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Opinion | The Triumph of the Ukrainian Idea - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...raine-liberal-nationalism.html nationalism liberalism ukraine
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  • The Ukrainians are winning not only because of the superiority of their troops. They are winning because they are fighting for a superior idea — an idea that inspires Ukrainians to fight so doggedly, an idea that inspires people across the West to stand behind Ukraine and back it to the hilt.
  • That idea is actually two ideas jammed together. The first is liberalism, which promotes democracy, individual dignity, a rule-based international order.
  • The second idea is nationalism.
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  • There are many people who assume that liberalism and nationalism are opposites. Liberalism, in their mind, is modern and progressive. It’s about freedom of choice, diversity and individual autonomy. Nationalism, meanwhile, is primordial, xenophobic, tribal, aggressive and exclusionary.
  • it has become clear that there are two kinds of nationalism: the illiberal nationalism of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and the liberal nationalism of Zelensky. The former nationalism is backward-looking, xenophobic and authoritarian.
  • The latter nationalism is forward-looking, inclusive and builds a society around the rule of law, not the personal power of the maximum leader. It’s become clear that if it is to survive, liberalism needs to rest on a bed of this kind of nationalism.
  • Nationalism provides people with a fervent sense of belonging. Countries don’t hold together because citizens make a cold assessment that it’s in their self-interest to do so. Countries are held together by shared loves for a particular way of life, a particular culture, a particular land
  • Nationalism provides people with a sense of meaning. Nationalists tell stories that stretch from a glorious if broken past forward to a golden future
  • Democracies need nationalism if they are to defend themselves against their foes. Democracies also need this kind of nationalism if they are to hold together.
  • Yascha Mounk celebrates the growing diversity enjoyed by many Western nations. But he argues they also need the centripetal force of “cultural patriotism,” to balance the centrifugal forces that this diversity ignites.
  • Finally, democracies need this kind of nationalism to regenerate the nation. Liberal nationalists are not stuck with a single archaic national narrative. They are perpetually going back, reinterpreting the past, modernizing the story and reinventing the community.
  • Over the past decades this kind of ardent nationalism has often been regarded as passé within the circles of the educated elites
  • The first problem with this posture is that it opened up a cultural divide between the educated class and the millions of Americans for whom patriotism is a central part of their identity
  • Liberal nationalism believes in what liberals believe, but it also believes that nations are moral communities and the borders that define them need to be secure
  • It believes that it’s sometimes OK to put Americans first — to adopt policies that give American workers an edge over workers elsewhere. It believes it’s important to celebrate diversity, but a country that doesn’t construct a shared moral culture will probably rip itself to shreds.
  • It shows what a renewed American liberal nationalism could do, if only the center and left could get over their squeamishness about patriotic ardor and would embrace and reinvent our national tradition.
  • “Self-centered individualism must therefore be replaced with a more collectivist spirit that nationalism knows how to kindle.”
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Opinion | Elon Musk Is Buying Twitter. Shudder. - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Carnegie and the steel barons elected Republican lawmakers and presidents committed to protecting their companies’ profits by levying high tariffs on foreign competitors. Mr. Musk’s companies, and his fortune, were built with billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies for his electric-car company, Tesla, and billions more in NASA contracts to ferry American astronauts into space, launch satellites and provide high-speed internet services tethered to his fleet of some 3,000 satellites.
  • What makes Mr. Musk particularly powerful and potentially more dangerous than the industrial-era moguls is his ability to promote his businesses and political notions with a tweet
  • The likely consequences of Mr. Musk’s Twitter ownership will be political as well as economic disruption.
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  • It is not unreasonable to expect that a Musk-owned and controlled Twitter will, in the name of free speech, allow disinformation and misinformation to be tweeted ad infinitum so long as it discredits his political opponents and celebrates and enriches himself and his allies.
  • Mr. Musk is correct that “free speech” must be honored and protected. But is it not time that we, as a people and a nation, engage in a wide-ranging, inclusive public debate on when and how free speech creates “a clear and present danger” — as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote a century ago — and whether we need government to find a way, through law or regulation or persuasion, to prevent this from happening?
  • Elon Musk is a product of his — and our — times. Rather than debate or deride his influence, we must recognize that he is not the self-made genius businessman he plays in the media. Instead, his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials who have allowed him and other billionaire businessmen to exercise more and more control over our economy and our politics.
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New survey finds antisemitic views are widespread in America - The Washington Post - 0 views

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  • The survey shows “antisemitism in its classical fascist form is emerging again in American society, where Jews are too secretive and powerful, working against interests of others, not sharing values, exploiting — the classic conspiratorial tropes,”
  • The study uses a new version of surveys the ADL has been doing in America since the 1960s in order to get at the specific nature of antisemitism, and what makes it different from other types of hate. Its new metric is centered on affirming or rejecting 14 statements, including whether Jews: “have too much control and influence on Wall Street,” “are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want,” or are “so shrewd that other people do not have a fair chance.”
  • Almost 4 in 10 Americans believe it’s mostly or somewhat true that “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to America,”
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  • It is difficult to assess whether antisemitic views have increased over time, given changes in the survey’s response options as well as how respondents were sampled.
  • Williams and some experts who helped review the study noted that it shows the views of Americans under 30 and those of Americans over 30 are very similar. Of Americans ages 18 to 30, 18 percent said six or more of the statements were true, while among those 31 and older, 20 percent did. Of younger Americans, 39 percent believed two to five statements, while among the older group, 41 percent did.
