Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged pike

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
jayhandwerk

Rep. Liz Pike announces retirement from politics | The Columbian - 0 views

www.columbian.com/...unces-retirement-from-politics

politics US liz pike rep retirement

shared by jayhandwerk on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Rep. Liz Pike, R-Camas, announced late Friday evening she is withdrawing from the race for Clark County council chair.
  • She said after her 58th birthday she “realized I want to spend more time with the people I love,” according to her post. “I’ve been truly blessed with the best friends and family a girl could ever have.”
  • Clark County Republican Party Chair David Gellatly said he wishes her the best of luck but is not surprised to hear Pike’s announcement.
Javier E

Are We All Too Cynical for Star Trek? - by Bill Coberly - 0 views

plus.thebulwark.com/...-all-too-cynical-for-star-trek

science fiction trek utopia values TV culture history

shared by Javier E on 04 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • WHAT DOES IT MEAN IF WE CAN’T even trust the institutions in our imagined utopias?
  • Starfleet’s exact role was left intentionally vague in the original series (1966–69); the writer’s guide for the original Star Trek explicitly encourages writers to “stay away from it as much as possible,” partly to avoid getting into the details of Earth’s future politics. But by the time of Star Trek’s heyday in the mid-1990s, Starfleet was established as an elite institution composed of brilliant and dedicated people (human and otherwise) who served in an organization resembling NASA, the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the Department of State all bundled together, with all of the opportunities for incoherence and mission creep that jumble implies.
  • One of the greatest episodes of Deep Space Nine (1992–99), “In the Pale Moonlight,” is entirely about how, in times of crisis, moral compromise may be necessary, even for Starfleet. But such cases are treated as exceptional, unusual circumstances far beyond the norm; as a rule, Starfleet is good, and the best way to be a good servant of the true and just in the world of Star Trek is by being a good Starfleet officer. How does one be a good Starfleet officer? By doing one’s job, by being a professional, by following one’s duty.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • the characters in the core three modern shows—Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds—are less concerned with professionalism and duty and more concerned with personal morality, authenticity, and teamwork.
  • Dylan Roth, writing for Fanbyte, suggested that as Star Trek has aged, it has “changed from a series about benign authority to one about stalwart heroes protecting an institution from moral decay.” This is true enough, but I also think there’s something else going on with the modern Trek shows. Namely, the atmosphere and philosophy of the shows is much less comfortable with the maxims of professionalism and duty that were foundational to pre-2017 Star Trek media.
  • Modern Star Trek, much like older Star Trek, often presents its main characters as moral paragons, but whereas older Trek would usually depict them embodying Starfleet’s ideals in the presence of challenging aliens, modern Trek is more likely to establish their uprightness by contrast with the faceless and untrustworthy institution of Starfleet itself. Both eras do both things, at least occasionally, but the ratio has notably shifted.
  • WHY THE CHANGE? Part of it probably has to do with the other material that Star Trek writers are drawing from. The ’60s and ’90s-era Trek writers either served in the military themselves or were drawing from science fiction written by people who had. (Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, and many of the great science-fiction authors of the mid-twentieth century, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, and Walter M. Miller Jr., each served in some capacity in the World War II-era U.S. or British armed forces.
  • difference in leadership style is everywhere between the two eras. The Strange New Worlds version of Capt. Christopher Pike has been repeatedly praised for being more collaborative than commanding (I struggle to remember a time he has ever raised his voice), whereas Capt. Sisko shouts at everyone, as only the great Avery Brooks can shout. Picard’s version of its title character trades all his twentieth-century grouchy gravitas for a more grandfatherly role; his inspirational speeches now seek to buoy his friends’ confidence rather than inspire subordinates to high achievement.
  • Old-school Sisko reminds his crew of the expectations he has for them and unsubtly critiques their behavior as unbecoming of Starfleet officers. He acknowledges their difficulties (“I know it’s hot. . .”), but leaves no doubt that he expects them to perform their duties as professionals anyway. New-school Tilly motivates her command by making it clear that she sees and hears their concerns, and encourages them to work together by seeing the value in their unique life experiences.
  • modern Trek writers are far less likely to have served—but are far more likely to have worked in twenty-first-century corporate America, which has a rather different set of norms and concepts of professionalism.
  • more fundamentally, popular science fiction today—as written by authors like N.K. Jemisin, Martha Wells, and Tamsyn Muir—is more likely to be concerned with questions of identity and combating imperialism. It is also more likely to be written from marginalized perspectives, which have valid reasons to distrust institutions and authority. For many of these writers, concepts like “professionalism” have questionable implications
  • Besides, nobody likes any of America’s institutions anymore (and for all that Star Trek is ostensibly international, it is a fundamentally American franchise). Gallup’s polling about Americans’ faith in U.S. institutions shows it hovering at or near record-breaking lows, spawning a great deal of hand-wringing from people across the political spectrum. These apparently untrustworthy institutions range from purely political ones (the presidency, the Supreme Court, etc.) to “the church or organized religion” (whatever that means), “banks,” and “newspapers.”
  • What are professionalism and duty if not the suppression of individual quirks in service of some larger goal or institution? Duty overrides individual desires or assessments of right and wrong.
  • But older Trek nevertheless believed in duty, because it believed that Starfleet was a fundamentally good institution, even if it may be failed by individual bad or misguided actors. It elevated Starfleet’s regulations and codes of conduct almost to the status of holy wri
  • it is difficult to be seriously inspired by the notion of duties if one has a deep distrust of the institutions that assign such duties.
  • Of course the characters written by twenty-first-century authors, who are animated by the same deep distrust of American institutions as the rest of us, are less likely to justify themselves with the language of duty than they are by reference to personal morality and authenticity. And of course they’re going to be skeptical of rank and hierarchy because they don’t believe these things are necessarily signs of actual merit or accomplishment any more than the rest of us do.
  • Yet I worry. If Star Trek is supposed to start from the assumption that Starfleet and the Federation are quasi-utopian, I worry about what it says about our collective imaginations if we can’t even let the institutions of that fictional utopia be utopian. If we can’t even trust Starfleet, who can we trust?
blythewallick

