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U.S. Midterm Elections, Obama and Iran - 0 views

  • Obama now has two options in terms of domestic strategy.
  • The first is to continue to press his agenda, knowing that it will be voted down.
  • The second option is to abandon his agenda, cooperate with the Republicans and re-establish his image as a centrist.
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  • Obama also has a third option, which is to shift his focus from domestic policy to foreign policy.
  • There are two problems with Obama becoming a foreign policy president.
  • The first is that the country is focused on the economy and on domestic issues.
  • The second problem is that his presidency and campaign have been based on the general principle of accommodation rather than confrontation in foreign affairs
  • There are many actions that would satisfy Obama’s accomodationist inclinations, but those would not serve well in portraying him as decisive in foreign policy.
  • This leaves the obvious choice: Iran.
  • So far, Obama’s policy toward Iran has been to incrementally increase sanctions by building a weak coalition and allow the sanctions to create shifts in Iran’s domestic political situation. The idea is to weaken President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and strengthen his enemies, who are assumed to be more moderate and less inclined to pursue nuclear weapons. Obama has avoided overt military action against Iran, so a confrontation with Iran would require a deliberate shift in the U.S. stance, which would require a justification.
  • The most obvious justification would be to claim that Iran is about to construct a nuclear device. Whether or not this is true would be immaterial.
  • First, no one would be in a position to challenge the claim, and, second, Obama’s credibility in making the assertion would be much greater than George W. Bush’s, given that Obama does not have the 2003 weapons-of-mass-destruction debacle to deal with and has the advantage of not having made such a claim before.
  • Defining what it means to almost possess nuclear weapons is nearly a metaphysical discussion. It requires merely a shift in definitions and assumptions. This is cynical scenario, but it can be aligned with reasonable concerns.
  • As STRATFOR has argued in the past, destroying Iran’s nuclear capability does not involve a one-day raid, nor is Iran without the ability to retaliate. Its nuclear facilities are in a number of places and Iran has had years to harden those facilities. Destroying the facilities might take an extended air campaign and might even require the use of special operations units to verify battle damage and complete the mission. In addition, military action against Iran’s naval forces would be needed to protect the oil routes through the Persian Gulf from small boat swarms and mines, anti-ship missile launchers would have to be attacked and Iranian air force and air defenses taken out. This would not solve the problem of the rest of Iran’s conventional forces, which would represent a threat to the region, so these forces would have to be attacked and reduced as well.
  • An attack on Iran would not be an invasion, nor would it be a short war. Like Yugoslavia in 1999, it would be an extended air war lasting an unknown number of months.
  • It would be a war based on American strengths in aerial warfare and technology, not on American weaknesses in counterinsurgency.
  • It would strengthen the Iranian regime (as aerial bombing usually does) by rallying the Iranian public to its side against the aggression. If the campaign were successful, the Iranian regime would be stronger politically, at least for a while, but eviscerated militarily.
  • A campaign against Iran would have its risks.
  • Iran could launch a terrorist campaign and attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz
  • We have argued that a negotiation with Iran in the order of President Richard Nixon’s reversal on China would be a lower-risk solution to the nuclear problem than the military option. But for Obama, this is politically difficult to do. Had Bush done this, he would have had the ideological credentials to deal with Iran, as Nixon had the ideological credentials to deal with China. But Obama does not. Negotiating an agreement with Iran in the wake of an electoral rout would open the floodgates to condemnation of Obama as an appeaser. In losing power, he loses the option for negotiation unless he is content to be a one-term president.
  • I am arguing the following.
  • First, Obama will be paralyzed on domestic policies by this election. He can craft a re-election campaign blaming the Republicans for gridlock.
  • The other option for Obama is to look for triumph in foreign policy where he has a weak hand.
  • I am not claiming that Obama will decide to do this based on politics, although no U.S. president has ever engaged in foreign involvement without political considerations, nor should he. I am saying that, at this moment in history, given the domestic gridlock that appears to be in the offing, a shift to a foreign policy emphasis makes sense, Obama needs to be seen as an effective commander in chief and Iran is the logical target.
  • This is not a prediction. Obama does not share his thoughts with me. It is merely speculation on the options Obama will have after the midterm elections, not what he will choose to do.
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    "We are a week away from the 2010 U.S. midterm elections. The outcome is already locked in. Whether the Republicans take the House or the Senate is close to immaterial. It is almost certain that the dynamics of American domestic politics will change. The Democrats will lose their ability to impose cloture in the Senate and thereby shut off debate. Whether they lose the House or not, the Democrats will lose the ability to pass legislation at the will of the House Democratic leadership. The large majority held by the Democrats will be gone, and party discipline will not be strong enough (it never is) to prevent some defections. " By George Friedman at StratFor on October 26, 2010.
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Think You Know How To Study? Think Again : NPR - 0 views

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    "Find a quiet location. Keep a routine. Focus on one subject at a time. It all seems like sound advice for students who need to hit the books, but recent studies indicate the conventional wisdom is all wrong. New York Times reporter Benedict Carey has written about the research. He tells NPR's Neal Conan that though a lot of ideas about learning make intuitive sense, they're actually way off." At Talk of the Nation at NPR on October 25, 2010.
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Bacteria 'R' Us - 0 views

