of redeeming personal qualities.
  • What they think of as redeeming personal qualities are just qualities that tend to make them less uncomfortable. But the hatred of black culture and post-hoc rationalizations of this hatred using sociological data are just what racism is.
  • This is not to say that mere discomfort with cultural difference is the same thing as racism (or xenophobia). Such discomfort is unavoidable: You’d have this sort of discomfort if you tried live in a foreign country for a while, and you’d be tempted by the same sorts of ideas about how stupid and mean people are for not doing things the way you’re used to.
  • strange customs become “stupid” because they reflect less of ourselves back to us than we’re used to.
  • That lack of reflection is felt not only as a distressing deprivation of social oxygen, but as an affront, a positive discourtesy.
  • The mature way to deal with such discomfort is to treat it as of a kind with social anxiety in general: people are strange, when you’re a stranger. Give it some time, and that changes. But it won’t change if you develop hefty rationalizations about the inferiority and dangerousness of others and treat these rationalizations as good reasons for cultural paranoia.
  • Americans seem to have difficulty engaging in the required reflective empathy, and imagining how they would feel if they knew that every time they walked into a public space a large number of a dominant racial majority looked at them with fear and loathing. They might, under such circumstances, have a bad day.
  • anonymous on 28 Mar 14
     
    From Nick Lalone in Buzz. "John Derbyshire has been fired from the National Review for an openly racist column on how white people should advise their children with respect to "blacks": for the most part, avoid them. Because on the whole, they are unintelligent, antisocial, hostile, and dangerous. Or as he puts it, avoid "concentrations of blacks" or places "swamped with blacks," and leave a place when "the number of blacks suddenly swells," and keep moving when "accosted by a strange black" in the street. The language is alarmingly dehumanizing: black people come in "swamps" and "concentrations" (and presumably also in hordes, swarms, and just plain gangs). And it's clearly meant to be a dismissal of the notion - much talked about recently in light of the Trayvon Martin shooting - that African Americans should be able to walk down the street without being shunned, much less attacked."
anonymous

The Growing Importance of the Arctic Council - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...wing-importance-arctic-council

shared by anonymous on 17 May 13 - Cached
  • The Arctic Council was established in 1996 by the eight countries that have territory above the Arctic Circle -- the United States, Canada, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
  • Its main purpose was to be an intergovernmental forum (also involving Arctic indigenous groups) that promoted cooperation primarily regarding environmental matters and research. The Arctic Council's central focus has remained on environmental issues in the Arctic, and the body has had no meaningful decision-making power.
  • However, during this year's meeting, the council's members signed a legally binding agreement coordinating response efforts to marine pollution incidents.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Satellite data collected since 1979 shows that both the thickness of the ice in the Arctic and range of sea ice have decreased substantially, especially during the summer months.
  • U.S. Geological Survey estimates from 2008 suggest that 13 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and 30 percent of undiscovered natural gas reserves are located in the Arctic Circle.
  • In 2012, 46 ships transporting a total of 1.3 million tons reportedly used the Northern Sea Route, which runs along the northern coast of Russia; this represents a considerable increase from 2011, when 34 ships transported approximately 820,000 tons. In response to the route's growing importance, Russia set up the Northern Sea Route administration in March to supervise shipping.
  • Europe has a vested interest in alternative shipping routes to Asia becoming more economically viable, since such routes would allow trade to circumvent numerous bottlenecks like the Suez Canal and increase access to Asia's growing consumer markets.
  •  China has also shown a particular interest in the Arctic, and has lobbied the Nordic countries to support Beijing's bid for observer status in the Arctic Council.
  • Sailing along the Northern Sea Route rather than through the Mediterranean Sea and Suez Canal significantly reduces the trip between Rotterdam and Shanghai -- the Northern Sea Route is around 20 percent shorter. This translates into significant savings in terms of fuel and crew costs.
  • The Arctic Council is just one of many bodies dealing with regional collaboration in the Arctic. The Barents Euro-Arctic Council, the Nordic Council and the Conference of Parliamentarians of the Arctic Region also coordinate intergovernmental or interregional collaboration in the Arctic on a number of issues.
  • Allowing six more countries to become observer states shows that the members of the Arctic Council -- even those initially skeptical of expansion, such as Canada and Russia -- see the expansion as an opportunity to give the Arctic Council greater relevance.
  • In the coming years, the debate among member states to determine whether the Arctic Council should move beyond environmental issues and become a forum to address issues related to militarization, natural resources and trade routes will become more prominent. 
  • On May 10, the U.S. government presented its new general strategy for the Arctic. Little concrete information was revealed, but a clearer plan for implementing the strategy reportedly will be worked out in the coming months.
  • anonymous on 17 May 13
     
    "The Arctic is expected to become more important in the coming decades as climate change makes natural resources and transport routes more accessible. Reflecting the growing interest in the region, the Arctic Council granted six new countries (China, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Singapore) observer status during a May 15 ministerial meeting in Kiruna, Sweden. By admitting more observers, the Arctic Council -- an organization that promotes cooperation among countries with interests in the Arctic -- will likely become more important as a forum for discussions on Arctic issues. However, this does not necessarily mean it will be able to establish itself as a central decision-making body regarding Arctic matters."
anonymous

The Inequality That Matters - 1 views

www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm

shared by anonymous on 07 Jul 13 - Cached
  • there’s more confusion about this issue than just about any other in contemporary American political discourse.
  • The reality is that most of the worries about income inequality are bogus, but some are probably better grounded and even more serious than even many of their heralds realize. If our economic churn is bound to throw off political sparks, whether alarums about plutocracy or something else, we owe it to ourselves to seek out an accurate picture of what is really going on.
  • Let’s start with the subset of worries about inequality that are significantly overblown.
  • ...107 more annotations...
  • Most analyses of income inequality neglect two major points.
  • First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well.
  • by broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.
  • Compare these circumstances to those of 1911, a century ago. Even in the wealthier countries, the average person had little formal education, worked six days a week or more, often at hard physical labor, never took vacations, and could not access most of the world’s culture.
  • when average people read about or see income inequality, they don’t feel the moral outrage that radiates from the more passionate egalitarian quarters of society. Instead, they think their lives are pretty good and that they either earned through hard work or lucked into a healthy share of the American dream.
  • In narrowly self-interested terms, that view may be irrational, but most Americans are unwilling to frame national issues in terms of rich versus poor.
  • There’s a great deal of hostility toward various government bailouts, but the idea of “undeserving” recipients is the key factor in those feelings. Resentment against Wall Street gamesters hasn’t spilled over much into resentment against the wealthy more generally.
  • their constituents bear no animus toward rich people, only toward undeservedly rich people.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jul 13
       
      Which is how the policy can be reframed to the benefit of those that understand this more cleanly.
  • in the United States, most economic resentment is not directed toward billionaires or high-roller financiers—not even corrupt ones. It’s directed at the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jul 13
       