Opinion | In Private, Republicans Admit They Acquitted Trump Out of Fear - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ate-acquittal-impeachment.html

politics US history trump culture crisis Policy

shared by blythewallick on 06 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Think back to the fall of 2002, just a few weeks before that year’s crucial midterm elections, when the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq was up for a vote. A year after the 9/11 attacks, hundreds of members of the House and the Senate were about to face the voters of a country still traumatized by terrorism.
  • History has indeed taught us that when it comes to the instincts that drive us, fear has no rival. As the lead House impeachment manager, Representative Adam Schiff, has noted, Robert Kennedy spoke of how “moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle.”
  • Late in the evening on day four of the trial I saw it, just 10 feet across the aisle from my seat at Desk 88, when Mr. Schiff told the Senate: “CBS News reported last night that a Trump confidant said that Republican senators were warned, ‘Vote against the president and your head will be on a pike.’” The response from Republicans was immediate and furious. Several groaned and protested and muttered, “Not true.” But pike or no pike, Mr. Schiff had clearly struck a nerve. (In the words of Lizzo: truth hurts.)
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • I have asked some of them, “If the Senate votes to acquit, what will you do to keep this president from getting worse?” Their responses have been shrugs and sheepish looks.
  • Or — worst of all — that he might come to their state to campaign against them in the Republican primary. They worry:“Will the hosts on Fox attack me?”“Will the mouthpieces on talk radio go after me?”“Will the Twitter trolls turn their followers against me?”
  • As Senator Murray said on the Senate floor in 2002, “We can act out of fear” or “we can stick to our principles.” Unfortunately, in this Senate, fear has had its way. In November, the American people will have theirs.
Javier E