  • Regardless of the scale at which we explore the biosphere — whether we delve into the global ocean or the internal seas of individual organisms — bacteria are now known to be larger players than humans ever imagined.
  • Strictly by the numbers, the vast majority — estimated by many scientists at 90 percent — of the cells in what you think of as your body are actually bacteria, not human cells.
  • The number of bacterial species in the human gut is estimated to be about 40,000, according to Daniel Frank and Norman Pace, writing in the January 2008 Current Opinion in Gastroenterology. The total number of individual bacterial cells in the gut is projected to be on the order of 100 trillion, according to Xing Yang and colleagues at the Shanghai Center for Bioinformation Technology, reporting in the June 2009 issue of PLoS One, a peer-reviewed online science journal. Xing calculated a ballpark figure for the number of unique bacterial genes in a human gut at about 9 million.
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  • These facts by themselves may trigger existential shock: People are partly made of pond scum.
  • For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on the fundamental difference between two major types of life-forms: those that have a cell wall but few or no internal subdivisions, and those that possess cells containing a nucleus, mitochondria, chloroplasts and other smaller substructures, or organelles.
  • The former life-forms — often termed prokaryotes — include bacteria and the most ancient of Earth’s life-forms, the archaea.
  • The tree-of-life notion remains a reasonable fit for the eukaryotes, but emerging knowledge about bacteria suggests that the micro-biosphere is much more like a web, with information of all kinds, including genes, traveling in all directions simultaneously.
  • In principle, every bacterium can exchange genes with every other bacterium on the planet. A side effect of this reality: The notion of separate bacterial species is somewhat shaky, although the term is still in use for lack of a better alternative.
  • Even before quorum sensing was discovered in V. fischeri, scientists had noted many examples of coordinated action, such as “swarming,” in which a colony of bacteria moves as a unit across a surface, and the development of “fruiting bodies,” in which bacteria glom together to form inert spores as a means of surviving severe environmental conditions.
  • Bacteria can live solitary lives, of course, but they prefer to aggregate in biofilms, also known as “slime cities.” Biofilms usually form on a surface, whether it’s the inner lining of the intestines or inside water pipes or on your teeth. In these close-knit colonies, bacteria coordinate group production of a slimy translucent coating and fibers called “curli” and “pili” that attach the colony to something else. Biofilms can harbor multiple types of bacteria as well as fungi and protists (microscopic eukaryotes). A complex vascular system for transporting nutrients and chemical signals through a biofilm may also develop. As Tim Friend described in his book The Third Domain, explorers diving to the wreck of the Titanic found these features in “rusticles” — draped colonies of microbes — feeding on the iron in the Titanic‘s hull and skeleton, more than 2 miles under the surface.
  • The import of this distribution of microorganisms is unclear, but its existence reinforces the notion that humans should start thinking of themselves as ecosystems, rather than discrete individuals.
  • A microbe’s effects on the human body can depend on conditions. And if you approach the human body as an ecosystem, some researchers are finding, it may be possible to tune that system and prevent many diseases — from acute infections to chronic debilitating conditions — and even to foster mental health, through bacteria.
  • in practice, the medical notion of friendly microbes has yet to extend much past the idea that eating yogurt is good for you. For most doctors and medical microbiologists, microbes are enemies in a permanent war. Medicine certainly has good reason to view microbes as dangerous, since the germ theory of disease and the subsequent development of antibiotics are two of medical science’s greatest accomplishments.
  • When threatened, bacteria become defensive, often producing toxins that make the host even sicker. They also tend to speed up their acquisition of and purging of genes when under external selection pressure, of which antibiotics are an obvious and powerful example.
  • Gut bacteria play a role in obesity, which affects about a third of American adults.
  • Research in animals supports the idea that gut bacteria play a role in weight regulation.
  • bacteria produce some of the same types of neurotransmitters that regulate the function of the human brain.
  • it’s been known for a while that sick people get depressed and anxious. This seems so obvious as to be a no-brainer, but research suggests that some of the fear and fatigue associated with infections stems from immune responses affecting the brain.
  • As it turns out, however, very few bacteria can be grown in the relatively austere conditions of laboratories. In fact, only about 0.1 percent of all bacteria are currently culturable. Many bacteria don’t do well in monoculture, preferring to live in mixed communities of microorganisms. Those living in extreme temperatures and pressures require very specialized equipment to grow in a typical lab.
  • In fact, they wrote, the genes that enable these processes today “may have been distributed across a common global gene pool, before cellular differentiation and vertical genetic transmission evolved as we know it today.”
  • In other words, bacteria are supreme code monkeys that probably perfected the packages of genes and the regulation necessary to produce just about every form of life, trading genetic information among themselves long before there was anything resembling a eukaryotic cell, let alone the masters of the universe that humans believe humans to be.
  • Giovannoni stops short of claiming that bacteria are actually thinking. But the litany of bacterial talents does nibble at conventional assumptions about thinking: Bacteria can distinguish “self” from “other,” and between their relatives and strangers; they can sense how big a space they’re in; they can move as a unit; they can produce a wide variety of signaling compounds, including at least one human neurotransmitter; they can also engage in numerous mutually beneficial relationships with their host’s cells. Even more impressive, some bacteria, such as Myxococcus xanthus, practice predation in packs, swarming as a group over prey microbes such as E. coli and dissolving their cell walls.
  • These phenomena, Herbert Levine’s group argues, reveal a capacity for language long considered unique to humans.
  • That bacteria-centric argument is, of course, a hazy, metaphysical Gaian fantasy worthy of Avatar. In a more down-to-earth assessment, it is clear that bacteria are not what the general run of humans thought they were, and neither are humans.
