it killed an estimated one-third of the European population
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Black Death in Asia: The Origins of the Bubonic Plague - 0 views
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started in Asia and devastated many areas of that continent as well.
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Many scholars believe that the bubonic plague began in north-western China, while others cite south-western China or the steppes of Central Asia.
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an outbreak erupted in the Yuan Empire and may have hastened the end of Mongol rule over China. Three years later, the disease killed over 90 percent of the Hebei Province's populations
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with deaths totaling over 5 million people.
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From its origin at the eastern end of the Silk Road, the Black Death rode trade routes west stopping at Central Asian caravansaries and Middle Eastern trade centers and subsequently infected people all across Asia.
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"The Land of Darkness," or Central Asia. From there, it spread to China, India, the Caspian Sea and "land of the Uzbeks," and thence to Persia and the Mediterranean.
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The Central Asian scourge struck Persia just a few years after it appeared in China — proof if any is needed that the Silk Road was a convenient route of transmission for the deadly bacterium.
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Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish
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The region's population was slow to recover, in part due to the political disruptions caused by the fall of Mongol rule and the later invasions of Timur (Tamerlane).
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In 1335, the Il-Khan (Mongol) ruler of Persia and the Middle East, Abu Said, died of bubonic plague during a war with his northern cousins, the Golden Horde. This signaled the beginning of the end for Mongol rule in the region
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He goes on to charge that the Mongol leader "ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in hopes that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside."
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This incident is often cited as the first instance of biological warfare in history. However, other contemporary chroniclers make no mention of the putative Black Death catapults.
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European observers were fascinated but not too worried when the Black Death struck the western rim of Central Asia and the Middle East
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, the holy city of Mecca was hit by the plague, likely brought in by infected pilgrims on the hajj.
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It seems more likely, however, that traders from further east brought diseased fleas
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It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out... Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed."
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Perhaps the most significant impact that the Black Death had on Asia was that it contributed to the fall of the mighty Mongol Empire. After all, the pandemic started within the Mongol Empire and devastated peoples from all four of the khanates.
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The massive population loss and terror caused by the plague destabilized Mongolian governments from the Golden Horde in Russia to the Yuan Dynasty in China. The Mongol ruler of the Ilkhanate Empire in the Middle East died of the disease along with six of his sons.
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Although the Pax Mongolica had allowed increased wealth and cultural exchange, through a reopening of the Silk Road, it also allowed this deadly contagion to spread rapidly westward from its origin in western China or eastern Central Asia. As a result, the world's second-largest empire ever crumbled and fell.
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A summary about the route the Black Plague took and the tole it had. It is intesting how they called Central Asia the land of the darkness.
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The IPCC: Who Are They | Union of Concerned Scientists - 0 views
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess climate change based on the latest science.
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Governments request these reports through the intergovernmental process and the content is deliberately policy-relevant, but steers clear of any policy-prescriptive statements. Government representatives work with experts to produce the "summary for policymakers"
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The fifth assessment report, AR5, is the most comprehensive synthesis to date. Experts from more than 80 countries contributed to this assessment, which represents six years of work. More than 830 lead authors and review editors drew on the work of over 1000 contributors. About 2,000 expert reviewers provided over 140,000 review comments.
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the purpose of assessing “the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change. It does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data. It bases its assessment mainly on published and peer reviewed scientific technical literature.”
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And the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5, 2013/14) asserted that “[h]uman influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history.” These findings informed the climate negotiations resulting in the Paris Agreement of 2015, in which 197 countries committed to limiting global warming to below 2°C.
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In the end, it is the authors who bear the sole responsibility for the content of their chapters. Government representatives, however, do participate in the line-by-line review and revision of the much shorter summary for policymakers, or SPM, for each technical report.
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Each of these working groups has two co-chairs—one from a developed country and one from a developing country. An additional set of governmental representatives (frequently scientists) have been nominated by their countries to serve on the bureau of each working group. Together, the two co-chairs and the bureau members function as an executive committee, while the team of scientists drafting individual chapters of each working group’s assessment is sometimes referred to as the scientific core.
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The technical support units, co-chairs, and bureaus of each working group together assemble a list of proposed authors for its assessment, but the lead authors are selected by the entire working group. Governments and non-governmental organizations around the world are invited to nominate potential authors.
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AR5 WG1 alone generated 54,677 review comments. Many authors attest that this review process ranks among the most extensive for any scientific document.
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For the AR5, Working Group I summarized the physical science basis of climate change. Working Group II addressed the vulnerability of human and natural systems to climate change (i.e., the negative and positive consequences of global warming) and options for adapting to the changes. Working Group III assessed options for limiting heat-trapping emissions, evaluated methods for removing them from the atmosphere, and examined other means of slowing the warming trend, as well as related economic issues.
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The word “consensus” is often invoked, and sometimes questioned, when speaking of IPCC reports. In fact, there are two arenas in which a consensus needs to be reached in the production of IPCC assessments. One is the meeting of the entire IPCC, in which unanimity is sought among government representatives. Even though such consensus is not required (countries are free to register their formal dissent), agreement has been reached on all documents and SPMs to date—a particularly impressive fact.
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Government representatives propose authors and contributors, participate in the review process, and help reach a consensus on the report’s major findings. This can result (especially in the SPMs) in language that is sometimes weaker than it otherwise might be.
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The full assessment is a multi-level document for a wide array of audiences ranging from planners investing in protecting their communities to political leaders.
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But it also means that governments cannot easily criticize or dismiss a report that they themselves have helped shape and approved during political negotiations. As Sir John Houghton, co-chair of TAR Working Group I, once put it: “Any move to reduce political involvement in the IPCC would weaken the panel and deprive it of its political clout. . . . If governments were not involved, then the documents would be treated like any old scientific report. They would end up on the shelf or in the waste bin.”
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It is important, however, to reiterate a fundamental point about IPCC assessments: although governments are involved in the process and support it financially, science ultimately predominates. The chapters that underpin all the documents are written by and under the control of scientists, and scientists ensure that all the documents are both consistent with the findings of each chapter and scientifically credible in their own right.
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N.Y.P.D. Releases Secret Misconduct Records After Repeal of Shield Law - The New York T... - 0 views
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Inspired by racial justice protests, the Legislature repealed a law blocking police misconduct records from scrutiny. Now the outcomes of thousands of cases are available online.
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Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea have said that releasing the records would allow the nation’s largest police department to respond to public demands for accountability and transparency by showing it has a strong disciplinary system.
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But police reform advocates criticized the administration on Monday for continuing to withhold information about misconduct cases that did not result in a finding or admission of guilt by the officer — the vast majority of the records — even after a federal appeals court made it clear that the city could release them.
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“It is a slap in the face to every New Yorker that took to the streets and the polls demanding an end to the secrecy shrouding N.Y.P.D. abuse,” s
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And last month, a federal appeals court rejected a last-ditch legal challenge from police unions, which argued that releasing the records would put officers in danger and harm their careers.
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Before the secrecy law was repealed last year, New York was one of more than 20 states that did not make police disciplinary records public.
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Critics said, however, that the database presented only a sliver of the universe of misconduct allegations, obscuring the full picture. The profiles of some notable officers known to have been disciplined in the time period covered by the data show no record of those charges.
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The city announced plans to publish disciplinary summaries proactively online last summer, after the Legislature removed the law. Police unions, joined by those representing firefighters and corrections officers, sued in federal court and won a temporary delay.
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Susan Hutson, New Orleans’s independent police monitor since 2010, said the scope of the records being released in New York is “ahead of the game,” and other cities would be paying attention.
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Biden Administration Directs FEMA to Help Shelter Migrant Children - The New York Times - 0 views
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The agency will help provide basic care as criticism mounts over the treatment of the increasing number of young migrants who have filled detention facilities at the southwest border.
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WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assist in processing an increasing number of children and teenagers who have filled detention facilities at the southwest border, as criticism mounts over the treatment of young migrants.
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“A Border Patrol facility is no place for a child,” Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, said in a statement on Saturday. “Our goal is to ensure that unaccompanied children are transferred to H.H.S. as quickly as possible.”
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Previous administrations have also dispatched FEMA to help process migrants during surges in border crossings. However, the Biden administration cannot use disaster aid funding to support the processing of migrants in Texas after they cross the border without the consent of Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican. States must request the funding from the federal government.
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The agency will help provide basic care as criticism mounts over the treatment of the increasing number of young migrants who have filled detention facilities at the southwest border.