The Astonishing Age of a Neanderthal Cave Construction Site - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...484070

human origins neanderthal france

shared by Javier E on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • After drilling into the stalagmites and pulling out cylinders of rock, the team could see an obvious transition between two layers. On one side were old minerals that were part of the original stalagmites; on the other were newer layers that had been laid down after the fragments were broken off by the cave’s former users. By measuring uranium levels on either side of the divide, the team could accurately tell when each stalagmite had been snapped off for construction.Their date? 176,500 years ago, give or take a few millennia.
  • Outside Bruniquel Cave, the earliest, unambiguous human constructions are  just 20,000 years old. Most of these are ruins—collapsed collections of mammoth bones and deer antlers. By comparison, the Bruniquel stalagmite rings are well-preserved and far more ancient.
  • Neanderthals must have been responsible. There simply wasn’t any other hominin in that region at that time.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Why did they build the rings and mounds? The structures weren’t foundations for huts; the chamber contains no stone tools, human bones, or any other sign of permanent occupation, and besides, why build shelter inside a cave? “A plausible explanation is that this was a meeting place for some type of ritual social behavior,”
  • Nor is it clear how the Neanderthals made the structures. Verheyden says it couldn’t have been one lone artisan, toiling away in the dark. Most likely, there was a team, and a technically skilled one at that. They broke rocks deliberately, and arranged them precisely. They used fire, too.
  • “The Neanderthal group responsible for these constructions had a level of social organization that was more complex than previously thought,” the team writes.
  • These discoveries are part of the Neanderthals’ ongoing rehabilitation.
  • we now know that Neanderthals made tools, used fire, made art, buried their dead, and perhaps even had language. “The new findings have ushered a transformation of the Neanderthal from a knuckle-dragging savage rightfully defeated in an evolutionary contest, to a distant cousin that holds clues to our identity,”
  • we have several lines of evidence showing that the cognitive abilities and behaviors of Neanderthals were complex,” says Marie Soressi from Leiden University. “But we had no direct evidence of their ability to build. That changes the picture for me. It’s puzzling to find such structures so deep inside the cave.”
Javier E

Opinion | It's 2086. This Is What American History Could Look Like. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jan-6-shaman-past-future.html

historiography revisionist condemnation US culture

shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • If it seems far-fetched that a notorious insurgent could be given such a place of honor, the past begs to differ. When the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, was imprisoned after the Civil War (rumored to be dressed at the time of his arrest in his own outlandish costume), he was more reviled and mocked than any Capitol rioter, and his crimes far more serious. His statue joined George Washington’s in the Capitol 65 years later.
  • As curators at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, we are regularly confronted by hard physical evidence of just how slippery the past can be.
  • It is chilling, but not impossible, to envision the signs screaming “Stop the steal!” picked up on the garbage-strewn National Mall on Jan. 7, 2021, treated one day as patriotic treasures, displayed alongside the writing desk Thomas Jefferson used to draft the Declaration of Independence or the inkwell Abraham Lincoln dipped into to compose the Emancipation Proclamation.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • History, however, may have other plans. Contrary to the mantra, it has no right or wrong side.
  • Judging, it turns out, isn’t history’s strong suit. Notions of justice change radically over time, and they are not the reason we collect, preserve or display objects from the past
  • To curators and historians, the evolving meaning of our objects is far more fascinating than whom they label as unrighteous
  • The collections of the Smithsonian contain, for instance, pikes from John Brown’s failed slave rebellion in the South in 1859. At different moments since then, his pikes have symbolized a demented terrorist’s scheme for mass murder, a religious fanatic’s fiery crusade and a hero’s lonely struggle for justice.
  • Nothing in our past, no matter how blatant it may seem to us today, is guaranteed eternal condemnation
  • Our recent reckoning with American history has shown the indelible impact of staid forms of institutional power, like dedicating monuments, inscribing plaques and holding hearings. Enshrining rioters as heroes could be done fairly quietly.
  • There’s no controlling what the future will say about us. Generations just keep coming, re-evaluating old heroes and asking new questions.
  • We cannot know; we have no ownership over what is to come. The best we can do is map our moment scrupulously, to preserve the signposts that will lead to a place we’ll never see.
  • As curators, as historians, as citizens, we are frequently reminded that the past is a foreign country. But so is the future.
Javier E