  • The grand story of human exceptionalism — the idea that humans are separate from and superior to everything else in the biosphere — has taken a terminal blow from the new knowledge about bacteria. Whether humanity decides to sanctify them in some way or merely admire them and learn what they’re really doing, there’s no going back.
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    "Emerging research shows that bacteria have powers to engineer the environment, to communicate and to affect human well-being. They may even think." By Valerie Brown at Miller-McCune on October 18, 2010.
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The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • Guggenheim presents the popularized version of an account of American public education that is promoted by some of the nation’s most powerful figures and institutions.
  • The message of these films has become alarmingly familiar: American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.
  • The annual Gallup poll about education shows that Americans are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the quality of the nation’s schools, but 77 percent of public school parents award their own child’s public school a grade of A or B, the highest level of approval since the question was first asked in 1985.
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  • The message of the film is clear. Public schools are bad, privately managed charter schools are good.
  • Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic.
  • The proportion of charters that get amazing results is far smaller than 17 percent.Why did Davis Guggenheim pay no attention to the charter schools that are run by incompetent leaders or corporations mainly concerned to make money? Why propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools are the answer to our educational woes, when the filmmaker knows that there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones? Why not give an honest accounting?
  • The propagandistic nature of Waiting for “Superman” is revealed by Guggenheim’s complete indifference to the wide variation among charter schools. There are excellent charter schools, just as there are excellent public schools.
  • Guggenheim seems to believe that teachers alone can overcome the effects of student poverty, even though there are countless studies that demonstrate the link between income and test scores.
  • The movie asserts a central thesis in today’s school reform discussion: the idea that teachers are the most important factor determining student achievement.
  • But this proposition is false. Hanushek has released studies showing that teacher quality accounts for about 7.5–10 percent of student test score gains. Several other high-quality analyses echo this finding, and while estimates vary a bit, there is a relative consensus: teachers statistically account for around 10–20 percent of achievement outcomes. Teachers are the most important factor within schools.
  • But the same body of research shows that nonschool factors matter even more than teachers.
  • The film never acknowledges that charter schools were created mainly at the instigation of Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997.
  • He sold the idea as a way to open schools that would collaborate with public schools and help motivate disengaged students. In 1993, Shanker turned against the charter school idea when he realized that for-profit organizations saw it as a business opportunity and were advancing an agenda of school privatization.
  • Under NCLB, low-performing schools may be closed, while high-performing ones may get bonuses. Some charter schools “counsel out” or expel students just before state testing day. Some have high attrition rates, especially among lower-performing students.
  • Perhaps the greatest distortion in this film is its misrepresentation of data about student academic performance. The film claims that 70 percent of eighth-grade students cannot read at grade level. This is flatly wrong.
  • NAEP doesn’t measure performance in terms of grade-level achievement. The highest level of performance, “advanced,” is equivalent to an A+, representing the highest possible academic performance. The next level, “proficient,” is equivalent to an A or a very strong B. The next level is “basic,” which probably translates into a C grade. The film assumes that any student below proficient is “below grade level.” But it would be far more fitting to worry about students who are “below basic,” who are 25 percent of the national sample, not 70 percent.
  • Guggenheim didn’t bother to take a close look at the heroes of his documentary. Geoffrey Canada is justly celebrated for the creation of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which not only runs two charter schools but surrounds children and their families with a broad array of social and medical services.
  • On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in the other. It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn’t note it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees.
  • Contrary to Guggenheim’s mythology, even the best-funded charters, with the finest services, can’t completely negate the effects of poverty.
  • While blasting the teachers’ unions, he points to Finland as a nation whose educational system the US should emulate, not bothering to explain that it has a completely unionized teaching force.
  • His documentary showers praise on testing and accountability, yet he does not acknowledge that Finland seldom tests its students.
  • Guggenheim simply ignores the realities of the Finnish system.
  • Becoming a charter is no guarantee that a school serving a tough neighborhood will produce educational miracles.
  • It raises important questions, but all of the answers it offers require a transfer of public funds to the private sector. The stock market crash of 2008 should suffice to remind us that the managers of the private sector do not have a monopoly on success.
  • First, I thought to myself that the charter operators were cynically using children as political pawns in their own campaign to promote their cause.
  • Second, I felt an immense sense of gratitude to the much-maligned American public education system, where no one has to win a lottery to gain admission.
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    "Ordinarily, documentaries about education attract little attention, and seldom, if ever, reach neighborhood movie theaters. Davis Guggenheim's Waiting for "Superman" is different. It arrived in late September with the biggest publicity splash I have ever seen for a documentary. Not only was it the subject of major stories in Time and New York, but it was featured twice on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was the centerpiece of several days of programming by NBC, including an interview with President Obama." By Diane Ravitch at The New York Review of Books on November 11, 2010.
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2010 Isn't What Many Futurists Of The Past Imagined - 0 views

