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The petition emphasizes that the decision “removes HUGE amounts of history”—eras that, while accounting for only40 percent of AP World’s total current course work, comprise some 95 percent of human history since the development of agriculture and set the trajectories of civilizations for thousands of years to come. That history includes the technological advancements and environmental transformation that arose during humans’ migration from Africa to regions around the world; the rise of the Persian empire, the Qin dynasty, Teotihuacan in modern-day Mexico, and the Puebloan People in what today is the southwestern U.S.; and the birth of some of the world’s major religions, including Confucianism, Hinduism, and Christianity.

This class “is probably the only real chance [high-school students] are going to get to learn the African and American and Asian history before European colonization,”

“It’s so cool for students to learn [the third period] because it’s the one time in history that Europe wasn’t the big dog—it was in the Dark Ages while the rest of the world was innovating.”

Next year will not be a midterm election, after all. It will be a referendum on Trump — as it has to be, and as Trump will insist it be

the central task of the Democratic candidate will be not just to explain how dangerous Trump’s rhetoric and behavior is, but how un-American it is, and how a second term could leave behind an unutterably altered America. One term and the stain, however dark, might fade in time. Two terms and it marks us forever.

Biden made this moral case. And he did it with feeling, and a wounded sense of patriotism. He invoked previous presidents, including Republicans, who knew how insidiously evil white supremacy is and wouldn’t give any quarter to it. He reminded us that in politics, words are acts, and they have consequences when uttered by a national leader: “The words of a president … can move markets. They can send our brave men and women to war. They can bring peace. They can calm a nation in turmoil. They can console and confront and comfort in times of tragedy … They can appeal to the better angels of our nature. But they can also unleash the deepest, darkest forces in this nation.” And this, Biden argues, is what Trump has done: tap that dark psychic force, in an act of malignant and nihilist narcissism.

ven agenda-less Ahmari-ism galvanizes many social conservatives, especially younger ones. Ahmari highlights the thing they most fear: the relentless leftward shift of virtually every culturally powerful institution, increasingly including corporations. These social conservatives believe the left will use that cultural and economic power to proselytize their children for a sort of hypersexualized secular faith — and to cleanse the resisters from both the public square and the economic mainstream.

Those fears are often exaggerated, yet not utterly unfounded. If you’d told me 10 years ago that same-sex marriage meant evangelical Christian bakers might be legally required to cater gay weddings, I would have rolled my eyes at such hysterical conservative propaganda. Post-Obergefell v. Hodges, the default left-wing position seems to be that you cannot shun gay weddings and continue to own a bakery, or work as a tech CEO. 

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union went after Catholic hospitals for refusing to provide abortions, and companies have threatened to boycott states that sided with conservatives in the conflict between LGBTQ rights and religious liberty.

hen the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years.

It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.

Oklahoma Republican asked Muslims if they beat their wives, group says

An Oklahoma lawmaker who once likened Islam to a cancer this week handed out a questionnaire to Muslims that included questions such as “Do you beat your wife?”, a local civil rights organisation said.

“I will not tolerate something like Islam to come into the United States,” Bennett said, calling the religion “a cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out”.

John Bowlby is the father of attachment theory, which explains how humans are formed by relationships early in life, and are given the tools to go out and lead their lives

“All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”

The relationships that form you are mostly things you didn’t choose: your family, hometown, ethnic group, religion, nation and genes.

Mongol leader Genghis Khan (1162-1227) rose from humble beginnings to establish the largest land empire in history.

but he also granted religious freedom to his subjects, abolished torture, encouraged trade and created the first international postal system

the Mongols controlled between 11 and 12 million contiguous square miles, an area about the size of Africa

The full book contains criticism for the political left as earnestly constructive and thoughtfully formulated as any I have encountered

Rorty argued that an ascendant strain of postmodern Leftism with its roots in the academy has tended “to give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.”

This Left is more likely to participate in a public shaming than to lobby for a new law; it is more likely to mobilize to occupy a park or shut down a freeway than to register voters. It “exaggerates the importance of philosophy for politics, and wastes its energy on sophisticated theoretical analyses of the significance of current events.”

Re-Tribalization In The Global Village:

What I find most interesting about McLuhan’s work and media analysis is he actually thought most of these changes were bad

His argument was that Western civilization had become progressively de-tribalized since the invention of the printing press and the rise of mass literacy but that electronic media would lead to a re-tribalization that would have disastrous consequences for social cohesion.

More than 100,000 protesters have taken part in a peaceful march in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, chanting slogans against Narendra Modi’s new citizenship law.

organised by an umbrella group of Muslim and civil society organisations

More than 40% of Hyderabad’s estimated population of nearly 7 million people are Muslims.

