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Javier E

Triumph of the Unthinking - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...triumph-of-the-unthinking.html

ideology economics politics analogy financial crisis great recession

shared by Javier E on 09 May 15 - No Cached
  • “Words,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”
  • It’s true that in practice Mr. Obama pushed through a stimulus that, while too small and short-lived, helped diminish the depth and duration of the slump. But when Republicans began talking nonsense, declaring that the government should match the belt-tightening of ordinary families — a recipe for full-on depression — Mr. Obama didn’t challenge their position. Instead, within a few months the very same nonsense became a standard line in his speeches, even though his economists knew better, and so did he.
  • Like Mr. Obama and company, Labour’s leaders probably know better, but have decided that it’s too hard to overcome the easy appeal of bad economics, especially when most of the British news media report this bad economics as truth.
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  • What nonsense am I talking about? Simon Wren-Lewis of the University of Oxford, who has been a tireless but lonely crusader for economic sense, calls it “mediamacro.” It’s a story about Britain that runs like this: First, the Labour government that ruled Britain until 2010 was wildly irresponsible, spending far beyond its means. Second, this fiscal profligacy caused the economic crisis of 2008-2009. Third, this in turn left the coalition that took power in 2010 with no choice except to impose austerity policies despite the depressed state of the economy. Finally, Britain’s return to economic growth in 2013 vindicated austerity and proved its critics wrong.
  • every piece of this story is demonstrably, ludicrously wrong
  • Yet this nonsense narrative completely dominates news reporting, where it is treated as a fact rather than a hypothesis. And Labour hasn’t tried to push back, probably because they considered this a political fight they couldn’t win. But why?
  • Mr. Wren-Lewis suggests that it has a lot to do with the power of misleading analogies between governments and households, and also with the malign influence of economists working for the financial industry, who in Britain as in America constantly peddle scare stories about deficits and pay no price for being consistently wrong. If U.S. experience is any guide, my guess is that Britain also suffers from the desire of public figures to sound serious, a pose which they associate with stern talk about the need to make hard choices (at other people’s expense, of course.)
  • The fact is that Britain and America didn’t need to make hard choices in the aftermath of crisis. What they needed, instead, was hard thinking — a willingness to understand that this was a special environment, that the usual rules don’t apply in a persistently depressed economy, one in which government borrowing doesn’t compete with private investment and costs next to nothing.
Javier E

Thinking About the Unthinkable in Ukraine: What Happens If Putin Goes Nuclear? - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...king-about-unthinkable-ukraine

ukraine nuclear war options response strategy crisis

shared by Javier E on 04 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Planning for the potential that Russia would use nuclear weapons is imperative; the danger would be greatest if the war were to turn decisively in Ukraine’s favor.
  • There are three general options within which U.S. policymakers would find a variation to respond to a Russian nuclear attack against Ukraine
  • The United States could opt to rhetorically decry a nuclear detonation but do nothing militarily. It could unleash nuclear weapons of its own. Or it could refrain from a nuclear counterattack but enter the war directly with large-scale conventional airstrikes and the mobilization of ground forces.
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  • A conventional war response is the least bad of the three because it avoids the higher risks of either the weaker or the stronger options.
  • Today, with the balance of forces reversed since the Cold War, the current Russian doctrine of “escalate to deescalate” mimics NATO’s Cold War “flexible response” concept.
  • NATO promoted the policy of flexible response rhetorically, but the idea was always shaky strategically. The actual contingency plans it generated never commanded consensus simply because initiating the use of nuclear weapons risked tit-for-tat exchanges that could culminate in an apocalyptic unlimited war.
  • the group could not reach agreement on specific follow-on options beyond an initial symbolic “demonstration shot” for psychological effect, for fear that Moscow could always match them or up the ante.
  • NATO policymakers should not bank on Moscow’s restraint. Putin has more at stake in the war than Ukraine’s nuclear-armed supporters outside the country do, and he could bet that in a pinch, Washington would be less willing to play Russian roulette than he is
  • As NATO confronts the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons, the first question it needs to answer is whether that eventuality should constitute a real redline for the West
  • As dishonorable as submission sounds to hawks in advance, if the time actually comes, it will have the strong appeal to Americans, because it would avoid the ultimate risk of national suicide.
  • That immediate appeal has to be balanced by the longer-term risks that would balloon from setting the epochal precedent that initiating a nuclear attack pays off
  • This dilemma underlines the obvious imperative of maximizing Moscow’s disincentives to go nuclear in the first place.
  • if it wants to deter Putin from the nuclear gambit in the first place—governments need to indicate as credibly as possible that Russian nuclear use would provoke NATO, not cow it.
  • If NATO decides it would strike back on Ukraine’s behalf, then more questions arise: whether to also fire nuclear weapons and, if so, how. The most prevalent notion is an eye-for-an-eye nuclear counterattack destroying Russian targets comparable to the ones the original Russian attack had hit.
  • it invites slow-motion exchanges in which neither side gives up and both ultimately end up devastated.
  • both the tit-for-tat and the disproportionate retaliatory options pose dauntingly high risks.
  • A less dangerous option would be to respond to a nuclear attack by launching an air campaign with conventional munitions alone against Russian military targets and mobilizing ground forces for potential deployment into the battle in Ukraine. This would be coupled with two strong public declarations. First, to dampen views of this low-level option as weak, NATO policymakers would emphasize that modern precision technology makes tactical nuclear weapons unnecessary for effectively striking targets that used to be considered vulnerable only to undiscriminating weapons of mass destruction
  • That would frame Russia’s resort to nuclear strikes as further evidence not only of its barbarism but of its military backwardness.
  • The second important message to emphasize would be that any subsequent Russian nuclear use would trigger American nuclear retaliation.
  • Such a strategy would appear weaker than retaliation in kind and would worsen the Russians’ desperation about losing rather than relieve it, thus leaving their original motive for escalation in place along with the possibility that they would double down and use even more nuclear weapons.
  • The main virtue of the conventional option is simply that it would not be as risky as either the weaker do-nothing or the stronger nuclear options.
  • If the challenge that is now only hypothetical actually arrives, entering a nuclearized war could easily strike Americans as an experiment they do not want to run. For that reason, there is a very real possibility that policymakers would wind up with the weakest option: rant about the unthinkable barbarity of the Russian action and implement whatever unused economic sanctions are still available but do nothing militarily.
  • So far, Moscow has been buoyed by the refusal of China, India, and other countries to fully join the economic sanctions campaign imposed by the West. These fence sitters, however, have a stake in maintaining the nuclear taboo. They might be persuaded to declare that their continued economic collaboration with Russia is contingent on it refraining from the use of nuclear weapons.
Javier E

How the Politically Unthinkable Can Become Mainstream - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...overton-window-democrats.html

Overton window political viable Mainstream unthinkable ideas

shared by Javier E on 07 Aug 24 - No Cached
  • You’ve probably noticed that policies once dismissed out of hand — from “Medicare for all” to a 70 percent top tax rate; from sweeping action on climate change to abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement — are being discussed in mainstream circles now. The Overton window is a useful way to understand what’s happening.
  • The key is that shifts begin with the public. Mr. Overton argued that the role of organizations like his own was not to lobby politicians to support policies outside the window, but to convince voters that policies outside the window should be in it. If they are successful, an idea derided as unthinkable can become so inevitable that it’s hard to believe it was ever otherwise.
  • “Public officials cannot enact any policy they please like they’re ordering dessert from a menu,” Mr. Lehman said in an interview. “They have to choose from among policies that are politically acceptable at the time. And we believe the Overton window defines that range of ideas.”
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  • the window is a description, not a tactic: Shifting it doesn’t mean proposing extreme ideas to make somewhat less extreme ideas seem reasonable.
  • “It just explains how ideas come in and out of fashion, the same way that gravity explains why something falls to the earth,”
  • Joseph P. Overton introduced the concept in the 1990s as an executive at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy,
  • “We have come a very, very long way in the American people now demanding legislation and concepts that just a few years ago were thought to be very radical,” Mr. Sanders said in a recent interview.
  • That the Overton window is shifting doesn’t necessarily mean policies like Medicare for all will be enacted, and it doesn’t say anything about whether they are good or bad. But it does say something meaningful about the political climate.
  • Part of the story is polarization: Democrats moving left and Republicans right, to an extent “that we haven’t seen previously in a modern political period,”
  • As support for more ambitious policies has increased among Democrats, there has also been “a wave of young party leaders who are less encumbered by a long voting history tying them to more moderate and less progressive policy stances,” Dr. Atkinson said. “And they’re being supported by a base that is ready to hear these messages.”
oliviaodon

