Coates demonstrates that white Americans’ fear of black Americans, and their impulse to control blacks, are integral to the rise of the carceral state. A result is that one of every four black men born since the late 1970s has spent time in prison, at profound cost to his family. For this, Coates holds Moynihan, in part, responsible.
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Responsibility for Mass Incarceration - The Atlantic - 0 views
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My argument is that mass incarceration is built on a long history of viewing black people as unequal in general, and criminal in the specific.
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Moynihan presented a portrait to the president of an America riven by two groups—hard-working, law-abiding, working-class whites and criminal and scheming blacks.
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Through all of his memos Moynihan remains thoroughly committed to government action to help black families. He believes the black poor to be “unusually self-damaging,” but he does not believe they should be left to their fate. He believes the government should invest in poor black communities. But this is accompanied by a telling dig—aiding the ghettoes would prevent the militant black middle class from threatening the “the larger society much as the desperate bank robber threatens to drop the vial of nitroglycerin.” Moynihan used the rhetoric of black criminalization, even in arguing for government aid. It takes a peculiar blindness to wonder why we built prisons instead.
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The point is not that Moynihan wanted prisons. I am certain the growth in incarceration truly horrified Moynihan. And I don’t doubt for a minute the sincerity in the words that Weiner quotes in Moynihan’s defense. But the possession of good intentions, and deep sympathies, does not absolve men with power of their responsibility, nor of their imprudence. Whatever his ultimate goals, Moynihan buttressed, and employed, the logic of black criminality and white victimhood
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I spent the past year poring over books on and by Moynihan and examining as many memos written by him and articles on him as I could get my hands on. I came away with tremendous respect for his intelligence, his foresight and his broad, ranging curiosity. I did not come away from the research thinking him a racist. I did not come away thinking he was a conservative. But this is precisely the point. The story of mass incarceration, of American racism, is not simply a story of evil racists. It is also the story of people trying to help. And it is also the story of these same people not fully understanding the ugly traditions alive in their own country. Black criminalization is such a tradition and when Moynihan employed it he was playing with fire. Others got burned.
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BBC News - Obama official Jofi Joseph fired over insulting tweets - 0 views
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A senior White House official has been sacked after being unmasked as the man behind a widely read Twitter account that provided an abrasive commentary on his colleagues for more than two years.
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Jofi Joseph, 40, was fired from his job on the National Security Council nuclear non-proliferation team.
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He apologised for his "inappropriate and mean-spirited comments".
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In his tweets, Mr Joseph gave a lacerating commentary on anything from policy to personal appearance.
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, Mr Joseph joined Republican attacks on Mrs Clinton for perceived failings of her handling of last year's attack on the US diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.
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The Daily Beast website broke the news of his sacking, describing it as a shock and saying Mr Joseph was "well known among policy wonks".
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But it said that "inside the administration, there was little sympathy for the man who they feel had betrayed their confidence while taunting them all the while".
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In an apology emailed to Politico, Mr Joseph said: "It has been a privilege to serve in this administration and I deeply regret violating the trust and confidence placed in me.
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"What started out as an intended parody account of DC culture developed over time into a series of inappropriate and mean-spirited comments. I bear complete responsibility for this affair and I sincerely apologise to everyone I insulted."
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The Right Way to Remember the Confederacy - WSJ - 1 views
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Symbols matter. They say at a glimpse what words cannot, encapsulating beliefs and aspirations, prejudices and fears. Having no intrinsic value, they take meaning from the way we use them, changing over time along with our actions. The most obvious example is the ancient “gammadion,” which in early Eastern cultures meant “god,” “good luck,” “eternity” and other benign conjurations. We know it today as the swastika, and a quarter-century of usage by the Nazis forever poisoned it in Western culture.
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Southern “heritage” groups who oppose removing the battle flag are reluctant to acknowledge that this same dynamic has tainted their cherished emblem. But it has.
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Whatever the flag meant from 1865 to 1940, the flag’s misuse by a white minority of outspokenly bigoted and often violent people has indelibly shifted that meaning. It is now remembered around the world with images of defiant governors standing in schoolhouse doors, with the snapping dogs of Birmingham, with police barricades to keep black youths out of classrooms, with beatings and lynchings in the night, with churches set ablaze, with fear, intimidation, hatred and the constant reminder that the descendants of slaves were not welcome in their own country.
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Defenders of the battle flag often further assert that Southern secession and the resultant Civil War had little or nothing to do with slavery, arguing that only a tiny fraction of people in the seceding states—usually cited as 3% to 6%—actually owned slaves. Thus, they say, the flag’s opponents are wrong to condemn it is a symbol of slavery and oppression.
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But somebody owned the 3.5 million slaves in the Confederate states in 1861. In fact, census records reveal that 31% of all Confederate households held one or more slaves. The same records show that on farms large enough to avail themselves of slave labor, as many as 70% of planters owned their workers. Such ownership defined wealth and social status, regional culture and economic survival. The prospect of abolishing slavery threatened to upend the slave states’ societies and economies
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My fellow white Southerners today need feel no shame in confronting the motivations of our ancestors. The Confederates were men and women of their era; we can only judge them legitimately in that context. Otherwise, we could reject virtually all of human history on one currently unacceptable ground or another. As with symbols, standards, norms and mores change over the ages. We could be shocked indeed were we to live long enough to see how Americans 150 years from now might judge us by the measures of their time.
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Moreover, defending the battle flag with appeals to pride in ancestry and heritage evades the issue, deliberately and unsubtly. Black and white Americans today do not reject this emblem primarily because of what happened in the 1860s. They object because of what the flag has come to symbolize in the U.S. and around the world in our own lifetimes.