  • “It used to be that older Americans harbored more antisemitic views. The hypothesis was that antisemitism declined in the 1990s, the 2000s, because there was this new generation of more tolerant people. It shows younger people are much closer now to what older people think. My hypothesis is there is a cultural shift, fed maybe by technology and social media. The gap is disappearing,
  • in 2013, Pew convened a dozen or more top experts on American Judaism for a survey and asked about their priorities and what areas needed more information and attention. The consensus at the time was that antisemitism was at a historic low in the United States and that, while it still existed, it wasn’t a pressing concern. When Pew talked to experts in 2020, their attitudes were “a complete sea change. They told us antisemitism is a very pressing issue and we need to devote a lot of attention to understanding it.”
  • The vast majority of U.S. Jews told Pew in 2020 that antisemitism had increased in the past five years, and a slim majority said they personally feel less safe.
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Russia is becoming increasingly dependent on China - The Washington Post - 0 views

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  • A few weeks before Russia launched its war, Putin and Xi met at a summit and declared a partnership with “no limits.” Now, after a summer of spiraling tensions, their governments are locked in a tighter embrace, voicing their shared animus toward the American hegemon that looms over their own perceived spheres of influence.
  • This week, Zhang Hanhui, China’s ambassador to Moscow, attacked the United States for supposedly stoking the conflict in Ukraine. “As the initiator and main instigator of the Ukrainian crisis, Washington, while imposing unprecedented comprehensive sanctions on Russia, continues to supply arms and military equipment to Ukraine,” Zhang told Russian state news agency Tass. “Their ultimate goal is to exhaust and crush Russia with a protracted war and the cudgel of sanctions.”
  • Earlier, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, had lambasted Washington for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan. “This is not a line aimed at supporting freedom and democracy,” Peskov said. “This is pure provocation. It’s necessary to call such steps what they really are.”
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  • Putin may be possessed by neo-imperial dreams of Russia’s place in Europe, but he is presiding over a state of affairs that has steadily given Beijing more leverage over Moscow. Far removed from the days of the Cold War when the Kremlin viewed communist China as its “poorer cousin,” Russia — isolated and enfeebled — is sliding inexorably into the role of “junior partner” to the Asian giant.
  • The war in Ukraine has rendered Russia increasingly dependent on China: Sanctions have curtailed the global market for its exports and thinned out possible suppliers for its exports. Enter China, whose imports from Russia have surged, jumping 80 percent in May compared with last year, largely in the form of oil and other natural resources. The Russian market, left bereft of many European products, may get all the more flooded by Chinese goods and technology in the months and even years ahead.
  • Gabuev suggested that current trendlines could see China’s renminbi, which has already outperformed the euro on Moscow’s stock exchange, becoming “the de facto reserve currency for Russia even without being fully convertible,” and thereby “increasing Moscow’s dependence on Beijing.”
  • Imbalances that already existed between both countries are only amplifying. China is edging closer to Russia as a leading arms supplier to developing countries. Russia was compelled to significantly discount oil sales to China, while Chinese car manufacturers — recognizing the paucity of options now facing Russian consumers — have in some instances raised prices for their vehicles in Russia by 50 percent
  • Gabuev unpacked the geopolitical ramifications of Russia’s supplication to China. “To keep China happy, Russian leaders will have little choice but to accept unfavorable terms in commercial negotiations, to support Chinese positions in international forums such as the United Nations, and even to curtail Moscow’s relations with other countries, such as India and Vietnam,”
  • Even in the remote scenario where Putin himself falls, it’s hard to imagine the broader tectonic realignments taking place would shift all that much. “Russia is turning into a giant Eurasian Iran: fairly isolated, with a smaller and more technologically backward economy thanks to its hostilities to the West but still too big and too important to be considered irrelevant,
  • With China as Russia’s biggest external partner and major diplomatic ally, Gabuev concluded, “the aging ruling elite in the Kremlin, myopically fixated on Washington, will be even more eager to serve as China’s handmaidens as it rises to become the archrival of the United States.”
  • “The best way for the West to deal with the China-Russia alignment is to acknowledge that these bonds are strong and to improve its own resilience and deterrence capacities,” wrote Justyna Szczudlik, a China analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs.
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What to read as an introduction to India | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ad-as-an-introduction-to-india india introduction economist
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  • The book (which we reviewed in 2021), is two things in one: it is a relatively straightforward chronicle of eight centuries of Indian history, a period that gave rise to many things thought of today as quintessentially Indian, from biryani to the Hindi language
  • it offers powerful evidence, backed up with hundreds of examples from Professor Eaton’s scholarship, that Indians before the arrival of the British saw each other and themselves not through the lens of religion, as the leaders of the country today would have their citizens believe, but through the varifocals of language, ethnicity and community.
  • It is not uncommon to encounter, among a certain class of English gentleman, the notion that, on balance, India did not do so badly from British rule. Not only were Indians spared the horrors of French or Spanish—or, worse, Belgian—colonisation. But the British built the railways, the postal system and the administrative infrastructure of the country. They left behind the gifts of parliamentary democracy and the English language. In under 300 pages, Shashi Tharoor, a former under-secretary-general of the UN and a serving member of parliament in India, demolishes those arguments
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  • the many sins of empire, from draining India of its resources and destroying its industry, to the manner in which the British implemented a policy of divide-and-rule, giving rise to conflict between Hindus and Muslims, which ultimately led to the partition of India and Pakistan
  • As for the railways, post and industrialisation, he asks, “Why would India, which throughout its history had created some of the greatest (and most modern for their time) civilisations the world has ever known, not have acquired all the trappings of developed or advanced nations today, had it been left to itself to do so?”