We've Been Talking About World War III Since Before Pearl Harbor - History in the Headl... - 0 views

www.history.com/...-iii-since-before-pearl-harbor

war

shared by oliviaodon on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Ever since people began to speculate about “World War III,” its very name has implied its own inevitability. We talk about it not only as something that might happen, but something that will. And it’s been on our minds for a very long time.
  • The phrase seems to have emerged during the early 1940s, not long after people began to think of the “Great War” of 1914 as World War I—a precursor to World War II. Time magazine mused about a third war as early as November 1941, one month before Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into WWII. More consequentially, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill started planning for a World War III while he was still fighting the second war. And he kept on worrying about it, too. “After he’s out office, during the summer of 1945 through 1946, he continually believes that the Soviet Union are going to start another war,” says Jonathan Walker, a military history writer and author of Operation Unthinkable: The Third World War.
  • The introduction of the atomic bomb in the 1940s and the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s gave the phrase “World War III” a new, specific meaning: nuclear annihilation. And as the U.S. and the Soviet union became locked in a Cold War, it seemed that nuclear war could break out at any moment. Writers had already been stoking people’s fears about nuclear energy long before the U.S. harnessed it into bombs, says Spencer R. Weart, a science historian and author of The Rise of Nuclear Fear. When scientists first discovered radioactivity and nuclear energy at the turn of the century, it evoked both awe and terror. One of them, Frederick Soddy, thought “it might even be possible to set off an explosion that would destroy the entire world,” Weart says.
clairemann

Here's Why Fears of Post-Election Chaos Are Overblown | Time - 0 views

time.com/...2020-election-fears

gop US politics election trump

shared by clairemann on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In anxious tones, they ask about all of the election-related lawsuits, ballot deadlines, Electoral College technicalities and state-level hijinks. “People are so nervous, because they think this guy will do anything to stay in power,” he says.
  • Just 22% of Americans believe the election will be “free and fair,” according to a September Yahoo News/YouGov poll, compared with 46% who say it won’t be.
  • The President has sown doubt with groundless talk of a “rigged” election and repeated refusals to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed voting procedures, while the charged political climate has focused attention on the mechanics of an electoral system that’s shaky, underfunded and under intense strain. It would be naive to predict that nothing will go wrong.
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  • There are worst-case scenarios, and the President’s conduct has made them less unthinkable than usual. But the chances of their coming to pass are remote. Benjamin Ginsberg, who represented the GOP candidate in the 2000 recount, cautions against hysteria. “The panic seems to me to be way overblown,” he says.
  • What exactly are the worst-case scenarios? They start with the absence of a clear outcome on election night. Many states will be dealing with a massive increase in mail and absentee ballots, which take longer to process than in-person votes: they have to be removed from their envelopes, flattened for tabulation and checked for signatures and other technical requirements before they can be counted.
  • Three states loom largest in this concern: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. All three are key battlegrounds that have made a rapid and politically fraught push to expand voting by mail this year.
  • Other quirks, like a “naked ballot”–a legitimate ballot that a voter has failed to enclose in the required security envelope–may cause further uncertainty; a Pennsylvania court ruled this year that such ballots would not be counted in that state, which Trump won by just 44,000 votes. It all could add up to a presidential race that’s too close to call for days or weeks.
  • Current polls do not show a particularly tight race in those states, nor nationwide. And the polls have been far more stable, with far fewer undecided voters, than they were in 2016. Faster-counting states like Florida and Arizona, which have demonstrated the ability to rapidly tabulate large volumes of mail ballots, could well decide the election, rendering any uncertainty in the Rust Belt irrelevant.
  • The election’s outcome is unclear after days or weeks, and Trump is muddying the waters–lobbing lawsuits, disputing the count, accusing his opponents of cheating and convincing large swaths of the electorate that something untoward is going on behind the scenes.
  • Even if this happens, experts stress that Trump does not have the power to circumvent the nation’s labyrinthine election procedures by tweet. Elections are administered by state and local officials in thousands of jurisdictions, most of whom are experienced professionals with records of integrity.
  • There are well-tested processes in place for dealing with irregularities, challenges and contests. A candidate can’t demand a recount, for example, unless the tally is within a certain margin, which varies by state.
  • “While people may make claims to powers and make threats about what they may or may not do, the reality is that the candidates don’t have the power to determine the outcome of the election. It’s really important that voters understand that while a lot about our system is complicated, this isn’t a free-for-all.”
  • There’s a legal process to get there. The oft-invoked Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that resolved the 2000 standoff, was decided narrowly, specific to a particular situation in a particular place, notes Joshua Geltzer, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law. “These things Trump is saying–toss all the ballots, end the counting–those are not legal arguments,” he says.
  • Some fear a scenario in which, after weeks of uncertainty, the time comes for states to name electors to the Electoral College, and Republican legislators try to appoint their own rosters, overruling their state’s voters and forcing courts or Congress to resolve the matter.
  • “It’s unthinkably undemocratic to hold a popular vote for President and then nullify it if you don’t like the result,” says Adav Noti, chief of staff at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. While the possibility can’t be entirely dismissed given Republicans’ fealty to Trump, judges would likely take a dim view of such an effort, not to mention the political storm that would ensue.
  • The past few years have convinced many Americans to expect the unlikely, haunted by failures of imagination past. But when it comes to post-election mayhem, people’s imaginations may be getting the better of them.
  • “But by amplifying it as if it’s realistic, you create a very real problem of people not having faith in the system by which we choose our leaders. And that’s really harmful.”
Javier E

America's Enduring Caste System - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...isabel-wilkerson-caste.html