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50 Years Later, Troubles Still Cast 'Huge Shadow' Over Northern Ireland - The New York ... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...northern-ireland-troubles.html
northern ireland ireland new york times politics history culture
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This article gives a somewhat brief summary of the Irish Troubles. It also touches on how it poses issues to this day with the dilemma of Brexit and the independence of Ireland from that.
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Putin critics ask how his PM choice acquired expensive properties | World news | The Gu... - 0 views
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Russian president’s supporters praise Mikhail Mishustin as technocrat and self-made man
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Russian opposition figures have raised questions about how Vladimir Putin’s surprise choice for new prime minister has acquired properties worth millions of dollars.
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Mishustin’s appointment is part of a sweeping reorganisation of Russian government that will help enable Putin to maintain power after his expected exit from the presidency in 2024 under term limits. Analysts said Mishustin may play a role as a “caretaker” figure but was unlikely to be Putin’s long-term successor.
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Researchers for Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician and anti-corruption researcher, noted that Mishustin’s wife had earned nearly 790m rubles (nearly £10m) in the past nine years, according to government declarations. Little is known about her business and there are no companies listed in her name, the investigative group said. “Mishustin has been a ‘servant of the people’ for 20 of the past 22 years,” Navalny wrote in the investigation. “So why is he so damn rich?”
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Corruption scandals hounded Medvedev in recent years
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“The school of life has been tough for this man, and he is capable of big missions,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, the hard-nosed chairman of Russia’s parliament, adding that Mishustin was a “self-made man”.
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Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The recent rise in American anti-Semitism is well documented. I could fill pages with FBI hate-crime statistics, or with a list of violent attacks from the past six years or even the past six months, or with the growing gallery of American public figures saying vile things about Jews. Or I could share stories you probably haven’t heard, such as one about a threatened attack on a Jewish school in Ohio in March 2022—where the would-be perpetrator was the school’s own security guard. But none of that would capture the vague sense of dread one encounters these days in the Jewish community, a dread unprecedented in my lifetime.
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What I didn’t expect was the torrent of private stories I received from American Jew
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well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates
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These casual stories sickened me in their volume and their similarity, a catalog of small degradations. At a time when many people in other minority groups have become bold in publicizing the tiniest of slights, these American Jews instead expressed deep shame in sharing these stories with me, feeling that they had no right to complain. After all, as many of them told me, it wasn’t the Holocaust.
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These people talked about bosses and colleagues who repeatedly ridiculed them with anti-Semitic “jokes,” friends who turned on them when they mentioned a son’s bar mitzvah or a trip to Israel, romantic partners who openly mocked their traditions, classmates who defaced their dorm rooms and pilloried them online, teachers and neighbors who parroted conspiratorial lies. I was surprised to learn how many people were getting pennies thrown at them in 21st-century Americ
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the blood libel, which would later be repurposed as a key part of the QAnon conspiracy theory. This craze wasn’t caused by one-party control over printing presses, but by the lie’s popularity
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I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism. In fact, in the total absence of any education about Jews alive today, teaching about the Holocaust might even be making anti-Semitism worse.
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The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is a victim of its own success. When I arrived on a weekday morning to join a field trip from a local Catholic middle school, the museum was having a light day, with only 160 students visiting
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the docent established that the ’30s featured media beyond town criers, and that one-party control over such media helped spread propaganda. “If radio’s controlled by a certain party, you have to question that,” she said. “Back then, they didn’t.”
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I wondered about that premise. Historians have pointed out that it doesn’t make sense to assume that people in previous eras were simply stupider than we are, and I doubted that 2020s Americans could outsmart 1930s Germans in detecting media bias. Propaganda has been used to incite violent anti-Semitism since ancient times, and only rarely because of one-party control.
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The Nazi project was about murdering Jews, but also about erasing Jewish civilization. The museum’s valiant effort to teach students that Jews were “just like everyone else,” after Jews have spent 3,000 years deliberately not being like everyone else, felt like another erasur
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I was starting to see how isolating the Holocaust from the rest of Jewish history made it hard for even the best educators to upload this irrational reality into seventh-grade brains.
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the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?
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My stomach sank. The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity—Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature
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Millions of Jews identify as secular, which would be illogical if Judaism were merely a religion. But every non-Jewish society has tried to force Jews into whatever identity boxes it knows best—which is itself a quiet act of domination.
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“Religion, right,” the docent affirmed. (Later, in the gallery about Kristallnacht, she pointed out how Jews had been persecuted for having the “wrong religion,” which would have surprised the many Jewish converts to Christianity who wound up murdered. I know the docent knew this; she later told me she had abbreviated things to hustle our group to the museum’s boxcar.)
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The docent motioned toward the prewar gallery’s photos showing Jewish school groups and family outings, and asked how the students would describe their subjects’ lives, based on the pictures.“Normal,” a girl said.“Normal, perfect,” the docent said. “They paid taxes, they fought in the wars—all of a sudden, things changed.”
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the museum had made a conscious decision not to focus on the long history of anti-Semitism that preceded the Holocaust, and made it possible. To be fair, adequately covering this topic would have required an additional museum
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The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against anti-Semitism. But it doesn’t
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Then there was the word normal. More than 80 percent of Jewish Holocaust victims spoke Yiddish, a 1,000-year-old European Jewish language spoken around the world, with its own schools, books, newspapers, theaters, political organizations, advertising, and film industry. On a continent where language was tightly tied to territory, this was hardly “normal.” Traditional Jewish practices—which include extremely detailed rules governing food and clothing and 100 gratitude blessings recited each day—were not “normal” either.
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the idea of sudden change—referring to not merely the Nazi takeover, but the shift from a welcoming society to an unwelcoming one—was also reinforced by survivors in videos around the museum
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Teaching children that one shouldn’t hate Jews, because Jews are “normal,” only underlines the problem: If someone doesn’t meet your version of “normal,” then it’s fine to hate them.
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When I asked about worst practices in Holocaust education, Szany had many to share, which turned out to be widely agreed-upon among American Holocaust educators.
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First on the list: “simulations.” Apparently some teachers need to be told not to make students role-play Nazis versus Jews in class, or not to put masking tape on the floor in the exact dimensions of a boxcar in order to cram 200 students into i
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Szany also condemned Holocaust fiction such as the international best seller The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, an exceedingly popular work of ahistorical Christian-savior schlock
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She didn’t feel that Anne Frank’s diary was a good choice either, because it’s “not a story of the Holocaust”—it offers little information about most Jews’ experiences of persecution, and ends before the author’s capture and murder.
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Other officially failed techniques include showing students gruesome images, and prompting self-flattery by asking “What would you have done?
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Yet another bad idea is counting objects. This was the conceit of a widely viewed 2004 documentary called Paper Clips, in which non-Jewish Tennessee schoolchildren, struggling to grasp the magnitude of 6 million murdered Jews, represented those Jews by collecting millions of paper clips
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it is demeaning to represent Jewish people as office supplies.
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Best practices, Szany explained, are the opposite: focusing on individual stories, hearing from survivors and victims in their own words. The Illinois museum tries to “rescue the individuals from the violence,
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In the language I often encountered in Holocaust-education resources, people who lived through the Holocaust were neatly categorized as “perpetrators,” “victims,” “bystanders,” or “upstanders.” Jewish resisters, though, were rarely classified as “upstanders.
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I felt as I often had with actual Holocaust survivors I’d known when I was younger: frustrated as they answered questions I hadn’t asked, and vaguely insulted as they treated me like an annoyance to be managed. (I bridged this divide once I learned Yiddish in my 20s, and came to share with them a vast vocabulary of not only words, but people, places, stories, ideas—a way of thinking and being that contained not a few horrific years but centuries of hard-won vitality and resilience
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Szany at last explained to me what the dead Elster couldn’t: The woman who sheltered his sister took only girls because it was too easy for people to confirm that the boys were Jews.
