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Javier E

Soviet history: Stalin and his cursed cause | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...68-stalin-and-his-cursed-cause

stalin historiography

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Unlike other biographies that have focused on the most sensational episodes in the dictator’s life, it sets Stalin firmly in the historical context: the rise (and eventual fall) of what the author calls the “Red Empire”.
  • Where Stalin excelled, again and again, was in ruthlessness and attention to detail. He paid minute attention to extending Soviet rule in places conquered at the war’s end. He took great interest in details of science and cultural policy, fearing even the faintest breach in communist omniscience.
  • It is also a worthy successor to his “Lenin, Stalin, Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe” (2008), which compared and contrasted the three monsters.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Mr Gellately’s latest work has a good claim to be the best single-volume account of the darkest period in Russian history.
  • For all the havoc he wreaked on the countryside, Stalin knew next to nothing about it (he seems to have visited farms only once, in 1928).
  • Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman failed to grasp their counterpart’s malevolence. Winston Churchill made casual deals that consigned millions of people to slavery and torment. The foreigners thought Stalin was a curmudgeonly ally to be coaxed and cajoled. He treated them as enemies to be outwitted. Far from provoking Stalin into unnecessary hostility, the Western powers were not nearly tough enough.
Javier E

Unusual Flavor of G.O.P. Primary Illustrates a Famous Paradox - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ustrates-a-famous-paradox.html

social choice theory politics paradox political choice economics theory

shared by Javier E on 09 May 16 - No Cached
  • The failure of democracy to provide a coherent ranking of political hopefuls is a central insight of the sub-field of economics and political science known as social choice theory.
  • The issue is neatly illustrated by Condorcet’s paradox, which shows that a shifting set of coalitions can make a collective body appear that it has no idea what it wants.
  • the will of the people is an incoherent concept
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  • The problem is not that individual voters are clueless; in this story, they’re not. Even if each individual voter is rational and knows what he or she wants, the electorate as a whole can act as if it were clueless and can’t decide. Individually rational choices don’t necessarily add up to collectively rational choices.
  • The Marquis Condorcet, a French mathematician of the second half of the 18th century, showed how a majority-rule vote can lead to incoherent collective choices.
  • But Kenneth Arrow, the economics Nobel laureate, showed in his 1951 doctoral thesis that the problem runs far deeper than anyone had imagined. Mr. Arrow’s famous “impossibility theorem” says that there is no mechanism that can coherently speak for the will of the people.
  • Loosely speaking, this extraordinary result says that any mechanism that aims to speak for the will of the people — that is not a dictatorship — will be susceptible to at least one of three defects.
  • The first possible defect is the problem the marquis illustrated — the problem of preference cycles.
  • The second possible defect is that voters will make choices that suggest that the addition of irrelevant alternatives leads them to change their mind
  • The third possibility is that even when each voter individually prefers chocolate ice cream to vanilla, that somehow collectively the voters will choose vanilla instead.
  • Mr. Arrow’s impossibility theorem suggests that maybe the Republican primary results say less about the desires of Republican voters than they do about tensions inherent in groups of people collectively deciding what to do
  • Economic theorists have also pointed to a reason that the modern G.O.P. may be particularly susceptible to making strange choices. If disagreements between voters are simple enough — such as when some want more liberal policies and others more conservative policies — simple majority rule won’t suffer any of the defects that concerned Mr. Arrow
  • Republicans disagree both about the desirability of conservative versus moderate policies and on the need for an outsider or an establishment leader. This extra complexity is too much for democracy to bear, again raising the possibility of collective madness even in the face of individual rationality.
  • The point isn’t that democracy is bad; merely that it’s imperfect. And so even if this theorem points to the impossibility of a truly rational democracy, it doesn’t mean that the alternatives are any better. As Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
aqconces

Barack Obama's Hiroshima trip stirs debate on Harry Truman's fateful choice - ABC News ... - 0 views

www.abc.net.au/...7422086

barack obama hiroshima trip foreign policy

shared by aqconces on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • Barack Obama's visit to Hiroshima next week has reignited an emotive debate over former US president Harry Truman's epoch-making decision to drop the first atomic bomb
  • Within four months, the atomic bomb had been successfully tested, targets had been selected, "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing an estimated 214,000 people, and Japan's Emperor Hirohito had surrendered.
  • The speed, circumstances and repercussions of Truman's decision remain contentious.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • "When Mr Obama visits Hiroshima on May 27 he should place no distance between himself and Harry Truman," wrote Wilson Miscamble, a Notre Dame University history professor.
  • "Rather he should pay tribute to the president whose actions brought a terrible war to an end."
  • "I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act," he later wrote.
  • According to historian and biographer David McCullough, at that point not a single Japanese unit had surrendered during the war.
  • Meeting with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at Potsdam, the three leaders called for Tokyo to "surrender unconditionally" or face "prompt and utter destruction".
  • Within Truman's inner circle there were voices against using the bomb, including Dwight Eisenhower, the future president who was then a wartime general.
  • Japan showed no signs of surrender, despite heavy losses and a seemingly inevitable defeat.
  • Asked whether Mr Obama would make the same decision as Truman, aide and spokesman Josh Earnest said: "I think what the president would say is that it's hard to put yourself in that position from the outside."
  • "I think it's hard to look back and second-guess it too much."
Javier E

