Group items tagged

In debates over the roles of law and government in promoting the equality of income or in redistributing the fruits of capitalism, widely different motives are attributed to those who favor or oppose capitalism or income redistribution. According to one view, largely accepted in the academic social psychology literature (Jost et al. 2003), opposition to income redistribution and support for capitalism reflect an orientation toward social dominance, a desire to dominate other groups. According to another view that goes back at least to the nineteenth century origins of Marxism, anti-capitalism and a support for greater legal efforts to redistribute income reflect envy for the property of others and a frustration with one’s lot in a capitalist system.

compared to anti-redistributionists, strong redistributionists have about two to three times higher odds of reporting that in the prior seven days they were angry, mad at someone, outraged, sad, lonely, and had trouble shaking the blues. Similarly, anti-redistributionists had about two to four times higher odds of reporting being happy or at ease. Not only do redistributionists report more anger, but they report that their anger lasts longer. When asked about the last time they were angry, strong redistributionists were more than twice as likely as strong opponents of leveling to admit that they responded to their anger by plotting revenge. Last, both redistributionists and anti-capitalists expressed lower overall happiness, less happy marriages, and lower satisfaction with their financial situations and with their jobs or housework. Further, in the 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys anti-redistributionists were generally more likely to report altruistic behavior. In particular, those who opposed more government redistribution of income were much more likely to donate money to charities, religious organizations, and political candidates. The one sort of altruistic behavior that the redistributionists were more likely to engage in was giving money to a homeless person on the street.

In the United States, segments of the academic community seem to have reversed the relationship between pro-capitalism and income redistribution on the one hand, and racism and intolerance on the other. Those who support capitalism and oppose greater income redistribution tend to be better educated, to have higher family incomes, to be less traditionally racist, and to be less intolerant of unpopular groups. Those who oppose greater redistribution also tend to be more generous in donating to charities and more likely to engage in some other altruistic behavior. The academic assumption that anti-capitalism and opposition to income redistribution reflect an orientation toward social dominance seems unwarranted.

The UN agency for children says attacks against children have reached new levels of viciousness in the Central African Republic (CAR), where fighting between Muslim Seleka rebels and Christian militias left more than 1,000 people dead and displaced an estimated 400,000 in Bangui, the capital, this month.

According to Unicef, at least at least two children have been beheaded, and one of them mutilated, in the violence that has gripped Bangui since early December

Some 370,000 people – almost half the population of Bangui – have been displaced to dozens of sites across the capital over the past three weeks. About 785,000 people have been internally displaced throughout the country since the outbreak of violence more than a year ago.

Both have been riding nationalist waves of xenophobia – and have done their best to inflame it some more; both believe that military force is the first resort when challenged; both have contempt for the United States under its current president; both regard Europeans as pathetic weaklings and moral squishes; both use a pliant mass media to instill the tropes of paranoia, wounded pride and revenge; both target “infiltrators” in their midst, whether it be African immigrants and Palestinians or gays and Westerners; and both have invaded and threatened their neighbors. Perhaps most important of all: both have lost control to the even more enraged extremists to their right.

Netanyahu’s endless provocations have led to a cabinet even more hawkish than he and a country ever further away from any reconciliation with the people whose land it took decades ago.

Israel could send Gaza back to whichever age it wishes. Its military advantage, its general dominance, over the Palestinians has never been greater since 1948. But it chooses otherwise. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s talk of a ground invasion is empty. The last thing Israel wants, short of a cataclysm, is to go into Gaza and get stuck.

What Israel wants is the status quo (minus Hamas rockets). Israel is the Middle East’s status quo power par excellence. It seeks a calm Gaza under Hamas control, a divided Palestinian movement with Fatah running the West Bank, a vacuous “peace process” to run down the clock, and continued prosperity. Divide and rule. Hamas is useful to Israel as long as it is quiescent.

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, is also a status quo man. Late in his life, he is not prepared to make the painful decisions necessary to attain a two-state peace, decisions that would include relinquishing, against compensation, the so-called “right of return” for millions of Palestinian refugees. He prefers the comforts of his position and the ambiguity of concessions not formalized.

The return of the demolitions speaks volumes about how Netanyahu, who vowed after Tuesday’s attack to “settle the score with every terrorist”, approaches this conflict. For him, it really is about settling scores.

The first lesson this policy teaches Israelis is that it’s legitimate to inflict suffering on innocent people in order to discourage terrorism.

“A terrorist may be willing to sacrifice his own life, but maybe he will think twice if he knows the homes of his relatives will be destroyed. If the family pays the price, it’s different.”