  • Mumbai is in many ways unlike the rest of India: it is far richer, less caste-bound and a lot more easy-going. Yet it is also all of India in a single place
  • As the country’s commercial capital, it has long attracted migrants from all over the country. Most of India’s communities, languages and cuisines are represented here, if not all of its pathologies. The cliché about Mumbai is that it is a place of extreme contrasts: sprawling shantytowns nestled in the shadows of multi-million-dollar homes
  • He explains with great clarity the links between big Indian business and politics, and the implications for India’s industrial economy. Even so, India is no post-Soviet Russia. The historical analogy Mr Crabtree uses instead is America in the era of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. In America, it gave way to a progressive era of greater prosperity for all, he writes. The fate of nearly 1.4bn people hangs on whether India makes a similar journey.■
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Best Nursery in Sharjah, Al Qasimia | Preschool in Sharjah - 1 views

magickidsnursery.com Nursery in Sharjah Nursery in Al Qasimia Nursery in Rolla Nursery in Abu Shagara Nursery in Al Majaz Preschool In Sharjah Best Nursery in Sharjah
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  • magickidsnursery on 13 Sep 22
     
    Magic Kids Best Nursery in Sharjah, Al Qasimia, Buhaira, Rolla, Abu Shagara, Al Majaz is the one-stop Preschool in Sharjah. Magic Kids Nursery is the one-stop preschool-solution for parents who want the best for their little ones! The energetic ambience, effective learning methodologies and affectionate trainers bestow a powerful pre-school experience for children. At Magic Kids Nursery in Sharjah, we follow the EYFS Curriculum which substantially strengthens the learning foundation of our students. The learn-with-fun ambience and attitude of Magic Kids Nursery in Buhaira will nurture positive learning spirits of children. Kids love the learning experience throug well guided, effective peer-engagement.
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How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671847 UK economy culture history crisis politics society decline
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  • When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, it hit hard, smashing the engine of Britain’s economic ascent. Wary of rising deficits, the British government pursued a policy of austerity, fretting about debt rather than productivity or aggregate demand. The results were disastrous. Real wages fell for six straight years. Facing what the writer Fintan O’Toole called “the dull anxiety of declining living standards,” conservative pols sniffed out a bogeyman to blame for this slow-motion catastrophe. They served up to anxious voters a menu of scary outsiders: bureaucrats in Brussels, immigrants, asylum seekers—anybody but the actual decision makers who had kneecapped British competitiveness.
  • A cohort of older, middle-class, grievously nostalgic voters demanded Brexit, and they got it.
  • In the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one.
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  • the U.K. manufacturing industry has less technological automation than just about any other similarly rich country. With barely 100 installed robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers in 2020, its average robot density was below that of Slovenia and Slovaki
  • One analysis of the U.K.’s infamous “productivity puzzle” concluded that outside of London and finance, almost every British sector has lower productivity than its Western European peers.
  • What was once the world’s most powerful globalized empire has now voted to explicitly reduce global access to trade and talent. Since Brexit, immigration, exports, and foreign investment have all declined, likely reducing the size of the U.K.’s economy by several percentage points in the long run.
  • “Take out Greater London—the prosperity of which depends to an uncomfortable degree on a willingness to provide services to oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union—and the UK is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.”
  • Today, Britain seems trapped between a left-wing aversion to growth and a right-wing aversion to openness. On the academic left, the U.K. has lately been home to a surging movement called degrowtherism, which asserts that saving the planet requires rich countries to stop seeking growth.
  • On the right, the electorate is dominated by older voters who care more about culture wars than about competitiveness
  • The U.K. is now an object lesson for other countries dealing with a dark triad of deindustrialization, degrowth, and denigration of foreigners.
  • Enemies of progress can criticize the legacy of industrialization, productivity, and globalization. But the U.K. shows us what can happen when a rich country seems to reject all three. Rather than transforming into some post-economic Eden of good vibes, it becomes bitter, flailing, and nonsensical.
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A Chess Champion's Warning About Ukraine and U.S. Democracy - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Kasparov’s latest gambit is promoting what he views as two essential, connected ideas: that Putin’s war in Ukraine is a war for democracy itself, and that Western democracies are in peril unless their citizens fight for democratic values at home.
  • “I grew up in the Soviet Union, so I experienced undemocratic rule,” Kasparov said. “And while I never thought America was even close to this kind of desperation, when you look at history, the real threat in democracy comes when you have polarization.”
  • With Russia’s war effort flagging in Ukraine, Kasparov senses “panic” among authoritarian leaders from North Korea to Venezuela, because, he said, they view Putin as a man with “almost mystical powers.”
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  • . The group also organized an open letter, signed by 52 dissidents from 28 countries, warning that “to win the global fight against authoritarianism, America must once again believe in and live up to its own values.”
  • Western leaders should push to end the conflict as soon as possible, Kasparov argues, by giving Ukraine the heavy weapons its leaders say they need.
  • Here in the United States, Kasparov said, “It also could be a great moment for us to revise our commitment to democracy,” adding, “Because, let’s be honest, there was complacency.”
  • Kasparov was feuding online with Elon Musk, the Tesla founder. On Monday, Musk floated a 280-character proposal to end the war in Ukraine that, to Kasparov, seemed too friendly to the Kremlin. He called Musk’s proposal “moral idiocy.”
  • Kasparov’s response to Americans of all stripes is that although their democracy may be teetering, it’s still a beacon of hope to millions around the world. And as the war in Ukraine shows, maintaining it requires constant vigilance.
  • “You have to be an active member of society,” he said. “You have to be engaged. That is the message.”
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Putin's Regime Faces the Fate of His Kerch Bridge - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • “Battles are the principal milestones of secular history,” Winston Churchill wrote in his biography of the Duke of Marlboroug
  • The strike on the Kerch Strait Bridge was not a battle, but it was an important contributor to one of the great inflection points of this war—the moment when Russian elites began to understand that they are losing
  • The Kerch Strait Bridge attack, by contrast, inflicted at most a couple of casualties but packed multiple punches
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  • Russia’s military predicament is going from bad to worse. Occupying a thousand-kilometer front and reliant on massed firepower, the Russian military depends on creaking supply lines that run parallel to the front and that are increasingly vulnerable to Ukrainian precision attacks.