Who Turned My Blue State Red? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-turned-my-blue-state-red.html

safety net government benefits government GOP Democratic party poor voters trends

shared by Javier E on 21 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • IT is one of the central political puzzles of our time: Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.
  • The temptation for coastal liberals is to shake their heads over those godforsaken white-working-class provincials who are voting against their own interests.
  • this reaction misses the complexity of the political dynamic that’s taken hold in these parts of the country. It misdiagnoses the Democratic Party’s growing conundrum with working-class white voters. And it also keeps us from fully grasping what’s going on in communities where conditions have deteriorated
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.
  • The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.
  • After having her first child as a teenager, marrying young and divorcing, Ms. Dougherty had faced bleak prospects. But she had gotten safety-net support — most crucially, taxpayer-funded tuition breaks to attend community college, where she’d earned her nursing degree.
  • She landed a steady job at a nearby dialysis center and remarried. But this didn’t make her a lasting supporter of safety-net programs like those that helped her. Instead, Ms. Dougherty had become a staunch opponent of them. She was reacting, she said, against the sense of entitlement she saw on display at the dialysis center
  • “People waltz in when they want to,” she said, explaining that, in her opinion, there was too little asked of patients. There was nothing that said “‘You’re getting a great benefit here, why not put in a little bit yourself.’ ” At least when she got her tuition help, she said, she had to keep up her grades. “When you’re getting assistance, there should be hoops to jump through so that you’re paying a price for your behavior,” she said. “What’s wrong with that?”
  • these voters are consciously opting against a Democratic economic agenda that they see as bad for them and good for other people — specifically, those undeserving benefit-recipients who live nearby.
  • Where opposition to the social safety net has long been fed by the specter of undeserving inner-city African-Americans — think of Ronald Reagan’s notorious “welfare queen” — in places like Pike County it’s fueled, more and more, by people’s resentment over rising dependency they see among their own neighbors, even their own families.
  • This political disconnect among lower-income Americans has huge ramifications — polls find nonvoters are far more likely to favor spending on the poor and on government services than are voters, and the gap grows even larger among poor nonvoters
  • THAT pattern is right in line with surveys, which show a decades-long decline in support for redistributive policies and an increase in conservatism in the electorate even as inequality worsens. There has been a particularly sharp drop in support for redistribution among older Americans,
  • researchers such as Kathryn Edin, of Johns Hopkins University, found a tendency by many Americans in the second lowest quintile of the income ladder — the working or lower-middle class — to dissociate themselves from those at the bottom, where many once resided. “There’s this virulent social distancing — suddenly, you’re a worker and anyone who is not a worker is a bad person,” said Professor Edin. “They’re playing to the middle fifth and saying, ‘I’m not those people.’ ”
  • Meanwhile, many people who in fact most use and need social benefits are simply not voting at all. Voter participation is low among the poorest Americans, and in many parts of the country that have moved red, the rates have fallen off the charts. West Virginia ranked 50th for turnout in 2012; also in the bottom 10 were other states that have shifted sharply red in recent years, including Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee.
  • The political upshot is plain, Mr. Cauley added. “It’s not the people on the draw that’s voting against” the Democrats, he said. “It’s everyone else.”
  • low turnout by poor Kentuckians explained why the state’s Obamacare gains wouldn’t help Democrats. “I remember being in the room when Jennings was asked whether or not Republicans were afraid of the electoral consequences of displacing 400,000-500,000 people who have insurance,” State Auditor Adam Edelen, a Democrat who lost his re-election bid this year, told Joe Sonka, a Louisville journalist. “And he simply said, ‘People on Medicaid don’t vote.’
  • Republicans, of course, would argue that the shift in their direction among voters slightly higher up the ladder is the natural progression of things — people recognize that government programs are prolonging the economic doldrums and that Republicans have a better economic program.
  • it means redoubling efforts to mobilize the people who benefit from the programs. This is no easy task with the rural poor, who are much more geographically scattered than their urban counterparts. Not helping matters in this regard is the decline of local institutions like labor unions — while the United Mine Workers of America once drove turnout in coal country, today there is not a single unionized mine still operating in Kentucky.
  • it also means reckoning with the other half of the dynamic — finding ways to reduce the resentment that those slightly higher on the income ladder feel toward dependency in their midst. One way to do this is to make sure the programs are as tightly administered as possible. Instances of fraud and abuse are far rarer than welfare opponents would have one believe, but it only takes a few glaring instances to create a lasting impression
  • The best way to reduce resentment, though, would be to bring about true economic growth in the areas where the use of government benefits is on the rise,
manhefnawi

