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The Poverty of "Data Journalism" and the Irony of Gun Control - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...m-and-the-irony-of-gun-control guns debate 2nd amendment culture crisis
shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • the biggest victory of the NRA over the last generation isn’t so much making even the slightest and most modest gun control measures a political impossibility. The bigger win is the strategic victory of focusing the ‘debate’ on to such small-bore measures.
  • what we might call extreme gun ownership – individuals owning large numbers of often quasi-military firearms – is quite new. The mass casualty shooting is no longer a random freak out by a troubled person: it’s an established American idiom of violence, a way certain people choose to make a statement to the society at large.
  • 78% of Americans own no guns.3% own fully 50% of the firearms in the country.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Would a ban on “assault weapons” prevent a depressed man from killing himself with the handgun he’s owned for twenty years? Of course, not
  • the fact that we have vastly more gun suicides in the US is obviously due to the fact that guns are easy to buy, almost totally unregulated and pervasive, familiar and embedded in our culture. The idea of firearms is deeply embedded in many Americans understanding of their own identity, their sense of their safety and even the way they face or contemplate their own deaths. All of those are true.
  • In most parts of America, it doesn’t seem odd that one person is collecting a small arsenal of dozens of guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition or that the guns are capable of firing huge amounts of rounds quickly. It’s not just legal. It doesn’t raise any questions or need for scrutiny about a person’s mental state, or about what they plan to do with the weapons. Guns and now extreme gun ownership are deeply embedded in our culture in a way that laws alone, certainly not marginal measures, cannot easily change. This cultural component of the gun problem undergirded and structured by laws, but existing as a reality beyond it is the undiscussed factor in America’s mass violence problem.
  • step back from the small-bore specifics. The clearest factor separating the US from comparable, wealthy industrialized countries is the sheer number of guns we have, the almost total absence of regulation of those guns and the high rates of violence which has been a key component of American culture outside the Northeast for centuries.
  • the problem isn’t the NRA. It’s that support for unfettered rights to guns has grown tremendously over the last generation and politicians in most parts of the country don’t want to go up against that
  • the first step to creating change is to understand and think about – even if only in the minds of those who wish it – what change would actually look like, what it would mean, what would be ideal.
  • We’re now actively debating things that no civilized country has ever even contemplated – the right to take a semi-automatic weapon into a family restaurant or shopping mall. Meanwhile, mass ownership of guns has become and is becoming more and more deeply embedded into the political culture of a vast segment of the population.
  • Those of us who see the current situation as not just non-ideal but actually a sort of societal sickness need to start thinking way beyond things like closing the gun show loophole.In other words, yes, we really do want to take your guns. Maybe not all of them. But a lot of them.
  • that fact out into the open. More than thirty thousand Americans die every year from firearms injuries because we find that an acceptable price to pay for unregulated, mass gun ownership
  • It is also important to accept that to really change the prevalence of firearms deaths in the United States and the scourge of mass casualty shootings would require many fewer guns, a culture of regulation of gun ownership and less prevalence and less social acceptance of people who find their identity and sense of well-being intrinsically tied to the free and mass ownership of firearms
  • Do I think this is likely anytime soon? No, I don’t. But the US has undergone numerous revolutions of values, social acceptability, and laws before. So is it possible? Absolutely. The first step to creating a different, better future is understanding what it would look like and what it would take to get there. For now, we just choose not to do it. We need to accept that.
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Ross Douthat Has a Vision of America. It's Grim. - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 29 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • THE DECADENT SOCIETY How We Became the Victims of Our Own SuccessBy Ross Douthat
  • Though a self-declared conservative Catholic, Douthat is above all an American, which means that in one book he might light a candle to the Virgin, and in the next a candle to the Dynamo. This is partly what makes his weekly columns so interesting and unpredictable. Rather than encounter a rigid ideology at work, one senses a fruitful tension between these two commitments.
  • By “decadence” he means a kind of cultural exhaustion and world-weariness he senses in our time and that worries him precisely because it seems to be sustainable rather than a prelude to collapse.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • The malaise he analyzes is the result of various forces — economic, institutional, technological, cultural, even biological — coming together to sap us of our strength and hope.
  • He treats each of these in turn, weighing different hypotheses that might explain us to ourselves
  • Progressive politics depends on cultivating a sense of solidarity and social obligation, which becomes much harder as families shrink and grow older, and individualism becomes the dominant social fact.
  • As birthrates decline below replacement, the population ages and there are fewer workers and family members to support retirees with health needs
  • Our reproductive choices are creating a world where children grow up with fewer siblings and far fewer cousins, cutting them off from natural family networks that offer social support and lessons in getting over themselves
  • As a genre, social prophecy assumes a pact between author and reader. The author agrees to let his or her imagination loose in the jungle of trends, developments and crises of the moment. The reader agrees to suspend questions and judgments until the end, picking up insights along the way.
  • In the end he accepts that below-replacement fertility “is the fundamental fact of civilized life in the early 21st century” and that it “looks like an inevitable corollary of liberal capitalist modernity.”
  • Apart from gay rights, where opinion has genuinely shifted, he believes left and right find themselves pretty much where they were in the 1970s, though less inclined to act.
  • That might imply the need for public pronatal policies
  • it might also reflect the paradox that, since the sexual revolution, people have found it harder to pair off into couples and start families
  • Many conservatives have predicted that ubiquitous internet porn would inspire bacchanalias and violence, but in fact rates of sexual assault, teen sex and teen pregnancy have dropped since its introduction. Saturation, it seems, induces numbness, not desire.
  • Douthat’s chapters on stagnating innovation and institutional sclerosis as elements of our decadence are more conventional, though informative and well balanced.
  • Douthat levels the same charge of repetitiveness against our political intellectual culture and expresses a little nostalgia for sharp and sometimes violent confrontations
  • he keeps digging. He claims that the family size people in the Western world desire is actually higher than that needed for replacement, which suggests that there is an unsatisfied demand for children.
  • How can he say that ours is a static culture in the age of connectivity, which has accelerated change and turned ours into ever more “liquid societies”? An illusion. It has simply accelerated the circulation of the same tired cultural tropes, leaving us with wheels that turn ever faster in a ditch.
  • What about the political radicalism and rage exacerbated by social media? Probably just “a kind of digital-age playacting in which young people dissatisfied with decadence pretend to be fascists and Marxists on the internet, re-enacting the 1930s and 1960s with fewer street fights and more memes.”
  • “It’s possible that Western society is really leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth, all riled up in its own imagination and yet, in reality, comfortably numb.”
  • The least persuasive pages are devoted to pop culture, which he rightly sees as dull and repetitiv
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Sullivan: Why the Reactionary Right Must Be Taken Seriously - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 06 May 17 - No Cached
  • This notion of a national culture, rooted in, if not defined by, a common ethnicity, is even more powerful in European nations, which is why Brexit is so closely allied to Trumpism.
  • Is Britain changing so fast that it could lose any meaningful continuity with its history and culture? That is the question now occupying the British neo-reactionaries. Prime Minister Theresa May has not said many memorable things in office, except this: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”
  • Anton took issue with an article I wrote for this magazine in which I described Trump as reminiscent of Plato’s description of a tyrant emerging out of a decadent democracy and argued that we should do what we could to stop him.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • Anton’s critique was that I was half-right and half-wrong. I was right to see democracy degenerating into tyranny but wrong to see any way to avoid it. What he calls “Caesarism” is already here, as Obama’s abuse of executive power proved. Therefore: “If we must have Caesar, who do you want him to be? One of theirs? Or one of yours (ours)?”
  • he writes a reactionary blog, Unqualified Reservations, under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug and has earned a cult following among the alt-right. His magnum opus — “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” — is an alternately chilling and entertaining assault on almost everything educated Westerners hold to be self-evidently true.
  • Yarvin believes that the Western mind became corrupted during the Enlightenment itself. The very idea of democracy, allied with reason and constitutionalism, is bunk: “Washington has failed. The Constitution has failed. Democracy has failed.” His golden era: the age of monarchs. (“It is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.”) His solution: “It is time for restoration, for national salvation, for a full reboot. We need a new government, a clean slate, a fresh hand which is smart, strong and fair.”
  • The assumption that all of history has led inexorably to today’s glorious and democratic present is, he argues, a smug and self-serving delusion. It’s what used to be called Whig History, the idea that all of human history led up to the democratic institutions and civilizational achievements of liberal Britain, the model for the entire world.
  • Why do so many of us assume that progress is inevitable, if never complete? Yarvin, like the Claremonters and American Greatness brigade, blames an elite that he calls by the inspired name “the Cathedral,” an amalgam of established universities and the mainstream press. It works like this: “The universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent.
  • for Yarvin, the consent is manufactured not by capitalism, advertising, and corporations but by liberal academics, pundits, and journalists. They simply assume that left liberalism is the only rational response to the world. Democracy, he contends, “no longer means that the public’s elected representatives control the government. It means that the government implements scientific public policy in the public interest.”
  • His solution is not just a tyrannical president who hates all that the Cathedral stands for but something even more radical: “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power to a mysterious figure known only as the Receiver, who in the process of converting Washington into a heavily armed, ultra-profitable corporation will abolish the press, smash the universities, sell the public schools, and transfer ‘decivilized populations’ to ‘secure relocation facilities’ where they will be assigned to ‘mandatory apprenticeships.’ ”
  • This is 21st-century fascism, except that Yarvin’s Receiver would allow complete freedom of speech and association and would exercise no control over economic life. Foreign policy? Yarvin calls for “a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.” All social policy also disappears: “I believe that government should take no notice whatsoever of race — no racial policy. I believe it should separate itself completely from the question of what its citizens should or should not think — separation of education and state.”
  • Harari notes another paradox: Over hundreds of millennia, we have overcome starvation … but now are more likely to die of obesity than hunger. Happiness? Globally, suicide rates keep rising.
  • Because in some key respects, reactionaries are right. Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back. The Reformation did initiate brutal sectarian warfare. The French Revolution did degenerate into barbarous tyranny. Communist utopias — allegedly the wave of an Elysian future — turned into murderous nightmares. Modern neoliberalism has, for its part, created a global capitalist machine that is seemingly beyond anyone’s control, fast destroying the planet’s climate, wiping out vast tracts of life on Earth while consigning millions of Americans to economic stagnation and cultural despair.
  • And at an even deeper level, the more we discover about human evolution, the more illusory certain ideas of progress become. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari points out that hunter-gatherers were actually up to six inches taller than their more “civilized” successors; their diets were much healthier; infectious disease was much rarer; they worked less and goofed off more than we do.
  • I never doubted the cogency of many reactionary insights — and I still admire minds that have not succumbed to the comfortable assumption that the future is always brighter. I read the Christian traditionalist Rod Dreher with affection. His evocation of Christian life and thought over the centuries and his panic at its disappearance from our world are poignant. We are losing a vast civilization that honed answers to the deepest questions that human beings can ask, replacing it with vapid pseudo-religions, pills, therapy, and reality TV
  • Beyond all that, neo-reactionaries have a glaring problem, which is that their proposed solutions are so radical they have no chance whatsoever of coming into existence — and would be deeply reckless to attempt.
  • We also invent myths and stories to give meaning to our common lives. Among those myths is the nation — stretching from the past into the future, providing meaning to our common lives in a way nothing else can. Strip those narratives away, or transform them too quickly, and humans will become disoriented. Most of us respond to radical changes in our lives, especially changes we haven’t chosen, with more fear than hope
  • If we ignore these deeper facts about ourselves, we run the risk of fatal errors. It’s vital to remember that multicultural, multiracial, post-national societies are extremely new for the human species, and keeping them viable and stable is a massive challenge.
  • Globally, social trust is highest in the homogeneous Nordic countries, and in America, Pew has found it higher in rural areas than cities. The political scientist Robert Putnam has found that “people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle.” Not very encouraging about human nature — but something we can’t wish away, either
  • In fact, the American elite’s dismissal of these truths, its reduction of all resistance to cultural and demographic change as crude “racism” or “xenophobia,” only deepens the sense of siege many other Americans feel.
  • When this velocity of cultural change combines with a deepening — and accurate — sense of economic anxiety, is it shocking that human beings want to retreat into a past, to resuscitate the nation-state, and to reach backward for a more primeval and instinctual group identity? Or that they doubt the promise of “progress” and seek scapegoats in the governing classes that have encouraged all of this to happen?
