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Opinion | The Hard Road to Conservative Reform - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rvative-trump-republicans.html conservative conservatism gop reform economy history trump crisis
shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • And while Trump was winning, a certain amount of evidence emerged to confirm his darker view of the American situation — the surging opioid epidemic
  • “deaths of despair” among lower-income white Americans, growing evidence that the opening to China had worked out far better for Beijing’
  • All of this has left conservative policy wonks, the erstwhile reformocons and others, with a dilemma. Should they defend the post-Reagan economic order against Trump’s blustering, blundering assault — defend the benefits of “neoliberalism” and free trade and global openness, warn against the sclerosis that protectionism and industrial policy often bring, champion the innovative culture of Silicon Valley against its populist despisers? Or should they take Trump’s success as evidence that even reform conservatism was ultimately too sanguine and too moderate, and that there are deeper problems in the economic order that require a more-than-moderate conservative response?
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  • the vigorous intra-conservative debate over a new book, “The Once and Future Worker,” written by the former Mitt Romney domestic policy director Oren Cass. In certain ways the book is an extension of the reform-conservative project, an argument for policies that support “a foundation of productive work” as the basis for healthy communities and flourishing families and robust civic life. But Cass is more dramatic in his criticism of Western policymaking since the 1970s, more skeptical of globalization’s benefits to Western workers, and more dire in his diagnosis of the real socioeconomic condition of the working class.
  • Cass’s bracing tone reads like (among other things) an attempt to fix reform conservatism’s political problem, as it manifested itself in 2016 — a problem of lukewarmness
  • The critics’ concerns vary, but a common thread is that Cass’s diagnosis overstates the struggles of American workers and exaggerates the downsides of globalization, and in so doing risks giving aid and comfort to populist policies — or, for that matter, socialist policies, from the Ocasio-Cortezan left — that would ultimately choke off growth.
  • In a sense the debate reproduces the larger argument about whether a post-Trump conservative politics should seek to learn something from his ascent or simply aim to repudiate him — with Cass offering a reform conservatism that effectively bids against Trump for populist support, and his critics warning that he’s conceding way too much to Trumpist demagogy.
  • Cass’s book also raises a larger question that both right and left are wrestling with in our age of populist discontent: Namely, is the West’s post-1980 economic performance a hard-won achievement and pretty much the best we could have done, or is there another economic path available, populist or social democratic or something else entirely, that doesn’t just lead back to stagnation?
  • If you emphasize the disappointment, then experimenting with a different policy orientation — be it Cass’s work-and-family conservatism or an Ocasio-Cortezan democratic socialism or something else — seems like a risk worth taking; after all things aren’t that great under neoliberalism as it is.
  • if you focus on the possible fragility of the growth we have achieved, the ease with which left-wing and right-wing populisms can lead to Venezuela, then you’ll share the anxieties of Cass’s conservative critic
  • the best reason to bet on Cass’s specific vision is that the social crisis he wants to address it itself a major long-term drag on growth — because a society whose working class doesn’t work or marry or bear children will age, even faster than the West is presently aging, into stagnation and decline.
  • it might well be, as some of his critics think, that the working class’s social crisis is mostly or all cultural, a form of late-modern anomie detached from material privation. In which case political-economy schemes to “fix” the problem won’t have social benefits to match their potential economic costs.
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Germany's AfD turns on Greta Thunberg as it embraces climate denial | Environment | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-as-it-embraces-climate-denial germany denial climate change AfD politics
shared by Javier E on 14 May 19 - No Cached
  • While climate change barely got a mention on its social media channels when the AfD was first founded in 2013, it mentioned the topic on its channels about 300 times in 2017-18, and that has tripled over the past year to more than 900, with its main focus on Greta.
  • The party, whose members have been seen handing out climate change denial leaflets at school climate strikes, has ratcheted up its anti-Thunberg rhetoric ahead of the EU parliamentary elections this month. Its candidates have made comparisons between the Swedish teenager and a member of a Nazi youth organisation and called for her to seek treatment for what Maximilian Krah, an AfD candidate for the EU elections, called her “psychosis”.
  • It has also been repeatedly claimed on AfD’s Facebook page that she is the leader of a climate movement cult. Posts on the page make repeated use of terms such as “CO2Kult” (CO2 cult), “Klimawandelpanik” (climate change panic) and “Klimagehirnwäsche” (climate brain washing)
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  • “The AfD has been denying human-made climate change on its social media pages since 2016, and while it has not shifted its position it is clear that the party decided to communicate it more frequently.
  • “The fact that many mainstream politicians from across the political divide in Germany supported a 16-year-old female activist who was virtually unknown until a few months ago, allowed the party to present belief in climate change as irrational, hysteria, panic, cult-like or even as a replacement religion. Attacking Greta, at times in fairly vicious ways, including mocking her for her autism, became a way to portray the AfD’s political opponents as irrational.”
  • Promotional materials for the event cite Greta as someone placed on the frontline of climate activism “by PR professionals seeking to bedevil the plant-nutrient carbon dioxide” and describe the AfD as “the only party in Germany not willing to back the supposed climate consensus”.
  • “We are experiencing a shift to the right on social media and in society. In a short period of time, the new right has established its own counter-society on climate issues. With troll armies, agitating magazines and the support of climate sceptics like EIKE, it has created its own sphere that is massively underestimated.”
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Amazon, Walmart, and Other Stores Have Too Many Options - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...590185 amazon consumerism materialism surplus culture
shared by Javier E on 06 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • n theory, Amazon is a site meant to serve the needs of humans.
  • But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options. On the first page of results, half are nearly identical velvet hangers, and most of the rest are nearly identical plastic. They don’t vary much by price, and almost all of the listings in the first few pages of results have hundreds or thousands of reviews that average out to ratings between four and five stars. Even if you have very specific hanger needs and preferences, there’s no obvious choice. There are just choices.
  • Amazon’s success has pushed retailers such as Walmart and Target to carry even more stuff—especially online—and to get that stuff to shoppers even faster
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  • The global-manufacturing apparatus now has the capacity to churn out near-endless stuff. The industry’s output has ballooned 75 percent since 2007 to $35 trillion, according to one analysis, and millions of livelihoods depend on its continued growth.
  • . The internet-shopping boom has spawned an excess-stuff economy, in which retailers such as Overstock.com buy up extra product from full-price retailers
  • n the arms race to sell as many sandwich bags or beach towels as possible, a problem has become clear: Variety isn’t infinitely valuable.
  • Contemporary internet shopping conjures a perfect storm of choice anxiety
  • Research has consistently held that people who are presented with a few options make better, easier decisions than those presented with many. It has also shown that having many options is particularly confounding when the information available on them is limited or confusing
  • Those infinite, meaningless options can result in something like a consumer fugue state
  • Helping consumers figure out what to buy amid an endless sea of choice online has become a cottage industry unto itself
  • choice fatigue is one reason so many people gravitate toward lifestyle influencers on Instagram—the relentlessly chic young moms and perpetually vacationing 20-somethings—who present an aspirational worldview, and then recommend the products and services that help achieve it
  • Review videos, too, are popular on YouTube, and plenty of niche websites perform similar functions for products that serve a particular interest, such as hiking or photography
  • . Casper (mattresses), Glossier (makeup), Away (suitcases), and many others have sprouted up to offer consumers freedom from choice: The companies have a few aesthetically pleasing and supposedly highly functional options, usually at mid-range prices. They’re selling nice things, but maybe more importantly, they’re selling a confidence in those things
  • They have a strong precedent for believing that their type of extreme curation is what consumers want: Trader Joe’s sells many times fewer products than most of its suburban grocery-store competitors, but still tops consumers’ rankings of their favorite places to grocery shop.
