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redavistinnell

Typhoon Melor Slams the Philippines, Sends 725,000 Fleeing - NBC News - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...-sends-725-000-fleeing-n479396

typhoon philippines

shared by redavistinnell on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Typhoon Melor Slams the Philippines, Sends 725,000 Fleeing
  • Known locally as typhoon Nona, it made landfall Monday morning on tiny Batag Island in the eastern Philippines.
  • Initial reports from Red Cross chapters in areas affected by the typhoon indicated "minimal impact so far," but some buildings were damaged, according to International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies spokeswoman Kate Marshall.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • said 724,839 residents of three eastern provinces were evacuated Sunday and early Monday before the storm's arrival.
  • About 20 storms and typhoons hit the Philippines each year. In November 2013, Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest typhoon on record to make landfall, left more than 7,300 people dead and missing as it leveled entire villages and swept walls of seawater into parts of the central Philippines.
redavistinnell

North Korea claims it has hydrogen bomb - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

north korea claims hydrogen bomb

shared by redavistinnell on 11 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • North Korea claims it has hydrogen bomb as U.N. discusses human rights abuses
  • North Korea has added the hydrogen bomb to its arsenal, state media said Thursday, a development that, if true, would represent a major leap in its nuclear weapons capabilities.
  • Analysts in recent years have believed that North Korea may have been working toward -- but didn't yet have the capability to produce -- a hydrogen, or thermonuclear, bomb. It can be hundreds of times more powerful than an atomic bomb.
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  • North Korea had become "a powerful nuclear weapons state ready to detonate [a] self-reliant A-bomb and H-bomb to reliably defend its sovereignty and the dignity of the nation," Kim said, according to the KCNA report.
  • Experts have responded to Pyongyang's claim with skepticism.
  • But its conventional weaponry is dated, with limited effectiveness, and it has looked to developing its nuclear capabilities to project power internationally.
  • North Korea had previously used plutonium in nuclear tests, one of the elements used in more "small fry" fission weapons such as atomic bombs, Nilsson-Wright said, and a leap to thermonuclear capability would be surprising.
  • Kim's regime generally cloaks its efforts in secrecy and occasionally boasts of advances through propaganda outlets, leaving the rest of the world to attempt to connect the dots.
  • Pyongyang is a "black box", said Ewha's Kim. He added that the regime was well versed in using uncertainty about its true capabilities to generate fear and strengthen its hand in terms of negotiations.
  • "It's hard to regard North Korea as possessing an H-bomb. I think it seems to be developing it," Lee said, according to a report by South Korea's Yonhap news agency.
  • In May, it said it had the ability to miniaturize nuclear weapons, a development that would allow it to deploy nuclear weapons on missiles. A U.S. National Security Council spokesman responded that the United States did not think the North Koreans had such a capability.
  • A hydrogen bomb produces a fusion reaction -- the energy source of the sun and the stars -- in which colliding nuclei form a new nucleus. Fusion devices produce explosions "orders of magnitude more powerful than atomic bombs," according to the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization.
  • By comparison, the world's first thermonuclear test, conducted by the U.S. in the Marshall Islands in 1952, yielded the equivalent of 10.4 million tons of TNT, a blast 700 times more powerful.
silveiragu

Nations Approve Landmark Climate Accord in Paris - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...imate-change-accord-paris.html

climate_change accord politics policy

shared by silveiragu on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • suddenly, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France asked for opposition to the deal and, hearing none, gaveled the session closed.
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 12 Dec 15
       
      Interesting to evaluate this statement after the Congress of Vienna simulation.
  • The new accord changes that dynamic by requiring action in some form from every country, rich or poor. The echoes of those divides persisted during the negotiations, however.
  • Mr. Fabius, who has presided over the assembly, made an emotional appeal.
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  • “Our text is the best possible balance,” he said, “a balance which is powerful yet delicate, which will enable each delegation, each group of countries, with his head held high, having achieved something important.
  • negotiators from countries representing a self-described “high-ambition coalition” walked into the United Nations plenary session shortly before noon, they were swarmed by cheering
  • Mr. Ban has said there is “no Plan B” if this deal falls apart
  • But it is not yet certain that the draft accord will receive the unanimous support required for it to become legally binding.
  • But it is not yet certain that the draft accord will receive the unanimous support required for it to become legally binding.
  • A more likely course of events, Ms. Morgan and others said
  • They would then engage in sideline talks, while Mr. Fabius and his envoys negotiate to win their support.
  • Poorer countries had pushed for a legally binding provision requiring that rich countries appropriate a minimum of $100 billion a year to help them mitigate and adapt to the ravages of climate change. In the final deal, that $100 billion figure appears only in a preamble, not in what would be the legally binding portion of the agreement.
  • The stated goal of the agreement is to begin to level off the rise in fossil fuel emissions enough to stave off an increase in atmospheric temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit)
  • More recent scientific reports have concluded that even staving off that amount of warming will not save the planet from many of the worst effects of climate change, particularly rising sea levels. Thus, the text was expected to include a reference to reducing emissions enough to stave off a warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
  • Vulnerable low-lying island states have pushed for the inclusion of the more stringent target,
  • At the core of the agreement are a set of individual plan
  • n their own, those plans will lower greenhouse gas emissions only about half as much as is necessary
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 12 Dec 15
       
      Which is slightly humorous in a sad way, because the plans BY THEMSELVES will accomplish nothing; plans only are as good as how they are enacted.
  • The accord also requires “stock-taking” meetings every five year
  • It also sets forth language requiring countries to monitor, verify and publicly report their levels of emissions.
  • In the end, the final draft requires all countries to use the same system to report their emissions, but it allows developing nations to report fewer details until they build the ability to better count their carbon emissions
  • Some elements of the accord would be voluntary, while others would be legally binding. That hybrid structure was specifically intended to ensure the support of the United States
  • Such a proposal would be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Senate, where many lawmakers question the established science of climate change, and where even more hope to thwart President Obama’s climate change agenda.
  • As a result, all language in the accord relating to the reduction of carbon emissions is essentially voluntary
  • “This agreement is highly unlikely to trigger any legitimate grounds for compelling Senate ratification,” said Paul Bledsoe, a climate change official in the Clinton administration.
  • Representatives of 195 countries reached a landmark climate accord on Saturday that will, for the first time, commit nearly every country to lowering planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions to help stave off the most drastic effects of climate change.
  • final deal did not achieve all that environmentalists, scientists and some countries had hoped for
Javier E

Antony Beevor's 'Ardennes 1944' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ony-beevors-ardennes-1944.html

WWII US battle history

shared by Javier E on 19 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Beevor’s account ­forces one to reassess the merits of some familiar names. Perhaps no one comes off worse than Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group, who had failed to foresee the possibility of a German attack, who was out of touch with events for much of the battle and who seems to have spent a great deal of his time raging at Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.
  • Montgomery himself, however, receives little sympathy: His ambition to drive into Germany earlier that fall led him to neglect the clearing of the approaches to Antwerp. That great port, liberated on Sept. 4, was unusable as such for nearly three months because the Germans had been allowed to dig in along the Scheldt estuary. Instead, Montgomery launched Market Garden, a wildly ambitious effort
  • Beevor speculates that Montgomery had something like Asperger’s syndrome, and although one shies away from amateur diagnosis, one suspects that he is right. Oblivious almost to the end of the impact of his arrogance, smugness and condescension on others, he nearly brought about his own dismissal on the verge of final victory over Germany.
sarahbalick