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When we remember that common tax revenues support every expense connected with flying that flag or with displaying Confederate emblems on federal, state or municipal property, we confront the cruel irony of African-American taxpayers being forced to subsidize constant reminders of past and present injustices. Whatever private individuals and groups choose to do on their persons and their private property—and as Americans, they must be allowed their freedom of expression—the battle flag should disappear from display on public property
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Lee understood symbols. After the war, he opposed efforts to place monuments on the Confederacy’s battlefields. In 1869, he counseled that Southerners ought to “obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”
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All of which demands that we ask: Can we ever separate the memory of the Confederate experience from the memory of slavery? Is there any positive legacy to be drawn from the Confederacy? Can we admire Confederate leaders, even the all-but-deified Lee, without tacitly endorsing their cause? Ultimately, can we make the Confederacy worth remembering for the descendants of the slaves and those following generations of freedmen whom the whole nation betrayed by ignoring their new rights and liberties for a century?
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Such an exercise can come only by directly and honestly addressing the Confederacy and the war it fought, and owning up to the ways they are remembered—both of which are vital to understanding America’s course since 1860. To that end, the Confederacy’s monuments and symbols can be vital learning tools if placed in context. They must be preserved, not expunged. They must be understood, not whitewashed.
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The shibboleth that “state rights” caused secession is a suit of clothes desperately lacking an emperor. Only slavery (and its surrounding economic and political issues) had the power to propel white Southerners to disunion and, ultimately, war. Ironically, by taking a course that led to a war that they lost, the Confederates themselves launched the juggernaut that led to emancipation. To understand how freedom and justice came, why it was delayed for a century after the Civil War and why today so much mistrust and misunderstanding persists between black and white Americans, the vital starting point remains the Confederacy.
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In the end, Americans cannot afford to forget the Confederacy. It is a good thing that the Confederacy failed—not least because a permanently divided America would have had neither the strength nor the worldliness to confront the next century’s totalitarian menaces. But the Confederate experience also teaches lessons about Americans themselves—about how they have reacted in crisis, about matters beyond just bravery and sacrifice that constitute the bedrock of our national being.
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The Confederates were seen at the time as traitors by the North, and they are seen as racists down to the present day, but in the main, they sincerely believed that they were holding true to the guiding principles of democracy.
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To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, America has ever been a laboratory for that democracy. The Confederacy is its most notable failed experiment. The debate over the relation of the states to the federal government had been present since independence. The idea that secession was an alternative if conflicts over sovereignty couldn’t be resolved arose often enough that it was likely to be tried eventually, and so the Confederates tried. They failed. But good scientists don’t erase their laboratory failures; they learn from them.
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Franzen on freedom: The foibles of modern life in a borderline rogue state | The Economist - 0 views
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the last decade, America has emerged, even in its own estimation, as a problem state. That is, there are many criticisms one could make, as early as, well, our treatment of the Indians. It goes way back. And our long relationship with slavery—there have been some problems with the country at many points. And then the Cold War, we were certainly culpable. But the degree to which we are almost a rogue state, and causing enormous trouble around the world in our attempt to preserve our freedom to drive SUVs and whatever, by—MANZOOR: Operation Enduring Freedom.FRANZEN: Operation Enduring Freedom, good. It does make one wonder, what is it in the national character that is making us such a problem state? And I think a kind of mixed-up, childish notion of freedom
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Even the hardened neo-con architects of the war in Iraq are idealists of sorts, sincerely believing that frequent displays of America's awesome power to wreak devastation and death prevent even deadlier wars and make more favourable the chance that freedom will flourish worldwide. The United States is "causing enormous trouble around the world" not due to some muddled idea of freedom, but due to a mixed-up conviction that America is special, the vanguard of providence, called forth unto the world with the righteous sword of liberation. If America is "almost a rogue state", it is because our Pharisaic self-infatuation encourages us to see ourselves as a colossus of emancipation both able and obligated to stomp around the globe making it safe for democracy.
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not unlike empires of yore, America is a problem state because it is rich, powerful, and almost religiously full of itself.
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shared by Javier E on 13 Jan 11
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First Comes Fear - NYTimes.com - 0 views
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...before-hatred-comes-fear
fear demonization responsibility discourse technology US
shared by Javier E on 13 Jan 11
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Six months ago, police in California pulled over a truck that turned out to contain a rifle, a handgun, a shotgun and body armor. Police learned from the driver — sometime after he opened fire on them — that he was heading for San Francisco, where he planned to kill people at the Tides Foundation. You’ve probably never heard of the Tides Foundation — unless you watch Glenn Beck, who had mentioned it more than two dozen times in the preceding six months, depicting it as part of a communist plot to “infiltrate” our society and seize control of big business.
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The point is that Americans who wildly depict other Americans as dark conspirators, as the enemy, are in fact increasing the chances, however marginally, that those Americans will be attacked.
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calls to violence, explicit or implicit, can have effect. But the more incendiary theme in current discourse is the consignment of Americans to the category of alien, of insidious other. Once Glenn Beck had sufficiently demonized people at the Tides Foundation, actually advocating the violence wasn’t necessary.
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My own view is that if you decide to go kill a bunch of innocent people, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re not a picture of mental health. But that doesn’t sever the link between you and the people who inspired you, or insulate them from responsibility. Glenn Beck knows that there are lots of unbalanced people out there, and that his message reaches some of them. This doesn’t make him morally culpable for the way these people react to things he says that are true. It doesn’t even make him responsible for the things he says that are false but that he sincerely believes are true. But it does make him responsible for things he says that are false and concocted to mislead gullible people.
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What’s not transient, unfortunately, is the technological trend that drives much of this. It isn’t just that people can now build a cocoon of cable channels and Web sites that insulates them from inconvenient facts. It’s also that this cocoon insulates them from other Americans — including the groups of Americans who, inside the cocoon, are being depicted as evil aliens. It’s easy to buy into the demonization of people you never communicate with, and whose views you never see depicted by anyone other than their adversaries.
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ISIS Hostages Endured Torture and Dashed Hopes, Freed Cellmates Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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What appeared to be a turning point was in fact the start of a downward spiral for Mr. Foley, a 40-year-old journalist, that ended in August when he was forced to his knees somewhere in the bald hills of Syria and beheaded as a camera rolled.
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but as conditions grew more desperate, they turned on one another. Some, including Mr. Foley, sought comfort in the faith of their captors, embracing Islam and taking Muslim names.
