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because I live in the community that spawned Brock Turner, I have known on some level for many months that my version would never be reality.

Oakwood, Ohio, is about as idyllic a Midwestern community as one could imagine. The streets are tree-lined, the houses charming. The kids walk to school and go home for lunch. The schools are nationally recognized. In fact, the nickname for Oakwood is “The Dome,” so sheltered are its residents from violence, poverty and inconvenient truths. I have lived here for over 20 years.

Communities like this one have a dark side, though: the conflation of achievement with being “a good kid;” the pressure to succeed; the parents who shrug when the party in their basement gets out of control (or worse yet, when they host it) because “kids are gonna drink;” the tacit understanding that rules don’t necessarily apply. The cops won’t come. The axe won’t fall.

Michael Cembalest, the chief investment officer of JPMorgan Chase, wrote in July of this year (in a clients-only newsletter obtained by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson) that “profit margins have reached levels not seen in decades,” and “reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement.” (Cembalest printed the latter quote in boldfaced lettering.) “US labor compensation,” he explained, “is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP.”

Citigroup analysts see the American postindustrial economy’s abandonment of fair play as an interesting fact to consider in formulating future investment strategies

“The upper classes of this country raped this country” is one of the more polite things that Morgan Stanley money manager Steve Eisman has to say on the eve of the 2008 sub-prime fiasco.

College fraternities—by which term of art I refer to the formerly all-white, now nominally integrated men’s “general” or “social” fraternities, and not the several other types of fraternities on American campuses (religious, ethnic, academic)—are as old, almost, as the republic.

While the system has produced its share of poets, aesthetes, and Henry James scholars, it is far more famous for its success in the powerhouse fraternity fields of business, law, and politics. An astonishing number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, congressmen and male senators, and American presidents have belonged to fraternities

They also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.

Those issues relate to what another writer here, George Yancy, in writing about the Trayvon Martin case, referred to as a “white gaze” that renders all black bodies dangerous and deviant. Unless we dismantle this gaze and its centuries-strong cultural pillars, it will be difficult to go past the outrage on race.

 our unjust economic system. Under this system, people compete for basic goods and services in what seems to be a fair and non-discriminating market. But since they enter this market from vastly different social circumstances, competition is anything but fair. Those who already possess goods have a much better chance of renewing their access to them, whereas those who don’t have little chance of ever getting them.

an examination of the recent history of Cuba does in fact provide valuable lessons about the complex links between economic justice, access to basic goods and services, racial inequality, and what Gutting refers to as “continuing problems about race.”

Still, the battle was a dramatic turnaround from barely a year ago, when the rebels had the upper hand. Ill-disciplined, corrupt and often drunk, the Congolese soldiers were only somewhat more popular than the mutineer rebels who had taken up arms against them.

“You cannot compare the present army with the army of yesterday,”

Last week, the negotiations broke down and fighting resumed. A spokesman for M23 said the Congolese military had started the latest round of fighting, but General Bahuma said they were only responding to a rebel attack.

The great issues of the war were not resolved on that April morning at Appomattox.

not only is the Civil War not over; it can still be lost.

if the Civil War were fought in the United States today with its ten-fold greater population, 7.5 million soldiers would die.

the core argument for conservatism was indeed that it was truer to humankind's crooked timber; that it was more closely tethered to earth rather  than heaven; that it accepted the nature of fallen man and did not try to permanently correct it, but to mitigate our worst instincts and encourage the best, with as light a touch as possible. Religion was for bishops, not presidents. Utopias were for liberals; progress was not inevitable; history did not lead in one obvious direction; we are all limited by epistemological failure and cultural bias.

So on taxes today, a conservative would ask: what have we learned about the impact of lower rates over the last two decades - now the lowest as a percentage of GDP since the 1950s? In healthcare, what have we learned about the largely private system the GOP wants to preserve? A conservative would look at home and abroad for empirical answers, acknowledging no ultimate solution but the need for constant reform because society is always changing. On gay rights, a classic social change, he'd ask what a society should do in integrating the emergence of so many openly gay people, couples and families. On foreign policy, he'd move on a case by case basis, not by way of a "doctrine."