Gripping and inconsistent myths swirl about him. In one telling, Malcolm is a hate-filled bigot, who through religion came to see the kinship of all. In another he is the self-redeemer, a lowly pimp become an exemplar of black chivalry. In still another he is an avatar of collective revenge, a gangster whose greatest insight lay in changing not his ways, but his targets. The layers, the contradictions, the sheer profusion of Malcolm X’s public pronouncements have been a gift to seemingly every contemporary black artist and intellectual from Kanye to Cornel West.

For me, he embodied the notion of an individual made anew through his greater commitment to a broad black collective.

I thought back on the debate running from Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and I knew a final verdict had been reached. Who could look on a black family that had won the votes, if not the hearts, of Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina, waving to their country and bounding for the White House, and seriously claim, as Malcolm once did, that blacks were not American?

Saudi Arabia announced Sunday it was severing diplomatic relations with Shiite powerhouse Iran amid escalating tensions over the Sunni kingdom's execution of a prominent Shiite cleric.

The move came hours after protesters stormed and set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and followed harsh criticism by Iran's top leader of the Saudis' execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Iranian diplomatic personnel had 48 hours to leave his country and all Saudi diplomatic personnel in Iran had been called home.

many people now believe that Trump can defy political gravity - flouting conventions of propriety, embracing extremist positions, casually changing positions, all with no penalty. That won't work in a general election.

The key to understanding the Trump phenomenon - his ability to do all these things and pay no price - is that it has very little to do with Trump and almost everything to do with the portion of the electorate he is currently operating in. The current Republican party is built in large part on roughly 25% to 30% of the voting electorate which is radicalized and revanchist

We can think about the the nature of Trump's appeal in three basic ways.

The election’s final results, which have not yet been made public, are not about to fundamentally alter Iran’s domestic or foreign policy, at least in the short term. But they do give momentum to a turn away from the most confrontational politics of the last president — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — amid an electorate eager for Iran to emerge from decades of isolation.

When Election Day came, the president’s support base of middle-class Iranians turned out in big numbers, even though the overall turnout declined to 62 percent from 64 percent four years ago. A diverse group of Gucci lovers, student philosophers and family men carrying children wearing ‘‘Frozen’’ shirts, they came out for revenge against the hard-liners and appear to have exacted it.

Obtaining a strong minority in Parliament is not only Mr. Rouhani’s victory but also the result of a broader trend in which the Iranian political discourse is shifting away from a polarized universe of hard-liner versus reformist. Those supporting Mr. Rouhani prefer to call themselves pragmatists, centrists and moderates.

Nancy Reagan, the influential and stylish wife of the 40th president of the United States who unabashedly put Ronald Reagan at the center of her life but became a political figure in her own right, died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94.

President Obama said on Sunday that Mrs. Reagan “had redefined the role” of first lady, adding, “Later, in her long goodbye with President Reagan, she became a voice on behalf of millions of families going through the depleting, aching reality of Alzheimer’s, and took on a new role, as advocate, on behalf of treatments that hold the potential and the promise to improve and save lives.”

Behind the scenes, Mrs. Reagan was the prime mover in Mr. Reagan’s efforts to recover from the scandal, which was known as Iran-contra because some of the proceeds from the sale had been diverted to the contras opposing the leftist government of Nicaragua. While trying to persuade her stubborn husband to apologize for the arms deal, Mrs. Reagan brought political figures into the White House, among them the Democratic power broker Robert S. Strauss, to argue her case to the president.

Iranians will elect a Parliament that passes laws and a clerical council that is technically in charge of naming a successor to the supreme leader when he dies.

The supreme leader has final say on all matters of religion and state. But he also needs to balance the demands and interests of competing power centers like the Revolutionary Guards and the judiciary.

Parliament and the Assembly of Experts are officially independent powers, but parliaments — particularly the departing one — take their cues from him.

Islamic State's official magazine carried a photo on Wednesday of a Schweppes soft drink can it said was used to make an improvised bomb that brought down a Russian airliner over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula last month, killing all 224 people on board.

The photo showed a can of Schweppes Gold soft drink and what appeared to be a detonator and switch on a blue background, three simple components that if genuine are likely to cause concern for airline safety officials worldwide.

"The divided Crusaders of the East and West thought themselves safe in their jets as they cowardly bombarded the Muslims of the Caliphate," the English language Dabiq magazine said in reference to Russia and the West. "And so revenge was exacted upon those who felt safe in the cockpits."Western governments have said the Airbus A321 operated by Metrojet was likely brought down by a bomb and Moscow confirmed on Tuesday it had reached the same conclusion, but the Egyptian government said it has still not found evidence of criminal action.

In the six days and five nights we were in northeast Syria we heard not a single shot fired, nor saw a single bomb drop.