  • stuff’s creators tend to focus their energy on those who already have plenty. As options have expanded for people with disposable income, the opportunity to buy even basic things such as fresh food or quality diapers has contracted for much of America’s lower classes.
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When to Wage War, and How to Win: A Guide - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-gaddis-on-grand-strategy.html war history grand strategy strategy FDR arrogance humility
shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • What is “grand strategy” as opposed to simple strategy?
  • It denotes encompassing all the resources that a state can focus — military, economic, political and cultural — to further its own interests in a global landscape.
  • wars — or rather how not to lose them — are the general theme of his often didactic book.
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  • Gaddis keeps pounding — to the point of monotony — the seemingly self-evident: The grand strategist must prune away emotion, ego and conventional wisdom to accept that “if you seek ends beyond your means, then sooner or later you’ll have to scale back your ends to fit your means.
  • Their implicit idea is to remind America’s future best and brightest how the mostly successful grand strategy of the past saw America become the pre-eminent world power of the 20th century by winning two world conflicts along with the Cold War.
  • The case studies are variously drawn from some 16 years of co-teaching a well-regarded seminar on “Studies in Grand Strategy” at Yale
  • Paul Kennedy’s edited “Grand Strategies in War and Peace,” Charles Hill’s “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order” and more recently Linda Kulman’s “Teaching Common Sense: The Grand Strategy Program at Yale University.”
  • His repetitious observation about proportionality might have been banal — if so many leaders, many of them geniuses, had not forgotten it
  • A recurrent theme is the danger of omnipresent hubris. Even a great power cannot master the unexpected and uncontrollable — from the great plague at Athens, to the harsh Russian winter, to I.E.D.s and tribal factionalism in Iraq
  • The book is as much personal remembrance as strategic reflection, and is chock-full of aphorisms and enigmatic adages.
  • Gaddis believes the best way to hone strategic thinking is not just by mastering the advice of Machiavelli or Clausewitz (who both figure prominently in the class), much less contemporary high-tech wizardry, but also by understanding the interplay of history, literature and philosophy over 2,500 years of Western civilization — with occasional insights from Sun Tzu and other non-Western thinkers
  • In some sense “On Grand Strategy” is a traditional argument for the value of classical education in the broadest sense.
  • The student of strategy learns to balance a grasp of detail with proper humility: It is, of course, wise to have a plan and contingencies. But how will these prompt rival counter-responses? Do such agendas have the means adequate for their ends? Or are they more dreams, warped by ego and emotion
  • In contrast, the often arrogant neglect of grand strategic thinking has led to postwar quagmires, stalemates and the assorted misadventures that often drained American resources for either impossible or irrelevant aims, while tearing the country apart over the last 70 years.
  • Understanding the underappreciated role of irony is essential for a leader, and might have prevented the disasters of both 415 B.C. and 1588.
  • Tolstoy and Clausewitz appreciated that bad things can come from good intentions and vice versa. The best generals live with and react to paradoxes, Gaddis argues. The worst ignore or seek to undo them.
  • Gaddis sees these more successful global strategists as rope-a-dope pragmatists who remain elastic and patient enough to capitalize on events and opportunities as they unfold, rather than forcing them to fit preconceived schemes.
  • Morality matters, if defined less as self-righteous ardor and more as self-awareness of a leader’s effect on those around him and an appreciation of paradox.
  • A pragmatic St. Augustine has no problem with war — if it is a last resort to save civilization, without which there can be neither calm nor organized religion.
  • Still, courting calculated risk is essential
  • The gambler Winston Churchill took chances in 1940, albeit rational ones backed by educated guesses that, for all Hitler’s bluster, the Third Reich had neither the air nor sea power to destroy the Anglosphere
  • Gaddis’s American heroes are Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who he thinks “rescued democracy and capitalism.”
  • Roosevelt somehow was cognizant early on of how the singular military and economic potential of America might save Europe and Asia, but only if he first prepared reluctant Americans materially and psychologically for the inevitable war to come
  • Gaddis concludes with an invaluable warning that true morality embraces neither messianic interventionism nor the quest for utopianism
  • Instead, ethical leadership pursues the art of the possible for the greater (not the greatest) good
  • With regard to the American 21st century, Gaddis’s favorite novelists and philosophers perhaps argue against both optional intercessions abroad and moralistic lead-from-behind recessionals. The better course is to marshal American power to prepare for the often unavoidable existential crises on the horizon, with the full expectation that we do not have to be perfect to be good.
  • “On Grand Strategy” is many things — a thoughtful validation of the liberal arts, an argument for literature over social science, an engaging reflection on university education and some timely advice to Americans that lasting victory comes from winning what you can rather than all that you want.
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The End of 'Civilisation' - 0 views

www.weeklystandard.com/...the-end-of-civilisation civilizations civilization confidence culture multiculturalism history
shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • When she was a mere sprout of 14, Mary Beard tuned into the first episode of Sir Kenneth Clark’s famous BBC documentary, Civilisation, and felt a “slight tingle.”
  • “It had never struck me,” she wrote last year, “that it might be possible to trace a history of European culture, as Clark was to do, in 13 parts, from the early middle ages to the 20th century.”
  • on her way to becoming an accomplished classicist, would start to feel queasy. She became “decidedly uncomfortable with Clark’s patrician self-confidence and the ‘great man’ approach to art history—one damn genius after the next—that ran through the series.”
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  • “Civilisation had opened my eyes, and those of many others; not only visually stunning, it had shown us that there was something in art and architecture that was worth talking, and arguing, about.”
  • Beard is one of three “presenters” (or hosts) of the series, joining the historians Simon Schama and David Olusoga for a round-the-world, millennia-spanning tour of human hustle and bustle. The series has its faults of pacing and plotting, but it offers plenty of opportunities for Beard-like tingles
  • The new program is best understood as a kind of delayed rebuttal, sometimes quite explicit, to Clark and his view of history
  • The association is all to the good, and to Clark’s benefit, if it leads audiences back to civilization, and Civilisation, all 13 episodes of which are playing 24/7 at your neighborhood YouTube.
  • He wasn’t a natural TV star, but he was an accomplished lecturer, a brilliant stylist, and an unrivaled historian of art. When, in 1966, the BBC decided to produce a series on the history of European culture, Clark was the unanimous choice for presenter.
  • The job fell to the broadcaster and naturalist David Attenborough to introduce color to the BBC audience. He got the idea to film a survey of the greatest artworks of Europe, as a way of bringing color into British living rooms as tastefully and vividly (and cheaply) as possible.
  • It is hard to imagine, at this remove and with the conventions of documentary TV so well established, how strange Civilisation must have seemed 50 years ago. Color was just the first of the technological innovations, and the range of subjects and locales was unheard of
  • No one had seen a single presenter so dominate a nonfiction program of such length as Clark did. Unprecedented too were the long stretches in which Clark disappeared, leaving the camera to move tenderly over the surface of something beautiful.
  • The narration, full of anecdote and grand pronouncements, was pitched at the highest level, without condescension or pedantry
  • About that word civilization, the mere utterance of which set Clark off on his great televised adventure. He confronts it in the first episode’s opening moments, as he stands on the banks of the Seine with Notre-Dame Cathedral rising up behind him. “What is civilization?” he asks us. Then, amazingly—this is, after all, the title of his TV show—he shrugs! “I don’t know,” he says. It is a shrug at once amused, modest, and perhaps genuinely baffled. “I can’t define it in abstract terms. But I think I can recognize it when I see it.” He turns to look over his shoulder at the cathedral. “And I’m looking at it now.”
