Group items tagged

Thinking some more on Mitt Romney's high-handed claim that one in two Americans will vote for Obama simply to better ensure their own sloth, I was reminded of Lee Atwater's famous explanation of the Southern Strategy:You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

as tactics aimed at suppressing black citizenship become more abstract, they also have the side-effect of enveloping non-blacks. Atwater's point that the policies of the Southern Strategy hurt blacks more than whites is well taken. But some whites were hurt too. This is different than the explicit racism of slavery and segregation. During slavery white Southerners never worried about disenfranchising blacks. After slavery they needed poll taxes and the force of white terrorism. After white terrorism was routed and the poll tax outlawed, they targeted the voting process itself. But at each level what you see is more non-black people being swept into the pool of victims and the pool expanding.

You can paint a similar history of the welfare state, which was first secured by assuring racist white Democrats that the pariah of black America would be cut out of it. When such machinations became untenable, the strategy became to claim the welfare state mainly benefited blacks. And as that has become untenable, the strategy has become to target the welfare state itself, with no obvious mention of color. At each interval the ostensible pariah grows, until one in two Americans are members of the pariah class.

SEOUL—With a clandestine trip to Beijing this week, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has taken his first, tentative steps onto the world diplomatic stage.

Mr. Kim and his regime have sought legitimacy and recognition as a nuclear-weapons state as the country’s dilapidated economy has faced ever-tougher sanctions.

conducted in secrecy after a ride on an armored train to the Chinese capital, lays the groundwork for his biggest diplomatic date yet: a summit with U.S. President Donald Trump.

I had a very pleasant dinner with Michael Anton, the brilliant, bespoke Straussian who went to work for Trump’s National Security Council for a while

Anton is something of an intellectual pariah — a Washington Post columnist wrote last year that “there is little reason to ever listen” to him — but he’s a pariah in part because he’s a reactionary with a first-class mind

He reminds me why I’m a conservative, why the distinction between a reactionary and a conservative is an important one in this particular moment, and how the left unwittingly is becoming reactionism’s most potent enabler

How many Coronavirus deaths are needless? Epidemiologists estimate that 90% are. Crunching a few numbers myself, I conclude just the same. If America had had New Zealand’s approach, just 1500 people would have had to die. Instead, a figure approaching 100 times that number already have.

America will become something more than a failed state: a plague state. That means: a nation still infected by a virus much of the world has bested or conquered.

America will become a pariah state as it becomes a plague state.

His plan, he said, was to make the Saudis “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.”

Now, as president, Mr. Biden must deal with that government, whether it has redeeming value or not. And he must navigate a series of campaign promises to cut off arms shipments and make public the American intelligence conclusions about the role of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince and the de facto leader of the country, in the killing of the dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

But the issue of protocol is less important than the sharp shift in the way the Saudis are being treated.

In July 2014, four months after Putin annexed Crimea, only 10 percent of Republicans held a favorable opinion of Russia’s president, according to an Economist/YouGov poll. Today, that figure is 37 percent.

A recent poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that, while 65 percent of Americans support a congressional inquiry into Russian election interference, a narrow majority (51 percent ) of Republicans oppose it.

82 percent of Hillary Clinton voters want to maintain sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to its meddling, while only 16 percent of Trump voters do.

The answer to the question of how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been to partition “Palestine” into two states. This assumes, however, that the parties only have a dispute over land; but that has never been the case. The conflict has always had political, religious, historical, geographical and psychological dimensions. The international community’s unwillingness to accept this reality has led to the continued fantasy that a two-state solution is possible.

The Palestinians have never been prepared to share any part of the land they claim as their own.

Jews have no place in the Islamic world — except as second-class citizens (dhimmis) under Muslim rule

Hillary Clinton plans to deliver a scorching assessment of Donald J. Trump’s foreign policy prescriptions on Thursday, casting her likely Republican rival as a threat to decades of bipartisan tenets of American diplomacy and declaring him unfit for the presidency.

persistent assault to portray a potential Trump presidency as a dangerous proposition that would weaken American alliances and embolden enemies.

specific criticism of comments Mr. Trump has made about rethinking the United States’s support of NATO

Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.

What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.

the American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency.

America is a great land and lures immigrants worldwide, yet record numbers of U.S. citizens and permanent residents are giving up their citizenship or residency.

And this year that trend is up by at least 33%  from the previous high in 2011.

Since then, the tax and other consequences do not depend on why one leaves. Yet after Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin departed permanently for Singapore with his Facebook IPO riches, there was an angry backlash.

The purges, zealotry and mass strife that Mao unleashed during the Cultural Revolution left a lasting mark on every Chinese leader who has succeeded him. But Mr. Xi stands out because he is the first party chief from the generation of the Red Guards — the youth who served as Mao’s shock troops — and because he fell so far before beginning his trek to power, from a family in the party elite to an unmoored life as a teenage political pariah.