caste us class inequality white privilege racial hierarchy system

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • We in this country are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even.
  • Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures in the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.
  • And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.
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  • Many people may rightly say: “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked Indigenous people, never owned slaves.” And yes
  • Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be.
  • Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton: its caste system, which is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home.
  • Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order.
  • Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.
  • Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children
  • We may mention “race,” referring to people as Black or white or Latino or Asian or Indigenous, when what lies beneath each label is centuries of history and assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.
  • What people look like, or rather, the race they have been assigned or are perceived to belong to, is the visible cue to their caste. It is the historic flashcard to the public of how they are to be treated, where they are expected to live
  • in recent decades, we have learned from the human genome that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,” said J. Craig Venter, the genomics expert who ran Celera Genomics when the initial sequencing was completed in 2000. “We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.
  • Which means that an entire racial caste system, the catalyst of hatreds and civil war, was built on what the anthropologist Ashley Montagu called “an arbitrary and superficial selection of traits,” derived from a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of genes that make up a human being
  • “The idea of race,” Montagu wrote, “was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior social caste.”
  • Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.
  • Caste is rigid and deep; race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States
  • While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception — whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste.
  • Thus we are all born into a silent war game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing. The side to which we are assigned in the American system of categorizing people is proclaimed by the team uniform that each caste wears, signaling our presumed worth and potential.
  • he said to himself, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all his life.
  • One afternoon, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city then known as Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high school students whose families had been untouchables. The principal made the introduction.“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”
  • Social scientists often define racism as the combination of racial bias and systemic power, seeing racism, like sexism, as primarily the action of people or systems with personal or group power over another person or group with less power
  • over time, racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not. It has come to mean overt and declared hatred of a person or group because of the race ascribed to them, a perspective few would ever own up to
  • Who is racist in a society where someone can refuse to rent to people of color, arrest brown immigrants en masse or display a Confederate flag but not be “certified” as a racist unless he or she confesses to it or is caught using derogatory signage or slurs?
  • With no universally agreed-upon definition, we might see racism as a continuum rather than an absolute. We might release ourselves of the purity test of whether someone is or is not racist and exchange that mind-set for one that sees people as existing on a scale based on the toxins they have absorbed from the polluted and inescapable air of social instruction we receive from childhood.
  • Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.
  • Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.
  • Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism
  • Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two
  • Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.
  • Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage or privilege or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you
  • What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place.
  • For this reason, many people — including those we might see as good and kind people — could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense
  • Actual racists, actual haters, would by definition be casteist, as their hatred demands that those they perceive as beneath them know and keep their place in the hierarchy.
  • Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an X-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenges is flawed without it.
  • Race and caste are not the cause of and do not account for every poor outcome or unpleasant encounter. But caste becomes a factor, to whatever infinitesimal degree, in interactions and decisions across gender, ethnicity, race, immigrant status, sexual orientation, age or religion that have consequences in our everyday lives
  • The younger country, the United States, would become the most powerful democracy on Earth. The older country, India, would become the largest.
  • as if operating from the same instruction manual translated to fit their distinctive cultures, both countries adopted similar methods of maintaining rigid lines of demarcation and protocols.
  • The American system was founded as a primarily two-tiered hierarchy with its contours defined by the uppermost group, those identified as white, and by the subordinated group, those identified as Black, with immigrants from outside Europe forming blurred middle castes that sought to adjust themselves within a bipolar structure, and Native Americans largely exiled outside it.
  • The Indian caste system, by contrast, is an elaborate fretwork of thousands of subcastes, or jatis, correlated to region and village, which fall under the four main varnas — the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, the Vaishya, the Shudra and the excluded fifth, the Dalits. It is further complicated by non-Hindus — including Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Christians — who are outside the original caste system but have incorporated themselves into the workings of the country, at times in the face of resistance and attack, and may or may not have informal rankings among themselves and in relation to the varnas.
  • African-Americans, throughout most of their time in this land, were relegated to the dirtiest, most demeaning and least desirable jobs by definition. After enslavement and well into the 20th century, they were primarily restricted to the role of sharecroppers and servants — domestics, lawn boys, chauffeurs and janitors. The most that those who managed to get an education could hope for was to teach, minister to, attend to the health needs of or bury other subordinate-caste people.
  • the caste lines in America may have at one time appeared even starker than those in India. In 1890, “85 percent of Black men and 96 percent of Black women were employed in just two occupational categories,” wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg, “agriculture and domestic or personal service.”
  • So, too, with groups trained to believe in their inherent sovereignty. “The essence of this overestimation of one’s own position and the hate for all who differ from it is narcissism,” wrote Erich Fromm, a leading psychoanalyst and social theorist of the 20th century. “He is nothing,” Fromm wrote, “but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything.”
  • “Narcissus could not conceive that he was in love with his own reflection,” wrote the Harvard clinical psychologist Elsa Ronningstam in her 2005 book, “Identifying and Understanding the Narcissistic Personality.” “He was caught in an illusion.”
  • The political theorist Takamichi Sakurai, in his 2018 examination of Western and Eastern perspectives on the topic, and channeling Fromm, wrote bluntly: “Group narcissism leads people to fascism.” He went on, “An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives to rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism and so on.”
  • “The survival of a group,” Fromm wrote, “depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great as or greater than that of their own lives.”Thus, when under threat, they are willing to sacrifice themselves and their ideals for the survival of the group from which they draw their self-esteem.
Javier E

Ukraine War Will Accelerate the Decline of Globalization - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...e-the-decline-of-globalization

globalization trade costs deglobalization immigration china sovereignty

shared by Javier E on 14 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • At the dawn of the 20th century, Norman Angell famously (or infamously) predicted that the era of global commercial integration had made great power conflict so costly and destructive as to be unthinkable.
  • A few years later, the outbreak of World War I proved him right about the cost and destruction, but wrong about being unthinkable. The Great War ended the first era of globalization, and it took generations to rebuild the level of worldwide integration that pertained before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.
  • Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a much smaller conflict than World War I, and the trade disruptions associated with the U.S./European quasi-embargo on Russia are smaller than the British blockade of the Central Powers.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • the clash is nonetheless a giant step away from globalization — and, unlike World War I, it comes at a time when the world has already been moving away from economic integration: Trade’s share of global GDP peaked in 2008, and has been falling for the past decade.
  • the war in Ukraine doesn’t necessarily mark sharp a break in history. But it underlines and will perhaps cement the decline of globalization.
  • Similarly, the U.S. and Europe got vaccinated not only before low-income countries, but also before other rich countries — because they had the production capabilities.
  • Eventually, the logic of geopolitical conflict entered the equation. President Xi Jinping’s “Made in China 2025” initiative, for example, isn’t about creating jobs, it’s about securing economic space for China to operate with political autonomy.
  • even actors more benign than Putin can see the value of autonomy.
  • When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, national sovereignty took precedence over free trade almost everywhere.
  • That decline started with a populist backlash to the Great Recession and sluggish employment growth that made the politics of saving jobs more appealing than the politics of efficiency.
  • Meanwhile, in the U.S., one issue on which President Joe Biden hasn’t broken with his predecessor is trade with China.
  • Foreign nations see this, too. The sanctions regime against Russia is both extremely tough and surprisingly non-global.
  • There are good reasons for all this deglobalization. But it’s important to note that it will come at a cost.
  • Consumers around the world reaped large benefits from a world of specialization, comparative advantage, just-in-time shipping and elaborate supply chains.
  • But the populist economics that powered the current wave a decade ago are basically wrong. Mass unemployment after the financial crisis was a tragic mistake of demand-side policy, not a sin of globalization. America can absolutely drill more oil and gas, build more cars and microchips, and make more steel. But there is not a vast army of unemployed people to do that work.
  • If the U.S. reshores a large segment of tradeable goods, then it will have fewer people left to build houses, clean teeth, cut hair, cook food and care for children and the elderly.
  • To meet real security imperatives, these may be prices worth paying. Make no mistake, however: There is a price.
  • as more countries step away from globalization, the price will get steeper. A poorer world offers fewer customers for everyone’s exports, and a world less economically connected is one in which disruptions and conflict are more thinkable.
  • Are these costs unavoidable? Probably.
  • But they can be mitigated
  • One alternative to importing foreign-made goods, for example, is to import foreign-born workers. In an inflationary, supply-constrained, deglobalizing world, immigrants — including the so-called “unskilled” ones who clean houses, wash dishes and pick crops — are a valuable asset.
  • It’s also crucial to think pragmatically about what the actual issue any given policy is trying to address
  • there is a world of difference between a supply chain that depends on China and one that leads to Mexico, Central America or the Caribbean.
Javier E

How China Could Turn Crisis to Catastrophe - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...rophe-taiwan-invasion-689c29bd

china crisis catastrophe asia financial effects taiwan

shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • the most important international development on President Biden’s watch has been the erosion of America’s deterrence. The war in Ukraine and the escalating chaos and bloodshed across the Middle East demonstrate the human and economic costs when American power and policy no longer hold revisionist powers in check.
  • if the erosion of America’s deterrent power leads China and North Korea to launch wars in the Far East, it would be a greater catastrophe by orders of magnitude
  • a war over Taiwan would be far more serious for the world economy than the war in Ukraine or even a wider regional war in the Middle Eas
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  • Second, our margin of safety is shrinking: The power of American deterrence in the Far East is declining. While there are some favorable long-term trends, for the next few years at least, China and North Korea are likely to see more reasons to test the will and the power of the U.S. and its allies.
  • If China decides on forcible unification with Taiwan, it has two principal options. It can invade the island directly, or it can try to blockade it. Taiwan, which imports 97% of its energy supply and also depends on food imports, is vulnerable to such a blockade.
  • Whether China invades or blockades, the regional and global consequences would be the gravest shock to the global economy since World War II.
  • Regionally, the effect of closing the South China Sea and the waters around Taiwan to international trade would be calamitous. South Korea and Japan are both heavily dependent on imported fuel and food. Both economies depend on the ability of their great manufacturing companies to import raw materials and export finished goods. A suspension of maritime trade would effectively put both economies on life support, while making it difficult for tens of millions of people to heat their homes, run their cars or feed their children.
  • North Korea, seeing an opening in the global and regional chaos, would take the opportunity to attack at a time when U.S. forces would have enormous difficulty reinforcing and resupplying the South.
  • China would also be hit. Ships wouldn’t travel through war zones to Shanghai, Qingdao or Tianjin. The U.S. would likely, in addition to sanctions, enforce a blockade against ships seeking to supply China with goods deemed important for war.
  • For the rest of the world this would mean a massive supply-chain headache. From Taiwan’s semiconductors, vital for many industries and consumer products, to all the things that China, Japan and South Korea produce, the products of the Far East would vanish from inventories and store shelves.
  • Globally, makers of the raw materials for those countries, as well as growers of such agricultural commodities as soybeans and grain, would lose access to major markets.
  • the financial consequences of the war could pose insurmountable challenges for the world’s central banks. Stocks would crash. Currencies would gyrate. Debt markets would implode as sovereign borrowers like China and Japan faced wartime conditions and corporations dependent on Asian economies struggled to manage their debts.
  • Lulled into complacency by a long era of peace, most of us have yet to appreciate fully the dangers we face. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas attack on Israel should have made clear that we live in an era when the unthinkable can happen overnight. These days, we must not only learn to think about the unthinkable, in nuclear strategist Herman Kahn’s phrase. We also need to prepare for it.
Javier E