Obama, at Conference, Says U.S. Is Partly to Blame for Climate Change - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-climate-conference-cop21.html

u s france climate change conference obama

shared by sarahbalick on 30 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • “I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second-largest emitter,”
  • “to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.”
  • “No nation — large or small, wealthy or poor — is immune,” he said.
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  • “And when it comes to climate change, that hour is almost upon us.”
  • “For I believe, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that there is such a thing as being too late,”
  • “We know the truth that many nations have contributed little to climate change but will be the first to feel its most destructive effects,” he said.
  • “What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it,”
  • Mr. Obama has staked much of his legacy on ensuring success here, spending much of the past year courting the leaders of China, India and other major emitters in hopes they would finally agree to slow their rapidly rising use of coal and other carbon-intensive fuels.
  • They stopped at the site immediately after Mr. Obama landed at Orly Airport and was driven through the quiet and largely blocked-off streets of Paris.
  • Mr. Hollande arrived at the climate talks at 7:46 a.m. and was greeted by Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who was accompanied by Mr. Hollande’s former partner, the minister of ecology, Ségolène Royal.
  • Citing climate change as “a huge challenge,” Mr. Xi said it was “very important for China and the United States to be firmly committed to the right direction of building a new model of major country relations,” including by “partnering with each other to help the climate conference deliver its expected targets.”
  • “As the two largest economies in the world and the two largest carbon-emitters, we have both determined that it is our responsibility to take action,” Mr. Obama said, adding, “And so our leadership on this issue has been absolutely vital, and I appreciate President Xi’s consistent cooperation on this issue.”
  • The Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group of business and philanthropy leaders led by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates who have a combined total of $350 billion in private wealth, have pledged to invest in moving clean-energy technologies from laboratories to the marketplace.
  • “Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn, developing countries are allowed to grow,” he wrote in a column published in The Financial Times. “The lifestyles of a few must not crowd out opportunities for the many still on the first steps of the development ladder.
  • In exchange, India was demanding free technology from other countries as well as significant financial aid. India has some incentives to cooperate with broader plans to curb emissions. Some studies suggest that more Indians could be displaced as a result of rising seas than people from any other country, that cities in India are already among the world’s most polluted, and that nearly a fifth of deaths in India are caused in part by air pollution.
krystalxu

How Singapore Is Creating More Land for Itself - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ting-more-land-for-itself.html

Singapore land culture social politics crisis US economy

shared by krystalxu on 10 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • One of the island’s most distinctive features, though, remains hidden: the Jurong Rock Caverns, which hold 126 million gallons of crude oil.
  • Next year, three new vaults will be ready. Then, if all goes according to plan, there will be six more.
  • the Jurong Rock Caverns are less an emblem of the marvels of technology than of the anxiety of a nation.
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  • Singapore is the 192nd-largest country in the world.
  • I remarked that the phrase “freeing up land” occurs like clockwork in conversations with Singapore’s planners. He laughed.
  • But reclaiming land from the ocean has its limits, particularly in an age of a warming planet. Scientists warn that by 2100, sea levels may rise by as much as six feet, and furious storms will pound our coasts.
  • People have begun to leave Tuvalu, in the South Pacific; the Marshall Islands; and Nauru, in Micronesia. Five of the lowest Solomon Islands have already vanished.
  • how it fends off the ocean will be of deep interest to many other populous and productive cities near the water: New York, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Guangzhou, all miniature nations of a sort.
  • “If global temperatures continue to rise,” a government official said last year, “many parts of Singapore could eventually be submerged.
  • Singapore was a tiny nation, and dire fates awaited tiny nations that could not take care of themselves.
  • On the first floor of a city museum in the Urban Redevelopment Authority building, a wall is engraved with letters that spell SMALL ISLAND.
  • At the spot where the hill was broken down and carted off to build Boat Quay, there now stands One Raffles Place, clad in steel and glass, taller, in all probability, than its rock-and-mud forefather.
  • Beach Road, in the island’s belly, at one time had a self-evident name; now it reads like a wry joke, given how much new land separates it from the ocean.
  • Once, having strayed into Indonesia’s territorial waters without a permit, they were arrested.
  • Lim is able to narrate, practically by himself, a fine-grained history of the island’s reclamation projects.
  • Several countries have tired of feeding Singapore’s endless appetite for sand; Indonesia, Malaysia and, most recently, Cambodia have halted exports altogether.
  • but it still holds more than 200,000 human remains within its 400 acres, making it one of the largest Chinese graveyards outside China.
  • As the ocean grows less shallow, it becomes harder and harder to build the wall, to stabilize the infill, to protect it all from collapse.
  • The most miserable truth about this moment of the Anthropocene is the inevitability of it all; even if the whole world switched to solar power and turned vegetarian tomorrow, we cannot remove the carbon we’ve released into the atmosphere.
  • money can expand the imagination, swell the sense of the possible.
  • “Ships sail from the Suez, where they refuel, and then the next refueling stop is Singapore.”
  • Wang urged me to visit the Float at Marina Bay, the world’s largest floating stage, a 107,000-square-foot slice of steel that clings to the lip of Singapore’s esplanade.
  • Still, unnaturalness may well be the world’s conceivable future;
  • Singapore’s, as the country prepares to terraform itself in search of space. There will be more underground caverns, David Tan told me: a warren of research laboratories within the folds of Kent Ridge, right under the university; perhaps a warehousing facility beneath Jurong Bird Park.
  • Sky bridges and midair concourses are already a part of some public-housing estates.
  • Singapore already has high-rise factories: towers occupied by dozens of manufacturing units, all sharing amenities like cargo elevators, electricity and truck ramps.
  • . Given enough ready money, thorny issues of territorial sovereignty swiftly dissolve.
  • Singapore has always held elections, but only one party — Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party — has ever ruled the island, and only three men have ever been prime minister. Opposition parties have never been permitted to be anything more than frail invertebrates, so the P.A.P. can do as it pleases.
  • Most of the infill in the reclamations under a coming shipping-container terminal — planned to be the world’s largest — is rock and soil debris from construction projects.
  • The cemetery is so overgrown with weeds that it is one of Singapore’s few truly untended spaces.
  • The two countries bickered over reclamation activities here in 2002; it took three years of negotiations before Singapore could proceed.
  • Trapped beyond the inner wall was a low pool of water, yet to be filled in. Around us, the ocean lay idle in the sun, ready to challenge Singapore’s ingenuity with its patient, adamant rise.
Javier E

