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Javier E

The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-twitter-election.html

russia election influence campaign Trump 2016

shared by Javier E on 08 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Critics say that because shareholders judge the companies partly based on a crucial data point — “monthly active users” — they are reluctant to police their sites too aggressively for fear of reducing that nu
  • the scale of the sites — 328 million users on Twitter, nearly two billion on Facebook — means they often remove impostors only in response to complaints.
  • Facebook officials estimated that of all the “civic content” posted on the site in connection with the United States election, less than one-tenth of one percent resulted from “information operations” like the Russian campaign.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • while Facebook “has begun cutting out the tumors by deleting false accounts and fighting fake news,” Twitter has done little and as a result, “bots have only spread since the election.”
  • we cannot distinguish whether every single Tweet from every person is truthful or not,” the statement said. “We, as a company, should not be the arbiter of truth.”
  • “We are living in 1948,” said the adviser, Andrey Krutskikh, referring to the eve of the first Soviet atomic bomb test, in a speech reported by The Washington Post. “I’m warning you: We are at the verge of having something in the information arena that will allow to us to talk to the Americans as equals.”
  • “IP addresses can be simply made up,” Mr. Putin said, referring to Internet protocol addresses, which can identify particular computers. “There are such IT specialists in the world today, and they can arrange anything and then blame it on whomever. This is no proof.”
Javier E

Getting Radical About Inequality - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nequality-pierre-bourdieu.html

inequality radical status power symbolic prestige sociology social mobility culture economic

shared by Javier E on 18 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Pierre Bourdieu is helpful reading in the age of Trump. He was born in 1930, the son of a small-town postal worker. By the time he died in 2002, he had become perhaps the world’s most influential sociologist within the academy
  • His great subject was the struggle for power in society, especially cultural and social power. We all possess, he argued, certain forms of social capital. A person might have academic capital (the right degrees from the right schools), linguistic capital (a facility with words), cultural capital (knowledge of cuisine or music or some such) or symbolic capital (awards or markers of prestige). These are all forms of wealth you bring to the social marketplace.
  • In addition, and more important, we all possess and live within what Bourdieu called a habitus. A habitus is a body of conscious and tacit knowledge of how to travel through the world, which gives rise to mannerisms, tastes, opinions and conversational style
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  • A habitus is an intuitive feel for the social game. It’s the sort of thing you get inculcated with unconsciously, by growing up in a certain sort of family or by sharing a sensibility with a certain group of friends.
  • Your habitus is what enables you to decode cultural artifacts, to feel comfortable in one setting but maybe not in another. Taste overlaps with social position; taste classifies the classifier.
  • Bourdieu used the phrase “symbolic violence” to suggest how vicious this competition can get
  • The symbolic marketplace is like the commercial marketplace; it’s a billion small bids for distinction, prestige, attention and superiority.
  • Every minute or hour, in ways we’re not even conscious of, we as individuals and members of our class are competing for dominance and respect. We seek to topple those who have higher standing than us and we seek to wall off those who are down below. Or, we seek to take one form of capital, say linguistic ability, and convert it into another kind of capital, a good job.
  • Most groups conceal their naked power grabs under a veil of intellectual or aesthetic purity
  • Every day, Bourdieu argued, we take our stores of social capital and our habitus and we compete in the symbolic marketplace. We vie as individuals and as members of our class for prestige, distinction and, above all, the power of consecration — the power to define for society what is right, what is “natural,” what is “best.”
  • People at the top, he observed, tend to adopt a reserved and understated personal style that shows they are far above the “assertive, attention-seeking strategies which expose the pretensions of the young pretenders.”
  • People at the bottom of any field, on the other hand, don’t have a lot of accomplishment to wave about, but they can use snark and sarcasm to demonstrate the superior sensibilities.
  • Trump is not much of a policy maven, but he’s a genius at the symbolic warfare Bourdieu described. He’s a genius at upending the social rules and hierarchies that the establishment classes (of both right and left) have used to maintain dominance.
  • Bourdieu didn’t argue that cultural inequality creates economic inequality, but that it widens and it legitimizes it.
  • as the information economy has become more enveloping, cultural capital and economic capital have become ever more intertwined. Individuals and classes that are good at winning the cultural competitions Bourdieu described tend to dominate the places where economic opportunity is richest; they tend to harmonize with affluent networks and do well financially.
  • the drive to create inequality is an endemic social sin. Every hour most of us, unconsciously or not, try to win subtle status points, earn cultural affirmation, develop our tastes, promote our lifestyles and advance our class. All of those microbehaviors open up social distances, which then, by the by, open up geographic and economic gaps.
  • Bourdieu radicalizes, widens and deepens one’s view of inequality. His work suggests that the responses to it are going to have to be more profound, both on a personal level — resisting the competitive, ego-driven aspects of social networking and display — and on a national one.
Javier E