      Provincialism!
  • The high status of the wealthy in America, or for that matter the high status of celebrities, seems to bother our intellectual class most. That class composes a very small group, however
  • All that said, income inequality does matter—for both politics and the economy.
  • To see how, we must distinguish between inequality itself and what causes it. But first let’s review the trends in more detail.
  • Income inequality has been rising in the United States, especially at the very top.
  • The data show a big difference between two quite separate issues
  • income growth at the very top
  • greater inequality throughout the distribution
  • When it comes to the first trend, the share of pre-tax income earned by the richest 1 percent of earners has increased from about 8 percent in 1974 to more than 18 percent in 2007. Furthermore, the richest 0.01 percent (the 15,000 or so richest families) had a share of less than 1 percent in 1974 but more than 6 percent of national income in 2007. As noted, those figures are from pre-tax income, so don’t look to the George W. Bush tax cuts to explain the pattern. Furthermore, these gains have been sustained and have evolved over many years, rather than coming in one or two small bursts between 1974 and today.1
  • Caution is in order, but the overall trend seems robust. Similar broad patterns are indicated by different sources, such as studies of executive compensation. Anecdotal observation suggests extreme and unprecedented returns earned by investment bankers, fired CEOs, J.K. Rowling and Tiger Woods.
  • At the same time, wage growth for the median earner has slowed since 1973.
  • But that slower wage growth has afflicted large numbers of Americans, and it is conceptually distinct from the higher relative share of top income earners. For instance, if you take the 1979–2005 period, the average incomes of the bottom fifth of households increased only 6 percent while the incomes of the middle quintile rose by 21 percent. That’s a widening of the spread of incomes, but it’s not so drastic compared to the explosive gains at the very top.
  • The broader change in income distribution, the one occurring beneath the very top earners, can be deconstructed in a manner that makes nearly all of it look harmless. For instance, there is usually greater inequality of income among both older people and the more highly educated, if only because there is more time and more room for fortunes to vary.
  • Since America is becoming both older and more highly educated, our measured income inequality will increase pretty much by demographic fiat.
  • Economist Thomas Lemieux at the University of British Columbia estimates that these demographic effects explain three-quarters of the observed rise in income inequality for men, and even more for women.2
  • Attacking the problem from a different angle, other economists are challenging whether there is much growth in inequality at all below the super-rich. For instance, real incomes are measured using a common price index, yet poorer people are more likely to shop at discount outlets like Wal-Mart, which have seen big price drops over the past twenty years.3 Once we take this behavior into account, it is unclear whether the real income gaps between the poor and middle class have been widening much at all.
  • And so we come again to the gains of the top earners, clearly the big story told by the data.
  • It’s worth noting that over this same period of time, inequality of work hours increased too. The top earners worked a lot more and most other Americans worked somewhat less. That’s another reason why high earners don’t occasion more resentment: Many people understand how hard they have to work to get there.
  • A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more.
  • If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure—whether spending time with friends and family, walking in the woods and so on. Luck aside, that person’s income will never rise much above the threshold.
  • It’s not obvious what causes the percentage of threshold earners to rise or fall, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the more single-occupancy households there are, the more threshold earners there will be, since a major incentive for earning money is to use it to take care of other people with whom one lives.
  • For a variety of reasons, single-occupancy households in the United States are at an all-time high.
  • The funny thing is this: For years, many cultural critics in and of the United States have been telling us that Americans should behave more like threshold earners. We should be less harried, more interested in nurturing friendships, and more interested in the non-commercial sphere of life. That may well be good advice.
  • Many studies suggest that above a certain level more money brings only marginal increments of happiness.
  • What isn’t so widely advertised is that those same critics have basically been telling us, without realizing it, that we should be acting in such a manner as to increase measured income inequality.
  • Why is the top 1 percent doing so well?
  • Their data do not comprise the entire U.S. population, but from partial financial records they find a very strong role for the financial sector in driving the trend toward income concentration at the top.
  • The number of Wall Street investors earning more than $100 million a year was nine times higher than the public company executives earning that amount.
  • The authors also relate that they shared their estimates with a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, one who also has a Wall Street background. He thought their estimates of earnings in the financial sector were, if anything, understated.
  • Many of the other high earners are also connected to finance.
  • After Wall Street, Kaplan and Rauh identify the legal sector as a contributor to the growing spread in earnings at the top.
  • Finance aside, there isn’t much of a story of market failure here, even if we don’t find the results aesthetically appealing.
  • When it comes to professional athletes and celebrities, there isn’t much of a mystery as to what has happened.
  • There is more purchasing power to spend on children’s books and, indeed, on culture and celebrities more generally. For high-earning celebrities, hardly anyone finds these earnings so morally objectionable as to suggest that they be politically actionable.
  • We may or may not wish to tax the wealthy, including wealthy celebrities, at higher rates, but there is no need to “cure” the structural causes of higher celebrity incomes.
  • If we are looking for objectionable problems in the top 1 percent of income earners, much of it boils down to finance and activities related to financial markets. And to be sure, the high incomes in finance should give us all pause.
  • some investors opt for a strategy of betting against big, unexpected moves in market prices.
  • Most of the time investors will do well by this strategy, since big, unexpected moves are outliers by definition. Traders will earn above-average returns in good times. In bad times they won’t suffer fully when catastrophic returns come in, as sooner or later is bound to happen, because the downside of these bets is partly socialized onto the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the taxpayers and the unemployed.
  • To understand how this strategy works, consider an example from sports betting.
  • if you bet against unlikely events, most of the time you will look smart and have the money to validate the appearance. Periodically, however, you will look very bad
  • Does that kind of pattern sound familiar? It happens in finance, too. Betting against a big decline in home prices is analogous to betting against the Wizards. Every now and then such a bet will blow up in your face, though in most years that trading activity will generate above-average profits and big bonuses for the traders and CEOs. To this mix we can add the fact that many money managers are investing other people’s money.
  • If you plan to stay with an investment bank for ten years or less, most of the people playing this investing strategy will make out very well most of the time. Everyone’s time horizon is a bit limited and you will bring in some nice years of extra returns and reap nice bonuses.
  • And let’s say the whole thing does blow up in your face? What’s the worst that can happen? Your bosses fire you, but you will still have millions in the bank and that MBA from Harvard or Wharton.
  • For the people actually investing the money, there’s barely any downside risk other than having to quit the party early.
  • Moreover, smart shareholders will acquiesce to or even encourage these gambles.
  • They gain on the upside, while the downside, past the point of bankruptcy, is borne by the firm’s creditors.
  • Perhaps more important, government bailouts minimize the damage to creditors on the downside.
  • Neither the Treasury nor the Fed allowed creditors to take any losses from the collapse of the major banks during the financial crisis. The U.S. government guaranteed these loans, either explicitly or implicitly.
  • For better or worse, we’re handing out free options on recovery, and that encourages banks to take more risk in the first place.