The most straightforward theory for Western Rome’s collapse pins the fall on a string of military losses sustained against outside forces. Rome had tangled with Germanic tribes for centuries, but by the 300s “barbarian” groups like the Goths had encroached beyond the Empire’s borders.

410 the Visigoth King Alaric successfully sacked the city of Rome. The Empire spent the next several decades under constant threat before “the Eternal City” was raided again in 455, this time by the Vandals. Finally, in 476, the Germanic leader Odoacer staged a revolt and deposed the Emperor Romulus Augustulus.

it was also crumbling from within thanks to a severe financial crisis.

The death of the iconic Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has shocked the political world, altered the contours of the upcoming election and induced an overwhelming dread among liberals who fear some basic rights could now be in jeopardy.

it remains unclear whether the Senate will hold a vote before Election Day. If it did, it would represent a colossal act of hypocrisy since many of the same senators refused to even give Barack Obama’s last nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing, arguing that it was inappropriate to fill a seat on the court in an election year.

But Republicans have the power to force a vote, and barring defections, they could exercise it.

We in this country are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even.

Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures in the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.

And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.

An Oregon community group is calling for change to address racism after the fatal shooting of a Black teenager by a white man in an incident that police said began as an argument over loud music. 

Aidan Ellison, 19, was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the chest early Nov. 23 after officers responded to reports of a shooting in the parking lot of a hotel, according to police in Ashland, a predominantly white community near the state's California border.

Robert Paul Keegan, 47, was arrested on a murder charge, though he said he was in fear for his physical safety

To prove this somewhat quantitatively, Putnam and Garrett simplify the complex trajectory of American society since 1900 to four curves: economic inequality, political partisanship, social capital, and cultural narcissism

it is possible to get all the disparate trends to superimpose neatly on one another. Their observation of “an unexpected and remarkable synchronicity in trends in four very different spheres over the last 125 years” is the essence of the book. All of the indicators begin in the doldrums at the start of the twentieth century, before the titular upswing takes place. This happy trend extends until the 1960s, after which these indicators pivot and slowly trace a bell curve as they collapse back to their original nadirs: rancorous partisanship, deep inequality, and anomie.

For the authors, the synchronicity cannot be accidental. To the lay reader, this logic is compelling. To the social scientist forever spouting about the distinction between correlation and causation, however, it is merely suggestive

Facebook’s alarming power. The company is among the largest collectors of humanity’s most private information, one of the planet’s most-trafficked sources of news, and it seems to possess the ability, in some degree, to alter public discourse. Worse, essentially all of Facebook’s power is vested in Zuckerberg alone.

This feels intolerable; as the philosopher Kanye West put it, “No one man should have all that power.”

Persily proposes piercing the black box before we do anything else. He has written draft legislation that would compel large tech platforms to provide to outside researchers a range of data about what users see on the service, how they engage with it, and what information the platform provides to advertisers and governments.

The first institution Maoists captured was not the academy, it was the state. The seeds of the Cultural Revolution were not in the academy, but in the perceived weakness of the communist party in China, and Mao’s position within the party, after the failures of the Great Leap Forward. Maoists took over the state first, and 17 years later launched a campaign to force cultural change in the academy and elsewhere.

Cultural power, and related concepts like “privilege,” aren’t nothing, but they’re vaguer and less impactful than the state, which can credibility threaten, authorize, excuse, and utilize force.

State-backed violence made the Cultural Revolution, and if you think the social justice movement is similar, you misunderstand it.

There was also a hard political lesson. Thompson had witnessed the fall of the Weimar Republic close up, but what really moved here was the destruction of Austrian social democracy in 1934.

When, later, the guns were turned against Vienna Social Democrats, and destroyed the only society I have seen since the war which seemed to promise evolution toward a more decent, humane, and worthy existence in which the past was integrated with the future, real fear overcame me, and now never leaves me. In one place only I had seen a New Deal singularly intelligent, remarkably tolerant, and amazingly successful. It was destroyed precisely because it was insufficiently ruthless, insufficiently brutal. “Victory” (I saw) requires force to sustain victory. I had wanted victory, and peace.

In his classic text, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origina and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson explained how in the late 18th and early 19th century, the genres of the novel and the newspaper had helped enroll their readers in a new communal understanding of time.

Khazar, member of a confederation of Turkic-speaking tribes that in the late 6th century ce established a major commercial empire covering the southeastern section of modern European Russia.

the Khazars were originally located in the northern Caucasus region and were part of the western Turkic empire (in Turkistan)

y the beginning of the 7th century, the Khazars had become independent of the Turkic empire to the east.