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I realized that I wouldn’t have wanted to hear this answer from Elster. I did not want to make this thoughtful man sit onstage and discuss his own circumcision with an audience of non-Jewish teenagers. The idea felt just as dehumanizing as pulling down a boy’s pants to reveal a reality of embodied Judaism that, both here and in that barn, had been drained of any meaning beyond persecution
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Here I am in a boxcar, I thought, and tried to make it feel real. I spun my head to take in the immersive scene, which swung around me as though I were on a rocking ship. I felt dizzy and disoriented, purely physical feelings that distracted me. Did this not count as a simulation
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I had visited Auschwitz in actual reality, years ago. With my headset on, I tried to summon the emotional intensity I remembered feeling then. But I couldn’t, because all of the things that had made it powerful were missing. When I was there, I was touching things, smelling things, sifting soil between my fingers that the guide said contained human bone ash, feeling comforted as I recited the mourner’s prayer, the kaddish, with others, the ancient words an undertow of paradox and praise: May the great Name be blessed, forever and ever and ever
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Students at the Skokie museum can visit an area called the Take a Stand Center, which opens with a bright display of modern and contemporary “upstanders,” including activists such as the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and the athlete Carli Lloyd. Szany had told me that educators “wanted more resources” to connect “the history of the Holocaust to lessons of today.” (I heard this again and again elsewhere too.) As far as I could discern, almost nobody in this gallery was Jewish.
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As Szany ran a private demo of the technology for me, I asked how visitors react to it. “They’re more comfortable with the holograms than the real survivors,” Szany said. “Because they know they won’t be judged.”
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t the post-Holocaust activists featured in this gallery were nearly all people who had stood up for their own group. Only Jews, the unspoken assumption went, were not supposed to stand up for themselves.
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Visitors were asked to “take the pledge” by posting notes on a wall (“I pledge to protect the Earth!” “I pledge to be KIND!”)
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It was all so earnest that for the first time since entering the museum, I felt something like hope. Then I noticed it: “Steps for Organizing a Demonstration.” The Nazis in Skokie, like their predecessors, had known how to organize a demonstration. They hadn’t been afraid to be unpopular. They’d taken a stand.
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I left the museum haunted by the uncomfortable truth that the structures of a democratic society could not really prevent, and could even empower, dangerous, irrational rage. Something of that rage haunted me too.
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the more I thought about it, the less obvious it seemed. What were students being taught to “take a stand” for? How could anyone, especially young people with little sense of proportion, connect the murder of 6 million Jews to today without landing in a swamp of Holocaust trivialization, like the COVID-protocol protesters who’d pinned Jewish stars to their shirt and carried posters of Anne Frank?
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weren’t they and others like them doing exactly what Holocaust educators claimed they wanted people to do?
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The 2019 law was inspired by a changing reality in Washington and around the country. In recent years, Kennedy said, she’s received more and more messages about anti-Semitic vandalism and harassment in schools. For example, she told me, “someone calls and says, ‘There’s a swastika drawn in the bathroom.’ ”
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Maybe not, Kennedy admitted. “What frightens me is that small acts of anti-Semitism are becoming very normalized,” she said. “We’re getting used to it. That keeps me up at night.”“Sadly, I don’t think we can fix this,” Regelbrugge said. “But we’re gonna die trying.”
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Almost every city where I spoke with Holocaust-museum educators, whether by phone or in person, had also been the site of a violent anti-Semitic attack in the years since these museums had opened
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I was struck by how minimally these attacks were discussed in the educational materials shared by the museums.
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In fact, with the exception of Kennedy and Regelbrugge, no one I spoke with mentioned these anti-Semitic attacks at all.
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The failure to address contemporary anti-Semitism in most of American Holocaust education is, in a sense, by design
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the story of the (mostly non-Jewish) teachers in Massachusetts and New Jersey who created the country’s first Holocaust curricula, in the ’70s. The point was to teach morality in a secular society. “Everyone in education, regardless of ethnicity, could agree that Nazism was evil and that the Jews were innocent victims,” Fallace wrote, explaining the topic’s appeal. “Thus, teachers used the Holocaust to activate the moral reasoning of their students”—to teach them to be good people.
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The idea that Holocaust education can somehow serve as a stand-in for public moral education has not left us. And because of its obviously laudable goals, objecting to it feels like clubbing a baby seal. Who wouldn’t want to teach kids to be empathetic?
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by this logic, shouldn’t Holocaust education, because of its moral content alone, automatically inoculate people against anti-Semitism?
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Apparently not. “Essentially the moral lessons that the Holocaust is often used to teach reflect much the same values that were being taught in schools before the Holocaust,”
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(Germans in the ’30s, after all, were familiar with the Torah’s commandment, repeated in the Christian Bible, to love their neighbors.) This fact undermines nearly everything Holocaust education is trying to accomplish, and reveals the roots of its failure.
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One problem with using the Holocaust as a morality play is exactly its appeal: It flatters everyone. We can all congratulate ourselves for not committing mass murder.
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This approach excuses current anti-Semitism by defining anti-Semitism as genocide in the past
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When anti-Semitism is reduced to the Holocaust, anything short of murdering 6 million Jews—like, say, ramming somebody with a shopping cart, or taunting kids at school, or shooting up a Jewish nonprofit, or hounding Jews out of entire countries—seems minor by comparison.
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If we teach that the Holocaust happened because people weren’t nice enough—that they failed to appreciate that humans are all the same, for instance, or to build a just society—we create the self-congratulatory space where anti-Semitism grow
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One can believe that humans are all the same while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their millennia-old insistence on being different from their neighbors, are the obstacle to humans all being the same
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One can believe in creating a just society while being virulently anti-Semitic, because according to anti-Semites, Jews, with their imagined power and privilege, are the obstacle to a just society
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To inoculate people against the myth that humans have to erase their differences in order to get along, and the related myth that Jews, because they have refused to erase their differences, are supervillains, one would have to acknowledge that these myths exist
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To really shatter them, one would have to actually explain the content of Jewish identity, instead of lazily claiming that Jews are just like everyone else.
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one of several major Holocaust-curriculum providers, told me about the “terrible Jew jokes” she’d heard from her own students in Virginia. “They don’t necessarily know where they come from or even really why they’re saying them,” Goss said. “Many kids understand not to say the N-word, but they would say, ‘Don’t be such a Jew.’ ”
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There’s a decline in history education at the same time that there’s a rise in social media,”
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“We’ve done studies with our partners at Holocaust centers that show that students are coming in with questions about whether the Holocaust was an actual event. That wasn’t true 20 years ago.”
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Goss believes that one of the reasons for the lack of stigma around anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and jokes is baked into the universal-morality approach to Holocaust education. “The Holocaust is not a good way to teach about ‘bullying,’
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Echoes & Reflections’ lesson plans do address newer versions of anti-Semitism, including the contemporary demonization of Israel’s existence—as opposed to criticism of Israeli policies—and its manifestation in aggression against Jews. Other Holocaust-curriculum providers also have material on contemporary anti-Semitism.
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providers rarely explain or explore who Jews are today—and their raison d’être remains Holocaust education.
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Many teachers had told me that their classrooms “come alive” when they teach about the Holocaust
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Holocaust-education materials are just plain better than those on most other historical topics. All of the major Holocaust-education providers offer lessons that teachers can easily adapt for different grade levels and subject areas. Instead of lecturing and memorization, they use participation-based methods such as group work, hands-on activities, and “learner driven” projects.
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A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found a correlation between “warm” feelings about Jews and knowledge about the Holocaust—but the respondents who said they knew a Jewish person also tended to be more knowledgeable about the Holocaust, providing a more obvious source for their feelings
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In 2020, Echoes & Reflections published a commissioned study of 1,500 college students, comparing students who had been exposed to Holocaust education in high school with those who hadn’t. The published summary shows that those who had studied the Holocaust were more likely to tolerate diverse viewpoints, and more likely to privately support victims of bullying scenarios, which is undoubtedly good news. It did not, however, show a significant difference in respondents’ willingness to defend victims publicly, and students who’d received Holocaust education were less likely to be civically engaged—in other words, to be an “upstander.”
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These studies puzzled me. As Goss told me, the Holocaust was not about bullying—so why was the Echoes study measuring that? More important, why were none of these studies examining awareness of anti-Semitism, whether past or present?
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One major study addressing this topic was conducted in England, where a national Holocaust-education mandate has been in place for more than 20 years. In 2016, researchers at University College London’s Centre for Holocaust Education published a survey of more than 8,000 English secondary-school students, including 244 whom they interviewed at length.
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The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism
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“many students appeared to regard [Jews’] existence as problematic and a key cause of Nazi victimisation.” In other words, students blamed the Holocaust on the Jews
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This result resembles that of a large 2020 survey of American Millennials and Gen Zers, in which 11 percent of respondents believed that Jews caused the Holocaust. The state with the highest percentage of respondents believing this—an eye-popping 19 percent—was New York, which has mandated Holocaust education since the 1990s.