  • In short, there is an unholy dynamic of short-term trading and investing, backed up by bailouts and risk reduction from the government and the Federal Reserve. This is not good.
  • But more immediate and more important, it means that banks take far too many risks and go way out on a limb, often in correlated fashion. When their bets turn sour, as they did in 2007–09, everyone else pays the price.
  • And it’s not just the taxpayer cost of the bailout that stings. The financial disruption ends up throwing a lot of people out of work down the economic food chain, often for long periods.
  • In essence, we’re allowing banks to earn their way back by arbitraging interest rate spreads against the U.S. government. This is rarely called a bailout and it doesn’t count as a normal budget item, but it is a bailout nonetheless. This type of implicit bailout brings high social costs by slowing down economic recovery (the interest rate spreads require tight monetary policy) and by redistributing income from the Treasury to the major banks.
  • The more one studies financial theory, the more one realizes how many different ways there are to construct a “going short on volatility” investment position.
  • In some cases, traders may not even know they are going short on volatility. They just do what they have seen others do. Their peers who try such strategies very often have Jaguars and homes in the Hamptons. What’s not to like?
  • The upshot of all this for our purposes is that the “going short on volatility” strategy increases income inequality.
  • In normal years the financial sector is flush with cash and high earnings. In implosion years a lot of the losses are borne by other sectors of society. In other words, financial crisis begets income inequality. Despite being conceptually distinct phenomena, the political economy of income inequality is, in part, the political economy of finance.
  • If you’re wondering, right before the Great Depression of the 1930s, bank profits and finance-related earnings were also especially high.8
  • There’s a second reason why the financial sector abets income inequality: the “moving first” issue.
  • The moving-first phenomenon sums to a “winner-take-all” market. Only some relatively small number of traders, sometimes just one trader, can be first. Those who are first will make far more than those who are fourth or fifth.
  • Since gains are concentrated among the early winners, and the closeness of the runner-ups doesn’t so much matter for income distribution, asset-market trading thus encourages the ongoing concentration of wealth. Many investors make lots of mistakes and lose their money, but each year brings a new bunch of projects that can turn the early investors and traders into very wealthy individuals.
  • These two features of the problem—“going short on volatility” and “getting there first”—are related.
  • Still, every now and then Goldman will go bust, or would go bust if not for government bailouts. But the odds are in any given year that it won’t because of the advantages it and other big banks have.
  • It’s as if the major banks have tapped a hole in the social till and they are drinking from it with a straw.
  • In any given year, this practice may seem tolerable—didn’t the bank earn the money fair and square by a series of fairly normal looking trades?
  • Yet over time this situation will corrode productivity, because what the banks do bears almost no resemblance to a process of getting capital into the hands of those who can make most efficient use of it.
  • And it leads to periodic financial explosions. That, in short, is the real problem of income inequality we face today. It’s what causes the inequality at the very top of the earning pyramid that has dangerous implications for the economy as a whole.
  • A key lesson to take from all of this is that simply railing against income inequality doesn’t get us very far.
  • We have to find a way to prevent or limit major banks from repeatedly going short on volatility at social expense. No one has figured out how to do that yet.
  • It remains to be seen whether the new financial regulation bill signed into law this past summer will help.
  • The bill does have positive features.
  • First, it forces banks to put up more of their own capital, and thus shareholders will have more skin in the game, inducing them to curtail their risky investments.
  • Second, it also limits the trading activities of banks, although to a currently undetermined extent (many key decisions were kicked into the hands of future regulators).
  • Third, the new “resolution authority” allows financial regulators to impose selective losses, for instance, to punish bondholders if they wish.
  • We’ll see if these reforms constrain excess risk-taking in the long run. There are reasons for skepticism.
  • Most of all, the required capital cushions simply aren’t that high, so a big enough bet against unexpected outcomes still will yield more financial upside than downside
  • What about controlling bank risk-taking directly with tight government oversight? That is not practical. There are more ways for banks to take risks than even knowledgeable regulators can possibly control
  • It’s also not clear how well regulators can identify risky assets.
  • Some of the worst excesses of the financial crisis were grounded in mortgage-backed assets—a very traditional function of banks—not exotic derivatives trading strategies.
  • Virtually any asset position can be used to bet long odds, one way or another. It is naive to think that underpaid, undertrained regulators can keep up with financial traders, especially when the latter stand to earn billions by circumventing the intent of regulations while remaining within the letter of the law.
  • For the time being, we need to accept the possibility that the financial sector has learned how to game the American (and UK-based) system of state capitalism.
  • It’s no longer obvious that the system is stable at a macro level, and extreme income inequality at the top has been one result of that imbalance. Income inequality is a symptom, however, rather than a cause of the real problem.
  • The root cause of income inequality, viewed in the most general terms, is extreme human ingenuity, albeit of a perverse kind. That is why it is so hard to control.
  • Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy.
  • More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking.
  • Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense.
  • We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world.
  • That’s an underappreciated way to think about our modern, wealthy economy: Smart people have greater reach than ever before, and nothing really can go so wrong for them.
  • How about a world with no bailouts? Why don’t we simply eliminate the safety net for clueless or unlucky risk-takers so that losses equal gains overall? That’s a good idea in principle, but it is hard to put into practice.
  • Once a financial crisis arrives, politicians will seek to limit the damage, and that means they will bail out major financial institutions.
  • Had we not passed TARP and related policies, the United States probably would have faced unemployment rates of 25 percent of higher, as in the Great Depression. The political consequences would not have been pretty.
  • Bank bailouts may sound quite interventionist, and indeed they are, but in relative terms they probably were the most libertarian policy we had on tap. It meant big one-time expenses, but, for the most part, it kept government out of the real economy (the General Motors bailout aside).
  • So what will happen next?
  • One worry is that banks are currently undercapitalized and will seek out or create a new bubble within the next few years, again pursuing the upside risk without so much equity to lose.
  • A second perspective is that banks are sufficiently chastened for the time being but that economic turmoil in Europe and China has not yet played itself out, so perhaps we still have seen only the early stages of what will prove to be an even bigger international financial crisis.
  • A third view is perhaps most likely. We probably don’t have any solution to the hazards created by our financial sector, not because plutocrats are preventing our political system from adopting appropriate remedies, but because we don’t know what those remedies are.
  • Yet neither is another crisis immediately upon us. The underlying dynamic favors excess risk-taking, but banks at the current moment fear the scrutiny of regulators and the public and so are playing it fairly safe.
  • They are sitting on money rather than lending it out. The biggest risk today is how few parties will take risks, and, in part, the caution of banks is driving our current protracted economic slowdown. According to this view, the long run will bring another financial crisis once moods pick up and external scrutiny weakens, but that day of reckoning is still some ways off.
  • Is the overall picture a shame? Yes. Is it distorting resource distribution and productivity in the meantime? Yes. Will it again bring our economy to its knees? Probably. Maybe that’s simply the price of modern society. Income inequality will likely continue to rise and we will search in vain for the appropriate political remedies for our underlying problems.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jul 13
       