Mutual Distrust at the 2019 Munich Security Conference - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583015

security nato europe crisis

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • at the 2019 Munich Security Conference, which took place over the weekend, the charade ended.
  • The American position is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The Europeans are defaulting to nostalgia for a multilateral order. Meanwhile, the true challenge of a rising authoritarian bloc goes largely ignored.
  • The substance of Pence’s speech, though, was more significant and worrying. In 2017, Pence spoke at length about the importance of the NATO alliance and its historic accomplishments. In 2019, there was none of that. The only praise of NATO was for its response to Trump’s leadership on defense spending. Otherwise, Pence offered a litany of criticism leveled against NATO and the EU—for not doing enough on Iran, Nord Stream 2, or Venezuela. (Ironically, the EU would have had a common position on this last item were it not for the effective veto of the pro-Trump Italian government.)
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  • Pence could have come and spoken about the common challenge facing the alliance from China—which is what many Europeans and Americans expected him to do.
  • He did not choose that path, possibly fearing that it would be shot down by a president who has repeatedly rejected the idea of working with the EU on China.
  • There was also a notable absence. French President Emmanuel Macron canceled his joint appearance with Merkel after a dispute about the EU’s energy policy. The French are exasperated with the Germans, with whom they believe they cannot and will not work on needed reforms to the EU. The Germans, on the other hand, see the French as hopelessly nationalist, dreaming of Franco-German leadership with nothing to offer the Italians, the Poles, or others
  • With no explanation for the U-turn, Pence demanded that the EU now withdraw from the JCPOA. His message was clear: Under Trump, the alliance means getting behind whatever Washington decides, even if that changes weekly.
  • The administration’s national-security strategy of great-power competition wasn’t mentioned, nor was election interference, which Trump’s intelligence chiefs identified as a top threat facing the United States.
  • The German and British defense ministers and the EU High Representative all seemed stuck in the mid-2000s, offering little on the great-power competition unfolding around them.
  • Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff of the German Marshall Fund astutely observed that Merkel “was finally playing the role that American liberals had wanted her to play—that of leader of the free world.”
  • Meanwhile, the British have just decided to continue to work with the Chinese technology firm Huawei, cutting against the prevailing winds in Western democracies. This is the sort of concrete issue that should have been discussed by the alliance
  • In Munich, Yang Jiechi, a senior Chinese official, gave a long and meandering speech about win-win solutions and the benefits of multilateralism, which was completely at odds with China’s increasingly assertive and disruptive behavior.
  • Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif reveled in the disarray between the allies and sought to drive a wedge between them, weaponizing the Trump administration’s rhetoric about sovereignty.
  • There is a big problem. Western leaders are retreating into their foxholes, taking potshots at one another, rather than figuring out how to deal with new challenges
Javier E

Sun Yat-sen - Wikipedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Sun_Yat-sen

china Repubic history

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Sun saw the danger of this and returned to China in 1917 to advocate Chinese reunification. In 1921 he started a self-proclaimed military government in Guangzhou and was elected Grand Marshal.[81]
  • By this time Sun had become convinced that the only hope for a unified China lay in a military conquest from his base in the south, followed by a period of political tutelage that would culminate in the transition to democracy. In order to hasten the conquest of China, he began a policy of active cooperation with the Communist Party of China (CPC). Sun and the Soviet Union's Adolph Joffe signed the Sun-Joffe Manifesto in January 1923.[83] Sun received help from the Comintern for his acceptance of communist members into his KMT. Revolutionary and socialist leader Vladimir Lenin praised Sun and the KMT for their ideology and principles. Lenin praised Sun and his attempts at social reformation, and also congratulated him for fighting foreign Imperialism.[84][85][86] Sun also returned the praise, calling him a "great man", and sent his congratulations on the revolution in Russia.[87] With the Soviets' help, Sun was able to develop the military power needed for the Northern Expedition against the military at the north. He established the Whampoa Military Academy near Guangzhou with Chiang Kai-shek as the commandant of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA).[88] Other Whampoa leaders include Wang Jingwei and Hu Hanmin as political instructors. This full collaboration was called the First United Front.
  • In 1924 Sun appointed his brother-in-law T. V. Soong to set up the first Chinese Central bank called the Canton Central Bank.[89] To establish national capitalism and a banking system was a major objective for the KMT.[9
Javier E

The climate crisis is our third world war. It needs a bold response | Joseph Stiglitz |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...e-world-war-iii-green-new-deal

climate change economics policy crisis GND

shared by Javier E on 04 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with the climate crisis and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. They are right
  • An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II.
  • Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and complain that Green New Deal proponents confound the fight to preserve the planet, to which all right-minded individuals should agree, with a more controversial agenda for societal transformation. On both accounts the critics are wrong.
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  • The climate emergency is our third world war. Our lives and civilization as we know it are at stake, just as they were in the second world war.
  • When the US was attacked during the second world war no one asked, “Can we afford to fight the war?” It was an existential matter. We could not afford not to fight it. The same goes for the climate crisis.
  • We will pay for climate breakdown one way or another, so it makes sense to spend money now to reduce emissions rather than wait until later to pay a lot more for the consequences – not just from weather but also from rising sea levels. It’s a cliche, but it’s true: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
  • The war on the climate emergency, if correctly waged, would actually be good for the economy – just as the second world war set the stage for America’s golden economic era , with the fastest rate of growth in its history amidst shared prosperity
  • The Green New Deal would stimulate demand, ensuring that all available resources were used; and the transition to the green economy would likely usher in a new boom.
  • The biggest challenge will be marshalling the resources for the Green New Deal. In spite of the low “headline” unemployment rate, the United States has large amounts of under-used and inefficiently allocated resources.
  • The ratio of employed people to those of working age in the US is still low, lower than in our past, lower than in many other countries, and especially low for women and minorities
  • Together with better education and health policies and more investment in infrastructure and technology – true supply side policies – the productive capacity of the economy could increase, providing some of the resources the economy needs to fight and adapt to the climate breakdown.
  • Almost surely, however, there will have to be a redeployment of resources to fight this war just as with the second world war, when bringing women into the labor force expanded productive capacity but it did not suffice.
  • America is lucky: we have such a poorly designed tax system that’s regressive and rife with loopholes that it would be easy to raise more money at the same time that we increase economic efficiency. Taxing dirty industries, ensuring that capital pays at least as high a tax rate as those who work for a living, and closing tax loopholes would provide trillions of dollars to the government over the next 10 years, money that could be spent on fighting the climate emergency.
  • the creation of a national Green Bank would provide funding to the private sector for climate breakdown – to homeowners who want to make the high-return investments in insulation that enables them to wage their own battle against the climate crisis, or businesses that want to retrofit their plants and headquarters for the green economy
Javier E