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Worse, in the English study, “a significant number of students appeared to tacitly accept some of the egregious claims once circulated by Nazi propaganda,” instead of recognizing them as anti-Semitic myths.
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One typical student told researchers, “Is it because like they were kind of rich, so maybe they thought that that was kind of in some way evil, like the money didn’t belong to them[;] it belonged to the Germans and the Jewish people had kind of taken that away from them?
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Another was even more blunt: “The Germans, when they saw the Jews were better off than them, kind of, I don’t know, it kind of pissed them off a bit.” Hitler’s speeches were more eloquent in making similar points.
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One of the teachers I met was Benjamin Vollmer, a veteran conference participant who has spent years building his school’s Holocaust-education program. He teaches eighth-grade English in Venus, Texas, a rural community with 5,700 residents; his school is majority Hispanic, and most students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. When I asked him why he focuses on the Holocaust, his initial answer was simple: “It meets the TEKS.”
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The TEKS are the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, an elaborate list of state educational requirements that drive standardized testing
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it became apparent that Holocaust education was something much bigger for his students: a rare access point to a wider world. Venus is about 30 miles from Dallas, but Vollmer’s annual Holocaust-museum field trip is the first time that many of his students ever leave their town.
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“It’s become part of the school culture,” Vollmer said. “In eighth grade, they walk in, and the first thing they ask is, ‘When are we going to learn about the Holocaust?’
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Vollmer is not Jewish—and, as is common for Holocaust educators, he has never had a Jewish student. (Jews are 2.4 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to a 2020 Pew survey.) Why not focus on something more relevant to his students, I asked him, like the history of immigration or the civil-rights movement?
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I hadn’t yet appreciated that the absence of Jews was precisely the appeal.“Some topics have been so politicized that it’s too hard to teach them,” Vollmer told me. “Making it more historical takes away some of the barriers to talking about it.”
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Wouldn’t the civil-rights movement, I asked, be just as historical for his students?He paused, thinking it through. “You have to build a level of rapport in your class before you have the trust to explore your own history,” he finally said.
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“The Holocaust happened long ago, and we’re not responsible for it,” she said. “Anything happening in our world today, the wool comes down over our eyes.” Her colleague attending the conference with her, a high-school teacher who also wouldn’t share her name, had tried to take her mostly Hispanic students to a virtual-reality experience called Carne y Arena, which follows migrants attempting to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Her administrators refused, claiming that it would traumatize students. But they still learn about the Holocaust.
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Student discomfort has been a legal issue in Texas. The state’s House Bill 3979, passed in 2021, is one of many “anti-critical-race-theory” laws that conservative state legislators have introduced since 2020. The bill forbade teachers from causing students “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex,” and also demanded that teachers introduce “diverse and contending perspectives” when teaching “controversial” topics, “without giving deference to any one perspective.
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These vaguely worded laws stand awkwardly beside a 2019 state law mandating Holocaust education for Texas students at all grade levels during an annual Holocaust Remembrance Week
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the administrator who’d made the viral remarks in Southlake is a strong proponent of Holocaust education, but was acknowledging a reality in that school district. Every year, the administrator had told Higgins, some parents in her district object to their children reading the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night—because it isn’t their “belief” that the Holocaust happened.
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In one model lesson at the conference, participants examined a speech by the Nazi official Heinrich Himmler about the need to murder Jews, alongside a speech by the Hebrew poet and ghetto fighter Abba Kovner encouraging a ghetto uprising. I only later realized that this lesson plan quite elegantly satisfied the House bill’s requirement of providing “contending perspectives.”
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The next day, I asked the instructor if that was an unspoken goal of her lesson plan. With visible hesitation, she said that teaching in Texas can be like “walking the tightrope.” This way, she added, “you’re basing your perspectives on primary texts and not debating with Holocaust deniers.” Less than an hour later, a senior museum employee pulled me aside to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to interview the staff.
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Many of the visiting educators at the conference declined to talk with me, even anonymously; nearly all who did spoke guardedly. The teachers I met, most of whom were white Christian women, did not seem to be of any uniform political bent. But virtually all of them were frustrated by what administrators and parents were demanding of them.
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Two local middle-school teachers told me that many parents insist on seeing reading lists. Parents “wanting to keep their kid in a bubble,” one of them said, has been “the huge stumbling block.”
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“It is healthy to begin this study by talking about anti-Semitism, humanizing the victims, sticking to primary sources, and remaining as neutral as possible.”
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Wasn’t “remaining as neutral as possible” exactly the opposite of being an upstander?
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In trying to remain neutral, some teachers seemed to want to seek out the Holocaust’s bright side—and ask dead Jews about i
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We watched a brief introduction about Glauben’s childhood and early adolescence in the Warsaw Ghetto and in numerous camps. When the dead man appeared, one teacher asked, “Was there any joy or happiness in this ordeal? Moments of joy in the camps?”
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These experiences, hardly unusual for Jewish victims, were not the work of a faceless killing machine. Instead they reveal a gleeful and imaginative sadism. For perpetrators, this was fun. Asking this dead man about “joy” seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of the Holocaust. There was plenty of joy, just on the Nazi side.
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In the educational resources I explored, I did not encounter any discussions of sadism—the joy derived from humiliating people, the dopamine hit from landing a laugh at someone else’s expense, the self-righteous high from blaming one’s problems on others—even though this, rather than the fragility of democracy or the passivity of bystanders, is a major origin point of all anti-Semitism
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To anyone who has spent 10 seconds online, that sadism is familiar, and its source is familiar too: the fear of being small, and the desire to feel big by making others feel small instead.
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Nazis were, among other things, edgelords, in it for the laughs. So, for that matter, were the rest of history’s anti-Semites, then and now. For Americans today, isn’t this the most relevant insight of all?
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“People say we’ve learned from the Holocaust. No, we didn’t learn a damn thing,”
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“People glom on to this idea of the upstander,” she said. “Kids walk away with the sense that there were a lot of upstanders, and they think, Yes, I can do it too.”
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The problem with presenting the less inspiring reality, she suggested, is how parents or administrators might react. “If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”
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But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms?
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I asked Klett why no one seemed to be teaching anything about Jewish culture. If the whole point of Holocaust education is to “humanize” those who were “dehumanized,” why do most teachers introduce students to Jews only when Jews are headed for a mass grave? “There’s a real fear of teaching about Judaism,” she confided. “Especially if the teacher is Jewish.”
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Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?
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“Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”
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“Survivors have told me, ‘Thank you for teaching this. They’ll listen to you because you’re not Jewish,’ ” she said. “Which is weird.”
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perhaps we could be honest and just say “There is no point in teaching any of this”—because anti-Semitism is so ingrained in our world that even when discussing the murders of 6 million Jews, it would be “pushing an agenda” to tell people not to hate them, or to tell anyone what it actually means to be Jewish
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The Dallas Museum was the only one I visited that opened with an explanation of who Jews are. Its exhibition began with brief videos about Abraham and Moses—limiting Jewish identity to a “religion” familiar to non-Jews, but it was better than nothing. The museum also debunked the false charge that the Jews—rather than the Romans—killed Jesus, and explained the Jews’ refusal to convert to other faiths. It even had a panel or two about contemporary Dallas Jewish life. Even so, a docent there told me that one question students ask is “Are any Jews still alive today?”
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American Holocaust education, in this museum and nearly everywhere else, never ends with Jews alive today. Instead it ends by segueing to other genocides, or to other minorities’ suffering
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But when one reaches the end of the exhibition on American slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., one does not then enter an exhibition highlighting the enslavement of other groups throughout world history, or a room full of interactive touchscreens about human trafficking today, asking that visitors become “upstanders” in fighting i
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That approach would be an insult to Black history, ignoring Black people’s current experiences while turning their past oppression into nothing but a symbol for something else, something that actually matters.
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It is dehumanizing to be treated as a symbol. It is even more dehumanizing to be treated as a warning.
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How should we teach children about anti-Semitism?
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Decoster began her conference workshop by introducing “vocabulary must-knows.” At the top of her list: anti-Semitism.
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“If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”
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She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?”
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“Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said
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I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”
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I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.
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“The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”
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This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.
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Decoster moved on to a snazzy infographic of a wheel divided in thirds, each explaining a component of anti-Semitism
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“Racial Antisemitism = False belief that Jews are a race and a threat to other races,”
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Anti-Judaism = Hatred of Jews as a religious group,”
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then “Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory = False belief that Jews want to control and overtake the world.” The third part, the conspiracy theory, was what distinguished anti-Semitism from other bigotries. It allowed closed-minded people to congratulate themselves for being open-minded—for “doing their own research,” for “punching up,” for “speaking truth to power,” while actually just spreading lies.