      Painfully straightforward.
  • anonymous on 07 Jul 13
     
    "Does growing wealth and income inequality in the United States presage the downfall of the American republic? Will we evolve into a new Gilded Age plutocracy, irrevocably split between the competing interests of rich and poor? Or is growing inequality a mere bump in the road, a statistical blip along the path to greater wealth for virtually every American? Or is income inequality partially desirable, reflecting the greater productivity of society's stars?"
anonymous

Why Mass Effect is the Most Important Science Fiction Universe of Our Generation - 3 views

io9.com/...ion-universe-of-our-generation

shared by anonymous on 21 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Think of the Big Issues in your favorite series. Whether it is realistic science explaining humanoid life throughout the galaxy, or dealing with FTL travel, or the ethical ambiguity of progress, or even the very purpose of the human race in our universe, Mass Effect has got it. By virtue of three simple traits – its medium, its message, and its philosophy – Mass Effect eclipses and engulfs all of science fiction's greatest universes. Let me show you how.
  • As a vessel for an epic science fiction narrative, the medium of action-adventure game affords three immediate advantages – setting, casting, and emotional involvement.
  • The first advantage, setting, involves the portrayal of alien species and alien worlds with ease.
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • Because they are filmed with human actors, series like Star Trek and Star Wars leverage mostly human and very humanoid (vulcan, bajoran, betazoid) characters. Even though we are told humans are only one race among many, we somehow always end up running the galaxy and living everywhere. All the important characters who get the most screen time are human beings.
  • Run around the Citadel and you'll be damned if you find more than two or three humans out of hundreds of citizens milling about, shopkeepers hocking their wares, and government officials eyeing you suspiciously. The entire government of the galaxy, known as the Council, is run by non-humans. The majority of characters on screen at any given time are alien.  Being able to render any race with equal ease means that as a human, you truly feel like the minority species we are.
  • Second, the ability to customize the cast of Mass Effect is only possible with a video game.
  • I can't very well rewatch all of Star Trek: The Next Generation with a female Picard of Middle Eastern descent who grew up on a space station. Mass Effect gives me that option with Shepard.
  • Third, and for the sake of narrative, perhaps the most intriguing, is the player involvement in ethical decision making.
  • The critical difference is the duration and scale of the consequences of the decisions made in Mass Effect.
  • First, decisions are not a function of gameplay but of narrative.
  • Second, decisions are persistent through each installment in the series.
  • Further, each decision is clouded by an insufficient amount of information. Players often act in the dark, evaluating and analyzing the he-said-she-said of characters whose motivations are rarely selfless or noble.
  • A prime example is that even during rousing speeches, the player is able to make on-the-fly decisions that alter the pathos of Shepard's rhetoric.
  • During an interview I had with Daniel Erickson, lead writer for Star Wars: The Old Republic, he revealed two key elements of BioWare's process that makes their games ideal for ethical exploration.
  • The first is that quality voice acting triggers complex emotional responses in players. The second is that allowing players to choose their next line in conversation based on emotion, not the precise words written down, creates a huge level of investment by the player in the main character.
  • Other media ask you to evaluate and observe the decisions of the main character. Mass Effect enables you to believe the world in which the story is told, to cast the major characters and to participate in the decisions and face the consequences of character choices. In short, one cannot help but become deeply invested in the universe and narrative Mass Effect builds.
  • Mass Effect has a simple message: human beings are delusional about their importance in the grand scheme of things.
  • Mass Effect starts with humanity in the galaxy where it should have been in the United Federation of Planets: unnoticed among the other minor species struggling to prove to the Council why they add anything of value to the civilization that is Citadel Space.
  • Star Wars and Star Trek start with the assumption that humans will be important in galactic civilization. Why? In part because the medium forced that decision, but more so because both universes assume that human beings add meaning to the universe. Mass Effect doesn't make such an assumption. Mass Effect never lets you forget that we might not add one jot of meaning or benefit to intelligent life beyond our solar system.
  • Humanity's minority and irrelevant status is underlined by the fact that on the Citadel we are not only new, but one among many second class species.
  • Mass Effect is colored by this message in three distinct ways.
  • First, the actions of many major human characters almost always have a subtle undercurrent of petulance or entitlement.
  • Mass Effect portrays our species from the perspective of the established species in the universe: we are fumbling neophytes with FTL drives.
  • Second, the lowering of human status diffuses any xenophobic urges a player might have.
  • The constant presence of other species on the Normandy, a human Alliance/Cerberus ship, is a perpetual reminder that we are out of our depth in the universe. No problem, no matter how much the player may want it to be, will be solved unilaterally by human gumption and know-how.
  • Ok, now imaging playing that character within a context whatever the player's gender, race, or orientation, that the simple humanity of the player is subjected to believable and, within the Mass Effect universe, true prejudice, insults, and scrutiny. The impact of the message on the player's interactions with other species is that, after facing what feels like unwarranted treatment, the player is forced to recognize the perspective of any species one might encounter along the way. Mass Effect makes you view the reflection of humanity in a mirror darkly.
  • Third, by undermining the player's sense of pride in being human, Mass Effect also opens doors to what would likely be highly controversial discussions were humanity "in charge."
  • In Star Trek (TOS, TNG, & DS9), those who are genetically engineered are seen as myopic elitists and supremacists, convinced of their own vaunted status, not wishing to allow their world to be "tainted" by those who are impure. In Mass Effect, Miranda and Grunt are rich and rounded characters who are genuinely superior in some aspects due to their modifications, but also reflect the increased self-awareness and contemplativeness we would hope to see in a superior being.
  • In Star Trek cyborgs (Borg) and androids (Data) are one of two things: a threat to humanity or desperate to emulate it. In Mass Effect, Shepard's resurrection leaves her largely cybernetic while EDI, the ship AI, and Legion, an autonomous mobile geth platform, are more interested in helping and understanding humans than they are attempting to become or obliterate human beings.
  • Shepard's constant discussions with, dependance upon, and similarities to her non-organic crew members is made more accessible to the player due to Mass Effect's questioning of human exceptionalism.
  • Mass Effect's message is designed to open up narrative complexity by destabilizing the player's sense of confidence in his or her own skin. By undermining the value of being human, threatening and novel lifeforms become relatable, minority aliens become allies, and human intentions become questionable.
  • In nearly great popular science fiction universe, there is a flaw. Born of systemic bias, the flaw is one that fundamentally undermines the narrative that carves its way through the characters, species, technologies and worlds that populate any given sci-fi story. Our greatest stories set in space often reference the flaw with oblique references to a long forgotten species, cataclysmic events, or godlike entities. Something is wrong with the universe, but we cannot place it.
  • The flaw in every science fiction series is that they shy from the deep horror of the existence of intelligent life in infinite spacetime – save for two: the one that brought first brought it to our attention and the one that sees this horror as the framework for reality.
  • The flaw is a simple one: the assumption that life has meaning, that intelligent life has a purpose, and that humanity contributes anything to the universe.
  • There is no recognizable divine presence, such as a god, in the universe, and humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence, and perhaps are just a small species projecting their own mental idolatries onto the vast cosmos, ever susceptible to being wiped from existence at any moment. This also suggests that the majority of undiscerning humanity are creatures with the same significance as insects in a much greater struggle between greater forces which, due to humanity's small, visionless and unimportant nature, it does not recognize.
  • Cosmicism is not merely the idea that there is no meaning in the universe. It's far worse. Instead, the argument is that there is meaning, but it is so far above and beyond human understanding that we can never attain meaningful existence.
  • Mass Effect forces the observant player to ask, "Why fight for survival in a meaningless universe?" From the answer stems a story that demands the player confront the purpose of human beings in the galaxy at every level. To play Mass Effect is to consider the value of the lives of other species, the meaning of life on a cosmic scale, and the importance of individual relationships in the face of cataclysm.
  • First, one must accept the premise that the technology to explore the universe is a trap and a structure that forces galactic civilization to follow an invariable path. Like Descartes' mischievous demon or Hume's apathetic creator, the universe is indeed the product of an intelligence, but a negligent one at best, a malicious one at worst.
  • Cosmicism underpins Mass Effect's ability to show the permutations of how the Drake Equation imagined intergalactic civilizations: warts and all.
  • Citadel Space is dominated by the same law as Dune's planetary empire: a ban on artificial intelligence.
  • The Reapers are biomechanical equivalents of the Elder Gods of H.P. Lovecraft. If the xenomorphs in Alien had a deity, it would be a Reaper. Inconceivable, immortal, uninvolved super-beings that are not divinities per se, but so far beyond our realm of existence as to drive insane those who encounter and worship them.
  • Mass Effect is the first blockbuster franchise in the postmodern era to directly confront a godless, meaningless universe indifferent to humanity. Amid the entertaining game play, the interspecies romance, and entertaining characters, cosmological questions about the value of existence influence every decision.
  • Therein the triple layered question – What value does galactic civilization bring to the universe; What value does humanity bring to galactic civilization, and What value do I bring to humanity – forces the player to recontextualize his or her participation in the experiment of existence.
  • The value of Mass Effect as a science fiction universe is that it is a critical starting point for discussion about the purpose of humanity in a materialistic universe. Without an answer to that question, there is no real reason for Ender to defeat the Buggers, or for humanity to seek out new life and new civilizations, or for us to not let non-organic life be the torch bearer for intelligence in the universe.
  • anonymous on 21 Feb 12
     
    "Mass Effect is the first blockbuster franchise in the postmodern era to directly confront a godless, meaningless universe indifferent to humanity. Amid the entertaining game play, the interspecies romance, and entertaining characters, cosmological questions about the value of existence influence every decision. The game is about justifying survival, not of mere intelligent life in the universe, the Reapers are that, but of a kind of intelligence. Therein the triple layered question - What value does galactic civilization bring to the universe; What value does humanity bring to galactic civilization, and What value do I bring to humanity - forces the player to recontextualize his or her participation in the experiment of existence."
  • Erik Hanson on 24 Feb 12
     
    Man, I would have liked to run this on GWJ.
  • anonymous on 24 Feb 12
     
    Yeah, it's very well written. I'm not in a position to, like, critique it or anything, but it's SO much fun to read. :)
anonymous

The American Public's Indifference to Foreign Affairs - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...s-indifference-foreign-affairs