Opinion | Europe May Be Headed for Something Unthinkable - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...european-union-far-right.html

europe right-wing evolution history culture politics

shared by Javier E on 13 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • European elites are right to worry. But the focus on divisions within the bloc obscures a much more disturbing development taking place beneath the surface: a coming together of the center right and the far right, especially on questions around identity, immigration and Islam.
  • With European parliamentary elections next year, this convergence is bringing into clearer view the possibility of something like a far-right European Union. Until recently, such a thing would have seemed unthinkable. Now it’s distinctly plausible.
  • Since then, the convergence between the center right and the far right in Europe has gone further. The lesson that center-right parties drew from the rise of right-wing populism was that they needed to adopt some of its rhetoric and policies. Conversely, some far-right parties have become more moderate, albeit in a selective way. At a national level, parties from the two camps have governed together, both formally, as in Austria and Finland, and informally, as in Sweden.
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  • Yet the most striking illustration of this convergence is the harmonious relationship between the European center right and Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy, who became prime minister of Italy last year. As soon as she indicated that she would not disrupt the bloc’s economic policy and would be supportive of Ukraine, the European People’s Party was willing to work with her — and its leader, Manfred Weber, even sought to form an alliance with her. The center right, it turns out, doesn’t have a problem with the far right. It just has a problem with those who defy E.U. institutions and positions.
  • Such thinking is behind the hardening of migration policy. But it is also influencing Europe in a deeper way: The union has increasingly come to see itself as defending an imperiled European civilization, particularly in its foreign policy. During the past decade, as the bloc has seen itself as surrounded by threats, not least from Russia, there have been endless debates about “strategic autonomy,” “European sovereignty” and a “geopolitical Europe.”
  • figures like President Emmanuel Macron of France have also begun to frame international politics as a clash of civilizations, in which a strong, united Europe must defend itself.
  • Supporters of the bloc tend to see European unity as an end in itself — or to assume that a more powerful European Union, long idealized as a civilizing force in international politics, would automatically benefit the whole world
  • as the union unites around defending a threatened European civilization and rejecting nonwhite immigration, we need to think again about whether it truly is a force for good.
Javier E

Bruce Bartlett: The Debt Limit Is the Real Fiscal Cliff - NYTimes.com - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...limit-is-the-real-fiscal-cliff

fiscal crisis debt limit Republicans economics president

shared by Javier E on 25 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Washington is all abuzz over the impending tax increases and spending cuts referred to as the fiscal cliff, an absurdly inaccurate term that both Democrats and Republicans have unfortunately adopted in order to pursue their own agendas. In truth, it is a nonproblem unless every impending tax increase and spending cut takes effect permanently – something so unlikely as to be effectively impossible.
  • there is a very real fiscal problem that will occur almost simultaneously – expiration of the debt limit. Much of what passes for fiscal-cliff concern is actually anxiety about whether Republicans in Congress will force a default on the nation’s debt in pursuit of their radical agenda.
  • No less an authority than the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who basically controls the Republican Party’s fiscal policy, has said repeatedly that the debt limit is where the real fight will be over the next several weeks
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  • MR. ALLEN: O.K., O.K., wait. You’re proposing that the debt ceiling be increased month by month? MR. NORQUIST: Monthly. Monthly. Monthly if he’s good, weekly if he’s not.
  • In short, the debt limit is a hostage that Republicans are willing to kill or maim in pursuit of their agenda. They have made this clear ever since the debt ceiling debate in 2011, in which the Treasury came very close to defaulting on the debt.
  • At the risk of stating the obvious, the debt limit is nuts. It serves no useful purpose to allow members of Congress to vote for vast cuts in taxation and increases in spending and then tell the Treasury it is not permitted to sell bonds to cover the deficits Congress created. To my knowledge, no other nation has such a screwy system.
  • At some point, Treasury will lack the cash to pay the bills that are due and it will face nothing but unthinkable choices – don’t pay interest to bondholders and default on the debt, don’t pay Social Security benefits, don’t pay our soldiers in the field and so on.
  • In a new book, “Is U.S. Government Debt Different?,” Howell Jackson, a law professor at Harvard, walks through options for prioritizing government spending in the event that Republicans insist on committing financial suicide. They are all illegal or unconstitutional to one degree or another. They would require the Treasury to either abrogate Congress’s taxing power, spending power or borrowing power.
  • the question of what a president should do when he must act and all his options are unconstitutional. They cite Abraham Lincoln’s July 4, 1861, message to Congress in support of the idea that some laws are more unconstitutional than others and the president is empowered to violate the one that is least unconstitutional when he has no other option. Said Lincoln, “To state the question more directly, are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?”
  • In the present case, of course, the one law would be the debt limit, which Professors Buchanan and Dorf say is less binding on the president than unilaterally cutting spending or raising taxes without congressional approval. Hence, if Republicans are truly mad and absolutely refuse to raise the debt limit, thereby risking default or the nonpayment of essential government bills, Professors Buchanan and Dorf believe the president would have the authority to sell bonds over and above the limit.
  • There are a host of practical problems any time the president is forced into uncharted constitutional territory, as Lincoln so often was. But when faced with an extortion demand from a political party that no longer feels bound by the historical norms of conduct, the president must be willing to do what has to be done.
Javier E

Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire | Marc Parry | News | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...empire-caroline-elkins-mau-mau