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Wolfson clarified for his audience what this centuries-long demonization of Jews actually means, citing the scholar David Patterson, who has written: “In the end, the antisemite’s claim is not that all Jews are evil, but rather that all evil is Jewish.”
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Wolfson told the teachers that it was important that “anti-Semitism should not be your students’ first introduction to Jews and Judaism.” He said this almost as an aside, just before presenting the pig-excrement image. “If you’re teaching about anti-Semitism before you teach about the content of Jewish identity, you’re doing it wrong.
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this—introducing students to Judaism by way of anti-Semitism—was exactly what they were doing. The same could be said, I realized, for nearly all of American Holocaust education.
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The Holocaust educators I met across America were all obsessed with building empathy, a quality that relies on finding commonalities between ourselves and others.
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a more effective way to address anti-Semitism might lie in cultivating a completely different quality, one that happens to be the key to education itself: curiosity. Why use Jews as a means to teach people that we’re all the same, when the demand that Jews be just like their neighbors is exactly what embedded the mental virus of anti-Semitism in the Western mind in the first place? Why not instead encourage inquiry about the diversity, to borrow a de rigueur word, of the human experience?
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I want a hologram of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks telling people about what he called “the dignity of difference.”
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I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews doe
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There is no empathy without curiosity, no respect without knowledge, no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor
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This is what a 'multipolar' world looks like. It's chaos | The Spectator - 0 views
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multipolar rules-based world order hamas israel enlightenment culture politics history crisis
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The Hamas terror attack has triggered war in Gaza, a geopolitical crisis and now – from Sydney to New York City – outbursts of street-level anti-Semitism in the West. Unless it de-escalates quickly, it looks like a strategic turning point both for Palestinian nationalism and Israel
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though I am no expert on the region, I can throw some concreteness into the current battle of abstractions.
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But the international community has a right to demand proportionality, restraint, respect for international law, and condemn breaches of it. President Biden last night was right to emphasise the need for lawfulness.
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Let’s start with the obvious: Israel has a right to defend itself, rescue the hostages, arrest and prosecute Hamas and engage in lawful armed combat with its enemy.
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People claiming the Hamas attack is the ‘violence of the oppressed’ are deluded. Hamas rules Gaza like a mafia state: its operatives walk around neighbourhoods in twos, dressed in dark suits, prying into people’s business. They run the place on a mixture of terror, public service provision and the kudos of their fighters.
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They are feared but there is widespread disrespect for them, especially among secular and nationalist sections of the population.
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Paradoxically, the western ‘anti-imperialists’ trying to apologise for the terror attack, and the Israeli right calling for retribution against civilians, both need to identify Hamas with the Palestinian population of Gaza in order to justify violence. But there is no basis for doing so.
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The fact that a violent action takes place in the context of a wider oppression does not make it either (a) just (b) lawful under international law or c) effective in pursuit of social justice.
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In this case, Hamas’s act of terror looks set to achieve the opposite.
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What does Hamas want?
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Hamas has offered a truce and asked for negotiations, stating that it has ‘achieved its objective’. If so, it’s logical to conclude that the immediate objective was to demonstrate proof-of-concept of an unstoppable pogromist terror. Do as we ask or we do this again, might be a fair summary.
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The wider aim, according to numerous experts, is to force Hamas and Iran back into the power-broking process in the Middle East region, paralysing Saudi-Israeli rapprochement.
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The firm view of the Islamic Republic is that the governments that are gambling on normalizing relations with the Zionist regime will suffer losses. Defeat awaits them…Today, the situation of the Zionist regime is not a situation that encourages closeness to it. They [other governments] should not make this mistake. The usurper [Zionist] regime is coming to an end.
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Hamas could only achieve the aim of ending Saudi-Israeli rapprochement with an attack designed to trigger massive retribution, risking a regional all-out war.
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there’s a line in Khamenei’s 3 October speech that, in retrospect looks explanatory: Thus, [the Zionists] are filled with grudge. They are filled with anger! Of course, the Quran exclaims: “Say, “die of your rage!” (3:119). That’s right. Be angry, and die of your rage. And this will happen. They are dying. With God’s help, this matter of ‘die of your rage’ is happening now as regards the Zionist regime.
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‘Die of your rage’ might actually be a good summary of what Hamas intends Israel to now do.
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Enraged by the barbarity of the attacks, Israel unleashes unprecedented collective punishment against Gaza, triggering both Hezbollah and West Bank militants to join in the fight; this in turn prompts a wave of anti-Semitic demonstrations in western cities, and draws the USA into a regional quagmire, testing the limits of American support for Israel
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Meanwhile combat losses, and retribution over the complete failure of Netanyahu’s strategy of ‘managing’ the conflict, raise political divisions in Israeli society to the point where its democracy fails.
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In a context where both Russia and China have complex hybrid destabilisation operations going on in western democracies, and where the Brics+ project is pursuing the active decomposition of the rules-based order, this objective does not look as mad as at first sight.
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the ‘multipolar world’ turns out not to be one of peaceful coexistence, but characterised by extreme conflicts and genocide.
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In pursuit of systemic competition Beijing and Moscow are scraping at every open wound in the body geopolitic
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it’s what you get when you purposefully dismantle an international order based on treaties and explicit rules. And where elites in Russia, the USA, Brasil and parts of Europe are openly experimenting with ethno-nationalist politics.
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Chaos, then, is a feature of multipolarity, not a bug.
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Israel has signalled its military objective is to destroy Hamas. From my experience in Gaza I would say: that is possible.
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But be in no doubt. It will need a sustained urban combat operation, a long-term military occupation, massive loss of civilian life, an existential refugee crisis in Sinai, and the diversion of US-supplied ammunition and resources from Ukraine.
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Attempting it with a largely conscript/reservist army, full of recently mobilised and enraged soldiers? Again it’s worth remembering Khamenei’s exhortation to Israelis to ‘die of your rage’.
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The very impossibility of all these outcomes shows why we need an internationally mediated peace, alongside a functional two-state solution, which allows the people of Gaza to live in peace, exercise democracy and travel across borders.
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not only will liberal sympathy for Israel evaporate, but the Muslim minorities in some Western countries will be radicalised.
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Typically, from my experience, combat in Gaza takes the following form. There is a street with children playing at one end; in the middle it is eerily deserted; at the other end is the IDF and above is an IDF drone. But there is no front line. The mujahedeen are in tunnels, popping up to take sniper shots or lay IEDs at night, and only committing ATGMs once a vehicle comes into view. The only front line is, for most of the time, between the IDF and Palestinian civilians.
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Both sides risk miscalculating. Hamas does not care what happens to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of whom hate Hamas.
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But there is a danger of miscalculation for Israel too. Netanyahu’s far-right government completely missed the threat, actively stoked tensions in the West Bank and Al Aqsa, and could easily now double down on a self-destructive course.
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Ultimately, you cannot hold two million people in an open air prison without a gaoler to keep order. If Hamas can’t do it, the IDF will have to be a permanent occupation force, or it will have to install the PA, or the UN will have to send a stabilisation force.
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Danger of miscalculation
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The Brics+ ideology
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The Gaza crisis is the latest example of how the Russian/Chinese ‘multipolar world’ project works in practice. It doesn’t matter whether there is a chain of command that goes Moscow→Tehran→Hamas. There is a chain of understanding – seize every opportunity to militarise all conflict; exploit every unexpected breakthrough; make all violence symbolic; weaponise the information space and push conflict into the heartlands of ‘imperialism’.
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the Brics+ ideology. Its central tenets are that a multipolar world is better than the charter system; that universalism and international law are over; that the West no longer has the right to use the structures of international governance to normalise concepts like democracy or human rights; and that everything that disorganises the rules-based order is progressive, even when carried out by reactionary political forces.
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Arab nationalism no longer looks like the dominant ideology on the demonstrations we’ve seen in Sydney, London and NYC. Alongside it there’s a mixture of Islamism plus the ‘decolonisation’ agenda of postmodernist academia.
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For the past two years, during the Ukraine war, this incipient red-brown ideology has been mostly contained:
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with this conflict there is now a danger that the masses turn up, and are corralled into this emergent fusion of far-left/far-right politics.