  • Meanwhile, Russia’s military mobilization is a deeply unpopular botch, as more Russian men flee the country than can be inducted into an army that cannot equip them, cannot train them, and cannot lead them.
  • More disasters await. Ten thousand to 20,000 of Russia’s best remaining troops are bottled up in the city of Kherson, their backs against the Dnipro River and the bridges behind them unusable for heavy traffic.
  • Surovikin—his face set in the menacing scowl of most Russian generals—will not be able to create a unified command organization overnight. Nor is he likely to escape the micromanagement from the Kremlin that seems to have plagued Russia’s war effort. What he will do, however, is repeat the brutalities over which he presided in Syria, where the Russian military gained experience not in fighting but in butchering civilians
  • Putin may now face the unappetizing choice between picking a more effective, colorful, and (on the nationalist right) popular set of subordinates who could turn on him, or sticking with the loyal but failed mediocrities who have absorbed the obloquy associated with Putin’s system and the president himself.
  • Dictatorships built solely on fear and self-interest are brittle things, and in Russia the cracks are showing.
  • Running throughout the open conduits of opinion, primarily on Telegram, is boiling discontent with the military, the conduct of this war, the absurd insistence that it is not a war but a “special technical operation,” the incompetent mobilization, and, by implication, Putin himself.
  • At the same time, Russian paranoia about the West, a combination of grievance and thwarted desires to restore an imperial state, has created an atmosphere in which measured policy is impossible.
  • All of this suggests that predictions of stalemate are wrong, at least so far as the higher conduct of this war is concerned. The impulse of General Surovikin will be to destroy civilians, power plants, and hospitals, because he cannot beat the Ukrainian army.
  • “Great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.”
  • A much larger psychological disaster for Russia will ensue if and when Kherson falls and the largest city that Russia has taken is lost to Ukraine, together with thousands of Russian prisoners. That would be the real inflection point, a great battle, and as Churchill also put it:
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Will Elon Musk-owned Twitter end up as a "deal from hell"? | The Economist - 0 views

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  • mergers and acquisitions that end happily do so for a variety of reasons. It’s the unhappy ones that are alike. This is particularly true of m&a deals done at the top of the business cycle, when hubris runs amok, lofty valuations make acquirers sloppy with their money and the most radical ideas are made to sound plausible. In this category sits Elon Musk’s shotgun wedding to Twitter
  • Mr Musk’s latest attempt to justify it is to describe it as a step towards a Chinese-style “everything app”. It is just as likely to go down in history as a top-of-the-market “deal from hell”.
  • the stock phrases that sum up such debacles—wrong target, wrong time, wrong price tag—already seem applicable to his pursuit of Twitter, and may explain why he has spent so long trying to wriggle out of the deal
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  • the first hints of hell come from hubris. The self-styled “Technoking” has every reason for self-belief. Tesla is the world’s most valuable carmaker. SpaceX is literally rocket science in action. Yet for executives like him it’s a fine line from that to overconfidence. Sony’s Morita Akio crossed it. So did AOL’s Steve Case and RBS’s Fred Goodwin
  • The corollary of hubris is sloppy financing, another attribute of top-of-the-market megaflops. This is particularly true at the tail end of bull markets
  • as with many M&A deals, deteriorating markets can turn a flawed acquisition into a disaster. That possibility must haunt Mr Musk. The digital-advertising market on which Twitter depends has crumbled. Tesla’s own shares, the source of most of his wealth, have lost a third of their value since he made the bid (don’t cry for him, he is still worth $220bn). The deal financing includes $13bn of high-risk debt and spreads on this kind of instrument have soared
  • the repercussions are likely to be troubling. Either banks are stuck with hard-to-sell debt and suffer hefty losses or, in the unlikely event that they abandon the deal, a superhero of 21st-century capitalism faces a $44bn day of reckoning
  • Finally there is strategy. In Mr Bruner’s analysis, the worst M&A deals are done when the target is in an industry far beyond the acquirer’s “domain knowledge”. That is surely true of Mr Musk and Twitter
  • it also has a hellish side. It could pit the world’s most powerful businessman against tech regulators. It could stir up trouble geopolitically (imagine a reinstated Donald Trump weighing in, as Mr Musk has done, on Russia and Ukraine). And it could enrage China, thwarting Tesla’s prospects there. Another deal for the history books, no doubt
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J. D. Vance and the Collapse of Dignity - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Americans once expected politicians to carry themselves with a seriousness that indicated their ability and willingness to tackle problems, whether poverty or war, that were too difficult for the rest of us. We elected such people not because we wanted them to be like us but because we hoped that they were better than us: smarter, tougher, and capable of being leaders and role models.
  • ven some of the most flawed people we elevated to high office at least pretended to be better people, and thus were capable of inspiring us to be a better nation.
  • Today, we no longer expect or even want our politicians to be better than we are.
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  • The new American right, however, has blown past the relatively innocuous populism of the past 40 years and added a fetid cynicism about almost everything related to public life.
  • Not only are the MAGA Republicans seemingly repelled by the idea of voting for someone better than they are; they support candidates who are often manifestly worse people than the average citizen, so that they may slather their fears about their own shortcomings and prejudices under a sludgy and undifferentiated hatred about almost everyone in public office.
  • These populists not only look past the sins of their candidates but also defend and even celebrate them
  • The same Republicans who claim to venerate the Founders and the Constitution have intentionally turned our politics into a scuzzy burlesque.
  • consider how many people cheer on unhinged cranks such as Marjorie Taylor Greene or allow themselves to be courted by smarmy opportunists such as Vance and Ted Cruz.
  • This new populism, centered in the modern Republican Party, has no recognizable policy content beyond the thrill of cruelty and a juvenile boorishness meant largely to enrage others.