Sullivan: Why the Reactionary Right Must Be Taken Seriously - 0 views

nymag.com/...t-must-be-taken-seriously.html

right culture trump reaction conservatism demagogue crisis

shared by Javier E on 06 May 17 - No Cached
  • This notion of a national culture, rooted in, if not defined by, a common ethnicity, is even more powerful in European nations, which is why Brexit is so closely allied to Trumpism.
  • Is Britain changing so fast that it could lose any meaningful continuity with its history and culture? That is the question now occupying the British neo-reactionaries. Prime Minister Theresa May has not said many memorable things in office, except this: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”
  • Anton took issue with an article I wrote for this magazine in which I described Trump as reminiscent of Plato’s description of a tyrant emerging out of a decadent democracy and argued that we should do what we could to stop him.
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  • Anton’s critique was that I was half-right and half-wrong. I was right to see democracy degenerating into tyranny but wrong to see any way to avoid it. What he calls “Caesarism” is already here, as Obama’s abuse of executive power proved. Therefore: “If we must have Caesar, who do you want him to be? One of theirs? Or one of yours (ours)?”
  • he writes a reactionary blog, Unqualified Reservations, under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and has earned a cult following among the alt-right. His magnum opus — “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” — is an alternately chilling and entertaining assault on almost everything educated Westerners hold to be self-evidently true.
  • Yarvin believes that the Western mind became corrupted during the Enlightenment itself. The very idea of democracy, allied with reason and constitutionalism, is bunk: “Washington has failed. The Constitution has failed. Democracy has failed.” His golden era: the age of monarchs. (“It is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.”) His solution: “It is time for restoration, for national salvation, for a full reboot. We need a new government, a clean slate, a fresh hand which is smart, strong and fair.”
  • The assumption that all of history has led inexorably to today’s glorious and democratic present is, he argues, a smug and self-serving delusion. It’s what used to be called Whig History, the idea that all of human history led up to the democratic institutions and civilizational achievements of liberal Britain, the model for the entire world.
  • Why do so many of us assume that progress is inevitable, if never complete? Yarvin, like the Claremonters and American Greatness brigade, blames an elite that he calls by the inspired name “the Cathedral,” an amalgam of established universities and the mainstream press. It works like this: “The universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent.
  • for Yarvin, the consent is manufactured not by capitalism, advertising, and corporations but by liberal academics, pundits, and journalists. They simply assume that left liberalism is the only rational response to the world. Democracy, he contends, “no longer means that the public’s elected representatives control the government. It means that the government implements scientific public policy in the public interest.”
  • His solution is not just a tyrannical president who hates all that the Cathedral stands for but something even more radical: “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver, who in the process of converting Washington into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation will abolish the press, smash the universities, sell the public schools, and transfer ‘decivilized populations’ to ‘secure relocation facilities’ where they will be assigned to ‘mandatory apprenticeships.’ ”
  • This is 21st-century fascism, except that Yarvin’s Receiver would allow complete freedom of speech and association and would exercise no control over economic life. Foreign policy? Yarvin calls for “a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.” All social policy also disappears: “I believe that government should take no notice whatsoever of race — no racial policy. I believe it should separate itself completely from the question of what its citizens should or should not think — separation of education and state.”
  • I never doubted the cogency of many reactionary insights — and I still admire minds that have not succumbed to the comfortable assumption that the future is always brighter. I read the Christian traditionalist Rod Dreher with affection. His evocation of Christian life and thought over the centuries and his panic at its disappearance from our world are poignant. We are losing a vast civilization that honed answers to the deepest questions that human beings can ask, replacing it with vapid pseudo-religions, pills, therapy, and reality TV
  • Because in some key respects, reactionaries are right. Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back. The Reformation did initiate brutal sectarian warfare. The French Revolution did degenerate into barbarous tyranny. Communist utopias — allegedly the wave of an Elysian future — turned into murderous nightmares. Modern neoliberalism has, for its part, created a global capitalist machine that is seemingly beyond anyone’s control, fast destroying the planet’s climate, wiping out vast tracts of life on Earth while consigning millions of Americans to economic stagnation and cultural despair.
  • And at an even deeper level, the more we discover about human evolution, the more illusory certain ideas of progress become. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari points out that hunter-gatherers were actually up to six inches taller than their more “civilized” successors; their diets were much healthier; infectious disease was much rarer; they worked less and goofed off more than we do.
  • Harari notes another paradox: Over hundreds of millennia, we have overcome starvation … but now are more likely to die of obesity than hunger. Happiness? Globally, suicide rates keep rising.
  • We are tribal creatures in our very DNA; we have an instinctive preference for our own over others, for “in-groups” over “out-groups”; for hunter-gatherers, recognizing strangers as threats was a matter of life and death
  • We also invent myths and stories to give meaning to our common lives. Among those myths is the nation — stretching from the past into the future, providing meaning to our common lives in a way nothing else can. Strip those narratives away, or transform them too quickly, and humans will become disoriented. Most of us respond to radical changes in our lives, especially changes we haven’t chosen, with more fear than hope
  • If we ignore these deeper facts about ourselves, we run the risk of fatal errors. It’s vital to remember that multicultural, multiracial, post-national societies are extremely new for the human species, and keeping them viable and stable is a massive challenge.
  • Globally, social trust is highest in the homogeneous Nordic countries, and in America, Pew has found it higher in rural areas than cities. The political scientist Robert Putnam has found that “people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle.” Not very encouraging about human nature — but something we can’t wish away, either
  • In fact, the American elite’s dismissal of these truths, its reduction of all resistance to cultural and demographic change as crude “racism” or “xenophobia,” only deepens the sense of siege many other Americans feel.
  • When this velocity of cultural change combines with a deepening — and accurate — sense of economic anxiety, is it shocking that human beings want to retreat into a past, to resuscitate the nation-state, and to reach backward for a more primeval and instinctual group identity? Or that they doubt the promise of “progress” and seek scapegoats in the governing classes that have encouraged all of this to happen?
  • The tragedy of our time, of course, is that President Obama tried to follow Lincoln’s advice. He reached out to those who voted against him as often as he could. His policies, like Obamacare, were aimed at helping the very working poor who gave Trump the White House. He pledged to transcend the red-blue divide. He acknowledged both the necessity of law enforcement and the legitimate African-American fear of hostile cops
  • A black man brought up by white people, he gave speech after speech attempting to provide a new narrative for America: one of slowly integrating moral progress, where racial and class divides could be overcome. He criticized the reductive divisiveness of identity politics. And yet he failed
  • he couldn’t stem the reactionary tide that now washes ever closer ashore. If a man that talented, with that biography, found himself spitting into the wind, a powerful storm is indeed upon us.
  • how can you seriously regard our political system and culture as worse than ever before in history? How self-centered do you have to be to dismiss the unprecedented freedom for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals? Or the increased security for the elderly and unemployed, and the greater access to health care by the poor and now the working poor? Compare the air we breathe today with that of the 1950s. Contrast the religious tolerance we take for granted today with the enmities of the past.
  • Over the very long haul, too, scholars such as Steven Pinker have found convincing evidence that violence among humans is at the lowest levels since the species first emerged.
  • It is also one thing to be vigilant about the power of the administrative state and to attempt to reform and modernize it; it is quite another to favor its abolition. The more complex modern society has become, the more expertise is needed to govern it — and where else is that expertise going to come from if not a professional elite?
  • the liberal media has nothing like the monopoly it once enjoyed. There are two “Cathedrals” in the 21st century — and only one has helped produce a conservative Supreme Court, a Republican Congress, a Republican president, and near-record Republican majorities in statehouses around the country
  • Beyond all that, neo-reactionaries have a glaring problem, which is that their proposed solutions are so radical they have no chance whatsoever of coming into existence — and would be deeply reckless to attempt.
  • There is, perhaps, a way to use reactionary insights and still construct a feasible center-right agenda. Such a program would junk Reaganite economics as outdated but keep revenue-neutral tax reform, it could even favor redistribution to counter the deep risk to democracy that soaring inequality fosters, and it could fix Obamacare’s technical problems. You could add to this mix stronger border control, a reduction in legal immigration, a pause in free-trade expansion, a technological overhaul of the government bureaucracy, and a reassertion of Americanism over multiculturalism.
  • The left, for its part, must, it seems to me, escape its own bubble and confront the accelerating extremism of its identity politics and its disdain for millions of “deplorable” white Americans. You will not arrest the reactionary momentum by ignoring it or dismissing it entirely as a function of bigotry or stupidity. You’ll only defuse it by appreciating its insights and co-opting its appeal.
cdavistinnell