Can Liberal Democracy Survive Social Media? | by Yascha Mounk | NYR Daily | T... - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...democracy-survive-social-media

democracy liberal social media myth politics

shared by Javier E on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • the basic deal that traditional elites offered to the people at the inception of our political system: “As long as you let us call the shots, we will pretend to let you rule.”
  • Today, that deal is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, and the reason is both unlikely and counterintuitive
  • Until a few decades ago, governments and big media companies enjoyed an oligopoly over the means of mass communication. As a result, they could set the standards of acceptable political discourse.
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  • In one of the most subtle early analyses of what he tellingly called “Liberation Technology,” Larry Diamond argued that new digital tools would empower “citizens to report news, expose wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest, monitor elections, scrutinize government, deepen participation, and expand the horizons of freedom.” Diamond’s article was published in the summer of 2010.
  • Twitter, Andrew Sullivan wrote in The Atlantic, had proven to be a “critical tool for organizing.” In twenty-first-century conflict, Nicholas Kristof echoed in The New York Times, “government thugs firing bullets” would increasingly come up against the resistance of “young protesters firing ‘tweets.’”
  • As Clay Shirky argued in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, even in longstanding democracies like the United States the power of digital technology made it much easier for activists to coordinate
  • thanks to Twitter, Donald Trump did not need the infrastructure of traditional media outlets. Instead, he could tweet messages directly to his millions of followers. Once he had done so, established broadcasters faced a stark choice: ignore the main subject of conversation and make themselves irrelevant—or discuss each tweet at length, thereby amplifying Trump’s message even as they ostensibly scrutinized it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they chose the latter course of action.
  • Breathless claims about digital technology’s liberating potential turned into equally breathless prognostications of doom. Social media was declared the most dangerous foe of liberal democracy.
  • The truth about social media is not that it is necessarily good or bad for liberal democracy. Nor is it that social media inherently strengthens or undermines tolerance.
  • On the contrary, it is that social media closes the technological gap between insiders and outsiders.
  • At times, this meant marginalizing passionate critics of the status quo—and thus making it harder for the weak and powerless to make their voices heard. At other times, it meant declining to publish conspiracy theories, outright lies, or racist rants—and thus stabilizing liberal democracy
  • The credibility of those claims depends on what they are compared to. So long as the memory of absolute monarchy was recent, and a more directly democratic system seemed unfeasible, liberal democracies could claim to empower the people.
  • One response has been to put pressure on Twitter and Facebook to change their algorithms and enforce stricter community guidelines; this is the tack that most tech critics have taken in the United State
  • Another response has been to limit what can be said on social media platforms by coercive legislation; this is the stance that European governments have adopted, with remarkable speed.
  • it seems at least as plausible to think that Americans won’t be willing to compromise on their First Amendment rights; that they will decamp to more freewheeling alternatives if existing social media platforms are tamed; and, indeed, that more subtle, yet no less powerful, forms of hate will continue to spread on existing platforms even if its most outrageous manifestations are suppressed.
  • There is, then, a very real possibility that the rise of digital technology, and the concomitant spread of essentially costless communication, have set up a direct clash between two of our most cherished values: freedom of speech and the stability of our political system.
  • the challenge is even more fundamental.
  • Rather, the daily experience of liking and sharing posts on social media may habituate users to a simulated form of direct democracy that makes the existing institutions of representative democracy appear intolerably outmoded.
  • Could digital natives—reared on the direct efficacy of social media—simply be less willing to tolerate the slow, indirect workings of analogue institutions designed in the eighteenth century?
  • And might they therefore be more resistant to accepting the democratic myth that has long underwritten the stability of the American Republic?
  • The political systems of countries like Great Britain and the United States were founded not to promote, but to oppose, democracy; they only acquired a democratic halo in retrospect, thanks to more recent claims that they allowed the people to rule.
  • the rise of the Internet and social media is making the ideological foundation of liberal democracy—which has had a tight hold over our imagination for the better part of two centuries—look increasingly brittle.
  • This held true for the century or so during which democracy enjoyed an unprecedented ideological hegemony. In the age of the Internet, it no longer does. As a result, the democratic myth that helped to make our institutions look uniquely legitimate is losing its hold.
  • The undemocratic roots of our supposedly democratic institutions are clearly on display in Great Britain. Parliament was not designed to put power in the hands of the people; it was a blood-soaked compromise between a beleaguered monarch and the upper echelons of the country’s elite
  • Because the US was founded in a more ideologically self-conscious manner, the same history is even more evident here. For the Founding Fathers, the election of representatives, which we have come to regard as the most democratic way to translate popular views into public policy, was a mechanism for keeping the people at bay
  • In short, the Founding Fathers did not believe a representative republic to be second best; they found it far preferable to the factious horrors of a true democracy.
  • It was only in the nineteenth century, as egalitarian sentiment rose on both sides of the Atlantic, that a set of entrepreneurial thinkers began to dress an ideologically self-conscious republic up in the unaccustomed robes of a born-again democracy.
  • Only gradually did the US make real improvements to its democratic process.
  • And crucial to that transformation was a story about the limits of democratic governance under modern conditions.
  • In ancient Athens, so the story went, the people—or at least those who were regarded as the people, which is to say adult male citizens—could rule directly because there were relatively few of them, because the territory of the state was so small, and because they had leisure to govern since so many of them owned slaves who took care of their daily needs
  • As John Adams noted, the people “can never act, consult, or reason together, because they cannot march five hundred miles, nor spare the time, nor find a space to meet.” In industrial nations that expanded over a huge territory direct democracy was thought to be impossible.
  • While representative institutions had been founded in ideological opposition to democracy, they were now re-described as the closest instantiation of that ideal possible under modern conditions. Thus, the founding myth of liberal-democratic ideology—the improbable fiction that representative government would facilitate the rule of the people—was born.
  • we have not even started to address the issue of how to make the democratic promise of our political system ring true for a new generation.
  • or a long century, the founding myth of liberal democracy retained sufficient footing in reality to keep a deep hold over the popular imagination, and help one political system conquer half the globe. But that basis is now crumbling
  • With the advent of the Internet, John Adams’s worry about the people’s inability to deliberate together has come to seem quaint
  • The physical agora of ancient Athens could be replaced by a virtual agora that would allow millions to debate and vote on policy proposals with even greater ease. As a result, citizens now have a much more instinctive sense that our democratic institutions are highly mediated.
  • They know that if we wanted to design a system of government that truly allowed the people to rule, it would not look much like the representative democracy of today.
  • The rise of the Internet and social media has thus created a giant mismatch between the direct efficiency of our digital lives and the cumbersome inefficiency of our formal institutions—and that has accentuated the contrast between our system’s promise to let the people rule and the reality that the people rarely feel as though they can have a real impact on the most important decisions facing their country
  • The Internet threatens to end the hegemony of liberal democracy not only by amplifying the voice of a small band of haters and extremists, but also by alienating a much larger number of digital natives from the decidedly analogue institutions by which they are governed.
  • We have only just begun to face up to the first big corrosive influence of digital technology on our politics: the way in which social media has helped to mainstream extremists
  • We’re only beginning to understand how we can stop vast platforms like Facebook and Twitter from spreading hate and fake news—and whether that will even prove possible without sacrificing constitutive elements of our political system
  • The rising tide of egalitarian sentiment during the nineteenth century should, by rights, have come into conflict with a set of avowedly aristocratic institutions. Instead, its fresh packaging gave the representative institutions of the United States and the United Kingdom a new lease on life. It pleased the elites who continued to get their way on the most important issues as much as it pleased the egalitarians who came to see it as a realization of their aspirations.
  • the widespread frustration with the state has less to do with excessive bureaucracy or overly cumbersome processes than it does with the underlying reality of the economy and the welfare state: what political scientists call the “performance legitimacy” of our political system has suffered from a combination of rising living costs, stagnating real wages, growing inequality, and dwindling social services.
  • More important, the real barrier to public participation in politics has always been interest, time, and expertise as much as it has been technology
  • Even if it were easy to weigh in, even vote, on every decision made at the local, county, state, and federal level, most citizens would hardly marshal the enthusiasm to be so intimately engaged with such a wide variety of questions of public policy.
  • Nor would most citizens miraculously develop the expertise to assess, for example, what kinds of regulations are needed to keep a power plant safe
  • A dozen years after the invention of Facebook, by contrast, the new technology has spread to every corner of the globe. Some two billion people actively use the platform.
  • there can be little doubt that, in the short run—which is to say, for the rest of our lives—it will make for a more chaotic world.
  • Unfettered by the constraints of the old media system, and buoyed by a growing popular cynicism about democracy’s promise, the demagogues have been willing to say whatever it takes to get elected—to flatter and deceive, to obfuscate, and even to incite hatred of their fellow citizens. Perhaps their rhetoric will prove to be unstoppable. As one state legislator recently pointed out to me, it is difficult for a rational politician to win a debate with a three-sentence answer when his rival is offering a one-sentence answer—especially when the other candidate can blast his simplistic take all over Twitter and Facebook.
  • All is not lost. But to revitalize liberal democracy in the digital age, it will not be enough to think carefully about how to enforce privacy rights or stifle the most hateful voices on the Internet. We must also think anew about how to fill the democratic promise with meaning for a new generation that has lost the belief in the democratic myth that long provided legitimacy for our political system.
Javier E