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More than an hour later, they flagged a taxi for the 25-mile drive to Turkey. They never reached the border.The gunmen who sped up behind their taxi did not call themselves the Islamic State because the group did not yet exist on Nov. 22, 2012, the day the two men were grabbed.
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The kidnappings, which were carried out by different groups of fighters jousting for influence and territory in Syria, became more frequent. In June 2013, four French journalists were abducted. In September, the militants grabbed three Spanish journalists.
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At first, the abuse did not appear to have a larger purpose. Nor did the jihadists seem to have a plan for their growing number of hostages.Mr. Bontinck said Mr. Foley and Mr. Cantlie had first been held by the Nusra Front, a Qaeda affiliate. Their guards, an English-speaking trio whom they nicknamed “the Beatles,” seemed to take pleasure in brutalizing them.Later, they were handed over to a group called the Mujahedeen Shura Council, led by French speakers.Mr. Foley and Mr. Cantlie were moved at least three times before being transferred to a prison underneath the Children’s Hospital of Aleppo.
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Mr. Foley converted to Islam soon after his capture and adopted the name Abu Hamza, Mr. Bontinck said. (His conversion was confirmed by three other recently released hostages, as well as by his former employer.)“I recited the Quran with him,” Mr. Bontinck said. “Most people would say, ‘Let’s convert so that we can get better treatment.’ But in his case, I think it was sincere.”
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When Mr. Bontinck was released, he jotted down the phone number of Mr. Foley’s parents and promised to call them. They made plans to meet again.He left thinking that the journalists, like him, would soon be freed.
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After months of holding them without making any demands, the jihadists suddenly devised a plan to ransom them. Starting last November, each prisoner was told to hand over the email address of a relative. Mr. Foley gave the address of his younger brother.The group sent a blitz of messages to the families of the hostages.Those who were able to lay the emails side by side could see they had been cut and pasted from the same template.
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Within this subset, the person who suffered the cruelest treatment, the former hostages said, was Mr. Foley. In addition to receiving prolonged beatings, he underwent mock executions and was repeatedly waterboarded.
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Mr. Foley shared his meager rations. In the cold of the Syrian winter, he offered another prisoner his only blanket.He kept the others entertained, proposing games and activities like Risk, a board game that involves moving imaginary armies across a map: another favorite pastime in the Foley family. The hostages made a chess set out of discarded paper. They re-enacted movies, retelling them scene by scene. And they arranged for members of the group to give lectures on topics they knew well.
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By June, the cellblock that had once held at least 23 people had been reduced to just seven. Four of them were Americans, and three were British — all citizens of countries whose governments had refused to pay ransoms.
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shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 16
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What a divided America actually hears when Obama speaks - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...5-88cd-753e80cd29ad_story.html
polarization politics obama perception partisan
shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 16
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According to experts who study polarization, Americans don’t necessarily disagree more on policy. What has changed is the level of mistrust, and even vitriol, Americans have for politicians and their fellow citizens on the other side of the political divide. It is a suspicion that makes people question their neighbors’ motives, their sincerity and their intelligence.
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“We’ve become so entrenched in our partisan identities. . . . It’s like a really intense sports rivalry. It’s not about policy but an emotional distrust of the other side.”
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A senior White House official put it event more bluntly: “We’re literally growing apart from each other.”
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A major focus for Obama during his final year in office is to blunt those divisions by trying to remind Americans of the values that they share. “It will be core to what you hear from us this year,” said David Simas, the White House director of political strategy. “You can expect to hear it in every setting, in every place, around any topic and speech, because it is that important to the president.”
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The challenge for Obama — and virtually every politician today — is breaking through in a climate defined more by alienation, frustration and anger than differences on policy. Policies can be modified or changed. But how does a president persuade an angry and mistrustful nation to actually listen to each other?
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“Once we lose the ability to talk to each other, we lose the ability to reach consensus, which is at the core of politics in Washington and every town hall around the nation.”
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Republican presidential debate: 6 takeaways - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views
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Republican presidential debate: 6 takeaways
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Rubio called the real estate mogul's Trump University "a fake school." He invoked Trump's business record to question his sincerity on immigration, saying: "You're the only person on this stage that's ever been fined for hiring people that worked on your projects illegally."
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Rubio pressed for more specifics, saying that "now he's repeating himself" -- an ironic response from a candidate who has been mocked as robotic for repeating talking points at speeches and debates.
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When Trump said he was simply a "negotiator," Rubio shot back: "The Palestinians are not a real estate deal, Donald."
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He spent much of his time attacking Trump, too -- but Cruz was clearly Robin to Rubio's Batman in going after the front-runner on stage.
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But Carson may own social media for another line. When it comes to choosing a Supreme Court nominee, Carson said, he would look examine "the fruit salad of their life."
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Harvard Law to Abandon Crest Linked to Slavery - The New York Times - 0 views
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Harvard Law School is poised to abandon an 80-year-old shield based on the crest of a slaveholding family that helped endow the institution, as campuses across the country debate the use of historic names and symbols that some consider offensive.
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s. Gordon-Reed said sheaves of wheat had also appeared on American pennies and did not have the visceral associations of a Confederate or Nazi flag. Besides, she said, since it was designed in 1936, the shield had taken on its own meaning, separate from the Royall family, honoring the law school graduates. Her opinion acknowledged the complexities that universities confront in dealing with these issues and was a rare departure from the cautious approach of many campuses.
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In the letter of apology, the deans, Stephen Lassonde and Thomas Dingman, said the place mat “failed to account for the many viewpoints that exist on our campus.
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In an email Friday, Ms. Gordon-Reed said she had been influenced by her scholarship on Hemings. “This is my life’s work,” she said. “I sincerely believe that we owe it to the enslaved to work through those feelings and think of ways to carry their stories forward. And we should do that in a way that shows the inherently entwined nature of the good and bad of our past, using written text and symbols like the sheaves and, even, buildings like Monticello.”
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The Enduring Impact of World War I - The New York Times - 0 views
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the bloodiest episode of combat in human history, generating 60,000 casualties in a single day
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but its occurrence in a television program that is acutely sensitive to historical accuracy is a sign of just how deeply, if in some ways obscurely, World War I remains embedded in the popular consciousness.