shared by anonymous on 18 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • At different times, lesser events have transfixed Americans. This week, Americans seemed to be indifferent to all of them. This may be part of a cycle that shapes American interest in public affairs.
  • The United States was founded as a place where private affairs were intended to supersede public life.
  • Public service was intended less as a profession than as a burden to be assumed as a matter of duty -- hence the word "service."
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  • In many European countries, the state is at the center of many of the activities that shape private life, but that is less true in the United States.
  • The American public is often most active in public affairs when resisting the state's attempts to increase its presence, as we saw with health care reform. When such matters appear settled, Americans tend to focus their energy on their private lives, pleasures and pains. 
  • Of course, there are times when Americans are aroused not only to public affairs but also to foreign affairs. That is shaped by the degree to which these events are seen as affecting Americans' own lives.
  • There is nothing particularly American in this. People everywhere care more about things that affect them than things that don't.
  • People in European or Middle Eastern countries, where another country is just a two-hour drive away, are going to be more aware of foreign affairs. Still, they will be most concerned about the things that affect them.
  • The United States' geography, obviously, shapes American thinking about the world. The European Peninsula is crowded with peoples and nation-states. In a matter of hours you can find yourself in a country with a different language and religion and a history of recent war with your own. Americans can travel thousands of miles using their own language, experiencing the same culture and rarely a memory of war. Northwestern Europe is packed with countries. The northeastern United States is packed with states.
  • Passing from the Netherlands to Germany is a linguistic, cultural change with historical memories. Traveling from Connecticut to New York is not.
  • American interest is cyclical, heavily influenced by whether they are affected by what goes on. After 9/11, what happened in the Islamic world mattered a great deal. But even then, it went in cycles.
  • It's not that Americans are disinterested in foreign affairs, it's that their interest is finely calibrated. The issues must matter to Americans, so most issues must carry with them a potential threat.
  • The outcome must be uncertain, and the issues must have a sufficient degree of clarity so that they can be understood and dealt with. Americans may turn out to have been wrong about these things in the long run, but at the time, an issue must fit these criteria
  • Context is everything. During times of oil shortage, events in Venezuela might well have interested Americans much more than they did last week. During the Cold War, the left-wing government in Venezuela might have concerned Americans. But advancements in technology have increased oil and natural gas production in the United States. A left-wing government in Venezuela is simply another odd Latin government, and the events of last week are not worth worrying about. The context renders Venezuela a Venezuelan problem.
  • It is not that Americans are disengaged from the world, but rather that the world appears disengaged from them. At the heart of the matter is geography.
  • The American reality is that most important issues, aside from Canada and Mexico, take place across the ocean, and the ocean reasonably is seen as a barrier that renders these events part of a faraway realm.
  • During the Cold War, Americans had a different mindset. They saw themselves in an existential struggle for survival with the communists.
  • One thing that the end of the Cold War and the subsequent 20 years taught the United States was that the world mattered -- a mindset that was as habitual as it was reflective of new realities.
  • Starting in the late 1980s, the United States sent troops to Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Kuwait. The American public was engaged in all of these for a variety of reasons, some of them good, some bad. Whatever the reasoning, there was a sense of clarity that demanded that something be done.
  • After 9/11, the conviction that something be done turned into an obsession. But over the past 10 years, Americans' sense of clarity has become much more murky, and their appetite for involvement has declined accordingly.
  • More recently, the standards for justifying either type of intervention have become more exacting to policymakers. Syria was not a matter of indifference, but the situation lacked the clarity that justified intervention.
  • The United States seemed poised to intervene and then declined. The American public saw it as avoiding another overseas entanglement with an outcome that could not be shaped by American power.
  • We see the same thing in Ukraine. The United States cannot abide a single power like Russia dominating Eurasia. That would create a power that could challenge the United States. There were times that the Ukrainian crisis would have immediately piqued American interest. While some elements of the U.S. government, particularly in the State Department, did get deeply involved, the American public remained generally indifferent.
  • From a geopolitical point of view, the future of Ukraine as European or Russian helps shape the future of Eurasia. But from the standpoint of the American public, the future is far off and susceptible to interference.
  • (Americans have heard of many things that could have become a major threat -- a few did, most didn't.)
  • This is disconcerting from the standpoint of those who live outside the United States. They experienced the United States through the Cold War, the Clinton years and the post-9/11 era. The United States was deeply involved in everything. The world got used to that.
  • I spoke to a foreign diplomat who insisted the United States was weakening. I tried to explain that it is not weakness that dictates disengagement but indifference. He couldn't accept the idea that the United States has entered a period in which it really doesn't care what happens to his country.
  • The diplomat had lived in a time when everything mattered and all problems required an American position. American indifference is the most startling thing in the world for him.
  • This was the position of American isolationists of the early 20th century.
  • The isolationist period was followed, of course, by the war and the willingness of the United States to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty," in the words of John F. Kennedy. Until very recently, that sweeping statement was emblematic of U.S. foreign policy since 1941.
  • The current public indifference to foreign policy reflects that shift. But Washington's emerging foreign policy is not the systematic foreign policy of the pre-World War II period. It is an instrumental position, which can adapt to new circumstances and will likely be changed not over the course of decades but over the course of years or months.
  • The sense that private life matters more than public is intense, and that means that Americans are concerned with things that are deemed frivolous by foreigners, academics and others who make their living in public and foreign policy.
  • They care about some things, but are not prepared to care about all things.
  • Whether this sentiment is good or bad is debatable. To me, it is simply becoming a fact to be borne in mind. I would argue that it is a luxury, albeit a temporary one, conferred on Americans by geography.
  • Americans might not be interested in the world, but the world is interested in Americans. Until this luxury comes to an end, the United States has ample assistant secretaries to give the impression that it cares.
  • anonymous on 18 Feb 14
     
    "Last week, several events took place that were important to their respective regions and potentially to the world. Russian government officials suggested turning Ukraine into a federation, following weeks of renewed demonstrations in Kiev. The Venezuelan government was confronted with violent and deadly protests. Kazakhstan experienced a financial crisis that could have destabilized the economies of Central Asia. Russia and Egypt inked a significant arms deal. Right-wing groups in Europe continued their political gains. "
anonymous

Thoughts on Minority Threat and Modern Day Vigilantes - 0 views

crimegeek.com/reat-and-modern-day-vigilantes

shared by anonymous on 17 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • What do many of them initially believe about Crime in America? Two things stand out. . . One, cities are a dangerous place filled with gang bangers, thieves, and drug dealers. Two, the criminal justice system is essentially at war with a group of bad people who are hell bent on making life miserable for the rest of us.
  • We tend to fear what is either unknown or different. We all have our personal boogeymen, those things that cause the hair on the back of our necks to stand up. In the academic study of policing, we call this boogeyman the symbolic assailant (SA).
  • When I first discuss SA’s with my students they automatically assume I am talking about profiling. Not exactly. The symbolic assailant is a composite of every person who has ever given you shit, acted out of line, or been a threat to themselves or others.
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  • What separates this from profiling is that this imaginary person is based upon direct experiences the officer has had with specific citizens. When an officer looks over their shoulder to see what went bump in the night, this is what they’re looking for – a trigger that lets them know if the situation they’ve wandered into is safe or not.
  • Profiling, on the other hand, is based upon indirect experiences with broad groups (or types) of people.
  • Zimmerman is not alone in using race as a primary indicator of perceived dangerousness. A common refrain used to justify behavior like Zimmerman’s is that sadly young African-American males do commit the lions share of crime in America.
  • This argument uses Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data to back up its assertions. By that standard, it becomes very easy to then connect the dots and see somebody like Travyon Martin as a potential threat.
  • the UCR is not only voluntarily submitted by police departments but more importantly only measures crime actually reported to the police.
  • Research studies have found that anywhere from 30 to 50% of crime goes unreported. If anything, this data reflects citizen and police behavior more than actual crime incidents.
  • When our images of young African Amrican males are limited to hoodlums and athletes it should come as little surprise that Zimmerman (and the jury) thought he’d made the right call in his pursuit of Martin. This works both ways however.
  • One of my favorite courses to teach is Criminal Justice and Film. One of my favorite parts of the course is when I screen a double feature of “Dirty Harry” and “Taxi Driver.” Everybody always cheers and collectively feels a sense of relief when Eastwood takes matters into his own hands and guns down the psychotic Scorpio killer. At the end of the film, Eastwood tosses his badge away in disgust.
  • The reaction is markedly different with “Taxi Driver”. Instead of relief, the audience feels disgust and revulsion when the psychotic Travis Bickle saves a child prostitute by massacring a tenement full of pimps and thugs. The public reaction within the film treats Bickle as a hero. As an audience we know the truth, Bickle is a mentally disturbed Vet and a failed political assassin.
  • Despite the wildly different audience reactions to these two films, both characters are eerily similar. Both Harry and Bickle are struggling to overcome personal traumas ( the death of a wife and the horrors of War respectively). Both view the decaying cities of the 70s as being filled with animals. Both are increasingly disgusted with a society that seems to care more about protecting scum than the innocent. Both men are overwhelmingly alone and have trouble maintaining any semblance of a social relationship. And both have developed speeches and phrases to deliver as they mete out their own brand of vigilante justice.
  • Why do we view these characters so differently? One word: perception.
  • It becomes much easier to excuse and justify Harry’s actions simply because he’s a much more (seemingly) likable and charming person. This is why stand your ground laws are so problematic from a public policy perspective.
  • Public policy, particularly criminal justice policy, tends to be based more on conventional wisdom or common sense than empirical research.
  • Academics need to not only do a better job publicizing their research but we need to make it more accessible and relatable to non professional nerds. Only when this happens will public policy reflect science instead of somebody’s gut feeling. Let’s get to work.
  • anonymous on 17 Aug 13
     
    "I teach Criminal Justice in a rural and predominantly White state. One of the difficulties teaching my discipline in this environment is that I am mainly discussing urban problems in a place where the nearest large city is several hours and an entire state away. Many of my students only know about crime and urban America from what their family, cable news and AM radio tell them."
anonymous