Magazine - Roberts's Rules - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...2

constitution law supreme court legal

shared by Javier E on 29 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Roberts added that in some ways he considered his situation—overseeing a Court that is evenly divided on important issues—to be ideal. “You do need some fluidity in the middle, [if you are going] to develop a commitment to a different way of deciding things.” In other words, on a divided Court where neither camp can be confident that it will win in the most controversial cases, both sides have an incentive to work toward unanimity, to achieve a kind of bilateral disarmament.
  • Marshall’s example had taught him, Roberts said, that personal trust in the chief justice’s lack of an ideological agenda was very important, and Marshall’s ability to win this kind of trust inspired him
  • “If I’m sitting there telling people, ‘We should decide the case on this basis,’ and if [other justices] think, ‘That’s just Roberts trying to push some agenda again,’ they’re not likely to listen very often,” he observed.
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  • Roberts said he intended to use his power to achieve as broad a consensus as possible. “It’s not my greatest power; it’s my only power,” he laughed. “Say someone is committed to broad consensus, and somebody else is just dead set on ‘My way or the highway. And I’ve got five votes, and that’s all I need.’ Well, you assign that [case] to the [consensus-minded] person, and it gives you a much better chance, out of the box, of getting some kind of consensus.”
  • He acknowledges that his undergraduate thesis at Harvard about the failure of the British Liberal Party in the Edwardian era may have reflected his early suspicion of the politics of personality. “My central thesis with respect to the Liberal Party was that they made a fatal mistake in investing too heavily in the personalities of Lloyd George and Churchill, as opposed to adopting a more broad-based reaction to the rise of Labour; that they were steadily fixated on the personalities.”
  • “You’re always trying to persuade people, obviously, as an advocate,” he said. “And I do find, I did find, that you can be generally more successful in persuading people, in arguing a case [when you] go in with something that you think has the possibility of getting seven votes rather than five. You don’t like going in thinking, ‘Here’s my pitch, and I’m honing it to get five votes.’ That’s a risky strategy,”
  • It is, whatever else, a fascinating personal psychology dynamic, to get nine different people with nine different views. It’s going to take some time,” he said. Some justices prefer arguments in writing, others are more receptive to personal appeals, and all react badly to heavy-handed orders. To lead such a strong-willed group requires the skills of an orchestra conductor, as Felix Frankfurter used to say—or of the extremely subtle and observant Supreme Court advocate that Roberts used to be.
  • Another reason for Rehnquist’s success as a chief justice, Roberts said, was his temperament—namely, that he knew who he was and had no inclination to change his views simply to court popularity. “That Scandinavian austerity and sense of fate and complication,” as Roberts put it, were important parts of Rehnquist’s character, as was his Lutheran faith. “It’s a significant and purposeful mode of worship to get up in the morning to do your job as best you can, to go to bed at night and not to worry too much about whether the best that you can do is good enough or not. And he didn’t: once a case was decided, it was decided, and if every editorial page in the country was going to trash it, he didn’t care.” Roberts said he associated Rehnquist with a certain midwestern stubbornness. “Anyone who clerked for him was familiar with him intoning the phrase, ‘Well, I’m just not going to do it.’” Here Roberts did a spot-on impersonation of Rehnquist’s deadpan drawl. “That meant that was the end of it, no matter how much you were going to try to persuade him. It wasn’t going to happen.”
  • “Politics are closely divided,” he observed. “The same with the Congress. There ought to be some sense of some stability, if the government is not going to polarize completely. It’s a high priority to keep any kind of partisan divide out of the judiciary as well.”
Javier E

Palo Alto train death opens fresh wound in a community searching for solutions - Contra... - 0 views

www.contracostatimes.com/...th-opens-fresh-wound-community

suicide silicon valley teen

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The boy's death happened at about 6:25 a.m. on the tracks just south of the city's Churchill Avenue, near the elegant century-old high school on an oak-studded Spanish Mission campus, directly across the street from Stanford University, in a ZIP code synonymous with success. Two student suicides earlier this school year at neighboring Gunn High School led to a flurry of community meetings and teen outreach, and the district has been working to overhaul its teen mental-health policies since a much-publicized cluster of student suicides in 2009.
  • the very life of the school district has been altered in ways large and small. Social studies classes start with meditation. Teachers and staff have been taught to help identify teens struggling with depression or in distress. The district is accelerating construction of a student wellness center at Gunn High School, where students can talk to counselors and mental health professionals and nutritionists to decompress.To reduce stress, the school district -- home to the progeny of top Stanford faculty and many of Silicon Valley's tech titans -- reformed its homework policy in 2012, but the plan was never fully implemented. Now it is back on the school board's agenda. The district also recently contracted with a data-analysis firm called Hanover Research Group to analyze homework, grading practices and curriculum.
  • Both Gunn and Paly have convened sessions to listen to students. A similar communitywide gathering was held last week, and another is scheduled. Teachers offer academic accommodations -- like not collecting homework, or delaying tests -- and Paly economics teacher Alexander Davis created a "Gratitude Wall" in his classroom for students to write what they are grateful for on sticky notes.Paly, many students say, is a place where teachers care about their well-being. But the causes of suicide are complex.The school offers an array of electives and resources. "There's journalism, glassblowing, theater -- there may be a little more pressure, but a lot more opportunity here," said senior Jack Brook. "People are happy when they find a passion, and there's a lot of opportunity to find a passion here."
Grace Gannon

For Polar Bears, a Climate Change Twist - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rs-a-climate-change-twist.html

climate change polar bears environment

shared by Grace Gannon on 22 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 22 Oct 14
     
    While climate change is evidently devastating for polar bear populations (as their habitats have diminished in size, becoming small rafts of ice, leaving less time for hunting their food of choice: seals), a surprisingly beneficial symptom of climate change has presented itself. Polar bears have adapted to eating snow geese, found in areas like the Cape Churchill peninsula; the large populations of snow geese allow the polar bears to have an abundance of food, eliminating the concern of being unable to hunt.
aqconces

