Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged rebellion

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Javier E

China Is a Paper Dragon - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • “We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century,” Biden said. His aides describe the president as preoccupied with the challenge from China.
  • aides say Biden believes it is a key test by which historians will judge his presidency.”
  • As Biden said to the nation from the well of the House of Representatives, the authoritarian President Xi Jinping is “deadly earnest” about China “becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others—autocrats—think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies.”
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • many of the advances cited as Chinese strengths don’t hold up to close scrutiny. American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”
  • The book argues that China’s economic, financial, technological, and military strength is hugely exaggerated by crude and inaccurate statistics.
  • The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes.
  • China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then
  • Worried about Chinese students’ high scores on comparative math tests? You’re looking at the curated outputs of highly selective groups of students. Whereas public school is free through high school in the United States, China’s government only covers the costs of elementary and middle school. At many Chinese high schools, families have to pay tuition and other expenses, and these outlays are among the highest in the world. Consequently, 76 percent of China’s working-age population has not completed high school.
  • in the 1800s, the Chinese empire had a GDP much larger than that of Great Britain. The Chinese army of 800,000 men also enormously exceeded Britain’s troop numbers. Yet when the two states clashed in the two Opium Wars, from 1839 to 1842 and again in 1858, China was crushingly defeated. Why? A great part of the answer, then as now, was the cost of repression.
  • Many Chinese college students describe their universities as “diploma factories,” where student-teacher ratios are double the average in U.S. universities, cheating is rampant, students spend a quarter of their time studying “Mao Zedong thought,” and students and professors are denied access to basic sources of information, such as Google Scholar and certain academic journal repositories.
  • Chinese firms’ total spending on R&D as a percentage of sales revenue stalled at levels four times below the average for American firms. … Chinese firms remain dependent on foreign technologies and manual labor and have a rudimentary level of automation and digitization: on average Chinese enterprises have just nineteen robots per ten thousand employees; U.S. firms, by contrast, use an average of 176 robots per ten thousand employees.
  • But isn’t China sprinting to overtake the United States? Yes, but it’s stumbling badly in that pursuit. China now leads the world in retractions of scientific studies due to fraud; one-third of Chinese scientists have admitted to plagiarizing or falsifying results (versus 2 percent of U.S. scientists); and two-thirds of China’s R&D spending has been lost to corruption.
  • Beckley’s clarifying theoretical insight: Repression is expensive
  • The Chinese military’s first and paramount mission is preserving the power of the Chinese Communist Party against China’s own people. The U.S. military can focus entirely on external threats.
  • The lines that plot the comparative GDP of the United States and China distort the real balance of power between the two societies, Beckley argues, because China must devote such a large share of its resources to basic subsistence needs to avert the overthrow of the state.
  • this might be a useful moment to hear a contrary voice. In 2018, the Tufts University professor Michael Beckley published a richly detailed study of Chinese military and economic weaknesses. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.
  • Nineteenth-century China faced an average of 25 local uprisings a year. Most of its troops had to be deployed to suppress rebellions and control banditry, leaving few available for war-fighting.
  • A final piece of the answer is that technological copycats face huge disadvantages against technological innovators. They will always lag behind the more creative rival, not only in the factory, but on the battlefield. “Repeatedly during the Opium Wars … Chinese armies of thousands were routed in minutes by a few hundred, or even a few dozen, British troops,”
  • Beckley seeks to highlight the immense defects of gross GDP as a measure of national strength—factoring in the costs of repression—and the strategic predicament of China’s location, barred from the open ocean by a ring of potential enemies on its eastern front, extending from Russia, through Korea, past Japan, to the Philippines, and then to Vietnam.
  • He said that he had become more alarmed by China’s aggressive and repressive intentions, but remained as dubious as ever about Chinese capacities.
  • Sanders lost the nomination, but he won the debate within the Democratic Party over trade policy. In his address, Biden committed to extending and enlarging “Buy American” favoritism in government procurement. His administration is maintaining Trump’s anti-China tariffs and is “reviewing”—not yet removing—tariffs against the European Union and other trade partners. Biden economic advisers warned during his campaign that trade expansion would rank low on their list of priorities, and so it is proving.
  • The Trump administration raised the defense budget by more than $100 billion a year, and the spending increases have continued even after the campaign against ISIS came to an end. More and more of the money is being directed to preparations for a conflict with China.
  • China’s language and behavior is assertive and provocative, for sure. China’s power is rising, yes. Its behavior at home and abroad is becoming more oppressive and more brutal; that’s also tragically true.
  • as Americans muster the courage and will to face Chinese realities, that reckoning needs also to appreciate the tremendous capabilities of this country, and the very real limits besetting China: a fast-aging population, massive internal indebtedness, and a regime whose worsening repression suggests its declining popularity.
  • two deep truths about Chinese society: It’s about to be home to a lot of old people, and trust in the state is very low, and for good reason.
  • As China’s population ages, it will deplete its savings. Chinese people save a lot to compensate for the state’s meager social-security provision. For three decades, the savings of ordinary people financed the spectacular borrowing of China’s state-owned enterprises
  • What happens as the savings are withdrawn to finance hundreds of millions of retirements? Again—who knows?
  • China misallocates capital on a massive scale. More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places
  • China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital
  • More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms. The next best alternative: sending their children out. Pre-pandemic, almost 1 million young Chinese attended Western universities. Pre-pandemic, only about 10,000 Americans were studying in China; single thousands were from other Western countries—and almost all of them were in the country to study language, not any academic specialty.
  • U.S. policy makers should look to the future with a little more confidence and a lot more trust in trade, markets, and the superior potential of a free people under an elected government.
anonymous