British Empire empire history

shared by Javier E on 20 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Elkins emerged with a book that turned her initial thesis on its head. The British had sought to quell the Mau Mau uprising by instituting a policy of mass detention. This system – “Britain’s gulag”, as Elkins called it – had affected far more people than previously understood. She calculated that the camps had held not 80,000 detainees, as official figures stated, but between 160,000 and 320,000. She also came to understand that colonial authorities had herded Kikuyu women and children into some 800 enclosed villages dispersed across the countryside. These heavily patrolled villages – cordoned off by barbed wire, spiked trenches and watchtowers – amounted to another form of detention. In camps, villages and other outposts, the Kikuyu suffered forced labour, disease, starvation, torture, rape and murder.
  • “I’ve come to believe that during the Mau Mau war British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that betrayed a perverse colonial logic,” Elkins wrote in Britain’s Gulag. “Only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people and physically and psychologically atomising its men, women, and children could colonial authority be restored and the civilising mission reinstated.” After nearly a decade of oral and archival research, she had uncovered “a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead”.
  • lkins knew her findings would be explosive. But the ferocity of the response went beyond what she could have imagined. Felicitous timing helped. Britain’s Gulag hit bookstores after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had touched off debate about imperialism. It was a moment when another historian, Niall Ferguson, had won acclaim for his sympathetic writing on British colonialism. Hawkish intellectuals pressed America to embrace an imperial role. Then came Bagram. Abu Ghraib. Guantánamo. These controversies primed readers for stories about the underside of empire.
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  • Enter Elkins. Young, articulate and photogenic, she was fired up with outrage over her findings. Her book cut against an abiding belief that the British had managed and retreated from their empire with more dignity and humanity than other former colonial powers, such as the French or the Belgians.
  • Some academics shared her enthusiasm. By conveying the perspective of the Mau Mau themselves, Britain’s Gulag marked a “historical breakthrough”, says Wm Roger Louis, a historian of the British empire at the University of Texas at Austin. Richard Drayton of King’s College London, another imperial historian, judged it an “extraordinary” book whose implications went beyond Kenya. It set the stage for a rethinking of British imperial violence, he says, demanding that scholars reckon with colonial brutality in territories such as Cyprus, Malaya, and Aden (now part of Yemen).
  • But many other scholars slammed the book. No review was more devastating than the one that Bethwell A Ogot, a senior Kenyan historian, published in the Journal of African History. Ogot dismissed Elkins as an uncritical imbiber of Mau Mau propaganda. In compiling “a kind of case for the prosecution”, he argued, she had glossed over the litany of Mau Mau atrocities: “decapitation and general mutilation of civilians, torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells, burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the stomachs of pregnant women”. Ogot also suggested that Elkins might have made up quotes and fallen for the bogus stories of financially motivated interviewees. Pascal James Imperato picked up the same theme in African Studies Review. Elkins’s work, he wrote, depended heavily on the “largely uncorroborated 50-year-old memories of a few elderly men and women interested in financial reparations”.
  • In this very long book, she really doesn’t bring out any more evidence than that for talking about the possibility of hundreds of thousands killed, and talking in terms almost of genocide as a policy,” says Philip Murphy, a University of London historian who directs the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and co-edits the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. This marred what was otherwise an “incredibly valuable” study, he says. “If you make a really radical claim about history, you really need to back it up solidly.
  • Critics didn’t just find the substance overstated. They also rolled their eyes at the narrative Elkins told about her work. Particularly irksome, to some Africanists, was her claim to have discovered an unknown story
  • During the Mau Mau war, journalists, missionaries and colonial whistleblowers had exposed abuses. The broad strokes of British misbehaviour were known by the late 60s, Berman argued. Memoirs and studies had added to the picture. Britain’s Gulag had broken important new ground, providing the most comprehensive chronicle yet of the detention camps and prison villages.
  • among Kenyanists, Berman wrote, the reaction had generally been no more than: “It was as bad as or worse than I had imagined from more fragmentary accounts.”
  • If, at that late date,” he wrote, “she still believed in the official British line about its so-called civilising mission in the empire, then she was perhaps the only scholar or graduate student in the English-speaking world who did.”
  • she believes there was more going on than the usual academic disagreement. Kenyan history, she says, was “an old boys’ club”.
  • “Who is controlling the production of the history of Kenya? That was white men from Oxbridge, not a young American girl from Harvard,” she says.
  • for years clues had existed that Britain had also expatriated colonial records that were considered too sensitive to be left in the hands of successor governments. Kenyan officials had sniffed this trail soon after the country gained its independence. In 1967, they wrote to Britain’s Foreign Office asking for the return of the “stolen papers”. The response? Blatant dishonesty, writes David M Anderson, a University of Warwick historian and author of Histories of the Hanged, a highly regarded book about the Mau Mau war.
  • Internally, British officials acknowledged that more than 1,500 files, encompassing over 100 linear feet of storage, had been flown from Kenya to London in 1963, according to documents reviewed by Anderson. Yet they conveyed none of this in their official reply to the Kenyans
  • The turning point came in 2010, when Anderson, now serving as an expert witness in the Mau Mau case, submitted a statement to the court that referred directly to the 1,500 files spirited out of Kenya. Under legal pressure, the government finally acknowledged that the records had been stashed at a high-security storage facility that the Foreign Office shared with the intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6. It also revealed a bigger secret. This same repository, Hanslope Park, held files removed from a total of 37 former colonies.
  • A careful combing-through of these documents might normally have taken three years. Elkins had about nine months. Working with five students at Harvard, she found thousands of records relevant to the case: more evidence about the nature and extent of detainee abuse, more details of what officials knew about it, new material about the brutal “dilution technique” used to break hardcore detainees
  • The British government, defeated repeatedly in court, moved to settle the Mau Mau case. On 6 June 2013, the foreign secretary, William Hague, read a statement in parliament announcing an unprecedented agreement to compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured and abused during the insurrection. Each would receive about £3,800. “The British government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration,” Hague said. Britain “sincerely regrets that these abuses took place.” The settlement, in Anderson’s view, marked a “profound” rewriting of history. It was the first time Britain had admitted carrying out torture anywhere in its former empire.
  • some scholars find aspects of Elkins’s vindication story unconvincing. Philip Murphy, who specialises in the history of British decolonisation, attended some of the Mau Mau hearings. He thinks Elkins and other historians did “hugely important” work on the case. Still, he does not believe that the Hanslope files justify the notion that hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Kenya, or that those deaths were systematic. “Probably most of the historical criticisms of the book still stand,” he says. “I don’t think the trial really changes that.
  • second debate triggered by the Mau Mau case concerns not just Elkins but the future of British imperial history. At its heart is a series of documents that now sits in the National Archives as a result of Britain’s decision to make public the Hanslope files. They describe, in extensive detail, how the government went about retaining and destroying colonial records in the waning days of empire. Elkins considers them to be the most important new material to emerge from the Hanslope disclosure.
  • One record, a 1961 dispatch from the British colonial secretary to authorities in Kenya and elsewhere, states that no documents should be handed over to a successor regime that might, among other things, “embarrass” Her Majesty’s Government. Another details the system that would be used to carry out that order. All Kenyan files were to be classified either “Watch” or “Legacy”. The Legacy files could be passed on to Kenya. The Watch files would be flown back to Britain or destroyed. A certificate of destruction was to be issued for every document destroyed – in duplicate. The files indicate that roughly 3.5 tons of Kenyan documents were bound for the incinerator.
  • . Broadly speaking, she thinks end-of-empire historians have largely failed to show scepticism about the archives. She thinks that the fact that those records were manipulated puts a cloud over many studies that have been based on their contents. And she thinks all of this amounts to a watershed moment in which historians must rethink their field.
  • Murphy says Elkins “has a tendency to caricature other historians of empire as simply passive and unthinking consumers in the National Archives supermarket, who don’t think about the ideological way in which the archive is constructed”. They’ve been far more sceptical than that, he says. Historians, he adds, have always dealt with the absence of documents. What’s more, history constantly changes, with new evidence and new paradigms. To say that a discovery about document destruction will change the whole field is “simply not true”, he says. “That’s not how history works.”
  • Some historians who have read the document-destruction materials come away with a picture of events that seems less Orwellian than Elkins’s. Anderson’s review of the evidence shows how the purging process evolved from colony to colony and allowed substantial latitude to local officials. Tony Badger, a University of Cambridge professor emeritus who monitored the Hanslope files’ release, writes that there was “no systematic process dictated from London”
  • Badger sees a different lesson in the Hanslope disclosure: a “profound sense of contingency”. Over the decades, archivists and Foreign Office officials puzzled over what to do with the Hanslope papers. The National Archives essentially said they should either be destroyed or returned to the countries from which they had been taken. The files could easily have been trashed on at least three occasions, he says, probably without publicity. For a variety of reasons, they weren’t. Maybe it was the squirrel-like tendency of archivists. Maybe it was luck. In retrospect, he says, what is remarkable is not that the documents were kept secret for so many years. What is remarkable is that they survived at all.
Javier E