On these terms, today's GOP could not be less conservative. I'd insist it's less conservative than Obama. It does not present reality-based reform for emergent problems. It simply reiterates dogma and ruthlessly polices dissent or debate.

The story of the denazification of Germany after 1945 comes in two versions. The one we know best allows us to congratulate ourselves on a job well done. We turned the most powerful and frightening dictatorship in Europe into a stable, peaceable and functioning democracy for the first time in its history. This is the story we grew up with during the cold war, one that justified the partition and occupation of the country over many decades.

there is also a much less self-­congratulatory version of denazification. It dwells on the darker side by exposing once taboo subjects like the expulsion of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe and the apparently countless rapes carried out by the Red Army.

there were then — and remain to this day — two mysteries in the conduct of the German people at the war’s end, mysteries that go to the heart of Taylor’s book. One was the question of why they continued to fight so resolutely, for so long, against obviously overwhelming odds, even after it must have been clear that the war was lost. Taylor stresses two completely counterproductive messages sent by the Allies: the policy of unconditional surrender, and especially the draconian Morgenthau Plan advanced by the American Treasury secretary, which called for the destruction of Germany’s industrial base and the pastoralization of the country. He also highlights the Germans’ sheer terror at the approaching Red Army, a terror that had been fanned, as he notes, by Goebbels’s publicizing of an early Soviet atrocity in an East Prussian village. Finally, there was straightforward Nazi coercion as the regime rounded on its own people, killing more and more of them.

to some of Suu Kyi’s admirers in the West, and ethnic and religious minorities here in Burma, the last few months have been disconcerting.

Suu Kyi, however, is making no apologies for sounding less like a human rights icon and more like a politician playing to the country’s Buddhist majority.

“Please don’t forget that I started out as the leader of a political party. I cannot think of anything more political than that,” Suu Kyi said at a Dec. 6 news conference in Rangoon. “Icon was a depiction that was imposed on me by other people.”

Cuba poured out in a rally here on Saturday during which President Obama was denounced unsparingly as a traitor and a liar.

This week’s announcements from Mr. Obama and the Cuban president, Raúl Castro, have revived in stark fashion the resentments of these exiles, many of whom now feel utterly betrayed by the government of their adopted land.

“All Obama is doing is throwing a lifeline to the Castros so that they can continue crushing the people of Cuba,” said Roberto Delgado Ramos, 78, who said he was arrested twice, in 1960 and 1964, for “counterrevolutionary activities” and served a total of 12 years in prison. “The Castros are the ones who need to pay for the blood that they have spilled.”

what we see is that some lives matter more than others, that some lives matter so much that they need to be protected at all costs, and that other lives matter less, or not at all. And when that becomes the situation, then the lives that do not matter so much, or do not matter at all, can be killed or lost, can be exposed to conditions of destitution, and there is no concern, or even worse, that is regarded as the way it is supposed to be

we have to remember that under slavery black lives were considered only a fraction of a human life, so the prevailing way of valuing lives assumed that some lives mattered more

when and where did black lives ever really get free of coercive force? One reason the chant “Black Lives Matter” is so important is that it states the obvious but the obvious has not yet been historically realized. So it is a statement of outrage and a demand for equality, for the right to live free of constraint, but also a chant that links the history of slavery, of debt peonage, segregation, and a prison system geared toward the containment, neutralization and degradation of black lives,

This week’s conversation is with Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon and the author of “The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality After the History of Philosophy.”

My first book, “Race and Mixed Race” (1991) was an analysis of the incoherence of U.S. black/white racial categories in their failure to allow for mixed race. In “Philosophy of Science and Race,” I examined the lack of a scientific foundation for biological notions of human races, and in “The Ethics and Mores of Race,” I turned to the absence of ideas of universal human equality in the Western philosophical tradition.

Critical philosophy of race, like critical race theory in legal studies, seeks to understand the disadvantages of nonwhite racial groups in society (blacks especially) by understanding social customs, laws, and legal practices.

While protests of the so-called rape culture on college campuses have surfaced before — Take Back the Night marches are decades old — the sudden convergence of exposure and outrage over these acts of sexual violence suggests a tolerance tipping point in American culture for a problem that institutions and victims alike have long hidden from view.