How Republicans Fanned the Flames Before US Capitol Building Riot - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass,” said Mr. Brooks, Republican of Alabama. “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? Louder! Will you fight for America?”
  • Hours later, urged on by President Trump at the same rally, rioters stormed the Capitol, where Congress was meeting to formalize Mr. Biden’s election, chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” threatening to shoot Speaker Nancy Pelosi and forcing lawmakers to evacuate the building in a scene of violence and mayhem.
  • But a handful of Mr. Trump’s most loyal allies in the House had gone even further in the days and weeks before the riot, urging their supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to make a defiant last stand to keep him in power.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, first-term lawmakers who ran as outspoken defenders of Mr. Trump, referred to the day as Republicans’ “1776 moment.”
  • As rioters laid siege to the Capitol, Mr. Gosar posted a message of calm on Twitter, telling his followers, “Let’s not get carried away here.”
  • Their comments have raised questions about the degree to which Republicans may have coordinated with protest organizers.
  • “We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Mr. Alexander said in a since-deleted video, “so that who we couldn’t rally, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”
  • “I make no apology for doing my absolute best to inspire patriotic Americans to not give up on our country and to fight back against anti-Christian socialists in the 2022 and 2024 elections,”
  • “We’re going to need to take a broader look at members of Congress who may have encouraged or even facilitated the attack on the Capitol,”
  • Other House Democrats were pushing to invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, added after the Civil War, which disqualifies people who “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States from holding public office.
  • Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, introduced a resolution on Monday with 47 co-sponsors that would initiate investigations for “removal of the members who attempted to overturn the results of the election and incited a white supremacist attempted coup.”
  • “Even if it’s just a few, we have to make sure the message is clear that you cannot be a sitting Congress member and incite an insurrection and work to overturn an election,”
kaylynfreeman

Opinion | Congress Should Bar Trump From Ever Holding Office - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Congress should use its constitutional power to prohibit instigators and perpetrators of last week’s violent siege of the Capitol, including President Trump, from holding public office ever again.
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      YES
  • The 14th Amendment gives Congress the power to enforce Section 3 through legislation. So Congress can immediately pass a law declaring that any person who has ever sworn to defend the Constitution — from Mr. Trump to others — and who incited, directed, or participated in the Jan. 6 assault “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” and is therefore constitutionally disqualified from holding office in the future.
  • We believe legislators of conscience should brandish this option not as a substitute for impeachment but as a complement to it.
anonymous

Opinion: Nothing will be allowed to stop Joe Biden's inauguration - CNN - 0 views

shared by anonymous on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Law enforcement authorities are bracing for violence and attempts at disrupting the inauguration of our nation's 46th president, Joe Biden, on January 20. Online threats, which have become de rigueur in the current age of division and stoked partisan outrage, abound.
  • To anyone in America just waking up from a four-year slumber, what an odd and incongruous presidential declaration. We fight like hell during the campaign.
  • Our society acknowledges that as bitterly as we fought the election contest, we remain the United States of America.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The direct result of last Wednesday's Capitol riots, where some Trump supporters overwhelmed Capitol Police checkpoints and occupied and defiled our national seat of government, should distress us all.
  • But what was the Capitol attack and the dark forces it embodied but an emergency? Angry protesters carrying American flags and screeching "stop the steal" abounded. The silly coup attempt -- exemplified by the "QAnon Shaman," shirtless and replete in horned headgear, and the cad who attempted to make off with Nancy Pelosi's lectern -- should embarrass us all.
  • Nothing will impede the peaceful transition of American power that has been so central to our democracy since George Washington handed over the reins to John Adams in 1797 -- 223 years ago. Nothing.
  • Make no mistake about it -- this was an insurrection. I fully understand the precision of language required by our criminal justice system. Title 18 U.S. Code § 2383 defines it this way: "Whoever incites, sets on foot, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof..." Storming the meeting place of our nation's legislature meets this definition.
  • The thing about mobs is that they are not precise, controllable instruments. Once you roil up an instigator or agitator or two, they act as the catalyst for mobilization -- what results then transforms into a singular, dangerous vessel -- and otherwise sober or reasonable folks get caught up in frenzy.
  • These weren't patriots. They were part of a seditious action that resulted in a police officer's death. They were part of the rabble that included a cop killer. The murdered officer, Brian Sicknick, was also an Air National Guard veteran.
  • The incitement and execution of mob violence on Congress is a horror unto itself but, sadly, disorderly crowds bent on destructive action have also become all too familiar over these paralyzingly long past eight months.
Javier E

Chinese youth - Young Chinese are both patriotic and socially progressive | Special rep... - 0 views