"The assistance we've received," he said, "has been ammunition for Kalashnikovs, for heavy machine guns, for mortars, but we haven't received any weapons."

ISIS is not just a group of fanatics, it's also a bureaucracy

The Death Penalty Election: A Louisiana Parish Is Ground Zero for the Capital Punishment Debate

For a county of around 250,000 residents, Caddo Parish, Louisiana, has attracted an outsize share of attention of late: long-form articles in The New Yorker and the New York Times, a Super-PAC funded by billionaire George Soros, and Saturday’s closely watched election for the office of district attorney, now headed for a runoff.

“Our community does not need any more controversy,” Cox told the Shreveport Times, when he decided not to run.

There can be only one explanation for this kind of behavior: White House officials, and many others in Washington, really do not feel they are living in a fully legal state. True, there is no communist terror; the president’s goons will not arrest public officials who testify to Congress; no one will be murdered if they walk out of the White House and start campaigning for impeachment or, more importantly, for the invocation of the 25th Amendment, the procedure to transfer power if a president is mentally or physically unfit to remain in office. Nevertheless, dozens of people clearly don’t believe in the legal mechanisms designed to remove a president who is incompetent or corrupt

You can imagine why this would be. Leading members of Congress might resist invoking the 25th Amendment, which would of course be described by Trump’s supporters as a “Cabinet coup.” The mob — not the literal, physical street mob, but the online mob that has replaced it — would seek revenge. There may not be any presidential goons, but any senior official who signs his or her name to a call for impeachment or removal will certainly be subjected to waves of hatred on social media, starting with a denunciation from the president. Recriminations will follow on Fox News, along with a smear campaign, a doxing campaign, attacks on the target’s family and perhaps worse. It is possible we have underestimated the degree to which our political culture has already become more authoritarian.

Maybe we have also underestimated the degree to which our Constitution, designed in the 18th century, has proved insufficient to the demands of the 21st.

One thing the two men share is a recklessness that looks like courage in the eyes of their supporters, but which also sabotages the work of policymaking and diplomacy.

On the lengthy efforts of Mrs. May's government to arrive at a compromise with Brussels, Mr. Trump scoffed that “deals that take too long are never good ones.”

nobody has any idea what “hard” Brexit actually means in policy terms. It is not so much hard as abstract. “Soft” Brexit might sound weak or halfhearted, but it is also the only policy proposal that might actually work.

Carrasco was also a formal suspect in the irregular hiring of 40 clerks who were given jobs for life at the diputación in 2007, shortly after she arrived. Many of those handed the jobs – after getting such impossibly high marks in the exams that the local ombudsman concluded they must have seen the questions first – had links to politicians. The only surprising thing about the story was just how blatant the cheating seemed to be.

“That’s how diputaciónes work in cities like León,” says Rosa Seijas, a temporary clerk who sat the exams and sued after failing to win a place. “I remember the first time I worked there [as a temp], people kept asking me: ‘Who do you belong to?’” The implication was that she owed her job to one of the local politicians.

The ambitious young woman felt like Carrasco’s protege and began to dream of two things. First, she wanted a job for life at the diputación, of the kind enjoyed by established civil servants. A recent poll by the AXA Foundation showed that this is the career ambition for a quarter of Spanish students.

Mr. Ullrich offers a fascinating Shakespearean parable about how the confluence of circumstance, chance, a ruthless individual and the willful blindness of others can transform a country — and, in Hitler’s case, lead to an unimaginable nightmare for the world.

Mr. Ullrich underscores Hitler’s shrewdness as a politician — with a “keen eye for the strengths and weaknesses of other people” and an ability to “instantaneously analyze and exploit situations.”

Hitler “was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognize the difference between lies and truth” and editors of one edition of “Mein Kampf” described it as a “swamp of lies, distortions, innuendoes, half-truths and real facts.”

the West Virginia GOP primary confirms that this sort of vulgar demagoguery is becoming routine. Trump’s election was no aberration. Rather, he exploited deep problems in American politics that had been building for years — and others, following his example, will exploit those same problems after he’s gone.

Before Trump, there was Sarah Palin, the tea party movement, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), the Republican Study Committee, the Freedom Caucus. The Republican Party tried to harness the rage of the nativist right but ultimately couldn’t contain it.

Now we have Blankenship, Roy Moore, Joe Arpaio and a proliferation of name-calling misfits and even felons on Republican ballots. They are monsters created by the GOP, or rather the power vacuum the GOP has become.

The continuing military, as maritime, supremacy of Spain could hardly have been more sensationally demonstrated than by these twin events

dramatic evidence of Spain's right to universal empire, but had also caused, by their determination and devotion

the twenty-year-old Philip IV deserved to be called 'el Rey Planeta' – the Planet King