The cargo of Iranian oil was then handed over to the United States for being in violation of American sanctions that ban Iran from selling its oil, according to Iranian news media, a claim that could not be independently verified.
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Iran Seizes Two Greek Tankers in Persian Gulf - The New York Times - 0 views
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Iranian oil and energy experts said Iran’s seizure of the ships was a signal to Washington that Iran would toughen its stance if the Biden administration returned to Trump-era policies of maximum pressure and began seizing tankers and crude oil cargo belonging to Iran.
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Greece’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Iran’s actions on Friday were “tantamount to acts of piracy” and would have a negative impact on Iran-Greece relations, as well as Iran’s relations with the European Union, of which Greece is a member. It advised its citizens not to travel to Iran.
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“The main purpose is to send a clear message to the West that future seizures of oil tankers will be met with a response in kind,” said Sina Azodi, an Iran analyst at the Atlantic Council in Washington.
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Iranian news media said the two vessels had an estimated combined capacity to carry 1.8 million barrels of oil and that their cargo was now in Iran’s possession.
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Iran has a history of the retaliatory seizing of oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz in response to ships carrying its oil being stopped or confiscated. But the incident on Friday marked the first time in months that a foreign-flagged vessel was targeted by Iran.
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The shadow war between Iran and Israel has also played out in the waters of the Persian Gulf, with the West accusing Iran of a drone attack on an Israeli-affiliated tanker that killed two European crew members in 2021. Iran denied it had a role in the attack
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In Concession to Poland, E.U. Opens Door to Frozen Funds - The New York Times - 0 views
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About $38 billion earmarked for Poland from a coronavirus recovery fund had been blocked over judicial disputes. But relations with the bloc improved over Poland’s strong stance against Russia.
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In a major concession to the Polish government, the European Union’s executive arm on Wednesday opened the door for the disbursement of billions of dollars in aid to Poland that had been blocked during a standoff over judicial independence in the country.
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“The approval of this plan is linked to clear commitments by Poland on the independence of the judiciary, which will need to be fulfilled before any actual payment can be made,”
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Reflecting how divisive the issue is in Brussels, two commissioners voted against the approval of Poland’s plan on Wednesday, a first since the recovery fund was established, and two others sent letters expressing concern over the move.
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Laurent Pech, professor of European law at Middlesex University in London called the commitments “vague, partial and easy to evade.”
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the invasion of Ukraine by President Vladimir Putin of Russia changed everything, tilting the balance of power in Europe and reshuffling alliances.
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The rule of law is an existential issue for the European Union: For the bloc to function properly, all member nations have to follow the same principles.
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Last year, frustrated by Poland’s recalcitrance on judicial independence issues, the bloc started using the sharpest tool at its disposal: money, withholding much needed aid from the coronavirus fund.
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“Poland simply deserves this money,” the country’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, told local media last week. “And now, with the war going on, Poland needs it even more.”
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Poland and Hungary, led by right-wing authoritarian leaders who backed each other in conflicts with Brussels over the rule of law, took divergent paths following the Russian invasion. Under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Hungary maintains close relations with Mr. Putin and has become a main spoiler of E.U. unity.
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In response to the concerns by the European Commission, President Andrzej Duda of Poland put forward a bill amending the disciplinary system, which is expected to be approved by the Polish Parliament on Thursday.
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But analysts say that Mr. Duda’s bill offers only cosmetic tweaks and does not resolve the fundamental issue identified by the European Court of Justice — pressure on judges to rule in accordance with the desires of the government.
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What next for world powers in war-torn Libya? | News | Al Jazeera - 0 views
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The presence of both Turkish and Russian forces in the North African country is deeply unsettling to European powers, unlike the United States, analysts say.
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Libya’s electoral commission decided that no such vote could take place for numerous reasons. The presence of foreign forces on Libyan soil was unquestionably one of the delicate factors, adding complexity and controversy to the now-postponed election scheduled for December 24.
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First, the Turks and Russians have too much to gain from staying in Libya. Second, they have little incentive to leave under current circumstances because the only power in the world that could potentially use its leverage to pressure Turkish and Russian forces to depart is the United States. It is unlikely for the US to play its cards in such a manner.
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Washington is not interested in Libya, especially at this time when there are far more pressing problems – from Donbas to North Korea, to China and, above all, to the enormous internal problems that the Biden administration is facing,”
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From Washington’s perspective, this is not necessarily problematic so long as the Wagner Group’s presence does not expand. Because of such concerns about the Russian force enlarging its footprint in Libya, the US sees the Turkish military’s presence in the polarised North African country as the best outcome that Washington could realistically expect.
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Beyond issues stemming from economic competition, there are security issues that give EU members reason to perceive the Turkish and Russian hard power in Libya as threatening national interests of European powers. “Finally, whoever controls the Libyan coast controls migration flows and this is a strategic issue that Brussels should not underestimate,” said Fasanotti.
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The presence of both Turkish and Russian forces in the North African country is deeply unsettling to European powers, unlike Washington that has taken a far more favourable stance towards Ankara’s role in Libya.
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“The presence of Turkish forces there is of course considered detrimental to France’s interests, given the strategic alignment of Paris to Abu Dhabi and its support of the Eastern forces of General Khalifa Haftar in the 2019-2020 Tripoli offensive,”
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“Economic competition must be also factored into these considerations, which help explain why after many years of a worrisome intra-European spat, Paris [which backed Haftar] and Rome [which backed the Government of National Accord] decided to come together, set aside their differences, and face outsiders expanding their influence in the Libyan arena.”
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“The only mechanism that the United States has is the Turkish presence. When the United States looks at Turkey it sees a NATO member.
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If the US remains unwilling to throw its weight around in Libya and maintains its own perspectives on Turkish-Russian rivalry for influence that leads Washington to be more accommodating of Ankara’s Libya foreign policy than several of the US’s close European allies, these divisions could deepen.