How the Monuments Men Saved Italy's Treasures | History | Smithsonian - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...ved-italys-treasures-180948005

saved italy treasures history

shared by aqconces on 19 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • As Allied Forces fought the Nazis for control of Europe, an unlikely unit of American and British art experts waged a shadow campaign
  • It was the fall of 1943. A couple of months earlier, the Sicilian landings of July 10 had marked the beginning of the Allied Italian campaign.
  • The idea of safeguarding European art from damage was unprecedented in modern warfare.
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  • The brainchild of experts associated with American museums, the concept was embraced by President Roosevelt, who established the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas.
  • The commission assisted the War Department by providing maps of European cities and towns where significant monuments and religious sites were highlighted, to be used by bombing crews and commanders when planning operations.
  • In Britain, Prime Minister Churchill approved a parallel committee in the spring of 1944. Like all sections of the Allied military government, the MFAA would be composed nearly equally of American and British officers.
  • The commission selected a few enlisted men to serve in Italy with the Allied armies—MFAA ranks would increase to more than 80 as the war progressed across Europe and reached France, Austria and Germany—and charged them to report on and bring first aid to damaged buildings and art treasures, and indoctrinate troops on the cultural heritage of Italy.
  • The Italian campaign, predicted to be swift by Allied commanders, turned into a 22-month slog. The whole of Italy became a battlefield.
  • In Sicily, Monuments Officers encountered utter destruction in the main coastal towns, while the interior of the island, and its ancient Greek temples, were unscathed.
  • In December 1943, after repeated reports of Allied soldiers’ vandalism reached Supreme Headquarters, General Eisenhower addressed a letter to all Allied commanders. He warned his men not to use “the term ‘military necessity’...where it would be more truthful to speak of military convenience or even personal convenience.” Military necessity, Eisenhower insisted, should not “cloak slackness or indifference.”
qkirkpatrick

Lessons to be learned from how Britain handled a refugee crisis in 1914 | Letters | Wor... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ndled-a-refugee-crisis-in-1914

refugees crisis britain politics history culture

shared by qkirkpatrick on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Why did Robert Winder in his survey of refugees fleeing to Britain not include the closer parallel to today’s problem: that of Belgians coming in 1914
  • Estimates of 100,000 Belgians, mostly in family groups, and overwhelmingly coming in the three months of September to November 1914 were welcomed throughout Britain as victims of a war their government did not seek, and ours did little to avoid.
  • These families were welcomed in towns and villages by a spontaneously formed scattering of committees which raised cash, found empty houses, organised brass bands to greet them at railway stations.
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  • Leek housed more than 50 refugees in three different properties by Christmas 1914 and silk-mill workers led a fund-raising scheme which made over £2,500 by May 1916.
  • One very obvious observation is that in 1914 the government was slow and clumsy in its response to the flood of humanity. Churchill flatly rejected any idea of receiving them, and the Local Government Board had no part in distributing the families. This was done by volunteers
qkirkpatrick

How WWI was waged at sea deck - Washington Times - 0 views

www.washingtontimes.com/...20040313-103729-8239r

wwi navy politics history battle of Jutland

shared by qkirkpatrick on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • In “Dreadnought,” the reader is reminded that the author is a biographer at heart: His portraits of the young Winston Churchill; of the intense, eccentric Adm. Sir John “Jacky” Fisher; and of Germany’s ambitious Adm. Alfred von Tirpitz make for a riveting narrative.
  • The two great fleets had vastly different origins. The German fleet was the creation of an unstable monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who chose to compete for naval supremacy with the Royal Navy.
  • At sea as on land, World War I confounded the planners on both sides. The Germans anticipated a sea blockade, but thought that an enemy blockade close to their own coast would be vulnerable to sorties by their own warships.
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  • Instead, Britain instituted a remote blockade, declaring most of the North Sea a war zone and enforcing the blockade from a distance. Much of the war was passed in attempts by each side to lure the other into a naval ambush.
  • The climax of World War I at sea was the Battle of Jutland on May 31, 1916. There, in the North Sea off Denmark, a sortie by German battle cruisers led to the greatest naval battle of the last century, involving at one time or another more than 200 vessels, including 44 battleships.
  • The British lost more ships and men than their enemies in the resulting melee, in part because of the rugged construction of the German ships.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: America's New Religions - 0 views