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“the war to end all wars,” it has instead become the war to which all subsequent wars, and much else in modern life, seem to refer.
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novel form of organized mass death.
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filtered through the blood, smoke and misery of those earlier engagements.
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tablished a pattern that would continue to hold, consciously and not, for much of the 20th century.
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a tradition that included not only martial epics and popular adventure novels but also religious and romantic allegories like John Bunyan’s
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That soldier, in turn, with some adjustments of outfit and equipment, would march through the subsequent decades, leaving behind a corpus of remarkably consistent firsthand testimony.
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This was clear enough to Larkin, whose patriotism rested on the notion that England was the worst place on earth with the possible exception of everywhere else.
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The title of “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien’s cycle of autobiographical stories about life before, during and after combat in Vietnam,
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“There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.
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has remained in effect even as the geography has changed.
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arkin’s subject is less the war as such than a faded England of “archaic faces” and bygone habits, an England that ceased to exist sometime
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arkin also suggests that it is complicated, even deceptive. Individuals like the anonymous children and husbands
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last few centuries conquering most of the rest of the globe are another story. Photo
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whole, its legacy for the individual veteran will be cynicism and disillusionment.
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To imply that Britain (or for that matter any other combatant nation)
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Another, favored at the time by a handful of vanguard intellectuals (notably the Italian Futurists)
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ccounts of that summer, especially in France and Britain, frequently emphasize beautiful weather and holiday pleasures.
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A lovely example of the interplay of empirical reality and literary embellishment: the meteorological record will attest to the color and clarity of the sky, but only the cruel, corrective irony of hindsight can summon the word “optimistic.”
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chapters will also make clear the extent to which that “civilization,” so intoxicated by its own rhetoric of national glory and heroic destiny
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argely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”
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After Sept. 11, 2001, we were told — we told ourselves — that everything had changed. In a curious reversal of the logic of the Great War, the
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detachment and personal whimsy” would give way to an ethic of seriousness and sincerity.
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Ordinary soldiers were routinely referred to as “heroes” and “warriors,” even as their deaths and injuries were kept from public view.
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But the Great War is not quite finished with us. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have wound down in bloody inconclusiveness, the men and women who served in them have started writing,
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The book belongs in the irreverent company of “Catch-22,” which is to say on the same shelf as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Chevalier’s “Fear.”
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“The Things They Carried.” A deceptively modest collection of linked short stories, “Redeployment” bristles with place names,
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who derived a stark lesson from his own experience at the Battle of the Somme: “The War had won, and would go on winning.”
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Honest and Dishonest Socialism - WSJ - 0 views
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The Clinton political method appears to be a dominant gene, because Chelsea started the onslaught. Mr. Sanders “wants to dismantle” Medicare, ObamaCare and the state children’s health insurance program, she said. “I worry if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we’ll go back to an era—before we had the Affordable Care Act—that would strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance.”
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The former first lady was confronted with Chelsea’s cheap shot on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Wednesday. “You know, I adore my daughter and I know what she was saying,” she replied, going on to argue that her daughter was technically right that Mr. Sanders would “dismantle” entitlements in their current form
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The difference between Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton is political character. He’s a sincere socialist who follows his principles, however unrealistic or calamitous, to their logical conclusions. Mrs. Clinton will conceal her true ambitions if that’s what it takes to win, and she’ll drop on her opponents any political anvils that happen to be handy.
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Japanese Culture: 4th Edition (Updated and Expanded) (Kindle version) (Studies of the W... - 0 views
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It is fitting that Japan’s earliest remaining works, composed at a time when the country was so strongly under the civilizing influence of China, should be of a historical character. In the Confucian tradition, the writing of history has always been held in the highest esteem, since Confucianists believe that the lessons of the past provide the best guide for ethical rule in the present and future. In contrast to the Indians, who have always been absorbed with metaphysical and religious speculation and scarcely at all with history, the Chinese are among the world’s greatest record-keepers.
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he wrote that it is precisely because life and nature are changeable and uncertain that things have the power to move us.
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The turbulent centuries of the medieval age produced many new cultural pursuits that catered to the tastes of various classes of society, including warriors, merchants, and even peasants. Yet, coloring nearly all these pursuits was miyabi, reflected in a fundamental preference on the part of the Japanese for the elegant, the restrained, and the subtly suggestive.
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“Nothing in the West can compare with the role which aesthetics has played in Japanese life and history since the Heian period”; and “the miyabi spirit of refined sensibility is still very much in evidence” in modern aesthetic criticism.9
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there has run through history the idea that the Japanese are, in terms of their original nature (that is, their nature before the introduction from the outside of such systems of thought and religion as Confucianism and Buddhism), essentially an emotional people. And in stressing the emotional side of human nature, the Japanese have always assigned high value to sincerity (makoto) as the ethic of the emotions.
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If the life of the emotions thus had an ethic in makoto, the evolution of mono no aware in the Heian period provided it also with an aesthetic.
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Tsurayuki said, in effect, that people are emotional entities and will intuitively and spontaneously respond in song and verse when they perceive things and are moved. The most basic sense of mono no aware is the capacity to be moved by things, whether they are the beauties of nature or the feelings of people,
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One of the finest artistic achievements of the middle and late Heian period was the evolution of a native style of essentially secular painting that reached its apex in the narrative picture scrolls of the twelfth century. The products of this style of painting are called “Yamato [that is, Japanese] pictures” to distinguish them from works categorized as “Chinese pictures.”
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The Fujiwara epoch, in literature as well as the visual arts, was soft, approachable, and “feminine.” By contrast, the earlier Jōgan epoch had been forbidding, secretive (esoteric), and “masculine.”
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Despite the apparent lust of the samurai for armed combat and martial renown, much romanticized in later centuries, the underlying tone of the medieval age in Japan was from the beginning somber, pessimistic, and despairing. In The Tale of Genji the mood shifted from satisfaction with the perfections of Heian courtier society to uncertainty about this life and a craving for salvation in the next.