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Opinion | Russians Must Accept the Truth. We Failed. - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...russia-ukraine-putin.html
responsibility russia individualism culture politics history activism failure
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In 2011, when it was announced that Mr. Putin would return to the Kremlin as president, tens of thousands took to the streets in protest. In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and fomented war in the Donbas, we held huge antiwar rallies. And in 2021 we took to the streets once more throughout the country when Russia’s main opposition figure, Aleksei Navalny, was arrested after his return to Moscow.
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I want to believe we did everything in our power to rein in Mr. Putin. But it’s not true. Though we protested, organized, lobbied, spread information and built honest lives in the shadow of a corrupt regime, we must accept the truth: We failed. We failed to prevent a catastrophe and we failed to change the country for the better. And now we must bear that failure.
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Those who stayed have lost much of what remained of their freedom. After Mastercard and Visa suspended operations in Russia, many can’t even pay for a VPN service to get independent media.
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During the 77 years since World War II, Russia was regarded — no matter what other perceptions it carried — as the country that helped to save humanity from the greatest evil the world has ever known. Russia was the heroic country that defeated fascism, even if that victory forced 45 years of Communism on half of Europe.
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Not anymore. Russia is now the nation that unleashed a new evil, and unlike the old one, it’s armed with nuclear weapons.
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for those who opposed the regime, in ways big and small, the responsibility is also ours to bear. How did it happen? What did we do wrong? How do we prevent this from happening again
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Russia is a very individualistic society, in which people, to quote the cultural historian Andrei Zorin, live with a “Leave me alone” mind-set. We like to isolate ourselves from one another, from the state, from the world.
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This allowed many of us to build vibrant, hopeful, energetic lives against a grim backdrop of arrests and prison. But in the process, we became insular and lost sight of everyone else’s interests.
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We must now put aside our individual concerns and accept our common responsibility for the war. Such an act is, first and foremost, a moral necessity.
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it could also be the first step toward a new Russian nation — a nation that could talk to the world in a language other than wars and threats, a nation that others will learn not to fear.
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Where the war in Ukraine goes from here - 0 views
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Russia’s leadership no longer appears to be trying to oust Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky from power. Instead, the short-term goal seems to be gaining control over the territories Russia annexed last fall. Putin has said he’s open to negotiations, while Russian troops continue to attack Ukraine’s cities.
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krainian officials have been unwavering in their stance that a peace settlement is impossible until Russia withdraws from within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders (which would mean leaving Crimea and regions that had been under the control of Russian-backed separatists since 2014). Ukrainian political scientist Volodymyr Fesenko told Morning Brew that the need to liberate these territories is a consensus view shared by the vast majority of Ukrainians.
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It’s possible that the two sides will agree to freeze the conflict, which would entail minimal fighting but no peace settlement. But according to Fesenko, “there is a common understanding” among experts that this scenario “will not bring peace, but will only be a pause in the war.”
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He predicts that meaningful negotiations won’t begin before the end of the year, and that the next six months (at least) will be marked with active combat.
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Guriev believes that a necessary condition for permanent peace is “Putin exiting [power].” He says that after the war ends, Marshall Plan-style aid will be necessary for Ukraine—and Russia.
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China's reaction to Russian incursion into Ukraine muted, denies backing it - The Washi... - 0 views
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The Russian attacks are the greatest test yet for an emerging Moscow-Beijing axis, which has recently shown signs of evolving from what many considered a “marriage of convenience” to something resembling a formal alliance
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In recent weeks, China has voiced support for Russia’s “legitimate security concerns” but has balanced that with calls for restraint and negotiations, echoing the approach China took during the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Beijing appeared to be repeating that tightrope walk on Thursday, as it called for calm while news of the attacks sent regional markets plunging.
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Despite the outward show of mutual support between the two countries, there have been indications that China was caught flat footed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement of military action.
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That same day, when China warned its nationals in Ukraine about a worsening situation, it did not tell them to leave the country. On Thursday, with explosions going off nearby, many of the 8,000-odd Chinese passport holders in the country took to microblog Weibo to call for help.
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Yun Sun, Director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, noted Tuesday that the Chinese policy community appeared to be in “shock” at the sudden escalation of fighting after having “subscribed to the theory that Putin was only posturing and that U.S. intelligence was inaccurate as in the case of invading Iraq.”
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Minutes after the declaration, Chinese representative to the United Nations Zhang Jun was telling a Security Council meeting: “we believe that the door to a peaceful solution to the Ukraine situation is not fully shut, nor should it be.”
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In recent weeks, Chinese experts have argued that de-escalation was possible even as they adopted Russia’s view of the conflict. Wang Yiwei, director of the Center for European Studies at Renmin University, wrote in late January that only the actions of Ukraine or the United States could bring about a war, but because the former lacked “gall” and the latter lacked strength for a direct conflict with Russia, tensions could be dispelled.
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“When can China evacuate?” asked a user with the handle LumpyCut. “We are in Kyiv near the airport. I just heard three enormous bombings and can estimate the size of the mushroom clouds by sight.”
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In an interview on Thursday, Wang defended his prediction as being primarily about the possibility of a direct conflict between the United States and Russia, not fighting in eastern Ukraine.
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Hua also rejected suggestions that China might adhere to U.S.-led sanctions against Russia, pointing to China’s long-held stance against the use of sanctions adopted outside of United Nations deliberations.
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China’s support for Russia has also stopped short of direct approval for Russian military action. Over the weekend, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reiterated that all countries sovereignty must be respected, adding that “Ukraine is not an exception.”
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Such hesitation comes, however, during a time of growing strategic alignment between Moscow and Beijing, built primarily on shared disdain for the United States and the Western-led world order.
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Hawkish commentators in China were quick to explain Putin’s attack on Thursday as the result of provocation from the United States. “That the situation came to today’s step is due to spiraling escalation,” Fu Qianshao, a military commentator, told nationalist publication the Shanghai Observer
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“Russia had already said many times that it would withdraw troops, but America always promoted an atmosphere of conflict.”