  • The tragedy of our time, of course, is that President Obama tried to follow Lincoln’s advice. He reached out to those who voted against him as often as he could. His policies, like Obamacare, were aimed at helping the very working poor who gave Trump the White House. He pledged to transcend the red-blue divide. He acknowledged both the necessity of law enforcement and the legitimate African-American fear of hostile cops
  • A black man brought up by white people, he gave speech after speech attempting to provide a new narrative for America: one of slowly integrating moral progress, where racial and class divides could be overcome. He criticized the reductive divisiveness of identity politics. And yet he failed
  • he couldn’t stem the reactionary tide that now washes ever closer ashore. If a man that talented, with that biography, found himself spitting into the wind, a powerful storm is indeed upon us.
  • how can you seriously regard our political system and culture as worse than ever before in history? How self-centered do you have to be to dismiss the unprecedented freedom for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals? Or the increased security for the elderly and unemployed, and the greater access to health care by the poor and now the working poor? Compare the air we breathe today with that of the 1950s. Contrast the religious tolerance we take for granted today with the enmities of the past.
  • Over the very long haul, too, scholars such as Steven Pinker have found convincing evidence that violence among humans is at the lowest levels since the species first emerged.
  • It is also one thing to be vigilant about the power of the administrative state and to attempt to reform and modernize it; it is quite another to favor its abolition. The more complex modern society has become, the more expertise is needed to govern it — and where else is that expertise going to come from if not a professional elite?
  • the liberal media has nothing like the monopoly it once enjoyed. There are two “Cathedrals” in the 21st century — and only one has helped produce a conservative Supreme Court, a Republican Congress, a Republican president, and near-record Republican majorities in statehouses around the country
  • We are tribal creatures in our very DNA; we have an instinctive preference for our own over others, for “in-groups” over “out-groups”; for hunter-gatherers, recognizing strangers as threats was a matter of life and death
  • There is, perhaps, a way to use reactionary insights and still construct a feasible center-right agenda. Such a program would junk Reaganite economics as outdated but keep revenue-neutral tax reform, it could even favor redistribution to counter the deep risk to democracy that soaring inequality fosters, and it could fix Obamacare’s technical problems. You could add to this mix stronger border control, a reduction in legal immigration, a pause in free-trade expansion, a technological overhaul of the government bureaucracy, and a reassertion of Americanism over multiculturalism.
  • The left, for its part, must, it seems to me, escape its own bubble and confront the accelerating extremism of its identity politics and its disdain for millions of “deplorable” white Americans. You will not arrest the reactionary momentum by ignoring it or dismissing it entirely as a function of bigotry or stupidity. You’ll only defuse it by appreciating its insights and co-opting its appeal.
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Reading in the Time of Books Bans and A.I. - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 22 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • We are in the throes of a reading crisis.
  • While right and left are hardly equivalent in their stated motivations, they share the assumption that it’s important to protect vulnerable readers from reading the wrong things.
  • But maybe the real problem is that children aren’t being taught to read at all.
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • . In May, David Banks, the chancellor of New York City’s public schools, for many years a stronghold of “whole language” instruction, announced a sharp pivot toward phonics, a major victory for the “science of reading” movement and a blow to devotees of entrenched “balanced literacy” methods
  • As corporate management models and zealous state legislatures refashion the academy into a gated outpost of the gig economy, the humanities have lost their luster for undergraduates. According to reports in The New Yorker and elsewhere, fewer and fewer students are majoring in English, and many of those who do (along with their teachers) have turned away from canonical works of literature toward contemporary writing and pop culture. Is anyone reading “Paradise Lost” anymore? Are you?
  • While we binge and scroll and D.M., the robots, who are doing more and more of our writing, may also be taking over our reading.
  • There is so much to worry about. A quintessentially human activity is being outsourced to machines that don’t care about phonics or politics or beauty or truth. A precious domain of imaginative and intellectual freedom is menaced by crude authoritarian politics. Exposure to the wrong words is corrupting our children, who aren’t even learning how to decipher the right ones. Our attention spans have been chopped up and commodified, sold off piecemeal to platforms and algorithms. We’re too busy, too lazy, too preoccupied to lose ourselves in books.
  • the fact that the present situation has a history doesn’t mean that it isn’t rea
  • the reading crisis isn’t simply another culture-war combat zone. It reflects a deep ambivalence about reading itself, a crack in the foundations of modern consciousness.
  • Just what is reading, anyway? What is it for? Why is it something to argue and worry about? Reading isn’t synonymous with literacy, which is one of the necessary skills of contemporary existence. Nor is it identical with literature, which designates a body of written work endowed with a special if sometimes elusive prestige.
  • Is any other common human undertaking so riddled with contradiction? Reading is supposed to teach us who we are and help us forget ourselves, to enchant and disenchant, to make us more worldly, more introspective, more empathetic and more intelligent. It’s a private, even intimate act, swathed in silence and solitude, and at the same time a social undertaking. It’s democratic and elitist, soothing and challenging, something we do for its own sake and as a means to various cultural, material and moral ends.
  • Fun and fundamental: Together, those words express a familiar utilitarian, utopian promise — the faith that what we enjoy doing will turn out to be what we need to do, that our pleasures and our responsibilities will turn out to be one and the same. It’s not only good; it’s good for you.
  • Reading is, fundamentally, both a tool and a toy. It’s essential to social progress, democratic citizenship, good government and general enlightenment.
  • It’s also the most fantastically, sublimely, prodigiously useless pastime ever invented
  • Teachers, politicians, literary critics and other vested authorities labor mightily to separate the edifying wheat from the distracting chaff, to control, police, correct and corral the transgressive energies that propel the turning of pages.
  • His despair mirrors his earlier exhilaration and arises from the same source. “I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!”
  • Reading is a relatively novel addition to the human repertoire — less than 6,000 years old — and the idea that it might be available to everybody is a very recent innovation
  • Written language, associated with the rise of states and the spread of commerce, was useful for trade, helpful in the administration of government and integral to some religious practices. Writing was a medium for lawmaking, record-keeping and scripture, and reading was the province of priests, bureaucrats and functionaries.
  • For most of history, that is, universal literacy was a contradiction in terms. The Latin word literatus designated a member of the learned elite
  • Anyone could learn to do it, but the mechanisms of learning were denied to most people on the grounds of caste, occupation or gender.
  • According to Steven Roger Fischer’s lively and informative “A History of Reading” (2003), “Western Europe began the transition from an oral to a literate society in the early Middle Ages, starting with society’s top rungs — aristocracy and clergy — and finally including everyone else around 1,200 years later.”
  • . The print revolution catalyzed a global market that flourishes to this day: Books became commodities, and readers became consumers.
  • For Fischer, as for many authors of long-range synthetic macrohistories, the story of reading is a chronicle of progress, the almost mythic tale of a latent superpower unlocked for the benefit of mankind.
  • “If extraordinary human faculties and powers do lie dormant until a social innovation calls them into life,” he writes, “perhaps this might help to explain humanity’s constant advancement.” “Reading,” he concludes, “had become our union card to humanity.”
  • For one thing, the older, restrictive model of literacy as an elite prerogative proved to be tenacious
  • The novel, more than any other genre, catered to this market. Like every other development in modern popular culture, it provoked a measure of social unease. Novels, at best a source of harmless amusement and mild moral instruction, were at worst — from the pens of the wrong writers, or in the hands of the wrong readers — both invitations to vice and a vice unto themselves
  • More consequential — and more revealing of the destabilizing power of reading — was the fear of literacy among the laboring classes in Europe and America. “Reading, writing and arithmetic,” the Enlightenment political theorist Bernard Mandeville asserted, were “very pernicious to the poor” because education would breed restlessness and disconte
  • “It was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read,” Frederick Douglass writes in his “Narrative of the Life” recalling the admonitions of one of his masters, whose wife had started teaching young Frederick his letters. If she persisted, the master explained, their chattel would “become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”
  • “As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.”
  • The crisis is what happens either when those efforts succeed or when they fail. Everyone likes reading, and everyone is afraid of it.
  • Douglass’s literary genius resides in the way he uses close attention to his own situation to arrive at the essence of things — to crack the moral nut of slavery and, in this case, to peel back the epistemological husk of freedom.
  • He has freed his mind, but the rest has not followed. In time it would, but freedom itself brings him uncertainty and terror, an understanding of his own humanity that is embattled and incomplete.
  • Here, the autobiographical touches on the mythic, specifically on the myth of Prometheus, whose theft of fire — a curse as well as a blessing bestowed on a bumbling, desperate species — is a primal metaphor for reading.
  • A school, however benevolently conceived and humanely administered, is a place of authority, where the energies of the young are regulated, their imaginations pruned and trained into conformity. As such, it will inevitably provoke resistance, rebellion and outright refusal on the part of its wards
  • Schools exist to stifle freedom, and also to inculcate it, a dialectic that is the essence of true education. Reading, more than any other discipline, is the engine of this process, precisely because it escapes the control of those in charge.
  • Apostles of reading like to quote Franz Kafka’s aphorism that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” By itself, the violence of the metaphor is tempered by its therapeutic implication.
  • Kafka’s previous sentence: “What we need are books that hit us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide.”
  • Are those the books you want in your child’s classroom? To read in this way is to go against the grain, to feel oneself at odds, alienated, alone. Schools exist to suppress those feelings, to blunt the ax and gently thaw the sea
  • That is important work, but it’s equally critical for that work to be subverted, for the full destructive potential of reading to lie in reach of innocent hands.
  • Roland Barthes distinguished between two kinds of literary work:
  • Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria: the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.
  • he is really describing modalities of reading. To a member of the slaveholding Southern gentry, “The Columbian Orator” is a text of pleasure, a book that may challenge and surprise him in places, but that does not undermine his sense of the world or his place in it. For Frederick Douglass, it is a text of bliss, “bringing to crisis” (as Barthes would put it) his relation not only to language but to himself.
  • If you’ll forgive a Dungeons and Dragons reference, it might help to think of these types of reading as lawful and chaotic.
  • Lawful reading rests on the certainty that reading is good for us, and that it will make us better people. We read to see ourselves represented, to learn about others, to find comfort and enjoyment and instruction. Reading is fun! It’s good and good for you.
  • Chaotic reading is something else. It isn’t bad so much as unjustified, useless, unreasonable, ungoverned. Defenses of this kind of reading, which are sometimes the memoirs of a certain kind of reader, favor words like promiscuous, voracious, indiscriminate and compulsive.
  • Bibliophilia is lawful. Bibliomania is chaotic.
  • The point is not to choose between them: This is a lawful publication staffed by chaotic readers. In that way, it resembles a great many English departments, bookstores, households and classrooms. Here, the crisis never ends. Or rather, it will end when we stop reading. Which is why we can’t.
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Hard Times in the Red Dot - The American Interest - 0 views

www.the-american-interest.com/...hard-times-in-the-red-dot us collapse history trump politics disaster exceptionalism Singapore
shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Deaths per million in Singapore equal about 4; the comparable U.S. figure, as of June 15, is 356.
  • traits with cultural roots planted deep from experience that run through all of East Asia to one degree or another. Unlike most Americans, East Asians retain some imagination for tragedy, and that inculcates a capacity for stoicism that can be summoned when needed.
  • Stoicism here wears off faster now, along with any vestigial passion for politics, in rough proportion to the burgeoning in recent decades of affluence and a culture of conspicuous consumption
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • it wears off faster among the young and energetic than among the older, more world-weary but also more patient
  • Middle-class Singaporean families often refer to themselves nowadays as the “sandwich generation,” by which they mean that between needing to care for elderly parents and spending heavily on tuition or tutoring and uniforms for school-age children, they have little left to spend on themselves
  • There are more than 10,000 cases, and numbers are rising fast. More than 800 cases were registered in just five and a half days this past week, more than the previous all-time record for a full week.
  • The Singaporean system lacks an open-ended entitlement akin to the U.S. Social Security system. It uses a market-based system with much to commend it, but it isn’t perfect. The system is designed to rely in part on multigenerational families taking care of the elderly, so as is the case everywhere, when a family doesn’t cohere well for one reason or another, its elderly members often suffer most.
  • with the coming of Singapore’s second monsoon season, the island is suffering the worst bout of dengue fever infections in more than a decade.
  • No country in the world has benefited more than Singapore from U.S. postwar grand strategy, except perhaps China. Which is an interesting observation, often made here, in its own right.
  • He proceeded to explain that the U.S. effort in Vietnam had already bought the new nations of Southeast Asia shelter from communist onslaught for three to four precious years.
  • LKY’s son, current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, repeated the same conclusion in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. He added that ever since the Vietnam War era, regardless of the end of the Cold War and dramatic changes in China, the U.S. role in East Asia has been both benign—he did not say error-free—and stabilizing.