When to Wage War, and How to Win: A Guide - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-gaddis-on-grand-strategy.html

war history grand strategy strategy FDR arrogance humility

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • What is “grand strategy” as opposed to simple strategy?
  • It denotes encompassing all the resources that a state can focus — military, economic, political and cultural — to further its own interests in a global landscape.
  • wars — or rather how not to lose them — are the general theme of his often didactic book.
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  • Gaddis keeps pounding — to the point of monotony — the seemingly self-evident: The grand strategist must prune away emotion, ego and conventional wisdom to accept that “if you seek ends beyond your means, then sooner or later you’ll have to scale back your ends to fit your means.
  • Their implicit idea is to remind America’s future best and brightest how the mostly successful grand strategy of the past saw America become the pre-eminent world power of the 20th century by winning two world conflicts along with the Cold War.
  • The case studies are variously drawn from some 16 years of co-teaching a well-regarded seminar on “Studies in Grand Strategy” at Yale
  • Paul Kennedy’s edited “Grand Strategies in War and Peace,” Charles Hill’s “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order” and more recently Linda Kulman’s “Teaching Common Sense: The Grand Strategy Program at Yale University.”
  • His repetitious observation about proportionality might have been banal — if so many leaders, many of them geniuses, had not forgotten it
  • In contrast, the often arrogant neglect of grand strategic thinking has led to postwar quagmires, stalemates and the assorted misadventures that often drained American resources for either impossible or irrelevant aims, while tearing the country apart over the last 70 years.
  • The book is as much personal remembrance as strategic reflection, and is chock-full of aphorisms and enigmatic adages.
  • Gaddis believes the best way to hone strategic thinking is not just by mastering the advice of Machiavelli or Clausewitz (who both figure prominently in the class), much less contemporary high-tech wizardry, but also by understanding the interplay of history, literature and philosophy over 2,500 years of Western civilization — with occasional insights from Sun Tzu and other non-Western thinkers
  • In some sense “On Grand Strategy” is a traditional argument for the value of classical education in the broadest sense.
  • The student of strategy learns to balance a grasp of detail with proper humility: It is, of course, wise to have a plan and contingencies. But how will these prompt rival counter-responses? Do such agendas have the means adequate for their ends? Or are they more dreams, warped by ego and emotion
  • A recurrent theme is the danger of omnipresent hubris. Even a great power cannot master the unexpected and uncontrollable — from the great plague at Athens, to the harsh Russian winter, to I.E.D.s and tribal factionalism in Iraq
  • Understanding the underappreciated role of irony is essential for a leader, and might have prevented the disasters of both 415 B.C. and 1588.
  • Tolstoy and Clausewitz appreciated that bad things can come from good intentions and vice versa. The best generals live with and react to paradoxes, Gaddis argues. The worst ignore or seek to undo them.
  • Gaddis sees these more successful global strategists as rope-a-dope pragmatists who remain elastic and patient enough to capitalize on events and opportunities as they unfold, rather than forcing them to fit preconceived schemes.
  • Morality matters, if defined less as self-righteous ardor and more as self-awareness of a leader’s effect on those around him and an appreciation of paradox.
  • A pragmatic St. Augustine has no problem with war — if it is a last resort to save civilization, without which there can be neither calm nor organized religion.
  • Still, courting calculated risk is essential
  • The gambler Winston Churchill took chances in 1940, albeit rational ones backed by educated guesses that, for all Hitler’s bluster, the Third Reich had neither the air nor sea power to destroy the Anglosphere
  • Gaddis’s American heroes are Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who he thinks “rescued democracy and capitalism.”
  • Roosevelt somehow was cognizant early on of how the singular military and economic potential of America might save Europe and Asia, but only if he first prepared reluctant Americans materially and psychologically for the inevitable war to come
  • Gaddis concludes with an invaluable warning that true morality embraces neither messianic interventionism nor the quest for utopianism
  • Instead, ethical leadership pursues the art of the possible for the greater (not the greatest) good
  • With regard to the American 21st century, Gaddis’s favorite novelists and philosophers perhaps argue against both optional intercessions abroad and moralistic lead-from-behind recessionals. The better course is to marshal American power to prepare for the often unavoidable existential crises on the horizon, with the full expectation that we do not have to be perfect to be good.
  • “On Grand Strategy” is many things — a thoughtful validation of the liberal arts, an argument for literature over social science, an engaging reflection on university education and some timely advice to Americans that lasting victory comes from winning what you can rather than all that you want.
oliviaodon

A Week Around the World With The Atlantic - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...548795

news

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration published its National Security Strategy (NSS), a document meant to guide its foreign-policy vision. Thomas Wright argued that the document itself is coherent, but that its success depends on the bureaucracy’s ability to constrain the president to its vision.
  • “We are not the kind to be afraid or to bow down. Our struggle is a struggle for the soul of this country. We will never back down,”
  • “In a single blinding moment, I recognized the fragility of not just life but the human experience itself.”
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  • How a Secretive Police Squad Racked Up Kills in Duterte's Drug War, by Clare Baldwin and Andrew R.C. Marshall, is a special report that delves into the story of a secret police squad in the Philippines, part of Batasan Station, whose officers were on the front lines of President Duterte’s war on drugs. (Via Reuters)
manhefnawi

Jerome Bonaparte: King of Westphalia | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...rome-bonaparte-king-westphalia