  • The GOP’s goals now boil down to power for its elected royalty and cheap coliseum pleasures for its rank and file.
  • Republicans, therefore, are forced to lower their—and our—standards for admission to public office, because the destruction of dignity is the only way they can find the candidates who will do what decent men and women will not, including abasing themselves to Donald Trump.
  • Let us leave aside the cult around Trump, which has now reached such levels of weirdness that the specter of Jim Jones is probably pacing about the netherworld in awe.
  • I’m an adult. I get it. Our elected officials aren’t saints, and only rarely are they heroes. But must they now be a cavalcade of clowns and charlatans, joyously parading their embrace of vice and their rejection of virtue? The Republican Party seems to think so.
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What Happens If Putin Falls Out of a Window? - 0 views

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  • Cochran identifies four different blame narratives he found in his historical survey:
  • The pretender narrative targets political leadership’s lack of judgement and competence in instigating a failed war. The decision to go to war was misguided and based on faulty assessments or narrow interests, and any assurances of victory made at the outset have proven a façade. In contrast, the bungler narrative maligns political leadership for ineffective prosecution of the war regardless of who started the war. Associated critiques relate to inadequately resourcing the military, tying the military’s hands, or otherwise adopting a “no win” approach. The backstabber narrative cites political leadership for prematurely and unnecessarily terminating a war that was still winnable and still worth fighting. Success remained within reach, but political leadership pulled the plug before the military could finish the job and thus snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Finally, the sellout narrative focuses on political leadership’s failure to procure the best possible outcome despite military defeat, highlighting leadership’s role in an unfair peace settlement that betrays the nation’s sacrifice. 
  • Of these four narratives, only the “pretender” narrative leaves room for the new leader to walk away from the failed war. The other three more or less commit the new guy to keep fighting.
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  • So the question is: What are the chances that Putin could be deposed and then made to be seen as a “pretender” by his successor? And are there ways in which the West could help this narrative along?
  • ou can’t assume that just because Putin goes away, the strongman who takes over for him—and in the near term, a new strongman is the only possible successor—will feel as though his position is secure enough to walk away from Ukraine.
  • Any new leader who seeks to extricate Russia from Putin’s war likely will face tough domestic hurdles
  • Russia’s current domestic political environment, as characterized by an intense blame game pitting political versus military leadership, would be especially dangerous for Putin’s successor and disincentive any move to abandon Russia’s war aims in Ukraine and seek peace, at least in the short term.
  • What Freedman describes is a scenario in which it seems likely that if Putin is deposed, the “backstabber” narrative will dominate among the Russian power elite:
  • There is a cleft both in elite and public opinion in Russia, and it is now becoming visible on television.  Some people think that the war is a holy cause and can be won if heads roll, leadership behaves honorably, and more men and materiel are sent to the front.  Among them are the military bloggers who are actually at the front, and whose voices are becoming more mainstream.  This is a trap for Putin, since he is already sending everything that he can.  Those voices make him look weak.  Other people think that the war was a mistake.  These voices will make him look foolish.  This is just the most basic of a number of contradictory positions that Putin now faces, from an exposed and weakened position.
  • there’s Timothy Snyder’s analysis:
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Don't Buy the Mitt Romney Martyr Theory - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671725 gop history crisis culture politics us radicalization
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  • Ever since Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016, an industry of rationalization and justification has thrived. The theme is clear: Look what you made us do. The argument is simple: Democratic unfairness and media bias radicalized Republicans to such an extent that they turned to Trump in understandable outrage. Republicans had been bullied, so they turned to a bully of their own.
  • has been, in fact, a Mitt Romney radicalization process.
  • It isn’t rooted in Republican anger on behalf of Romney but in Republican anger against Romney, and over time that anger has grown to be not just against Romney the man but also against the values he represents.
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  • in hindsight, the real Romney radicalization is far more clear. You could see the seeds planted during the 2012 Republican primary. On January 19, two days before South Carolina primary voters cast their ballot, Newt Gingrich had a moment during the GOP primary debate.
  • Surely, heavily evangelical voters in a key Republican stronghold would be concerned about Gingrich’s scandals? No, they were far angrier at media outlets than they were at any Republican hypocrisy.
  • Gingrich went on to win the South Carolina primary in a “landslide” powered by evangelicals. It was the only time in primary history that South Carolina voters failed to vote for the eventual GOP nominee. But South Carolina voters weren’t out of step; rather they were ahead of their time. They forecast the Republican break with character in favor of a man who would “fight.”
  • To understand the emotional and psychological aftermath of Romney’s loss, one has to look at the cultural break between the GOP establishment—which commissioned an “autopsy” of the party in 2012 that called for greater efforts at inclusion—and a grassroots base that was convinced that it had been hoodwinked by party leaders into supporting the “safe” candidate.
  • And so the Republican establishment and the Republican base moved apart, with one side completely convinced that Romney lost because he was perhaps, if anything, too harsh (especially when it came to immigration) and the other convinced that he lost because he was too soft.
  • When Trump won, the base had its proof of concept. Fighting worked, and not even Trump’s loss—along with the loss of the House and the Senate in four short years—has truly disrupted that conclusion. And why would it? Many millions still don’t believe he lost.
  • The Mitt Romney martyr theory thus suffers from a fatal defect. It presumes that large numbers of Republicans weren’t radicalized before Romney’s rough treatment. In truth, they already hated Democrats and the media, and when Romney lost, their message to the Republican establishment in 2016 was just as clear as it was in South Carolina in 2012. No more nice guys. The “character” that mattered was a commitment to punching the left right in the mouth.
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Donald Trump Tried to Destroy the Constitution - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • David Frum summed up the committee’s findings—and the nation’s reaction—in one tweet: “Decisive [and] irrefutable documentary evidence that the 45th president of the United States tried to overthrow the US Constitution by violence, no big deal, just another news day.”