  • a sense of civilization’s meaning, by his lights, forms soon enough. Throughout the programs certain words come up over and over: enlarge, deepen, extend, broaden, expand, and above all, life-enhancing. An act or piece of art that is life-enhancing—that allows us to have life, and to have it more abundantly—is civilized; one that isn’t isn’t.
  • In the first episode Clark compares the ornamental prow of a Viking ship, showing a fearsome animal head, with the head of a once-celebrated sculpture from antiquity known as the Apollo Belvedere. The prow is “a powerful work of art,” he acknowledges, and “more moving to most of us” than the Apollo.
  • Each expresses a cultural ideal. The prow emerged from “an image of fear and darkness” while the Apollo, the product of “a higher stage of civilization,” emerged from an ideal of harmony and perfection, justice and reason and beauty held in equilibrium. This is the civilizing ideal that Western Europe inherited from Greece and Rome
  • As Beard says, his “great man” theory of history was even then at odds with the prevailing academic view, which saw (and sees) history as a process swept along by technology, economics, and shifts in the balance of brute power.
  • He was a confessed “hero worshipper.” “I believe in genius,” he said. When an excellent biography of Clark was published a year ago—Kenneth Clark: Life, Art, and ‘Civilisation’ by James Stourton—nearly all reviewers mentioned this hoary defect. Clark’s approach was “scandalous,” “outrageous,” and of course it was stuffed with dead white males
  • it’s hard to see how any survey of European high culture up to the First World War could include large numbers of nonwhite non-males, since it was produced almost exclusively by persons who had the temporary advantage of being white and male
  • Clark was too sophisticated, too honest to be a cheerleader. Alongside the glories he shows examples of what happens when civilization goes wrong.
  • Clark was acutely aware of his program’s shortcomings and omissions. He regretted not dwelling more on philosophy and law, but he “could not think of any way of making them visually interesting.”
  • Critics too often forget the subtitle of Civilisation: A Personal View. “Obviously,” Clark wrote, “I could not include the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Syria, Greece and Rome, because to have done so would have meant another ten programmes, at least.” Ditto India, China, and “the world of Islam.
  • He reckoned that any misunderstanding was worth the risk. “I didn’t suppose that anyone could be so obtuse as to think that I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian era and the East.
  • Yet the charge against Clark hasn’t been that he was forgetting non-Western cultures but that he was willfully dismissing them, committing an act of denigration.
  • relativism—a term that Beard and her costars would reject as right-wing cliché—is the motive force behind the series. A variety of academics, plus a narrator, are brought in to reinforce the presenters in their judgment that it is wrong to make judgments.
  • The story Clark wanted to tell was relatively straightforward—one critic cleverly compared Civilisation to a relay race, with one great man passing the baton to another. Civilisations, by contrast, does a great deal of jumping about, forward and backward and sideways, not merely in geography and chronology but in the sequence of ideas
  • question-and-answer combo recurs throughout Civilisations. It has a dual purpose: It’s meant first to rattle our confidence in our objective judgment—hey, that figurine is pretty!—and then to turn our attention back on ourselves to discover the cultural conditioning that has manipulated us into the illusion that our judgments are objective—that we have good reason to think the figurine is pretty. “Different eyes behold different things,” we are told.
  • To the extent Civilisations treats particular pieces of art, it dwells on their function—to what purposes were they put? Mostly, it turns out, art was about projecting and protecting the power of an elite
  • If you are uncomfortable with this approach—seeing the glories of human creativity reduced to tools for class warfare—too bad
  • “I love the history of art,” he tells the camera. “I love looking at these beautiful images. But I also recognize that there’s something quite sinister about their past.
  • “Sinister” sounds judgmental, doesn’t it? So judgmental indeed that I don’t think even Clark used it at all in his Civilisation. But it nicely summarizes the attitude toward the West that viewers of the new Civilisations will find unavoidable, even if they’re confident enough to find it unpersuasive
  • Next to life-enhancing, the most important word in Clark’s account of civilization was confidence. Several things came together to make a civilization, Clark said: a measure of material prosperity, a sense of history, a range of vision, and a feeling of permanence, of being situated in a particular moment between past and future, that makes it worthwhile to construct things meant to last
  • “But far more,” he said, “it requires confidence—confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, confidence in one’s own mental powers.” His program was an effort to persuade his audience that confidence in their inherited civilization was well-earned.
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Donald Trump Is the First Porn President - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...559523 trump porn materialism opportunism culture gop
shared by Javier E on 05 May 18 - No Cached
  • In the end, Trump, McDougal, and Daniels are three Republicans who are happy to build, inhabit, and impose upon all of us a heartless world, untroubled by the one consistently compelling notion that the GOP used to offer: that the American institution most worthy of respect was the family, the home, the shelter of one another.
  • He’s not a playboy or, really, much of a husband. He’s a porn president, where every intimate interaction is for sale if the money is right, and where the underlying truth of each deal is that at the end of it somebody is going to get screwed. This time—maybe, maybe—it could be him.
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Among the Post-Liberals - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...among-the-post-liberals.html post-liberalism consensus resistance
shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • there is suddenly resistance. Its political form is an angry nationalism, a revolt of the masses in both the United States and Europe. But the more important development may be happening in intellectual circles, where many younger writers regard the liberal consensus as something to be transcended or rejecte
  • The first post-liberal school might be called the new radicals, a constellation of left-wing writers for whom the Marxist dream lives anew. In journals-of-ideas like Jacobin and n+1
  • the new reactionaries, a group defined by skepticism of democracy and egalitarianism, admiration for more hierarchical orders, and a willingness to overthrow the Western status quo.
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  • they have appeal in areas like the tech industry where mainstream conservatism presently has little influence, because (like fascism in its heyday) the new reaction blends nostalgia with a hyper-modernism
  • there is a third group of post-liberals, less prominent but still culturally significant: Religious dissenters. These are Western Christians, especially, who regard both liberal and neoconservative styles of Christian politics as failed experiments, doomed because they sought reconciliation with a liberal project whose professed tolerance stacks the deck in favor of materialism and unbelief.
  • Some of these religious dissenters are seeking a tactical retreat from liberal modernity, a subcultural resilience in the style of Orthodox Jews or Mennonites or Mormons.
  • others are interested in going on offense. In my own church, part of the younger generation seems disillusioned with post-Vatican II Catholic politics, and is drawn instead either to a revived Catholic integralism or a “tradinista” Catholic socialism — both of which affirm the “social kingship” of Jesus Christ, a phrase that attacks the modern liberal order at the root.
  • their ideas are, perhaps, genuinely dangerous to the order we take for granted in the West. Or — it all depends — they might be beneficial, because liberal civilization’s flourishing has often depended on forces that a merely procedural order can’t generate, on radical and religious correctives to a flattened view of human life.
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Reviled by G.O.P., WikiLeaks Embraced by Trump for Clinton Email Leaks - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ks-hillary-clinton-emails.html donald trump clinton US politics wikileaks new york times election
shared by Megan Flanagan on 13 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Donald J. Trump is suddenly embracing an unlikely ally: The document-spilling group WikiLeaks,
  • increasingly seizing on a trove of embarrassing emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign
  • an extraordinary turnabout after years of bipartisan criticism of the organization
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  • or past disclosures of American national security intelligence and other confidential information.
  • President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia insisted on Wednesday that his nation was being falsely accused.
  • Clinton, the Republican candidate said: “Maybe there is no hacking. But they always blame Russia,” he said, as part of an effort to “tarnish me.”