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I’ve spent the period post-2016 trying to equip the democratic left to defeat this ideology. It’s not about being ‘anti-woke’, or apologising for colonialism: it means teaching people that a cocktail of anti-humanism, anti-universalism and anti-rationality is a route to excusing the totalitarian states in Russia and China, and – now – the genocidal actions of their proxies.
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A case study of this is the statement issued by 31 Harvard student groups saying they ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence’ – just hours after the Hamas attack began.
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the global left is rapidly splitting into irreconcilable camps – as Edward Thompson recognised it would, under the influence of post-structuralism in the 1970s.
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The logical implication is that Palestinians have no agency whatsoever. That Hamas murders civilians because Israel has ‘structured’ Palestinian reality to make that inevitable. For people presumably wedded to ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, it is a shockingly colonialist premise.
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The logic is that Israel is responsible for everything Hamas does because its violence has ‘structured every aspect of Palestinian existence’ since the Nakba.
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There are many civilisations, and none is superior or inferior to another. They are equal since each civilisation represents a unique expression of its own culture, traditions, and the aspirations of its people.
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In a way, what Putin preaches is an ‘intersectionality of the peoples’: identity politics raised from the level of the individual to the level of the ethnic group.
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And it turns out anti-Enlightenment leftism makes it pretty easy to converge with that view. The common assumptions are disdain for universalism, scorn for international law and human rights, repudiation of the Enlightenment (and thus liberalism, social democracy, humanistic Marxism and anarchism) and worship of any totalitarian government that delivers economic development.
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This is the modern incarnation of Stalinism, and – to the surprise of nobody who has studied actual Stalinism – it has no problem seeing fascists like Hamas as the ‘agent of progress’.
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we need to understand how closely this hyper-deterministic and anti-universal world view maps onto the ideology presented, for example, by Putin at Valdai last week. For Putin there is no single human civilisation, only civilisations, which must be rooted in ethnicity establish their co-existence through the survival of the fittest:
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One camp, he said, is a theology. The other a tradition of active reason. The first repudiates liberalism and universalism. The second recognises its debt to liberalism and wants to make universalism consistent
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The first claims international law is a sham; the second knows that, though the institutions of the rules-based order are flawed, they are better than chaos.
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that you can stand with the Israeli people under attack while simultaneously standing up for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.
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Those flaunting their joy at the murder of Israeli civilians need to understand the licence this creates in the minds of rightwing ethno-nationalists in our own society. What Hamas did to the kids of Kfar Azar, the far right wants to do to you.
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A Professor Reviews CliffsNotes and Other Cheat Sheets - The New York Times - 0 views
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cheat study notes online summary learning school culture trends education
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At this time of year, students are buying textbooks and looking for ways to avoid reading them
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What has changed is how many study guides, or cheat sheets, are available online and on mobile phones. Whether you know them as CliffsNotes, SparkNotes or Shmoop, these seemingly ubiquitous guides are now, in many cases, free.
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“Two to three years ago, the wisdom was that students do research online, but not study online,” said Emily Sawtell, a founder of McGraw-Hill’s online collaborative study site called GradeGuru. “That has changed in the last 12 months.” Ms. Sawtell said she had tracked a significant increase in the search term “study guide” on Google.
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Professors warn that these guides are no substitutes for reading great works of literature, but concede, grudgingly, that as an adjunct, they can stimulate thought and deepen insight.
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CliffsNotes guides cover not only literature, but also foreign languages, math, science, history and other topics, and many of the guides are free online.
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In booklet form, 159 literature study guides are available, costing about $6 to $10 each. But more than 250 are available online, and all can be viewed free. Downloading them as PDF files costs $5 to $10 each. A comparatively paltry 39 CliffsNotes for literature are available for mobile at $1.99 each for the iPhone.
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CliffsNotes, owned by Wiley Publishing, also offers free podcasts called CramCasts, which are three- to five-minute overviews of books with a plot summary.
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Dr. Fisher liked the idea behind Shmoop’s “Why Should I care?” section. It explains the satire in “Candide” by comparing it to modern satires like “The Simpsons” and “The Family Guy.” The problem, he said, is that the writing strains to relate to students. “It makes an interesting attempt to be hip,” he said, “but it is just so high school-y.”
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The Closing of the American Mind: A Summary - 0 views
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Preface
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“No teacher can doubt that his real task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice.” p. 20
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A liberal education is one that helps students to ask themselves and answer the question, “what is man?… In our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers [to that question] and thinking about them.” p. 21
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Introduction: Our Virtue
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“There is one thing that a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative…. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.” p. 25
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Democratic education…wants and needs to produce men and women [who are] supportive of a democratic regime.” p. 26
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The historical assumption of the human sciences was (and remains) that an objective human nature exists and can be discovered—if not by reason itself, then at least by empirical science guided by reason. Science was a method to allow us to rise beyond the prejudices of our culture in order to discover the truths of human nature. It was a mechanism for opening our minds, an instrument of openness. p. 37-38
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Liberalism has always tended towards increased freedom—i.e., decreased regulation. But “it was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral and political knowledge…. It begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all…[and] of course the result is that…the argument justifying freedom disappears, and…all beliefs begin to have an attenuated character.” p. 28
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Modern education is concerned mainly with correcting ethnocentrism—showing students that their preferences are merely accidents of their culture and that no single culture is better than any other. The roots of this movement are found in the problems (racism, mistreatment) that arose due to the multicultural nature of American life. p. 29-30
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The Founders envisioned a society where individuals were bound together by their belief in and adherence to the rights of the Constitution. Minority factions were seen as a bad thing, detracting from social cohesiveness. p. 31
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However, the provision of equal rights did not guarantee equal treatment, and minority groups suffered. This caused them to retreat into their minority identities and oppose the majority—indeed, “much of the intellectual machinery of twentieth-century American political thought and social science was constructed for the purpose of making an assault on [the] majority…. The very idea of a majority—now understood to be selfish interest—is done away with in order to protect the minorities.” p. 32-35
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However, its ideas about what this means have changed over time, starting with a faith in the human rights of the U.S. Constitution, but ultimately changing to (now) mean “openness,” i.e., relativism. p. 26-27
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“Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is a democratic prejudice.” p. 40
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Today, “the human sciences want to make us culture-beings with the instruments [science and reason] that were invented to liberate us from culture…: cultural relativism, historicism, the fact-value distinction—are the suicide of science. Culture, hence closedness, reigns supreme. Openness to closedness is what we teach.” p. 38-39
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Yet the dogmatic modern assumption is that human nature does not exist, that our ways of being are culturally determined, that our minds are inherently constrained—“closed”—by cultural influences. p. 38
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“There are two types of openness, the openness of indifference…and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude.” p. 41
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The openness of indifference advocates the removal of all requirements in education—why should students learn languages or philosophy? But the reality is that, “to be open to knowing, there are certain types of things one must know which most people don’t want to bother to learn and which appear boring and irrelevant…true openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present.” p. 41
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The Clean Slate
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On the surface, Americans seems to lack a true culture or set of traditions. But most of them grew up with a shared knowledge of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, and “contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political [and intellectual] traditions of any nation in the world.” And this tradition is not confused or counterbalanced by a history of monarchy or aristocracy. p. 52-55
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So we have a culture in which to root education, but we have begun to undermine it. The idealism of the American founding has been explained away as mythical, selfishly-motivated, and racist. And so our culture has been devalued. p. 55-56
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Religion, too, has been explained away, but this has left us without a standpoint from which to understand our experience as humans. Parents “have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world.” p. 56-57
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“As it now stands, students have powerful images of what the perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.” p. 67
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Books
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“I have begun to wonder whether the experience of the greatest texts from early childhood is not a prerequisite for a concern throughout life for them and for lesser but important literature. The soul’s longing…may well require encouragement at the outset.” p. 62
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Literature is critical because it presents to young people the range of possibilities of human types—both good and bad. p. 62-64
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But students are less and less exposed to literature, and as a result, “they have only pop psychology to tell them what people are like, and the range of their motives…. [Therefore,] people become more alike, for want of knowing they can be otherwise. What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside.” p. 64
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Without exposure to literature, students usually resort to the movies. But movies do not provide the “distance from the contemporary” that students need, and so this only reinforces the belief that the here and now is all there is. p. 64
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The loss of literature has also meant the loss of heroes. In a “perversion of the democratic principle,” this lack is almost admired, since being oneself is the supposed goal. But whether or not it is seen as desirable, students invariably seek role models. And without literature, they only have those around them (and in the media) to emulate. p. 66-67