  • More than half of Chinese in their 20s express a desire to start their own business. Others will climb up the ranks of the ruling Communist Party
  • How they understand their country’s past and what they ask of its future are essential to understand how they might one day lead China.
  • Youth often stands for trendsetting and rebellion. In China, the young must navigate an authoritarian state and a bruisingly competitive education system. This is when big life decisions are made and adult identities formed.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Without siblings, they shoulder alone the full weight of their parents’ (and grandparents’) expectations: to excel at school, secure a stable job, marry and have children, all before the age of 30.
  • Newlyweds hit a ten-year low in 2019. Women in Shanghai marry on average at 29, later than Americans and a jump of six years in a decade
  • The jiulinghou are China’s best-educated cohort yet. Last year the country churned out a record 9m graduates.
  • A pay cheque is no longer enough; young people want a sense of purpose. As labour-intensive manufacturing winds down, young migrants from the countryside are taking up gigs that give them more freedom in the booming informal sector.
  • In China this cohort has a generational identity: the jiulinghou, or “post-90s”, a shorthand term for those born between 1990 and 1999. They number 188m—more than the combined populations of Australia, Britain and Germany.
  • Despite pervasive censorship, they use China’s online networks to promote such causes as feminism, environmentalism and nationalism.
  • When they feel insulted by foreign entities, be they K-pop bands or America’s National Basketball Association, millions clamour online for consumer boycotts that cow even mighty multinationals. Patriotic sentiment has long been strong. But increasingly youths do not question the regime’s claim that loving country and party are one and the same.
  • The jiulinghou are seen as apolitical, except in their naive and brash patriotism; concerned with getting ahead, but only to buy the latest iPhone. Many see them as materialistic and entitled, a generation of “little emperors” doted on by their parents.
  • This does not always describe the jiulinghou.
  • “We are the jiulinghou,” the message read. “We are certainly not brain-dead!...In fact, we are passionate, we are rising and we are ready to take on responsibility.”
  • young people speak out for social causes. Many join volunteer groups or donate to charity. No generation has been more vocal in its support of LGBT and women’s rights. Students have backed factory workers trying to unionise, and staged silent street protests about climate change.
  • Young people do not intend to challenge the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party. Their social liberalism has grown even as support for the party rises
  • The jiulinghou are comfortable with a rising, assertive China. The party knows how to play on this. It has hammered home that China stopped the spread of covid-19 within its borders as the West bungled its response. Spin doctors have not had to exert themselves on the calamitous failings of Donald Trump’s presidency. More overseas Chinese students are returning home, disillusioned with the West. Young pride feeds off a new worldly confidence.
  • China divides its generations by decades. The qilinghou (post-70s) are defined by childhoods after Mao’s death in 1976. The balinghou (post-80s) grew up as China reformed and opened to the world under Deng Xiaoping. It is often now argued that generations change every five years, or even every three—the talk is already of the linglinghou, most of whom are still in school. To speak of millennials, whose definition in the West is those born between 1981 and 1996, is to shoehorn four Chinese generations into one.
  • The gap is easy to grasp if you ask parents to recall their 20s. They mention jobs allocated by the party through their danwei, a government-controlled work unit.
  • The lives of jiulinghou share two features. One is that they began after the pro-democracy protests of 1989. The state relentlessly scrubs from the internet any reference to the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen protests.
  • The second feature is that those born since 1991 spent their late teens with Mr Xi in power. They might be called Generation Xi
  • Students take obligatory courses on Marxism, nationalism and the doctrines of Mao; last year “Xi Jinping Thought” was added. This affects how they see the world. A survey in 2019 by China Youth Daily, a state organ, found that three in four of those born after 1995 think China is “not perfect, but always improving”.
  • Yet not every young Chinese holds rosy views of the party. In Hong Kong, young protesters fighting for Western freedoms have made clear their fury at their erosion by the Beijing government. Tibetan and Uyghur youths seethe in silence as brutal state-led campaigns erase their cultures and languages
Javier E

A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? | WIRED - 0 views

  • Sale believed society was on the verge of collapse. That wasn’t entirely bad, he argued. He hoped the few surviving humans would band together in small, tribal-style clusters. They wouldn’t be just off the grid. There would be no grid. Which was dandy, as far as Sale was concerned.
  • “History is full of civilizations that have collapsed, followed by people who have had other ways of living,” Sale said. “My optimism is based on the certainty that civilization will collapse.”
  • Sale was a bit taken aback—he’d never put a date on it. Finally, he blurted out 2020. It seemed like a good round number.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Kelly then asked how, in a quarter century, one might determine whether Sale was right.Sale extemporaneously cited three factors: an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes.
  • “I bet you $1,000 that in the year 2020, we’re not even close to the kind of disaster you describe,” he said.
  • Twenty-five years later, the once distant deadline is here. We are locked down. Income equality hasn’t been this bad since just before the Great Depression. California and Australia were on fire this year.
  • When Sale and Kelly made the bet, they had assumed that by 2020 the winner would be obvious. Maybe all it would take was a look around: Is civilization still here, or not? It clearly is still kicking around. But the pandemic, its economic consequences, and the worsening climate crisis have made things interesting. What would Patrick say?
  • That’s what Patrick had to determine. In early December he began writing up his decision. Despite his wariness toward tech, he had no intention of jumping on the current techlash bandwagon. Instead, the bet was constructed on three clear conditions, and Patrick would consider each one separately, as if judging a boxing match round by round.
  • Round by round, the outcome would seem to make it a draw. But when making the final call, Patrick stuck to the language of the original bet. In that fateful Greenwich Village encounter, Sale called for a convergence of three disasters. “Kirk must hit the trifecta to win, meaning that all three horses of his apocalypse must come through,” Patrick wrote. “Only one of his predictions was a winner; one came in neck and neck; and one was way back in the pack.”
  • So on December 31, Patrick declared Kelly the winner in an email to the bettors. “But it’s a squeaker and not much cause for celebration,” he concluded.
anonymous