  • More than that, U.S. support for an expanding free-trade accented global economic order has enabled Singapore to surf the crest of burgeoning economic growth in Asia, becoming the most successful transshipment platform in history. It has enabled Singapore to benefit from several major technological developments—containerization is a good example—that have revolutionized international trade in manufactures
  • Few realize that military power can do more than either compel or deter. Most of the time most military power in the hands of a status quo actor like the United States neither compels nor deters; it “merely” reassures, except that over time there is nothing mere about it
  • The most important of these reasons—and, I’ve learned, the hardest one for foreigners to understand—is that the Protestant/Enlightenment DNA baked indelibly into the American personality requires a belief in the nation’s exceptionalist virtue to justify an activist role abroad
  • Singapore has ridden the great whale of Asian advancement in a sea of American-guaranteed tranquility.
  • Singapore’s approach to dealing with China has been one of strategic hedging. There is no getting around the need to cooperate economically and functionally with China, for Chinese influence permeates the entire region. Do a simple thought experiment: Even if Singaporeans determined to avoid China, how could they avoid the emanations of Chinese relations with and influence on Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, and Korea? Impossible.
  • Singapore’s close relationship with the United States needs to be seen as similarly enmeshed with the greater web of U.S. relationships in littoral Asia, as well as with India and the Middle East. It is misleading, therefore, to define the issue as one of Singapore’s confidence, or lack thereof, that the United States will come to Singapore’s aid and defense en extremis.
  • The utility of the U.S. role vis-à-vis China is mainly one of regional balancing that indirectly benefits Singaporean security.
  • Singapore’s hedging strategy, which reflects a similar disposition throughout Southeast Asia with variations here and there, only works within certain ranges of enabling reality. It doesn’t work if American power or will wanes too much, and it doesn’t work if the broader Sino-American regional balance collapses into glaring enmity and major-power conflict.
  • Over the past dozen years the worry has been too much American waning, less of capability than of strategic attention, competence, and will. Now, over the past year or two, the worry has shifted to anxiety over potential system collapse into conflict and even outright war.
  • It’s no fun being a sentient ping pong ball between two behemoths with stinging paddles, so they join together in ASEAN hoping that this will deflect such incentives. It won’t, but people do what they can when they cannot do what they like.
  • the flat-out truth: The United States is in the process of doing something no other great power in modern history has ever done. It is knowingly and voluntarily abdicating its global role and responsibilities
  • It is troubled within, so is internally directed for reasons good and otherwise. Thus distracted from the rest of the world in a Hamlet-like act sure to last at least a decade, it is unlikely ever to return in full to the disinterested, active, and constructive role it pioneered for itself after World War II.
  • The recessional began already at the end of the George W. Bush Administration, set roots during the eight years of the Obama presidency, and became a bitter, relentless, tactless, and barely shy of mad obsession during the Trump presidency.
  • the strategy itself is unlikely to be revivified for several reasons.
  • One Lee Kuan Yew vignette sums up the matter. In the autumn of 1968, at a dinner in his honor at Harvard, the Prime Minister had to sit through a litany of complaints from leading scholars about President Johnson’s disastrously escalatory war policies in Vietnam. When they were through, no doubt expecting sympathy from an Asian leader, LKY, never one to bite his tongue, turned on his hosts and announced: “You make me sick.”
  • When, for justifiable reasons or not, the nation loses its moral self-respect, it cannot lift its chin to look confidently upon the world, or bring itself to ask the world to look upon America as a worthy model, let alone a leader.
  • That fact that most Americans today also increasingly see expansive international engagement as too expensive, too dangerous, too complex to understand, and unhelpful either to the “main street” American economy or to rock-bottom American security, is relevant too
  • the disappearance of a single “evil” adversary in Soviet communism, the advent of near-permanent economic anxiety punctuated by the 2008-9 Great Recession—whatever numbers the stock market puts up—and the sclerotic polarization of American politics have left most Americans with little bandwidth for foreign policy narratives.
  • Few listen to any member of our tenured political class with the gumption to argue that U.S. internationalism remains in the national interest. In any event, few try, and even fewer manage to make any sense when they do.
  • In that context, pleas from thoughtful observers that we must find a mean between trying to do too much and doing too little are likely to be wasted. No thoughtful, moderate approach to any public policy question can get an actionable hearing these days.
  • what has happened to “the America I knew and so admired” that its people could elect a man like Donald Trump President? How could a great country deteriorate so quickly from apparent competence, lucidity of mind, and cautious self-confidence into utterly debilitating spasms of apparent self-destruction?
  • The political culture as a whole has become a centrism incinerator, an immoderation generator, a shuddering dynamo of shallow intellectual impetuosity of every description.
  • in the wake of the George Floyd unrest one side thinks a slogan—“law and order”—that is mighty close to a dogwhistle for “shoot people of color” can make it all better, while the other side advocates defunding or abolishing the police, for all the good that would do struggling inner-city underclass neighborhoods.
  • To any normal person these are brazenly unserious propositions, yet they suck up nearly all the oxygen the U.S. media has the inclination to report about. The optic once it reaches Singapore, 9,650 miles away, is one of raving derangement.
  • Drop any policy proposal into any of the great lava flows of contemporary American irrationality and any sane center it may possess will boil away into nothingness in a matter of seconds
  • It’s hard for many to let go of hoary assurances about American benignity, constancy, and sound judgment
  • It is a little like trying to peel a beloved but thoroughly battered toy out of the hands of a four-year old. They want to hold onto it, even though at some level they know it’s time to loosen their grip.
  • Since then the mendacious narcissism of Donald Trump, the eager acquiescence to it of nearly the entire Republican Party, and its deadly metathesis in the COVID-19 and George Floyd contexts, have changed their questions. They no longer ask how this man could have become President. Now they ask where is the bottom of this sputtering cacophonous mess? They ask what will happen before and then on and after November 3
  • Singapore’s good fortune in recent decades is by no means entirely an accident of its ambient geostrategic surroundings, but it owes much to those surroundings. While Singaporeans were honing the arts of good government, saving and investing in the country, educating and inventing value-added jobs for themselves, all the while keeping intercommunal relations inclined toward greater tolerance and harmony, the world was cooperating mightily with their ambitions. At the business end of that world was the United States
  • The U.S. grand strategy of providing security goods to the global commons sheltered Singapore’s efforts in more ways than one over the years
  • In 1965, when Singapore was thrust into independence from the Malaysian union, a more fraught environment could barely have been imagined. Indonesia was going crazy in the year of living dangerously, and the konfrontasi spilled over violently onto Singapore’s streets, layering on the raw feelings of race riots here in 1964. Communist Chinese infiltration of every trade union movement in the region was a fact of life, not to exclude shards of Singapore’s, and the Cultural Revolution was at full froth in China. So when U.S. Marines hit the beach at Da Nang in February 1965 the independence-generation leadership here counted it as a blessing.
  • this is exactly the problem now: Those massively benign trends are at risk of inanition, if not reversal.
  • While China is no longer either Marxist or crazy, as it was during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it is still Leninist, as its recent summary arrogation of Hong Kong’s negotiated special status shows. It has meanwhile grown mighty economically, advanced technologically at surprising speed, and has taken to investing grandly in its military capabilities. Its diplomacy has become more assertive, some would even say arrogant, as its Wolf Warrior nationalism has grown
  • The downward economic inflection of the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing economic strains
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Your Hitler analogy is wrong, and other complaints from a history professor - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...trump-is-hitler politics US history education
shared by lenaurick on 24 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Recently, writers and pundits have been on a quest to find historical analogs for people, parties, and movements in our own times. Trump is like Hitler, Mussolini, and Napoleon; the imploding GOP getting rid of one ill-suited candidate after another is like Robespierre in the French Revolution, who stuck the executioner in the guillotine because there was no one left to behead. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was like Robert E. Lee.
  • Oh, and how Obama was like Hitler? But that's so 2015.
  • Really? Trump is like Hitler? The egotistical buffoon who sees himself as his own primary foreign adviser and changes his views on abortion three times in one day is like the despicable human being who oversaw the death of 6 million Jews? Hitler comparison has become so common over the years that it has its own probability factor known as Godwin's Law.
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  • History is alive, and she has a lot to teach us. I quote William Faulkner (what history professor hasn't?) who famously declared: "The past is never dead. It is not even past."
  • In fact, presidential hopeful Ben Carson's comparisons to slavery were so common that he was parodied as suggesting that even buying a Megabus ticket is like slavery (which, sadly, is almost believable).
  • People aren't always sure what to do with history. But the laziest use is to make facile comparisons between then and now, this person and that.
  • Mostly these comparisons are shallow and not rooted in any depth of meaningful knowledge of the past. They rely on caricatures and selective historical tidbits in a way that, indeed, just about anyone can be compared to anyone else.
  • These comparisons tend to come in two forms: those meant to elevate, and those meant to denigrate. Both use historical comparisons to accomplish their goals
  • By associating their 21st-century political agendas with the 18th-century American rebels, modern Tea Partiers collapse the distance between then and now in order to legitimize their cause.
  • Slavery is another popular go-to comparison. But ... sorry, Kesha: Recording contracts are not like slavery. And Republicans: ”Neither is the national debt, Obamacare, income tax, or gun control. Or the TSA, global warming, or Affirmative Action.
  • History is not a deck of cards from which to randomly draw for comparative purposes. It is an immense repository of human thinking, doing, and being that can and should help us be slightly less narrow-minded and shortsighted than our forefathers and foremothers sometimes were. Good uses of history require more substance, unpacking, and analysis than a few quick sound bites can provide.
  • History as critique, honest assessment, and self-examination. Thinking long and hard about the treatment of Native Americans, past and present. American imperialism. Slavery, and its intertwining with the rise of modern capitalism. Xenophobia. Suppression of women's rights. These stories need to be told and retold, painful as they may be.
  • People who make historical comparisons don't actually believe that Ted Cruz is like Robespierre. But then why bother? The reason there aren't longer expositions of how exactly Trump is like Hitler is because, well, very quickly the analogy would break down. Male ... popular ... racist ... oh, never mind. These analogies are usually politically motivated, shallow, and intended to shock or damn. It's just lazy, and more politics as usual.
  • When we say that Trump or Obama is like Hitler, we slowly water down our actual knowledge of the very historical things we are using for comparison. When people link their frustration with the Affordable Care Act or gun control to slavery, they greatly diminish the historical magnitude and importance of a horrific historical reality that irreversibly altered the lives of 10 to 12 million enslaved Africans who were forced across the Atlantic to the Americas between the 15th and 19th centuries. Scholars speak of a "social death" that came from the incredible violence, emotional damage, and physical dislocation that took place during the Middle Passage and beyond.
  • Flippant comparisons also belittle and ignore the way that historical trauma creates immense ongoing psychological pain and tangible collective struggle that continues through generations, even up through the present.
  • One charitable reading of why people make these comparisons is that they fear we will end up in unpleasant and unfortunate situations that are like past circumstances. Behind the charge of Trump being a fascist is the fear that Trump, if elected president, will rule unilaterally in a way that oppresses certain segments of the population.
  • The only problem is that history really doesn't repeat itself. If anything, it remixes themes, reprises melodies, and borrows nasty racist ideologies. There are no exact historical analogs to today's politicians — jackasses or saviors.
  • "History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes." And it is in the rhyming that history still plays an important role.
  • Historian William Bouwsma once noted that the past is not the "private preserve of professional historians." Rather, he argued that history is a public utility, like water and electricity. If Bouwsma is right, the kind of history most people want is like water: clear, available at the turn of a knob, and easily controllable. But really, history is more like electricity shooting down the string of Franklin's fabled kite: wild, with alternating currents and unexpected twists, offshoots, and end results.
  • Voting for Trump won't bring about an American Holocaust, but it could usher in a new yet rhyming phase of history in which US citizens and immigrants from certain backgrounds are targeted and legally discriminated against, have their civil liberties curtailed, and even get forcibly relocated into "safe" areas. Hard to imagine?
  • American history, as Jon Stewart brilliantly reminded us, is at its core a series of events in which the current dominant group (no matter how recently established) dumps on the newest immigrant group. Catholics. Jews. Irish. Asians. They've all been in the crosshairs. All of them have been viewed as just as dangerous as the current out-group: Muslims.
  • The GOP's current crisis mirrors the French Revolution? Ted Cruz is like Robespierre? Please. You are granting way too much historical importance to the self-implosion of a political movement that rose to power over the past 30 years on a platform of moralistic piety, militarism, anti-abortion, and xenophobia.
  • If simplistic comparisons cheapen the past and dumb down our public discourse, using the past to understand how we got to where we are today is actually productive. It increases knowledge, broadens our perspective, and helps connect dots over time.