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    "The late visionary Arthur C. Clarke was a master of predictive fiction. In Clarke's 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey - which he co-wrote with director Stanley Kubrick - we get a taste of the vast influence that computers will have in our lives over the coming decades. The 1984 movie sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, was about - among other things - humans making contact with alien life. The year he chose for this breakthrough: 2010. Well, here we are. It's 2010 and no word from a Jovian moon yet. But it's only October." By Linton Weeks at NPR on October 18, 2010.
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Wikileaks Iraq war logs: every death mapped - 0 views

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    "The Wikileaks Iraq war logs provide us with a unique picture of every death in Iraq. These are those events mapped using Google Fusion tables" By Simon Rogers at The Guardian on October 23, 2010.
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Mapping Islam: Bad and Good Efforts - 0 views

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    "Mapping the distribution of religious groups is often a frustrating exercise. Good data on the numbers of adherents of any particular faith or sect, let alone the intensity of their beliefs, are often lacking, while the spatial intermingling of different religions presents formidable cartographic challenges. As a result, even the best maps of religion at the global scale are deeply flawed. Britain, for example, is almost always mapped as solidly "Protestant Christian," even though by 2005 it was estimated that more Britons were attending weekly services in Muslim mosques than in Anglican churches. As British Muslim populations are highly concentrated in urban areas, and as many non-church-goers still think of themselves as vaguely Christian, depicting Britain as a Christian land may be roughly acceptable. But more accurate cartography would portray Britain, like most of Europe, as largely secular and partly Muslim. " By Martin Lewis at GeoCurrent Events on October 22, 2010.
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An empirical perspective on religious and secular reasons « The Immanent Frame - 0 views