  • None of it seems to matter, because for a large swath of the American public, nothing really matters
  • here, I do not mean only the “MAGA Republicans,” loyalists who are already a lost cause
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  • As the historian Michael Beschloss said on MSNBC last night after the hearing, Trump “probably wanted to declare martial law.”
  • the insurrection was a close-run thing, noting that if “Trump and those rioters had been a little bit faster, we might be living in a country of unbelievable darkness and cruelty.”
  • But who cares? After all, inflation is too high, and gas is still too expensive, and that’s a bigger problem than the overthrow of the government, isn’t it?
  • In a country that still had a functional moral compass, citizens would watch the January 6 hearings, band together regardless of party or region, and refuse to vote for anyone remotely associated with Donald Trump, whom the committee has proved, I think, to be an enemy of the Constitution of the United States
  • His party, as an institution, supports him virtually unconditionally, and several GOP candidates around the country have already vowed to join Trump in his continuing attack on our democracy. To vote for any of these people is to vote against our constitutional order.
  • It’s that simple.
  • Lake is one of the most extreme election deniers and Trump sycophants in the GOP, but the Journal thinks she’d be great on the issue of school choice, as though the funding of education would be the big issue if Lake conspires with other Trump cultists across the United States to deliver the final blow to the notion of the peaceful and constitutional transfer of power.
  • To vote for anyone still loyal to a party led by the narcissistic sociopath who put our elected officials and our political system itself in peril is to abandon any pretense of caring whether the United States remains a constitutional democracy. The question is whether enough of us will care, in little more than three weeks from now, to make a difference.
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Francis Fukuyama: Still the End of History - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Over the past year, though, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of these strong states.
  • The weaknesses are of two sorts. First, the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader at the top all but guarantees low-quality decision making, and over time will produce truly catastrophic consequences
  • Second, the absence of public discussion and debate in “strong” states, and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow, and can erode at a moment’s notice.
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  • Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad. People across varied cultures do not like living under dictatorship, and they value their individual freedom. No authoritarian government presents a society that is, in the long term, more attractive than liberal democracy, and could therefore be considered the goal or endpoint of historical progress.
  • The philosopher Hegel coined the phrase the end of history to refer to the liberal state’s rise out of the French Revolution as the goal or direction toward which historical progress was trending. For many decades after that, Marxists would borrow from Hegel and assert that the true end of history would be a communist utopia. When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with this phrase in the title, I noted that the Marxist version was clearly wrong and that there didn’t seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy.
  • setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they’re doing any better.
  • Liberal democracy will not make a comeback unless people are willing to struggle on its behalf. The problem is that many who grow up living in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies begin to take their form of government for granted. Because they have never experienced an actual tyranny, they imagine that the democratically elected governments under which they live are themselves evil dictatorships conniving to take away their rights
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Elon Musk, Savant Idiot? - by Charlie Sykes - Morning Shots - 0 views

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  • Confusing entertainment with substance, we turned celebrities into senators, and reality tv stars into presidents; millions of Americans think that an over-leveraged performative asshole has somehow cracked the code of... well, pretty much everything.
  • Our starf**king culture simply can’t get enough of starf**king someone who is not just famous, but rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And has 114 million followers on Twitter.
  • In a long-vanished century, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the rich “are different from you and me,” but the new class of FU rich are something else altogether. They live in self-created bubbles of reinforcement that let them live lives of self-fondling solipsism
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  • This is their precious. But marinating in the power, celebrity, and lulz long enough turns the oligarchs into Gollums, like the one who exposed himself so fabulously and relentlessly this week.
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Taiwan Wants China to Think Twice About an Invasion - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Taiwan is now on pace to spend more than $19 billion on defense in 2023. But China spends more than $200 billion a year
  • Instead of building large, conventional hardware (airplanes, tanks, submarines), military experts have urged Taiwan to focus on so-called asymmetric capabilities (anti-ship weapons, surface-to-air missiles, stockpiles of small arms and ammunition), which have served Ukraine well in repelling a larger invader. That, combined with a bigger force of civilian reserves, could make the cost of an invasion too high for China. This approach has earned a nickname in global defense circles: “the porcupine strategy.”
  • China now has the world’s largest navy, with more than 350 ships and submarines. Its rocket force maintains the world’s largest arsenal of land-based missiles, which would feature in any war with Taiwan.
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  • Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, who was chief of Taiwan’s General Staff from 2017 to 2019, has championed the shift to asymmetric capabilities and has emerged as a Cassandra-like figure in his warnings that Taiwan is not preparing fast enough
  • You may not be able to stop an invasion, Lee says, but you can stop China from subjugating Taiwan. This entails denying China the ability to control the battle space. The Chinese haven’t fought a war in several decades, and Taiwan has geographic advantages—including ample mountains and few beaches suitable for amphibious operations
  • the first three section headings: “I. Taiwan Is Part of China—This Is an Indisputable Fact,” “II. Resolute Efforts of the CPC to Realize China’s Complete Reunification,” and “III. 2fChina’s Complete Reunification Is a Process That Cannot Be Halted.”
  • Lee points to two possible scenarios. The first is a coercive approach in which China encircles and pressures Taiwan—perhaps even seizing outlying islands and engaging in missile strikes. The second is a full-scale invasion.
  • Politically, Lee said, the message from China to the U.S. and Taiwan is simple: “I can do whatever I want in Taiwan, and there’s nothing the U.S. can do about it.” This message came across unequivocally in a white paper that Beijing released in August.
  • Anti-ship missiles, anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, drones, long-range artillery, and small arms could wreak havoc on an invading force, and disrupt the supply chains necessary to sustain an occupation.