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Despite political woes and territorial losses, the Sung was a time of great advancement in Chinese civilization. Some scholars, impressed by the extensive growth in cities, commerce, maritime trade, and governmental bureaucratization in the late T’ang and Sung, have even asserted that this was the age when China entered its “early modern” phase. The Sung was also a brilliant period culturally.
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the fortuitous combination of desire on the part of the Sung to increase its foreign trade with Japan and the vigorous initiative taken in maritime activity by the Taira greatly speeded the process of transmission.
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The Sung period in China, on the other hand, was an exceptional age for scholarship, most notably perhaps in history and in the compilation of encyclopedias and catalogs of art works. This scholarly activity was greatly facilitated by the development of printing, invented by the Chinese several centuries earlier.
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In addition to reviving interest in Japanese poetry, the use of kana also made possible the evolution of a native prose literature.
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peasantry, who formed the nucleus of what came to be known as the True Sect of Pure Land Buddhism. Through the centuries, this sect has attracted one of the largest followings among the Japanese, and its founder, Shinran, has been canonized as one of his country’s most original religious thinkers.
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True genre art, picturing all classes at work and play, did not appear in Japan until the sixteenth century. The oldest extant genre painting of the sixteenth century is a work, dating from about 1525, called “Views Inside and Outside Kyoto” (rakuchū-rakugai zu).
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the aesthetic principles that were largely to dictate the tastes of the medieval era. We have just remarked the use of sabi. Another major term of the new medieval aesthetics was yūgen, which can be translated as “mystery and depth.” Let
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One of the basic values in the Japanese aesthetic tradition—along with such things as perishability, naturalness, and simplicity—is suggestion. The Japanese have from earliest times shown a distinct preference for the subtleties of suggestion, intimation, and nuance, and have characteristically sought to achieve artistic effect by means of “resonances” (yojō).
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Amidism was not established as a separate sect until the time of the evangelist Hōnen (1133–1212).
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But even in Chōmei we can observe a tendency to transform what is supposed to be a mean hovel into something of beauty based on an aesthetic taste for “deprivation” (to be discussed later in this chapter) that evolved during medieval times.
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Apart from the proponents of Pure Land Buddhism, the person who most forcefully propagated the idea of universal salvation through faith was Nichiren (1222–82).
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Nichiren held that ultimate religious truth lay solely in the Lotus Sutra, the basic text of the Greater Vehicle of Buddhism in which Gautama had revealed that all beings possess the potentiality for buddhahood.
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At the time of its founding in Japan by Saichō in the early ninth century, the Tendai sect had been based primarily on the Lotus Sutra; but, in the intervening centuries, Tendai had deviated from the Sutra’s teachings and had even spawned new sects, like those of Pure Land Buddhism, that encouraged practices entirely at variance with these teachings.
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Declaring himself “the pillar of Japan, the eye of the nation, and the vessel of the country,”14 Nichiren seems even to have equated himself with Japan and its fate.
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The kōan is especially favored by what the Japanese call the Rinzai sect of Zen, which is also known as the school of “sudden enlightenment” because of its belief that satori, if it is attained, will come to the individual in an instantaneous flash of insight or awareness. The other major sect of Zen, Sōtō, rejects this idea of sudden enlightenment and instead holds that satori is a gradual process to be attained primarily through seated meditation.
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Fought largely in Kyoto and its environs, the Ōnin War dragged on for more than ten years, and after the last armies withdrew in 1477 the once lovely capital lay in ruins. There was no clear-cut victor in the Ōnin War. The daimyos had simply fought themselves into exhaustion,
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Yoshimasa was perhaps even more noteworthy as a patron of the arts than his grandfather, Yoshimitsu. In any case, his name is just as inseparably linked with the flourishing of culture in the Higashiyama epoch (usually taken to mean approximately the last half of the fifteenth century) as Yoshimitsu’s is with that of Kitayama.
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The tea room, as a variant of the shoin room, evolved primarily in the sixteenth century.
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Shukō’s admonition about taking care to “harmonize Japanese and Chinese tastes” has traditionally been taken to mean that he stood, in the late fifteenth century, at a point of transition from the elegant and “aristocratic” kind of Higashiyama chanoyu just described, which featured imported Chinese articles, to a new, Japanese form of the ceremony that used native ceramics,
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the new kind of tea ceremony originated by Shukō is called wabicha, or “tea based on wabi.” Developed primarily by Shukō’s successors during the sixteenth century, wabicha is a subject for the next chapter.
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The Japanese, on the other hand, have never dealt with nature in their art in the universalistic sense of trying to discern any grand order or structure; much less have they tried to associate the ideal of order in human society with the harmonies of nature. Rather,
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The Chinese Sung-style master may have admired a mountain, for example, for its enduring, fixed quality, but the typical Japanese artist (of the fifteenth century or any other age) has been more interested in a mountain for its changing aspects:
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Zen culture of Muromachi Japan was essentially a secular culture. This seems to be strong evidence, in fact, of the degree to which medieval Zen had become secularized: its view of nature was pantheistic and its concern with man was largely psychological.
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Nobunaga’s castle at Azuchi and Hideyoshi’s at Momoyama have given their names to the cultural epoch of the age of unification. The designation of this epoch as Azuchi-Momoyama (or, for the sake of convenience, simply Momoyama) is quite appropriate in view of the significance of castles—as represented by these two historically famous structures—in the general progress, cultural and otherwise, of these exciting years.
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Along with architecture, painting was the art that most fully captured the vigorous and expansive spirit of the Momoyama epoch of domestic culture during the age of unification. It was a time when many styles of painting and groups of painters flourished. Of the latter, by far the best known and most successful were the Kanō,
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Motonobu also made free use of the colorful Yamato style of native art that had evolved during the Heian period and had reached its pinnacle in the great narrative picture scrolls of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
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what screen painting really called for was color, and it was this that the Kanō artists, drawing on the native Yamato tradition, added to their work with great gusto during the Momoyama epoch. The color that these artists particularly favored was gold, and compositions done in ink and rich pigments on gold-leaf backgrounds became the most characteristic works of Momoyama art.