Trump Election Shows Civics Education Has Failed - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...507293

education teaching civics history democracy authoritarian values

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • The 2016 campaign produced the unthinkable: the election of a presidential candidate whom members of his own party described as a classic authoritarian.
  • How is it possible that tens of millions of Americans supported a presidential candidate who consistently rejected basic constitutional principles that previously had been accepted across the political spectrum?
  • freedom of religion (proposing a ban on Muslim immigrants), freedom of the press (calling for opening up libel laws to go after critics), the rule of law (endorsing the murder of the families of terrorists), and the independence of the judiciary (questioning the bias of a judge based on ethnicity).
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  • What set Donald Trump apart, wrote the University of Texas historian Jeffrey Tulis to The New York Times, is that “no other previous major party presidential candidate has felt so unconstrained by … constitutional norms.”
  • A former top aide to President George W. Bush wrote that in the Republican nominee, “we have reached the culmination of the founders’ fears: Democracy is producing a genuine threat to the American form of self-government.”
  • Public schools are failing at what the nation’s founders saw as education’s most basic purpose: preparing young people to be reflective citizens who would value liberty and democracy and resist the appeals of demagogues
  • the 2016 election should spur renewed emphasis on the need for schools to instill in children an appreciation for civic values and not just a skill set for private employment.
  • the bipartisan education manta has been that education should prepare students to be “college-and-career  ready,” with no mention of becoming thoughtful democratic citizens
  • The Founders wanted voters to be educated so they could discern serious leaders of high character from con men who do not have the nation’s interests at heart. Beyond that, public education in the United States was also meant to instill a love of liberal democracy: a respect for the separation of powers, for a free press and free religious exercise, and for the rights of political minorities. Educating common people was the answer to the oligarchs who said the average citizen could not be trusted to choose leaders wisely.
  • Horace Mann, saw public education as the bedrock of the country’s democracy. He wrote: “A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.” Teachers, the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, should be regarded “as the priests of our democracy.”
  • Yet in recent years, democracy has been given short shrift in American public schooling in two important respects: the curriculum that is explicitly taught to students does not place democratic values at the center
  • and the “hidden” curriculum of what students observe on a daily basis no longer reinforces the importance of democracy. The failure of schools to model democracy for students is critical
  • With the rise of economic globalization, educators have emphasized the importance of serving the needs of the private marketplace rather than of preparing citizens for American democracy.
  • the Founders were deeply concerned with finding ways to ensure that their new democracy, which through the franchise provided ultimate sovereignty to the collective views of average citizens, not fall prey to demagogues. The problem of the demagogue, the Founders believed, was endemic to democracy, and they saw education as the safeguard of America’s system of self-governance.
  • In a telling sign, in 2013, the governing board of the National Assessment for Educational Progress dropped fourth- and 12th-grade civics and American history as a tested subject in order to save money.
  • Likewise, in recent years, promoting democratic values in the school environment itself by respecting the voices of parents and teachers alike—a sort of "implicit curriculum"—has not been a priority
  • Reformers didn’t like the influence teachers’ unions exercised in democratic elections, so they advocated for market-driven reforms that would reduce the influence of elected officials such as non-unionized charter schools, as well as for state takeovers of urban districts.
  • Civics literacy levels are dismal. In a recent survey, more than two-thirds of Americans could not name all three branches of the federal government.
  • Education Secretary John King said only a third of Americans could identify Joe Biden as the vice president or name a single Supreme Court justice. Far worse, declining proportions say that free elections are important in a democratic society.
  • When asked in the World Values Survey in 2011 whether democracy is a good or bad way to run a country, about 17 percent said bad or very bad, up from about 9 percent in the mid-1990s.
  • Among those ages 16 to 24, about a quarter said democracy was bad or very bad, an increase from about 16 percent from a decade and a half earlier. Some 26 percent of millennials said it is “unimportant” that in a democracy people should “choose their leaders in free elections.”
  • Among U.S. citizens of all ages, the proportion who said it would be “fairly good” or “very good” for the “army to rule,” has risen from one in 16 in 1995, to one in six today.
  • a June 2016 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that a majority of Americans showed authoritarian (as opposed to autonomous) leanings.
  • Moreover, fully 49 percent of Americans agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.”
  • in 2016, the United States elected as president an individual whom the Brookings Institution Scholar Robert Kagan called “the most dangerous threat to U.S. democracy since the Civil War.”
  • schools need to put democracy back into education. Rigorous courses in history, literature, and civics would cultivate knowledge of democratic practices and a belief in democratic values.
  • In addition to teaching democratic values directly, what if educators and policymakers thought more carefully about addressing what is taught to students implicitly through how they choose to run schools? Are parents and community members a part of decision-making or are they shut out by state takeovers and billionaire philanthropists call the shots?
  • a growing number of school districts (including Rochester) are also promoting democratic values through socioeconomic and racial school integration of student bodies at the school and classroom levels. Integrated learning environments underline the democratic message that in America, everyone is equal. By contrast, when American schoolchildren are educated in what are effectively apartheid schools—divided by race and class—the democratic message of equal political rights and heritage is severely undermined.
  • demagogues can more effectively inflame passions against “others”—Muslims, Mexican immigrants, or African Americans—when, growing up, white Christian schoolchildren do not personally know many members of these groups. A large body of research finds that integrated schools can reduce prejudice and racism that stems from ignorance and lack of personal contact
Javier E

Donald Trump's Christian Soldiers - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trumps-christian-soldiers.html

christianity christian demagogue religion culture

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Of all the reasons it once seemed unthinkable that Donald J. Trump might be the Republican nominee, one of the strongest was the G.O.P.’s reputation as the party of religious conservatives.
  • Trump was a different kind of figure: Not merely lukewarm or unorthodox, but a proud flouter of the entire Judeo-Christian code — a boastful adulterer and a habitual liar, a materialist and a sensualist, a greedy camel without even the slightest interest in squeezing through the needle’s eye
  • And yet: Despite his transparent irreligiosity, Trump has won easily across the South, one of the most religious portions of the country. Among both self-identified evangelicals and Catholics, he’s consistently polled as well as the evangelical Ted Cruz and the Roman Catholic Marco Rubio.
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  • This week two influential conservative Catholic scholars, Robert George and George Weigel, put out an open letter to their co-believers, urging them to reject Trump as “manifestly unfit to be president of the United States.”
  • some clarity is also needed about what it means, exactly, that Trump is winning religious voters.
  • Trump is not the first choice of most active churchgoers. Indeed, active religiosity is (relatively speaking) one of the bulwarks against Trumpism, and his coalition is strongest among the most secular Republicans
  • 38 percent still described themselves as weekly churchgoers.
  • As with the wider conservative coalition, Trump is heightening conservative religion’s internal contradictions and fracturing it along pre-existing fault lines
  • Trump is losing the most active believers, but he’s winning in what I’ve previously termed the “Christian penumbra” — the areas of American society (parts of the South very much included) where active religiosity has weakened, but a Christian-ish residue remains.
  • The inhabitants of this penumbra still identify with Christianity, but they lack the communities, habits and support structures that make the religious path (somewhat) easier to walk. As a result, this Christian-ish landscape seems to produce more social dysfunction, more professional disappointment and more personal disarray than either a thoroughgoing secularism or a fully practiced faith
  • his occasional nods to religious faith — like, say, his promise to make store clerks say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” — are well tailored for voters for whom Christian identity is still a talisman even when an active faith is all but gone.
  • among Americans who do still have an active faith, Trump has exploited the widening gap between what many conservative Christians assumed about the relationship between their country and their faith, and what the last 10 years or more of social and political change have revealed about the nation’s drift
  • Evangelicals have for decades believed that the country was more conservative than not, more Christian than not. The bipartisanship on religious liberty and the civic faith of the country was conducive to that. Now they’ve woken up to a reality in the Obama years that this was a polite fiction.
  • If this is really a post-Christian society, they seem to be thinking, then Christians need to make sure the meanest, toughest heathen on the block is on their side. So it makes sense to join an alliance of convenience with a strongman, placing themselves under his benevolent protection, because their own leaders have delivered them only to defeat.
  • the lure of the strongman is particularly powerful for those believers whose theology was somewhat Trumpian already — nationalistic, prosperity-worshiping, by turns apocalyptic and success-obsessed.
  • With the steady post-1960s weakening of traditional Christian confessions, the preachers of this kind of gospel — this distinctively American heresy, really — have assumed a new prominence in the religious landscape. Trump, with his canny instinct for where to drive the wedge, has courted exactly these figures
  • he’s wooed televangelists and prosperity preachers, and pitched himself to believers already primed to believe that a meretricious huckster with unusual hair might be a vessel of the divine will.
  • Which he is not, save perhaps in this sense: In the light of Trumpism, many hard truths about American Christianity — its divisions, its failures, its follies, its heresies — stand ruthlessly exposed.
Javier E