  • An example of a policy that would apply to all citizens is gay marriage, and we have all encountered religious reasons for banning gay marriage, such as, “Leviticus 18:22 tells us that homosexuality is an abomination before God.”
  • “Public reason” is a bit more obscure, but liberal theorists mean by the term general reasons that are widely or near universally shared by citizens. This would preclude reasons deriving from any “comprehensive perspective,” such as religion, obviously including Leviticus 18:22.
  • It is critical for our society that we get this normative debate right, for the stakes are high. We face increasing religious diversity. Liberal theorists, like Rawls, say that unless we keep religious reasons out of the public sphere, we could descend into a religiously motivated civil war similar to the Thirty Years’ War of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, critics of liberal theorists, like religious ethicist Charles Mathewes, say that unless we allow each other to talk about our deep differences, such as our religious beliefs, we could descend into the same nightmare that concerns the liberal theorists.
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  • This normative debate is about what people should do in public debates, but knowing what people actually do would allow theorists to develop greater nuance in their analyses.
  • One of the premises of this entire debate is that religious people want to use religious reasons in public debates.
  • If anyone would want to use religious reasons, it would be these activists. But what the scholars find is that, in fact, the religious Right offers secular reasons for their policy proposals.
  • This is not because they are normatively sanctioned for using religious reasons, as critics of liberal theory suggest. Rather, religious reasons do not convince people to accept one’s position.
  • Scholars such as Robert Audi say that religious reasons should not be used anywhere along the spectrum, while others, like Chris Eberle in an earlier post, argue that religious reasons can be given by elected officials while passing laws; and Charles Taylor writes that the use of religious reasons by elected officials is fine, but secular reasons are required in the “official language of the state,” such as the wording of laws.
  • the acceptability of using religious reasons depends on the proximity of the reason-giver to the creation of policy
  • near the “actual power” end of the spectrum, religious people do not want to give religious reasons, because they do not work.
  • If they do not work to mobilize a sub-group of citizens to  advocate for banning abortion, they are not going to be effective for forging a majority vote in Congress, which in theory is just as pluralistic as the citizenry.
  • In my interviews, a majority of the people thought one should use religious discourse with the Hindu neighbor, with conservative Protestants being the most likely to say so. Interestingly, a majority of the secular respondents also thought that one should use religious discourse
  • The most prevalent reason given for advocating the use of religious reasons is that using only secular reasons is not possible if you are religious.
  • respondents actually wanted to start the conversation with secular reasons in order to be understood.
  • As one evangelical said, he tries to avoid “Christian speak” because “nobody knows what the heck you are talking about.” However, if they were asked to give reasons for their reasons, then the respondents thought that eventually their religious reasons would have to be brought into the conversation, because those are “behind” everything.
  • two implications
  • First, it seems that both professional activists and ordinary religious people, including religious conservatives, want to use public reasons in the public sphere.
  • A second implication is that, contrary to what many theorists maintain, religious people appear to be quite capable of translating between religious and secular reasons
  • Calhoun, expanding on Habermas’s notion of translation, explores the idea that what is needed is not the translation of religious reasons into secular reasons, or the exclusive use of one or the other, but “mutual interrogation,” or a “complementary learning process” about people’s real reasons, religious or otherwise.
  • What would happen if people started invoking their comprehensive perspectives by using religious reasons? Famously, Richard Rorty claimed that religious reasons are a conversation-stopper, because they are unintelligible to those who do not share one’s religious beliefs. So, if Rorty is correct, Habermas’s translation proposal will never work.
  • Even though religious reasons are second-order, having religious reasons and not using them is considered insincere. To actually understand the other person’s argument, you have to hear their religious reasons if they have them.
  • Interestingly, the secular respondents did not want religious people to give secular reasons. Their reasoning is: if this is how a religious person thinks, why shouldn’t they be able to talk that way?
  • Of course, many of the secular people added that they were not going to be convinced by the religious reasons, but they would want others to offer such reasons if they wanted to.
  • This is but a sampling of the normative insights that can be developed from the limited existing empirical data on the use of religious reasons in the public sphere. It would be helpful for normative theorists to identify the critical empirical questions that they have, and for empiricists to discuss with them what is actually possible to determine. Working together, the two groups could really shake up the debate about this critical social issue.
  • My concern is that reason-giving isn’t necessarily where the action is, or at least where all of it is. Aside from the “that’s-just-who-I-am” approach you detail in the post, I can think of some other possible routes from religion to public discourse that bypass reason-giving.
  • A prime example here is Christine O’Donnell’s justification for her anti-masturbation stance, which is prima facie idiotic: “…if he already knows what pleases him, and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture?” Leaving aside O’Donnell in specific, everybody of course already knows why a real, live sexual partner is in the picture!
  • The statement only makes any sense at all if uttered in a religious context, i.e., one in which there is an assumed religious commonality between the speaker and the audience. In this case, the commonality is the religious assumption that the purpose of sexuality is essentially religious. Thus this deserves to be understood as religious reason-giving even though there is no religious language in the reason!
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    "This "religion in the public sphere" thread has featured debates about whether citizens of liberal democratic societies can offer religious reasons for public laws that will be coercive on all citizens, or whether they must use, in John Rawls's terms, "public reason."" By John H. Evans at the Immanent Frame on October 1, 2010.
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Climate Change and Systemic Volatility - 0 views

  • What struck me about this chart, though, is the amount of blue in two of the world's emerging great powers (China and India). The next three to four decades seem likely to witness challenges to the political status quo by at least two rising powers just as those nations are experiencing extreme domestic socio-economic volatility caused by the compounding effects of climate change. To me, this is extremely worrying, because it means that the ruling regimes of those nations will be under intense domestic pressure, leading to potentially volatile and risky foreign policy behavior in order to either preserve domestic unity or seek the resources and geostrategic position to mitigate internal difficulties. Doesn't bode well for those who hope for those states to rise in non-disruptive ways.
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    "There are a few obvious reactions here. One is to note how many of the worlds major emitters of greenhouse gas (so far) are in the "low risk" zone, proving definitively that mother nature has no sense of justice. Another good point is made by Yglesias, who notes that despite reasonably direct lines of causation (greenhouse emissions cause climate shifts which further immiserate already-desperately-poor farmers in already-desperately-poor parts of the world), "free market" boosters seem willfully blind to the negative externalities of polluting behavior; morally this is very weird. " Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch on October 22, 2010.
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Krauthammer and "Scientific" Political Analysis - 0 views

  • Anyone having even a passing familiarity with American politics literature (and as someone with more of a comparative/IR focus, my own familiarity is indeed passing) knows there is precisely one reason the Democrats are going to get punished in a couple of weeks: the economy. Incumbents get punished when the economy is bad. The economy right now is really bad, so incumbents are going to get punished especially harshly. That's really the only story here
  • for all of Krauthammer's harping about the importance of independents, there's really no such thing. The vast majority of self-identified "independents" lean strongly one way or another, though they might be more inclined than strong partisans to punish the incumbent party for a poor economy.
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    "Anyone having even a passing familiarity with American politics literature (and as someone with more of a comparative/IR focus, my own familiarity is indeed passing) knows there is precisely one reason the Democrats are going to get punished in a couple of weeks: the economy. Incumbents get punished when the economy is bad. The economy right now is really bad, so incumbents are going to get punished especially harshly. That's really the only story here." By Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch on October 22, 2010.
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France in Turmoil | STRATFOR - 0 views