nymag.com/...an-americas-new-religions.html

religion ideology American idea

shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.
  • By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).
  • Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer.
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  • “Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.” It exists because we humans are the only species, so far as we can know, who have evolved to know explicitly that, one day in the future, we will die. And this existential fact requires some way of reconciling us to it while we are alive.
  • This is why science cannot replace it. Science does not tell you how to live, or what life is about; it can provide hypotheses and tentative explanations, but no ultimate meaning
  • appreciating great art or music is ultimately an act of wonder and contemplation, and has almost nothing to say about morality and life.
  • Here’s Mill describing the nature of what he called “A Crisis in My Mental History”:
  • It is perfectly possible to see and record the absurdities and abuses of man-made institutions and rituals, especially religious ones, while embracing a way of life that these evil or deluded people preached but didn’t practice
  • Seduced by scientism, distracted by materialism, insulated, like no humans before us, from the vicissitudes of sickness and the ubiquity of early death, the post-Christian West believes instead in something we have called progress — a gradual ascent of mankind toward reason, peace, and prosperity — as a substitute in many ways for our previous monotheism
  • We have constructed a capitalist system that turns individual selfishness into a collective asset and showers us with earthly goods; we have leveraged science for our own health and comfort. Our ability to extend this material bonanza to more and more people is how we define progress; and progress is what we call meaning
  • But none of this material progress beckons humans to a way of life beyond mere satisfaction of our wants and needs. And this matters. We are a meaning-seeking species
  • Ditto history
  • religious impulses, once anchored in and tamed by Christianity, find expression in various political cults. These political manifestations of religion are new and crud
  • Russell, for his part, abandoned Christianity at the age of 18, for the usual modern reasons, but the question of ultimate meaning still nagged at him. One day, while visiting the sick wife of a colleague, he described what happened: “Suddenly the ground seemed to give away beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless.”
  • Our modern world tries extremely hard to protect us from the sort of existential moments experienced by Mill and Russell
  • Netflix, air-conditioning, sex apps, Alexa, kale, Pilates, Spotify, Twitter … they’re all designed to create a world in which we rarely get a second to confront ultimate meaning — until a tragedy occurs, a death happens, or a diagnosis strikes
  • Liberalism is a set of procedures, with an empty center, not a manifestation of truth, let alone a reconciliation to mortality. But, critically, it has long been complemented and supported in America by a religion distinctly separate from politics, a tamed Christianity
  • So what happens when this religious rampart of the entire system is removed? I think what happens is illiberal politics. The need for meaning hasn’t gone away, but without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction.
  • Will the house still stand when its ramparts are taken away? I’m beginning to suspect it can’t.  And won’t.
  • like almost all new cultish impulses, they demand a total and immediate commitment to save the world.
  • it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered: ‘No!’”
  • They are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided.
  • social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups
  • it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself.
  • “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin
  • To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.
  • many Evangelicals are among the holiest and most quietly devoted people out there. Some have bravely resisted the cult. But their leaders have turned Christianity into a political and social identity, not a lived faith, and much of their flock — a staggering 81 percent voted for Trump — has signed on. They have tribalized a religion explicitly built by Jesus as anti-tribal.
  • The terrible truth of the last three years is that the fresh appeal of a leader-cult has overwhelmed the fading truths of Christianity.
  • This is why they are so hard to reach or to persuade and why nothing that Trump does or could do changes their minds. You cannot argue logically with a religion
  • — which is why you cannot really argue with social-justice activists either
  • so we’re mistaken if we believe that the collapse of Christianity in America has led to a decline in religion. It has merely led to religious impulses being expressed by political cults.
  • both cults really do minimize the importance of the individual in favor of either the oppressed group or the leader
  • They demonstrate, to my mind, how profoundly liberal democracy has actually depended on the complement of a tolerant Christianity to sustain itself — as many earlier liberals (Tocqueville, for example) understood.
  • It is Christianity that came to champion the individual conscience against the collective, which paved the way for individual rights. It is in Christianity that the seeds of Western religious toleration were first sown. Christianity is the only monotheism that seeks no sway over Caesar, that is content with the ultimate truth over the immediate satisfaction of power. It was Christianity that gave us successive social movements, which enabled more people to be included in the liberal project, thus renewing i
  • The question we face in contemporary times is whether a political system built upon such a religion can endure when belief in that religion has become a shadow of its future self.
  • We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong. And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical
  • I think it was mainly about how the people of Britain shook off the moral decadence of the foreign policy of the 1930s, how, beneath the surface, there were depths of feeling and determination that we never saw until an existential crisis hit, and an extraordinary figure seized the moment.
  • how profoundly I yearn for something like that to reappear in America. The toll of Trump is so deep. In so many ways, he has come close to delegitimizing this country and entire West, aroused the worst instincts within us, fed fear rather than confronting it, and has been rewarded for his depravity in the most depressing way by everything that is foul on the right and nothing that is noble.
  • I want to believe in America again, its decency and freedom, its hostility, bred in its bones, toward tyranny of any kind, its kindness and generosity. I need what someone once called the audacity of hope.
  • I’ve witnessed this America ever since I arrived — especially its embrace of immigrants — which is why it is hard to see Trump tearing migrant children from their parents
  • But who, one wonders, is our Churchill? And when will he or she emerge?
Javier E

Opinion | Can a Horrible Boss Be a Great Leader? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...amy-klobuchar-staff.html

character boss management leadership

shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • On June 26, 1940, as Britain was girding for the onslaught of the Luftwaffe after the fall of France, Clementine Churchill wrote her husband, Winston, an admonishing note.
  • “There is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough, sarcastic and overbearing manner,” she warned the prime minister, who was otherwise preoccupied by the prospect of imminent Nazi invasion, a scheming foreign secretary, a restive backbench, and the absence of material support from the United States.
  • “I have noticed a deterioration in your manner, and you are not so kind as you used to be,” she continued. “It is for you to give the orders and if they are bungled — except for the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Speaker — you can sack anyone and everyone. Therefore with this terrific power you must combine urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm.”
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  • Clementine concluded by citing a French proverb, “One can reign over hearts only by keeping one’s composure.”
  • Winston got the message and found ways to make amends. As his private secretary, Jock Colville, later recalled, “When he was at No. 10 there was always laughter in the corridors, even in the darkest and most difficult times.”
  • it might have been lost if he hadn’t won the confidence and love of those who made the victory possible.
  • horrible bosses make for leadership failures, for reasons that should be obvious.
  • Office tantrums bespeak a broader absence of self-control
  • Suspiciousness undermines the trust necessary for effective leadership
  • High-handedness and jealousy drive away talent and ambition
  • Whatever else Americans may need in our next commander in chief, what we don’t need is an irascible executive running an administration along feudal lines, with the serfs made to pay the price. Calming the country requires calm at the top.
Javier E

The middle ground no longer exists over Brexit. It's all or nothing now | Andrew Rawnsl... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-brexit-its-all-or-nothing-now

brexit UK politics longer

shared by Javier E on 19 May 19 - No Cached
  • Whether she should have looked for a compromise much earlier will be a question that will detain historians. Their judgment will shape a lot of the verdict on Mrs May’s tortured premiership. She has been a member of the Conservative party all her adult life and anyone familiar with the party’s behaviour over the past three decades might have intuited that it would be impossible to unite Tories around any Brexit strategy.
  • A leader with more foresight than Mrs May could have worked that out and realised that the only way to manage it through the Commons was by building a cross-party majority. Had Mrs May begun Brexit by going to Brussels with a negotiating mandate pre-approved by parliament, she might have enhanced her clout with the EU as well as her chances of securing parliamentary agreement on the outcome.
  • Instead of trying to build a parliamentary consensus and seeking common ground between the 52% and the 48%, she chose to entrench divisions within the Commons and inflame them in the country by taking one side against the other
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  • When she failed to get the mandate for a hard Brexit that she sought at the 2017 election, she might have switched strategy and attempted to reach out to the opposition at that point. She instead doubled down on her original, fatal strategy and made herself a hostage of the DUP and the Tory ultras on her backbenches.
  • She is the product of a political culture that tends to emphasise the adversarial over the consensual. It is expressed in the architecture of a parliament that sits the two sides confronting each other.
  • This is especially true of a Tory party that reveres Margaret Thatcher above all its other leaders since Winston Churchill. The Conservative party is in love with the concept of the battling leader and rather disdains the idea of the healing leader.
  • Pressure is building within Labour for the party to take an unambiguous stand on the other side of the barricades and become an anti-Brexit party. That pressure will be increased when the Euros see large numbers of previous Labour voters desert the party for the Lib Dems, Greens and Change UK. If a general election hasn’t happened by September, Labour’s party conference is highly likely to force its reluctant leadership to make a no-qualifications commitment to a fresh referendum
  • The chances of this concluding with no Brexit or a no-deal Brexit are both rising sharply.
Javier E