Former Yemeni President to Saudis: Let's 'turn the page' - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Yemen vs. Saudi Arabia peace warfare

shared by cdavistinnell on 04 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • Former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh -- whose supporters are now in a shaky alliance with the Houthi rebels in the fight against the Saudi-led coalition -- tossed an olive branch on Saturday to Riyadh, saying he is open to talks with the coalition and ready to "turn the page."
  • Saleh's message did not sit well with the Houthis, whose spokesman called his remarks "a coup against our alliance and partnership." The reaction is another sign of a developing rift among rebel groups in the Yemen civil war
  • The Houthis, a Shiite tribal militia from northwest Yemen, have been at war with the central government for the better part of a decade. Saudi Arabia and its allies claim that Iran backs and funds the rebels, something the rebels deny.
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  • "The coalition calls all honorable Yemeni people to get rid of the Iranian allied militants and end the era of oppression and threats from the militants allied with Iran." The Saudi Press Agency published the reaction.
Javier E

Liberals Need to Take Their Fingers Out of Their Ears - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...erals-conservatives-trump.html

whitelash working class trump liberals

shared by Javier E on 08 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • Not only are the values that the left takes for granted heatedly disputed in many sections of the country, the way many Democratic partisans assert that their values supplant or transcend traditional beliefs serves to mobilize the right.
  • liberal democracy’s allowance of these things inevitably creates conditions of “normative threat,” arousing the classic authoritarian fears about threats to oneness and sameness, which activate those predispositions — about a third of most western populations lean toward authoritarianism — and cause the increased manifestation of racial, moral and political intolerance.
  • “Libertarians and/non-authoritarians,” Stenner writes,are likewise aroused and activated under these conditions, and move toward positions of greater racial, moral and political tolerance as a result. Which increases political polarization of the two camps, which further increases normative threat, and so it goes on. This is what I mean by the core elements of liberal democracy creating conditions that inevitably undermine it.
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  • A system like our ideal liberal democracy, which does not place any constraints on critiques of leaders, authorities and institutions; and does not allow any suppression of ideas no matter how dangerous to the system or objectionable to its citizens; and does not permit itself to select who can come in, or stay, based on their acceptance/rejection of fundamental liberal democratic values, has both: (1) guaranteed perpetual generation of conditions of normative threat, and all the activation, polarization, and conflict that that produces, and (2) disallowed all means for protecting itself against that “authoritarian dynamic,” which otherwise might have included allowing: some selectivity in regard to the fundamental values of those who are allowed to come, and to stay; constraints on certain kinds of critiques of leaders, authorities and institutions;
  • constraints on free speech that exclude racist or intolerant speech; some ability to write moral strictures into public policy to reflect traditional beliefs where the majority “draws the line.” If a liberal democracy were to allow those things, it would no longer be a liberal democracy. But if it does not allow those things, it is extremely difficult to protect itself from fundamental threats to its continued existence
  • “Both sides of this increasingly polarized divide see the other as trying to extirpate their way of life — and not inaccurately,” Schnurer wrote in “War on the Blue States” in U.S. News and World Report earlier this month:
  • Blue America spent the last eight years dictating both economic and cultural changes invalidating virtually every aspect of Red America. Liberals see all that as both righteous and benevolent — we’re both promoting better values and willing to help train them to be more like us.
  • The prototypical Trump voter sees a changing America leaving him behind; part of this is economic, part of it demographic, part cultural. I think liberals tend to see this as a thin cover for racism, a reflection of troglodyte viewpoints, and in any event unwarranted as the world these folks are resisting would be better even for them if only they’d let it, by giving up their benighted religious views, accepting job training in the new technologies, and preferably moving to one or the other coasts or at least the closest major city.
  • I don’t think there’s much argument that the modern economy is killing off small towns, US-based manufacturing, the interior of the US generally, etc. There is, or could be, an argument as to whether that’s just the necessary functioning of larger economic forces, or whether there are political choices that have produced, or at least aided and abetted, those outcomes
  • This is a classic political problem of general benefit at the cost of specific individual harm. At a minimum, “we” — as a country but also as a self-styled progressive subset of that country — have given inadequate thought to those harms and how to ameliorate them; but I think you can also make the argument that we have exacerbated them.
  • Schnurer, himself a liberal, argues that blue America has over the last decade declared war on the “red way of life.”
  • The political, economic, and cultural triumph nationwide of a set of principles and realities essentially alien to large numbers of Americans is viewed as (a) being imposed upon them, and (b) overturning much of what they take for granted in their lives — and I don’t think they’re wrong about that. I think they’ve risen in angry revolt, and now intend to give back to the “elite” in the same terms that they’ve been given to.
  • Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, observes that “believers in liberal democracy have unilaterally disarmed in the defense of the institution” by agreeing in many cases with the premise of the Trump campaign: “that the country is a hopeless swamp.” This left Democrats “defenseless when he proposed to drain it.”
  • Where, Pinker asks,are the liberals who are willing to say that liberal democracy has worked? That environmental regulations have slashed air pollutants while allowing Americans to drive more miles and burn more fuel? That social transfers have reduced poverty rates fivefold? That globalization has allowed Americans to afford more food, clothing, TVs, cars, and air-conditioners? That international organizations have prevented nuclear war, and reduced the rate of death in warfare by 90 percent? That environmental treaties are healing the hole in the ozone layer?
  • Pinker continues:Over the longer run, I think the forces of modernity prevail — affluence, education, mobility, communication, and generational replacement. Trumpism, like Brexit and European populism, are old men’s movements: support drops off sharply with age.
  • The problem is that even if Pinker is right, his analysis does not preclude a sustained period in which the anti-democratic right dominates American politics. There is no telling how long it will be before the movement Trump has mobilized will have run its course. Nor can we anticipate — if and when Trumpism does implode — how extensive the damage will be that Pinker’s “forces of modernity” will have to repair.
g-dragon

Black Death in Asia: The Origins of the Bubonic Plague - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/-in-asia-bubonic-plague-195144