  • The two groups have different economic and social interests, but they are coming together in their angst toward the government and in their anger toward President Nicolas Sarkozy. This presents a dangerous situation for Paris, as it has the potential to spark wider societal unrest unless the government moves to satisfy one of the groups.
  • The origins of the French welfare state go back to the 60-year period of nearly constant turmoil following the 1789 French Revolution. The revolution was followed by the 1793-94 Reign of Terror; the White Terror of 1794; Napoleon Bonaparte’s rule from 1804 to 1814, which included an almost uninterrupted period of pan-European warfare; another White Terror in 1815; and two more revolutions, in 1830 and 1848. The 1848 Revolution took on a particularly socialist tinge, as a nascent working class that was growing amid the country’s industrialization united with the peasantry in protest of their conditions.
  • Under Napoleon III, social order was largely restored for the next 20 years — to be disrupted by the war against Prussia in 1870 — but more importantly, the French social welfare state became a crucial part of the government’s social contract with its citizens. In order to pacify and unite its restive population, the state vowed that it would take care of its citizens from cradle to grave.
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  • The French, in other words, are neither lazy nor illogical. The protesters see the reforms as a threshold that, if crossed by the government, could undermine the foundation of the last 150 years of French society. Thus, while only 7-8 percent of the working population belongs to a labor union — the lowest percentage in the EU and even lower than that in the United States — nearly 70 percent of the population supports the ongoing strikes and believes they should continue if the proposed reforms pass, which they likely will by Oct. 23.
  • The context of the 2010 unrest is therefore not very different from 1995. The French budget deficit is forecast to hit 8.2 percent of GDP, and Paris is being forced by Germany to rein in spending to conform to the EU’s fiscal rules. Germany is making EU-wide fiscal discipline an essential condition of its continued support for EU institutions, a message that was elucidated during the Greek sovereign debt crisis but understood to apply to everyone.
  • In addition to protests from the French middle classes and workers demanding a continuation of the established social contract, there are protests from French citizens who feel they were never offered that social contract in the first place.
  • The protests of the last couple of days in France have seen both groups pour out onto the streets. The rioting and violence are still not in any way at a level that could be construed as threatening to the government; both the 2005 and 2007 riots were more intense. However, the protesters are using more strategic tactics, targeting the country’s energy infrastructure, and hence are less reliant on drawing out the masses to the streets.
  • The youth need a flexible labor market and thus would need substantial portions of the French welfare state to be eroded if their employment situation were to be remedied. Therefore, Paris will have a hard time satisfying both groups.
  • Ultimately, the commitments Paris has made to its people over the last 150 years are incompatible with the commitments it has made to Berlin in the last 20 years.
  • However, the French state has a very clear history of conceding to its population’s demands. At the very least, it is inevitable that Paris will have to give in to one of the groups, either by admitting that the social contract cannot be changed or by offering it in an amended form to the disaffected youth and citizens of immigrant descent.
  • It is likely that it will give in to the more established group — the workers and middle classes — since they have shown with their tactics that they have the ability to seriously threaten the French state’s efforts to function by targeting its energy infrastructure. Simply moving forward with a policy that three-quarters of the population rejects is unsustainable. At the point when Paris gives in to one side, however, France may cease to be at conflict with itself and instead come into conflict with Germany.
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    "Unrest in France sparked by protests against the government continued Oct. 21. The turmoil is ostensibly over proposed government pension reforms, but it is about much more than that. The protests themselves are a confrontation between the government and unionized labor - older generations that want to protect benefits hard won in the 19th century and enhanced in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, another group of French citizens - disaffected youths, many of immigrant Arab and African descent - are protesting not for employment benefits, but for employment itself." By StratFor on October 22, 2010.
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Ned Hall and L. A. Paul - 0 views

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    "Suzy throws a rock which causes a window to break. That is token causation: a particular event c causes another particular event e. According to a simple counterfactual account of token causation, c is a cause of e exactly if e wouldn't have occurred if c hadn't occurred. In this episode, Hall and Paul discuss why the pursuit of a counterfactual account is attractive, and consider problems for such an account raised by preemptive causes, preventive causes, the transitivity of causation, and overdetermination."
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Turn on, Start Up, Drop Out - 0 views

  • To describe Peter Thiel as simply a libertarian wildly understates the case. His belief system is based on unapologetic selfishness and economic Darwinism. His most famous quote—borrowed from Vince Lombardi—is, "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser." In a personal statement produced last year for the Cato Institute*, Thiel announced: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." The public, he says, doesn't support unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism and so he doesn't support the public making decisions. This anti-democratic proclamation comes with some curious historical analysis. Thiel says that the Roaring 20s were the last period when it was possible for supporters of freedom like him to be optimistic about politics. "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron," he writes.
  • What differentiates Thiel's Silicon Valley style of philanthropic libertarianism from Glenn Beck's screaming-raving-weeping variety is a laissez-faire attitude toward personal behavior and the lack of any demagogic instinct. Thiel, who is openly gay, wants to flee the mob, not rally it through gold-hoarding or flag-waving.
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    "Hyper-libertarian Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel's appalling plan to pay students to quit college." By Jacob Weisberg at Slate on October 16, 2010.
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Throw the Bums In - 0 views