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China Declared Its Russia Friendship Had 'No Limits.' It's Having Second Thoughts. - WSJ - 0 views
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Western nations including the U.S., the U.K. and Canada were laying the groundwork for a diplomatic boycott of the Games over China’s human-rights record. The Biden administration was about to kick off a Summit for Democracy in early December that sought to establish a clear alternative to Beijing’s autocratic rule.
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Those moves infuriated Beijing and drove its decision-making, say the officials and advisers, who are familiar with the process leading to the Feb. 4 declaration.
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One of Mr. Xi’s objectives was to lay out an ideological foundation for the partnership between China and Russia, those people said. To that end, the Chinese ambassador to Washington teamed up with his Russian counterpart in publishing an unusual joint opinion piece in late November in the magazine of the Center for the National Interest
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The two argued that democracy “can be realized in multiple ways” and isn’t the prerogative of any one country or group of countries. It called China “a whole-process, socialist democracy” and said democracy was the fundamental principle of Russia’s “democratic federative law-governed state.”
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The Feb. 4 joint statement said both countries “have profound democratic traditions rooted in a thousand years of development,
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It was Beijing that suggested including that the two countries’ friendship has “no limits”—wording read with apprehension in the West—according to the officials and advisers. The intention was less a declaration China would stand by Russia in case of war than a strong message to the U.S. about the resolve the two have in confronting what they see as increased American threats, the people said.
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“China’s eagerness to present a strong alignment with Russia to counter the U.S. caused it to miss all the signs and to go in a dangerous direction,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank focused on promoting peace and security.
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“It’s undeniable that right now, China is occupying an awkward nexus in which they’re trying to sustain their deep and fundamental relationship with Russia,”
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Beijing has refrained from coming to Moscow’s aid in a significant way. China is taking steps to buy Russian farm and energy products. But it is complying with the more damaging financial sanctions the U.S. has imposed on Russia, for fear of losing access to the dollar-dominated global trading system, say some Chinese bankers. They say their default position is to comply with the sanctions unless higher-ups tell them otherwise.
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China’s ambiguous stance on the Russia-Ukraine war will likely speed up moves by countries from the U.K. and Australia to Japan to guard against Beijing,
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a planned summit between China and the EU for April, if it isn’t canceled, is now likely to be dominated by discussions of China’s position on Ukraine.
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Beijing’s most difficult contortions are on territorial sovereignty. China has built its foreign policy around the principle that a country’s territory is inviolable and its internal affairs should be free from interference by others.
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China’s commitment to that principle seemingly would force it to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, something it has refrained from doing. Its policy statements have called for dialogue to resolve the crisis, avoiding the word invasion. Meanwhile, Western officials worry that Russia’s actions based on the argument that Ukraine is historically a part of Russia could embolden China to step up its own long-stated goal to bring Taiwan into its fold.
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Since rising to power in late 2012, Mr. Xi has made himself the dominant force in China’s foreign policy and put emphasis on what he calls “big-power diplomacy”—a marked change from the relatively unassuming foreign-policy agendas of previous Chinese leaders that featured compromise and focused on building up ties with the U.S.
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Today, despite Chinese state media’s pro-Russia rhetoric, some advisers privately question whether the partnership could cut China off from Western technologies and other resources and hurt its development, according to the foreign-policy advisers. After all, they have noted in private discussions, it is China’s opening to the U.S. and its allies that has propelled enormous Chinese growth in the past four decades.
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China and Russia’s shared interest in confronting the U.S. has helped drive their relationship to its closest point since early in the Cold War. Part of that is due to the personal ties between Messrs. Xi and Putin, authoritarians who have visions of restoring their countries to past glory, even if in China’s case that past was centuries ago.
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Sergey Radchenko, an international-relations professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, pointed to instances where Mr. Putin would be deliberately late for meetings with foreign dignitaries. On one occasion, he brought out his dog to a meeting with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel who, Mr. Putin knew, was terrified of dogs.
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“He would never let himself do anything like that to Xi,” Mr. Radchenko said. “He’s extremely respectful to Xi because he sees a close relationship with China as one of Russia’s most valuable political assets.”
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Is Humanism a Real Philosophy? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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What her book set out to defend is an intellectual tradition, admittedly ill-choate, that stands for reason, the ennobling potential of education, and the centrality of the “human dimension of life,” as opposed to systems and abstract theories.
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ut in the intervening months, advanced chatbots descended; so did the possibility that they might soon imperil the whole of that enterprise. Automation stands poised to displace the production of essays and scholarly inquiry. It’s suddenly plausible to imagine that freethinking, that tradition of poking and prodding at all fixed ideas and institutions, will drift into obsolescence, because an oracular machine will instantly spit back answers to life’s questions with an aura of scientific authority.
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Progressives in the academy have bludgeoned humanism’s fundamental precepts. Gone is the old motto “I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me,” replaced by the fetishization of “lived experience.
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Meanwhile, STEM’s conquest of the university has wrecked old humanistic homes. As Nathan Heller’s recent article in The New Yorker documented, the English department is now an unpopulated, undesired version of its former self.
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That her book doesn’t feel terribly urgent perhaps speaks to a fundamental weakness within humanism.
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Bakewell self-identifies as a stalwart of humanism, but even she concedes that this is an elusive label. “Humanism is personal, and it is a semantic cloud of meanings and implications, none attachable to any particular theorist or practitioner.” Without a pithy definition or clear doctrine, she can manage only to narrow humanism down to three characteristics: freethinking, hope, and inquiry
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By setting aside all thoughts of the afterlife, the humanist can focus on making the most of earthly existence, pursuing happiness and mitigating suffering.
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the belief that people can feel genuine solidarity for one another, despite their differences—but this is a paper-thin morality that hardly survives the skepticism that Bakewell celebrates.