Napoleonic Era Germany France Political

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  • In October 1812, Napoleon, conqueror of an empty and fire-blackened Moscow, pondered retreat. In Cassel, his youngest brother Jerome, King of Westphalia, had problems too
  • the King’s army would have done its work but for the disobedience of his corps commanders, especially General Reynier; secondly, that Jerome was dismissed before Napoleon knew the effect of his alleged failure; thirdly, that Jerome delayed leaving Warsaw because he was still playing the political role for which he had really been brought to Poland
  • even if Napoleon re-established the Kingdom, the Poles would insist on a Polish lung.2 This settled, Jerome turned to his military duties
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  • After Jerome arrived, Napoleon appointed an ambassador to Warsaw, and sponsored the re-establishment of the Polish Confederation. All signs seemed to point to the resurrection of the Kingdom of Poland, with Jerome on the throne. In mid-June, while his army moved forward roughly on schedule, Jerome remained in Warsaw to confer with Prince Adam Czartoryski,1 head of the Confederation
  • For a country with a basically agricultural economy, and a population of only two million, this was a heavy burden. To make matters worse, Napoleon established tax-free Imperial fiefs within the Kingdom, and demanded extraordinary contributions from time to time
  • Napoleon intended Westphalia to be a model state, one that the other members of the Rheinbund might admire and copy. In many respects it so became, and perhaps would have fully become, had not Napoleon himself wrecked its finances
  • Napoleon had planned all along that the experienced and skilful Marshal would command the right wing
  • With most of his troops serving Napoleon in Austria, he found himself faced by what might have become a serious uprising, led by Colonel Dornberg, late of the King’s own Guard. Five thousand men marched on Cassel, where Jerome had only fifteen hundred Guardsmen, almost all Westphalians
  • Napoleon gave him minor commands during the 1806-1807 campaign in Germany and Poland, from which he emerged a Major-General. Then, in July 1807, the Tilsit treaties recognized the new Kingdom of Westphalia; and Jerome, duly married to Catherine of Württemberg in August, entered Cassel in December
  • Your Kingdom is without police, without finances, without organization,” wrote the Emperor in April 1809
  • Though Napoleon refused Jerome any important command, some Westphalians fought with the Emperor to the end
  • A good part of Jerome’s Guard voluntarily saw him safely across the Rhine. Jerome returned to fight at Waterloo, and lived to see his nephew, Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. The descendants of his son by Elizabeth Patterson were prominent in the United States until the line became extinct in 1945. is perhaps just that the great-great-grandson of Jerome and his sturdy, gentle Catherine is the Bonapartist pretender in 1964.
manhefnawi

Louis XII: Medieval King or Renaissance Monarch? | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...al-king-or-renaissance-monarch

Louis XII Monarch France Renaissance Medieval Political Kingship 1500

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  • Early in the afternoon of April 7th, 1498, Charles VIII of France escorted his queen, Anne of Brittany, to an antiquated gallery at his chateau of Amboise, to watch a game of tennis
  • After the travails of Valois France during the Hundred Years War and the kingdom's subsequent recovery under Charles VII and Louis XI, few magnates any longer felt inclined to contest the title of a mature heir apparent.
  • Louis himself had been brought up in relatively impecunious circumstances, thanks partly to the antipathy of the late Louis XI towards him and his house. There were nobles who had felt that the ruler's treatment of them and their kind as well as his alleged general misgovernment warranted conspiracy and even revolt against him. Although Louis d'Orleans had been far too young to engage in that reign's most concerted expression of magnate resentment, the War of the Public Weal, he had rationalised in comparable terms his own behaviour under Charles VIII.
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  • And in all this he had invoked a version of medieval constitutionalism rooted in feudal law: that, regardless of the will of Louis XI, it was his right with his fellow princes to control the royal council and to exercise powers of regency during Charles VIII's minority
  • Such judgements spring partly from the impact of French incursions upon Italy itself, closely followed as they were by interventions from a Spain newly unified under its Catholic kings.
  • 'For France', according to Henri Lapeyre, 'a new destiny opened with the expedition of Charles VIII'. And according to Roger Doucet, although 'neither Charles VIII nor Louis Xll had any great gifts of government', during their reigns 'a great change took place, a change which may be regarded as a transformation of the monarchical system itself'
  • Whilst noblemen languished in rural penury or occupied themselves with court intrigues, the monarch held sway through the agency of his new men over a territory which, thanks not least to the acquisition of Brittany, was more unified under the Crown than ever before
  • So some jurists and humanists were ready to avow; and in propagating the ideology of monarchy, scholars were joined by artists who gave it visual expression through images pregnant with symbolism
  • On Louis XII's council nobles continued, as they had under his immediate predecessors, to rub shoulders with members of commoner extraction
  • Feudal independence might be long since gone; royal policy might no longer be susceptible to the dictates of magnate coalitions, as Louis d'Orleans had discovered to his cost. But royal resources and royal government remained very much the preserve of oligarchs amongst whom the nobility more than held their own
  • When economic recovery eventually got under way, hard on the heels of military revival under Charles VII, the conditions for reconstituting noble fortunes were not automatically restored
  • A notable instance is the house of La Tremoille, based mainly in western France, whose income from all sources fell by two-thirds between the end of the fourteenth century and the death of Louis XI, only to rise within two generations beyond its former level, owing not least to the efforts and system of estate-management developed by Louis II de La Tremoille, head of his house under Louis XII
  • Louis II de La Tremoille took care to cultivate royal favour. His distinguished service to Charles VIII in the wars of the 1480s which Louis d'Orleans helped to precipitate did not prevent his enjoying the patronage of the latter, once king
  • The phenomenon is obscured by the prominence in public affairs of some of Louis XII's best-known servants.
  • Personal secretary in due course to Louis XII, Robertet held numerous fiscal offices and married into the circle of Tours-based financiers upon whom successive monarchs relied to find them funds
  • and towards the 'absolutism' of the following centuries. Its formation, we are assured, was at least in some degree the achievement of Louis XII, for all that ruler's personal deficiencies and youthful waywardness
  • Confronted with economic difficulties, the nobles of Renaissance France rallied to the service of the Crown and were rewarded accordingly. What the kingdom experienced, in Bernard Chevalier's view, was 'not the rise of the bourgeoisie, but the triumph of the nobility'
  • Apanage after apanage had reverted to the Crown while, under Louis XII, the princes of the blood happened to be unusually young and the heads of other major dynasties to be preoccupied with affairs in their lands on the fringes of the kingdom
  • The most sensational domestic episode of Louis XII’s reign was the fall of one of his principal councillors and commanders, the notoriously grasping Marshal de Gie, accused in 1504 of crimes amounting to treason, owing in good measure to the machinations of the queen and her associates against him. Yet such incidents were exceptional
  • So much is evident from the legislative record of Louis XII's reign
  • Despite his advocacy of the role of the Estates-General under his predecessor, only once, in 1506, did Louis XII convene that assembly, and on that occasion as a device to extricate himself from a dilemma in his foreign affairs
  • Louis XII issued his most ambitious legislative act within his first regnal year: the ordinance of Blois on the 'justice and police' of the realm.
  • Shortly before his death Charles VIII had declared 'that there is no more clear and evident proof of custom than that which is made by the common agreement and consent of the Estates' of the relevant communities. Louis XII proceeded in a similar spirit, dispatching commissioners from his sovereign courts to consult with such Estates and so to record their customs in written form
  • The Renaissance monarchy as exemplified by Louis XII was aristocratic in its complexion, consultative in its methods and also, in a sense, popular. The reputation for benignity with which Du Moulin credited him echoed the appellation which the Estates-General of 1506 plucked from classical precedent to confer upon this monarch. Louis was the 'father of the people'; much later, the citizens of eighteenth-century Paris would remember him aw such when trying to rouse their king Louis XVI to a livelier sense of monarchical duty.
  • o far as the extant evidence will allow historians to judge, the average annual yield of direct taxation in his reign was significantly less than in Charles VIII's, and Iess than one half of Louis XI's demands in the early 1480s
  • How, then, are we to account for beliefs that Renaissance monarchy as exemplified in this reign paved the way for the authoritarianism and splendour associated with 'absolute' monarchy in the following centuries? The answer scarcely lies in the personal attributes of Louis XII
  • Despite – or because of – his excesses, he failed to beget a legitimate heir. His ultimate attempts to do so provoked ribaldry a good deal more overt than the rumours and suspicions that had accompanied his succession to the throne. Nine months after the death of Anne of Brittany in January 1514, Louis, in his fifty-third year, married Mary Tudor, teenage sister of Henry VIII of England
  • Exactly twelve weeks after his wedding, Louis XII died
  • But the impact of monarchy and interpretations of its nature did not depend upon the physical capabilities of its incumbent. The king had two bodies. Whatever the frailty of his body natural, his body mystical, epitome of the realm itself, existed before him and did not perish with his death
  • Under Louis XII, however, such propaganda reached fresh heights, with some infusion of new themes often of Italian inspiration, but above all through intensified and diversified use of traditional symbolism whereby artists and scholars cultivated portentous images of monarchy
  • Replete with time-honoured allusions, such images proliferated to an exceptional degree in the reign of Louis XII. They obliterated all impressions of the questionable character of Louis d'Orleans and his suspect biological antecedents. They elevated royal power to divine status. And they contributed significantly to clear the ground for the growth of the ideology of absolutism to full flower in the era of the Sun King
manhefnawi