  • Based on a few emails plucked from the account, Mr. Trump and his team have accused Clinton aides of improperly receiving inside information from the Obama administration
  • the campaign received an update from the Department of Justice about the timing of the release of Mrs. Clinton’s State Department emails
  • Republican allies say he has come to believe that WikiLeaks could yield a critical mass of negative and destructive information — if not a smoking gun — that drives up Mrs. Clinton’s already high unfavorable ratings with voters and perhaps even derails her candidacy.
  • emails began to appear on Friday afternoon, just hours after the director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement attributing previous hacks to the Russian government
  • The Clinton campaign is trying its own political jujitsu with the hacks,
  • there was “the possibility that Trump’s allies had advance knowledge of the release of these illegally obtained emails.”
  • Republicans have previously condemned WikiLeaks and similarly blasted the leaks by Edward J. Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, and said they were evidence of carelessness by the Obama administration
  • if he keeps on pressuring on it, it really will help,”
  • touched off a feverish debate over government invading people’s privacy,
  • “I thought what Snowden did was disgraceful, treasonous. But the reality is the information is out there, and if Hillary doesn’t deny it then to me it certainly has to be used.”
  • Democrats showed no compunction about using unauthorized material when it came to Mr. Trump’s 1995 tax returns, or a leaked NBC audio recording of Mr. Trump boasting about groping
  • information that WikiLeaks and other outlets had made public from hacking collectives is “relevant.”
  • “But for this information, a number of revelations would remain secret — how Hillary Clinton really feels, how paranoid she really was about an Elizabeth Warren challenge, her ability to articulate a message that’s cohesive and credible,”
  • insisted showed “bias” toward Catholics.
  • the Clinton campaign seemed uncertain about how to navigate the disclosures,
  • Democrats expressed deep concern about how much more widespread the breaches could be.
  • WikiLeaks email will do little to help Mr. Trump attract more undecided voters, especially women, or reassure wavering Trump supporters.
  • “They ought to spend less time figuring out how to reinforce those people and more time trying to add to his vote column.”
  • He said the emails “make more clear than ever, just how much is at stake in November and how unattractive and dishonest our country has become.”
  • aggressively pushed the Clinton camp emails in news media briefings and cable news appearances
  • “reaffirmed” comments that he has made as a candidate about the two-faced nature of politicians and alleged malfeasance in government.
  • “It’s really backing up what the people have been feeling all of this time about the corruption of government, embedded, just the trickle-down corruption.”
  • the emails are highly unlikely to influence undecided voters
  • But 55 to 60 percent of the country is open to a Clinton presidency and wants to see the next president get to work with Congress to help the country.”
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Tech Billionaires Want to Destroy the Universe - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...503963 artificial simulation gnostic history
shared by Javier E on 14 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • “Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer; two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.”
  • Ignore for a moment any objections you might have to the simulation hypothesis, and everything impractical about the idea that we could somehow break out of reality, and think about what these people are trying to do.
  • The two billionaires (Elon Musk is a prime suspect) are convinced that they’ll emerge out of this drab illusion into a more shining reality, lit by a brighter and more beautiful star. But for the rest of us the experience would be very different—you lose your home, you lose your family, you lose your life and your body and everything around you
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  • Every summer we watch dozens of villains plotting to blow up the entire universe, but the motivations are always hazy. Why, exactly, does the baddie want to destroy everything again? Now we know.
  • It’s not just Elon Musk, who stated that ‘there’s a one in a billion chance we’re living in base reality,’ who believes this—in an extraordinary piece of hedge-betting, the Bank of America has judiciously announced that the probability that waking life is just an illusion is, oh, about fifty-fifty
  • Tech products no longer feel like something offered to the public, but something imposed: The great visionary looks at the way everyone is doing something, and decides, single-handedly, to change it.
  • once social reality is the exclusive property of a few geegaw-tinkerers, why shouldn’t physical reality be next? With Google’s Calico seeking hedge-fund investment for human immortality and the Transformative Technology Lab hoping to externalize human consciousness, the tech industry is moving into territory once cordoned off for the occult. Why shouldn’t the fate of the entire cosmos be in the hands of programmers hiding from the California sun, to keep or destroy as they wish?
  • Unsurprisingly, nobody bothered to ask us whether we want the end of the world or not; they’re just setting about trying to do it. Silicon Valley works by solving problems that hadn’t heretofore existed; its culture is pathologically fixated on the notion of ‘disruption.’
  • Its real antecedents are the Gnostics, an early Christian sect who believed that the physical universe was the creation of the demiurge, Samael or Ialdaboath, sometimes figured as a snake with the head of a lion, a blind and stupid god who creates his false world in imperfect imitation of the real Creator. This world is a distorted mirror, an image; in other words, a kind of software.
  • Kabbalist mysticists, Descartes with his deceiving demon, and Zhuangzi in his butterfly dream have all questioned the reality of their sense-experiences, but this isn’t a private, solipsistic hallucination; in the simulation hypothesis, reality is a prison for all of us
  • there’s always been the lingering suspicion that our reality is somehow unreal—it’s just that what we once thought about in terms of dreams and magic, cosmic minds or whispering devils, is now expressed through boring old computers, that piece of clunky hardware that waits predatory on your desk every morning to code the finest details of your life.
  • The Gnostics were often accused by other early Christians of Satanism, and they might have had a point: Many identified the jealous, petty, prurient God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge, while sects such as the Ophites revered the serpent in the Garden of Eden as the first to offer knowledge to humanity, freeing them from their first cage
  • In his book, Baudrillard also talks about virtual realities and deceptive images, but his point isn’t that they have clouded our perception of the reality beyond. The present system of social images is so vast and all-encompassing that it’s produced a total reality for itself; it only lies when it has us thinking that there’s something else behind the façade. Baudrillard, always something of an overgrown child, loved to refer to Disneyland: As he pointed out, it’s in no way a fake—when you leave its gates, you return to an America that’s just one giant Disneyland, a copy without an original, from coast to coast
  • ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
  • Digital and cinematic media actively construct our experience of reality. The world of film stars and theme parks, social media and supermarket shelves designed to look like something out of an old-time grocery—this is the one we live in. Our Silicon Valley Satanists have made a very questionable assumption: What if there’s nowhere to break out into?
  • the virtual is also real. Why is a universe composed of software necessarily any less real than one composed of matter? Computer simulation is of course only a metaphor, a new-ish way of describing what was once expressed in oneiric or theological terms. They can’t really mean that our universe was built in something similar to the machine you’re using to read these words right now;
  • simulation is a process independent of whatever divine or technological apparatus is used to achieve it. The real argument is that, by some unknown mechanism, what we see is only a function of what really exists. But we’ve known since Kant that our sense-perception can never give us a full account of the material world; all this can be said of any conceivable reality
  • Outside the simulation hypothesis there are scientists who propose that our universe is a single black hole, with what we perceive as matter being a hologram emerging from a two-dimensional ring of information along its event horizon; there are mathematical Platonists who, following Max Tegmark, consider the world to be a set of abstract mathematical objects, of which physical objects are a crude epiphenomenon. If matter doesn’t ‘really’ exist, there’s no need for anything to be rooted anywhere; we might live suspended in a looping chain of simulations and appearances that coils back on itself and never has to touch the ground
  • Elon Musk and his co-religionists aren’t actually blinded by artifice; they’re fixated on a strange and outdated notion that somewhere, there has to be a concrete reality—they’ve just decided that it’s not this one
  • What’s far more worrying is the fact that the people who want to destroy the only world we really have are also the people increasingly in charge of it.