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she would clearly like humanism to be more substantial than it actually is. The ism suffix in Bakewell’s subject is, in fact, a bit of misdirection, because it implies a political idea or perhaps a coherent worldview
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Humanism is not a synonym for liberalism or philosophical pragmatism. It more accurately describes a temperament
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he humanistic canon she constructs sprawls to include the likes of David Hume, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, John Stuart Mill, Zora Neale Hurston, and Thomas Mann.
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It can sometimes be a struggle to see the commonalities, other than some degree of skepticism about religion, an underlying decency, and a general cheeriness in the midst of dreary struggles against the prevailing politics of their times.
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While it’s true that freethinking is the enemy of authoritarianism, humanism suffers from a tendency to oversell itself. It doesn’t have a good track record of effectively standing up to facism,
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in the current American context, right-wing ethno-nationalists have cynically draped themselves in the trappings of humanism. The likes of Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson present themselves as the true defenders of freethinking and open inquiry.
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Self-doubt, a cheerful disposition, and a joyous pursuit of knowledge are qualities that might make for wise leaders, but can also produce hapless political combatants. Or, as Mann once declared: “In all humanism there is an element of weakness, which … may be its ruin.”
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humanism is more like religion than Bakewell is prepared to admit. At its best, it is a secular faith. Its universalist spirit and open-mindedness are ethical stances. Its wishful optimism about human possibility can provide spiritual nourishment in a fallen world.
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This makes it a style of dissidence well suited for the age of AI. The humanist becomes the contrarian who insists on maintaining that which automation seeks to render obsolete: the faculties of the independent mind, the very core of intellectual personhood.
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Most-read 2022: Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under easter... - 0 views
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I am staring at about a dozen, stiff, eight-foot high, orange-red penises, carved from living bedrock, and semi-enclosed in an open chamber. A strange carved head (of a man, a demon, a priest, a God?), also hewn from the living rock, gazes at the phallic totems – like a primitivist gargoyle. The expression of the stone head is doleful, to the point of grimacing
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Karahan Tepe (pronounced Kah-rah-hann Tepp-ay), which is now emerging from the dusty Plains of Harran, in eastern Turkey, is astoundingly ancient. Put it another way: it is estimated to be 11-13,000 years old.
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The obsession with the penis is obvious – more so, now we have the benefit of hindsight provided by Karahan Tepe and the other sites. Very few representations of women have emerged from the Tas Tepeler so far; there is one obscene caricature of a woman perhaps giving birth. Whatever inspired these temple-towns it was a not a benign matriarchal culture. Quite the opposite, maybe.
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Karahan Tepe, and its penis chamber, and everything that inexplicably surrounds the chamber – shrines, cells, altars, megaliths, audience halls et al – is vastly older than anything comparable, and plumbs quite unimaginable depths of time, back before agriculture, probably back before normal pottery, right back to a time when we once thought human ‘civilisation’ was simply impossible.
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After all, hunter gatherers – cavemen with flint arrowheads – without regular supplies of grain, without the regular meat and milk of domesticated animals, do not build temple-towns with water systems.
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Taken together with its age, complexity, sophistication, and its deep, resonant mysteriousness, and its many sister sites now being unearthed across the Harran Plains – collectively known as the Tas Tepeler, or the ‘stone hills’ – these carved, ochre-red rocks, so silent, brooding, and watchful in the hard whirring breezes of the semi-desert, constitute what might just be the greatest archaeological revelation in the history of humankind.
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The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer’s day in 1994, had made an irreversibly profound discovery – which would eventually lead to the penis pillars of Karahan Tepe, and an archaeological anomaly which challenges, time and again, everything we know of human prehistory.
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in late 1994 the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came to the site of Gobekli Tepe to begin his slow, diligent excavations of its multiple, peculiar, enormous T-stones, which are generally arranged in circles – like the standing stones of Avebury or Stonehenge. Unlike European standing stones, however, the older Turkish megaliths are often intricately carved: with images of local fauna. Sometimes the stones depict cranes, boars, or wildfowl: creatures of the hunt. There are also plenty of leopards, foxes, and vultures. Occasionally these animals are depicted next to human heads.
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over time archaeological experts began to accept the significance. Ian Hodden, of Stanford University, declared that: ‘Gobekli Tepe changes everything.’ David Lewis-Williams, the revered professor of archaeology at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, said, at the time: ‘Gobekli Tepe is the most important archaeological site in the world.’
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Urfa man now has a silent hall of his own in one of Turkey’s greatest archaeological galleries. More importantly, we can now see that Urfa man has the same body stance of the T-shaped man-pillars at Gobekli (and in many of the Tas Tepeler): his arms are in front of him, protecting his penis
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‘Gobekli Tepe upends our view of human history. We always thought that agriculture came first, then civilisation: farming, pottery, social hierarchies. But here it is reversed, it seems the ritual centre came first, then when enough hunter gathering people collected to worship – or so I believe – they realised they had to feed people. Which means farming.’ He waved at the surrounding hills, ‘It is no coincidence that in these same hills in the Fertile Crescent men and women first domesticated the local wild einkorn grass, becoming wheat, and they also first domesticated pigs, cows and sheep. This is the place where Homo sapiens went from plucking the fruit from the tree, to toiling and sowing the ground.’
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People were already speculating that – if you see the Garden of Eden mythos as an allegory of the Neolithic Revolution: i.e. our fall from the relative ease of hunter-gathering to the relative hardships of farming (and life did get harder when we first started farming, as we worked longer hours, and caught diseases from domesticated animals), then Gobekli Tepe and its environs is probably the place where this happened
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‘I believe Gobekli Tepe is a temple in Eden’. It’s a quote I reused, to some controversy, because people took Klaus literally. But he did not mean it literally. He meant it allegorically.
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‘We have found no homes, no human remains. Where is everyone, did they gather for festivals, then disperse? As for their religion, I have no real idea, perhaps Gobekli Tepe was a place of excarnation, for exposing the bones of the dead to be consumed by vultures, so the bodies have all gone
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I do definitely know this: some time in 8000 BC the creators of Gobekli Tepe buried their great structures under tons of rubble. They entombed it. We can speculate why. Did they feel guilt? Did they need to propitiate an angry God? Or just want to hide it?’ Klaus was also fairly sure on one other thing. ‘Gobekli Tepe is unique.’