  • If Americans truly want to understand this GOP moment, we need not look to revolutionary France, but to the circa-1970s US, when the modern Republican Party was born. I know, Republican pundits like to call themselves the "party of Lincoln," but that is mostly nonsense
  • To compare Trump to Napoleon or Hitler is to make a vacuous historical comparison that obscures more than it reveals. But it is actually constructive to try to understand Trump as a fairly logical outcome of some of the cultural impulses that drove the moral majority and the religious right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It tells us how we got here and, potentially, how to move forward.
  • Done well, history gives us perspective; it helps us gain a longer view of things. Through an understanding of the past we come to see trends over time, outcomes, causes, effects. We understand that stories and individual lives are embedded in larger processes. We learn of the boundless resilience of the human spirit, along with the depressing capacity for evil — even the banal variety — of humankind.
  • The past warns us against cruelty, begs us to be compassionate, asks that we simply stop and look our fellow human beings in the eyes.
  • Why, then, is Obama-Washington still on my office wall? Mostly to remind me of the irony of history. Of its complexity. That the past might not be past but is also not the present. It is a warning against mistaking progression in years with progress on issues. It is a reminder that each one of us plays an important part in the unfolding of history.
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'Human impulses run riot': China's shocking pace of change | News | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...chinas-shocking-pace-of-change china history culture development
shared by Javier E on 06 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • During the Cultural Revolution, there were certainly cases of husbands and wives denouncing each other and fathers and sons falling out, but these were not typical – the vast majority of families enjoyed unprecedented solidarity.
  • After Mao’s death, the economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping brought dramatic changes to China, changes that permeated all levels of Chinese society. In a matter of 30 years, we went from one extreme to another, from an era where human nature was suppressed to an era where human impulses could run riot, from an era when politics was paramount to an era when only money counts.
  • Before, limited by social constraints, people could feel a modicum of freedom only within the family; with the loss of those constraints, that modest freedom which was once so prized now counts for little.
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  • Extramarital affairs have become more and more widespread and are no longer a cause for shame. It is commonplace for successful men to keep a mistress, or sometimes multiple mistresses – which people often jokingly compare to a teapot needing at least four or five cups to make a full tea set.
  • In China today, Buddhist temples are crowded with worshippers, while Taoist temples are largely deserted. A few years ago, I asked a Taoist abbot: “Taoism is native to China, so why is it not as popular as Buddhism, which came here from abroad?” His answer was short: “Buddhism has money and Taoism doesn’t.”
  • In recent years, for instance, many retired military veterans have gathered together across the country in protests against the stingy benefits and pensions they receive from the state. Back in the 1980s, they argue, veterans used to be more generously rewarded, relative to the cost of living. Today, even though China is richer, they receive little
  • the fierce economic competition that now characterises life in China. In numerous industries, it has become common practice to try to secure more business by pushing down prices as low as they can possibly go
  • The result of all this ferocious competition is that the profit margin keeps getting slimmer and slimmer, and those who suffer most are ordinary workers, who often see no increase in their salary even as their work hours are extended.
  • Someone reported to me an exchange he had had with one of Shanghai’s ultra-rich, a man who had relied on bribery and other underhand methods to transform himself from a pauper into a millionaire.
  • Even Chinese beggars have to keep up with the times: sometimes they too have a QR code handy, and they will ask passersby to scan it and use the mobile payment platform to dispense some spare change.
  • This novelty is all the more remarkable given that just 30 years ago, when Chinese people went on business trips, they would worry so much about their money being stolen that they would hide cash in their underpants, the safest place for it.
  • Urbanisation has created a lot of problems, one of them being what happens after farmers move to cities. Local governments have expropriated large swathes of agricultural land to enable an enormous urban expansion program
  • After their land and houses in the countryside are expropriated, farmers “move upstairs” into housing blocks that the local government has provided in compensation. In wealthy counties, some farmers may be awarded up to three or four apartments, in which case they will live in one and rent out the other two or three; others may receive a large cash settlement.
  • how do they adjust to city life? Now disconnected from the form of labour to which they were accustomed, what new jobs are there for them to do? Some drive taxis and some open little shops, but others just loaf around, playing mahjong all day, and others take to gambling and lose everything they have
  • Mao’s monthly salary, for example, was just 404.8 yuan, compared to my parents’ joint income of 120 yuan. There was only a small gap between rich and poor, and social inequalities were limited.
  • in the space of just a few years, Alibaba’s Alipay mobile app and Tencent’s WeChat Pay app have been loaded on to practically every smartphone in the country. From big shopping malls to little corner shops – any place where a transaction can be made will have the scannable QR codes for these two payment platforms displayed in a prominent location.
  • How he wished he could be one of those workers, he said, for though their work was hard and their pay was low, they didn’t have to live in a state of such high anxiety. Faced with the prospect of losing everything they have gained, such people find themselves wishing their spectacular career hadn’t happened at all, wishing they could reclaim the past.
  • let me try to capture the changing outlook of three generations of Chinese boys as a way of mapping in simple terms China’s trajectory over the years. If you asked these boys what to look for in life, I think you would hear very different answers. A boy growing up in the Cultural Revolution might well have said: “Revolution and struggle.” A boy growing up in the early 1990s, as economic reforms entered their second decade, might well have said: “Career and love.” Today’s boy might well say: “Money and girls.”
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Why Napoleon's Still a Problem in France - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/...ill-problem-france-250223.html napoleon france history historiography
shared by Javier E on 20 May 14 - Cached
  • Two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain.“The divide is generally down political party lines,” says professor Peter Hicks, a British historian with the Napoléon Foundation in Paris. “On the left, there’s the ’black legend’ of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the ’golden legend’ of a strong leader who created durable institutions.”
  • While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, a decade ago, the president and prime minister—at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin—boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon’s greatest military victory. More from the May 16 Issue Political First Responders Flights of Fancy Flower Power “It’s almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story,” Hicks tells Newsweek
  • In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle,
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  • Napoleon enthusiasts tell a different story. David Chanteranne, editor of a magazine published by Napoléonic Memory, France’s oldest and largest Napoleonic association, cites some of Napoleon’s achievements: the Civil Code, the Council of State, the Bank of France, the National Audit office, a centralized and coherent administrative system, lycées, universities, centers of advanced learning known as école normal, chambers of commerce, the metric system and freedom of religion.
  • “Napoleon was not a French patriot—he was first a Corsican and later an imperial figure, a journey in which he bypassed any deep affiliation with the French nation,” Clark tells Newsweek. “His relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent. Did he stabilize it or shut it down? He seems to have done both. He rejected democracy, he suffocated the representative dimension of politics, and he created a culture of courtly display.”
  • “French public opinion remains deeply divided over Napoleon, with, on the one hand, those who admire the great man, the conqueror, the military leader and, on the other, those who see him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, the gravedigger of the revolution. Politicians in France rarely refer to Napoleon for fear of being accused of authoritarian temptations, or not being good Republicans.”
  • the French fascination with Napoleon is perfectly reasonable. “The whole world is fascinated. More books have been written about him than anyone in history,”
  • In France, at least, enthusiasm looks set to diminish. Napoleon and his exploits are scarcely mentioned in French schools anymore. In the past, history was the study of great men and women. Today the focus of teaching is on trends, issues and movements. “France in 1800 is no longer about Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte. It’s about the industrial revolution,” says Chanteranne. “Man does not make history. History makes men.”
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BBC World Service - The War That Changed the World, St. Petersburg: Revolution - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p028g3n4 history Russian revolution culture wwi
shared by qkirkpatrick on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The Romanovs ruled Russia for centuries until World War One brought revolution and an abrupt end to their imperial reign. In this special debate fro
  • The Russian novelist and well-known public commentator Tatyana Tolstaya delivers a specially commissioned essay which evokes the way revolution and war changes individual lives through the story of her own great-grandmother.
3More

Hundreds Arrested as Group Urges New Russian Revolution - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...russia-revolution-arrests.html Russia revolution politics culture beliefs
shared by anonymous on 07 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The police arrested more than 200 people in a roundup on Sunday that the local news media linked to an obscure right-wing movement that had been calling for a repeat of the Russian Revolution, timed near its 100th anniversary.
  • Mr. Maltsev’s planned event may have overlapped with the aftermath of protests by nationalists who have used Unity Day to stage marches against immigrants. Many nationalist activists were out on the streets over the weekend.
  • Artpodgotovka is a nationalist and populist movement that has tried to emulate European far-right organizations. While the Kremlin has financed and is suspected of maintaining ties to European far-right parties and organizations, the arrests over the weekend underscored its scant tolerance for such groups at home.
9More

An Overview of the Declaration of Pillnitz - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/eclaration-of-pillnitz-1221700 history French Revolution Prussia and Austria Declaration hidden meaning
shared by g-dragon on 19 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The Declaration of Pillnitz was a statement issued by the rulers of Austria and Prussia in 1792 to try and both support the French monarchy and forestall a European war as a result of the French Revolution. It actually had the opposite effect, and goes down in history as a terrible misjudgement.
  • most of Europe, who were monarchies less than pleased about citizens organising.
  • Concerned about both the welfare of his sister Marie Antoinette and the status of brother in law King Louis XVI of France, Emperor Leopold of Austria met with King Frederick William of Prussia at Pillnitz in Saxony. The plan was to discuss what to do about the way the French Revolution was undermining royalty and threatening family.
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  • French aristocracy who had fled the revolutionary government, for armed intervention aimed at restoring the full powers of the French king and the whole of the ‘old regime’.
  • He had followed events in France, but was afraid intervention would threaten his sister and brother in law, not help them (he was completely right). However, when he thought they had escaped he rashly offered all his resources to aid them. By the time of Pillnitz he knew the French royals were effectively prisoners in France.
  • Austria and Prussia were not natural allies given recent European history, but at Pillnitz they reached agreement and put out a declaration.
  • While it stated that the fate of the French Royals was of “common interest” to Europe’s other leaders, and while it urged France to restore them and made threats if harm came to them, the subtext was in the section saying Europe would only take military action with the agreement of all the major powers. As everybody knew Britain would have nothing to do with such a war at that point, Austria and Prussia were, in practice, not tied to any action. It sounded tough, but promised nothing of substance. It was a piece of clever word play. It was a total failure.
  • The Declaration of Pillnitz was thus designed to assist the pro-royal faction in the revolutionary government against the republicans rather than threaten a war.
  • France had developed a culture that did not recognise subtext: they spoke in moral absolutes, believed that oratory was a pure form of communication and that cleverly written text was disingenuous.
27More

A Revolution Is Coming for China's Families - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...lopment-welfare-state-3c1e0091 china revolution demographics aging implications economic cultural political
shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • In January Beijing announced that the country’s total population shrank in 2022—a decade earlier than Western demographers had been forecasting as recently as 2019.
  • one rapidly approaching demographic problem has flown under Beijing’s radar: the crisis of the Chinese family, the foundation of Chinese society and civilization.
  • The Chinese family is about to undergo a radical and historically unprecedented transition. Extended kinship networks will atrophy nationwide, and the widespread experience of close blood relatives will disappear altogether for many
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  • This is a delayed but inescapable consequence of China’s birth trends from the era of the notorious one-child policy (1980-2015)
  • Beijing thus far has ignored this looming crisis because planners don’t prepare for things they don’t track. Officials don’t regard data on the family as relevant to statecraft or security. So statistics tally males and females—not uncles, sisters, cousins, widows.
  • We estimate past patterns and project trends through demographic modeling—simulations replicating China’s available population numbers—while “building” family trees consistent with those figures. We can approximate nationwide changes in China’s extended family networks in the past with reasonable validity and describe what lies ahead with fair confidence.
  • we are only now living through the era of “peak kin” in China. In terms of sheer numbers, Chinese networks of blood relatives were never nearly as thick as at the start of the 21st century.
  • Because of dramatic postwar improvements in health and mortality, men and women in their 40s today have on average five times as many living cousins as in 1960.
  • China’s “kin explosion” may be an important, heretofore unobserved factor in China’s remarkable economic performance since Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.
  • China is now on the cusp of a severe and unavoidable “kin crash,” driven by prolonged subreplacement fertility
  • China’s rising generations will likely have fewer living relatives than ever before in Chinese history.
  • A “kin famine” will thus unfold unforgivingly over the next 30 years—starting now. As it intensifies, the Chinese family—the most important institution protecting Chinese people against adversity in bad times and helping them seize opportunity in good times—will increasingly falter in both these crucial functions.