At the Met, Heavy Metal on a Continental Scale - The New York Times - 0 views

  • But he could not foresee how quickly his knightly exploits would seem antique. A new world had been discovered across the Atlantic, and in Saxony a professor named Martin Luther had nailed some thoughts on religion to a church door. Merchants from Lisbon to Venice were making fortunes, and chivalry became a hangup from an earlier age.
  • Though it’s armed to the teeth with flashy military gear — meant for both function and fashion, and for both men and horses — you’ll also find paintings, illustrated books and celebratory images made with the hottest new technology of the late 15th century: printmaking.
  • Five hundred years ago, at a moment of political rebellion and economic anxiety, a leader arose who understood the public allure of the martial imagination, and how war could turn a noble into something like a superman. He was Emperor Maximilian I of the Holy Roman Empire, and out of an iffy inheritance in Austria he emerged as one of the most powerful leaders in Renaissance Europe, presiding over territories from the modern-day Netherlands all the way to Croatia.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • For Maximilian I, the emperor at the heart of “The Last Knight,” armor was as much for propaganda as protection.
katherineharron

Mitt Romney: What 'Pierre Delecto' tells us about the current Republican Party - CNNPol... - 0 views

  • These three things are amazing beyond words:1) Mitt Romney has a lurker Twitter handle. 2) The handle name is "Pierre Delecto."3) "C'est Moi" is how Romney confirmed to a reporter that he was Delecto and Delecto was him.
  • "He explained that he uses a secret Twitter account — 'What do they call me, a lurker?' — to keep tabs on the political conversation. 'I won't give you the name of it,' he said, but 'I'm following 668 people.'"
  • By Feinberg's count, Pierre only ever tweeted 10 times (Romney -- or someone -- made the account private once its existence was revealed.) Which isn't a lot. (Good analysis!) But the nature of these tweets -- or, mostly, replies -- are interesting.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • On one level, "Pierre Delecto" is totally explainable by human nature. Romney knows that he looks defensive and thin-skinned if he uses his official Senate account to push back on his critics. To avoid that, he creates an alter ego that allows him to do just that. (NBA superstar Kevin Durant did the same thing, and of course don't forget President Donald Trump's pre-White House, telephone alter ego John Barron.)
  • In one response to criticism of Romney from liberal commentator Soledad O'Brien, Pierre noted that Romney (AKA him) was the "only Republican to hit" Trump on the Mueller Report and defended his "moral compass." In another, Delecto defended Romney from a Twitter onslaught by Washington Post blogger and Trump critic Jennifer Rubin.
  • While Pierre is right that Romney has been more willing than most Republican elected officials to publicly criticize Trump, it's also true that Romney hasn't a) been all that critical of Trump or b) done anything to put his discomfort with Trump into action.
  • Instead, he's used a fake Twitter person to defend himself and his image. Which works nicely as a metaphor for how elected Republican officials, more broadly, are dealing with Trump: light criticism (at most) in public and open anger, frustration and near-rebellion behind the scenes or covered by the anonymity of quotes without their names attached.
  • Which, last time I checked, doesn't have any actual impact on either President Donald Trump or the fate of the party he continues to lead with reckless abandon.
johnsonel7

Road built by biblical villain uncovered in Jerusalem - 0 views

  • Pontius Pilate is a man many Jews and Christians love to hate. For Christians, the Roman governor of Judaea played a central role in the execution of Jesus around A.D. 30, while for Jews he was a callous ruler who set the stage for the rebellion that led to the destruction of Jerusalem four decades later. But a new discovery suggests that Pilate also spent a good deal of time and money embellishing the famous city that drew Jewish pilgrims as well as visitors from around the Roman Empire.
  • The latest coins discovered beneath the paving stones date to around A.D. 31. The most common Jerusalem coins from the first century were minted after 40, “so not having them beneath the street means the street was built before their appearance, in other words only in the time of Pilate,” says Donald Ariel, a coin expert with the Israel Antiquities Authority.
  • During a ceremony last June inaugurating part of the tunnel, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman dismissed these concerns. The project, he said, “confirms with evidence, with science, with archaeological studies that which many of us already knew, certainly in our heart: the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish people.” And, if the science proves correct, it was a despised Roman who helped make it a city renowned across the empire for its holy sites and monumental architecture.
brookegoodman

What is the Magna Carta? - HISTORY - 0 views

  • While the Magna Carta, signed in 1215, primarily secured liberties for England’s elite classes, its language protecting due process and barring absolute monarchy has guided the fundamental principles of common law in constitutions around the world for the last 800 years.
  • In fear that the rebellion would escalate to full-scale civil war and endanger his throne, King John affixed his seal on the document at Runnymede on June 15, 1215, making it Europe’s first written constitution.
  • the Magna Carta was reinstated under 9-year-old King Henry III.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Ironically, the Magna Carta would inspire American colonists a few hundred years later to declare independence from the British themselves
  • “No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised, outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will we proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.”
  • The four remaining copies of the original Magna Carta are housed at Salisbury Cathedral, Lincoln Cathedral and the British Museum.
Javier E