A Quiet Giant of Investing Weighs In on Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...h-klarman-trump-investors.html

investor hedge fund trump

shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • a private letter he wrote to his investors a little over two weeks ago about investing during the age of President Trump — and offering his thoughts on the current state of the hedge fund industry — has quietly become the most sought-after reading material on Wall Street.
  • He is Seth A. Klarman, the 59-year-old value investor who runs Baupost Group, which manages some $30 billion.
  • Mr. Klarman sets forth a countervailing view to the euphoria that has buoyed the stock market since Mr. Trump took office, describing “perilously high valuations.”
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  • “Exuberant investors have focused on the potential benefits of stimulative tax cuts, while mostly ignoring the risks from America-first protectionism and the erection of new trade barriers,”
  • “While they might be popular, the reason the U.S. long ago abandoned protectionist trade policies is because they not only don’t work, they actually leave society worse off.”
  • He worries, for example, that Mr. Trump’s stimulus efforts “could prove quite inflationary, which would likely shock investors.”
  • Much of Mr. Klarman’s anxiety seems to emanate from Mr. Trump’s leadership style. He described it this way: “The erratic tendencies and overconfidence in his own wisdom and judgment that Donald Trump has demonstrated to date are inconsistent with strong leadership and sound decision-making.”
  • “The big picture for investors is this: Trump is high volatility, and investors generally abhor volatility and shun uncertainty,” he wrote. “Not only is Trump shockingly unpredictable, he’s apparently deliberately so; he says it’s part of his plan.”
  • he warned, “If things go wrong, we could find ourselves at the beginning of a lengthy decline in dollar hegemony, a rapid rise in interest rates and inflation, and global angst.”
  • he issued a statement after Mr. Trump criticized a judge over his Mexican heritage, saying he planned to support Mrs. Clinton: “His words and actions over the last several days are so shockingly unacceptable in our diverse and democratic society that it is simply unthinkable that Donald Trump could become our president.”
  • “Despite my preference to stay out of the media,” he wrote, “I’ve taken the view that each of us can be bystanders, or we can be upstanders. I choose upstander.”
  • “This should give long-term value investors a distinct advantage,” he wrote. “The inherent irony of the efficient market theory is that the more people believe in it and correspondingly shun active management, the more inefficient the market is likely to become.
  • “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
Javier E

Jon Stewart, Religion Teacher Extraordinaire | Religion & Politics - 0 views

religionandpolitics.org/...eligion-teacher-extraordinaire

religion media

shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Stewart and his writers do two things that make them unique on popular television. First, they cover — and yes, I would say “cover,” not just satirize or mock — a wide range of religions. If you watched only The Daily Show, you would nonetheless learn, in time, about Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and a whole spectrum of smaller faiths, a category that I would argue includes atheism. And second, they pay attention to points of theology that more traditional news and talk shows skip over. Using chunks of time that would be unthinkable on a network newscast — six minutes for a segment on Mormonism! — The Daily Show teaches the finer points of belief, mining them for humor but at the same time serving a real educational function. 
  • The Daily Show approaches American religion in the spirit of tolerance, but not with the wimpy, eager-to-please hand-wringing that characterizes so much liberal dialogue in this country. Rather, religions are shown to be strange and possibly cringe-inducing: our job is to take an honest look, then tolerate them anyway. It’s a call to rigorous citizenship.
  • There is no apparent ideology, either religious or skeptical, animating Stewart’s treatment of religion. More than anything, he and his writers have the scrupulosity of objective journalists. They win laughs without deforming, or even exaggerating, the religion’s actual beliefs. This is an extraordinary feat. Most religious humor, especially on television or in the movies, depends on stereotypes, which are by definition crude and reductive. Stewart’s writers, by contrast, find humor in the specifics of each faith.
julia rhodes

An extraordinary turn against military intervention - 0 views

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US history politics crisis policy syria war 20th century liberal realism

shared by julia rhodes on 10 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • julia rhodes on 10 Sep 13
     
    An extraordinary turn against military intervention | Al Jazeera America The negative reaction in Congress and among the American people to President Obama's proposal of military intervention has been sharp U.S. receptiveness to Russia's proposal to sequester Syria's chemical weapons shows how eager Washington is to avoid a military response. It would, however, be something extraordinary - even historic. It would suggest that a substantial percentage of Americans believe that a proposed war is a bad idea. In the context of American history, this is almost unthinkable. War is woven into the fabric of American life, and Americans usually embrace it. "All the great masterful races have been fighting races," Roosevelt declared Advances in the technology of destruction and killing made it difficult to sustain belief in war's beauty or nobility. Because the U.S. possesses such overwhelming military force, it naturally seeks to use that force. This has led inexorably to the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. American leaders have always acted on the assumption that in the end, they have recourse to all the coercive power they need to achieve any geopolitical goal. They assumed, however, that whatever problems arose, the power of the United States was so overwhelming that it would be able to resolve them. This conviction now seems to be slipping away. Public opinion surveys show scant support for bombing. Never in modern history have Americans been so doubtful about the wisdom of bombing, invading or occupying another country. American reluctance to intervene in a faraway land suggests a retreat from hubris toward reality - a creeping fear that the United States, powerful as it is, may not be able to control the effects of its foreign adventures. Generations of Americans once grew up believing not only that their country was omnipotent, but that it was an essential force for good in the world. This is an e
Javier E

What Drives Success? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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success culture ethnicity insecurity superiority impulse control psychology values

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.
  • These facts don’t make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.
  • Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic or educational background.
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  • The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a small part of the picture.
  • Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.
  • Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism.
  • The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.
  • Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.
  • By 1990, United States-born Cuban children — whose parents had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing — were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.
  • Meanwhile, some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example — are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.
  • MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time.
  • while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.
  • The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.
  • the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success
  • The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.
  • research shows that some groups are instilling them more frequently than others, and that they are enjoying greater success.
  • Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.
  • it’s precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control — the ability to resist temptation — and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.
  • We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America’s most successful groups tells itself that it’s exceptional in a deep sense.
  • That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in American culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s rising groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their children.
  • Numerous studies, including in-depth field work conducted by the Harvard sociologist Vivian S. Louie, reveal Chinese immigrant parents frequently imposing exorbitant academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”), making them feel that “family honor” depends on their success.
  • In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-American students reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.
  • Moreover, being an outsider in a society — and America’s most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another — is a source of insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life’s precariousness to their children.
  • Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well. Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don’t live in the moment.
  • The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children’s happiness with excessive restraints or demands. By contrast, every one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age
  • Needless to say, high-achieving groups don’t instill these qualities in all their members. They don’t have to
  • At the same time, if members of a group learn not to trust the system, if they don’t think people like them can really make it, they will have little incentive to engage in impulse control.
  • success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies
  • Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning — precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.
  • Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the “longing to rise.”
  • It’s just much harder when you have to do it on your own, when you can’t draw on the cultural resources of a broader community, when you don’t have role models or peer pressure on your side, and instead are bombarded daily with negative images of your group in the media.
  • But it would be ridiculous to suggest that the lack of an effective group superiority complex was the cause of disproportionate African-American poverty. The true causes barely require repeating
  • Nor does the lack of a group superiority narrative prevent any given individual African-American from succeeding. It simply creates an additional psychological and cultural hurdle that America’s most successful groups don’t have to overcome.
  • Culture is never all-determining. Individuals can defy the most dominant culture and write their own scripts
  • The same factors that cause poverty — discrimination, prejudice, shrinking opportunity — can sap from a group the cultural forces that propel success. Once that happens, poverty becomes more entrenched.
  • Disappearing blue-collar jobs and greater returns to increasingly competitive higher education give a tremendous edge to groups that disproportionately produce individuals driven, especially at a young age, to excel and to sacrifice present satisfactions for long-term gains.
  • THE good news is that it’s not some magic gene generating these groups’ disproportionate success. Nor is it some 5,000-year-old “education culture” that only they have access to. Instead their success is significantly propelled by three simple qualities open to anyone.
  • The way to develop this package of qualities — not that it’s easy, or that everyone would want to — is through grit.
  • It requires turning the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority. This kind of superiority complex isn’t ethnically or religiously exclusive. It’s the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.
  • research shows that perseverance and motivation can be taught, especially to young children.
  • The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America’s animals were bigger than Europe’s) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.
  • But prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. By 2000, all that remained was our superiority complex, which by itself is mere swagger, fueling a culture of entitlement and instant gratification.
  • the trials of recent years — the unwon wars, the financial collapse, the rise of China — have, perversely, had a beneficial effect: the return of insecurity.
Javier E