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What Flake got right - and wrong - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...what-flake-got-right-and-wrong trump politics assessment presidency gop propaganda
shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Flake gave an impressive and far-reaching speech indicting Trump’s web of lies and the damage his international pals (e.g., Vladimir Putin) are doing to freedom of the press.
  • Give him credit — but only partial credit. Elected Republicans engage in much of the same anti-truth propaganda as the president does. The evening programming of an entire TV cable “news” network is dedicated to conspiracy theories, misleading information about immigrants and terrorists, and refusal to cover facts that contradict the president’s tropes.
  • Trump did not materialize out of thin air. He masterfully manipulated white grievance and anti-elite conspiracy-mongering. But the ground was plowed by many of Flake’s colleagues and by Republicans’ self-selected news outlets. Getting rid of Trump will help, but unless and until the mind-set that permeates the right is dismantled, the war on the truth will rage on.
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Trump to Reportedly Keep Iran Nuclear Alive for Now - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550205 US Iran policy politics
shared by malonema1 on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The “worst deal ever” will most likely live to see another 120 days.The Associated Press reported Wednesday that President Trump will this week extend relief from nuclear-related economic sanctions on Iran. If it seems like a procedural matter, it is, but it also means in practice that it keeps alive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the Iran deal is known. Reinstating the sanctions would have put the United States in violation of the agreement. The president must decide every 120 days whether to waive the sanctions.  
  • Trump faced two separate choices. One was whether to certify or decertify the JCPOA under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which Congress passed in 2015 to give it the right to review the accord and require the president to verify Iran’s compliance with the agreement every 90 days. In October, Trump declined to certify compliance, but did not tear up the deal—in decertifying the deal, he left to Congress the decision of what to do about it. Congress has been focused on other things, however. The other and more consequential choice was whether to waive or reimpose sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear activities, and it is on this decision that U.S. participation in the deal lives or dies. If AP’s report is correct, Trump has passed up this opportunity to withdraw.  
  • The new sanctions will almost certainly anger Iranian officials, but are likely to be cautiously welcomed by the other parties to the JCPOA: the European Union, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the U.K., all of which wanted the deal to be preserved because, they said, it had succeeded in freezing the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and its uranium-enrichment activity.The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris climate deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, both signature foreign-policy initiatives of President Obama, bolster fears that the JCPOA could go the same way. Trump’s remarks on the presidential campaign trail, where he called the agreement the “worst deal ever,” further cast its future into doubt. But the JCPOA’s other signatories, especially the EU and the U.K., have been vocal in their support of the agreement and have made their case to the White House and lawmakers. China and Russia, who are also parties to the deal, have also signaled they will stay in it.
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  • Part of the problem has been that, beyond the headlines trumpeting sales of aircraft to Iran by Boeing and Airbus, and energy investments by European and Chinese companies, there has actually been little real foreign direct investment in Iran since the JCPOA was signed. Last April, Iran’s finance minister said memorandums of understanding worth $50 billion were signed after the JCPOA went into effect in January 2016. But a government spokesman said that from March 2016 to March 2017, the Iranian fiscal year, Iran received $13 billion in foreign investment. It turned out that the memorandums were for the most part only that—the investments have yet to materialize.
  • “It is excessive to expect a radical change in the field [of foreign investment] as long as the concept is controversial for the top influential elites,” Majid Tehrani, an organization development adviser in trade, transport and finance industries, told Al-Monitor.Existing U.S. sanctions on Iran are broad enough to hinder any potential economic activity. The fact that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the target of U.S. sanctions, has significant stakes in Iranian companies makes investing in the country a legal minefield. Had the U.S. reimposed sanctions, multinational companies would have hesitated to invest in Iran. Now that it looks like the JCPOA is alive for another 120 days, the uncertainty over the agreement’s future hasn’t gone away.
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Pakistan Will Try to Make Trump Pay - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549887 US Pakistan politics policy
shared by malonema1 on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Before the news cycle—and the president himself—got consumed with the new White House tell-all last week, Donald Trump made a good foreign policy decision, albeit seemingly in haste. The administration announced it was suspending security assistance to Pakistan, on the grounds that the country is continuing to arm, assist, fund, and provide sanctuary to a wide array of Islamist militant groups that are murdering U.S. troops and their allies in Afghanistan. Well-placed sources involved with calculating the relevant funds have told me that this was not a planned policy and took the other agencies, not to mention the Pakistanis, by complete surprise. Rather it was an ex post facto response to Trump’s January 1, 2018 tweet vituperatively repining that:
  • The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!
  • The United States was well into the surge at this point; between NATO forces and Afghan forces, there were hundreds of thousands of troops to resupply, all of whom had relied on the routes through Pakistan. The need to find alternative routes by land and air—including through Central Asia—ended up costing the Americans about $100 million per month more than the previous arrangement. Many feared that while this worked to get supplies into Afghanistan, it would not be sufficient to get massive amounts of war materiel out of Afghanistan when the United States and NATO withdrew. Consequently, the U.S. government hoped that Pakistan would reopen the ground routes. But it turns out that weaning itself off them was not such a bad option after all.
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  • Pakistan now says the alliance is over—and good riddance. Foreign Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif complained that “This is not how allies behave.” He is absolutely correct: U.S. allies do not take its lower and middle-class taxpayers’ hard-earned money and hand it over to enemies such as the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba.Asif went on to offer the usual protestations that Pakistan’s military operations have cleared Pakistan of sanctuaries for these groups to hide in. But if there were such scoundrels on Pakistan’s territory, he said that if Pakistan went after them, “then the war will again be fought on our soil, which will suit the Americans.”
  • Still, Pakistan likely suspects it has the upper hand, and for good reason: It has cultivated a global fear that it is too dangerous to fail. This is why many Americans have been afraid to break ties with Pakistan and have never encouraged the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral organizations to cut off the country and let Pakistan wallow in its own mess. Pakistan believes it has effectively bribed the international community with the specter that any instability could result in terrorists getting their hands on Pakistani nuclear technology, fissile materials, or a weapon. In fact, Pakistan has stoked these fears by having the world’s fastest-growing nuclear program, including of battlefield nuclear weapons. It is conceivable that Pakistan could use funds from a future IMF bailout to service its burgeoning Chinese debt.
  • Still, one positive side effect of having an erratic head of state is that the United States now has a genuine and credible threat to act against Pakistan. America has not been in such a position since 9/11, when it used its position of leverage to coerce Pakistan to facilitate the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Whereas Pakistan had long comforted itself that neither Presidents Bush nor Obama would seriously alter course, due to the petting zoo of Islamist militants that Pakistan cultivated as crucial tools of foreign policy, and to its nuclear weapons, Pakistan will have to seriously consider that Trump means what he says. Since the early months of the war on terror that began in October 2001, the United States has ultimately swerved when confronted with Pakistani brinkmanship. Pakistan can’t count on that this time.
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This Is the Next Generation of Republican Leadership - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...551657 GOP leader leadership
shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • “The big thing that I think defines the struggle for the party is that a bunch of people want to define it by what we’re against, and a bunch want to define it around what we’re for,” observed GOP strategist Kevin Madden. “Right now, it’s about 70-30, with the ‘against’ crowd winning.
  • GOP strategists and leaders argue that you have to look beyond the bomb throwers and reality-TV-type characters to find the folks who’ll take Republicans forward.
  • ask around, and party players are happy to hold forth on their favorite comers. Some are seen as having White House potential, while others are regarded as better suited for long-term congressional or state leadership
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  • Nikki Haley and Ben Sasse are likely to ring bells; Josh Hawley and Charlie Baker, not so much. Bonus points for anyone outside Tulsa who has heard of G.T. Bynum.) All should be on the radar of anyone concerned about where the GOP is headed.