Why Changing The Way We See The Civil War Will Help Us Preserve Our Country | Talking P... - 0 views

  • Once the most popular name in the North was The War of the Rebellion, but to white Southerners that name made it too clear who was at fault. By the late 19th and early 20th century, as white Southerners and Northerners looked for ways to paper over some of the past, forget the overthrow of Reconstruction, and adjust to a reunited nation based on segregation and disfranchisement of the former slaves, the name the Civil War became popular as a way of covering up all the messiness and confusion of the conflict.
  • It wasn’t just a Brothers’ War or a family feud or a restorative war to save the Union, as the name Civil War implies. It was also something bigger than that: It was a revolution that deserved to stand next to the revolutions in England and Haiti and maybe even France. Like those revolutions, it was fought to remake the world, not just to determine who was in charge. And like those revolutions, it did not stay within the old boundaries of law and constitution but instead relied upon blunt, violent tools — military rule and occupation — to force through changes that the leaders could not accomplish by normal means.
  • The name the Civil War covered up the messiness in American history; many great historians have tried to uncover the full story through the language of revolution but they haven’t been able to convince the public or even other social scientists. But if we think of the Civil War as a revolution, we have to face some challenging ideas: that the system set up by the Founders faltered, that the country could not be saved by normal means, that slavery could not be killed by the typical procedures or laws and congressional debate
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Constitution could not prevent civil war, and it could not end slavery. Therefore, Republicans reluctantly and temporarily abandoned some of their faith in the Constitution to save the country and to end slavery. They broke constitutional norms, relied on military rule, added states, and threatened to dismantle the Supreme Court because they did not believe they could end slavery within the Constitution as it was.
  • As architects of a country that failed, the First American Republic, the First Founders might shimmer as warnings or ideals but not as guides. Americans might have to shed the sense that the Founders possess answers to our current predicaments or blame for our situation. They might retain their glamor — like José Martí in Cuba, Miguel Hidalgo in Mexico, even Toussaint-Louverture in Haiti — as emblems of romantic struggles that do not quite speak to the present political conditions. We might see their work the way the French see the First, Second, Third, or Fourth Republics, as important preludes but also as relics who, having used up their magic, can safely be held and examined. Voices of the past, not oracles of the future.
delgadool

Extinction Rebellion's plan to save the climate with civil disobedience - Vox - 0 views

  • They’ve glued themselves to trains, blockaded major bridges, and chained themselves to government buildings
  • They’ve glued themselves to trains, blockaded major bridges, and chained themselves to government buildings
    • delgadool
       
      wow!
  • nonviolent civil disobedience is our only shot at countering the climate emergency.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • So might Hallam’s plan to replace the government with a Citizens’ Assembly, a group of randomly selected citizens, which he argues would be more democratic and more responsive to the climate crisis than the status quo.
  • French President Emmanuel Macron just promised to give 150 randomly chosen people the power to set the policy agenda on cutting carbon emissions. In the UK, 110 people will take part in an assembly to decide on policies for achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
  • we can no longer rely on incremental reforms, like those advocated by most environmental nonprofits
  • You’ve got to understand, it’s like we’ve gone to the doctor and he’s told us we’ve got terminal cancer. We need to reduce carbon emissions in a matter of months and years, not decades. We need to change governments’ actions very quickly.
  • Yes, 3.5 percent is the average of what we’ve needed in uprisings since 1900.
  • This is too important for it to be about political ideology or ego. But people have been doing climate marches for more than 30 years. It doesn’t work because no one is losing money or reputation. The most effective way to do that is breaking the law and going to prison.
delgadool

English Civil Wars - Definition, Causes & Results - HISTORY - 0 views

  • The English Civil Wars (1642-1651) stemmed from conflict between Charles I and Parliament over an Irish insurrection
  • paved the way for a rebellion by Catholic Ireland (October 1641)
  • The English conflict left some 34,000 Parliamentarians and 50,000 Royalists dead, while at least 100,000 men and women died from war-related diseases, bringing the total death toll caused by the three civil wars in England to almost 200,000.
delgadool

In Huawei Battle, China Threatens Germany 'Where It Hurts': Automakers - The New York T... - 0 views

  • VW, Daimler and BMW sell more cars in China than anywhere else and many already cooperate with Huawei — a dependency Beijing is not shy to exploit.
  • Whatever Germany decides will shape its relations with China for years and reverberate across the Continent. It will send a powerful political signal on how united, or fractured, Europe will be in the digital age of rivalry between Washington and Beijing.
  • China, on the other hand, is elbowing its way onto the European stage as a new strategic player and an increasingly indispensable economic partner.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • It is a position that China has not been shy to weaponize.
  • “It is not about individual companies, but rather security standards,” the chancellor said in November. “It is about the certification we will carry out. That should be our guiding benchmark.”
  • rebellion is brewing in Germany’s foreign policy and intelligence community — scared of American threats to limit intelligence sharing — and even among some of the chancellor’s own lawmakers, who want to submit a proposal to Parliament with tougher security criteria that would, in effect, keep Huawei out.
  • “Car companies gather loads of personal data from the drivers of their cars, and they face an enormous risk of an angry public outraged to find their data used by the Chinese Communist Party,” said Mr. Grenell, the United States ambassador.
  • German automakers like Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW have continued to record sales gains in China and to take share from rivals like Ford, even as the overall market has slumped.
  • Today Volkswagen earns almost half its sales revenue in China and has 14 percent of the Chinese car market.
  • “If we were to pull out” of China, Herbert Diess, the chief executive of Volkswagen, told the Wolfsburger Nachrichten newspaper in December, “a day later 10,000 of our 20,000 development engineers in Germany would be out of work.”
Javier E