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality by Timothy Snyder | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

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holocaust wwII genocide history

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today’s confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share
  • Historians must, as best we can, cast light into these shadows and account for these people. This we have not done.
  • Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come.
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  • The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.
  • By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.
  • the other state that killed Europeans en masse in the middle of the century: the Soviet Union. In the entire Stalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Soviet policies killed, in a conservative estimate, well over five million Europeans
  • In shorthand, then, the Holocaust was, in order: Operation Reinhardt, Shoah by bullets, Auschwitz; or Poland, the Soviet Union, the rest. Of the 5.7 million or so Jews killed, roughly 3 million were pre-war Polish citizens, and another 1 million or so pre-war Soviet citizens: taken together, 70 percent of the total. (After the Polish and Soviet Jews, the next-largest groups of Jews killed were Romanian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak. If these people are considered, the East European character of the Holocaust becomes even clearer.)
  • The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.
  • The Germans did manage to carry out policies that bore some resemblance to these plans
  • The Germans killed somewhat more than ten million civilians in the major mass killing actions, about half of them Jews, about half of them non-Jews. The Jews and the non-Jews mostly came from the same part of Europe. The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.
  • German suffering under Hitler and during the war, though dreadful in scale, does not figure at the center of the history of mass killing. Even if the ethnic Germans killed during flight from the Red Army, expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945–1947, and the firebombings in Germany are included, the total number of German civilians killed by state power remains comparatively small
  • when one considers the total number of European civilians killed by totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century, one should have in mind three groups of roughly equal size: Jews killed by Germans, non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet state.
  • An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Be zec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived.
  • We know about the Gulag because it was a system of labor camps, but not a set of killing facilities. The Gulag held about 30 million people and shortened some three million lives. But a vast majority of those people who were sent to the camps returned alive.
  • the Gulag distracts us from the Soviet policies that killed people directly and purposefully, by starvation and bullets. Of the Stalinist killing policies, two were the most significant: the collectivization famines of 1930–1933 and the Great Terror of 1937–1938.
  • It is established beyond reasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starved to death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of 1932–1933. Soviet documents reveal a series of orders of October–December 1932 with evident malice and intention to kill. By the end, more than three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had died.
  • The largest action of the Great Terror, Operation 00447, was aimed chiefly at “kulaks,” which is to say peasants who had already been oppressed during collectivization. It claimed 386,798 lives. A few national minorities, representing together less than 2 percent of the Soviet population, yielded more than a third of the fatalities of the Great Terror.
  • If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today’s Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.
  • mass killing happened, predominantly, in the parts of Europe between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia themselves.
  • Soviet repressions are identified with the Gulag
  • During the war, many Soviet Russians were killed by the Germans, but far fewer proportionately than Belarusians and Ukrainians, not to mention Jews. Soviet civilian deaths are estimated at about 15 million. About one in twenty-five civilians in Russia was killed by the Germans during the war, as opposed to about one in ten in Ukraine (or Poland) or about one in five in Belarus.
  • Poland was attacked and occupied not by one but by both totalitarian states between 1939 and 1941, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, then allies, exploited its territories and exterminated much of its intelligentsia at that time. Poland’s capital was the site of not one but two of the major uprisings against German power during World War II: the ghetto uprising of Warsaw Jews in 1943, after which the ghetto was leveled; and the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army in 1944, after which the rest of the city was destroyed.
  • By starving Soviet prisoners of war, shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civilians in anti-partisan actions, German forces made Belarus the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944. Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country.
  • Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union followed a path to economic self-sufficiency, Germany wishing to balance industry with an agrarian utopia in the East, the USSR wishing to overcome its agrarian backwardness with rapid industrialization and urbanization. Both regimes were aiming for economic autarky in a large empire, in which both sought to control Eastern Europe. Both of them saw the Polish state as a historical aberration; both saw Ukraine and its rich soil as indispensable. They defined different groups as the enemies of their designs, although the German plan to kill every Jew is unmatched by any Soviet policy in the totality of its aims. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic develop-ment. In a world of scarcity, particularly of food supplies, both regimes integrated mass murder with economic planning.
  • If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.
julia rhodes

Converging Interests May Lead to Cooperation Between Israel and Gulf States - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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interests cooperation gulf israel states nytimes history politics crisis policy

shared by julia rhodes on 01 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Looking for a potential bright spot in the roiling upheaval of the Middle East, American and Israeli officials meeting in Jerusalem on Monday held out the hope of growing security cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gul
  • “The U.S. and the regional allies cannot find a solution to Syria, stabilize Egypt and halt the Iranian threat without the other,” Mr. al-Otaiba said. “There is simply no way around working together to resolve these issues.”
  • “World jihadists are not fighting only against Israel,” said Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, chief of the Israeli Defense Forces, adding that it would behoove neighboring states to look for ways to combat common enemies.
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  • Most notably, Arab states have long insisted on the resolution of the Palestinians’ dispute with Israel before any wider peace initiative could be taken up.
  • That idea, basically unthinkable a few years ago, could be more plausible now because of widespread worry over Iran’s nuclear program, coupled with chaos in Syria and turmoil in Egypt. Even though Saudi Arabia and other gulf countries have long viewed Israel as the Arab world’s biggest adversary, the rise of threats they all share in common is creating a new urgency to find common ground, the officials said.
  • For instance, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates share comparable views on the rise and fall of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. They all were far more comfortable with the government of President Hosni Mubarak, and were dismayed at what they viewed as an abandonment of Mr. Mubarak by the United States in the face of the initial Tahrir Square uprising.
  • The Egyptian-Israeli “peace treaty and its architecture is part of the overarching strategy of the ruling elite in Egypt,” a senior Israeli military official said on Monday, though he noted that the treaty is still not popular with much of the Egyptian public, the military government is “committed to that for many good reasons.”
  • Another thing potentially bringing Israel and Gulf states together is their intensifying criticism of American foreign policy.
Javier E

Greece Over the Brink - The New York Times - 0 views

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greece financial Euro economics austerity

shared by Javier E on 29 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • most — not all, but most — of what you’ve heard about Greek profligacy and irresponsibility is false. Yes, the Greek government was spending beyond its means in the late 2000s. But since then it has repeatedly slashed spending and raised taxes. Government employment has fallen more than 25 percent, and pensions (which were indeed much too generous) have been cut sharply. If you add up all the austerity measures, they have been more than enough to eliminate the original deficit and turn it into a large surplus.
  • So why didn’t this happen? Because the Greek economy collapsed, largely as a result of those very austerity measures, dragging revenues down with it.
  • And this collapse, in turn, had a lot to do with the euro, which trapped Greece in an economic straitjacket. Cases of successful austerity, in which countries rein in deficits without bringing on a depression, typically involve large currency devaluations that make their exports more competitive
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  • Greece, without its own currency, didn’t have that option.
  • the ruling leftist coalition, was willing to accept the austerity that has already been imposed. All it asked for was, in effect, a standstill on further austerity.
  • But the troika was having none of it. It’s easy to get lost in the details, but the essential point now is that Greece has been presented with a take-it-or-leave-it offer that is effectively indistinguishable from the policies of the past five years.
  • The purpose must therefore be to drive him from office, which will probably happen if Greek voters fear confrontation with the troika enough to vote yes next week.
  • But they shouldn’t, for three reasons. First, we now know that ever-harsher austerity is a dead end: after five years Greece is in worse shape than ever. Second, much and perhaps most of the feared chaos from Grexit has already happened. With banks closed and capital controls imposed, there’s not that much more damage to be done.
  • Finally, acceding to the troika’s ultimatum would represent the final abandonment of any pretense of Greek independence.
  • it’s time to put an end to this unthinkability. Otherwise Greece will face endless austerity, and a depression with no hint of an end.
  • Hooray for Obamacare JUN 25
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