Bulbonic Plague asia origins

shared by g-dragon on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • it killed an estimated one-third of the European population
  • started in Asia and devastated many areas of that continent as well.
  • Many scholars believe that the bubonic plague began in north-western China, while others cite south-western China or the steppes of Central Asia.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • an outbreak erupted in the Yuan Empire and may have hastened the end of Mongol rule over China. Three years later, the disease killed over 90 percent of the Hebei Province's populations
  • with deaths totaling over 5 million people.
  • From its origin at the eastern end of the Silk Road, the Black Death rode trade routes west stopping at Central Asian caravansaries and Middle Eastern trade centers and subsequently infected people all across Asia.
  • "The Land of Darkness," or Central Asia. From there, it spread to China, India, the Caspian Sea and "land of the Uzbeks," and thence to Persia and the Mediterranean.
  • The Central Asian scourge struck Persia just a few years after it appeared in China — proof if any is needed that the Silk Road was a convenient route of transmission for the deadly bacterium.
  • Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish
  • The region's population was slow to recover, in part due to the political disruptions caused by the fall of Mongol rule and the later invasions of Timur (Tamerlane).
  • It seems more likely, however, that traders from further east brought diseased fleas
  • He goes on to charge that the Mongol leader "ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in hopes that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside."
  • This incident is often cited as the first instance of biological warfare in history. However, other contemporary chroniclers make no mention of the putative Black Death catapults.
  • European observers were fascinated but not too worried when the Black Death struck the western rim of Central Asia and the Middle East
  • , the holy city of Mecca was hit by the plague, likely brought in by infected pilgrims on the hajj.
  • In 1335, the Il-Khan (Mongol) ruler of Persia and the Middle East, Abu Said, died of bubonic plague during a war with his northern cousins, the Golden Horde. This signaled the beginning of the end for Mongol rule in the region
  • It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out... Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed."
  • Perhaps the most significant impact that the Black Death had on Asia was that it contributed to the fall of the mighty Mongol Empire. After all, the pandemic started within the Mongol Empire and devastated peoples from all four of the khanates.
  • The massive population loss and terror caused by the plague destabilized Mongolian governments from the Golden Horde in Russia to the Yuan Dynasty in China. The Mongol ruler of the Ilkhanate Empire in the Middle East died of the disease along with six of his sons.
  • Although the Pax Mongolica had allowed increased wealth and cultural exchange, through a reopening of the Silk Road, it also allowed this deadly contagion to spread rapidly westward from its origin in western China or eastern Central Asia. As a result, the world's second-largest empire ever crumbled and fell.
  • g-dragon on 24 Oct 17
     
    A summary about the route the Black Plague took and the tole it had. It is intesting how they called Central Asia the land of the darkness.
leilamulveny

Amid High Drama, Biden Declares Democracy Has Survived, Unity Possible - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ved-unity-possible-11611181187

biden democracy wsj US Culture Pandemic

shared by leilamulveny on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Over the last five decades, Joe Biden endured multiple personal tragedies and saw his political obituary written over and over again—yet always found a way to pick up the pieces and move forward.
  • Mr. Biden was sworn in amid extraordinary circumstances: an ongoing pandemic, the glaring absence of an outgoing president who refused to accept the legitimacy of last year’s election, the scars of a mob attack designed to prevent him from taking office still visible on the Capitol just behind him, the nation’s first woman and first minority vice president at his side.
  • The first was that democracy has survived a severe blow. The second was that unity is possible. And the third was that the country will need that unity to weather a coronavirus storm that will continue to rage for a while longer.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Yet for the first time since the Civil War, that reassurance was necessary. That’s because this transfer of power actually wasn’t peaceful. It was disrupted by violence while the counting of electoral-college votes was disrupted by violent attack.
  • “To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words,” he said. “It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy. Unity. Unity.” He specifically called for the political leaders surrounding him to “lower the temperature.”
  • Finally, he warned the nation that the coronavirus, which has stalked the land and hobbled the economy for 10 months, isn’t done doing its damage. The nation already has lost more to the pandemic than it did in all of World War II, he said, yet “we are entering what may be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation, one nation.”
  • Having spent more than four decades in the Senate and the White House, Mr. Biden has genuine friendships on which he can draw in a time of political blood feuds. His call to end divisive rhetoric and lower the national temperature, which was seen almost as an anachronistic throwback when he stressed it at the outset of his political campaign, now seems precisely the right message for the moment.
  • Millions of Trump supporters don’t, at the moment, accept the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s election. Ideological warfare between left and right is possible—and may already have begun as Republicans protested a series of executive orders Mr. Biden immediately issued to overturn Trump policies on his own authority.
ethanshilling

US to Increase Military Presence in Germany - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-military-germany.html

europe military russia

shared by ethanshilling on 13 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The United States and NATO, anxious about a major Russian troop buildup on Ukraine’s border, signaled strong support for the Kyiv government on Tuesday.
  • And in what was considered another message to Moscow, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said in Germany on Tuesday that the United States would increase its military presence there by about 500 personnel and that it was scuttling plans introduced under President Donald J. Trump for a large troop reduction in Europe.
  • “The U.S. stands firmly behind the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told Mr. Kuleba.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “This meeting is extremely timely given what is happening along the Ukrainian border with Russia,” Mr. Kuleba said, calling it the “border of the democratic world.”
  • “In recent weeks, Russia has moved thousands of combat-ready troops to Ukraine’s borders, the largest massing of Russian troops since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014,” Mr. Stoltenberg of NATO said
  • “These forces will strengthen deterrence and defense in Europe,” Mr. Austin said after meeting his German counterpart, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. “They will augment our existing abilities to prevent conflict and, if necessary, fight and win.”
  • The increase in U.S. troops in Germany is a strong indication of the Biden administration’s commitment to NATO and to collective European defense.
  • One of the two new units will involve field artillery, composite air and missile defense, intelligence, cyberspace, electronic warfare, aviation and a brigade support element.
  • On Tuesday, Sergei K. Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister, said that “two armies and three airborne units were successfully deployed to the western borders of Russia”
  • Russia is widely seen as testing Mr. Biden and keeping the pressure on Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has moved against some of the Kremlin’s favorite oligarchs.
  • Ian Bond, a former British diplomat who is head of foreign policy for the Center for European Reform, said that a war was unlikely now but could come this summer.
  • In any event, Mr. Bond said, the United States and NATO should both reassure Ukraine and “deter Russia by shifting the cost-benefit calculation in favor of de-escalation’’ — in particular by being clear to Moscow about what the consequences of a new military intervention would be.
Javier E

The purging of Liz Cheney is about much more than the future of the GOP - The Washingto... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-ab43-bebddc5a0f65_story.html

cheney gop Politics crisis us democracy trump truth

shared by Javier E on 16 May 21 - No Cached
  • It is far more than a case of internecine warfare, as a Democrat who has been in many partisan battles against GOP candidates said in a private email praising Cheney. “As regards the politics of the moment, Cheney needs affirmation and a megaphone,” wrote the Democrat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to express himself freely. “She is preaching for principle — and that is important. This is so far above partisan nonsense. We must all understand what she is doing and applaud it.”
  • The maneuvering of recent days, the resistance to truth-telling and action in the states all point to something worrisome. That is the prospect of a wider and more persistent effort to challenge the legitimate results of the 2022 or 2024 elections, if they go against the GOP.
anonymous

Art as Influence and Response: A First Look at World War I and the Visual Arts | The Me... - 0 views

www.metmuseum.org/...d-the-visual-arts-introduction

shared by anonymous on 09 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Like their countrymen, many artists, writers, and intellectuals initially welcomed the war for a range of reasons:
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 09 Oct 19
       
      People used art during WWI to express their feeling towards the war. This relates to our class because of what we are learning. It helps us understand the war more-we can see it through artwork
  • While some artists, such as George Grosz—who had long rejected militarism and nationalist sentiment—rejected the war from the beginning yet were conscripted into service, and others, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 09 Oct 19
       
      Art can spark ones view, declare ones view, and change ones view
  • Artists searched for an appropriate language to express the chaos and carnage that resulted from modern industrial warfare, reevaluating subject matter, techniques, materials, and styles, as well as their positions and responsibilities as cultural producers.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 09 Oct 19
       