Italy - The age of Charles V | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...The-age-of-Charles-V

Charles V Rules Italy

shared by manhefnawi on 10 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Charles I, who was elected Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1519 upon the death of his paternal grandfather, Maximilian, aspired to universal monarchy over the far-flung territories he had inherited, from Germany, the Low Countries, Italy, and Spain to the New World.
  • The revolt of the comuneros (1520–21), an uprising of a group of Spanish cities, was successfully quelled, securing Castile as the bedrock of his empire, but the opposition of Francis I of France, of Süleyman I (the Magnificent; ruled 1520–66) of the Ottoman Empire, and of the Lutheran princes in Germany proved more intractable.
  • When a refitted French army of 30,000 men retook Milan in 1524, the new Medici pope, Clement VII (reigned 1523–34), changed sides to become a French ally. But, at the most important battle of the Italian wars, fought at Pavia on Feb. 24, 1525, the French were defeated and Francis I was captured.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • after his release, he abrogated the Treaty of Madrid (January 1526), in which he had been forced, among other concessions, to abandon his Italian claims. He headed a new anti-Spanish alliance, the Holy League of Cognac (May 1526), which united France with the papacy, Milan, Florence, and Venice.
  • Spanish military superiority eventually owed its success to the introduction in 1521 of the musket (an improved harquebus) and to the refinement of pike and musket tactics in the years preceding the Battle of Pavia. Such tactics dominated land warfare until the Battle of Rocroi in 1643.
  • The Papal States were restored, and in 1530 the pope crowned Charles V emperor and king of Italy
  • Italy remained subject to sporadic French incursions into Savoy in 1536–38 and 1542–44 during a third and fourth Habsburg-Valois war, and Spain’s Italian possessions were increasingly taxed to support Charles’s continual campaigns; however, for the remainder of his reign, Charles’s armies fought the French, the Ottomans, and the Protestant princes outside Italy. Notable for Italy was Charles V’s capture of Tunis in 1535 and his glorious march up the Italian peninsula in 1536 to confirm his personal rule. But the Ottomans formally allied themselves with France against the Habsburgs thereafter, defeated an allied fleet at Prevesa, retook Tunis in 1538, and stepped up their assault on the Venetian empire in the Mediterranean.
  • Italy became a part of the Spanish Habsburg inheritance of his son, Philip II (ruled 1556–98), and, after the Spanish victory over the French at St. Quentin (1557), the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) officially confirmed the era of Spanish domination that had existed in Italy since 1530.
aidenborst

Did Joe Biden (already) blow his chance at bipartisanship? - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

Politics US crisis Culture policy Pandemic economics bipartisanship Biden Biden-Administration stimulus-bill

shared by aidenborst on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Within the next 24 hours, the House is expected to pass and President Joe Biden is expected to sign the American Rescue Plan -- a massive $1.9 trillion Covid-19 stimulus bill that will likely be the signature accomplishment of the 46th president's first year (if not entire first term) in office.
  • The central question -- in both the near- and long-term -- around the bill is a simple one, with lots of potential answers: Was it worth it?
  • "When the histories of the Biden presidency are written, there's a fair chance that this will be looked upon as a serious error of judgement—one that may plague this administration for a good while."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • It is absolutely true that Biden ran as a candidate who could bring Americans together following the increasingly divisive presidency of Donald Trump. Even during the darkest days of his struggles in the Democratic primary, Biden made the case that the only way the country could heal was to understand that we had a lot more in common that our politics (and our politicians) wanted us to believe.
  • "To overcome these challenges -- to restore the soul and to secure the future of America -- requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity. Unity."
  • "If Republicans have suddenly begun to deeply value and prioritize bipartisanship in Washington, they can start by supporting $2k checks and retroactive unemployment for people," sarcastically tweeted New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in late January. "Then it will be bipartisan."
  • "We all want bipartisanship and I think you're gonna see more of it as we move down the pike," Sanders said on ABC in late January. "We all look forward to working with Republicans. But right now, this country faces an unprecedented set of crises."
cartergramiak