Opinion | The Worst President Hails the Greatest Generation - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-d-day-freedom.html

WWII allies international relations history

shared by Javier E on 08 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • If we really wanted to honor the sacrifices of D-Day, we would do well to learn again what it is the Allies really fought for — not to save the United States or even Britain (which by 1944 could not be beaten) but to liberate Europe; not to defeat an aggressive nation-state but to eradicate a despicable ideology; not to enjoy the spoils as the victors but to lay the foundations of a just and enduring peace; not to subsume our values under our interests but to define our interests according to our values.
  • “The price of greatness is responsibility,” Winston Churchill told an audience at Harvard in 1943. The greatest generation was also the most responsible one. Will it be said of ours that we were the least?
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.
manhefnawi

1704: Blenheim, Gibraltar and the Making of a Great Power | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...braltar-and-making-great-power

Europe in 1700s Philip V of Spain War Succession Gibraltar British Military Marlborough General

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  • glories of Queen Anne’s reign (1702-14), ‘that short period of our History, which contains so many illustrious Actions
  • The most significant of these actions were in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13, Britain not involved until 1702), as the European powers jostled for control of the Spanish empire following the death of the last Spanish Habsburg king, Charles II, in 1700. On July 23rd, 1704, British naval forces captured Gibraltar and held out against Franco-Spanish attempts to regain it, while a few weeks later on August 13th, John Churchill, then Earl of Marlborough, heavily defeated a Franco-Bavarian army at Blenheim in Bavaria
  • The Blenheim campaign was crucial in preventing French hegemony in western Europe. Allied with Britain and the Dutch against France, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (r.1658-1705) was central to the struggle on the European mainland as his defeat would have allowed the French to dominate both Germany and northern Italy and to concentrate against the Anglo-Dutch efforts in the Low Countries and the lower Rhineland
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  • A combination of Louis XIV of France, the Elector of Bavaria, Max Emanuel, and Hungarian rebels, threatened to overthrow Leopold, and thus to end the Habsburg ability to counter-balance French power
  • These depots enabled the army to maintain cohesion and discipline, instead of having to disperse to obtain supplies
  • Marlborough had been more successful than his opponents in integrating cavalry and infantry; his cavalry were better trained for charging; and the artillery, under Colonel Holcroft Blood, manoeuvred rapidly on the battlefield, and was brought forward to help support the breakthrough in the centre
  • The victory ended the threat to Austria. Most of the Franco-Bavarian army was no longer effective after the battle and its subsequent retreat to the Rhine. The Allies followed up the battle with the conquest of southern Germany, as Bavaria was ‘taken out’ of the war, and took the major fortresses of Ulm, Ingolstadt and Landau before the close of the year. It was not until 1741 that French forces were again to campaign so far to the east – and later, and more seriously, in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when no British army marched to the Danube. In contrast, Marlborough’s advance into Germany had prepared the way for George II to campaign there in 1743, a campaign that culminated in another victory for the British and Austrians over the French at Dettingen, to the east of Frankfurt
  • Under Marlborough at Blenheim, the British army reached a peak of success that it was not to achieve again in Europe for another hundred years, until Wellington
  • Marlborough’s army was the most battle-hardened British army since those of the Civil Wars of the 1640s, but the armies of the Civil Wars had not been engaged in battles that were as extensive or sieges of positions that were as well fortified as those that faced Marlborough’s forces
  • The British in Gibraltar were now besieged on land by the French and the supporters of Philip V, but, as with the lengthy siege of Gibraltar by the Spaniards in 1780 during the American War of Independence, British fleet action proved crucial to the relief of the besieged garrison
  • As Marlborough was Master-General of the Ordnance as well as Captain-General of the Army, he was able to overcome any institutional constraints on co-operation between artillery and the rest of the army
  • Like Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the Thirty Years’ War seventy years earlier, Marlborough made his cavalry charge fast and act like a shock force, rather than as mounted infantry relying on pistol firepower
  • Marlborough went on to win other battles – notably Ramillies (1706), Oudenaarde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709) – but none had the dramatic impact of Blenheim, in part because that victory ended the danger that the anti-French alliance would collapse. But he also found that victory did not make it any easier to get the Allied forces to work together, and this, combined with differences in military and diplomatic strategy among the political leaders (the Dutch were especially cautious), made his task very difficult
  • Meanwhile, a few weeks earlier the seizure of Gibraltar had brought together Britain’s role as a Continental power with her interests as a maritime state. British troops were engaged in Iberia in support of ‘Charles III’, Leopold I’s second son and the Habsburg candidate for the crown of Spain, against Louis XIV’s second grandson, Philip V of Spain, who had been installed in 1700 under the terms of Charles II’s will. It proved far easier for Britain to intervene on the littoral, however, than to control the interior
  • the seizure of Gibraltar proved important as it registered the shift of naval hegemony from France to Britain. In the early 1690s Britain and France had contested the English Channel, but following the British victory at Barfleur in 1692, the navy had become far more effective in the Mediterranean. The dispatch of a large fleet under Russell to the Mediterranean in 1694 had been followed by its wintering at the then Allied port of Cadiz, a new achievement. The competing interests of Austria, France and Spain in the western Mediterranean ensured that this area was the cockpit of European diplomacy
  • n 1702, Sir George Rooke had concentrated on Spain’s Atlantic waters as a consequence of an attempt to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet from the New World. His attack on Cadiz had failed, but the Franco-Spanish fleet at Vigo was successfully attacked. British naval strength encouraged Portugal to switch sides in 1703; but, in an even more significant move, the same year Sir Cloudesley Shovell entered the Mediterranean and persuaded Victor Amadeus II of Savoy-Piedmont to abandon his alliance with Louis XIV
  • Rooke’s capture of Gibraltar on July 23rd, 1704, when the landing force was crucially supported by naval gunfire that silenced the enemy battery on the New Mole, led the French to mount a naval response to regain Gibraltar for Philip V and to demonstrate that France was still the leading naval power in the Mediterranean
  • Marlborough’s battles were fought on a more extended front than those of the 1690s, let alone the 1650s
  • These blows led the French to abandon the siege. Gibraltar’s inhabitants had been allowed to remain in the town if they took an oath of fidelity to ‘Charles III’, but ultimately the victory of Philip V, the Bourbon claimant, in the wider war removed this option, and instead the British acquired Gibraltar under the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. In an attempt to improve relations with Spain, in 1721 George I promised to approach Parliament for consent to return Gibraltar to Spain, but this was not deemed politically possible
  • Three years later a fleet based at Gibraltar discouraged a junction between Bourbon naval forces in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when the Mediterranean formed a frontline between the alliance systems of two clashing empires, Gibraltar was a key British resource
  • Maintaining a presence in Gibraltar thereafter ceased to be of vital strategic concern to the British and became a curiosity to many; but its major role for a quarter-millennium of national history should not be underplayed.
  • It failed, after a night-time error in navigation led to the loss of eight transport ships and nearly 900 men in the St Lawrence estuary, but the Peace of Utrecht of 1713 left Britain with recognition of its wartime gains: not only Gibraltar and Minorca, but also Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. This weakened the defences of New France and left the British clearly dominant in North American waters
Javier E