“Xi got to see both sides of that time, which is one reason I think he’s such an interesting character,” she said, “but that’s also why he’s so difficult to read.”Unlike some youths from elite backgrounds, Mr. Xi did not turn against the party or Mao, but learned to revere strict order and abhor challenges to hierarchy, said Yongyi Song, a historian and librarian in Los Angeles who has long studied the Cultural Revolution.“He suffered much under Mao,” Mr. Song said, “but I think that actually increased his belief that those who are ‘born red,’ those children of the party elite, earned the right to inherit Mao’s place at the center.”

Russia’s relations with many Western nations, including the United States, may be at their worst levels since the Cold War, but its relationship with North Korea is blooming faster than the famously lush flower beds of Moscow’s Alexander Garden.

On Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced an agreement to designate 2015 a “Year of Friendship” with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which is regarded by much of the world as a pariah state.

Tellingly, news of the Year of Friendship came on the same day that Berlin officials said that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, had declined Mr. Putin’s invitation to attend the ceremony. The German government cited Russia’s policies in Ukraine, where the Kremlin has annexed Crimea and backed violent separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, as the reason for her refusal to attend.

The genre of Obama race speeches has always been bounded by the job he was hired to do. Specifically, Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people.

But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers. For a creedal country like America, this poses a problem—in nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country's nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, "You wear the mask."

As it happens, there is nothing about a congenitally racist country that necessarily prevents an individual leader hailing from the pariah class. The office does not care where the leader originates, so long as the leader ultimately speaks for the state.

Keep Israel out of it.

Israel obviously supports the effort to stop the Islamic State.

Western leaders should also pause to reconsider the old habit of keeping Israel on the sidelines

in his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace.

Cruz’s behavior in the Haley case is almost the dictionary definition of pharisaism: an overzealous application of the letter of the law in a way that violates the spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy.

Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them

To the governments of the other 27 European Union nations, the U.K. message is that failure to agree a Brexit deal would be a geopolitical calamity that could bring unimaginable risks to the Continent’s security. But to the British public, the message has been one of reassurance. The government insists that preparations are well under way to cope with any fallout should the talks fail: Brexiters have flooded the airwaves to drive home the message that no deal is no big deal.

In December’s Joint Report on the state of the negotiations, the British government accepted an obligation to pay €40 billion ($46.4 billion) to the EU in settlement of the U.K.’s outstanding financial commitments

if the U.K. leaves the EU with no agreement and refuses to pay its debts, it will become an international legal pariah, at least in the EU’s eyes. The EU will want to recover what it believes it is rightfully owed and will pursue its claims through international courts.

in our current culture, it’s precisely the elites who seem to be driving tribal identity and thought, and doubling down on ideological and affectional polarization

“The more highly educated also tend to be more strongly identified along political lines.” He quoted from her book: Political knowledge tends to increase the effects of identity as more knowledgeable people have more informational ammunition to counter argue any stories they don’t like

Much of the growth in ideological consistency has come among better educated adults — including a striking rise in the share who have across-the-board liberal views, which is consistent with the growing share of postgraduates who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party.”

These outcasts are from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, which is at the center of a rapidly spreading viral outbreak that has killed more than 420 people in China and sent fear rippling around the world. They are pariahs in China, among the millions unable to go home and feared as potential carriers of the mysterious coronavirus.

All across the country, despite China’s vast surveillance network with its facial recognition systems and high-end cameras that is increasingly used to track its 1.4 billion people, the government has turned to familiar authoritarian techniques — like setting up dragnets and asking neighbors to inform on one another — as it tries to contain the outbreak.

Local officials offered no explanation but returned a few days later to fasten police tape to his door and hang a sign that warned neighbors that a Wuhan returnee lived there. The sign included an informant hotline to call if anyone saw him or his family leave the apartment. Mr. Tang said he received about four calls a day from different local government departments.

On Tuesday night, President Trump delivered the most harshly partisan State of the Union speech in memory.

But when he was wrong, as he often was, he was poisonously wrong. He grotesquely caricatured the criminality of undocumented immigrants, rewrote the history of his assaults on Americans’ health care and drastically inflated the number of jobs expected to be created by the new trade bill.

By the end, many Republicans had conceded that Mr. Trump did the things he was accused of. Some agreed that they were “improper,” “inappropriate” or even “wrong.” Yet rather than try to get to the bottom of his behavior, they joined the White House in covering up as much about it as they could.

Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en mass amid the corona pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard.

at least ten ships around the world – carrying nearly 10,000 passengers – are still stuck at sea after having been turned away from their destination ports in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of the ships are facing increasingly desperate medical situations, including one carrying hundreds of American, Canadian, Australian and British passengers, currently off the coast of Ecuador and seeking permission to dock in Florida.

Dramatic scenes of coronavirus-stricken cruises, such as the Grand Princess in California and the Diamond Princess in Japan, have become synonymous with the pandemic. The plight of those still adrift highlights how cruise ships have become a kind of pariah of the seas, as cities push back against becoming the next home for a potentially infected vessel.