The Afghanistan War Is Ending. A Pennsylvania Town Exhales. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nsylvania-afghanistan-war.html

politics US Culture biden

shared by cartergramiak on 19 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • But straight out of high school, Aidan fulfilled his dream in this patriotic town south of Pittsburgh, where there are crisp American flags around memorials to veterans in front of the municipal building. Today, Aidan is 20 and stationed with the Army in Kentucky. And this past week, his father exhaled in profound relief when President Biden announced that American troops would be coming home from Afghanistan.
  • “I’m not a Biden fan but I’m for that, pulling the troops out of there,” said Mr. Miller, 46, a salesman. He dismissed the arguments of some Republican officials and military leaders that Taliban extremists would overrun the country once Americans left. “We can’t babysit everybody,” he said.
  • “It’s a very complicated question,” said Rick Palma, standing outside McGrogan’s Tap Room, reflecting on Mr. Biden’s decision. Mr. Palma is a retired manager at a United States Steel mill in nearby Clairton, which is the fictional setting for “The Deer Hunter,” the 1978 movie that powerfully evoked blue-collar communities whose young men went to Vietnam.“Is it time to bring them home? Perhaps,” Mr. Palma, a former Army officer, said. “If you bring them all the way back, there’s the possibility that Al Qaeda will regroup.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • That view, by a Democratic president in a deeply partisan era, is largely shared among people in southwestern Pennsylvania — a region generally hostile to Democrats, but where even voters who opposed Mr. Biden’s election approved of his withdrawal plan.
  • “The real problem here is we can’t be isolationist,” said Howard Dean, the Democrat who ran a 2004 presidential campaign as an early opponent of the Iraq War. He proposed a series of excruciating questions that Americans might face about using military force in the near future: What if China invades Taiwan? What if Russian tanks roll across Ukraine?
  • Ms. Pallatto, 59, said Mr. Biden should not have announced a withdrawal deadline. “You televise to the Taliban we’re going to be completely gone at this date,” she said. America’s Afghan partners won’t be able to stand on their own “and we’re going to end up back there again,” she said.
  • Not everyone on Pike Street was aware of the president’s decision to leave Afghanistan, a reflection of how the drawn-out conflict, with relatively low American casualties, has dropped from the headlines. Just 12 percent of Americans told an Associated Press/NORC poll last year that they closely followed events in the war.
Javier E

How a Liberal Lawyer in Georgia Took an Extreme Right Turn - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-Jr-georgia-capitol-riot.html