The Holocaust Museum's Lesson for America Today - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...560495

isolationism nativism America First

shared by Javier E on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • visitors from anywhere in the United States can discover what their hometown newspapers were saying during the rise of Hitler. The answer is: a lot. Discrimination against, and then persecution of, Germany’s Jews was widely covered. Kristallnacht, the officially sanctioned pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, received particular attention, and was roundly condemned across the country. The sympathy with the Jews of Germany and later Europe was impressive, and is documented by contemporary Gallup polls.
  • But were Americans willing to take in refugees, even children? The answer is no: By a three-to-one margin, including on the eve of the war and indeed after it, Americans did not want such immigrants.
  • Grimmer yet: Did America admit at least those refugees provided for in the skimpy quotas allowed under law in the years leading up to 1941 and American entry? The answer again is no: not by a large margin. In 1936, for example, barely a quarter of the visas that could have been issued to refugees from Germany—most of them Jews—were in fact issued.
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  • Roosevelt was a master calculator who was leading a country that wanted nothing to do with immigrants, nothing to do with European squabbles, and not a whole lot to do with Jews.
  • The isolationist organization America First gets its share of attention here, and deservedly so. Launched in September 1940, it soon built up a membership of over 800,000. Led by the retired general and business executive Robert Wood, its most charismatic spokesman was the heroic aviator Charles Lindbergh, a strange but inflammatory hero for the isolationists, who was not beyond the occasional Jew-baiting himself.
  • The mood is more that of the early 1930s, when the horrors of Auschwitz lay in the unimagined and unimaginable future. Then, Americans, angry that the war of 1914–18, the war to end all wars, had not in fact done so, were suspicious of foreigners and susceptible to the demagoguery of politicians like Huey Long or Gerald Nye. They tried to close themselves off from the world. If building a wall would have done it, many would have favored it.
  • the America of the 1930s was not all that great. There were—as we have been reminded by the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice—the pitiless murders of African Americans by lynch mobs. There were scores of such killings in the 1930s. There was casual and open bigotry and discrimination against Jews and other religious and ethnic groups.
  • There were, thank goodness, other voices and other movements.
  • There was Freedom House, established by Wendell Willkie—FDR’s failed opponent in 1940—and Eleanor Roosevelt, to counteract America First. It remains today one of the great voices of conscience in chronicling the abuses of freedom wherever they occur, true to the legacy of those who founded it almost eight decades ago. It, not America First, is the true voice of a generation that at last made a difficult choice and the right choice.
  • America First opposed the Atlantic Charter issued by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941 after their meeting off Newfoundland, presumably including clauses like the pledge to respect the right to self-government. It captured the imaginations of some privileged young men, to include a couple of future presidents and assorted intellectual luminaries. It vanished into thin air after Pearl Harbor
  • Roosevelt turned all of his extraordinary political skills to averting the disaster that would have meant—and even so, it was only through a series of extraordinary miscalculations by America’s enemies that the United States fully stepped up to the challenges awaiting it
Javier E

Video reveals Steve Bannon links to Boris Johnson | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-bannon-links-to-boris-johnson

cooperation international Bannon UK Brexit alt-right politics history crisis

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • On the day that article 50 was triggered, Nigel Farage was filmed with a pint of beer thanking them both. “Well done Bannon. Well done Breitbart. You helped with this. Hugely
  • Alison Klayman, the film-maker, said that Bannon had been “unequivocal” about his communications with Johnson. She also said that Bannon had met Farage, a close associate, several times during the same visit.
  • Klayman asks him if they’ve been speaking on the phone and he says: “Talked to him initially over the phone then it’s just easier to go back and forth on text. It’s just easier. I’ve been telling him one of my recommendations is that he gave one of the most important political speeches of 2016. Was his closing speech, a three-to-five-minute speech in June 2016, his closing argument on national TV for the Leave campaign ... And it was magnificent. “And all I was telling him all weekend was just to incorporate those themes. Those same themes. Basically, he was saying that June 23 was independence day for Great Britain. Their independence day being like our July 4.” Bannon adds: “This is the tee up, right. He’s back.” He then describes Johnson’s career, saying: “He wrote a really great book on Churchill. That’s one of the things I told him over the weekend.” Bannon says he got to know Johnson after the US presidential election when he was working as Donald Trump’s chief strategist. “Right after we won, Boris flew over. Because their victory was as unexpected as ours. I got to know him quite well in the transition period,” he said.
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  • The video is bound to raise further questions about Johnson’s openness and the extent to which he has relied on Bannon for advice at key stages in his bid for Downing Street
  • Bannon has described the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – known as Tommy Robinson – as the “backbone” of Britain.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: NY Times Abandons Liberalism for Activism - 0 views