Among the Insurrectionists - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • What I do know, after spending hours sponging up Trumpist paranoia, conspiracism, and cultishness, is that this gathering was not merely an attempted coup but also a mass-delusion event, not something that can be explained adequately through the prism of politics. Its chaos was rooted in psychological and theological phenomena, intensified by eschatological anxiety.
  • a resident of Texas who said his name was Don Johnson (I did not trust this to be his name), told me that the country was coming apart, and that this dissolution presaged the End Times. “It’s all in the Bible,” he said. “Everything is predicted. Donald Trump is in the Bible. Get yourself ready.”
  • The conflation of Trump and Jesus was a common theme at the rally. “Give it up if you believe in Jesus!” a man yelled near me. People cheered. “Give it up if you believe in Donald Trump!” Louder cheers.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “A year from now we’re gonna start working on Congress,” Trump said through the boombox. “We gotta get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world. We gotta get rid of them.”
  • Their leader and, for some, savior—a number of them would profess to me their belief that the 45th president is an agent of God and his son, Jesus Christ—was rehearsing his pitiful list of grievances, and also fomenting a rebellion against, among others, the klatch of treacherous Republicans who had aligned themselves with the Constitution and against him.
  • The treasonous behavior of Liz Cheney and many of her Republican colleagues was, to them, a fixed insurrectionary fact, but Pence was still in a plastic moment. Across the day, however, I could feel the Trump cult turning against him, as it turns against most everything.
rerobinson03

Opinion | Impeach Trump Again - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The attack on the Capitol on Wednesday was not a spontaneous eruption of violence. It was the culmination of a campaign waged by the president of the United States and his allies in Congress and the right-wing media to overturn the results of a free and fair election that began even before the ballots began to be counted on Election Day.
  • The riot came at the cost of at least five lives and shook the confidence of the nation and the world in the stability of American democracy.
  • We fight. We fight like hell,” the president said. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Then, after it was clear Mr. Biden was the victor, and after weeks of public and private attempts to get states to change their vote totals and deliver him a second term, the president encouraged his supporters to converge on Washington on Jan. 6. (“Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted.) Tens of thousands of them, from all over the country, answered his call.
  • If Republican senators refuse to convict Mr. Trump, they would go on the record — for their constituents to see and reconcile — defending a man who was happy to put their lives, and the nation’s democratic future, at risk for nothing but his own quest to hold on to power.
  • Mr. Trump is not the only person at fault. Many Republican lawmakers riled up his supporters for weeks with false claims of election rigging and continued to object to the electoral vote even after the attack. The 14th Amendment bars from office any federal or state lawmaker who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or given “aid or comfort” to those who have. Congressional leaders will need to reckon with which of their colleagues require censure for their actions, and perhaps even expulsion.
rerobinson03

8 Reasons Why Rome Fell - HISTORY - 0 views

  • The most straightforward theory for Western Rome’s collapse pins the fall on a string of military losses sustained against outside forces. Rome had tangled with Germanic tribes for centuries, but by the 300s “barbarian” groups like the Goths had encroached beyond the Empire’s borders.
  • 410 the Visigoth King Alaric successfully sacked the city of Rome. The Empire spent the next several decades under constant threat before “the Eternal City” was raided again in 455, this time by the Vandals. Finally, in 476, the Germanic leader Odoacer staged a revolt and deposed the Emperor Romulus Augustulus.
  • it was also crumbling from within thanks to a severe financial crisis.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Constant wars and overspending had significantly lightened imperial coffers, and oppressive taxation and inflation had widened the gap between rich and poor
  • the Western Empire seated in the city of Milan, and the Eastern Empire in Byzantium, later known as Constantinople. The division made the empire more easily governable in the short term, but over time the two halves drifted apart.
  • Most importantly, the strength of the Eastern Empire served to divert Barbarian invasions to the West. Emperors like Constantine ensured that the city of Constantinople was fortified and well guarded, but Italy and the city of Rome—which only had symbolic value for many in the East—were left vulnerable.
  • With such a vast territory to govern, the empire faced an administrative and logistical nightmare. Even with their excellent road systems, the Romans were unable to communicate quickly or effectively enough to manage their holdings.
  • Rome struggled to marshal enough troops and resources to defend its frontiers from local rebellions and outside attacks, and by the second century the Emperor Hadrian was forced to build his famous wall in Britain just to keep the enemy at bay.
  • ineffective and inconsistent leadership only served to magnify the problem.
  • Civil war thrust the empire into chaos, and more than 20 men took the throne in the span of only 75 years, usually after the murder of their predecessor.
  • The political rot also extended to the Roman Senate, which failed to temper the excesses of the emperors due to its own widespread corruption and incompetence. As the situation worsened, civic pride waned and many Roman citizens lost trust in their leadership.
  • The Barbarian attacks on Rome partially stemmed from a mass migration caused by the Huns’ invasion of Europe in the late fourth century. When these Eurasian warriors rampaged through northern Europe, they drove many Germanic tribes to the borders of the Roman Empire.
  • In brutalizing the Goths, the Romans created a dangerous enemy within their own borders. When the oppression became too much to bear, the Goths rose up in revolt and eventually routed a Roman army and killed the Eastern Emperor Valens during the Battle of Adrianople in A.D. 378. T
  • 410, when the Goth King Alaric moved west and sacked Rome.
  • The decline of Rome dovetailed with the spread of Christianity, and some have argued that the rise of a new faith helped contribute to the empire’s fall.
  • Christianity displaced the polytheistic Roman religion, which viewed the emperor as having a divine status, and also shifted focus away from the glory of the state and onto a sole deity.
  • For most of its history, Rome’s military was the envy of the ancient world.
  • Unable to recruit enough soldiers from the Roman citizenry, emperors like Diocletian and Constantine began hiring foreign mercenaries to prop up their armies. The ranks of the legions eventually swelled with Germanic Goths and other barbarians, so much so that Romans began using the Latin word “barbarus” in place of “soldier.” While these Germanic soldiers of fortune proved to be fierce warriors, they also had little or no loyalty to the empire, and their power-hungry officers often turned against their Roman employers
Javier E