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there could hardly be a more striking contrast between the spirits of two ages than the one reflected in the transition from the subdued monochromatic art of Japan’s medieval era to the blazing use of color by Momoyama artists, who stood on the threshold of early modern times.
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aware, which, as we saw in Chapter 3, connotes the capacity to be moved by things. In the period of the Shinkokinshū, when Saigyō lived, this sentiment was particularly linked with the aesthetic of sabi or “loneliness” (and, by association, sadness). The human condition was essentially one of loneliness;
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During the sixteenth century the ceremony was further developed as wabicha, or tea (cha) based on the aesthetic of wabi. Haga Kōshirō defines wabi as comprising three kinds of beauty: a simple, unpretentious beauty; an imperfect, irregular beauty; and an austere, stark beauty.
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The alternate attendance system also had important consequences in the cultural realm, contributing to the development for the first time of a truly national culture. Thus, for example, the daimyos and their followers from throughout the country who regularly visited Edo were the disseminators of what became a national dialect or “lingua franca” and, ultimately, the standard language of modern Japan.
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They also fostered the spread of customs, rules of etiquette, standards of taste, fashions, and the like that gave to Japanese everywhere a common lifestyle.
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“[Tokugawa-period] statesmen thought highly of agriculture, but not of agriculturalists.”6 The life of the average peasant was one of much toil and little joy. Organized into villages that were largely self-governing, the peasants were obliged to render a substantial portion of their farming yields—on average, perhaps 50 percent or more—to the samurai, who provided few services in return. The resentment of peasants toward samurai grew steadily throughout the Tokugawa period and was manifested in countless peasant rebellions
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Although in the long run the seclusion policy undeniably limited the economic growth of Tokugawa Japan by its severe restrictions both on foreign trade and on the inflow of technology from overseas, it also ensured a lasting peace that made possible a great upsurge in the domestic economy, especially during the first century of shogunate rule.
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Both samurai and peasants were dependent almost solely on income from agriculture and constantly suffered declines in real income as the result of endemic inflation; only the townsmen, who as commercialists could adjust to price fluctuations, were in a position to profit significantly from the economic growth of the age.
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We should not be surprised, therefore, to find this class giving rise to a lively and exuberant culture that reached its finest flowering in the Genroku epoch at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The mainstays of Genroku culture were the theatre, painting (chiefly in the form of the woodblock print), and prose fiction,
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The Japanese had, of course, absorbed Confucian thinking from the earliest centuries of contact with China, but for more than a millennium Buddhism had drawn most of their intellectual attention. Not until the Tokugawa period did they come to study Confucianism with any great zeal.
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One of the most conspicuous features of the transition from medieval to early modern times in Japan was the precipitous decline in the vigor of Buddhism and the rise of a secular spirit.
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The military potential and much of the remaining landed wealth of the medieval Buddhist sects had been destroyed during the advance toward unification in the late sixteenth century. And although Buddhism remained very much part of the daily lives of the people, it not only ceased to hold appeal for many Japanese intellectuals but indeed even drew the outright scorn and enmity of some.
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it was the Buddhist church—and especially the Zen sect—that paved the way for the upsurge in Confucian studies during Tokugawa times. Japanese Zen priests had from at least the fourteenth century on assiduously investigated the tenets of Sung Neo-Confucianism, and in ensuing centuries had produced a corpus of research upon which the Neo-Confucian scholarship of the Tokugawa period was ultimately built.
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Yamaga Sokō is generally credited as the formulator of the code of bushidō, or the “way of the warrior.”4 Certainly he was a pioneer in analyzing the role of the samurai as a member of a true ruling elite and not simply as a rough, and frequently illiterate, participant in the endless civil struggles of the medieval age.
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The fundamental purpose of Neo-Confucian practice is to calm one’s turbid ki to allow one’s nature (ri) to shine forth. The person who achieves this purpose becomes a sage, his ri seen as one with the universal principle, known as the “supreme ultimate” (taikyoku), that governs all things.
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Neo-Confucianism proposed two main courses to clarify ri, one objective and the other subjective.7 The objective course was through the acquisition of knowledge by means of the “investigation of things,” a phrase taken by Chu Hsi from the Chinese classic The Great Learning (Ta hsüeh). At the heart of things to investigate was history,
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Quite apart from any practical guidance to good rulership it may have provided, this Neo-Confucian stress on historical research proved to be a tremendous spur to scholarship and learning in general during the Tokugawa period;8 and, as we will see in the next chapter, it also facilitated the development of other, heterodox lines of intellectual inquiry.
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the subjective course appeared to have been taken almost directly from Buddhism, and in particular Zen. It was the course of “preserving one’s heart by holding fast to seriousness,” which called for the clarification of ri by means remarkably similar to Zen meditation.
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The calendrical era of Genro ku lasted from 1688 until 1703, but the Genroku cultural epoch is usually taken to mean the span of approximately a half-century from, say, 1675 until 1725. Setting the stage for this rise of a townsman-oriented culture was nearly a century of peace and steady commercial growth.
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places of diversion and assignation, these quarters were the famous “floating worlds” (ukiyo) of Tokugawa fact and legend. Ukiyo, although used specifically from about this time to designate such demimondes, meant in the broadest sense the insubstantial and ever-changing existence in which man is enmeshed.
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ukiyo15 always carried the connotation that life is fundamentally sad; but, in Genroku times, the term was more commonly taken to mean a world that was pleasurable precisely because it was constantly changing, exciting, and up-to-date.
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the Tokugawa period was not at all like the humanism that emerged in the West from the Renaissance on. Whereas modern Western humanism became absorbed with people as individuals, with all their personal peculiarities, feelings, and ways, Japanese humanism of the Tokugawa period scarcely conceived of the existence of true individuals at all; rather, it focused on “the people” and regarded them as comprising essentially types, such as samurai, farmers, and courtesans.
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there is little in the literature as a whole of that quality—character development—that is probably the single most important feature of the modern Western novel.