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These days Gobekli Tepe is not just a famous archaeological site, it is a Unesco World-Heritage-listed tourist honeypot which can generate a million visitors a year. It is all enclosed by a futuristic hi-tech steel-and-plastic marquee (no casual wandering around taking photos of the stones and workers
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Necmi shows me the gleaming museum built to house the greatest finds from the region: including a 11,000 year old statue, retrieved from beneath the centre of Sanliurfa itself, and perhaps the world’s oldest life size carved human figure
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This number is so large it is hard to take in. For comparison the Great Pyramid at Giza is 4,500 years old. Stonehenge is 5,000 years old. The Cairn de Barnenez tomb-complex in Brittany, perhaps the oldest standing structure in Europe, could be up to 7,000 years old.
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Aslan tells me how archaeologists at Gobekli have also, more recently, found tantalising evidence of alcohol: huge troughs with the chemical residue of fermentation, indicating mighty ritual feasts, maybe.
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he explains how scientists at Karahan Tepe, as well as Gobekli Tepe, have now found evidence of homes.
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The builders lived here. They ate their roasted game here. They slept here. And they used, it seems, a primitive but poetic form of pottery, shaped from polished stone. They possibly did elaborate manhood rituals in the Karahan Tepe penis chambe
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Yet still we have no sign at all of contemporary agriculture; they were, it still appears, hunter gatherers, but of unnerving sophistication.
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Another unnerving oddity is the curious number of carvings which show people with six fingers. Is this symbolic, or an actual deformity? Perhaps the mark of a strange tribe?
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Karahan Tepe is stupefyingly big. ‘So far,’ he says, ‘We have dug up maybe 1 per cent of the site’ – and it is already impressive. I ask him how many pillars – T stones – might be buried here. He casually points at a rectangular rock peering above the dry grass. ‘That’s probably another megalith right there, waiting to be excavated. I reckon there are probably thousands more of them, all around us. We are only at the beginning. And there could be dozens more Tas Tepeler we have not yet found, spread over hundreds of kilometres.’
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Karahan too was definitely and purposely buried. That is the reason Necmi and his team were able to unearth the penis pillars so quickly, all they had to do was scoop away the backfill, exposing the phallic pillars, sculpted from living rock.
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the most remarkable answer of all, and it is this: archaeologists in southeastern Turkey are, at this moment, digging up a wild, grand, artistically coherent, implausibly strange, hitherto-unknown-to-us religious civilisation, which has been buried in Mesopotamia for ten thousand years. And it was all buried deliberately.
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Facebook's hardware ambitions are undercut by its anti-China strategy - The Washington ... - 0 views
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For more than a year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a point of stoking fears about China. He’s told U.S. lawmakers that China “steals” American technology and played up nationalist concerns about threats from Chinese-owned rival TikTok.
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Meta has a growing problem: The social media service wants to transform itself into a powerhouse in hardware, and it makes virtually all of it in China.So the company is racing to get out.
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Facebook has hit walls, say three people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.
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Until recently, the people said, Meta executives viewed the company’s reliance on China to make Oculus virtual reality headsets as a relatively minor concern because the company’s core focus was its social media and messaging apps.
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“Meta is building a complicated hardware product. You can’t just turn on a dime and make it elsewhere,”
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Facebook’s public criticism of China began in 2019 when Zuckerberg warned, in a speech at Georgetown University, that China was exporting a dangerous vision for the internet to the rest of the world — and noted that Facebook was abandoning its efforts to break into that country’s market.
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The anti-China stance has since extended into a full-blown corporate strategy. Nick Clegg, the company’s president, wrote an op-ed attacking China in The Washington Post in 2020, the same year Zuckerberg attacked China in a congressional antitrust hearing.
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At the antitrust hearing in Congress in 2020, Zuckerberg used his opening remarks to attack China in terms that went much further than his industry peers. He said it was “well-documented that the Chinese government steals technology from American companies,” and repeated that the country was “building its own version of the internet” that went against American values. He described Facebook as a “proudly American” company and noted that TikTok was the company’s fastest-growing rival.
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“They were trying to find things that [Zuckerberg] could agree with Trump on, and it’s a pretty slim list,” said one of the people, describing how the company landed on its anti-China strategy. “If you’re not going to try to be in this country anyway, you might as well use it to your political advantage by contrasting yourself with Apple and TikTok.”
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shared by Javier E on 04 May 24
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Opinion | The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez You Don't Know - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...alexandria-ocasio-cortez.html
Democratic party politics history US biden progressive majority coalition
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First impressions are hard to erase, and the obstinacy that made Ms. Ocasio-Cortez an instant national celebrity remains at the heart of her detractors’ most enduring critique: that she is a performer, out for herself, with a reach that exceeds her grasp.
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In straddling the line between outsider and insider, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is trying to achieve the one thing that might just shore up her fractured party: building a new Democratic coalition that can consistently draw a majority of American support.
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In some ways, she’s asking the obvious questions: What’s broadly popular among a vast majority of Americans, and how can I make it happen? To achieve progress on these issues, she has sought common ground in places where her peers are not thinking to look. Her willingness to forge unlikely alliances, in surprisingly productive places, has opened a path to new voters — for her party, her ideas and her own political ambitions if she ever decides to run for higher office.
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Since 2016, there have been two competing visions for the Democratic Party. One is the promise that began with Barack Obama of a multiracial coalition that would grow stronger as America’s demographics shifted; the other is the political revolution championed by Bernie Sanders as a way to unite nonvoters with the working class
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what’s clear is that at a time when Democrats are struggling, she is quietly laying the groundwork to build a coalition broader than the one she came to power with, unafraid to take risks along the way.
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After five years in Congress, she has emerged as a tested navigator of its byzantine systems, wielding her celebrity to further her political aims in a way few others have.