      Artists wanted to explain what was going on during this awful time period. Not everyone could see it immediately so artists decided to paint the events that were going on so people could eventually see the true story.
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  • orld War I and the Visual Arts includes other materials such as helmets (whose prototypes were designed at The Met by former Arms and Armor curator Bashford Dean), medals, and examples of trench art—all of which work together to provide the broadest possible scope of how the visual arts were affected by and contributed to the war experience.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 09 Oct 19
       
      One can tell their views by art this usually included propaganda.
brookegoodman

These Are the 7 Weapons the Barbarians Used to Take Down Rome - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...7-legendary-barbarian-weapons

history

shared by brookegoodman on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The Battle-Axe
  • Germanic soldiers were known to wield heavy battle-axes capable of smashing through shield, armor and helmet in a single blow.
  • “The iron head of this weapon was thick and exceedingly sharp on both sides while wooden handle was very short,”
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  • The double-edged long sword was the main weapon of the Gauls,
  • The Long Sword
  • The axe was one of the many barbarian weapons that carried over into the medieval world.
  • Chainmail
  • chainmail, which may have been invented in Europe by the Gallic Celts in the third century B.C. Most Gallic mail took the form of a short-sleeved shirt or vest made from an interlocking mesh of small metal rings. This provided flexibility while also protecting the wearer from slashing blows by swords and daggers,
  • Chainmail was extremely labor intensive to make—a single vest might include tens of thousands of rings
  • The Celtic Chariot
  • Julius Caesar became the first Roman general to encounter the war chariots of the native Celtic tribes.
  • . The Falcata
  • When the Romans invaded modern day Spain in 218 B.C., they came face to face with a barbarian tribe known as the Celtiberians. These warriors were renowned both for their guerilla fighting ability and their skill as sword-smiths and metalworkers.
  • “falcata,” a curved, two-foot-long steel sword that was single-edged near the hilt and double-edged near the point. The weapon was weighted towards the tip, which allowed it to slash or stab its way through armor with relative ease.
  • The Recurve Bow
  • Attila and his Hun steppe marauders invaded Europe from the East and cut a bloody swath across the Roman Empire
  • Most Hun warriors carried composite bows assembled from wood, sinew, horn and bone. Unlike the Western bow, these steppe weapons were made to curve back on themselves at the ends, which generated added torque and made arrows fly with enough velocity to penetrate armor at 100 yards
  • Siege Towers and Battering Rams
  • Unlike most barbarian groups, the Huns were particularly proficient at siege warfare.
  • Huns used massive, wheeled siege towers to move protected archers close to the battlements and rain arrows onto the city’s defenders. They also pummeled the city’s walls with huge battering rams, which Priscus described as “a beam with a sharp metal point suspended on chains hung loosely from a V-shaped timber frame.”
chrispink7

Yemen attack: 80 soldiers killed by Iran-backed Houthi rebels - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by chrispink7 on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • At least 80 Yemeni soldiers attending prayers at a mosque were killed and 130 others injured in ballistic missile and drone attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels, the UN Special Envoy for Yemen reported Sunday
  • Yemen has been embroiled in a yearslong civil war that has pitted a coalition backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
  • Yemen's Ministry of Defense said the attack was "to avenge the killing of the Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani," who died in a US drone strike in Iraq on January 3. The ministry offered no evidence to show how it might know the rebels' motive.Read MoreThe attack does come, however, as several nations in the Middle East ready themselves for retaliatory attacks by Iranian-backed militias.Yemen's Defense Ministry said "the armed forces will remain the solid rock that breaks the ambitions" of Iran's goal of destabilizing security in Yemen and the wider region, according to a statement carried by Yemeni state news agency Saba.The Houthis did not make any immediate claim of responsibility.
zarinastone

America's reality TV president relies heavily on 2016 script for 2020 campaign - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...story

US Politics Trump election

shared by zarinastone on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The episode was one more reminder that, as he has sought reelection in 2020, Trump has relied heavily on the playbook he drew up to win the White House once before.
  • He's trying to re-create that full out warfare he created in 2016, and in part so many of his actions are because Trump himself is superstitious.
  • Most presidential candidates have followed a time-honored path -- focusing on their base of support in the primaries and pivoting to more centrist rhetoric during the general election to win over independent voters. Trump never made the pivot, Conant said.
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  • In tactics, message and approach, Trump has not strayed far from his last campaign.
  • This year may look different, Dowd said. But Trump "basically has not changed since he came down the escalator."
  • Though the state of the nation and the mood of the electorate is far different than in 2016, that has not stopped Trump or his team trying to recreate the moments they believe helped him win four years ago.
  • he can see Trump is benefiting from more organic movement by his supporters.
  • The adviser said the campaign should have been focused more on Biden's early efforts to attract support from the progressive wing of his party.
  • Once again, President Trump is scheduled to close out his campaign with a stop back in Michigan Monday night.
pier-paolo

The Pax Romana | Western Civilization - 0 views

courses.lumenlearning.com/...the-pax-romana

shared by pier-paolo on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The Pax Romana was established under Augustus, and for that reason it is sometimes referred to as the Pax Augusta
  • Augustus closed the Gates of Janus three times to signify the onset of peace: in 29 BCE, 25 BCE, and 13 BCE, likely in conjunction with the Ara Pacis ceremony.
  • The Romans regarded peace not as an absence of war, but as the rare situation that existed when all opponents had been beaten down and lost the ability to resist. Thus, Augustus had to persuade Romans that the prosperity they could achieve in the absence of warfare was better for the Empire than the potential wealth and honor acquired when fighting a risky war.
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  • The Ara Pacis is a prime example of the propaganda Augustus employed to promote the Pax Romana, and depicts images of Roman gods and the city of Rome personified amidst wealth and prosperity.
  • By law, Augustus held powers granted to him for life by the Senate, including supreme military command and those of tribune and censor. It took several years for Augustus to develop the framework within which a formally republican state could be led under his sole rule.
  • Augustus passed a series of laws between the years 30 and 2 BCE that transformed the constitution of the Roman Republic into the constitution of the Roman Empire. During this time, Augustus reformed the Roman system of taxation, developed networks of roads with an official courier system, established a standing army, established the Praetorian Guard, created official police and fire-fighting services for Rome, and rebuilt much of the city during his reign.
  • Augustus modified the Roman political system to make it more palatable to the senatorial classes, eschewing the open authoritarianism exhibited by Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony
  • By the end of the first settlement, Augustus was in an ideal political position. Although he no longer held dictatorial powers, he had created an identity of such influence that authority followed naturally.
  • Augustus’s challenge was to persuade Romans that the prosperity they could achieve in the absence of war was better for the Empire than the potential wealth and honor acquired from fighting. Augustus succeeded by means of skillful propaganda.
  • Augustus renounced his ten-year consulship, but in return, secured the following concessions for himself.
  • The Pax Romana (Latin for “Roman peace”) was a long period of relative peace and minimal expansion by military forces experienced by the Roman Empire in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE.
  • Its span was approximately 206 years (27 BCE to 180 CE).
  • The Pax Romana started after Augustus, then Octavian, met and defeated Mark Antony in the Battle of Actium
  • Beyond Rome’s frontiers, he secured the Empire with a buffer region of client states, and made peace with the troublesome Parthian Empire through diplomacy.
  • The Romans regarded peace not as an absence of war, but the rare situation that existed when all opponents had been beaten down and lost the ability to resist.
  • A seat on the consuls’s platform at the front of the Curia The right to speak first in a Senate meeting, or ius primae relationis The right to summon a meeting of the Senate, which was a useful tool for policy making Care of Rome’s grain supply, or cura annonae, which gave him sweeping patronage powers over the plebs
  • The Ara Pacis Augustae, or Altar of Augustan Peace, is one of the best examples of Augustan artistic propaganda and the prime symbol of the new Pax Romana.
  • Augustus died in 14 CE at the age of 75. He may have died from natural causes, although unconfirmed rumors swirled that his wife Livia poisoned him.
Javier E