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“Nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth…. Tradition has become superfluous.” p. 58
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We are left with a culture filled with “the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art…. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy. This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such.” p. 74-75
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Relationships
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“In short, after the war, while America was sending out its blue jeans to unite the young of all nations, a concrete form of democratic universalism that has had liberalizing effects on many enslaved nations, it was importing a clothing of German fabrication for its souls, which clashed with all that and cast doubt on the Americanization of the world on which we had embarked, thinking it was good and in conformity with the rights of man
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“This indeterminate or open-ended future and the lack of a binding past mean that the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature—spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone…. Why are we surprised that such unfurnished persons should be preoccupied principally with themselves?” p. 87-88
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“The one eccentric element in this portrait, the one failure…is the relation between blacks and whites.” Although black students are present on campuses, they “have, by and large, proved indigestible.” p. 91
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the Black Power movement arrived and the universities conceded to identity politics, which took the form of Black-themed courses, quotas, and an unwillingness to fail black students. p. 94-95
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“The black student who wants to be just a student and to avoid allegiance to the black group has to pay a terrific price, because he is judged negatively by his black peers and because his behavior is atypical in the eyes of whites. White students have silently and unconsciously adjusted to a group presence of blacks, and they must readjust for a black who does not define himself by the group.” Affirmative action cements this dynamic. p. 95-96
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The restructuring of the family requires that men subdue their masculine character. “And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them ‘care’ is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail…. The old moral order, however imperfect it may have been, at least moved towards the virtues by way of the passions. If men were self-concerned, that order tried to expand the scope of self-concern to include others [i.e., his wife and children], rather than commanding men to cease being concerned with themselves.” p. 129
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“I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should go back to them. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitutes for them just because we want or need them.” p. 130
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“All of our reforms have helped strip the teeth of our gears, which can therefore no longer mesh. They spin idly, side by side, unable to set the social machine in motion.” p. 131
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Modern students are lacking the longing that is critical for a full enjoyment of life. They are complacent. And the universities do not see themselves as providing for such a longing. p. 134-136
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The German Connection
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Value relativism is the modern replacement for traditional morality, and “constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism.” p. 141
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Value relativism has sunk so far into the American consciousness that its vocabulary has become colloquial: we talk about ‘charisma,’ ‘life-style,’ ‘commitment,’ ‘identity,’ etc. “Although they, and the things to which they refer, would have been incomprehensible to our fathers, not to speak of our Founding Fathers.” p. 147
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Students today are largely apathetic about any concerns outside of themselves. There isn’t any malice in this self-centeredness; but it has become so entrenched in American culture that it isn’t even recognized as unusual. p. 82-86
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“We chose [to import] a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had its starting point dislike of us and our goals.” p. 153
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The question isn’t even asked whether the German doctrine of value-creation is contrary to democratic and egalitarian ideals; but it certainly seems to leave room for their opposites and perhaps promote them—i.e., value relativism seems to allow for fascism. p. 154
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The Self
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Although a precise definition remains elusive, “the self is the modern substitute for the soul.” p. 173
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Man used to strive for fulfillment by taming his bodily desires in order to live virtuously. But this changed after Machiavelli (and Hobbes after him) suggested that instead we ignore virtue and follow our desires, which find their root in the state of nature. p. 174-175
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Following their advice, “our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us.” p. 175
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Locke then replaced the virtuous man with the rationally selfish one. “Beneath his selfishness, of course, lies an expectation that it conduces more to the good of others than does moralism.” p. 175-176
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“All higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men’s reason and used to limit human passion, has disappeared.” p. 176
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That reason “is unable to rule in culture or in soul…constitutes a crisis of the West…[whose] regimes are founded on reason.” Previous regimes relied on religion, but Enlightenment undermined religion. p. 196
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Psychology came to us “in order to treat the parts of man which had been so long neglected by liberal society…. Modern psychology has this in common with what was always a popular opinion, fathered by Machiavelli—that selfishness is somehow good. Man is self, and the self must be selfish. What is new is that we are told to look more deeply into the self, that we assumed too easily that we know it and have access to it.” p. 178
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Prior to this, it was only God who was dignified—not man. And God was dignified in his freedom, his ability to create. If man was to be elevated, he, too, must be free; he, too, must be able to create. p. 180
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And so, following Rousseau and our dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment, we have elevated creativity above reason as the ultimate virtue, and the artist replaced the philosopher and scientist at the admired human type. p. 181-182
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Yet those who praise creativity don’t realize why. They admire it without seeing that it is the result of Romantic thought absorbed into democratic public opinion. And it has influenced the whole political spectrum, from Left to Right. p. 181-182
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The Germans (Nietzsche and Weber) recognized as early as 1919 that the scientific spirit was dead, that reason cannot establish values. But Americans (naïvely, and largely unknowingly) still held onto the rationalist dream, written as they were into our political foundations. p. 194-195
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When those ideas came to the U.S. (via Weber), “a very dark view of the future was superimposed on our incorrigible optimism. We are children playing with adult toys.” p. 195
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“The psychology of the self has succeeded so well that it is now the instinct of most of us to turn for a cure for our ills back within ourselves rather than to the nature of things.” p. 179
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Rousseau and others recognized this. “The very idea of culture was a way of preserving something like religion without talking about it.” But Nietzsche saw this was impossible. p. 196-197
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We are left with no religion, but we still have religious impulses. p. 197
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“The disenchantment of God and nature necessitated a new description of good and evil. To adapt a formula of Plato about the gods, we do not love a thing because it is good, it is good because we love it. It [became] our decision to esteem that makes something estimable.” p. 197
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“Since values are not rational…they must be imposed.” Will, or commitment, is the primary virtue; it is the equivalent of (what used to be) faith. “Nietzsche was not a fascist; but this project inspired fascist rhetoric, which looked to the revitalization of old cultures or the foundation of new ones, as opposed to the rational, rootless cosmopolitanism of the revolutions of the Left.” p. 201-202
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Nietzsche was a cultural relativist. This meant he anticipated war, because wars are inevitable when values are imposed and unrooted in truth or anything objective. p. 202
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“Just over the horizon, when Weber wrote, lay Hitler…. He was the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader—the demagogue—hoped for by Weber.” Weber was not looking for something so extreme, but “when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietzsche, it is hard to set limits.” p. 213-214
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“Hitler did not cause a rethinking of the politics here or in Europe. All to the contrary—it was while we were fighting him that the thought that had preceded him in Europe conquered here.” And it remains dominant. p. 214
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The language of values implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social, and personal. It has been facilitated by a softening and blurring of the idea of religion and “the sacred,” which are no longer seen as dangerous.
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“As an image of our current intellectual condition, I keep being reminded of the newsreel pictures of Frenchmen splashing happily in the water at the seashore, enjoying the paid annual vacations legislated by Leon Blum’s Popular Front government. It was 1936, the same year Hitler was permitted to occupy the Rhineland. All our big causes amount to that kind of vacation.” p. 239
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This is our educational crisis and opportunity. Western rationalism has culminated in a rejection of reason. Is this result necessary?” p. 240
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Opinion | How Long Will A.I.'s 'Slop' Era Last? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Sequoia Capital, calculated that investments in A.I. were running short of projected profits by a margin of at least several hundred billion dollars annually. (He called this “A.I.’s $600 billion question” and warned of “investment incineration.”)
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In a similarly bearish Goldman Sachs report, the firm’s head of global equity research estimated that the cost of A.I. infrastructure build-out over the next several years would reach $1 trillion. “Replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I’ve witnessed,” he noted. “The crucial question is: What $1 trillion problem will A.I. solve?”
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that trillion-dollar A.I. expenditure, more than the United States spends annually on its military, and think: What exactly is that money going toward?
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What is A.I. even for?
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“A.I. slop”: often uncanny, frequently misleading material, now flooding web browsers and social-media platforms like spam in old inboxes. Years deep into national hysteria over the threat of internet misinformation pushed on us by bad actors, we’ve sleepwalked into a new internet in which meaningless, nonfactual slop is casually mass-produced and force-fed to us by A.I.
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It has already helped drive down the cost and drive up the performance of next-gen batteries and solar photovoltaic cells, whose performance can also be improved, even after the panels have been manufactured and installed on your roof, by as much as 25 percent
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while the internet was never perfectly trustworthy, one epoch-defining breakthrough of Google was that it got us pretty close. Now the company’s chief executive acknowledges that hallucinations are “inherent” to the technology it has celebrated as a kind of successor for ranked-order search results, which are now often found far below not just the A.I. summary but a whole stack of “sponsored” results as well.