“I think we are at a critical moment,” said Eugene R. Fidell, an expert on military justice at Yale Law School. “The military is not on an island all to itself, and the debate in the country is over what is the medicine we need to take. The fact that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way our society treats women is a proposition on which there is now general agreement.”

“As women expect more equality,” said Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, who banned some fraternity functions after two separate assault cases, “the prevalence of this archaic behavior becomes increasingly intolerable. You now find flash points where you can protest against that behavior on college campuses and in the military, and there will be others where women and others can get attention for their claims.”

Inveighing against the barbarism of ISIS, the president pointed out that it would be foolish to blame Islam, at large, for its atrocities. To make this point he noted that using religion to brutalize other people is neither a Muslim invention nor, in America, a foreign one: Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

The "all too often" could just as well be "almost always." There were a fair number of pretexts given for slavery and Jim Crow, but Christianity provided the moral justification

Stephens went on to argue that the "Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa" could only be accomplished through enslavement. And enslavement was not made possible through Robert's Rules of Order, but through a 250-year reign of mass torture, industrialized murder, and normalized rape—tactics which ISIS would find familiar. Its moral justification was not "because I said so," it was "Providence," "the curse against Canaan," "the Creator," "and Christianization." In just five years, 750,000 Americans died because of this peculiar mission of "Christianization." Many more died before, and many more died after. In his "Segregation Now" speech, George Wallace invokes God 27 times and calls the federal government opposing him "a system that is the very opposite of Christ."

Activist Israel Kaunatjike journeyed from Namibia to Germany, only to discover a forgotten past that has connections to his own family tree

Black and white people shared a country, yet they weren't allowed to live in the same neighborhoods or patronize the same businesses. That, says Kaunatjike, was verboten.

A few decades after German immigrants staked their claim over South-West Africa in the late 19th century, the region came under the administration of the South African government, thanks to a provision of the League of Nations charter.

David Crouch in Copenhagen and Patrick Kingsley in London Tuesday 26 January 2016 12.55 EST Last modified on Tuesday 26 January 2016 14.21 EST Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on Pinterest Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp Shares 5,011 5011 save-for-later__label sa

The bill presented by the centre-right minority government of the prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, was approved after almost four hours of debate by 81 of the 109 lawmakers present, as members of the opposition Social Democrats and two small rightwing parties backed the measures.

“There’s no simple answer for a single country, but until the world comes together on a joint solution [to the migrant crisis], Denmark needs to act,” MP Jakob Ellemann-Jensen of Rasmussen’s Venstre party said during the debate.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may at last leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been holed up for three and a half years.

But even though he may leave with the support of a United Nations working group, he is still likely to be arrested in Britain on sex crime charges for alleged crimes in Sweden that date back several years.

Assange had said he would surrender to British police for arrest Friday if the U.N. group ruled he had not been unlawfully detained. However, any judgment by the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention would be only a "moral recommendation" and would not be legally binding.

In Guatemala, military stands trial for sexual slavery

Sitting at the defense table, Asig sat with his head tilted toward the floor in apparent boredom. Reyes Giron flipped through case documents with one hand, his other arm clasped tight over his gut. A former lieutenant in the Guatemalan army, Reyes Giron is accused of leading what the prosecution has described as a strategic effort to crush peasant resistance.

During that war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996, battles between the state and Marxist guerrillas often served as impetus and cover for massacres that left an estimated 200,000 people dead and another 45,000 missing — the vast majority of them civilians.

Most voters do not listen through their ears. They listen through their stomachs. If a leader can connect with them on a gut level, their response is: “Don’t bother me with the details. I trust your instincts.”

Trump’s Republican rivals keep thinking that if they just point out a few more details about him, voters will drop The Donald and turn to one of them instead. But you can’t talk voters out of something that they haven’t been talked into.

G.O.P. elites sold their own souls and their party so many times to charlatans and plutocrats that you wonder when it’s going to show up on closeout on eBay: “For sale: The G.O.P. soul. Almost empty. This soul was previously sold to Sarah Palin, the Tea Party anarchists, Rush Limbaugh, Grover Norquist, the gun lobby, the oil industry, the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and Fox News. Will bargain. No offer too low.”