Battle of Poltava | Summary | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Battle-of-Poltava

Russia Sweden Peter I Charles XII

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  • Battle of Poltava, (8 July 1709), the decisive victory of Peter I the Great of Russia over Charles XII of Sweden in the Great Northern War
  • In spite of his previous success against the Russians, Charles XII had not been able to challenge Moscow
  • Although he recovered, he was unable to lead his army in person. Command was transferred to Field Marshal Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld and General Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt
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  • the Swedish army had ceased to exist. Charles managed to flee southward to the Ottoman Empire, where he spent five years in exile. Poltava was a major turning point. Russia could now dominate the Polish and Baltic lands without any Swedish opposition, and Peter became the leading ruler in the region
manhefnawi

The Spanish Blue Division | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...spanish-blue-division

Russia Soviet Union Second World War Germany Military

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  • ‘Russia is guilty,’ declared the Spanish Foreign Minister.
  • Only twelve volunteers remained. Hitler was impressed. He called the Spaniards ‘the only virile Latin race’
  • Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the U.S.S.R., had been launched with the hope of quick victory
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  • Francisco Franco Bahamonde, Caudillo and dictator of Spain, needed a general. Carefully balancing the two bulwarks of his regime - Falange and Army- he selected an old comrade from the Moroccan campaigns, General Agustin Munoz Grandes, then Commandant of the garrison opposite Gibraltar
  • He was again turning his eyes towards Gibraltar
  • Without Franco’s approval, he would find it difficult to cross their homeland in order to take Gibraltar
  • Guilty of our Civil War... of the murder of our brothers and sisters... The destruction of Communism is a necessary condition for the survival of a free and civilized Europe
  • As the German front swayed and the Führer sacked generals by the score, his admiration for the iron-willed Munoz Grandes grew
  • General Emilio Esteban Infantes reported to the Reich in June 1942, but Munoz Grandes was already planning to turn his glory into political capital at home. He sought and was granted an interview with Hitler
  • employ the Spaniards in a new offensive to storm the Russian barricades
  • Field Marshal von Manstein, with the Blue Division in his van, was preparing to smash through the Leningrad perimeter when, suddenly, the Red Army pre-empted his attack. By November, General Sir Bernard Montgomery had struck at El Alamein, the Allies had landed in North Africa, Stalingrad was encircled by the Russians, and von Manstein hurried south to the rescue. The Leningrad offensive was stillborn. In December, a disappointed Munoz Grandes headed home for a triumphal reception, while Esteban Infantes took over the Blue Division
  • he urgently needed the Blue Division at full strength to achieve his diplomatic goals
  • The Blue Division was a counter in the Caudillo’s game. If Hitler had won, Spain would have been an ally. As the Third Reich collapsed, the guripas were pulled home, and the franquista state acknowledged them only as anti-Communist volunteers, who had proved to the Führer that Spaniards would fight, even should he reach through their homeland to Gibraltar
manhefnawi

Return of the King: The Bourbon Restoration | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...eturn-king-bourbon-restoration

France Monarch Restoration Europe Napoleon Louis XVIII

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  • On June 18th, the Battle of Waterloo brought to an end Napoleon's attempted comeback in the Hundred Days
  • At this point, two centuries ago, the victorious Allies – Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia – would determine the fate of France
  • The Austrian chancellor, Metternich, came from Vienna, Tsar Alexander from St Petersburg and, from Berlin, the 72-year-old Prussian Marshal Blücher
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  • Since both the republican and imperial models were discredited and unacceptable to the victorious Allies, a royal restoration was inevitable; Wellington warned that there would be no peace in Europe unless the Bourbons mounted the throne again. The Congress of Vienna, held to define European frontiers after two decades of war, reversed Napoleon's conquests but was otherwise generous to France
  • The new monarch, Louis XVIII, had made a poor fist of it on his first return from exile in Britain in May 1814. He surrounded himself with appointees who had been out of government business for more than two decades and the first restoration was brought to an abrupt end by the Hundred Days. Louis fled once more, to return three weeks after Waterloo
  • Louis Stanislas Xavier Bourbon, grandson of Louis XV and brother of Louis XVI, became heir to the throne when Louis' son died in prison in 1795
  • If France is still France, it is thanks to the Russians
  • Ignoring the king's desire for national unity, royalists in various parts of the country exacted their revenge for events since the Revolution of 1789
  • The Allies imposed financial indemnities on an economy that had been weakened by the demands of Napoleon's constant war-making and the effects of the British naval blockade
  • At the end of November 1815 a white-faced Richelieu signed the definitive peace agreement dictated by the Allies, lamenting that 'all is finished (by) this fatal treaty'
  • Russia, Prussia and Austria proclaimed their Holy Alliance and Britain joined them in the Quadruple Alliance
  • Then came 15 years wandering around Europe, including two in remote Courland in the Baltic, after which he came to rest for seven years in England
  • France was on its way to being re-integrated into the European system. This reflected the country's continental importance; Europe could not function without it. The path to national recovery was faster than might have been expected in the summer of 1815
  • the Hexagon between the Alps and the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Channel could no longer aspire to dominate Europe as it had sought to do under Louis XIV and Bonaparte
Javier E