  • China’s withering of the family is set to collide with a tsunami of new social need from the country’s huge elderly population, whose ranks will more than double between 2020 and 2050
  • By 2050 living parents and in-laws will outnumber children for middle-aged Chinese men and women. Thus exigency may overturn basic familial arrangements that have long been taken for granted. The focus of the family in China will necessarily turn from the rearing of the young to the care of the old.
  • The reliability and durability of familial bonds of duty will be an increasingly critical question—perhaps even a matter of life and death for many, including frail and impecunious elders in the Chinese hinterlands
  • growing numbers of men in decades ahead will enter old age without spouses or children—the traditional sources of support for the elderly.
  • by 2050, 18% of China’s men in their 60s will have no living descendants, twice the fraction today.
  • who will look after these unfortunates?
  • Still worse than the macroeconomic implications of old-age dependency may be the effect of China’s family crisis on the so-called micro-foundations of the national economy—the little things that make markets work.
  • Since earliest recorded history, China’s guanxi networks, a distinctive form of special relationships and professional connections, have helped get business done by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs. The proliferation of blood relatives was likely a powerful stimulant for growth during the era of China’s phenomenal upswing.
  • the kin dearth may prove an economic depressant well beyond what current “head count” projections suggest.
  • China’s coming family revolution could easily conduce to a rise in personal risk aversion. Risk aversion may in turn dampen mobility, including migration.
  • Less migration means less urbanization, which means less growth—and possibly still more pessimism and risk aversion.
  • If the waning of the family requires China to build a huge social welfare state over the coming generation, as we surmise it will, Beijing would have that much less wherewithal for influencing events abroad through economic diplomacy and defense policy.
  • by 2050 at least half of China’s overall pool of male military-age manpower will be made up of only children. Any encounter by China’s security forces involving significant loss of life will presage lineage extinction for many Chinese families.
  • Autocracies are typically tolerant of casualties—but maybe not in the only-child China of today and the decades ahead.
  • Failure to contemplate the implications of the coming changes in Chinese family structure could prove a costly blind spot for the Communist Party. Blind spots expose governments to the risk of strategic surprise. The consequences of social, economic and political risks tend to be greatest when states aren’t prepared for them.
13More

The American Dream Is Dying: Our Culture Needs Repair | National Review - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...eam-dying-culture-needs-repair American dream crisis culture economics
shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • If you were born in 1940, there was a 92 percent chance you’d do better than your parents. That number has declined every decade since — from 79 percent for those born in 1950, to 62 percent in 1960, 61 percent in 1970, to a low of 50 percent for those born in 1980.
  • Even worse, younger people who do better than their parents are highly concentrated in the upper-middle class. Those born outside of the top-30th income percentile were likely to make less than their parents:
  • American life expectancy has decreased for the first time in decades. The decline is due to increases in deaths from multiple causes, including heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and suicide.
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  • hidden within the statistics is the third disturbing report, a rise in fatal heroin overdoses so dramatic that heroin deaths have for the first time surpassed gun homicides:
  • the two most important books of the decade are Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Robert Putnam’s Our Kids. Murray’s book potently demonstrates how the upper-middle class is diverging from the rest of America. Prosperous families tend to delay childbearing until after marriage, complete their educations, get married, and stay married. Poor and working-class families have children out of wedlock, struggle to finish school, and divorce or remain unmarried at much greater rates.
  • That doesn’t mean that individual kids can’t rise above their troubles, but the large-scale impact is decidedly negative.
  • Putnam’s book details the heartbreaking impact of early-childhood trauma from dissolving families and economic instability. By the time kids reach young adulthood, they’ve been shaped by their backgrounds in indelible ways
  • There is simply an overwhelming amount of social science showing that single-parent and unstable families do worse economically than the stable, mother-father household.
  • Kids and adults aren’t blank slates, possessing equal prospects for success regardless of family situation
  • our nation is changing. We’re producing a generation of poor and working-class young people who are less equipped to take advantage of economic opportunity and a generation of upper-middle-class kids who are fully prepared to enjoy the fruits of the world’s most potent and innovative economy.
  • it’s a great time to be prosperous in America. It’s a terrible time to be poor or working-class.
  • instead of focusing on loving our neighbor, all too many of us focus instead on finding a political savior, the man on the white horse who’ll make things right. When culture changes this profoundly, it creates wounds public policy simply can’t heal.
  • America can heal itself, but it won’t be easy. It will take a culture change on the same scale as the sexual revolution that fractured families and even now relentlessly teaches the gospel of self-indulgence. It will take a renewed love for the “least of these” in our American family, and it will take men and women who care for others not just by sending money but by creating deep and meaningful relationships.
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On Grand Strategy (John Lewis Gaddis) - 0 views

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  • minds. Ordinary experience, he pointed out, is filled with “ends equally ultimate . . . , the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others.” The choices facing us are less often between stark alternatives—good versus evil, for instance—than between good things we can’t have simultaneously. “One can save one’s soul, or one can found or maintain or serve a great and glorious State,” Berlin wrote, “but not always both at once.”
  • We resolve these dilemmas by stretching them over time. We seek certain things now, put off others until later, and regard still others as unattainable. We select what fits where, and then decide which we can achieve when. The process can be difficult: Berlin emphasized the “necessity and agony of choice.” But if such choices were to disappear, he added, so too would “the freedom to choose,” and hence liberty itself.24
  • only narratives can show dilemmas across time. It’s not enough to display choices like slivers on a microscope slide. We need to see change happen, and we can do that only by reconstituting the past as histories, biographies, poems, plays, novels, or films. The best of these sharpen and shade simultaneously: they compress what’s happening in order to clarify, even as they blur, the line between instruction and entertainment. They are, in short, dramatizations. And a fundamental requirement of these is never to bore.
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  • When Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) asks the president how he can reconcile so noble an aim with such malodorous methods, Lincoln recalls what his youthful years as a surveyor taught him: [A] compass . . . [will] point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms
  • chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp . . . , [then] what’s the use of knowing true north?
  • The real Lincoln, as far as I know, never said any of this, and the real Berlin, sadly, never got to see Spielberg’s film. But Tony Kushner’s screenplay shows Fitzgerald’s linkage of intelligence, opposing ideas, and the ability to function: Lincoln keeps long-term aspirations and immediate necessities in mind at the same time. It reconciles Berlin’s foxes and hedgehogs with his insistence on the inevitability—and the unpredictability—of choice:
  • Whether we approach reality from the top down or the bottom up, Tolstoy seems to be saying, an infinite number of possibilities exist at an indeterminate number of levels, all simultaneously. Some are predictable, most aren’t, and only dramatization—free from the scholar’s enslavement to theory and archives—can begin to represent them.
  • what is “training,” as Clausewitz understands it? It’s being able to draw upon principles extending across time and space, so that you’ll have a sense of what’s worked before and what hasn’t. You then apply these to the situation at hand: that’s the role of scale. The result is a plan, informed by the past, linked to the present, for achieving some future goal.
  • I think he’s describing here an ecological sensitivity that equally respects time, space, and scale. Xerxes never had it, despite Artabanus’ efforts. Tolstoy approximated it, if only in a novel. But Lincoln—who lacked an Artabanus and who didn’t live to read War and Peace—seems somehow to have achieved it, by way of a common sense that’s uncommon among great leaders.
  • It’s worth remembering also that Lincoln—and Shakespeare—had a lifetime to become who they were. Young people today don’t, because society so sharply segregates general education, professional training, ascent within an organization, responsibility for it, and then retirement.
  • This worsens a problem Henry Kissinger identified long ago: that the “intellectual capital” leaders accumulate prior to reaching the top is all they’ll be able to draw on while at the top.37 There’s less time now than Lincoln had to learn anything new.
  • A gap has opened between the study of history and the construction of theory, both of which are needed if ends are to be aligned with means. Historians, knowing that their field rewards specialized research, tend to avoid the generalizations
  • Theorists, keen to be seen as social “scientists,” seek “reproducibility” in results: that replaces complexity with simplicity in the pursuit of predictability. Both communities neglect relationships between the general and the particular—between universal and local knowledge—that nurture strategic thinking.
  • concrete events in time and space—the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment—this alone contained the truth,
  • Collaboration, in theory, could have secured the sea and the land from all future dangers. That would have required, though, the extension of trust, a quality with strikingly shallow roots in the character of all Greeks.
  • The only solution then is to improvise, but this is not just making it up as you go along. Maybe you’ll stick to the plan, maybe you’ll modify it, maybe you’ll scrap it altogether. Like Lincoln, though, you’ll know your compass heading, whatever the unknowns that lie between you and your destination. You’ll have in your mind a range of options for dealing with these, based—as if from Machiavelli—upon hard-won lessons from those who’ve gone before.
  • The past and future are no more equivalent, in Thucydides, than are capabilities and aspirations in strategy—they are, however, connected.
  • The past we can know only from imperfect sources, including our own memories. The future we can’t know, other than that it will originate in the past but then depart from it. Thucydides’ distinction between resemblance and reflection—between patterns surviving across time and repetitions degraded by time—aligns the asymmetry, for it suggests that the past prepares us for the future only when, however imperfectly, it transfers. Just as capabilities restrict aspirations to what circumstances will allow.
  • Insufficiency demands indirection, and that, Sun Tzu insists, requires maneuver: [W]hen capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far; when far away, that you are near. Offer an enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. . . . When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. . . . Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. . . . Keep him under a strain and wear him down. Opposites held in mind simultaneously, thus, are “the strategist’s keys to victory.”
  • it was Pericles who, more than anyone else, unleashed the Peloponnesian War—the unintended result of constructing a culture to support a strategy.
  • By the mid-450s Pericles, who agreed, had finished the walls around Athens and Piraeus, allowing total reliance on the sea in any future war. The new strategy made sense, but it made the Athenians, as Thucydides saw, a different people. Farmers, traditionally, had sustained Athens: their fields and vineyards supplied the city in peacetime, and their bodies filled the ranks of its infantry and cavalry when wars came. Now, though, their properties were expendable and their influence diminished.
  • If Athens were to rely upon the ardor of individuals, then it would have to inspire classes within the city and peoples throughout the empire—even as it retained the cohesiveness of its rival Sparta, still in many ways a small town.
  • Pericles used his “funeral oration,” delivered in Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War’s first year, to explain what he hoped for. The dead had given their lives, he told the mourners, for the universality of Athenian distinctiveness: Athens imitated no one, but was a pattern for everyone. How, though, to reconcile these apparent opposites? Pericles’ solution was to connect scale, space, and time: Athenian culture would appeal to the city, the empire, and the ages.
  • The city had acquired its “friends,” Pericles acknowledged, by granting favors, “in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in [its] debt; while the debtor [knows] that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift.” Nevertheless, the Athenians had provided these benefits “not from calculations of expediency, but in the confidence of liberality.” What he meant was that Athens would make its empire at once more powerful and more reassuring than that of any rival.
  • It could in this way project democracy across cultures because insecure states, fearing worse, would freely align with Athens.22 Self-interest would become comfort and then affinity.
  • The Athenians’ strategy of walling their cities, however, had reshaped their character, obliging them restlessly to roam the world. Because they had changed, they would have to change others—that’s what having an empire means—but how many, to what extent, and by what means? No one, not even Pericles, could easily say.
  • Equality, then, was the loop in Pericles’ logic. He saw both it and empire as admirable, but was slow to sense that encouraging one would diminish the other.
  • Like Lincoln, Pericles looked ahead to the ages. He even left them monuments and sent them messages. But he didn’t leave behind a functional state: it would take well over two millennia for democracy again to become a model with mass appeal.
  • as Thucydides grimly observes, war “brings most men’s character to a level with their fortunes.”
  • “Island” strategies require steady nerves. You have to be able to watch smoke rise on horizons you once controlled without losing your own self-confidence, or shaking that of allies, or strengthening that of adversaries.
  • For the abstractions of strategy and the emotions of strategists can never be separated: they can only be balanced. The weight attached to each, however, will vary with circumstances. And the heat of emotions requires only an instant to melt abstractions drawn from years of cool reflection.
  • if credibility is always in doubt, then capabilities must become infinite or bluffs must become routine. Neither approach is sustainable: that’s why walls exist in the first place.
  • he encouraged his readers to seek “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” For without some sense of the past the future can be only loneliness: amnesia is a solitary affliction.
  • But to know the past only in static terms—as moments frozen in time and space—would be almost as disabling, because we’re the progeny of progressions across time and space that shift from small scales to big ones and back again. We know these through narratives, whether historical or fictional or a combination of both.
  • No one can anticipate everything that might happen. Sensing possibilities, though, is better than having no sense at all of what to expect. Sun Tzu seeks sense—even common sense—by tethering principles, which are few, to practices, which are many.