'I Feel Sorry for Americans': A Baffled World Watches the U.S. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-united-states.html

US prestige international Politics pandemic

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Myanmar is a poor country struggling with open ethnic warfare and a coronavirus outbreak that could overload its broken hospitals. That hasn’t stopped its politicians from commiserating with a country they think has lost its way.
  • “I feel sorry for Americans,” said U Myint Oo, a member of parliament in Myanmar. “But we can’t help the U.S. because we are a very small country.”
  • “Personally, it’s like watching the decline of the Roman Empire,” said Mike Bradley, the mayor of Sarnia, an industrial city on the border with Michigan, where locals used to venture for lunch.
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  • “The U.S.A. is a first-world country but it is acting like a third-world country,” said U Aung Thu Nyein, a political analyst in Myanmar.
  • Adding to the sense of bewilderment, Mr. Trump has refused to embrace an indispensable principle of democracy, dodging questions about whether he will commit to a peaceful transition of power after the November election should he lose.
  • “It reminds me of Belarus, when a person cannot admit defeat and looks for any means to prove that he couldn’t lose,” said Kiryl Kalbasnikau, a 29-year-old opposition activist and actor. “This would be a warning sign for any democracy.”
  • “We used to look to the U.S. for democratic governance inspiration,” said Eduardo Bohórquez, the director of Transparency International Mexico. “Sadly, this is not the case anymore.”
  • “The world sees the dismantling of social cohesion within American society and the mess in managing Covid,” said Yenny Wahid, an Indonesian politician and activist. “There is a vacuum of leadership that needs to be filled, but America is not fulfilling that leadership role.
  • Ms. Wahid, whose father was president of Indonesia after the country emerged from decades of strongman rule, said she worried that Mr. Trump’s dismissive attitude toward democratic principles could legitimize authoritarians.
  • “Trump inspired many dictators, many leaders who are interested in dictatorship, to copy his style, and he emboldened them,” she said.
  • “They now know what it’s like in other countries: violating norms, international trade and its own institutions,” said Eunice Rendon, an expert on migration and security and the director of Migrant Agenda, a nonprofit organization in Mexico. “The most powerful country in the world all of a sudden looks vulnerable.”
  • In Cambodia, which reports being largely spared by the virus so far, there is a measure of schadenfreude toward the United States. Prime Minister Hun Sen has survived as Asia’s longest serving leader by cracking down on dissent and cozying up to China.
  • “He has many nuclear weapons,” Sok Eysan, a spokesman for Mr. Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, said of Mr. Trump. “But he is careless with a disease that can’t be seen.”
aleija

Opinion | Justice Kavanaugh Unlocked Ways to Fight Foreign Interference - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...augh-foreign-interference.html

economics elections supreme court opinion

shared by aleija on 20 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Among many other recent developments not likely on anyone’s 2020 bingo card, a Supreme Court decision about foreign aid and legalized prostitution has shattered perceived constraints on the authority of the United States to robustly defend its elections against foreign interference.
  • ruled that the U.S. government can compel overseas public health organizations that receive U.S. foreign aid to publicly oppose prostitution
  • Yet Justice Kavanaugh’s decree — that “foreign citizens outside U.S. territory do not possess rights under the U.S. Constitution” — is so expansive that it spills into election law, giving federal and state governments ample authority to defend us against the full range of foreign political warfare, without fear of violating the First Amendment.
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  • Intelligence experts warn that Russia’s incursions are continuing in this election cycle, with its digital foot soldiers setting up fake news sites and spreading false stories of hacked voter information to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the vote.
  • Now, the Supreme Court has told us that the constitutional rights of foreign citizens outside U.S. territory cannot be violated because they have no constitutional rights to violate. Justice Kavanaugh heralded this lack of rights as a “bedrock legal principle.”
  • The key to this opinion’s paradigm shift is its transformation of a term that doesn’t even appear in the decision: “expenditure.”
  • Federal law defines an expenditure as “any purchase, payment, distribution, loan, advance, deposit, or gift of money or anything of value, made by any person for the purpose of influencing any election for federal office.
  • But if he wants to spend money to influence our elections — by inflaming social divisions, sowing discord, hiring troll farms, hacking campaign computers, suppressing the vote, or by any other means — the legal basis for the government to respond more aggressively is now crystal clear.
Javier E

Trump and Johnson aren't replaying the 1930s - but it's just as frightening | George Mo... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ohnson-fascism-us-uk-rightwing