  • That may not make sense, but the hidden brain is not in the rationality business. When we are stuck in a bad place, whether that bad place is a marriage, a traffic jam, or a weak economy, it is very tempting to try something new. Psychologists call this the action bias—and it turns out to have surprisingly broad ramifications.
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    "Americans distrust the GOP. So why are they voting for it?" By Shankar Vedantam at Slate Magazine on October 20, 2010.
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The danger of the partisan mind - 0 views

  • Mr Waldman is right to suggest that today's Republican alarm and Democratic light-heartedness are partisan phenomena. But one is no sillier than the other. The majority of Democrats who saw government as a threat in 2007 were right to do so, and nothing truly significant has changed since then. Likewise, the overwhelming majority of Republicans who were at ease with the state in 2007 were profoundly misguided; one wishes they had been roused from their oblivious slumber for better reasons.
  • The Gallup graph is truly troubling because it shows us that each party's base of supporters is more or less blind to government's threat to freedom when their favoured team is in power.
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    ""What happened to send the line for Democrats and the line for Republicans in opposite directions?" Mr Waldman asks. "Oh yeah-a Democratic president took office." Mr Waldman is correct to note that "[o]ur partisan predispositions affect not just what we think about candidates, or about policy proposals, but how we think about the objective facts of the world," and that since Barack Obama's election conservative elites "have been telling [right-leaning citizens] that our freedom hangs by a thread."" By The Economist on October 20, 2010.
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Income Inequality: Too Big to Ignore - 0 views

  • During the three decades after World War II, for example, incomes in the United States rose rapidly and at about the same rate — almost 3 percent a year — for people at all income levels.
  • The share of total income going to the top 1 percent of earners, which stood at 8.9 percent in 1976, rose to 23.5 percent by 2007, but during the same period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage declined by more than 7 percent.
  • The rich have been spending more simply because they have so much extra money. Their spending shifts the frame of reference that shapes the demands of those just below them, who travel in overlapping social circles. So this second group, too, spends more, which shifts the frame of reference for the group just below it, and so on, all the way down the income ladder. These cascades have made it substantially more expensive for middle-class families to achieve basic financial goals.
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  • the counties where income inequality grew fastest also showed the biggest increases in symptoms of financial distress.
  • The counties where long commute times had grown the most were again those with the largest increases in inequality.
  • The counties with the biggest increases in inequality also reported the largest increases in divorce rates.
  • these counties had the largest increases in bankruptcy filings.
  • There is no persuasive evidence that greater inequality bolsters economic growth or enhances anyone’s well-being.
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    "PEOPLE often remember the past with exaggerated fondness. Sometimes, however, important aspects of life really were better in the old days. " By Robert H. Frank at The New York Times on October 16, 2010.
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Objectivism & "Metaphysics," Part 16 - 0 views

  • First and perhaps most important of all, Popper doesn’t support free will and oppose determinism in order to support a view of human nature that goes against the wisdom of human experience and the evidence of experimental and evolutionary psychology.
  • By claiming that innate tendencies don’t exist, Rand undermines the ability to understand human motivation and the evolution of the social order.
  • “Ayn Rand refused to make collective judgments [about the individuals in her circle]. Each time she unmasked one of these individuals [i.e., broke from them] she struggled to learn from her mistake. But then she would be deceived again by some new variant.” [VOR, 350]
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  • She expected her acolytes to think, feel and behave like the heroes of Atlas Shrugged, rather than as human beings. She failed to recognize that many of the weaknesses which plague the human animal are congenital, rooted in biology and the human condition, and that they can never be overcome (assuming they can be overcome at all) if they are not first recognized and dealt with in the open.
  • Popper’s arguments against determinism are far more complex and sophisticated than Rand’s.
  • In his book on determinism, Popper mentions an argument issued by the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane. This argument, first introduced by Haldane in 1898, is so similar to Rand’s that one wonders if there isn’t a connection between the two.
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    "Seddon's defense of Rand's free will. In Fred Seddon's review of my book Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature, we find the following curious assertion: "I would point out that the Objectivist position is very close to that of Karl Popper." While superficially there are points in common between Popper's criticism of determinism and Rand's, the differences are more telling." By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on October 19, 2010.
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Why Russia And China Won't Fight - 0 views

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    "Every so often there appear claims, not only in the Western press but the Russian one, that (rising but overpopulated) China is destined to fight an (ailing and creaking) Russia for possession of its resources in the Far East*. For reasons that should be obvious, this is almost completely implausible for the next few decades. But let's spell them out nonetheless." By Anatoly Karlin at Sublime Oblivion on October 17, 2010.
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The Myth of the Yellow Peril: Overhyping Chinese Migration into Russia - 0 views