nymag.com/...s-liberalism-for-activism.html

brexit uk identify drag NYT propaganda white supremacy ideology activism liberalism American idea culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 19 - No Cached
  • “Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.”
  • How can an enduring “ideal” — like, say, freedom or equality — be “false” at one point in history and true in another? You could of course say that the ideals of universal equality and individual liberty in the Declaration of Independence were belied and contradicted in 1776 by the unconscionable fact of widespread slavery, but that’s very different
  • (They were, in fact, the most revolutionary leap forward for human freedom in history.) You could say the ideals, though admirable and true, were not realized fully in fact at the time, and that it took centuries and an insanely bloody civil war to bring about their fruition
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  • the New York Times wants to do more than that. So it insists that the very ideals were false from the get-go — and tells us this before anything else.
  • America was not founded in defense of liberty and equality against monarchy, while hypocritically ignoring the massive question of slavery. It was founded in defense of slavery and white supremacy, which was masked by highfalutin’ rhetoric about universal freedom. That’s the subtext of the entire project, and often, also, the actual text.
  • Hence the replacing of 1776 (or even 1620 when the pilgrims first showed up) with 1619 as the “true” founding. “True” is a strong word. 1776, the authors imply, is a smoke-screen to distract you from the overwhelming reality of white supremacy as America’s “true” identity
  • some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy,” Hannah-Jones writes. That’s a nice little displacement there: “some might argue.” In fact, Nikole Hannah-Jones is arguing it, almost every essay in the project assumes it — and the New York Times is emphatically and institutionally endorsing it.
  • Hence the insistence that everything about America today is related to that same slavocracy — biased medicine, brutal economics, confounding traffic, destructive financial crises, the 2016 election, and even our expanding waistlines!
  • The NYT editorializes: “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed … it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.” Finally! All previous accounts of American history have essentially been white lies, the NYT tells us, literally and figuratively.
  • A special issue dedicated to exposing the racial terror-state in America before and after Reconstruction is extremely worthwhile
  • In a NYT town hall recently leaked to the press, a reporter asked the executive editor, Dean Baquet, why the Times doesn’t integrate the message of the 1619 Project into every single subject the paper covers:
  • I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting … I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.”
  • It’s a good point, isn’t it? If you don’t believe in a liberal view of the world, if you hold the doctrines of critical race theory, and believe that “all of the systems in the country” whatever they may be, are defined by a belief in the sub-humanity of black Americans, why isn’t every issue covered that way?
  • “One reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that.” In other words, the objective was to get liberal readers to think a little bit more like neo-Marxists.
  • The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms.
  • It’s as much activism as journalism. And that’s the reason I’m dwelling on this a few weeks later. I’m constantly told that critical race theory is secluded on college campuses, and has no impact outside of them … and yet the newspaper of record, in a dizzyingly short space of time, is now captive to it
  • Its magazine covers the legacy of slavery not with a variety of scholars, or a diversity of views, but with critical race theory, espoused almost exclusively by black writers, as its sole interpretative mechanism.
  • I think that view deserves to be heard. The idea that the core truth of human society is that it is composed of invisible systems of oppression based on race (sex, gender, etc.), and that liberal democracy is merely a mask to conceal this core truth, and that a liberal society must therefore be dismantled in order to secure racial/social justice is a legitimate worldview.
  • This is therefore, in its over-reach, ideology masquerading as neutral scholarship
  • Take a simple claim: no aspect of our society is unaffected by the legacy of slavery. Sure. Absolutely. Of course. But, when you consider this statement a little more, you realize this is either banal or meaningless. The complexity of history in a country of such size and diversity means that everything we do now has roots in many, many things that came before us.
  • hat would be to engage in a liberal inquiry into our past, teasing out the nuances, and the balance of various forces throughout history, weighing each against each other along with the thoughts and actions of remarkable individuals — in the manner of, say, the excellent new history of the U.S., These Truths by Jill Lepore.
  • the NYT chose a neo-Marxist rather than liberal path to make a very specific claim: that slavery is not one of many things that describe America’s founding and culture, it is the definitive one.
  • Arguing that the “true founding” was the arrival of African slaves on the continent, period, is a bitter rebuke to the actual founders and Lincoln. America is not a messy, evolving, multicultural, religiously infused, Enlightenment-based, racist, liberating, wealth-generating kaleidoscope of a society. It’s white supremacy, which started in 1619, and that’s the key to understand all of it.
  • it is extremely telling that this is not merely aired in the paper of record (as it should be), but that it is aggressively presented as objective reality. That’s propaganda, directed, as we now know, from the very top — and now being marched through the entire educational system to achieve a specific end
  • between Sohrab Ahmari, representing the Trumpy post-liberals, and David French, a Reagan-style fusionist, it was a rare moment of agreement. They both took it as a premise that Drag Queen Story Hour — a relatively new trend in which drag queens read kids stories in local libraries — was a problem they both wish didn’t exist
  • both French and Ahmari have no idea what they are talking about.
  • drag queens are clowns. They are not transgender (or haven’t been until very, very recently). They are men, mainly gay, who make no attempt to pass as actual women, and don’t necessarily want to be women, but dress up as a caricature of a woman. Sure, some have bawdy names, and in the context of a late night gay bar, they can say some bawdy things. But they’re not really about sex at all. They’re about costume and play
  • Children love drag queens the way they love clowns or circuses or Halloween or live Disney characters in Disney World. It’s dress-up fun.
  • I think the cost-benefit analysis still favors being a member of the E.U. But it is not crazy to come to the opposite conclusion.
  • o how on Earth is this a sign of the cultural apocalypse? These clowns read children’s stories to kids and their parents, and encourage young children to read books. This is the work of the devil?
  • allow me to suggest a parallel version of Britain’s situation — but with the U.S. The U.S. negotiated with Canada and Mexico to create a free trade zone called NAFTA, just as the U.K. negotiated entry to what was then a free trade zone called the “European Economic Community” in 1973
  • Now imagine further that NAFTA required complete freedom of movement for people across all three countries. Any Mexican or Canadian citizen would have the automatic right to live and work in the U.S., including access to public assistance, and every American could live and work in Mexico and Canada on the same grounds. This three-country grouping then establishes its own Supreme Court, which has a veto over the U.S. Supreme Court. And then there’s a new currency to replace the dollar, governed by a new central bank, located in Ottawa.
  • How many Americans would support this
  • The questions answer themselves. It would be unimaginable for the U.S. to allow itself to be governed by an entity more authoritative than its own government
  • It would signify the end of the American experiment, because it would effectively be the end of the American nation-state. But this is precisely the position the U.K. has been in for most of my lifetim
  • It’s not a strip show, for Pete’s sake. It’s a laugh, designed for the entire family. And yes, Dave Chappelle, the sanest man in America at the moment, is right. Men dressed obviously as women are first and foremost funny.
  • It is requiring the surrender and pooling of more and more national sovereignty from its members. And in this series of surrenders, Britain is unique in its history and identity. In the last century, every other European country has experienced the most severe loss of sovereignty a nation can experience: the occupation of a foreign army on its soil. Britain hasn’t
  • this very resistance has come to define the character of the country, idealized by Churchill in the country’s darkest hour. Britain was always going to have more trouble pooling sovereignty than others. And the more ambitious the E.U. became, the more trouble the U.K. had.
  • that is Boris Johnson’s core case: the people decided, the parliament revoked Article 50, and so it is vital for democracy that the U.K. exit without any continuing hassle or delay. If parliament is seen as dismissing the result of the referendum, then the parliament will effectively be at war with the people as a whole, and he will rally the people against them. It’s near perfect populism. His job is to get what the people voted for done, despite the elites. And if that is the central message of the coming election campaign he will not only win, but handily.
Javier E