  • This is not to suggest Congress is devoid of leadership material. House member Will Hurd is making many, many Republican mouths water. The 40-year-old ex-CIA operative represents the Texas 23rd; it is the state’s largest and most competitive district, sprawling from San Antonio to El Paso, and its electorate is over 70 percent Latino. Hurd is young, sharp, media-savvy, tech-savvy, and ambitious. And he’s black—no small matter for Republicans looking to prove they aren’t the party of white nationalism.
  • many Republicans are especially enthusiastic about talented women rising through the ranks. House members Mia Love and Elise Stefanik are among those most often mentioned.
  • Multiple Republicans voiced optimism that Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn, now running for Senate, will turn out to be a force in the upper chamber.
  • Similarly, many GOP women are rooting for Arizona Representative Martha McSally
  • Over in the Senate, Nebraskan Ben Sasse has made a name for himself by being an early and consistent conservative critic of Trump.
  • Another name being talked about: Adam Putnam, the Florida congressman-turned-state agriculture commissioner now running for governor.
  • Then there’s Josh Hawley, the freshly scrubbed attorney general of Missouri, who is gunning for Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill’s seat
  • Oklahoma’s G.T. Bynum. A former Senate staffer and lobbyist, Bynum won a seat on the Tulsa city council in 2008. Fresh-faced and funny
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A Short History of Violent Buddhism - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/ory-of-violent-buddhism-195794 buddhism history Violence
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  • Buddhism is probably the most pacifistic of the major world religions.
  • His teachings stand in stark contrast to those of the other major religions, which advocate execution and warfare against people who fail to adhere to the religions' tenets.
  • To an outsider with a perhaps stereotypical view of Buddhism as introspective and serene, it is more surprising to learn that Buddhist monks have also participated in and even instigated violence over the years.
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  • For most of their history, the monks who invented kung fu (wushu) used their martial skills mainly in self-defense; however, at certain points, they actively sought out warfare, as in the mid-16th century when they answered the central government's call for aid in the fight against Japanese pirates.
  • Speaking of Japan, the Japanese also have a long tradition of "warrior-monks" or yamabushi.
  • In 1932, for example, an unordained Buddhist preacher called Nissho Inoue hatched a plot to assassinate major liberal or westernizing political and business figures in Japan so as to restore full political power to Emperor Hirohito.
  • Called the "League of Blood Incident," this scheme targeted 20 people and managed to assassinate two of them before the League's members were arrested.
  • various Zen Buddhist organizations in Japan carried out funding drives to buy war material and even weapons.
  • One example is in Sri Lanka, where radical Buddhist monks formed a group called the Buddhist Power Force, or B.B.S., which provoked violence against the Hindu Tamil population of northern Sri Lanka, against Muslim immigrants, and also against moderate Buddhists who spoke up about the violence
  • Another very disturbing example of Buddhist monks inciting and committing violence is the situation in Myanmar (Burma), where hard-line monks have been leading the persecution of a Muslim minority group called the Rohingya.
  • Perhaps, if Prince Siddhartha was alive today, he would remind them that they should not nurture such an attachment to the idea of the nation.
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Whispers of $80 Oil Are Growing Louder - MoneyBeat - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...s-of-80-oil-are-growing-louder oil us industrial revolution
shared by anonymous on 11 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Oil prices have been grinding higher and higher, spurring forecasters to predict they could hit $80 a barrel this year.
  • the right combination of geopolitical crises could tip crude prices into the $70 to $80 range. With supplies already so tight, any unexpected disruption could cause prices to surge.
  • After hitting a 5-year low in September 2017, global oil supply disruptions could materially increase in 2018
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  • Higher oil prices (WTI>$60, Brent>$65) now will lead to a correction later in the year,
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The Lessons of Iran's Protests - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549647
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  • The 2015 nuclear agreement signed by Iran and several world powers, including the U.S., was heralded internationally not only as a way to freeze the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, but also domestically as a way to open up Iran’s moribund economy.
  • At first, there were signs this was precisely what would happen: U.S., European, Russian, and Chinese companies all signed agreements with Iran. The World Bank estimated Iran’s economy grew 6.4 percent in 2016, on the back of 9.2 percent growth in the second quarter of the year. And there was hope the new openness would mark a new era of entrepreneurship.
  • Except none of this was quite enough to stop the nationwide protests that began December 28 over jobs and the cost of living.
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  • first sign something could be wrong came in the May 2017 presidential election.
  • There are several reasons Iran’s economy hasn’t taken off in the way Rouhani had promised.
  • But perhaps more important than the uncertainty over the agreement are Iran’s own demographics. Half of all Iranians are under the age of 30. More people are entering the workforce each year than jobs exist or are being created. This all but ensures that a country with near universal literacy—with no gender disparity—will continue to have double-digit unemployment for the foreseeable future.
  • The protests were able to spread because of, among other things, the penetration of the smartphone—more than 40 percent of Iranian households have access to at least one—which enabled Iranians to use messaging apps to spread the word about the demonstrations.
  • Ultimately this might have been what prevented them from getting bigger.
  • This is ultimately what could imperil the Iranian regime. Rouhani’s economic promises have yet to materialize.
  • “The Islamic Republic,” Takeyh warned, “is entering a period of prolonged transition where it will no longer be able to proffer a theocracy with a human face.”
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Failure Is an Option: Does History Forecast Disaster for the United States? - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...258846 politics history
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  • it is clear that human societies do not progress inevitably toward greater wealth. Creating the conditions in which self-interest will foster economic development is harder than optimistic Enlightenment thinkers believed. Economic growth is not predestined: Many countries have seen long-term declines in standards of living, as did Argentina in the twentieth century. Others, such as large parts of Africa, seem mired in strife and poverty. With even the United States and Western Europe facing economic stagnation, burdensome debt levels, unfavorable demographics, and rising global competition, it seems that sustained stability and prosperity may be the historical exception rather than the rule.
  • Why some societies stagnate while others thrive is the question addressed by economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James Robinson in Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.
  • differences, Acemoglu and Robinson argue, can all be explained by institutions. Long-lasting institutions, not short-term government policies, are the key determinant of societal outcomes. Development is not as simple as adopting a smarter set of economic policies: Instead, "the main obstacle to the adoption of policies that would reduce market failures and encourage economic growth is not the ignorance of politicians but the incentives and constraints they face from the political and economic institutions in their societies."
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  • Acemoglu and Robinson outline a theory of how economic and political institutions shape the fate of human societies. They reinterpret the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history, showing how differences in institutions interact with changing circumstances to produce development or stagnation.
  • It also has implications for the contemporary United States, where increasing inequality and the growing influence of money in politics threaten to reshape our political institutions.
  • In more fortunate countries, pluralistic political institutions prevent any one group from monopolizing resources for itself, while free markets empower a large class of people with an interest in defending the current system against absolutism. This virtuous circle, which first took form in seventeenth-century England, is the secret to economic growth.
  • Economic institutions are themselves the products of political processes, which depend on political institutions. These can also be extractive, if they enable an elite to maintain its dominance over society, or inclusive, if many groups have access to the political process. Poverty is not an accident: "[P]oor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty." Therefore, Acemoglu and Robinson argue, it is ultimately politics that matters.