fascism authoritarian crisis trump culture politics 1930s 2020s

shared by Javier E on 02 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • anger that should be directed at billionaires is instead directed by them. Facing inequality and exclusion, poor wages and insecure jobs, people are persuaded by the newspapers billionaires own and the parties they fund to unleash their fury on immigrants, Muslims, the EU and other “alien” forces.
  • From the White House, his Manhattan tower and his Florida resort, Donald Trump tweets furiously against “elites”. Dominic Cummings hones the same message as he moves between his townhouse in Islington, with its library and tapestry room, and his family estate in Durham. Clearly, they don’t mean political or economic elites. They mean intellectuals: the students, teachers, professors and independent thinkers who oppose their policies. Anti-intellectualism is a resurgent force in politics.
  • Myths of national greatness and decline abound. Make America Great Again and Take Back Control propose a glorious homecoming to an imagined golden age. Conservatives and Republicans invoke a rich mythology of family life and patriarchal values. Large numbers of people in the United Kingdom regret the loss of empire.
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  • Extravagant buffoons, building their power base through the visual media, displace the wooden technocrats who once dominated political life. Debate gives way to symbols, slogans and sensation. Political parties that once tolerated a degree of pluralism succumb to cults of personality.
  • Politicians and political advisers behave with impunity. During the impeachment hearings, Trump’s lawyer argued, in effect, that the president is the nation, and his interests are inseparable from the national interest.
  • Trump shamelessly endorses nativism and white supremacy. Powerful politicians, such as the Republican congressman Steve King, talk of defending “western civilisation” against “subjugation” by its “enemies”. Minorities are disenfranchised. Immigrants are herded into detention centres.
  • Political structures still stand, but they are hollowed out, as power migrates into unaccountable, undemocratic spheres: conservative fundraising dinners, US political action committees, offshore trade tribunals, tax havens and secrecy regimes.
  • The bodies supposed to hold power to account, such as the Electoral Commission and the BBC, are attacked, disciplined and cowed. Politicians and newspapers launch lurid attacks against parliament, the judiciaryand the civil service.
  • Political lying becomes so rife that voters lose the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Conspiracy theories proliferate, distracting attention from the real ways in which our rights and freedoms are eroded
  • With every unpunished outrage against integrity in public life, trust in the system corrodes. The ideal of democracy as a shared civic project gives way to a politics of dominance and submission.
  • All these phenomena were preconditions for – or facilitators of – the rise of European fascism during the first half of the 20th century. I find myself asking a question I thought we would never have to ask again. Is the resurgence of fascism a real prospect, on either side of the Atlantic?
  • It is easier to define as a political method. While its stated aims may vary wildly, the means by which it has sought to grab and build power are broadly consistent. But I think it’s fair to say that though the new politics have some strong similarities to fascism, they are not the same thing.
  • Trump’s politics and Johnson’s have some characteristics that were peculiar to fascism, such as their constant excitation and mobilisation of their base through polarisation, their culture wars, their promiscuous lying, their fabrication of enemies and their rhetoric of betrayal
  • But there are crucial differences. Far from valorising and courting young people, they appeal mostly to older voters. Neither relies on paramilitary terror
  • Neither government seems interested in using warfare as a political tool.
  • Trump and Johnson preach scarcely regulated individualism: almost the opposite of the fascist doctrine of total subordination to the state.
  • Last century’s fascism thrived on economic collapse and mass unemployment. We are nowhere near the conditions of the Great Depression, though both countries now face a major slump in which millions could lose their jobs and homes.
  • Not all the differences are reassuring. Micro-targeting on social media, peer-to-peer texting and now the possibility of deepfake videos allow today’s politicians to confuse and misdirect people, to bombard us with lies and conspiracy theories, to destroy trust and create alternative realities more quickly and effectively than any tools 20th-century dictators had at their disposal.
  • this isn’t fascism. It is something else, something we have not yet named. But we should fear it and resist it as if it were.
clairemann

Wisconsin's Fox Valley Is Key to Presidential Election - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sin-presidential-election.html

US politics election trump gop

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Many of Wisconsin’s swing voters live in and south of Green Bay, a region of old mill towns and farms burning with coronavirus infections and personality-driven politics.
  • The 12,000 residents of this village 24 miles south of Green Bay backed Barack Obama in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016. But in 2018 they made a narrow split decision — a 461-vote margin for Gov. Scott Walker, a conservative Republican, and a 132-vote advantage for Senator Tammy Baldwin, a liberal Democrat.
  • Democrats tend to focus their Wisconsin campaigns on turning out voters in the liberal cities of Milwaukee and Madison, while Republicans concentrate on the conservative suburbs ringing Milwaukee.
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  • The combination of old factory towns and rural voters who have migrated to the Republican Party, college towns and small cities becoming increasingly Democratic, and Catholic voters inclined to back Democrats as long as they aren’t too strident on abortion rights has made the region that includes the state’s third-, fifth- and sixth-largest counties the ultimate presidential battleground.
  • It is also an epicenter of the coronavirus surge rampaging through Wisconsin.
  • “We have to get back to work. But at the same time, we see stories every day about how our hospitals are at capacity, and we don’t know what we’re going to do here anymore if beds continue to fill up.”
  • found an unusual number of people who have ping-ponged between parties during election years — and sometimes on the same ballot.
  • “I’m a true independent voter,” Mr. Werley, 34, said. “I really look at the person. I look at whether or not they are genuine.”Mr. Werley said there were few issues that drive his allegiance at the polls. Instead, he focuses on whether a candidate can be trusted.“I liked Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders,” he said of the arch-conservative Republican and democratic socialist. “They have been saying the same thing forever. I like sincere people that are not going to jump on the latest poll.”
  • Donald Trump Jr. addressed supporters on Tuesday in De Pere, and Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor and Democratic presidential hopeful, last week stumped for Mr. Biden at a brewery across the street from Lambeau Field, home of the locally beloved Packers.
  • “There’s an expectation that people that run for office take their voters seriously and work hard for their vote,” he said.
  • said the story of the Fox Valley is that its cities — Appleton, Green Bay and Oshkosh — are becoming more Democratic while the rural areas have become more Republican.
  • “I’m not always a Democrat, it depends on the person,” she said. “I think a lot of people are voting for Trump because of the abortion thing. I don’t like abortion either, I’m against it too, but I don’t like Trump.”
  • “We have a manufacturing base, we have a farming base, we just have a real unique mix that can really feel what’s happening,”
  • He said his old constituents did not engage in the sort of tribal political warfare that takes place in Milwaukee, Madison and the state’s rural regions.
  • “I still have not made a final decision,” she said. “Both of them have positive and negative things.”
carolinehayter

Trump team looks to box in Biden on foreign policy by lighting too many 'fires' to put ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...-biden-natsec-transition-fires