  • Lee also argues that Taiwan’s civilian population should be organized into a trained Territorial Defense Force, so that any attempted occupation would be met by the broadest possible resistance. “As long as China fails, Taiwan wins the war,”
  • “The purpose is to make China believe that if you want to invade Taiwan, you will suffer huge losses,” Lee said. “And if you still invade Taiwan, you will not be able to succeed.
  • as Lee sees it, the pace must quicken. “Taiwan needs a strategic paradigm shift,”
  • When Chiang fled to Taiwan—with roughly 2 million Chinese from the mainland—there were some 6 million people already living on an island that was just emerging from 50 years of Japanese rule. Most of the people living on the island when Chiang arrived could claim roots in Taiwan going back hundreds of years. They had their own languages and culture. So too did the island’s many Indigenous groups, such as the Amis, the Atayal, and the Paiwan.
  • To subjugate the island, Chiang killed and imprisoned tens of thousands over decades—a period known as the White Terror. He set up a military dictatorship under the leadership of his Chinese nationalist Kuomintang Party (KMT) and, from this offshore platform, vowed to reclaim mainland China.
  • After the election of President Ma Ying-jeou, in 2008, links of trade, investment, and travel helped reduce tensions with China. Ma was from the KMT, and the party’s Chinese heritage and its ties to Taiwan’s business elite eased the way to détente with Beijing.
  • But many Taiwanese, particularly the young, feared that forging too close a connection could ultimately give Beijing leverage over Taiwan. In 2014, in what became known as “the Sunflower Movement,” named for the flower that served as a symbol of hope, students occupied the Taiwan legislature to oppose a free-trade agreement with China. After a tense standoff, they succeeded in stopping the deal.
  • tus quo is really interesting, because in the American context that is what it mean
  • But the idea of it here is: There is no need to declare independence, because we are already independent. This country functions like an independent nation, but someone else says it is not.” Recent polling suggests that fewer than 5 percent of people in Taiwan identify as “only Chinese.”
  • n Chinese and KMT officials 30 years ago, an outcome
  • at represents anything but consensus. To the Chinese Communist Party, the consensus is that there is one China, and the government in Beijing is the sole legitimate authority. To the KMT, the consensus is that there is one China, but the Republic of China in Taiwan is the legitimate government. To the DPP, there is no consensus, only a fraught political reality to be managed
  • China proposes a “one country, two systems” regime, in which Taiwan becomes a formal part of China but maintains an autonomous political system. There is one big problem with this proposal: Hong Kong
  • in 2020, several “national-security laws” were passed giving the authorities broad powers to crush dissent. Activists were rounded up. Independent media were shut down. One country, two systems was dead. The fate of Hong Kong has had a profound impact on Taiwan.
  • Ukraine inspired the Taiwanese society a lot, including how Zelensky told their story,” Chiang said. He was almost matter-of-fact when he told me, “I would say war between China and Taiwan will definitely happen. We want to win.”
  • In our conversation, Tsai talked about what she had learned from Ukraine. One lesson is simply the need for international support—to defend itself or, better, to avoid a war in the first place
  • Another lesson of Ukraine is the importance of national character. Outside support, Tsai emphasized, depends on qualities only Taiwan can provide. “You need to have good leadership,” she said, “but more important is the people’s determination to defend themselves, and the Ukrainian people showed that.
  • Hanging over all of this is the role of the United States. As one Taiwanese ex
  • ert pointedly asked me: “We can make ourselves a porcupine, but what are you going to do?”
  • Would the U.S. risk the biggest naval battle since World War II to break a Chinese blockade? Would the U.S. attack an invading Chinese force knowing that U.S. military personnel in Japan, Guam, and possibly Hawaii are within range of Chinese rockets? Would the American people really support a war with the world’s most populous country in order to defend Taiwan?
  • how the U.S. can help prepare Taiwan than on what the U.S. would do in a conflict.
  • small victories only point up the scale of the challenge. Wu himself has used the term cognitive warfare to describe the comprehensive nature of China’s pressure on Taiwan. “They use missiles, air, ships, disinformation, cyberattacks, and economic coercion,” he told me. As a warning sign, China has banned hundreds of exported products from Taiwan. “They claimed that our mangoes tested positive for COVID,”
  • . If China takes Taiwan, Wu suggested that the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitions could extend to the East China Sea, threatening Japan; to the South China Sea, where China has built militarized islands and claims an entire body of water bordering several nations; to the Indian Ocean, where China is expanding influence and could establish military bases; and to the Pacific Ocean, where China is working to establish security pacts with island nations
  • I sat there reading message after message, all posted in closed chat rooms, meant to bend Taiwanese minds to Beijing’s worldview. The meanings of buzzwords like cognitive warfare and resilience came into sharper focus. Facing the seemingly bottomless resources of a massive totalitarian state, here were two young people working for free on a Wednesday night, quietly insisting on the notion that there is indeed such a thing as objective reality.
  • to preserve this, Taiwan has to find some mix of the approaches that I’d heard about: preparing for a war while avoiding it; talking to China without being coerced by it; drawing closer to the U.S. without being reduced to a chess piece on the board of a great game; tending to a young democracy without letting divisions weaken it; asserting a unique identity without becoming an independent country.
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Efforts to block Inflation Reduction Act programs ramp up - The Washington Post - 0 views

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  • The nation’s largest companies and lobbying groups spent a combined $2.3 billion in 2022 to shape or scuttle key components of the emerging law, according to a review of federal ethics disclosures and data compiled by the money-in-politics watchdog OpenSecrets.
  • Among the fiercest critics was the pharmaceutical industry, which spent more than $375 million to lobby over that period, the records show. Many tried and failed to block Congress from granting the government new powers to negotiate the price of selected prescription drugs under Medicare.