Defeating the Covid-19 crisis could need a wartime coalition government | Martin Kettle... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...s-wartime-coalition-government

government politics coalition UK pandemic

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • although the transformation of the role of government in less than two weeks has been genuinely jaw-dropping, this is not yet the same as a wartime crisis in some very important ways. These differences need to be understood, not least because it may help to avoid the error, long familiar in military strategy, of mistakenly setting out to fight the last war rather than tackling the one that we actually face.
  • Britain in 2020 is not the Britain of 1939, let alone the Britain of 1914. We are an infinitely more connected, more individualistic and more informed society today than we were then.
  • the incomplete character of Sunak’s huge spending spike. Johnson may say that the state is standing behind society “through thick and thin” but the state is not yet standing behind households, behind renters and the self-employed. At the height of the second world war, public expenditure topped 80% of national income. We are nowhere near that figure yet.
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  • The Emergency Powers Act of 1939, for example, gave ministers sweeping authority to govern through regulations with no parliamentary sanction whatever. Any act of parliament could be amended or suspended on a minister’s say-so. Food, fuel, pharmaceuticals and clothing were controlled by the state and strictly rationed. Ministers could intern anyone whose detention was thought expedient on grounds of public safety or the defence of the realm. Censorship of the media was effective and was broadly accepted by the media themselves.
  • this is unquestionably a national crisis. But it is just the start. We are still in the phoney war, it-will-be-all-over-in-weeks phase
  • In August 1914, most governments assumed the existing armed forces would do all the fighting and that civilians would not be much involved. They were wrong. By the same token, it is possible that Johnson and Dominic Cummings still imagine they will be able to spin their way through the crisis and resume their interrupted election agenda. But they would be wrong too.
  • The country has been deeply divided by austerity and Brexit. That’s why, just as in 1915 and 1940, it may eventually feel inevitable for Labour and even the SNP to be brought into a governing coalition in some way. This may be a wartime government but, as Asquith and Churchill found out and Johnson may learn, the politics that emerged from the war may be very different from the politics that preceded it.
Javier E

Trump's Instincts Undermine U.S. Response to COVID-19 - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608266

trump response pandemic

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • A threat so grave handed Trump a history-making opportunity that eluded many of his predecessors. He’d become a wartime president, with a chance to refashion his legacy. That moment has come and is likely gone
  • “This is Trump’s Churchill moment,” Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, told me. “This time will define his presidency.”
  • “There are times when you really need a president—and those are the ones that have forged our great presidents,”
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  • “A crisis allows them to mobilize the country in ways that ordinary times do not. It’s not like a crisis allows you to become a great leader, but it offers the chance. It also offers the chance for great difficulty.”
  • Trump now concedes that a recession may hit. But even his former advisers offer a more ominous forecast. Kevin Hassett, who chaired Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, told CNN on Monday that the chances of a global recession are “close to 100 percent.” Next month, the U.S. economy could show a loss of 1 million jobs, he said
  • We are in a recession right now,” Stephen Moore, a former Trump campaign adviser whom the president had (controversially) considered for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board, told me. “The economy is at a complete standstill right now. This changes everything politically and economically.”
  • For now, Trump has bigger problems than reelection. A rich irony underlies his challenge. The disease’s trajectory hinges, in part, on the competence of the same state leaders with whom Trump has tussled. He needs Cuomo, Inslee, and California Governor Gavin Newsom to delive
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