  • Since 1989 the population of the Russian Far East declined by 14% to 6.7 million in 2002; shorn of subsidies from the center, it is now dependent on the rest of East Asia for food and consumer imports. It sits next to Chinese Manchuria (the provinces of Heilongjiang, Liaoning and Jilin), an environmentally-strained rust belt of 108 million souls. Thus it is not surprising to see American geopolitical jockeys, Russian xenophobes and anti-Putin "liberals" alike (i.e. Radio Free Europe's Aleksandr Golts and Echo Moskvi Radio's Yulia Latynina, etc) claiming that a stealth demographic invasion of Russia is well underway which will in a few years result in a Chinese Far East.
  • The issue of Chinese migration to Russia and its political consequences starts with one main question - how many of them are there? All reputable estimates are in the range of 200,000 to 400,000, with 500.000 as the absolute maximum, most of them shuttle traders or seasonal laborers. The academic Gel'bras first came with these figures in 2001, based on adding up numbers from separate towns and regions.
  • Most migrants come from cities or small towns, and only 20% from villages - although the latter figure is higher in Moscow. Only 5% were employed in agriculture back in China. 38% were "workers" and 11% were "worker-peasants". Although only 6% admitted they had been unemployed, the real figure is much higher since 70% of workers and 68% of worker peasants said they migrated because they couldn't find a job in China.
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  • Chinese Migration - Facts, Objectivity and Subjectivity: a Kazakh perspective. As in Russia, they massively overstate the Chinese presence, mixed marriages, etc. Ironically twice as many Kazakhs visit China every year than vice versa. What's happening with Chinese expansion in Russia?: a comprehensive and sarcastic recounting of prior alarmist estimates of the numbers of Chinese in Russia. The Russian vector in global Chinese migration: notes that the alarmism of the 1990's and early 2000's is dwindling away and being replaced by more scientific views of Chinese migration to Russia. Notes that Russian migration as a share of total Chinese global migration is tiny - as of 1990, the total number of Chinese overseas was about 37mn, including 30% of the population in Malaysia, 10% in Thailand, 17% in Brunei and 4% in Indonesia. Lots of other stuff.
  • I will now go beyond demography into geopolitics. China is not the monolith that it is usually painted as in the West; its strong central government conceals a greater deal of simmer, dynamism and regionalism.
  • China aimed to achieve three geopolitical aims in the following order:
  • 1) Maintain central authority over the commercial seaboard and the peasant hinterland 2) Surround itself by a buffer of vassal states on land - Tibet, Sinkiang, Mongolia, Manchuria, etc. 3) Build a strong navy to repel sea-based foreign predation, protect its trade and extend its influence over East Asia. Now and in the future, China is going to have cope with a panoply of threats to those geopolitical goals - rising inequalities, a disconnected bureaucracy, ethnic separatism and American and Japanese sea power. In other words, it's going to have its hands full and Chinese willingness to pursue reconciliation and friendship with Russia is a reflection of its need for a safe strategic rear (see Sino-Russian Relations in China Debates the Future Security Environment, Michael Pillsbury).
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    "One of the staples of alarmist, pessimistic and/or Russophobic (not to mention Sinophobic) commentary on Russian demography is a reworking of the yellow peril thesis. In these fevered imaginations, Chinese supposedly swim across the Amur River in their millions, establishing village communes in the taiga, and breeding prolifically so as to displace ethnic Russians and revert Khabarovsk and Vladivostok back to their rightful Qing Dynasty-era names, Boli and Haisanwei." By Anatoly Karlin at Russia Blog on April 1, 2009.
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Political Silence is Golden - 0 views

  • What are these candidates hiding from? The Politico story subscribes to the sports metaphor, explaining that the candidates are "running out the clock." If they say nothing, they won't get caught saying anything stupid, the theory goes.
  • But when politicians beat this sort of a retreat, they're not signaling that they fear the questions but that they fear the answers.
  • But filter-free media are self-limiting. To begin with, anything that Sarah Palin tweets goes out unfiltered. That's all well and good, but within seconds, the uber-media will suck it up, interpret it, fact-check it, and spit it out, making a mockery of her unfilteredness. Second, because the nonpress media speak primarily to supporters, they simply preach to the converted. To win, candidates must speak to more than the congregation, which requires conventional media exposure. Third, appearing on a friendly soundstage comes at a cost. A Tea Partier speaking on Fox News is just as prone to committing a campaign-debilitating gaffe as one taking a pummeling from aggressive reporters.
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  • Politicians and office-holders have no "duty" to speak to reporters, a truth that more reporters should understand. The press is not a Fourth Estate, a co-equal of the three branches of government, and it is due no lordly entitlements. Whenever candidates brush journalists off, the press should merely note the pols' taciturnity and maybe give thanks. In my experience, it's better to be snubbed than to be lied to.
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    "Earlier this month, Politico compiled a list of candidates who had gone AWOL, taken vows of semi-silence, or were otherwise dodging unwanted exposure to the press and the public. Many of them are Republicans of the Tea Party strain and include Colorado's Ken Buck, Delaware's Christine O'Donnell, Kentucky's Rand Paul, Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, and Nevada's Sharron Angle. Politico also named two exceedingly press-shy and public-avoiding Democratic office-seekers-Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania and Harry Reid of Nevada." By Jack Shafer at Slate on October 18, 2010.
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