Cognitive biases, not science, poses ethical dilemmas - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...science-poses-ethical-dilemmas

shared by anonymous on 21 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • “Is it okay to introduce non-human DNA in our genome?”
  • The premise is false. A substantial proportion of the human genome is derived from viruses.
  • “Should we biologically enhance non-human animals?”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Last I checked selection was a biological process. Domestication events have radically changed many organisms.
  • I recently listened to a radio interview with an activist for organic crops who expressed horror at transgenic organisms. Of course he himself is in some fashion transgenic (being a human, and loaded with viral sequence).
  • But the strange can become the familiar. There is little controversy over a process as unnatural as in vitro fertilization. We’ve gotten over it.
  • Similarly, our reactions to our obsequious and often malformed “best friend” is not horror, but affection. As far as transgenics goes, the issue is that humans have a false intuition for how we come into being, and what our essence is.
  • anonymous on 21 Oct 13
     
    "Yesterday I pointed to an io9 post, These Unresolved Ethical Questions Are About to Get Real, on my Twitter feed. It's interesting (that's why I tweeted it!), but there were some aspects which I thought were specious, and reflect common intuitions and fears in the public. Two in particular I want to highlight."
anonymous

The Way We Live Now - I Tweet, Therefore I Am - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...01wwln-lede-t.html

technology reflections

shared by anonymous on 30 Jul 10 - Cached
  • I quickly mastered the Twitterati’s unnatural self-consciousness: processing my experience instantaneously, packaging life as I lived it. I learned to be “on” all the time
  • Back in the 1950s, the sociologist Erving Goffman famously argued that all of life is performance: we act out a role in every interaction, adapting it based on the nature of the relationship or context at hand.
  • Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The expansion of our digital universe — Second Life, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter — has shifted not only how we spend our time but also how we construct identity.
  • “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are,” she explained. “But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.”
  • I enjoy those things myself. But when every thought is externalized, what becomes of insight? When we reflexively post each feeling, what becomes of reflection? When friends become fans, what happens to intimacy?
  • anonymous on 30 Jul 10
     
    "Each Twitter post seemed a tacit referendum on who I am, or at least who I believe myself to be. The grocery-store episode telegraphed that I was tuned in to the Seinfeldian absurdities of life; my concern about women's victimization, however sincere, signaled that I also have a soul. Together they suggest someone who is at once cynical and compassionate, petty yet deep. Which, in the end, I'd say, is pretty accurate." By Peggy Orenstein at NYTimes.com on July 30, 2010.
anonymous

Why US Different? - 0 views

www.overcomingbias.com/...why-us-different.html

criticalthinking america socialscience

shared by anonymous on 22 Sep 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 22 Sep 10
     
    Quoted at OB: "Perhaps it is this extreme tendency for Americans to punish free-riders, while not punishing cooperators, that contributes to Americans having the world's highest worker productivity. American society is also anomalous, even relative to other Western societies, in its low relational focus in work settings, which is reflected in practices such as the encouragement of an impersonal work style, direct (rather than indirect) communication, the clear separation of the work domain from the non-work, and discouragement of friendships at work." Post by Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias on September 22, 2010.
anonymous

Stephanie Coontz on "Mad Men" - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...stephanie-coontz-on-mad-men

generations

shared by anonymous on 11 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Let me bring this discussion back around to generations, turnings, and cyclical versus linear time.  One thing  Bill and I discovered many years ago, even before  The Fourth Turning appeared, was that most people who really do not like our perspective on history have fairly strong ideological motivations.  These tend to be people whose ideology colors their perspective on history, who see history moving from absolute error toward absolute rectitude, and who (therefore) are really bothered by a view of history that is not linear.  In this view, the idea that there might be something archetypal in a bygone generation or era of history seems bizarre, even perverse.  There can be no archetype for social dysfunction and blatant injustice.  It’s like a disease.  When it’s over, you hope and expect it never returns.
  • anonymous on 11 Oct 10
     
    "I have argued before that " Mad Men" is a fundamentally unhistorical rendition of how most Americans felt and behaved in late First Turning (the High) America. To summarize, my point was basically that most of the roles are played by Generation X (born 1961-1981) who meticulously "look" like circa-1960 business-world people-but who fail to reflect the authentic mood of the era as it was lived and experienced. Instead, the actors come across as Gen-Xers dressed in 1960 clothing and trapped in 1960 social mannerisms. Let me put aside all instance in "Mad Men" where the script is simply impossible-like characters telling each other to "get in touch with their feelings." Even aside from such obvious anachronisms, most scenes (to my eye and ear) are suffused with a sense of oppressive tension and cynicism." By Neil Howe at Lifecourse Blog on October 11, 2010.
anonymous

Tea Party Demographics: White, Republican, Older Male with Money - 0 views

www.digitaljournal.com/...289821

politics tea party

shared by anonymous on 16 Oct 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 16 Oct 10
     
    "Several polls are now out, assessing the demographics of the Tea Party Movement that largely agree the majority of its members are Republican, largely white, above the mean in age and income and voted for John McCain. So do Tea Party people reflect the average American as they represent themselves? Not usually if you are a middle-aged woman of Hispanic background, an African-American male or a union member in New England just scraping by, according to the polls." By Carol Forsloff at Digital Journal on March 30, 2010.
anonymous

Geopolitical Journey, Part 4: Moldova - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...litical_journey_part_4_moldova

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 20 Nov 10 - Cached
  • First, there is the question of what kind of country Moldova is. Second, there is the question of why anyone should care.
  • Stalin wanted to increase Ukraine’s security and increase Romania’s and the Danube basin’s vulnerability.
  • After the Soviet collapse, this territory became the Republic of Moldova. The portion east of the Dniester revolted with Russian support, and Moldova lost effective control of what was called Transdniestria.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Let me emphasize the idea that it “began to shift,” not that it is now a strategic asset. This is an unfolding process. Its importance depends on three things: the power of Russia; Russia’s power over Ukraine; a response from some Western entity.
  • Seventy years after the partition, Moldova has become more than a Romanian province, far from a Russian province and something less than a nation. This is where geopolitics and social reality begin to collide.
  • In the Eastern European countries, the Soviet era is regarded as a nightmare and the Russians are deeply distrusted and feared to this day. In Moldova, there is genuine nostalgia for the Soviet period as there is in other parts of the former Soviet Union.
  • For a large part of the Moldovan population, Russian is the preferred language.
  • three-way tension between Romanians, Moldovan Romanian speakers and Russian speakers.
  • The real struggle is between those who back the communists and those who support an independent Moldova oriented toward the European Union and NATO.
  • The real issue behind the complex politics is simply this: What is Moldova?
  • There is consensus on what it is not: It is not going to be a province of Romania. But Moldova was a province of Romania and a Soviet Socialist Republic. What is it now? What does it mean to be a Moldovan?
  • It is said to be one of the poorest countries in Europe, if not the poorest. About 12 percent of its gross domestic product is provided by remittances from emigrants working in other European countries, some illegally.
  • we have a paradox. The numbers say Moldova is extremely poor, yet there are lots of banks and well and expensively dressed young women.
  • There are three possible explanations.
  • The first is that remittances are flooding the country
  • The second is that there is a massive shadow economy that evades regulation, taxation and statistical analysis.
  • The third explanation is that the capital and a few towns are fairly affluent while the rural areas are extraordinarily poor.
  • From the Moldovan point of view, at least among the pro-Western factions, Moldova’s strategic problems begin and end with Transdniestria
  • The Russian view, driven home by history, is that benign situations can turn malignant with remarkable speed.
  • Regardless of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians are the ones concerned about things like a defensive river position while the Ukrainians see the matter with more detachment.
  • Moldova is a borderland-within-a-borderland. It is a place of foreign influences from all sides. But it is a place without a clear center.
  • If geopolitics were a theoretical game, then the logical move would be to integrate Moldova into NATO immediately and make it a member of the European Union.
  • geopolitics teaches that the foundation of national strategy is the existence of a nation.
  • Romania is still there. It is not a perfect solution, and certainly not one many Moldovans would welcome, but it is a solution, however imperfect.
  • anonymous on 20 Nov 10
     
    "This is the fourth installment in a series of special reports that Dr. Friedman will write over the next few weeks as he travels to Turkey, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Poland. In this series, he will share his observations of the geopolitical imperatives in each country and conclude with reflections on his journey as a whole and options for the United States." By George Friedman at StratFor on November 19, 2010.
anonymous