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Where not long ago we used to find the very best results for Google searches, we can now find instead potentially plagiarized and often inaccurate paragraph summaries of answers to our queries
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Machine learning may help make our electricity grid as much as 40 percent more efficient at delivering power as it is today, when many of its routing decisions are made by individual humans on the basis of experience and intuition
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This month, KoBold Metals announced the largest discovery of new copper deposits in a decade — a green-energy gold mine, so to speak, delivered with the help of its own proprietary A.I., which integrated information about subatomic particles detected underground with century-old mining reports and radar imagery to make predictions about where minerals critical for the green transition might be found.
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.I. is designing new proteins, rapidly accelerating drug discovery and speeding up clinical trials testing new medicines and therapies.
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perhaps that a more optimistic perspective can be drawn by analogy to what economists call the “environmental Kuznets curve,” which suggests that, as nations develop, they tend to first pollute a lot more and then, over time, as they grow richer, they ultimately pollute less.
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Even in describing regular old pollution, this framework has its shortcomings, especially because it treats as automatic eventual progress that has always required tooth-and-nail fights against some very stubborn bad actors
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A.I. is generating an awful lot of genuine pollution, too — both Google and Microsoft, which each pledged in 2019 to reach zero emissions by 2030, have instead expanded their carbon footprints by nearly 50 percent in the interim.
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Senate Votes to Extend Electronic Surveillance Authority - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ance-authority-under-fisa.html
liberty surveillance government intelligence rights
shared by Javier E on 29 Dec 12
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Congress gave final approval on Friday to a bill extending the government’s power to intercept electronic communications of spy and terrorism suspects, after the Senate voted down proposals from several Democrats and Republicans to increase protections of civil liberties and privacy.
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clearing it for approval by President Obama, who strongly supports it. Intelligence agencies said the bill was their highest legislative priority.
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Congressional critics of the bill said that they suspected that intelligence agencies were picking up the communications of many Americans, but that they could not be sure because the agencies would not provide even rough estimates of how many people inside the United States had had communications collected under authority of the surveillance law, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
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The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was adopted in 1978 and amended in 2008, with the addition of new surveillance authority and procedures, which are continued by the bill approved on Friday. The 2008 law was passed after the disclosure that President George W. Bush had authorized eavesdropping inside the United States, to search for evidence of terrorist activity, without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.
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By a vote of 52 to 43, the Senate on Friday rejected a proposal by Mr. Wyden to require the national intelligence director to tell Congress if the government had collected any domestic e-mail or telephone conversations under the surveillance law. The Senate also rejected, 54 to 37, an amendment that would have required disclosure of information about significant decisions by a special federal court that reviews applications for electronic surveillance in foreign intelligence cases.
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The No. 2 Senate Democrat, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, said the surveillance law “does not have adequate checks and balances to protect the constitutional rights of innocent American citizens.” “It is supposed to focus on foreign intelligence,” Mr. Durbin said, “but the reality is that this legislation permits targeting an innocent American in the United States as long as an additional purpose of the surveillance is targeting a person outside the United States.”
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Mr. Merkley said the administration should provide at least unclassified summaries of major decisions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “An open and democratic society such as ours should not be governed by secret laws,” Mr. Merkley said, “and judicial interpretations are as much a part of the law as the words that make up our statute.”
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Mr. Wyden said these writs reminded him of the “general warrants that so upset the colonists” more than 200 years ago. “The founding fathers could never have envisioned tweeting and Twitter and the Internet,” Mr. Wyden said. “Advances in technology gave government officials the power to invade individual privacy in a host of new ways.”
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The G.O.P.'s Digital Makeover - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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republicans science voters trends demographics
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Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the county has the highest concentration in the United States of computer engineers, designers, software developers and digital researchers – the skills essential for the tech wars. In 2012, Santa Clara County voted for Obama over Romney by a 70-27 margin, nearly 3 to 1.
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The number two in high tech employment is Boulder County, in Colorado. How did it vote? The map shows a sea of blue:
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Obama’s percentage of the vote in Boulder County, 70.28, was almost identical to what he won in Santa Clara County.
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the scientific community. Again, this is not a hotbed of Republican and conservative activism. Just the opposite.
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A July 2009 Pew Research Center survey found that the partisan leaning of scientists was 55 percent Democratic, 32 percent independent and 6 percent Republican, compared to 35 Democratic, 34 independent and 23 Republican among the general public. Ideologically, 52 percent of scientists polled by Pew described themselves as liberal, 35 percent as moderate and 9 percent as conservative, compared to 20 liberal, 38 moderate and 37 conservative among all voters.
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Scientific Revolution Video - Enlightenment - HISTORY.com - 0 views
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The introduction of the scientific method transformed society by using science and reason rather than political or religious dogma to explain natural phenomena.
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The Space Race - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com - 0 views
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The space race was a vital time for our country because of the developments that came from investing into space travel. The space race is what sparked the increase of visits to our orbit and beyond. One thing that some people may not know that for a long time we as americans were behind in the space race. Russia was beating us in achievements in space. I found this intriguing that our world could develop so quickly from entering space to going to the moon. It makes you wonder what we can do in the future.
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Crusades - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com - 0 views
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Contents The Crusades: Background The First Crusade (1096-99) The Crusader States and the Second Crusade (1147-49) The Third Crusade (1189-92) From the Fourth to the Sixth Crusade (1198-1229) End of the Crusades Print Cite Article Details: Crusades Author History.com Staff Website Name History.com Year Published 2010 Title Crusades URL http://www.history.com/topics/crusades Access Date October 29, 2016 Publisher A+E Networks Introduction The first of the Crusades began in 1095, when armies of Christians from Western Europe responded to Pope Urban II’s plea to go to war against Muslim forces in the Holy Land.
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Exclude Hungary from EU, says Luxembourg's Asselborn - BBC News - 0 views
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Exclude Hungary from EU, says Luxembourg's Asselborn
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Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn has called for Hungary to be suspended or even expelled from the European Union because of its "massive violation" of EU fundamental values.
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"Hungary is not far away from issuing orders to open fire on refugees," he suggested.
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"becoming impatient, it is not my personal approach to show a member state the door".
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"could not be taken seriously".
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The EU could not tolerate "such inappropriate behaviour", he said, and any state that violated such basic values "should be excluded temporarily, or if necessary for ever, from the EU''. It was "the only possibility to protect the cohesion and values of the European Union,'' he said.
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The head of Hungarian diplomacy described his Luxembourg counterpart as a "classic nihilist" who worked tirelessly to destroy Europe's security and culture. By way of contrast, Hungary was defending not only its own territory, but that of the EU as well, the foreign minister insisted.
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"Only Hungarians have the right to decide who they wish to live with."
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Syria conflict: UN suspends all aid after convoy hit - BBC News - 0 views
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Syria conflict: UN suspends all aid after convoy hit
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The UN has suspended all aid convoys in Syria after a devastating attack on its lorries near Aleppo on Monday.
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Russia and Syria have both insisted that their forces were not involved.
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But UN chief Ban Ki-moon launched a stinging attack on the Syrian government, saying it had killed the most civilians in the civil war.
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UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura also said there was still hope but said delegates from the Syria Support Group, which includes Russia, had agreed it was in danger.
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"Everything shown in the video is the direct result of a fire which mysteriously began at the same time as a large scale rebel attack on Aleppo," he said.
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A media activist who witnessed the attack told the BBC Arabic service that Russian reconnaissance planes had been spotted, apparently filming the passage of the convoy.
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Just a day ago, aid workers in Geneva were "almost celebrating" one said, because all the necessary permits had been received, all the warring parties had been notified, and a convoy was finally going to Aleppo province.
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The 31 lorries were carrying supplies for 78,000 people in Urum al-Kubra. But this morning, the optimistic mood had changed.
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He called the attack on the aid convoy "sickening, savage and apparently deliberate" and called for those responsible to be held to account.
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Unsubstantiated Report Has Compromising Information on Trump, Intelligence Chiefs Say - 0 views
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WASHINGTON - The chiefs of America's intelligence agencies last week presented President Obama and President-elect Donald J. Trump with a summary of unsubstantiated reports that Russia had collected compromising and salacious personal information about Mr. Trump, two officials with knowledge of the briefing said.