culture politics US trump history crisis individual corruption racism

shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • last year, as the progressive movement in Georgia was on the cusp of historic electoral triumph, Mr. Calhoun, a small-town lawyer whose family had long roots in the state, suddenly abandoned the Democrats. And not only that, he pledged to kill them.
  • “I have tons of ammo,” Mr. Calhoun wrote on Twitter three months before storming the U.S. Capitol with a pro-Trump mob. “Gonna use it too — at the range and on racist democrat communists. So make my day.”
  • Some Black residents of Americus, Mr. Calhoun’s hometown, were not shocked that a person so worldly could end up doing something like this. “The Jekyll and Hyde effect,” said the Rev. Mathis Kearse Wright Jr., the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Black residents in Sumter make up a reliable Democratic base, while whites are often divided, as one local put it, between liberal “come heres,” like Habitat employees, and conservative, locally raised, “been heres.”
  • Before it fell away, Mr. Calhoun’s white progressivism had a homegrown flavor, steeped in Georgia’s history, countercultural currents and higher education system. He preached criminal justice reform and broadcast his support for Hillary Clinton.
  • Then came his abrupt turn, and a headlong descent into some of the darkest places in Georgia history. He peppered his social media posts with racial slurs, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “fake negro.” He saluted the Confederacy, and he seemed to thirst for civil war.
  • He was not an unlettered man: In his years at school, Mr. Calhoun had written a master’s thesis on the historiography of Napoleon’s peninsular war and had attended a law seminar in Belgium. His profile — a well-educated, white-collar white man — matched that of some of the other Georgians who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6
  • The crowd that came from Georgia included a 53-year-old investment portfolio manager and a 65-year-old accountant. It included Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr., 51, a successful business owner who graduated from an elite Atlanta prep school, who was arrested in Washington the day after the riot with guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a phone with his text messages about “putting a bullet” into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s head.
  • he began a law career in Americus, an old Confederate cotton town and the seat of Sumter County, about 140 miles south of Atlanta. Sumter has for decades played an important role in liberal Georgia’s sense of possibility. A multiracial Christian commune, Koinonia Farm, was founded there in the 1940s. Jimmy Carter lives in the tiny town of Plains, and the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity, founded by a Koinonia family, is headquartered in Americus
  • while Mr. Calhoun’s politics had changed drastically, Mr. Lankford said, his personality had not.“He’s the same old banty rooster, just on the other side of the fence,” Mr. Lankford said.
  • Rev. Wright suggested that the racism deep at the root of Georgia’s history was still very much alive, even if white people, including some of those who saw themselves as progressive, did not want to admit it. “What President Trump did was allow it to bud and to grow,” he said. “A lot of people who had been suppressing it no longer felt that they had to suppress it.”
  • “I was a Democrat for 30 years,” he wrote in a recent social media post. The new gun control proposals changed that, he said. “I was called a white supremacist and a racist for defending the 2A,” he continued, using a shorthand for the Second Amendment. Given all that he had done as a lawyer for “justice,” he said, “that hurt my feelings a little. That’s when I became a Trump supporter.”
  • His conversion was total. By the fall of 2020 he was posting about a looming “domestic communist problem” and the “rioting BLM-Antifa crime wave.” Of Joe Biden, he wrote: “Hang the bastard.”
  • Old friends were baffled, and some grew nervous. “I’ll be slinging enough hot lead to stack you commies up like cordwood,” Mr. Calhoun wrote on Twitter in October. Then, a few days later: “Standing by, and when Trump makes the call, millions of heavily armed, pissed off patriots are coming to Washington.”
  • After the election, Mr. Calhoun held a small gun rights rally in town, and the violent posts continued, with talk of civil war, mounting heads on pikes and showing the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar “what the bottom of the river looks like.” In December, a reporter for The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, found Mr. Calhoun buying a Confederate flag outside a Trump rally. “This is about independence and freedom,” Mr. Calhoun told the reporter, describing Trumpism and Southern secession as similarly justified fights against tyranny.
  • On Jan. 6, Mr. Calhoun’s posts showed he had made his way inside the U.S. Capitol with the mob. “The first of us who got upstairs kicked in Nancy Pelosi’s office door,” he wrote in one post. “Crazy Nancy probably would have been torn into little pieces, but she was nowhere to be seen.”
  • A week later, federal agents arrested him at his sister’s house in Macon, Ga., where he had stockpiled two AR-15-style assault rifles, two shotguns, a handgun, brass knuckles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, according to the testimony of an F.B.I. agent.
  • After the 2016 election, an old friend, Bob Fortin, remembers Mr. Calhoun excoriating him for voting for Mr. Trump. “He cussed me out in his kitchen,” said Mr. Fortin, who said he later regretted his vote. “He made me feel like a complete ass.”
  • At Mr. Calhoun’s Jan. 21 court hearing in Macon, Charles H. Weigle, the federal magistrate judge, ruled that there was probable cause to believe that Mr. Calhoun had committed crimes when he stormed the Capitol.
  • A man who had committed such “extreme violence,” the judge said — who believed that it was his patriotic duty to take up arms and fight in a new civil war — constituted a danger to the community.The judge sent Mr. Calhoun back to jail.
Javier E