Geopolitical Journey, Part 2: Borderlands - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...cal_journey_part_2_borderlands

geopolitics europe fsu

shared by anonymous on 17 Nov 10 - Cached
  • A borderland is a region where history is constant: Everything is in flux.
  • The countries we are visiting on this trip (Turkey, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and Poland) occupy the borderland between Islam, Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity.
  • My interest in the region is to understand more clearly how the next iteration of regional geopolitics will play out. Russia is far more powerful than it was 10 years ago. The European Union is undergoing internal stress and Germany is recalculating its position. The United States is playing an uncertain and complex game. I want to understand how the semicircle of powers, from Turkey to Poland, are thinking about and positioning themselves for the next iteration of the regional game.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • I have been accused of thinking like an old Cold warrior. I don’t think that’s true. The Soviet Union has collapsed, and U.S. influence in Europe has declined. Whatever will come next will not be the Cold War. What I do not expect this to be is a region of perpetual peace. It has never been that before. It will not be that in the future. I want to understand the pattern of conflict that will occur in the future. But for that we need to begin in the past, not with the Cold War, but with World War I.
  • he Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed, the Russian empire was replaced by the Soviet Union, and the German empire was overthrown and replaced by a republic.
  • The Carpathian Mountains form a rough boundary between the Russians and the rest of Europe from Slovakia to the south.
  • The northern part of Europe is dominated by a vast plain stretching from France to Moscow.
  • Following World War I, Poland re-emerged as a sovereign nation.
  • Pilsudski is an interesting figure
  • The Russians defeated the Ukrainians and turned on Poland. Pilsudski defeated them.
  • It is interesting to speculate about history if Pilsudski had lost Warsaw. The North European Plain was wide open, and the Soviets could have moved into Germany. Undoubtedly, the French would have moved to block them, but there was a powerful Communist Party in France that had little stomach for war. It could have played out many different ways had Pilsudski not stopped the Russians. But he did.
  • His vision was something called the Intermarium — an alliance of the nations between the seas built around Poland and including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Finland and the Baltic states.
  • Pilsudski’s Intermarium makes a kind of logical if not historical sense. It is not historical because this borderland has always been the battleground for others. It has never formed together to determine its fate.
  • As always, the Intermarium is caught between Russia and Europe.
  • the entire question of the price and value of the European Union became a central issue in Germany.
  • Germany has not thought of itself as a freestanding power since 1945. It is beginning to think that way again, and that could change everything, depending on where it goes.
  • For Poland, the specter of a German-Russian entente is a historical nightmare. The last time this happened, in 1939, Poland was torn apart and lost its sovereignty for 50 years.
  • geopolitics teaches that subjective inclinations do not erase historical patterns.
  • The question in Ukraine is whether their attempt to achieve complete independence is over, to be replaced by some informal but iron bond to Russia
  • There is no more important question in Europe at the moment than the future of Ukraine.
  • The area east of the Dniester, Transdniestria, promptly seceded from Moldova
  • Moldova is the poorest country in Europe. Its primary export is wine, sent mostly to Russia. The Russians have taken to blocking the export of wine for “health reasons.” I think the health issue is geopolitical and not biological.
  • Romania is oriented toward the European Union but is one of the many countries in the union that may not really belong there.
  • as its power increases in the Balkans, Turkey will be one of the forces that countries like Romania will have to face.
  • Russia as seen through the eyes of its neighbors is the purpose of this trip, and that’s the conversation I will want to have.
  • It is a theory that argues that the post-Cold War world is ending. Russia is re-emerging in a historically recognizable form. Germany is just beginning the process of redefining itself in Europe, and the EU’s weaknesses have become manifest. Turkey has already taken the first steps toward becoming a regional power. We are at the beginning of a period in which these forces play themselves out.
  • I am going to the region with an analytic framework, a theory that I will want to test.
  • Those who argue that the Turkish government is radically Islamist are simply wrong, for two reasons.
  • First, Turkey is deeply divided
  • Second, the Islamism of the Turkish government cannot possibly be compared to that of Saudi Arabia
  • The single greatest American fear should not be China or al Qaeda. It is the amalgamation of the European Peninsula’s technology with Russia’s natural resources. That would create a power that could challenge American primacy.
  • This is not a time of clear strategic thinking in Washington. I find it irritating to go there, since they regard my views as alarmist and extreme while I find their views outmoded and simplistic.
  • The United States is a vast nation, and Washington thinks of itself as its center, but it really isn’t. The United States doesn’t have a center. The pressures of the world and the public shape its actions, albeit reluctantly.
  • I regard NATO as a bureaucracy overseeing an alliance whose mission was accomplished 20 years ago.
  • The Intermarium countries remain infatuated with the European Union and NATO, but the infatuation is declining. The year 2008 and Germany’s indifference to these countries was not pleasant, and they are learning that NATO is history.
  • Washington still thinks of Russia as the failed state of the 1990s. It simply doesn’t take it seriously. It thinks of the European Union as having gone over a speed bump from which it will recover. But mostly, Washington thinks about Afghanistan. For completely understandable reasons, Afghanistan sucks up the bandwidth of Washington, allowing the rest of the world to maneuver as it wishes.
  • Nothing, of course, could be further from Washington’s mind.
  • I am not making strategy but examining geopolitical forces. I am not planning what should be but thinking about what will likely happen.
  • anonymous on 17 Nov 10
     
    "This is the second installment in a series of special reports that Dr. Friedman will write over the next few weeks as he travels to Turkey, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Poland. In this series, he will share his observations of the geopolitical imperatives in each country and conclude with reflections on his journey as a whole and options for the United States. "
anonymous

Odds Are, It's Wrong - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...Odds_Are,_Its_Wrong

science layscience statistics methodology

shared by anonymous on 19 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 19 Nov 10
     
    "It's science's dirtiest secret: The "scientific method" of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation. Statistical tests are supposed to guide scientists in judging whether an experimental result reflects some real effect or is merely a random fluke, but the standard methods mix mutually inconsistent philosophies and offer no meaningful basis for making such decisions. Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing." By Tom Siegfried at Science News on March 27, 2010.
anonymous

Geopolitical Journey, Part 3: Romania - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...litical_journey_part_3_romania

geopolitics romania russia

shared by anonymous on 20 Nov 10 - Cached
  • In school, many of us learned the poem Invictus. It concludes with the line, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” This is a line that a Victorian gentleman might bequeath to an American businessman. It is not a line that resonates in Romania.
  • empires collide where Romania is.
  • the great powers are sorting themselves out again and therefore Romania is becoming more important to others.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • The Carpathian Mountains define Romania, but in an odd way. Rather than serving as the border of the country, protecting it, the Carpathians are an arc that divides the country into three parts.
  • To the south of the mountains is the Wallachian Plain
  • To the northwest of the Carpathians is Transylvania, more rugged, hilly country.
  • In the east of the Carpathians is the Moldavian Plain.
  • Romania is one nation divided by its geography. None of the three parts is easy to defend.
  • About the only time before the late 19th century that Romania was united was when it was completely conquered.
  • Some of us experience geopolitics as an opportunity. Most of humanity experiences it as a catastrophe.
  • To understand Romania as an ally one must bear this in mind: When the Soviets began their great counterattack at Stalingrad, they launched it over Romanian (and Hungarian) troops. Romanians maneuvered themselves into the position of fighting and dying for the Germans, and then got their revenge on the Germans by being slaughtered by the Soviets.
  • The way the Romanians got the Soviets to tolerate this was by building a regime more rigid and oppressive than even that of the Soviet Union at the time.
  • Contemporary Romania cannot be understood without understanding Nicolae Ceausescu.
  • Stalin didn’t trust communists who stayed home and resisted. He preferred communists who had fled to Moscow in the 1930s and had proved themselves loyal to Stalin by their betrayal of others.
  • Ceausescu decided to pay off the national debt. His reason seemed to flow from his foreign policy — he didn’t want Romania to be trapped by any country because of its debt — and he repaid it by selling to other countries nearly everything that was produced in Romania.
  • One of her books, The Appointment, takes place in Romania under the communists.
  • When one reads this book, as I did in preparing for this trip, one understands the way in which the Securitate tore apart a citizen’s soul — and remembers that it was not a distant relic of the 1930s but was still in place and sustaining the Romanian regime in 1989.
  • Romania emerged from the previous 70 years of ongoing catastrophe by dreaming of simple things and having no illusions that these things were easy to come by or things Romanians could control.
  • Romanians yearned to become European simply because being Romanian was too dangerous.
  • For Romania, national sovereignty has always been experienced as the process of accommodating itself to more powerful nations and empires. So after 1991, Romania searched for the “someone else” to which it could subordinate itself. More to the point, Romania imbued these entities with extraordinary redemptive powers. Once in NATO and the European Union, all would be well.
  • Germany remains an exporting country exporting into Romania and leaving precious little room for Romania to develop its economy.
  • a good part of Romania’s exports to Germany are from German-owned firms operating in Romania.
  • During the period of relative prosperity in Europe from 1991 to 2008, the structural reality of the EU was hidden under a rising tide.
  • Romania is a developing country. Europe’s regulations are drawn with a focus on the highly developed countries. The laws on employment guarantees mean that Europeans don’t hire workers, they adopt them. That means that entrepreneurship is difficult. Being an entrepreneur, as I well know, means making mistakes and recovering from them fast. Given the guarantees that every worker has in Europe, an entrepreneur cannot quickly recover from his mistakes. In Romania, the agility needed for risk-taking is not readily available under EU rules drawn up for a mature economy.
  • There are regulations and there are relationships. The latter mitigate the former. In Germany this might be called corruption. In Romania it is survival.
  • First, there is no doubt that NATO and the European Union did not work in Romania’s favor at the moment. Second, there is no question of rethinking Romania’s commitment to either.
  • NATO and the European Union keep the anti-democratic demons of the Romanian soul at bay. Being part of Europe is not simply a matter of strategic or economic benefits. It represents a transitional point in Romanian history.
  • The Western Europeans are not about to be drawn into Eastern European paranoia fed by nostalgic American strategists wanting to relive the Cold War, as they think of it.
  • I raised two strategic alternatives with Romanian officials and the media.
  • One was the Intermarium — an alliance, perhaps in NATO, perhaps not — of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
  • Turkey is Romania’s fourth-largest export target, and one of the few major trading partners that imports more from Romania than it exports.
  • In this region, the fear of the past dominates and oppresses while the confident, American-style military planning and economic restructuring I suggested is alien and frightening.
  • I had thought that Romania’s problem was that it was part of Europe, a weak power surrounded by stronger ones. They seem to believe that their solution is to be part of Europe, a weak power surrounded by stronger ones.
  • anonymous on 20 Nov 10
     