'Cancel culture' doesn't stifle debate, but it does challenge the old order | Billy Bra... - 0 views

  • a quote from the preface of Animal Farm: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
  • Orwell’s quote is not a defence of liberty; it’s a demand for licence, and has become a foundational slogan for those who wilfully misconstrue one for the other.
  • Over the past decade, the right to make inflammatory statements has become a hot button issue for the reactionary right, who have constructed tropes such as political correctness and virtue signalling to enable them to police the limits of social change while portraying themselves as victims of an organised assault on liberty itself.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Many of those who attached their names to the letter are longstanding cultural arbiters, who, in the past, would only have had to fear the disapproval of their peers. Social media has burst their bubble and they now find that anyone with a Twitter account can challenge their opinions.
  • An open letter that is clearly decrying cancel culture (without naming it as such), signed by 150 academics and writers from all sides of the political spectrum, appeared this week in Harper’s Magazine. The signatories complained of a censoriousness that was stifling debate and called for arguments to be settled by persuasion rather than action.
  • the main thrust of their argument was a howl of anguish from a group that has suddenly found its views no longer treated with reverence.
  • The latest creation in their war against accountability is “cancel culture”, an ill-defined notion
  • The ability of middle-aged gatekeepers to control the agenda has been usurped by a new generation of activists who can spread information through their own networks, allowing them to challenge narratives promoted by the status quo.
  • The great progressive movements of the 21st century have sprung from these networks: Black Lives Matter; #MeToo; Extinction Rebellion. While they may seem disparate in their aims, what they have in common is a demand for accountability.
  • Although free speech remains the fundamental bedrock of a free society, for everyone to enjoy the benefits of freedom, liberty needs to be tempered by two further dimensions: equality and accountability
  • Without equality, those in power will use their freedom of expression to abuse and marginalise others. Without accountability, liberty can mutate into the most dangerous of all freedoms – impunity.
  • a new generation has risen that prioritises accountability over free speech. To those whose liberal ideals are proving no defence against the rising tide of duplicitous authoritarianism, this has come as a shock. But when reason, respect and responsibility are all under threat, accountability offers us a better foundation on which to build a cohesive society, one where everyone feels that their voice is heard
carolinehayter