  • The logic of extractive and inclusive institutions explains why growth is not foreordained. Where a cohesive elite can use its political dominance to get rich at the expense of ordinary people, it has no need for markets and free enterprise, which can create political competitors. In addition, because control of the state can be highly lucrative, infighting among contenders for power produces instability and violence. This vicious circle keeps societies poor
  • Countries differ in their economic success because of their different institutions, the rules influencing how the economy works, and the incentives that motivate people," write Acemoglu and Robinson. Extractive institutions, whether feudalism in medieval Europe or the use of schoolchildren to harvest cotton in contemporary Uzbekistan, transfer wealth from the masses to elites. In contrast, inclusive institutions -- based on property rights, the rule of law, equal provision of public services, and free economic choices -- create incentives for citizens to gain skills, make capital investments, and pursue technological innovation, all of which increase productivity and generate wealth.
  • Acemoglu and Robinson differentiate their account from alternatives that they label the "culture," "geography," and "ignorance" hypotheses.
  • An example of the first is Max Weber's famous argument that Calvinism lay at the roots of capitalist development
  • the best-known recent example of the second is Jared Diamond's explanation of the Spanish Conquest as the inevitable outcome of geographic differences between Eurasia and the Americas.
  • Most economists, Acemoglu and Robinson assert, subscribe to the ignorance hypothesis, according to which "poor countries are poor because they have a lot of market failures and because economists and policymakers do not know how to get rid of them." According to this view, development can be engineered through technocratic policies administered by enlightened experts.
  • this focus on policy obscures the fundamental importance of politics.
  • Their perspective is informed by New Institutional Economics, an approach developed in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and associated with prominent economists such as Douglass North and Oliver Williamson, that focuses on how economic forces are mediated by institutions such as political systems and legal codes
  • A state based on extractive institutions, whether the Kuba Kingdom of seventeenth-century Central Africa or more recently the Soviet Union, can generate growth, especially when starting from low levels of development. But in most of these cases, the ruling elite is unwilling to allow inclusive economic institutions because they would threaten its political supremacy; the inevitable result is economic stagnation.
  • This leaves open the question of why some societies end up with inclusive rather than extractive institutions -- why some are rich and some are poor. The answer, according to Acemoglu and Robinson, is that institutions evolve -- and that history is messy.
  • Institutions change in subtle ways over time, allowing societies to drift apart. When major shocks occur, small differences in institutions can send societies down vastly different historical paths.
  • Early modern England, France, and Spain were all feudal societies with power-hungry monarchs. But the English Parliament had slightly more power than its continental relatives; as a result, the crown was unable to monopolize trade with the Americas, which made many merchants rich instead; in turn, this new commercial class became an important part of the coalition that overthrew James II in 1688, successfully fighting off absolutism. In Spain, by contrast, the monarchy controlled overseas trade, quashed internal challenges to its authority, and maintained extractive economic institutions -- and the country went into long-term decline. Crucially, Acemoglu and Robinson remind us that these outcomes were not preordained. James II might have suppressed the Glorious Revolution, or the Spanish Armada might have succeeded a century earlier. History is like that.
  • In this light, the material prosperity of the modern world, unevenly distributed though it is, is a fortunate historical accident.
  • But inclusive institutions can also break down. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a small group of families transformed Venice's semi-democratic institutions into a hereditary aristocracy and then monopolized long-distance trade, spelling the end of the city-state's economic expansion
  • Acemoglu and Robinson, by contrast, examine why nations fail. Societies, in their telling, are like Tolstoy's families: The success stories are similar -- pluralist democracies with regulated capitalist economies -- but failure comes in different forms. There are many ways in which elites can impose extractive institutions that cripple economic development.
  • The United States is one of the happy families of Why Nations Fail. Although our institutions have often been deeply flawed, Acemoglu and Robinson show how crucial moments in history, from Jamestown to the Progressive Era to the civil-rights movement, have led to the expansion of political democracy and economic opportunity.
  • Rather than as a series of inevitable triumphs, however, this history can also be seen as a warning -- that our institutions are fragile, always at risk of being subverted by elites seeking to exploit political power for their narrow economic ends. That risk has reappeared today.
  • The power of the financial sector is only one example of the broader threat to our inclusive political institutions: namely, the ability of the economic elite to translate their enormous fortunes directly into political power. In the wake of the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United, super PACs can mobilize unlimited amounts of money--and can accept contributions from 501(c)4 organizations, which do not have to identify their donors.
  • This may seem like a level playing field. But money is not distributed evenly. American Crossroads, for example, has consistently raised more than 90 percent of its funds from billionaires (with a "b"). The recent, breathtaking rise in inequality has put unprecedented resources at the disposal of the super-rich. With the ability to secretly invest unlimited sums in political activities, they now have the opportunity to swamp all other participants in American politics.
  • Rising inequality and deregulation of political spending have made possible a new kind of class warfare. The 1 percent can blanket the airwaves, install their chosen representatives, and sway public policy in their favor.
  • The most direct way to translate political power into cold, hard cash is to advocate for lower taxes. Republican presidential candidates spent the past year competing to offer the most bountiful tax cuts to the super-rich
  • Showering goodies on the rich would require draconian cuts to Social Security and Medicare -- programs that are popular among the Tea Party rank and file. Republicans' current anti-tax orthodoxy reflects the interests of their wealthy funders rather than their middle-income base.
  • As Warren Buffett observed, "there's been class warfare going on for the last twenty years, and my class has won." This should be little surprise: "My side has had the nuclear bomb. We've got K Street, we've got lobbyists, we've got money on our side."
  • Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents were instrumental in unleashing unlimited corporate political spending in Citizens United, accelerating the concentration of political power in the hands of the super-rich.
  • The most potent bulwark of inclusive institutions is probably the rich variety of influential interest groups that all have the ability to participate in politics. Still, the accumulation of huge fortunes and their deployment for political ends has changed the nature of our political institutions. Funding by the economic elite is a major reason why Republicans advocate transfers from ordinary people to the rich in the form of tax cuts and reductions in government services -- and why Democrats have been dragged to the right along with the GOP
  • Acemoglu recently said, "We need noisy grassroots movements to deliver a shock to the political system," citing both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as potentially helpful developments. As he recognized, however, the one with more staying power -- the Tea Party -- has been co-opted by well-funded, elite-dominated groups (including Americans for Prosperity). If a popular movement can be bankrolled as easily as an attack ad, it is hard to see what money can't buy in politics. The next test for America will be whether our political system can fend off the power of money and remain something resembling a real democracy -- or whether it will become a playground where a privileged elite works out its internal squabbles.
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Europe and the Turks: The Civilization of the Ottoman Empire | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...ks-civilization-ottoman-empire Ottoman Empire
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  • This year the Turks have been celebrating the 500th anniversary of their conquest of Constantinople. Turkish rule in Europe began nearly a century earlier, and was firmly established by the time that the occupation of the Imperial city rounded off the Turkish dominions and made Constantinople once again the capital of a great empire. But the anniversary may serve as the occasion for some reflections on the place of the Ottoman Empire in the history of Europe and of the world
  • the loss of Constantinople is a great historical disaster, a defeat of Christendom which has never been repaired
  • Western travellers in Turkey, who were the major source of information to the Western world, with few exceptions reinforced these prejudices. Most of them lacked the perceptiveness and imagination to realize that though the familiar good qualities that they appreciated at home were missing in Turkey, there were others present of a different kind
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  • Like most liberated peoples, the Balkan, and later the Arab, states tended to blame all the defects and shortcomings of their societies upon the misrule of the fallen imperial masters
  • This negative attitude to the Turks, while predominant, is not the only one. There is also what one might call a positive legend of the Turk in Europe - and here I am not speaking of the political and military considerations which from time to time led European powers to sup with the Turk, though with a long spoon
  • Turkish culture is, as one would expect, mainly Islamic, and the educated Ottoman was as familiar with the Arabic and Persian classics as his Western contemporaries with those of Greece and Rome
  • Against the charge of destructiveness that is often brought against Turkish rule, the same evidence may be cited. The registers show an increase in population and prosperity in most areas after the conquest, which the travellers - by no means friendly witnesses - confirm
  • Certainly the Sultan was no democrat; but after all, democracy, as we know and practise it, has flourished in only a few places, and in most of them is recent and precarious. The Sultan was not a true despot, but the supreme custodian of the God-given Holy Law of Islam, to which he himself was subject.