  • Clausewitz’s concept of training, however, retains its relevance. It’s the best protection we have against strategies getting stupider as they become grander, a recurring problem in peace as well as war. It’s the only way to combine the apparent opposites of planning and improvisation: to teach the common sense that comes from knowing when to be a hedgehog and when a fox.
  • Victories must connect: otherwise they won’t lead anywhere. They can’t be foreseen, though, because they arise from unforeseen opportunities. Maneuvering, thus, requires planning, but also improvisation. Small triumphs in a single arena set up larger ones elsewhere, allowing weaker contenders to become stronger.
  • The actions of man, Kennan concluded, “are governed not so much by what he intellectually believes as by what he vividly realizes.”
  • Nor is it clear, even now, whether Christianity caused Rome’s “fall”—as Gibbon believed—or—as the legacies of Augustus suggest—secured Rome’s institutional immortalities. These opposites have shaped “western” civilization ever since. Not least by giving rise to two truly grand strategies, parallel in their purposes but devised a thousand years apart
  • Augustine shows that reality always falls short of the ideal: one can strive toward it, but never expect to achieve it. Seeking, therefore, is the best man can manage in a fallen world, and what he seeks is his choice. Nevertheless, not all ends are legitimate; not all means are appropriate. Augustine seeks, therefore, to guide choice by respecting choice. He does this through an appeal to reason: one might even say to common sense.
  • A peaceful faith—the only source of justice for Christians—can’t flourish without protection, whether through toleration, as in pre-Constantine Rome, or by formal edict, as afterward.20 The City of God is a fragile structure within the sinful City of Man. It’s this that leads Christians to entrust authority to selected sinners—we call it “politics”—and Augustine, for all his piety, is a political philosopher.
  • Augustine concluded that war, if necessary to save the state, could be a lesser evil than peace—and that the procedural prerequisites for necessity could be stated. Had provocation occurred? Had competent authority exhausted peaceful alternatives? Would the resort to violence be a means chosen, not an end in itself? Was the expenditure of force proportionate to its purposes, so that it wouldn’t destroy what it was meant to defend?
  • No one before Augustine, however, had set standards to be met by states in choosing war. This could be done only within an inclusionary monotheism, for only a God claiming universal authority could judge the souls of earthly rulers. And only Augustine, in his era, spoke so self-confidently for Him. The
  • Augustine’s great uncertainty was the status of souls in the City of Man, for only the fittest could hope to enter the City of God. Pre-Christian deities had rarely made such distinctions: the pagan afterlife was equally grim for heroes, scoundrels, and all in between.25 Not so, though, with the Christian God: behavior in life would make a huge difference in death. It was vital, then, to fight wars within rules. The stakes could hardly be higher.
  • Alignment, in turn, implies interdependence. Justice is unattainable in the absence of order, peace may require the fighting of wars, Caesar must be propitiated—perhaps even, like Constantine, converted—if man is to reach God. Each capability brings an aspiration within reach, much as Sun Tzu’s practices tether his principles, but what’s the nature of the tether? I think it’s proportionality: the means employed must be appropriate to—or at least not corrupt—the end envisaged. This, then, is Augustine’s tilt: toward a logic of strategy transcending time, place, culture, circumstance, and the differences between saints and sinners.
  • a more revealing distinction may lie in temperament: to borrow from Milan Kundera,37 Machiavelli found “lightness of being” bearable. For Augustine—perhaps because traumatized as a youth by a pear tree—it was unendurable.
  • “I judge that it might be true that fortune is arbiter of half our actions, but also that she leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern.” Fifty percent fortune, fifty percent man—but zero percent God. Man is, however precariously, on his own.
  • States, Machiavelli suggests, operate similarly. If governed badly, men’s rapacity will soon overwhelm them, whether through internal rebellion or external war. But if run with virtù—his untranslatable term for planning without praying40—states can constrain, if not in all ways control, the workings of fortune, or chance. The skills needed are those of imitation, adaptation, and approximation.
  • Machiavelli commends the study of history, “for since men almost always walk on paths beaten by others and proceed in their actions by imitation . . . , a prudent man should always enter upon the paths beaten by great men, and imitate those who have been most excellent, so that if his own virtue does not reach that far, it is at least in the odor of it.”
  • What, then, to do? It helped that Machiavelli and Berlin had lightness of being, for their answer is the same: don’t sweat it. Learn to live with the contradictions. Machiavelli shows “no trace of agony,” Berlin points out, and he doesn’t either:
  • Eternal truths have little to do with any of this, beyond the assurance that circumstances will change. Machiavelli knows, as did Augustine, that what makes sense in one situation may not in the next. They differ, though, in that Machiavelli, expecting to go to Hell, doesn’t attempt to resolve such disparities. Augustine, hoping for Heaven, feels personally responsible for them. Despite his afflictions, Machiavelli often sees comedy.42 Despite his privileges, Augustine carries a tragic burden of guilt. Machiavelli sweats, but not all the time. Augustine never stops.
  • “Lightness of being,” then, is the ability, if not to find the good in bad things, then at least to remain afloat among them, perhaps to swim or to sail through them, possibly even to take precautions that can keep you dry. It’s not to locate logic in misfortunes, or to show that they’re for the best because they reflect God’s will.
  • Augustine and Machiavelli agree that wars should be fought—indeed that states should be run—by pre-specifiable procedures. Both know that aspirations aren’t capabilities. Both prefer to connect them through checklists, not commandments.43
  • Augustine admits, which is why good men may have to seek peace by shedding blood. The greater privilege, however, is to avert “that calamity which others are under the necessity of producing.” Machiavelli agrees, but notes that a prince so infrequently has this privilege that if he wishes to remain in power he must “learn to be able not to be good,” and to use this proficiency or not use it “according to necessity.”51 As fits man’s fallen state, Augustine sighs. As befits man, Machiavelli simplifies.
  • As Machiavelli’s finest translator has put it: “[J]ustice is no more reasonable than what a person’s prudence tells him he must acquire for himself, or must submit to, because men cannot afford justice in any sense that transcends their own preservation.”53
  • princes need advisers. The adviser can’t tell the prince what to do, but he can suggest what the prince should know. For Machiavelli this means seeking patterns—across time, space, and status—by shifting perspectives. “[J]ust as those who sketch landscapes place themselves down in the plain to consider the nature of mountains . . . and to consider the nature of low places place themselves high atop mountains,
  • Machiavelli embraces, then, a utilitarian morality: you proportion your actions to your objective, not to progress from one nebulous city to another, but because some things have been shown to work and others haven’t.60
  • Who, then, will oversee them? They’ll do it themselves, Machiavelli replies, by balancing power. First, there’ll be a balance among states, unlike older Roman and Catholic traditions of universality. Machiavelli anticipates the statecraft of Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck,
  • But Machiavelli understands balancing in a second and subtler sense, conveyed more explicitly in The Discourses than in The Prince: [I]t is only in republics that the common good is looked to properly in that all that promotes it is carried out; and, however much this or that private person may be the loser on this account, there are so many who benefit thereby that the common good can be realized in spite of those few who suffer in consequence.64 This idea of an internal equilibrium within which competition strengthens community wouldn’t appear again until Adam Smith unveiled an “invisible hand” in The Wealth of Nations (1776), until the American Founding Fathers drafted and in The Federalist justified constitutional checks and balances (1787–88), and until Immanuel Kant linked republics, however distantly, with Perpetual Peace (1795).
  • Machiavelli’s great transgression, Berlin concluded, was to confirm what everyone knows but no one will admit: that ideals “cannot be attained.” Statecraft, therefore, can never balance realism against idealism: there are only competing realisms. There is no contest, in governing, between politics and morality: there is only politics. And no state respects Christian teaching on saving souls. The incompatibilities are irreconcilable. To deny this is, in Berlin’s words but in Machiavelli’s mind, to “vacillate, fall between two stools, and end in weakness and failure.”
  • And approximation? “[P]rudent archers,” Machiavelli points out, knowing the strength of their bow, “set their aim much higher than the place intended, not to reach such height with their arrow, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to achieve their plan.”41 For there will be deflection—certainly from gravity, perhaps from wind, who knows from what else? And the target itself will probably be moving.
  • Augustine’s City of God no longer exists on earth. The City of Man, which survives, has no single path to salvation. “[T]he belief that the correct, objectively valid solution to the question of how men should live can in principle be discovered,” Berlin finds, “is itself in principle not true.” Machiavelli thus split open the rock “upon which Western beliefs and lives had been founded.” It was he “who lit the fatal fuse.”
  • Machiavelli’s blood ran colder than was ordinary: he praised Cesare Borgia, for example, and he refused to condemn torture despite having suffered it (Augustine, never tortured, took a similar position).75 Machiavelli was careful, however, to apportion enormities: they should only forestall greater horrors—violent revolution, defeat in war, descent into anarchy, mass killing, or what we would today call “genocide.”
  • Berlin sees in this an “economy of violence,” by which he means holding a “reserve of force always in the background to keep things going in such a way that the virtues admired by [Machiavelli] and by the classical thinkers to whom he appeals can be protected and allowed to flower.”76 It’s no accident that Berlin uses the plural. For it comes closer than the singular, in English, to Machiavelli’s virtù, implying no single standard by which men must live.
  • “[T]here are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational,” Berlin insists, “capable of understanding . . . and deriving light from each other.” Otherwise, civilizations would exist in “impenetrable bubble[s],” incomprehensible to anyone on the outside. “Intercommunication between cultures in time and space is possible only because what makes men human is common to them, and acts as a bridge between them. But our values are ours, and theirs are theirs.”
  • Perhaps there are other worlds in which all principles are harmonized, but “it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act.”77 By shattering certainty, Machiavelli showed how. “[T]he dilemma has never given men peace since it came to light,” Berlin lightly concludes, “but we have learnt to live with it.”
  • Posterity has long regarded Augustine and Machiavelli as pivots in the history of “western” thought because each, with enduring effects, shifted long-standing relationships between souls and states.
  • Philip promises obedience to God, not his subjects. Elizabeth serves her subjects, fitting God to their interests. The king, looking to Heaven, venerates. The queen, feet on earth, calculates. The differences test the ideas of Augustine and Machiavelli against the demands of statecraft at the dawn of the modern age.
  • Relishing opposites, the queen was constant only in her patriotism, her insistence on keeping ends within means, and her determination—a requirement for pivoting—never to be pinned down.
  • Pivoting requires gyroscopes, and Elizabeth’s were the best of her era. She balanced purposefulness with imagination, guile, humor, timing, and an economy in movement that, however extravagant her display, kept her steady on the tightrope she walked.
  • Machiavelli, thinking gyroscopically, advised his prince to be a lion and a fox, the former to frighten wolves, the latter to detect snares. Elizabeth went him one better by being lion, fox, and female, a combination the crafty Italian might have learned to appreciate. Philip was a grand lion, but he was only a lion.
  • princes can through conscientiousness, Machiavelli warned, become trapped. For a wise ruler “cannot observe faith, nor should he, when such observance turns against him, and the causes that made him promise have been eliminated. . . . Nor does a prince ever lack legitimate causes to color his failure to observe faith.”46
  • What we like to recall as the Elizabethan “golden age” survived only through surveillance and terror: that was another of its contradictions, maintained regretfully with resignation.
  • The queen’s instincts were more humane than those of her predecessors, but too many contemporaries were trying to kill her. “Unlike her sister, Elizabeth never burned men for their faith,” her recent biographer Lisa Hilton has written. “She tortured and hanged them for treason.”60 Toleration, Machiavelli might have said, had turned against Elizabeth. She wanted to be loved—who wouldn’t? It was definitely safer for princes, though, to be feared.
  • “The failure of the Spanish Armada,” Geoffrey Parker has argued, “laid the American continent open to invasion and colonization by northern Europeans, and thus made possible the creation of the United States.” If that’s right, then the future pivoted on a single evening—August 7, 1588—owing to a favorable wind, a clever lord admiral, and a few fiery ships. Had he succeeded, Philip would have required Elizabeth to end all English voyages to America.4
  • In contrast to Spain’s “new world” colonies—and to the territories that France, more recently, had claimed (but barely settled) along the banks of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers—British America “was a society whose political and administrative institutions were more likely to evolve from below than to be imposed from above.”10 That made it a hodgepodge, but also a complex adaptive system.
  • The principles seem at odds—how can supremacies share?—but within that puzzle, the modern historian Robert Tombs has suggested, lay the foundations of England’s post-Stuart political culture: [S]uspicion of Utopias and zealots; trust in common sense and experience; respect for tradition; preference for gradual change; and the view that “compromise” is victory, not betrayal. These things stem from the failure of both royal absolutism and of godly republicanism: costly failures, and fruitful ones.