FC95: The Age of Louis XIV, the "Sun King" (1643-1715) - The Flow of History - 2 views

www.flowofhistory.com/...FC95

Louis XIV history france

shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Introduction From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture.  Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland.  Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world.  In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population.  France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states.  This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".
  • Louis' early life and reign (1643-61) Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five.  Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government.  In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys.  Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives.  Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles.  This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.
  • Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it.  Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example.  Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength.  There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army. Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper.  Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports.  This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism.  While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state.  Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage.  Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Religion was one aspect of Louis' reign that illustrated the absolute nature of his monarchy quite well.  Louis himself was quite a pious Catholic, learning that trait from his mother.  However, in the spirit of the day, he saw religion as a department of state subordinate to the will of the king.  By the same token, not adhering to the Catholic faith was seen as treason. As a result, Louis gradually restricted the rights of the French Huguenots and finally, in 1685, revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had given them religious freedom since the end of the French Wars of Religion in 1598.  This drove 200,000 Huguenots out of France, depriving it of some of its most skilled labor.  Thus Louis let his political and religious biases ruin a large sector of France's economy.
  • Versailles Louis' religious faith was largely a superficial one attached to the elaborate ritual of the Catholic mass.  This love of ritual also showed itself in how Louis ran his court at his magnificent palace of Versailles, several miles outside of Paris.  Much of the reason for building Versailles goes back to the Fronde that had driven Louis from Paris as a young boy.  Ever since then, Louis had distrusted the volatile Paris mob and was determined to move the court away from the influence of that city.  Versailles was also the showpiece of Louis' reign, glorifying him as the Sun King with its magnificent halls and gardens.
  • Just as Louis's palace at Versailles dominated European culture during the late 1600's and early 1700's, his diplomacy and wars dominated Europeans political history.  As Louis himself put it: "The character of a conqueror is regarded as the noblest and highest of titles."  Interestingly enough, he never led his troops in battle except for overseeing a few sieges from a safe distance.
  • Louis' main goals were to expand France to its "natural borders": the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees.  This, of course, would make him enemies among the Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Spanish, and English.  Therefore, Louis' diplomacy had to clear the way to make sure he did not fight everyone at once.  For this purpose he skillfully used money to neutralize potential enemies (such as Charles II of England in the Secret Treaty of Dover) and extracted favorable terms from stalemate or losing situations.  But Louis could also make some fateful blunders to hurt his cause.  His obsessive hatred of the Dutch dominated his policy too much, as did his own self-confidence and arrogance in trying to publicly humiliate his enemies.  However, this just alarmed Louis' enemies more, especially the Dutch, Austrians, and English, who allied against Louis to preserve the balance of power.
  • Exhaustion on both sides finally led to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.  Louis' grandson took the throne of Spain and its American empire, but the French and Spanish thrones could not be united under one ruler.  Austria got the Spanish Netherlands to contain French aggression to the north.  Just as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had contained Hapsburg aggression, the Treaty of Utrecht contained French expansion.  Two years later Louis XIV was dead, with little to show for his vaunted ambitions as a conqueror except an exhausted economy and dissatisfied populace.
  • Results of Louis' reign The age of Louis XIV was important to European history for several reasons.  First of all, it saw the triumph of absolutism in France and continental Europe.  Versailles was a glittering symbol and example for other European rulers to follow.  Any number of German and East European monarchs modeled their states and courts after Louis XIV, sometimes to the point of financial ruin.  Second, Louis' wars showed the system of Balance of Power politics working better than ever.  French aggression was contained and the status quo was maintained.  All this had its price, since the larger sizes of the armies and the final replacement of the pike with the musket took European warfare to a new level of destruction.  Finally, Louis' reign definitely established France as the dominant power in Europe.  However, the cost was immense and left his successors a huge debt.  Ironically, the problems caused by Louis XIV's reign would help lead to the French Revolution in 1789 and the spread of democratic principles across Europe and eventually the world.
  • I am the state. — Voltaire, incorrectly quoting Louis XIV
1 - 11 of 11
Showing 20▼ items per page