  • This security and prosperity, given to peasant agriculture by a Government which had inherited the ancient loyalty owed by the Balkan peoples to the Imperial Byzantine throne, did much to reconcile them to the other imperfections of Ottoman rule, and account in large measure for the long tranquillity that reigned in the Balkans until the explosive irruption of nationalist ideas from the West
  • Two other qualities which have been attributed to the Turks are fanaticism and intolerance. The Ottoman Turks were indeed fanatical Moslems, dedicated to the maintenance and expansion of the Islamic state. But toleration is a relative matter
  • The well-known preference of the 15th-century Greeks for Moslem rather than Frankish rule was not without its reasons. The confrontation of Christendom and Islam has sometimes been compared with the present Cold War
  • When Ottoman rule in the Balkans ended, the Balkan peoples resumed their national existence, with their own religions and languages and national cultures intact
  • With the decline of the Ottoman Empire, some of the traditional charges against the Turks become in part justified.
  • Islam is far more akin to Europe in its cultural traditions than to the true Orient, in India and China. But the Turks were familiar in a nearer and more material sense. They had been in Anatolia since the 11th century, absorbing the ancient races of the peninsula; in Europe since the 14th century
  • The loss of Constantinople was certainly a defeat of Christendom and of Europe - though perhaps not so total as was once feared.
  • Nor was it a victory of barbarism, but rather of another and not undistinguished civilization
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Philip II of Spain: Champion of Catholicism | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...-ii-spain-champion-catholicism Religion Spain Philip Foreign Policies
shared by manhefnawi on 15 May 18 - No Cached
  • Philip II was a loyal son of the Catholic Church
  • Philip's sense of religious mission crucially shaped foreign and imperial policy
  • It was the 1590s before the Inquisition managed to extend its control over printed materials beyond Castile to the rest of Spain, and any resourceful person with a taste for suspect literature could obtain prohibited texts from Italy, France, and the Low Countries
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  • Philip promulgated the entire body of decrees in Spain in July 1564
  • The Spanish Church at the time of Philip's accession was in dire need of reform
  • Its limited budget and resources (a mere 45 inquisitors were responsible for 8 million Spaniards) meant that it could not possibly carry out this broad range of duties
  • His long conflict against the Turks was motivated as much by a sense of Spain's strategic needs in the Mediterranean as by any desire to join the Pope on a religious crusade against the 'Infidel'
  • May festivals were banned, and plays, public meetings, business and games were prohibited inside churches, but the attempt to ban bullfighting on holy days was a miserable
  • The government, fearing that the revolt might spread or that it might attract Turkish support, dispatched 20,000 Spanish troops, commanded by Philip's half-brother Don Juan, to restore order
  • the Spanish Church as a whole was unenthusiastic about the monarchy's reforming efforts, only gradually and reluctantly adopting Tridentine standards of education, behaviour and dress
  • After the victory at Lepanto in October 1571, at which 117 Ottoman ships were captured and dozens more sunk for the loss of only 20 Christian ships, Philip's propagandists trumpeted both Philip's faith and the blessings of God upon Spain
  • After intervening in France in the 1590s, he was outraged to discover that the Pope recognised Henry IV as the rightful ruler of France and was working to obtain his conversion to Catholicism
  • Yet while religion may not have been dominant in Philip's considerations during the 1570s, it appears to have become more influential towards the end of his reign
  • In the 1580s and 1590s Philip allowed himself to be drawn into the French Civil Wars, intervening militarily between 1590 and 1598
  • Overall, it seems that, as the reign progressed, Philip allowed religious considerations to loom ever larger in his shaping of foreign policy
  • the Pope, as ruler of the Papal States, felt threatened by the power of Spain, which controlled the Italian states of Naples, Sicily, Sardinia and Milan
  • The Papacy traditionally sought room for diplomatic manoeuvre by playing Spain off against the other great Catholic power, France, but the weakness of late sixteenth-century France made this impossible, and the Pope's consequent reliance upon Spanish arms against Ottoman and Protestant threats only made him more resentful.
  • The Pope constantly hectored Philip to embark upon crusades against the Turks, against Elizabeth of England, against heresy in the Netherlands, but Philip, knowing full well the costs of such an aggressive policy, resisted until the 1580s. Thereafter Philip, at war with England, France and the Netherlands,
  • But when Pius V sought to follow up the victory at Lepanto with a crusade against the Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean, Philip demurred, preferring 'to gain some benefit for my own subjects and states from this league and all its expenses rather than employ them in so risky an undertaking as a distant expedition in the Levant
  • Philip is often portrayed as a 'champion of Catholicism' and the evidence of his religious policy at home and abroad largely bears out this judgement
  • The fear of its introduction froze the … heretics of Italy, France and Germany into orthodoxy… It condemned not deeds but thoughts … it arrested on suspicion, tortured till confession, and then punished by fire
  • They paint a more positive picture of a regime striving, certainly, to purify the nation, but also to educate and reform its morals and worship
  • On the one hand, the power of the State and the Inquisition appears less all-pervasive than we once believed; and on the other, the Spanish people themselves appear as both the agents of the Inquisition and its principal 'victims'
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Why Trump Has Failed on His Foreign-Policy Initiatives - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Donald Trump entered office with more scope for initiative in foreign policy than any of his recent predecessors.
  • “Gradually and then suddenly.” That was how one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters described the process of going bankrupt. The phrase applies vividly to the accumulating failures of President Trump’s foreign-policy initiatives.
  • Trump also enjoyed greater material scope: a growing economy, federal finances that were less of a mess than usual, and a lower pace of combat operations than at any time since 9/11.
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  • This is why presidents are surrounded by elaborate staff systems to help them—and oblige them—to think through their words and actions.  
  • Through his first months in office, Trump threw his power about as if it were an infinite resource. He growled threats, issued commands, picked quarrels, and played favorites.
  • His idea of foreign policy is to bark orders like an emperor, without thinking very hard about how to enforce compliance or what to do if compliance is not forthcoming.
  • First, because he talked so much and tweeted so much, he revealed much more of himself much earlier than other presidents
  • Second, foreign leaders have concluded that the shortest path to Trump’s heart runs through his wallet
  • Third, Trump’s highly suspicious dealings with Russia before the election potentially put him at the mercy of countries in a position to embarrass him
  • At a time of relatively low military casualties and strong job growth, the president’s popularity at home roughly matches that of George W. Bush’s during the worst months of the Iraq war, 2005–2006, and Barack Obama’s during the most disappointing months of the weak recovery from the recession of 2009. The president’s options are narrowing even before the midterm elections.
  • America’s friends are turning their backs fast. (Only 17 percent of South Koreans trust Trump to do the right thing, according to the Pew global surveyin 2017, well before the latest chaos. Obama’s trust rating in South Korea bounced between a low of 75 percent and a high of 88 percent over his presidency.
  • All this is only the beginning. Deficits are rising fast. Military commitments are rising fast
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