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Six weeks to sanity: The anti-Trump surge is finally here - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ti-trump-surge-is-finally-here gop conservatism demagogue crisis politics
shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Why couldn’t the GOP have figured all this out before Trump got to 1,237 delegates?
  • Right-wingers will smell a plot. (The MSM held back until he had the nomination!) But there were a number of factors in the primary — a huge field (dividing the not-Trump vote and shielding him in debates), a press entranced with his media show, the novelty of his “act,” and the collapse of his opponents at critical times (e.g., Sen. Marco Rubio’s pre-New Hampshire primary debate) — that aided Trump.
  • there is something fundamentally amiss on the right that in a mere six weeks the country has figured out Trump, whereas Republicans in nine months plainly could not see the character they were embracing. That should highlight some troubling deficiencies on the right.
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  • First, the anti-immigration obsession that had transfixed the right-wing inured many supposed gate-keepers (e.g., magazines, pundits) as well as the base to a candidate peddling a dangerous brew of nativism, protectionism and isolationism. If the “respectable” publications rant and rave about “amnesty,” one can imagine why Trump’s idea for a wall might have gotten traction rather than guffaws
  • Second, over the past seven years, the anti-government tirades from talk radio, from Beltway groups such as Heritage Action and even from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) saturated the base, convincing them that everyone with experience “betrayed them” and only outsiders devoid of exposure to governance had the secret sauce for peace and prosperity.
  • Third, the “establishment” — the officialdom of the Republican National Committee — facilitated Trump’s rise, convinced he’d run as an independent
  • One, therefore, is left with an unpleasant reality: A plurality of GOP voters wanted Trump
  • A significant segment of the GOP primary electorate itself lacked common sense, standards of decency, and intolerance of bigotry and cruelty. No group was worse than the evangelical “leaders” who cheered him along the way.
  • A Republican wag joked that the GOP needs not only a new candidate but also a new base. There is something to that. In the 2016 postmortem, it will be worth examining the extent to which the GOP has promoted crackpots, become ghettoized in distorted right-wing media and lost track of what 21st-century America believes and looks like
  • the party as a whole has to expand its vision and its base. It’s time to stop reveling in ignorance and celebrating lost causes.
  • It’s a problem when the rest of the country has to rescue the GOP and the country from Republican voters’ terrible judgment.
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A Quiet Giant of Investing Weighs In on Trump - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...h-klarman-trump-investors.html investor hedge fund trump
shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • a private letter he wrote to his investors a little over two weeks ago about investing during the age of President Trump — and offering his thoughts on the current state of the hedge fund industry — has quietly become the most sought-after reading material on Wall Street.
  • He is Seth A. Klarman, the 59-year-old value investor who runs Baupost Group, which manages some $30 billion.
  • Mr. Klarman sets forth a countervailing view to the euphoria that has buoyed the stock market since Mr. Trump took office, describing “perilously high valuations.”
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  • “Exuberant investors have focused on the potential benefits of stimulative tax cuts, while mostly ignoring the risks from America-first protectionism and the erection of new trade barriers,”
  • “While they might be popular, the reason the U.S. long ago abandoned protectionist trade policies is because they not only don’t work, they actually leave society worse off.”
  • He worries, for example, that Mr. Trump’s stimulus efforts “could prove quite inflationary, which would likely shock investors.”
  • Much of Mr. Klarman’s anxiety seems to emanate from Mr. Trump’s leadership style. He described it this way: “The erratic tendencies and overconfidence in his own wisdom and judgment that Donald Trump has demonstrated to date are inconsistent with strong leadership and sound decision-making.”
  • “The big picture for investors is this: Trump is high volatility, and investors generally abhor volatility and shun uncertainty,” he wrote. “Not only is Trump shockingly unpredictable, he’s apparently deliberately so; he says it’s part of his plan.”
  • he warned, “If things go wrong, we could find ourselves at the beginning of a lengthy decline in dollar hegemony, a rapid rise in interest rates and inflation, and global angst.”
  • he issued a statement after Mr. Trump criticized a judge over his Mexican heritage, saying he planned to support Mrs. Clinton: “His words and actions over the last several days are so shockingly unacceptable in our diverse and democratic society that it is simply unthinkable that Donald Trump could become our president.”
  • “Despite my preference to stay out of the media,” he wrote, “I’ve taken the view that each of us can be bystanders, or we can be upstanders. I choose upstander.”
  • “This should give long-term value investors a distinct advantage,” he wrote. “The inherent irony of the efficient market theory is that the more people believe in it and correspondingly shun active management, the more inefficient the market is likely to become.
  • “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
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Why the Tea Party Isn't Going Anywhere - Theda Skocpol - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...282591 republicans tea party
shared by Javier E on 28 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Here is the key point: Even though there is no one center of Tea Party authority—indeed, in some ways because there is no one organized center—the entire gaggle of grassroots and elite organizations amounts to a pincer operation that wields money and primary votes to exert powerful pressure on Republican officeholders and candidates.