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Three terms in, one gets the sense that we’re witnessing a skilled tactician exiting her political adolescence and coming into her own as a veteran operator out to reform America’s most dysfunctional political body.
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To grasp what sets Ms. Ocasio-Cortez apart from many of her colleagues, you have to understand where she finds allies
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In 2019, she and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas considered joining forces to write a bill that would bar former members of Congress from becoming lobbyists. Asked why she would consider an alliance with someone so loathed by liberals, she said, “I will swallow all of my distaste in this situation because we have found a common interest.”
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It was a window into the politician she would become: pragmatic and results-driven, willing to work with people she considers her political adversaries, at least on legislation that appeals to her base
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She has attributed the success of these efforts at least in part to her role as the second most powerful Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, which she said has “opened many windows” for collaboration.
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while these bills may seem like small victories, they are more than that because, in a sense, she is redefining what bipartisanship looks like in Washington.
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For decades, bipartisanship has meant bringing together moderates, lobbyists and establishment insiders to produce watered-down legislation unpalatable to many voters in both political partie
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What Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is doing is different; she’s uniting politicians on the fringes of American politics around a broadly popular set of policies.
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Americans in both parties overwhelmingly say that they don’t trust the government to do the right thing and that donors and lobbyists have too much sway over the legislative process.
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more than 8 in 10 Americans believe politicians “are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems.” One-fifth of respondents said lack of bipartisan cooperation was the biggest problem with the political system.
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Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s efforts to reach out to Republicans are offering what a sizable portion of Americans want from Congress: a return to getting things done.
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The few policy matters on which progressives and conservatives align often boil down to a distrust of politicians and of big corporations, particularly technology companies and pharmaceutical giants.
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Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has shrewdly made those causes her passion, building alliances with conservative colleagues interested in holding these industries accountable.
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Last spring, she cosponsored a bill with, among others, Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, and Matt Gaetz, the Florida rabble-rouser who has become one of Mr. Trump’s most steadfast allies. The legislation would bar members of Congress from trading individual stocks, a measure that as of the fall of 2022 was supported by nearly 70 percent of voters across party lines.
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On Gaza, too, she has been willing to buck other members of her party to pursue an agenda that a majority of voters support. She was one of the first Democrats to call for a cease-fire; within weeks, nearly 70 percent of Americans said Israel should call one and try to negotiate with Hamas.
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In March, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was accosted by a handful of protesters who demanded that she call Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.
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Less than three weeks later, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did accuse Israel of genocide and chastised the White House for providing military aid to the country while it blockaded Gaza. “If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in a speech on the House floor, “open your eyes. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away.”
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Last month, she voted against providing additional funding for Israel. Those were unpopular positions in Congress, where unconditional support for the country remains the norm, but they put her in line with a majority of Democratic voters.
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These stances haven’t been enough to quell the doubts from a faction of the left that helped get her elected. Over the past few weeks, some have accused her of caving in to pressure from moderate Democrats
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. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has taken much of the heat from leftist activists who see her as a symbol of the contradictions and compromises inherent in the political system. It may not be realistic to expect absolute purity from her; she is, after all, a politician. But these critiques overlook the promise of what she’s doing behind the scenes.
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Democratic pollsters and strategists are searching for ways for Mr. Biden to win back Muslims and Arab Americans in swing states such as Michigan and Georgia, recent college graduates who hoped to have their student debt forgiven, immigrant-rights activists and Latinos.
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Some of the betrayal these voters feel was hardly the president’s fault; he was hampered on student loan debt by a federal judiciary stacked with judges sympathetic to conservative legal arguments, and Congress refused to pass the comprehensive immigration bill he supported in 2021, which would have provided legal status to as many as 11 million undocumented immigrants.
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A more gifted orator might have been able to make the structural impediments in his way clear to voters, while also putting forth a proactive vision for dismantling the core problems baked into our politics.
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In that, someone like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Mr. Biden for re-election in 2023, may be able to help. She’s the Democratic Party’s most charismatic politician since Barack Obama and its most ardent populist since Bernie Sanders.
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Last month, when the journalist Mehdi Hasan asked her how she’d respond to “a young progressive or Arab American who says to you, ‘I just can’t vote for Biden again after what he’s enabled in Gaza,’” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said a vote for Mr. Biden didn’t necessarily mean an endorsement of all his policies. “Even in places of stark disagreement, I would rather be organizing under the conditions of Biden as an opponent on an issue than Trump,” she said. It was a shrewd political maneuver, designed to distance herself from Democrats who support Israel unconditionally, while meeting voters — some of whom have lost family members in Gaza — where they are
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There are, of course, limits to this strategy. Some on the left see Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Mr. Biden as a betrayal of progressive values, particularly in the wake of the climbing death toll in Gaza.
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The moderate Republicans who turned out for Mr. Biden in 2020 might shrink from a Democratic Party led by someone they consider an outspoken progressive.
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But for every moderate or leftist voter lost with a strategy like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s, the Democratic Party may be able to win someone new — from the pool of disillusioned Americans who feel shut out of the political process.
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shared by Javier E on 19 May 24
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Dave Ramsey Tells Millions What to Do With Their Money. People Under 40 Say He's Wrong.... - 0 views
www.wsj.com/...nder-40-say-hes-wrong-56733630
financial advice advisor austerity discipline Gen Z money learning trends culture
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Ramsey, the well-known and intensely followed 63-year-old conservative Christian radio host, has 4.4 million Instagram followers, 1.9 million TikTok followers and legions more who listen to his radio shows and podcasts.
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His message is brutal and direct: Avoid debt at all costs. Pay for everything in cash. Embrace frugality.
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Plenty of 20- and 30-year-olds are pushing back, largely on TikTok. The hashtag #daveramseywouldntapprove, for instance, has 66.8 million views. Many say they don’t want to eat rice and beans every night—a popular Ramsey trope—or hold down multiple jobs to pay off loans. They also say Ramsey is out of touch with their reality.