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Democrats Should Worry about British Labour's Collapse | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

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  • With the rise of Momentum, what had been implicit in Blair and Brown’s politics — the parties’ identification with London and the university towns — became codified in the group’s support for a cultural politics that broke with Labour’s historical commitments to family, community, and nation
  • This politics consisted of enthusiastic support for Remain.  In the runup to the 2019 vote, the activists joined hands with the pro-Blair MPs to favor a second referendum, a “people’s vote,” which they assumed would repudiate the 2016 results
  • They championed “open borders,” immediate eligibility for migrants to Britain’s extensive social services, including its free National Health Services, and voting rights for migrants, regardless of their citizenship, in national elections. They extolled “diversity” and condemned supporters of Leave as bigots and xenophobes.  Patriotism itself was identified with xenophobia.
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  • At the pre-election Labour Conference in Brighton in September 2019, which I attended, speakers called on Britain to provide reparations to make amends for its imperial past and even condemned Britain for global warming — presumably, by initiating the industrial revolution.
  • The young activists also espoused controversial views on family and gender
  • Prior to the 2019 election, an ad hoc group, the Labour Committee for Trans Rights, called for the expulsion from the party of two longstanding feminist organizations that restricted membership in their rape shelters to biological women
  • But Labour’s equivocal stand on Brexit and its identification with the cultural views of young, urban, college-educated activists overrode any appeal that its economic platform might have had.
  • In a post-election study, Paula Surridge, Matthew Goodwin, Oliver Heath, and David Cutts found the that support for Brexit was “strongly associated with cultural values.”  These values “cut across the traditional left-right divide” and undermined Labour’s historic identification with the economic left. 
  • After the election, trade unionist Paul Embery, a member of the group, wrote in his book Despised, “Labour today has virtually nothing to say to the small town and post-industrial Britain, the kind of places out there in the provinces which were once its mainstay.  It is no longer the ‘people’s party’, but the party for the woke, the Toytown revolutionary and Twitter.”
  • The other factor in Labour’s defeat in 2019 and on Thursday was Boris Johnson’s ability to get a deal on Brexit and his  move leftward on economic policy.
  • Johnson, who replaced May in July 2019,  made none of those mistakes. He got parliament to endorse the outlines of a Brexit deal, and he pledged to increase funding for the NHS and to initiate an industrial policy to “level up” Britain’s deindustrialized regions. Johnson’s politics hit the sweet spot in the British electorate: social democratic on economics, but conservative (although not in the American sense of the religious right) on social and cultural policy.  That’s the magic formula that allowed the Tories to lay siege to Labour’s Red Wall.
  • Johnson’s success with the vaccine and his budget boosted his popularity and laid the basis for the Tories’ success in Thursday’s election.
  • Starmer tried to distance Labour from Momentum, Corbyn, and the cultural left.  He declared that he was “proud to be patriotic” and advised Labour officials to display the Union Jack at their appearances.  He opposed the demand to expel the feminist groups and called on the party to “put family first.”  But as Thursday’s results showed, the damage was already done.  Barring a major misstep by Johnson and the Tories, Labour could be out of power for the rest of the decade.
  • the Democrats’ success in 2020 could prove fleeting.  In 2020, they were blessed with a candidate who was able to stem, and in a few instances slightly reverse, the flight of working class voters in middle America from the Democratic Party. That was critical to Biden’s success in a state like Pennsylvania.
  • But Biden is a 78-year-old relic who in his person and in his emphasis on economics reflects an older labor-oriented Democratic party that is being replaced by a party preoccupied with culture and identity.
  • Many of the young Democrats elevate racial issues above those of class — framing what could be universal appeals to national betterment in racial terms; they want to increase immigration and grant citizenship to unauthorized immigrants, but appear indifferent to securing America’s borders
  • they justifiably champion the rights of transgender women —  biological men who identify as women — to be free from discrimination in employment or housing, but dismiss concerns that a blanket identification of sex with declared gender could threaten rights specific to biological women;
  • and as homicides rise, and as justifiable protests against police brutality turned into mayhem and looting, they have advocated defunding  rather than reforming the police.
  • Democrats’ identification with these kind of views played a role in Democratic losses in Congressional races in 2020.
  • Democrats in 2020 were also blessed with a perfect opponent in Donald Trump.  Trump’s bigotry and corruption turned off far more voters than it attracted.
  • If Trump continues to be the poster-boy for the Republican Party, Democrats will benefit in 2022 and 2024, but if he recedes, and his most ardent followers fade into the background, the Democrats could suffer defeat in Congressional elections and in the presidential election of 2024
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The Renaissance - why it changed the world - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...renaissance-changed-the-world
shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • he Renaissance – that cultural, political, scientific and intellectual explosion in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries – represents perhaps the most profoundly important period in human development since the fall of Ancient Rome. 
  • From its origins in 14th-century Florence, the Renaissance spread across Europe –
  • It coincided with a boom in exploration, trade, marriage and diplomatic excursions... and even war.
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  • Italy in the 14th century was fertile ground for a cultural revolution. The Black Death had wiped out millions of people in Europe – by some estimates killing as many as one in three between 1346 and 1353. 
  • By the simplest laws of economics, it meant that those who survived were left with proportionally greater wealth:
  • Advances in chemistry led to the rise of gunpowder, while a new model of mathematics stimulated new financial trading systems and made it easier than ever to navigate across the world. 
  • Renaissance art did not limit itself to simply looking pretty, however. Behind it was a new intellectual discipline: perspective was developed, light and shadow were studied, and the human anatomy was pored over – all in pursuit of a new realism and a desire to capture the beauty of the world as it really was. 
  • Families such as the Medici of Florence looked to the Ancient Roman and Greek civilisations for inspiration – and so did those artists who relied on their patronage. 
  • Even as the artists were creating a bold new realism, scientists were engaged in a revolution of their own. Copernicus and Galileo had developed an unprecedented understanding of our planet’s place in the cosmos, proving that the Earth revolved around the Sun. 
  • If the Renaissance was about rediscovering the intellectual ambition of the Classical civilisations, it was also about pushing the boundaries of what we know – and what we could achieve. 
  • olumbus discovered America, Ferdinand Magellan led an expedition to circumnavigate the globe. 
  • Even as our world shrank in size and significance when placed in the context of our new understanding of the universe, so it grew in physical terms, as new continents were found, new lands colonised, new cultures discovered whose own beliefs and understandings were added to the great intellectual firestorm raging across Europe. 
  • Never before (or since) had there been such a coming together of art, science and philosophy
  • The seeds of the modern world were sown and grown in the Renaissance. From circumnavigating the world to the discovery of the solar system, from the beauty of Michelangelo’s David to the perfection of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, from the genius of Shakespeare to the daring of Luther and Erasmus, and via breathtaking advances in science and mathematics, man achieved new heights
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(2) What Was the 'Soviet Century'? - by André Forget - Bulwark+ - 0 views

plus.thebulwark.com/...what-was-the-soviet-century soviet russia culture policy crisis history politics
shared by Javier E on 20 May 23 - No Cached
  • Schlögel makes the argument that the Soviet Union is best understood not primarily as the manifestation of rigid Communist ideology, but as an attempt to transform an agrarian peasant society into a fully modern state
  • “A ‘Marxist theory,’” he writes, “yields very little for an understanding of the processes of change in postrevolutionary Russia. We get somewhat nearer the mark if we explore the scene of a modernization without modernity and of a grandiose civilizing process powered by forces that were anything but civil.” In other words, the interminable debates about whether Lenin was the St. Paul of communism or its Judas Iscariot are beside the point: As a Marxist might put it, the history of the Soviet Union is best explained by material conditions.
  • the story one pieces together from his chapters goes something like this. In the years between 1917 and 1945, the Russian Empire ceased to be a semi-feudal aristocracy governed by an absolutist monarch whose rule rested on divine right, and became an industrialized state. It dammed rivers, electrified the countryside, built massive factories and refineries, collectivized agriculture, raised literacy rates, set up palaces of culture, created a modern military, and made the Soviet Union one of the most powerful countries in the world. In the course of doing so, it sent some of its best minds into exile, crippled its system of food production, set up a massive network of prison camps, watched millions of its citizens die of hunger, killed hundreds of thousands more through slave labor and forced relocation, and executed a generation of revolutionary leaders. It did all this while surviving one of the most brutal civil wars of the twentieth century and the largest land invasion in history.
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  • Over the next forty-five years, it tried to establish a solid basis for growth and prosperity. It launched an ambitious housing program to create living spaces for its massive and rapidly urbanizing population, and to nurture the growth of a Soviet middle class that had access to amenities and luxury goods. At the same time, it systematically blocked this new middle class from exercising its creative faculties outside a narrow range of approved topics and ideological formulas, and it could not reliably ensure that if someone wanted to buy a winter coat in December, they could find it in the shop. It created a state with the resources and technology to provide for the needs of its citizens, but that was unable to actually deliver the goods.
  • The USSR moved forward under the weight of these contradictions, first sprinting, then staggering, until it was dismantled by another revolution, one that was orchestrated by the very class of party elites the first one had produced. But the states that emerged from the Soviet Union in 1991, and the people who lived in them, had undergone a profound change in the process.
  • Schlögel argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a “new Soviet person” (novy sovetsky chelovek). But, as he puts it,The new human being was the product not of any faith in a utopia, but of a tumult in which existing lifeworlds were destroyed and new ones born. The “Homo Sovieticus” was no fiction to be casually mocked but a reality with whom we usually only start to engage in earnest when we realize that analyzing the decisions of the Central Committee is less crucial than commonly assumed
  • Placing the emphasis on modernization rather than ideology allows Schlögel to delineate oft-ignored parallels and connections between the USSR and the United States. In the 1930s, especially, there was a great deal of cultural and technical collaboration between U.S. citizens and their Soviet counterparts, which led to what Hans Rogger called “Soviet Americanism” (sovetsky amerikanizm). “In many respects,” Schlögel writes, Soviet citizens “felt closer to America; America had left behind the class barriers and snobbery of Old Europe. America was less hierarchical; you could rise socially, something otherwise possible only in postrevolutionary Russia, where class barriers had broken down and equality had been universally imposed by brute force.”
  • As each rose to a position of global economic, political, and military predominance, the British Empire and the United States divided the world into “white” people, who had certain inalienable rights, and “colored” people who did not. The USSR, rising later and faster, made no such distinctions. An Old Bolshevik who had served the revolution for decades was just as likely to end their life freezing on the taiga as a Russian aristocrat or a Kazakh peasant.
  • Pragmatism and passion were certainly present in the development of the USSR, but they were not the only inputs. Perhaps the crucial factor was the almost limitless cheap labor supplied by impoverished peasants driven off their land, petty criminals, and political undesirables who could be press-ganged into service as part of their “reeducation.”
  • Between 1932 and 1937, the output of the Dalstroy mine went from 511 kilograms of gold to 51.5 tons. The price of this astonishing growth was paid by the bodies of the prisoners, of whom there were 163,000 by the end of the decade. The writer Varlam Shalamov, Schlögel’s guide through this frozen Malebolge, explains it this way:To turn a healthy young man, who had begun his career in the clean winter air of the gold mines, into a goner, all that was needed, at a conservative estimate, was a term of twenty to thirty days of sixteen hours of work per day, with no rest days, with systematic starvation, torn clothes, and nights spent in temperatures of minus sixty degrees in a canvas tent with holes in it, and being beaten by the foremen, the criminal gang masters, and the guards.
  • There is no moral calculus that can justify this suffering. And yet Schlögel lays out the brutal, unassimilable fact about the violence of Soviet modernization in the 1930s: “Without the gold of Kolyma . . . there would have been no build-up of the arms industries before and during the Soviet-German war.” The lives of the workers in Kolyma were the cost of winning the Second World War as surely as those of the soldiers at the front.
  • Of the 250,000 people, most of them prisoners,1 involved in building the 227-kilometer White Sea Canal, around 12,800 are confirmed to have died in the process. Even if the actual number is higher, as it probably is, it is hardly extraordinary when set against the 28,000 people who died in the construction of the 80-kilometer Panama Canal (or the 20,000 who had died in an earlier, failed French attempt to build it), or the tens of thousands killed digging the Suez Canal
  • it is worth noting that slave labor in mines and building projects, forced starvation of millions through food requisitions, and the destruction of traditional lifeworlds were all central features of the colonial projects that underwrote the building of modernity in the U.S. and Western Europe. To see the mass death caused by Soviet policies in the first decades of Communist rule in a global light—alongside the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas, and the great famines in South Asia—is to see it not as the inevitable consequence of socialist utopianism, but of rapid modernization undertaken without concern for human life.