  • Tea Party influence does not depend on general popularity at all. Even as most Americans have figured out that they do not like the Tea Party or its methods, Tea Party clout has grown in Washington and state capitals. Most legislators and candidates are Nervous Nellies, so all Tea Party activists, sympathizers, and funders have had to do is recurrently demonstrate their ability to knock off seemingly unchallengeable Republicans (ranging from Charlie Crist in Florida to Bob Bennett of Utah to Indiana’s Richard Lugar). That grabs legislators’ attention and results in either enthusiastic support for, or acquiescence to, obstructive tactics
  • footholds gained are not easily lost. Once solid blocs of Tea Party supporters or compliant legislators are ensconced in office, outside figures like Dick Armey of FreedomWorks (in 2011) and Jim DeMint of Heritage Action (in 2013) appoint themselves de facto orchestrators, taking control away from elected GOP leaders John Boehner and Mitch McConnell.
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  • Americans may resent the Tea Party, but they are also losing ever more faith in the federal government—a big win for anti-government saboteurs. Popularity and “responsible governance” are not the goals of Tea Party forces, and such standards should not be used to judge the accomplishments of those who aim to undercut, block, and delay—even as Tea Party funders remain hopeful about holding their own or making further gains in another low-turnout midterm election in November 2014.
  • Anyone concerned about the damage Tea Party forces are inflicting on American politics needs to draw several hard-headed conclusions.
  • Democrats need to get over thinking that opinion polls and media columns add up to real political gains. Once the October 2013 shutdown ended in supposed total victory for President Obama and his party, many Democrats adopted a cocky swagger and started talking about ousting the House GOP in 2014. But a clear-eyed look shows that Tea Party obstruction remains powerful and has achieved victories that continue to stymie Democratic efforts to govern effectively—a necessary condition for Democrats to win enthusiastic, sustained voter support for the future, including in midterm elections
  • Also worth remembering is that “moderate Republicans” barely exist right now. Close to two-thirds of House Republicans voted against bipartisan efforts to reopen the federal government and prevent U.S. default on loan obligations, and Boehner has never repudiated such extortionist tactics
  • Cruz may very well enjoy unified and enthusiastic grassroots Tea Party support from the beginning of the primary election season. In the past, less extreme GOP candidates have always managed to garner the presidential nomination, but maybe not this time. And even if a less extreme candidate finally squeaks through, Cruz will set much of the agenda for Republicans heading into 2016.
  • at least three successive national election defeats will be necessary to even begin to break the determination and leverage of Tea Party adherents. Grassroots Tea Partiers see themselves in a last-ditch effort to save “their country,” and big-money ideologues are determined to undercut Democrats and sabotage active government
  • Our debates about federal budgets still revolve around degrees of imposed austerity. Government shutdowns and repeated partisan-induced “crises” have greatly undercut U.S. economic growth and cost up to a year’s worth of added jobs. Real national challenges—fighting global warming, improving education, redressing extreme economic inequalities, rebuilding and improving economic infrastructure—go unaddressed as extreme GOP obstructive capacities remain potent in Washington and many state capitals.
  • Unless non-Tea Party Republicans, independents, and Democrats learn both to defeat and to work around anti-government extremism—finding ways to do positive things for the majority of ordinary citizens along the way—Tea Party forces will still win in the end. They will triumph just by hanging on long enough to cause most Americans to give up in disgust on our blatantly manipulated democracy and our permanently hobbled government.
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Does the Sense of American Exceptionalism Help the United States or Hurt It? - Room for... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...p-the-united-states-or-hurt-it exceptionalism US history politics ideology culture
shared by Javier E on 18 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • President Vladimir Putin of Russia criticized President Obama’s assertion of “American exceptionalism,” the idea that the U.S.’s heritage and policies make it uniquely able to do what it feels is right.
  • Some say the concept is crucial to America’s ability to protect national interests. Others say it has led the U.S. into military and diplomatic quagmires.
  • Does the sense of American exceptionalism help the U.S. or hurt it?
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'He Hated Error More Than He Loved Truth' - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...360329 racism race white supremacy US history culture
shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • I first began seriously considering the immortality of white supremacy after listening to Nell Irvin Painter.
  •  Here are a couple interviews on that point--one with Phoebe Judge at WUNC in the Research Triangle in North Carolina, the other with Jonathan Judaken before a lecture at Rhodes College in Memphis.
  • The two that really pushed me over were were Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom and Barbara and Karen Fields' Racecraft. Morgan is indispensable. There is no single book I've found myself reviewing more over the past five years. 
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  • the basic argument is that Americans tend to speak of "race" as a biological constant, which it isn't. That notion it, itself, a product of racism.
  • we say that we need a "conversation on race" or "race divides America" or we speak of "different races." Another way to say this is we need to have a "conversation on racism" or "racism divides America," or to speak of "historical victims of racism." This is very key. The was no white and black race until we created one, and this creation was--itself--an act of racism, done to justify other acts of racism. Presuming that there is biological constant called "white" and "black" removes human actors, elides responsibility, and annihilates history.