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Rising inflation has led to surging prices for groceries, cars and many essentials. The cost of a college education has skyrocketed in two decades, with the average student debt for federal loans at $37,000, according to the Education Department. Overall debts for Americans in their 30s jumped 27% from late 2019 to early 2023—steeper than for any other age group.
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She began paying off $48,000 in student loans (a Ramsey do) and also took out a loan to buy a 2016 Honda (a Ramsey don’t). Her rationale was that it was safer to pay extra for a more reliable car than a junker she could buy with cash. S
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When she saw a comment from Ramsey online about how people receiving pandemic stimulus payments were “pretty much screwed already,” Israel felt it came across as shaming people. The pandemic shutdowns ended a decadelong economic expansion for Black Americans, a disproportionate number of whom lost their jobs and relied on those checks.
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“Moralizing financial decisions is very damaging to marginalized groups,” says Israel, who is Black.
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Many young adults scratch their heads over his advice that people should let their credit scores dwindle and die.
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People need a good credit score, says Mandy Phillips, a 39-year-old residential mortgage loan originator in Redding, Calif. She uses TikTok and other social media to educate millennials and Gen Z about home buying. Scores are vital when applying for mortgages and rentals.
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She also takes issue with Ramsey’s advice to only obtain a home loan if you can take out a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage with a down payment of at least 10%. Few younger buyers can pay the large monthly bills of shorter-term mortgages.
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“That may have worked years ago in the ’80s and ’90s, but that’s not something that is achievable for the average American,” Phillips says.
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Housing is a particularly hot-button topic. He advises people to only buy a house with their lawfully wedded spouse. Yet many young adults are pooling their finances with partners, friends or roommates to buy their first homes.
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Ramsey is perhaps best known for advocating a “debt snowball method”: People with multiple loans pay off the smallest balances first, regardless of interest rate. As you knock out each loan, he says, the money you have to put toward larger debt snowballs. Seeing small wins motivates people to keep going, he says.Conventional economic theory would be to pay off the highest-interest loans first, says James Choi, a finance professor at the Yale School of Management, who has studied the advice of popular finance gurus.
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Ramsey’s save-not-spend message sounds logical, young adults say. It’s his all-or-nothing approach that doesn’t work for them.
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Kate Hindman, a 31-year-old administrative assistant in Pasadena, Calif., who has taken an anti-Ramsey stance on TikTok, ended up with $30,000 in credit-card debt after she and her husband faced income-reducing job changes. They’ve since turned it into a consolidation loan with an 8% interest rate and pay about $1,200 a month.
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She wonders if the debt aversion is generational. Perhaps younger people are less willing to make huge sacrifices to be debt-free. Maybe carrying some amount of debt forever is a new normal.
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shared by Javier E on 20 May 24
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Toxic Political Culture Has Even Some Slovaks Calling Country 'a Black Hole.' - The New... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...vakia-politics-black-hole.html
slovakia authoritarian attitudes west liberal democracy violence politics history crisis culture
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Of all the countries in Central and Eastern Europe that shook off communist rule in 1989, Slovakia has the highest proportion of citizens who view liberal democracy as a threat to their identity and values — 43 percent compared with 15 percent in the neighboring Czech Republic
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Support for Russia has declined sharply since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but 27 percent of Slovaks see it as key strategic partner, the highest level in the region.
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many of its people — particularly those living outside big cities — feel left behind and resentful, Mr. Meseznikov said, and are “more vulnerable than elsewhere to conspiracy theories and narratives that liberal democracy is a menace.”
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The foundations of this were laid in the 1990s when Mr. Meciar formed what is still one of the country’s two main political blocs: an alliance of right-wing nationalists, business cronies and anti-establishment leftists. All thrived on denouncing their centrist and liberal opponents as enemies willing to sell out the country’s interests to the West
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“Meciar was a pioneer,” he said. “He was a typical representative of national populism with an authoritarian approach, and so is Fico.”
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On the day Mr. Fico was shot, Parliament was meeting to endorse an overhaul of public television to purge what his governing party views as unfair bias in favor of political opponents, a reprise of efforts in the 1990s by Mr. Meciar to mute media critics.
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The legislation was part of a raft of measures that the European Commission in February said risked doing “irreparable damage” to the rule of law. These include measures to limit corruption investigations and impose what critics denounced as Russian-style restrictions on nongovernmental organizations. The government opposes military aid to Ukraine and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, is often at odds with the European Union and, like Mr. Orban, favors friendly relations with Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.
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In the run-up to the election last September that returned Mr. Fico, a fixture of Slovak politics for more than two decades, to power, he and his allies took an increasingly hostile stance toward the United States and Ukraine, combined with sympathetic words for Russia.
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Their statements often recalled a remark by Mr. Meciar, who, resisting demands in the 1990s that he must change his ways if Slovakia wanted to join the European Union, held up Russia as an alternative haven: “if they don’t want us in the West, we’ll go East.”
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But, he added, “the frames that the society and its elites use to interpret the conflict remain the same: a choice between a Western path and being something of a bridge between the East and the West, as well as a choice between liberal democracy and illiberal, authoritarian government.”
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Andrej Danko, the leader of the party, which is now part of the new coalition government formed by Mr. Fico after the September election, said that the attempt to assassinate Mr. Fico represented the “start of a political war” between the country’s two opposing camps.
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Iveta Radicova, a sociologist opposed to Mr. Fico who is a former prime minister, said Slovakia’s woes were part of a wider crisis with roots that extend far beyond its early stumbles under Mr. Meciar.
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“Many democracies are headed toward the black hole,” as countries from Hungary in the East to the Netherlands in the West succumb to the appeal of national populism, she said. “This shift is happening everywhere.”