trump politics US history biden election

shared by carolinehayter on 20 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump's order of a further withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq is the latest foreign policy move on a growing list in his final weeks in office that are meant to limit President-elect Joe Biden's options before he takes office in January.
  • cyber and irregular warfare, with a focus on China
  • It is contemplating new terrorist designations in Yemen that could complicate efforts to broker peace.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • it has rushed through authorization of a massive arms sale that could alter the balance of power in the Middle East.
  • The Trump team has prepared legally required transition memos describing policy challenges, but there are no discussions about actions they could take or pause.
  • The Trump team's refusal to work with the incoming team stands in stark contrast with the conduct of previous administrations during transitions.
  • It's a strategy that radically breaks with past practice, could raise national security risks and will surely compound challenges for the Biden team
  • that the difference between Trump and Biden isn't a matter of the end goal, such as a departure from Afghanistan or a nuclear-free Iran, but simply a matter of how each leader wants to get there.
  • Other analysts say that damaging Biden's options might come second to a more important goal for Trump, who has floated the idea of running again in 2024.
  • A second official tells CNN their goal is to set so many fires that it will be hard for the Biden administration to put them all out.
  • the US will withdraw 2,500 more troops from both Afghanistan and Iraq by January 15, 2021, five days before Biden takes office.There are currently about 4,500 US troops in Afghanistan and 3,000 in Iraq.
  • "The price for leaving too soon or in an uncoordinated way could be very high. Afghanistan risks becoming once again a platform for international terrorists to plan and organize attacks on our homelands. And ISIS could rebuild in Afghanistan the terror caliphate it lost in Syria and Iraq,"
  • "We're not going to see in two months a total withdrawal from Afghanistan ... so some of this is just symbolism. ... Joe Biden can come into the White House in 2021 and put those troops back in."
  • China hawks in the Trump administration believe there are actions they can take now that will box Biden in, one administration official said. Steps include sanctions and trade restrictions on Chinese companies and government entities that officials believe will be politically impossible for the President-elect to undo. Axios first reported these moves.
  • Now the White House is building a wall of sanctions meant to prevent that from happening, creating new penalties linked to Iran's human rights abuses, its support for organizations such as Hezbollah and its ballistic missile program -- activities Iran is unlikely to stop.
  • Trump has floated the idea of a military strike on Iran but was dissuaded, according to The New York Times.
  • More visible are the administration's efforts to stymie Biden's pledge to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump rejected in 2018.
  • For Tehran, a central condition of rejoining the nuclear pact would be to benefit from the economic relief the deal promised but didn't deliver because of Trump's maximum pressure campaign.
  • They argue that in contrast, Biden's approach will be effective because he will work with partners to create what China fears most: an international united front against Beijing. That's something Biden allies say Trump has been unable to do. If Trump levies extra sanctions, the penalties will simply provide Biden with additional leverage, they say.
  • The web of new measures "will make it more difficult for Joe Biden to lift these sanctions and persuade companies and banks to return to Iran, especially when any sanctions lifted by Biden could be restored by a Republican president in 2025,"
  • under Trump, Iran has become closer to, not farther from, being able to create a nuclear weapon and that many Democrats will feel it is worth the political cost to return to the international deal meant to prevent that.
  • This month, the Trump administration authorized $23 billion in advanced weaponry sales to the United Arab Emirates that could alter the balance of power in the Middle East -- a deal the Biden team has expressed reservations about. The authorization came less than two months after the UAE joined a US-brokered agreement to normalize relations with Israel.
  • Critics worry the move could set off a new arms race in the region.
  • "That was something the UAE very much wanted the Trump administration to do before leaving office, and they did it very quickly and they notified even a much bigger potential package than what had been expected,
  • Trump's top diplomat, Mike Pompeo, is expected this week to pay the first visit by a US secretary of state to an Israeli West Bank settlement, capping an administration approach that has bucked traditional US policy and international consensus.
  • The President-elect is unlikely to change other norm-shattering steps by the Trump administration, including moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Dunne said. "They're just going to leave them," she said. "You're not going to undo everything."
  • For months, Pompeo has been pushing to designate Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels as terrorists despite pushback from State Department and United Nations officials. He may soon be successful, two State Department officials tell CNN, and if so, the move could handicap Biden's ability to develop his own policy in Yemen, because rolling back a terrorist designation is not easy, the officials said.
  • There are also fears that such a designation could impact humanitarian aid deliveries.
Javier E

FC95: The Age of Louis XIV, the "Sun King" (1643-1715) - The Flow of History - 2 views

www.flowofhistory.com/...FC95

Louis XIV history france

shared by Javier E on 23 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Introduction From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture.  Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland.  Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world.  In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population.  France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states.  This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".
  • Louis' early life and reign (1643-61) Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five.  Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government.  In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys.  Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives.  Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles.  This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.
  • Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it.  Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example.  Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength.  There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army. Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper.  Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports.  This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism.  While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state.  Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage.  Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.
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  • Versailles Louis' religious faith was largely a superficial one attached to the elaborate ritual of the Catholic mass.  This love of ritual also showed itself in how Louis ran his court at his magnificent palace of Versailles, several miles outside of Paris.  Much of the reason for building Versailles goes back to the Fronde that had driven Louis from Paris as a young boy.  Ever since then, Louis had distrusted the volatile Paris mob and was determined to move the court away from the influence of that city.  Versailles was also the showpiece of Louis' reign, glorifying him as the Sun King with its magnificent halls and gardens.
  • Religion was one aspect of Louis' reign that illustrated the absolute nature of his monarchy quite well.  Louis himself was quite a pious Catholic, learning that trait from his mother.  However, in the spirit of the day, he saw religion as a department of state subordinate to the will of the king.  By the same token, not adhering to the Catholic faith was seen as treason. As a result, Louis gradually restricted the rights of the French Huguenots and finally, in 1685, revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had given them religious freedom since the end of the French Wars of Religion in 1598.  This drove 200,000 Huguenots out of France, depriving it of some of its most skilled labor.  Thus Louis let his political and religious biases ruin a large sector of France's economy.
  • Results of Louis' reign The age of Louis XIV was important to European history for several reasons.  First of all, it saw the triumph of absolutism in France and continental Europe.  Versailles was a glittering symbol and example for other European rulers to follow.  Any number of German and East European monarchs modeled their states and courts after Louis XIV, sometimes to the point of financial ruin.  Second, Louis' wars showed the system of Balance of Power politics working better than ever.  French aggression was contained and the status quo was maintained.  All this had its price, since the larger sizes of the armies and the final replacement of the pike with the musket took European warfare to a new level of destruction.  Finally, Louis' reign definitely established France as the dominant power in Europe.  However, the cost was immense and left his successors a huge debt.  Ironically, the problems caused by Louis XIV's reign would help lead to the French Revolution in 1789 and the spread of democratic principles across Europe and eventually the world.
  • Louis' main goals were to expand France to its "natural borders": the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees.  This, of course, would make him enemies among the Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Spanish, and English.  Therefore, Louis' diplomacy had to clear the way to make sure he did not fight everyone at once.  For this purpose he skillfully used money to neutralize potential enemies (such as Charles II of England in the Secret Treaty of Dover) and extracted favorable terms from stalemate or losing situations.  But Louis could also make some fateful blunders to hurt his cause.  His obsessive hatred of the Dutch dominated his policy too much, as did his own self-confidence and arrogance in trying to publicly humiliate his enemies.  However, this just alarmed Louis' enemies more, especially the Dutch, Austrians, and English, who allied against Louis to preserve the balance of power.
  • Exhaustion on both sides finally led to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.  Louis' grandson took the throne of Spain and its American empire, but the French and Spanish thrones could not be united under one ruler.  Austria got the Spanish Netherlands to contain French aggression to the north.  Just as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had contained Hapsburg aggression, the Treaty of Utrecht contained French expansion.  Two years later Louis XIV was dead, with little to show for his vaunted ambitions as a conqueror except an exhausted economy and dissatisfied populace.
  • Just as Louis's palace at Versailles dominated European culture during the late 1600's and early 1700's, his diplomacy and wars dominated Europeans political history.  As Louis himself put it: "The character of a conqueror is regarded as the noblest and highest of titles."  Interestingly enough, he never led his troops in battle except for overseeing a few sieges from a safe distance.
  • I am the state. — Voltaire, incorrectly quoting Louis XIV
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