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Although shogunate authorities and Tokugawa-period intellectuals in general had relatively little interest in the purely metaphysical side of Chu Hsi’s teachings, they found his philosophy to be enormously useful in justifying or ideologically legitimizing the feudal structure of state and society that had emerged in Japan by the seventeenth century.
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With its radical advocacy of violent irrationality—to the point of psychosis—Hagakure has shocked many people. But during Japan’s militarist years of the 1930s and World War II, soldiers and others hailed it as something of a bible of samurai behavior, and the postwar nationalist writer Mishima Yukio was even inspired to write a book in praise of its values.
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It is significant that many of the leading prose writers, poets, and critics of the most prominent journal of Japanese romanticism, Bungakukai (The Literary World, published from 1893 until 1898), were either converts to or strongly influenced by Protestant Christianity, the only creed in late Meiji Japan that gave primacy to the freedom and spiritual independence of the individual. The absolutism embodied in the Meiji Constitution demanded strict subordination of the interests of the individual to those of the state;
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The feeling of frustration engendered by a society that placed such preponderant stress upon obedience to the group, especially in the form of filial piety toward one’s parents and loyalty to the state, no doubt accounts for much of the sense of alienation observable in the works of so many modern Japanese writers.
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These writers have been absorbed to an unusual degree with the individual, the world of his personal psychology, and his essential loneliness. In line with this preoccupation, novelists have perennially turned to the diary-like, confessional tale—the so-called I-novel—as their preferred medium of expression.
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In intellectual and emotional terms, the military came increasingly to be viewed as the highest repository of the traditional Japanese spirit that was the sole hope for unifying the nation to act in a time of dire emergency.
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The enemy that had led the people astray was identified as those sociopolitical doctrines and ideologies that had been introduced to Japan from the West during the preceding half-century or so along with the material tools of modernization.
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If there is a central theme to this book, it is that the Japanese, within the context of a history of abundant cultural borrowing from China in premodern times and the West in the modern age, have nevertheless retained a hard core of native social, ethical, and cultural values by means of which they have almost invariably molded and adapted foreign borrowing to suit their own tastes and purposes.
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Opinion | The Myths of Voter ID - The New York Times - 0 views
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a new study, one of the largest to date, from the economists Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons, which assessed the impact of voter ID laws between 2008 and 2016 using a nationwide voter file. The study finds that requiring voter identification has no effect on turnout — not overall, and not on “any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.”
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a literature review in 2017 that filtered out studies with obvious design flaws reported “modest, if any, turnout effects of voter identification laws” in the best research on the subject. So a voter ID requirement might possibly affect the closest of close races, based on what we’ve learned up till now — but if the Cantoni and Pons results hold up, the real effect is basically nil.
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But before conservatives claim vindication, the new paper also casts doubt on the argument for voter ID laws, finding no effect on fraud itself, nor even any effect on public confidence in the integrity of the ballot.
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No matter where you stand on the voter fraud-voter suppression controversies, these findings strengthen the case for dialing down outrage, reducing anxiety and generally recognizing that if we stopped pushing for these laws and stopped freaking out about how they supposedly doom democracy, voting in America would rattle along basically unchanged
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since it’s conservatives and Republicans who are the prime mover here, because they’re generally the ones pushing legal changes, they also have the primary obligation to step back and stand down.
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At the same time there’s also no question that a lot of Republican operatives pushing voter ID laws are cynics who expect their party to benefit from lower minority turnout, and a number of professional right-wing partisans — including our president — see an upside in frightening their voters or viewers with the racialized threat of “urban” ballot-stuffing.
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Which, again, is what makes the evidence from this study so helpful: It offers reasons for both the conservative sincerely worried about voter fraud and the operative cynically hoping for lower Democratic turnout to let this issue slide.
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shared by jayhandwerk on 11 Mar 18
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North Korea talks: Trump praises own role but Washington frets over details | US news |... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...h-korea-trump-kim-talks-summit
north korea trump talks politics US crisis policy
shared by jayhandwerk on 11 Mar 18
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Donald Trump’s sudden acceptance of a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has cast a cloud of uncertainty over Washington, with few details emerging over the terms of a potentially historic meeting that is fraught with risk.
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Trump later tweeted that “the deal with North Korea is very much in the making and will be, if completed, a very good one for the world. Time and place to be determined”.
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Nonetheless, Trump has expressed his confidence in the North’s sincerity. On Saturday, he tweeted: “North Korea has not conducted a Missile Test since November 28, 2017 and has promised not to do so through our meetings. I believe they will honor that commitment!”
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Gillette Gave Millennials the Ad They Want - The Atlantic - 0 views
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“Commercial life is so much a part of the cultural landscape, compared to 20 to 30 years ago,” she says. “Given that fact, and given that Millennials are looking for meaning, if you put the two together, I think that’s why we’re seeing [these ads].” Young people are staring into the void—and into an economic climate custom-made to break their back. What stares back is consumer choice, however ineffective. Marketers, it seems, have simply noticed the opportunity to meet the expectations that go along with that.
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what these marketing efforts help do is rebrand capitalism in a time when young people are questioning its efficacy. “If we want the world to survive, we have to think about the humans in it, not just selling products and making money,” says Brønn. She’s hopeful these marketing efforts are an indication that brands are sincere in their desire to be better global citizens.
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The Suffocation of Democracy | by Christopher R. Browning | The New York Review of Books - 0 views
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In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.
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Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.
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Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.
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Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.
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If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.
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Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.
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Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives
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In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.
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The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power
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the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.
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Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.
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Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.
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In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.
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The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics
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To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.
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Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights
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In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.
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the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures
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No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.
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Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.
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shared by Javier E on 13 Jan 18
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Trump Puts the Purpose of His Presidency Into Words - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...550454
trump racism policies tribal white supremacy politics history culture crisis
shared by Javier E on 13 Jan 18
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These remarks reflect scorn not only for those who wish to come here, but those who already have. It is a president of the United States expressing his contempt for the tens of millions of descendants of Africans, most of whose forefathers had no choice in crossing the Atlantic, American citizens whom any president is bound to serve.