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shared by Javier E on 25 May 24
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Trump Killed Not Just the Libertarian Party But Maybe the Libertarian Movement Too - 0 views
www.theunpopulist.net/...illed-not-just-the-libertarian
libertarian movement party politics history culture crisis trump
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Though libertarianism as a political philosophy will continue, there is no longer anything resembling a coherent libertarian movement in American politics. That’s because the movement still bearing its name is no longer recognizably libertarian in any meaningful sense of the term. Nor can it still claim to be a political movement, which implies an association organized around not just a consistent set of ideas but a distinct political identity
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For over a decade now, since Trump has dominated the national stage, longstanding disagreements have boiled over into a complete schism. There are those who have effectively become adjuncts of MAGA, and some who have gone firmly in the opposite direction, while others took a stance more akin to anti-anti-Trump voices who neither endorse nor firmly oppose the former president but train their ire toward those opposing Trump.
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requires tracing internal libertarian disputes that began long before the rise of Trump. In some ways, they are a microcosm of similar developments in the American intellectual landscape writ large
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In his 2007 history of the movement, Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty identifies five key figures who most shaped the nascent ideology and its organized advocacy: author Ayn Rand, and economists Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard
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With one exception, all paired radical free-market and smaller government views with liberal tolerance and cosmopolitanism on social issues. None were religious, and Rand and Mises were both avowedly irreligious. Friedman and Hayek both trended more moderate and pragmatic, and also achieved the highest degree of mainstream intellectual recognitio
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It was in Rothbard that the divergence began which today has culminated in the Libertarian Party’s convention transforming into a literal Trump rally
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he was also the most involved in creating a self-consciously libertarian movement and many of its institutions. In this he was aided by his skills as a prolific polemicist.
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From the start, Trump’s brand of illiberal populism had more than a passing resemblance to Rothbard’s paleo strategy—minus, as many classical liberal critics had long predicted, any meaningful moves to actually shrink government
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By accommodating and embracing conservative culture warriors, even including avowed white supremacists, Rothbard believed he was forming the basis of a political coalition to demolish modern big government
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As he outlined in a 1992 essay, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” paleolibertarianism was an explicit alliance between small-government radicalism and the extremist far-right.
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Across the loose constellation of libertarian think tanks, advocacy organizations, and electoral efforts in both the L.P. and the GOP, the embrace or rejection of Rothbard’s “paleo” idea was a source of perennial tension. Rothbard himself was involved for a time in both the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute, co-founding the latter before being acrimoniously ejected after a few years.
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the other end of the movement came to embrace the view of libertarianism as fundamentally an extension of the larger liberal tradition, continuous with a classical liberal political philosophy rather than a socially conservative one.
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Free markets and limited government were still a big part of the picture, but in service to a vision of a dynamic and pluralistic free society.
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it included an open embrace of police brutality, fuming about the need to “dispense instant punishment” to “bums,” while railing against efforts to undo America’s white supremacist past. Later, opposition to immigration became one of the paleo posture’s signature issues.
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it still embodied the burn-it-all-down reactionary ethos that saw tearing down established institutions as a necessary first step, even if that required an unrestrained autocrat
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After the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the then party leadership denounced the “blood and soil” rhetoric. But to the Rothbardians, this smacked of unacceptable wokeness. Within a few days, the Mises Caucus—named more for the ideas exhibited by the think-tank than the actual economist—was founded. Over the next few years, this group began launching hostile takeovers of state parties and then the national party. As they did so, the party increasingly adopted rhetoric that sounded more like the tiki-torch brigade than one committed to individual liberty.
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The two camps within the movement—the cosmopolitan and the paleo—already strained to nearly the breaking point, went through the inevitable rupture. A number of differences and disagreements fueled the split, but most central was the divide into MAGA-friendly and anti-Trump sympathies.
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It is no longer possible to ignore the conflict of visions about what kind of society freedom was supposed to yield. One in which private bigotry and established hierarchies were allowed free rein? Or an open and all-embracing one where different people and lifestyles disapproved by the traditional order could flourish?
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The only way the libertarian movement’s demise could bring down libertarianism as a political-philosophical framework is if one expected the ideas themselves to disappear. Happily, a robust conviction of the centrality of individual liberty—or of the need to fight a tyrannical state—is in no danger of fully fading away.
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shared by Javier E on 07 Aug 24
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How the Politically Unthinkable Can Become Mainstream - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...overton-window-democrats.html
Overton window political viable Mainstream unthinkable ideas
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You’ve probably noticed that policies once dismissed out of hand — from “Medicare for all” to a 70 percent top tax rate; from sweeping action on climate change to abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement — are being discussed in mainstream circles now. The Overton window is a useful way to understand what’s happening.
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The key is that shifts begin with the public. Mr. Overton argued that the role of organizations like his own was not to lobby politicians to support policies outside the window, but to convince voters that policies outside the window should be in it. If they are successful, an idea derided as unthinkable can become so inevitable that it’s hard to believe it was ever otherwise.
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“Public officials cannot enact any policy they please like they’re ordering dessert from a menu,” Mr. Lehman said in an interview. “They have to choose from among policies that are politically acceptable at the time. And we believe the Overton window defines that range of ideas.”
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the window is a description, not a tactic: Shifting it doesn’t mean proposing extreme ideas to make somewhat less extreme ideas seem reasonable.
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“It just explains how ideas come in and out of fashion, the same way that gravity explains why something falls to the earth,”
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Joseph P. Overton introduced the concept in the 1990s as an executive at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy,
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“We have come a very, very long way in the American people now demanding legislation and concepts that just a few years ago were thought to be very radical,” Mr. Sanders said in a recent interview.
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That the Overton window is shifting doesn’t necessarily mean policies like Medicare for all will be enacted, and it doesn’t say anything about whether they are good or bad. But it does say something meaningful about the political climate.
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Part of the story is polarization: Democrats moving left and Republicans right, to an extent “that we haven’t seen previously in a modern political period,”
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As support for more ambitious policies has increased among Democrats, there has also been “a wave of young party leaders who are less encumbered by a long voting history tying them to more moderate and less progressive policy stances,” Dr. Atkinson said. “And they’re being supported by a base that is ready to hear these messages.”