The 'Rage Moms' Democrats Are Counting On - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As millions of American families face an uncertain start to the school year, the anger of women who find themselves expected to be teacher, caregiver, employee and parent is fueling a political uprising.
  • President Trump’s handling of the pandemic is generating an entirely different sentiment, one not traditionally bestowed upon female voters or mothers.“I am a rage mom,” said Senator Patty Murray, the highest-ranking woman in Senate leadership.
  • With millions of American families facing an uncertain start to the school year, the struggle for child care, education and economic stability is fueling a political uprising, built on the anger of women who find themselves constantly — and indefinitely — expected to be teacher, caregiver, employee and parent.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • As the pandemic roars on, voters across America remain deeply angry and worried about the future. But the vocal outrage from women, in particular, is clear on protest lines and in polling data. Women were more likely than men to report having participated in protests over the past two years, and mothers with children in the home were twice as likely as fathers to report participating in a protest, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll from June.
  • Now, the rage moms are railing in Facebook groups about school shutdowns and in teacher union meetings about reopening without proper protection from the virus. They’re also packing virtual town halls with frustrations about schools, child care and the lack of leadership.
  • “There’s nobody giving us solutions,
  • Ms. Lopez is exactly the kind of voter Democrats hope will push them to victory in November, and they are aiming to turn that frustration with government inaction into a vote against Mr. Trump.
  • While the anger is loudest on the left, Democrats hope to capitalize on indications that the rage reaches across party lines
  • The broader focus on caregiving issues marks a significant shift in the political climate of even a few months ago, when Senator Elizabeth Warren made child care a centerpiece of her campaign in the Democratic presidential primary
  • At campaign events six months ago, Ms. Warren’s proposals for universal, government-funded child care would elicit nods primarily from mothers in the crowd, she said, followed by quiet conversations in the selfie line with women about their personal struggle balancing work and child care.During a virtual town hall meeting she held last month, however, more than half of the questions from the audience of 70,000 people were about schools, child care and working parents.
  • The pandemic is the spark but the backlash against Mr. Trump has been burning since the day after his inauguration, when millions of women joined protests across the country. Their fire has endured through #MeToo, waves of teachers’ strikes led by predominantly female unions, the outcry against school shootings, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations, a movement started largely by female racial justice activists. For the second election cycle in a row, a record-breaking number of female candidates are running for federal office. Mr. Biden’s selection of Ms. Harris was widely seen as a nod to the energy women have given the Democratic Party during the Trump era.
  • “Women are mobilized on a bigger scale than we’ve seen in a generation at least,” said Annelise Orleck, a historian at Dartmouth College who studies women’s political activism. “Women are organizing all across the spectrum.”
  • The activism is diffuse and multiracial, reflecting political battles that working class women have long waged for better health care, schools and child care. In some ways, more affluent suburban women are simply waking up to the untenable choices poorer women and women of color have faced for generations.
  • Last month, the Biden campaign kicked off a “Moms for Biden” group
  • The rebellion by white college-educated women against Mr. Trump helped Democrats win key swing districts in 2018, giving the party control of the House.
  • In recent weeks, support for Mr. Trump has begun to drop among white non-college educated women and older women — two more ideologically moderate groups that bolstered his winning coalition four years ago
  • In a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, Mr. Biden leads by 24 points among suburban women and just four points among suburban men, a statistical dead heat.
  • Last month, Mr. Biden announced a sweeping $775 billion caregiving proposal that would cover care for young children, older adults and family members with disabilities.
  • Mr. Biden has repeatedly described caregiving as an economic necessity that deserves sustained support, a marked shift in political rhetoric on a topic that was often seen by politicians as a special interest, not an issue to put at the center of a campaign
  • Parents with minor children make up about one-third of the country’s work force, according to the Brookings Institutions. In 2018, 23.5 million working parents relied upon school and child care programs while they went to work.
  • “For the last 10, 20 years, this has been sidelined and siloed as just a women’s issue,” said Brigid Schulte, who runs the Better Life Lab at New America, a research group. “It’s not and it never has been.”
  • Ms. Richards says Supermajority planned for 800 women to sign up for a recent organizing training it offered. It got 1,800 responses in the first week.
  • “The fact that we do not value child care, that we don’t value early education, this is not something that Covid created — it’s something that Covid exposed,” she said
  • While Democrats have proposed the most ambitious plans to tackle child care, there are some signs that Republicans, too, are facing pressure to address the issue. Last month, the House passed two bills that would provide more than $220 billion in funding for child care centers and tax credits. Each bill had support from more than a dozen Republicans, a notable number in a deeply polarized Congress.
  • “It wasn’t easy for most parents that I’ve talked to. To have no access to child care is crippling,” she said. She hopes the crisis point reached by many families during the pandemic will create political momentum for policies like paid leave, universal early childhood education and universal sick days.
  • “This pandemic has ripped wide an open wound that families have struggled with for a long time.”
anonymous

Russia Was Ready to Celebrate a Glorious Past. The Present Intervened. - The New York T... - 0 views

  • As the coronavirus began its silent but relentless march on Moscow in February, the names of the millions of Russian soldiers killed in the far deadlier horrors of World War II were already appearing, one by one, on state television, scrolling down the screen in a harrowing torrent.
  • The Kremlin offered soothing words about the pandemic, saying that Russia would not suffer too badly. So, the names kept coming, day after day, mourning Russia’s wartime martyrs at a staggering rate of more than 6,000 a minute.
  • And Russia awoke from its glorious, morbid memories of the Red Army’s defeat of Nazi Germany 75 years ago to confront an insidious enemy that kept getting closer and more menacing.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The grand party has been canceled, but this becalmed, sometimes brutal yet still beguilingly beautiful city is all decked out for a big celebration. Copies of the red banner that was raised above the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945 fly on every silent street.
  • In a country with a long history of legal nihilism, the mayor’s stay-at-home pleas were not expected to gain much traction. Russia is, after all, a land where, according to popular wisdom, “the severity of the law is compensated by the laxity of its enforcement” and “when something is not allowed but is greatly desired it can be done.”
  • Most Muscovites, however, have more or less obeyed. That the threat was real, and not just another propaganda exercise to keep protesters off the streets or to gin up fury at the West, became clear in late March. That is when President Vladimir V. Putin shelved a referendum on constitutional changes that would allow him to stay in power until 2036.
  • On the street near my apartment, an illuminated panel that at this time of year usually has a poster celebrating victory in 1945 now features a picture of the head doctor at Moscow’s main hospital for coronavirus patients. “Stay at home!” warns the doctor, who has himself tested positive. “This is the most dangerous place.”
  • old ladies with mops were still cleaning the platforms. We wondered: How long can that all last?But it did — for years and years, through an armed rebellion against President Boris N. Yeltsin, through an economic collapse more severe than the Great Depression, through two wars in Chechnya and murderous terrorist attacks in Moscow. The old ladies kept cleaning.
« First ‹ Previous 81 - 100 of 118 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page