    "This is the third installment in a series of special reports that Dr. Friedman will write over the next few weeks as he travels to Turkey, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Poland. In this series, he will share his observations of the geopolitical imperatives in each country and conclude with reflections on his journey as a whole and options for the United States. " By George Friedman at StratFor on November 16, 2010.
anonymous

Geopolitical Journey, Part 5: Turkey - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...olitical_journey_part_5_turkey

geopolitics turkey

shared by anonymous on 23 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Consider the juxtaposition of ancient ritual sacrifice so widely practiced that it requires global trade to sustain it.
  • Turkey will emerge as one of the great regional powers of the next generation, or so I think. It is clear that this process is already under way when you look at Turkey’s rapid economic growth even in the face of the global financial crisis, and when you look at its growing regional influence
  • Turkey’s emergence in the current context makes that anxiety all the more intense. A newly powerful and self-confident Turkey perceived to be increasingly Islamic will create tensions, and it has.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • Turkey’s evolution is framed by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the creation of modern Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
  • For Ataturk, the first step was contraction, abandoning any attempt to hold the Ottoman regions that surrounded Turkey.
  • The second step was to break the hold of Ottoman culture on Turkey itself.
  • The slaughter of World War I did more than destroy the Ottoman Empire. It shook its confidence in itself and its traditions.
  • Ataturk did not try to suppress Muslim life in the private sphere, but Islam is a political religion that seeks to regulate both private and public life.
  • For Ataturk, the military represented the most modern element of Turkish society and could serve two functions. It could drive Turkish modernization and protect the regime against those who would try to resurrect the Ottoman state and its Islamic character.
  • Ataturk came to power in a region being swept by European culture, which was what was considered modern.
  • the commonalities of life in poor, urban, religious neighborhoods don’t begin to overcome the profound differences — and importance — of the religions they adhere to.
  • That said, Carsamba drove home to me the problem the AKP, or any party that planned to govern Turkey, would have to deal with. There are large parts of Istanbul that are European in sensibility and values, and these are significant areas. But there is also Carsamba and the villages of Anatolia, and they have a self-confidence and assertiveness that can’t be ignored today.
  • They represent an increasingly important trend in the Islamic world and the option is not suppressing them (that’s gone) but accommodating them or facing protracted conflict, a kind of conflict that in the rest of the Islamic world is not confined to rhetoric. Carsamba is an extreme case in Istanbul, but it poses the issue most starkly.
  • given how healthy the Turkish economy is, wanting to join the European Union is odd. And the fact is that the European Union is not going to let Turkey in anyway.
  • But the AKP’s continued insistence that it wants to join the European Union is a signal to the secularists: The AKP is not abandoning the Europeanist/modernist project.
  • while Carsamba can’t be ignored, the secularists hold tremendous political power in their own right and have the general support of the military.
  • The problem for Turkey is how to bridge the gap between the secularists and the religious.
  • Never forget that at crucial points the Ottomans, as Muslim as they were, allied with the Catholics against the Orthodox Christians in order to dominate the Balkans. They made many other alliances of convenience and maintained a multinational and multireligious empire built on a pyramid of compromises. The AKP is not the party of the Wahhabi, and if it tried to become that, it would fall. The AKP, like most political parties, prefers to hold office.
  • The Turks failed to understand the American and European perception that Turkey had gone over to the radical Islamists.
  • When you take the 360-degree view that the AKP likes to talk about, it is an extraordinary and contradictory mixture of states. Turkey is a country that maintains relations with Iran, Israel and Egypt, a dizzying portfolio.
  • After an interregnum of nearly a century, Turkey is new to being a regional power, and everyone in the region is trying to draw Turkey into something for their own benefit.
  • Turkey’s strategy is to be friends with everyone, its “zero conflict with neighbors” policy, as the Turks call it. It is an explicit policy not to have enemies. The problem is that it is impossible to be friends with all of these countries.
  • Trying to be friendly with everyone is not going to work, but for the Turks, it is a better strategy now than being prematurely Byzantine.
  • I see Turkish foreign policy as simple and straightforward: What they say and what they intend to do are the same.
  • I am trying to understand the consequences of the re-emergence of Russia, the extent to which this will pose a geopolitical challenge and how the international system will respond.
  • The purpose of this trip is to get some sense of how the Turks think about Russia and where Russia fits into their strategic thinking.
  • There are no moves that Turkey can make that will not alienate some great power, and it cannot decline to make these moves.
  • Nevertheless, while the Russians aren’t an immediate threat, they are an existential threat to Turkey.
  • There is endless talk in Turkey of intentions, hidden meanings and conspiracies, some woven decades ago. It is not these things that matter.
  • Islam has replaced modernism as the dynamic force of the region, and Turkey will have to accommodate itself to that.
  • But modernism and secularism are woven into Turkish society. Those two strands cannot be ignored.
  • For all its complexity, I think Turkey is predictable. It will go through massive internal instability and foreign tests it is not ready for, but in the end, it will emerge as it once was: a great regional power.
  • As a subjective matter, I like Turkey and Turks. I suspect I will like them less as they become a great power. They are at the charming point where the United States was after World War I. Over time, global and great powers lose their charm under the pressure of a demanding and dissatisfied world. They become hard and curt. The Turks are neither today. But they are facing the kind of difficulties that only come with success, and those can be the hardest to deal with.
  • The tensions between the secularists and the religious must not be minimized. The tensions within the religious camp are daunting. The tensions between urban and rural are significant. The tensions between Turkey and its allies and neighbors are substantial, even if the AKP is not eager to emphasize this
  • But I think the answer to the question I came for is this: Turkey does not want to confront Russia. Nor does it want to be dependent on Russia. These two desires can’t be reconciled without tension with Russia.
  • anonymous on 23 Nov 10
     
    "This is the fifth installment in a series of special reports that Dr. Friedman will write over the next few weeks as he travels to Turkey, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Poland. In this series, he will share his observations of the geopolitical imperatives in each country and conclude with reflections on his journey as a whole and options for the United States." By George Friedman at StratFor on November 23, 2010.
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