  • The work to implement that program is underway: The Biden administration is supposed to identify the first 10 drugs it is targeting for negotiation by September, continue the formal process into 2024 and see the prices implemented in 2026, with more drugs to follow in future years. Drug manufacturers that refuse to comply would face steep financial penalties.
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Opinion | If Democrats Win Back the House, They Will Have John Roberts to Thank - The N... - 0 views

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  • Milligan, Wasserman continued, “could reverberate across the Deep South leading to the creation of new Black-majority, strongly Democratic seats in multiple states
  • If Democrats can gain five seats, it will critically affect the balance of power in Washington.
  • Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard and an expert on election law, wrote by email that Milligan is significant both substantively and politically:First, it means that Section 2 remains fully operative as a bulwark against racial vote dilution; second, it signals to conservative lower courts that they need to rule in favor of plaintiffs on facts like those in Milligan; third, it takes off the table arguments that Section 2 must be narrowly construed to avoid constitutional problems; and fourth, if Section 2 is constitutional, so should be other laws targeting racial disparities.
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  • it comes at a time when “a confluence of at least four political and technological developments will make its practical effect significant.”
  • First, technological advances, as used in the Milligan case, make it easier to find new V.R.A. districts that can be reasonably configured.
  • Second, minority-preferred candidates can win with lower minority voting-age populations (falling from estimates as high as 65 percent in the 1990s to below 45 percent now), which means more minority voters are available to create additional V.R.A. districts.
  • Third, the private bar has become extremely well resourced to pursue these cases.
  • Fourth, the debates over partisan gerrymandering in the last decade brought many new strong social scientists into this area, in which expert analysis of maps and voting patterns plays a critical role.
  • John Roberts’s majority opinion is particularly important because it rejects the argument that race-based remedial districting is unconstitutional:Alabama further argues that, even if the Fifteenth Amendment authorizes the effects test of section 2, that Amendment does not authorize race-based redistricting as a remedy for section 2 violations. But for the last four decades, this Court and the lower federal courts have repeatedly applied the effects test of section 2 as interpreted in Gingles and, under certain circumstances, have authorized race-based redistricting as a remedy for state districting maps that violate section 2.In that context, Roberts continued, “we are not persuaded by Alabama’s arguments that section 2 as interpreted in Gingles exceeds the remedial authority of Congress.”
  • My best guess is that Roberts and Kavanaugh thought it best to proceed cautiously and bide their time. The court as an institution can only take so many bombshells at a time. The issue will come back to the court soon enough.
  • But, Tribe continued, “Allen v. Milligan remains highly significant as an essential reminder that the court doesn’t exist in an isolation booth, unaffected by public reactions to its decisions that venture too far from the mainstream of legal and social thought.”
  • Roberts and Kavanaugh, in Tribe’s view, chose not to press the case against race-based redistricting in part because of “the controversy unleashed by the court in its shattering abortion ruling in Dobbs last June, coupled with other unrestrained shocks to the system delivered by the court in the landmark cases involving guns and climate change, and aggravated by the ethical stench swirling about the court as a result of improprieties.”
  • These developments, Tribe continued, “almost certainly had an impact, however subconscious, on the chief justice and on Justice Kavanaugh, who has increasingly sought to distance himself from the hard right.”
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The fourth leading cause of death in the US? Cumulative poverty | Reverend William Barb... - 0 views

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  • Current poverty – just being poor right now – is seventh on that list, and it alone causes 10 times as many deaths as homicide, close to five times as many deaths as gun violence, and 2.5 times as many deaths as drug overdoses.
  • Cumulative poverty that lingers year after year is associated with approximately 60% more deaths than current poverty, putting only heart disease, cancer and smoking-related deaths ahead in the number of Americans it kills
  • poverty is right up there with these other dreaded scourges – much higher, in fact, than many ills that have inspired investigative committees, major policy investments and sustained attention from the public and private sectors in American life.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • if this is true, why do we hear so much about crime rates, opioids and gun violence in America, but so little from our elected leaders about the crisis of poverty? Why is there no “Surgeon General’s Warning” on low-wage jobs?
  • we as a people have become numb to the unnecessary deaths that are normalized by the ways we often think and talk about the economy in public life.
  • the United States is the leader in poverty among the rich countries of the world. As of 2019, the US had the worst poverty rate overall (17.8%) and in children specifically (20.9%) among the other 25 wealthy countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
  • Seventy-five percent of all Americans between 20-75 years of age will be among the “current” poor or near poverty for at least one year of their lives.
  • Contrary to popular belief, poverty is hardly just the province of the inner city: only 10% of poor Americans live in high-poverty census tracts – most are spread out across the country. They are our neighbors. And although the rates of poverty are highest among communities of color, by sheer volume most people living in poverty are white.
  • poverty is a drag on our economy. Child poverty alone in the US presents an $800bn to $1.1tn price tag, based on reductions in adult productivity, criminal justice costs and the costs of healthcare for children from poor families.
  • Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton University, estimates that we could lift everyone within our borders above the poverty line for less than 1% of our national GDP – $177bn. Ending poverty is within our grasp. It is something we can accomplish together. So what’s stopping us?
  • As the economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson said in their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, “those who have power make choices that create poverty. They get it wrong not by mistake or ignorance but on purpose”.
  • recent book Poverty, By America: “Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.”
  • The incentives for maintaining the status quo, for keeping many Americans poor, rest on the fact that some people find considerable financial benefit from presiding over the misery of others
  • what a young Friedrich Engels – observing the deaths of factory-workers, the conditions of the slums, and the exploitation of children in Manchester, England in the mid-19th century – called “social murder”. Many were dying, while a few made a killing from their suffering. It was true then, and it is true now.
  • “Woe unto those who make unjust laws and rob the poor of their right.” But this prophetic challenge isn’t a condemnation. It is an invitation to life. Together, we can become the land of “liberty and justice for all” that has never yet bee
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