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And it is a public admission of sorts that he is incapable of being a president for all Americans, the logic of his argument elevating not just white immigrants over brown ones, but white citizens over the people of color they share this country with.
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The racist pseudoscience underpinning Walker’s belief that immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were incapable of responsible self-government is out of vogue today, but the both the sentiment and logic are now applied by the descendants of those very same “beaten races” who now work for Trump in the White House, who craft arguments defending his prejudice, and who cast ballots bearing his name.
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they are all now a part of Trump’s only sincere ideological project, the preservation of white political and cultural dominance.
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Trump has adopted policies that would be responsible for the displacement of nearly a million people of color in less than 12 months in office.
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The benefit of this history is that we know how the story ended then; with the adoption of racist immigration laws, and the immigrants from the “shithole countries” of the turn of the century defending the country in two world wars. But their children and grandchildren, having assimilated into the very whiteness Walker and his ilk saw as endangered, now repeat the same slander laid upon their ancestors against a new generation of immigrants looking for a better life in America. The old lies are now again embraced by the descendants of those who once suffered because of them.
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The president was not making an assessment of the relative quality of life in Haiti or Norway, he was condemning entire populations of people of as undesirable because of where they were born. Trump’s remarks do not merely express contempt for foreigners; but also for every American who shares their origins.
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The president’s focus on the nationality, rather than on the personal merits, of immigrants suggests what he means by “merit-based” immigration: Not accepting those immigrants who have mastered science or engineering or some other crucial skill, but instead a standard that finds white Scandinavians acceptable, while ruling out Haitians, Salvadorans, and Africans. The only “merits” here are accidents of birth and geography, owing to no individual accomplishment at all.
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Trump’s is not a logic that employs facts, it is one that employs tribe. It is the logic of “us” being better than “them,” with white Scandinavians reflecting a self-definition of “us,” that excludes blacks and latinos regardless of their relationship to this country.
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To describe the issue here, as many media outlets have, as one of coarse or vulgar language, is itself an obscenity. The president’s remarks reflect a moral principle that has guided policy while in office, a principle that is obvious to all but that some simply refuse to articulate.
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Comparative Colonization in Asia - 0 views
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Several different Western European powers established colonies in Asia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each of the imperial powers had its own style of administration, and colonial officers from the different nations also displayed various attitudes towards their imperial subjects.
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Nonetheless, British colonials held themselves apart from local people more than other Europeans did, hiring locals as domestic help, but rarely intermarrying with them. In part, this may have been due to a transfer of British ideas about the separation of classes to their overseas colonies.
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to Christianize and civilize the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the New World
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Although France sought an extensive colonial empire in Asia, its defeat in the Napoleonic Wars left it with just a handful of Asian territories. Those included the 20th-century mandates of Lebanon and Syria, and more especially the key colony of French Indochina - what is now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
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Some idealistic French sought not just to dominate their colonial holdings, but to create a "Greater France" in which all French subjects around the world truly would be equal. For example, the North African colony of Algeria became a depertment, or a province, of France, complete with parliamentary representation. This difference in attitude may be due to France's embrace of Enlightenment thinking, and to the French Revolution, which had broken down some of the class barriers that still ordered society in Britain.
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Nonetheless, French colonizers also felt the "white man's burden" of bringing so-called civilization and Christianity to barbaric subject peoples.
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On the personal level, French colonials were more apt than the British to marry local women and create a cultural fusion in their colonial societies
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The Dutch competed and fought for control of the Indian Ocean trade routes and spice production with the British, through their respective East India Companies. In the end, the Netherlands lost Sri Lanka to the British, and in 1662, lost Taiwan (Formosa) to the Chinese, but retained control over most of the rich spice islands that now make up Indonesia.
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As time went on, social pressure increased for French colonials to preserve the "purity" of the "French race."
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For the Dutch, this colonial enterprise was all about money. There was very little pretense of cultural improvement or Christianization of the heathens - the Dutch wanted profits, plain and simple. As a result, they showed no qualms about ruthlessly capturing locals and using them as slave labor on the plantations, or even carrying out a massacre of all the inhabitants of the Banda Islands to protect their monopoly on the nutmeg and mace trade.
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Portugal became the first European power to gain sea access to Asia. Although the Portuguese were quick to explore and lay claim to various coastal parts of India, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and China, its power faded in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the British, Dutch, and French were able to push Portugal out of most of its Asian claims.
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Although Portugal was not the most intimidating European imperial power, it had the most staying power. Goa remained Portuguese until India annexed it by force in 1961; Macau was Portuguese until 1999, when the Europeans finally handed it back to China; and East Timor or Timor-Leste formally became independent only in 2002.
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Portuguese rule in Asia was by turns ruthless (as when they began capturing Chinese children to sell into slavery in Portugal), lackadaisical, and underfunded. Like the French, Portuguese colonists were not opposed to mixing with local peoples and creating creole populations. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the Portuguese imperial attitude, however, was Portugal's stubbornness and refusal to withdraw, even after the other imperial powers had closed up shop.
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Portuguese imperialism was driven by a sincere desire to spread Catholicism and make tons of money. I
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Trump Threatens to Veto Immigration Bills that Don't Meet His Demands - The New York Times - 0 views
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Trump Threatens to Veto Immigration Bills that Don’t Meet His Demands
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President Trump on Wednesday called on lawmakers to oppose a series of bipartisan efforts to address immigration and resolve the fate of the so-called “Dreamers,” demanding fealty to his hard-line approach and increasing the odds of political gridlock as the Senate debates the issue.
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Mr. Trump urged senators to oppose any bill that did not also embrace the “four pillars” of his immigration approach, which includes a rewrite of the nation’s immigration laws that would close the country’s borders to many immigrants trying to come to the United States legally.
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“The American people know what’s going on,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor. “They know this president not only created the problem, but seems to be against every solution that might pass because it isn’t 100 percent of what he wants. If, at the end of the week, we are unable to find a bill that can pass — and I sincerely hope that’s not the case due to the good efforts of so many people on both sides of the aisle — the responsibility will fall entirely on the president’s shoulders and those in this body who went along with him.”