  • But Soviet Americanism was about more than cultural affinities. The transformation of the Soviet Union would have been impossible without American expertise.
  • Curiously enough, Schlögel seems to credit burnout from the era of hypermobilization for the fall of the USSR:Whole societies do not collapse because of differences of opinion or true or false guidelines or even the decisions of party bosses. They perish when they are utterly exhausted and human beings can go on living only if they cast off or destroy the conditions that are killing them
  • it seems far more accurate to say that the USSR collapsed the way it did because of a generational shift. By the 1980s, the heroic generation was passing away, and the new Soviet people born in the post-war era were comparing life in the USSR not to what it had been like in the bad old Tsarist days, but to what it could be like
  • Schlögel may be right that “Pittsburgh is not Magnitogorsk,” and that the U.S. was able to transition out of the heroic period of modernization far more effectively than the USSR. But the problems America is currently facing are eerily similar to those of the Soviet Union in its final years—a sclerotic political system dominated by an aging leadership class, environmental degradation, falling life expectancy, a failed war in Afghanistan, rising tensions between a traditionally dominant ethnic group and freedom-seeking minorities, a population that has been promised a higher standard of living than can be delivered by its economic system.
  • given where things stand in the post-Soviet world of 2023, the gaps tell an important story. The most significant one is around ethnic policy, or what the Soviet Union referred to as “nation-building” (natsional‘noe stroitel‘stvo).
  • In the more remote parts of the USSR, where national consciousness was still in the process of developing, it raised the more profound question of which groups counted as nations. When did a dialect become a language? If a nation was tied to a clearly demarcated national territory, how should the state deal with nomadic peoples?
  • The Bolsheviks dealt with this last problem by ignoring it. Lenin believed that “nationality” was basically a matter of language, and language was simply a medium for communication.
  • Things should be “national in form, socialist in content,” as Stalin famously put it. Tatar schools would teach Tatar children about Marx and Engels in Tatar, and a Kyrgyz novelist like Chinghiz Aitmatov could write socialist realist novels in Kyrgyz.
  • Unity would be preserved by having each nationality pursue a common goal in their own tongue. This was the reason Lenin did not believe that establishing ethno-territorial republics would lead to fragmentation of the Soviet state
  • Despite these high and earnest ideals, the USSR’s nationalities policy was as filled with tragedy as the rest of Soviet history. Large numbers of intellectuals from minority nations were executed during the Great Purge for “bourgeois nationalism,” and entire populations were subject to forced relocation on a massive scale.
  • In practice, Soviet treatment of national minorities was driven not by a commitment to self-determination, but by the interests (often cynical, sometimes paranoid) of whoever happened to be in the Kremlin.
  • The ethnic diversity of the USSR was a fundamental aspect of the lifeworlds of millions of Soviet citizens, and yet Schlögel barely mentions it.
  • As is often the case with books about the Soviet Union, it takes life in Moscow and Leningrad to be representative of the whole. But as my friends in Mari El used to say, “Moscow is another country.”
  • None of this would matter much if it weren’t for the fact that the thirty years since the dismantling of the USSR have been defined in large part by conflicts between and within the successor states over the very questions of nationality and territory raised during the founding of the Soviet Union.
  • in the former lands of the USSR, barely a year has gone since 1991 without a civil war, insurgency, or invasion fought over control of territory or control of the government of that territory in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe.
  • Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 euthanized any remaining hopes that globalization and integration of trade would establish a lasting peace in Eastern Europe. The sense of possibility that animates Schlögel’s meditations on post-Soviet life—the feeling that the lifeworld of kommunalkas and queues had given way to a more vivacious, more dynamic, more forward-looking society that was bound to sort itself out eventually—now belongs definitively to the past. Something has been broken that cannot be fixed.
  • It is worth noting (Schlögel does not) that of the institutions that survived the dismantling of the Soviet state, the military and intelligence services and the criminal syndicates were the most powerful, in large part because they were so interconnected. In a kind of Hegelian shit-synthesis, the man who established a brutal kind of order after the mayhem of the nineteen-nineties, Vladimir Putin, has deep ties to both. The parts of Soviet communism that ensured a basic standard of living were, for the most part, destroyed in the hideously bungled transition to a market economy. Militarism, chauvinism, and gangster capitalism thrived, as they still do today.
  • Perhaps it is now possible to see the Soviet century as an anomaly in world history, an interregnum during which two power blocks, each a distorted reflection of the other, marshaled the energies of a modernizing planet in a great conflict over the future. The United States and the USSR both preached a universal doctrine, both claimed they were marching toward the promised land.
  • The unipolar moment lasted barely a decade, and we have now fallen through the rotten floor of American hegemony to find ourselves once again in the fraught nineteenth century. The wars of today are not between “smelly little orthodoxies,” but between empires and nations, the powerful states that can create their own morality and the small countries that have to find powerful friends
  • the key difference between 2023 and 1900 is that the process of modernization is, in large parts of the world, complete. What this means for great-power politics in the twenty-first century, we are only beginning to understand.
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The great artificial intelligence duopoly - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...artificial-intelligence-2 AI basic income jobs unemployment automation rivalry
shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • The AI revolution will have two engines — China and the United States — pushing its progress swiftly forward. It is unlike any previous technological revolution that emerged from a singular cultural setting. Having two engines will further accelerate the pace of technology.
  • WorldPost: In your book, you talk about the “data gap” between these two engines. What do you mean by that? Lee: Data is the raw material on which AI runs. It is like the role of oil in powering an industrial economy. As an AI algorithm is fed more examples of the phenomenon you want the algorithm to understand, it gains greater and greater accuracy. The more faces you show a facial recognition algorithm, the fewer mistakes it will make in recognizing your face
  • All data is not the same, however. China and the United States have different strengths when it comes to data. The gap emerges when you consider the breadth, quality and depth of the data. Breadth means the number of users, the population whose actions are captured in data. Quality means how well-structured and well-labeled the data is. Depth means how many different data points are generated about the activities of each user.
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  • Chinese and American companies are on relatively even footing when it comes to breadth. Though American Internet companies have a smaller domestic user base than China, which has over a billion users on 4G devices, the best American companies can also draw in users from around the globe, bringing their total user base to over a billion.
  • when it comes to depth of data, China has the upper hand. Chinese Internet users channel a much larger portion of their daily activities, transactions and interactions through their smartphones. They use their smartphones for managing their daily lives, from buying groceries at the market to paying their utility bills, booking train or bus tickets and to take out loans, among other things.
  • Weaving together data from mobile payments, public services, financial management and shared mobility gives Chinese companies a deep and more multi-dimensional picture of their users. That allows their AI algorithms to precisely tailor product offerings to each individual. In the current age of AI implementation, this will likely lead to a substantial acceleration and deepening of AI’s impact across China’s economy. That is where the “data gap” appears
  • The radically different business model in China, married to Chinese user habits, creates indigenous branding and monetization strategies as well as an entirely alternative infrastructure for apps and content. It is therefore very difficult, if not impossible, for any American company to try to enter China’s market or vice versa
  • companies in both countries are pursuing their own form of international expansion. The United States uses a “full platform” approach — all Google, all Facebook. Essentially Australia, North America and Europe completely accept the American methodology. That technical empire is likely to continue.
  • The Chinese have realized that the U.S. empire is too difficult to penetrate, so they are looking elsewhere. They are trying, and generally succeeding, in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Those regions and countries have not been a focus of U.S. tech, so their products are not built with the cultures of those countries in mind. And since their demographics are closer to China’s — lower income and lots of people, including youth — the Chinese products are a better fit.
  • If you were to draw a map a decade from now, you would see China’s tech zone — built not on ownership but partnerships — stretching across Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Africa and to some extent South America. The U.S. zone would entail North America, Australia and Europe. Over time, the “parallel universes” already extant in the United States and China will grow to cover the whole world.
  • Policy-wise, we are seeing three approaches. The Chinese have unleashed entrepreneurs with a utilitarian passion to commercialize technology. The Americans are similarly pro-entrepreneur, but the government takes a laissez-faire attitude and the entrepreneurs carry out more moonshots. And Europe is more consumer-oriented, trying to give ownership and control of data back to the individual.
  • An AI arms race would be a grave mistake. The AI boom is more akin to the spread of electricity in the early Industrial Revolution than nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Those who take the arms-race view are more interested in political posturing than the flourishing of humanity. The value of AI as an omni-use technology rests in its creative, not destructive, potential.
  • In a way, having parallel universes should diminish conflict. They can coexist while each can learn from the other. It is not a zero-sum game of winners and losers.
  • We will see a massive migration from one kind of employment to another, not unlike during the transition from agriculture to manufacturing. It will largely be the lower-wage jobs in routine work that will be eliminated, while the ultra-rich will stand to make a lot of money from AI. Social inequality will thus widen.
  • The jobs that AI cannot do are those of creators, or what I call “empathetic jobs” in services, which will be the largest category that can absorb those displaced from routine jobs. Many jobs will become available in this sector, from teaching to elderly care and nursing. A great effort must be made not only to increase the number of those jobs and create a career path for them but to increase their social status, which also means increasing the pay of these jobs.
  • There are also issues related to poorer countries who have relied on either following the old China model of low-wage manufacturing jobs or of India’s call centers. AI will replace those jobs that were created by outsourcing from the West. They will be the first to go in the next 10 years. So, underdeveloped countries will also have to look to jobs for creators and in services.
  • I am opposed to the idea of universal basic income because it provides money both to those who don’t need it as well as those who do. And it doesn’t stimulate people’s desire to work. It puts them into a kind of “useless class” category with the terrible consequence of a resentful class without dignity or status.
  • To reinvigorate people’s desire to work with dignity, some subsidy can help offset the costs of critical needs that only humans can provide. That would be a much better use of the distribution of income than giving it to every person whether they need it or not. A far better idea would be for workers of the future to have an equity share in owning the robots — universal basic capital instead of universal basic income.
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The Truth About Tucker Carlson's Monologue - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...579460 propaganda partisan fox news crisis culture
shared by Javier E on 07 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • “Carlson is advancing a form of victim-politics populism that takes a series of tectonic cultural changes—civil rights, women’s rights, a technological revolution as significant as the industrial revolution, the mass-scale loss of religious faith, the sexual revolution, etc.—and turns the negative or challenging aspects of those changes into an angry tale of what they are doing to you.”
  • Untruths hurt real people. Try having dinner with a 79-year-old who watches Tucker Carlson every day. They’re anxious, angry, trapped in their own heads, and thinking of themselves as aggrieved victims. That’s why every assertion and argument on matters of national import that a popular TV-news host offers is “meaningful” and “important,” especially if it’s crafted to provoke an emotional response in viewers.
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A Tough Season for Believers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...20douthat.html Christianity history US
shared by Javier E on 21 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • our society reaps enormous benefits from religious engagement, while suffering from few of the potential downsides. Widespread churchgoing seems to make Americans more altruistic and more engaged with their communities, more likely to volunteer and more inclined to give to secular and religious charities. Yet at the same time, thanks to Americans’ ever-increasing tolerance, we’ve been spared the kind of sectarian conflict that often accompanies religious zeal.
  • In the last 50 years, the Christian churches have undergone what “American Grace” describes as a shock and two aftershocks. The initial earthquake was the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which undercut religious authority as it did all authority, while dealing a particular blow to Christian sexual ethics. The first aftershock was the rise of religious conservatism, and particularly evangelical faith, as a backlash against the cultural revolution’s excesses. But now we’re living through the second aftershock, a backlash to that backlash — a revolt against the association between Christian faith and conservative politics,
  • Having popularized the term “culture war” two decades ago, Hunter now argues that the “war” footing has led American Christians into a cul-de-sac. It has encouraged both conservative and liberal believers to frame their mission primarily in terms of conflict, and to express themselves almost exclusively in the “language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment and desire for conquest.”
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  • Thanks in part to this bunker mentality, American Christianity has become what Hunter calls a “weak culture” — one that mobilizes but doesn’t convert, alienates rather than seduces, and looks backward toward a lost past instead of forward to a vibrant future.
  • the Christian churches are mainly influential only in the “peripheral areas” of our common life
  • believing Christians are no longer what they once were — an overwhelming majority in a self-consciously Christian nation.
  • The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they’re competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities,
  • Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — and more and more like the diverse and complicated Roman Empire where their religion had its beginning, 2,000 years ago this week.
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