Trump's 'Animals' Remark Is Threatening to Immigrants - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...560762

dehumanization animals trump immigrants

shared by Javier E on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • “It took an animal to stab a man 100 times and decapitate him and rip his heart out,” Sanders said, referring to the case of an unidentified man killed in the Washington, D.C., suburbs in 2017. “Frankly I think the term ‘animal’ doesn’t go far enough, and I think that the president should continue to use his platform and everything he can do under the law to stop these types of horrible, horrible disgusting people.”
  • There’s a certain moral clarity to these kinds of comments that allows them to be wielded as incredibly effective weapons, both in mobilizing support and in kneecapping opponents.
  • People who oppose this straightforward moral assessment are cast as either misconstruing the speaker or choosing to defend monsters. In this brutally simplistic worldview, one must either side with the “animals” or the humans sent to contain them.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • there are policy and human-rights implications to what the president says and does. Dehumanizing rhetoric is a powerful real-world tool, especially when it’s coming from the president of the United States.
  • As with his remarks on Wednesday, it’s unclear whether Trump was referring specifically to gang members or to undocumented immigrants as a whole. This ambiguity could perhaps be chalked up to the president’s imprecise speech, but it’s connected to real policy. This unclarity is a key mechanism in the federal government’s targeting of immigrants across the country.
  • In 2017, ICE arrested and detained Daniel Ramirez Medina, a young undocumented immigrant who’d been shielded from deportation by enrolling in the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. ICE tried to strip him of his protected status and deport him, all because they claimed a tattoo of his birthplace proved his affiliation with a gang. According to criminal-justice and immigration advocates, the number of MS-13 arrests is inflated by these flimsy cases. In the Ramirez case, a federal judge criticized ICE for lying even in the court of law about Ramirez’s affiliation, saying the “agency [offered] no evidence to this Court to support its assertions.”
  • According to The Marshall Project, immigrants only have to meet some very loose criteria in order to fall into the gang dragnet, including hanging out where gang members usually frequent or being labeled as a gang member by a “reliable source,” such as a teacher.
  • the treatment of individuals caught up in the dragnet—from frigid detention centers to the separation of mothers from children—certainly still resembles what might be reserved for animals.
  • the combination of draconian rhetoric and the elision of nuance between real and perceived criminal elements is a crux of how racism has worked for centuries in this country and around the world.
  • “superpredator” originates as a zoological term for apex predatory animals—to mobilize massive public support for new criminal-justice policies and provide a moral high ground to marginalize any opponents.
  • any reasonable assessment of mass incarceration in black America will show that the damage has long been done. In Illinois, for example, over 80 percent of juveniles sentenced to life without parole under the superpredator dragnet were minorities. Driven to bloodlust against an ill-defined population of black youths made to be less than human, America strained against the Constitution and the basic precepts of human rights to stamp out a threat—based on a theory that has since been discredited.
  • The true peril of Trump’s comments on Wednesday is this: that the state will be further empowered to suspend human rights.
  • Dehumanization is not just a buzzword, but a descriptor of a specific and well-known psychological and sociological process, by which people are conditioned to accept inflicting increasingly inhumane conditions and punishments on other people
  • dehumanization means both a broadening of what’s acceptable and just who is unacceptable.
  • The most likely outcome of Trump’s “animals” rhetoric isn’t a return to some mythological Pax Americana, as his supporters might suggest. Quite the opposite: It could fuel more informing on neighbors, more regular harassment for people of color, a deeper and wider dragnet, and an increased acceptance of brutality and extralegal practices. That’s what happens when people stop being people.
manhefnawi

France - France in the early 17th century | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...ance-in-the-early-17th-century

Henry IV Strengthens the Monarchy

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  • The restoration of royal authority was not, of course, simply a matter of adjusting theories of kingship; there was a clear practical reason for Henry’s success. The country had tottered on the brink of disintegration for three decades. By the time of Henry’s succession, it was generally recognized that only a strong personality, independent of faction, could guarantee the unity of the state, even though unity meant religious toleration for the Protestant minority. In the Edict of Nantes (April 13, 1598) Henry guaranteed the Huguenots freedom of conscience and the right to practice their religion publicly in certain prescribed areas of the country.
  • Although the problem of religion was not finally settled by the Edict of Nantes, Henry did succeed in effecting an extended truce during which he could apply himself to the task of restoring the royal position
  • The chief need of the monarchy was to improve the financial situation, parlous since the days of Henry II’s wars and aggravated by the subsequent internecine conflict.
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  • Sully was not an original financial thinker. He undertook no sweeping changes, contenting himself with making the existing system work, for example, by shifting the emphasis from direct to indirect taxation. He succeeded in building both an annual surplus and substantial reserves.
  • the introduction in 1604 of a new tax, the paulette, named after the financier Charles Paulet, which enabled officiers (officeholders) to assure the heritability of their offices by paying one-sixtieth of the purchase price each year.
  • Henry IV believed in direct state intervention, and he took steps to fix wages and to prohibit strikes and illegal combinations of workmen. Henry’s policies bore fruit especially in the textile industries, where the production of luxury silk goods and woolen and linen cloth greatly increased. Henry also took the initiative in making commercial treaties with Spain and England, thereby increasing the volume of French trade and stimulating the export of grain, cattle, and wine.
  • he was able to prevent them from once more dividing his kingdom.
  • He did have to counter a conspiracy led by one of his own marshals, Charles de Gontaut, baron et duc de Biron, who plotted with the king of Spain and almost succeeded in raising southwestern France in revolt. Henry, however, had Biron arrested and executed in 1602; this strong action against an old friend and powerful enemy had the effect of subduing the political rising and strengthening Henry’s own authority.
  • When Henry IV was assassinated by François Ravaillac, a Catholic fanatic, in May 1610, he had gone a long way toward restoring the monarchy to a position of authority similar to that held by Francis I and Henry II and had reunified a state greatly threatened at his accession from both within and without.
manhefnawi

Charles William Ferdinand of Brunswick | Prussian noble | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...William-Ferdinand-of-Brunswick

7 Years War William V of Orange French Revolution Frederick III

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  • Distinguishing himself in the Seven Years’ War, which involved the struggle for supremacy in Germany between Austria and Prussia, he became Frederick the Great’s favourite.
  • Made a Prussian field marshal in 1787, Charles defeated the Dutch democratic Patriots in a campaign that returned the stadtholder William V of Orange to power. His reputation as a field commander established, Charles in 1792 reluctantly accepted command of the Prussian army against Revolutionary France.
  • Only reluctantly did he sign the punitive “manifesto” drafted by an émigré, which warned that Paris would be subjected to exemplary punishment if Louis XVI and his family were harmed
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The next year he defeated the French several times in Germany, but he retired after incessant quarrels with King Frederick William III.
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