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In New Textbook, the Story of Singapore Begins 500 Years Earlier - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-begins-500-years-earlier.html history archaology Singapore ethnic bias culture textbook
shared by Javier E on 13 May 14 - No Cached
  • “Every generation has to rewrite its history,” he said. While it used to suit Singapore to see itself as a city-state with a British heritage, modern Singapore needs a different interpretation of history to reinforce a more global perspective, he suggested.
  • Professor Miksic goes a step further. “A short history puts a nation on shaky ground; a shallowly rooted place could be overturned quickly,” he said. “If you can show a long cohabitation between the Malays and the Chinese, it proves you have a pretty stable arrangement.”
  • Other factors also may help explain the timing of the rewrite. “Now is a good time,” Professor Heng said. “There’s a need to develop a collective social memory. It’s become a political issue.”
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  • Professor Heng surmised that one reason it had taken so long to change the narrative may have been the government’s fears of communal conflict in the 1960s and ’70s.
  • “If Singapore before 1800 was a sleepy backwater, the Chinese majority could say, ‘We built Singapore; before it was a blank slate,”’ he said.
  • Professor Miksic gives credit for the new history lesson to former students who have reached positions of authority in academia and in the Ministry of Education.
  • Why did it take 30 years to change the story? “It takes overwhelming evidence to shift the mind-set of a people from one image of its past to another,”
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Assad's Forces May Be Aiding New ISIS Surge - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ppo-syria-insurgents-isis.html politics crisis policy nytimes
shared by johnsonma23 on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Assad’s Forces May Be Aiding New ISIS Surge
  • Islamic State fighters fought rival Syrian insurgents amid fears that the Islamic State was positioning itself to make Aleppo its next big prize. Syrian opposition leaders accused the Syri
  • an government of essentially collaborating with the Islamic State, leaving the militants unmolested as they pressed a surprise offensive against other insurgent groups
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  • rebels complained that the United States has refrained from contributing air support to help them fend off simultaneous attacks by the government and the Islamic State.
  • Western officials have sought to play down the significance of the militant group’s recent gains, including Palmyra, the strategically placed World Heritage site in Syria, and Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province.
  • Neither American officials nor Syrian insurgents have provided proof of such direct coordination, though it has long been alleged by the insurgents.
  • The latest attacks are part of a pattern, he said, in which Islamic State fighters have taken advantage of opportunities to attack rival insurgents when they are weak and under government bombardment.
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BBC News - Could Concorde ever fly again? No, says British Airways - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...business-24629451 airways british
shared by grayton downing on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • After 27 years, the world's most famous plane had been pensioned off - first by Air France and then by British Airways - marking the end of supersonic passenger flight.
  • "It was probably more advanced than Apollo 11, which put the first men on the Moon."
  • No military plane came anywhere close. It was so manoeuvrable and there was so much spare power, even ex-fighter pilots weren't used to it."
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  • Now, the whole point of that amazing aircraft was that it flew way beyond the reach of other planes. Faster and higher, hidden away.
  • Technically, Concorde was revolutionary
  • It was the first aircraft to have computer-controlled engine air intakes.
  • The Save Concorde Group (SCG) wants British Airways to either help fund a heritage flight, or release an aircraft to someone else who will.
  • "We firmly believe that the technical and safety challenges of returning a Concorde to the skies are absolutely prohibitive," says BA.
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The 150-Year War - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...31Horwitz.html civil war US heritage
shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • The Civil War isn’t just an adjunct to current events. It’s a national reserve of words, images and landscapes, a storehouse we can tap in lean times like these, when many Americans feel diminished, divided and starved for discourse more nourishing than cable rants and Twitter feeds.

ISIS threatens Iraq's priceless cultural heritage - 0 views

started by mollyharper on 23 Oct 14 no follow-up yet
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Simon Heffer Battles Historians about the First World War | New Republic - 0 views

www.thenewrepublic.com/...storians-about-first-world-war historiography WWI UK history origins
shared by Javier E on 27 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Now no one is alive who served in the trenches or on a dreadnought, and the reliance is entirely upon documents, there can be, paradoxically, far more rigour in the analysis, as sources are tested against each other, and the unreliability of active memory ceases to intrude.
  • Few historians have the range of specialisms needed, at least in the depth to which each is required, to tell the whole story,
  • First, an understanding of the history of power, international relations since (at least) the Congress of Berlin and of European diplomacy is required to illuminate the catastrophe of August 1914.
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  • One also requires
  • knowledge of the political heritage and divisions in certain countries that played a leading role in the drama
  • The historiography of the war began when the war did. On the most basic level there was a running commentary in the press. Further up the scale of debate and analysis, Oxford University Press quickly published Why We Are At War
  • there is the question of life away from the front. The political pressures and civilian unrest that led to the dissolution of first the Romanov, and then the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires in 1917-18 say as much about the effect of the war and its pervasive influence in the ensuing decades as the final outcome itself.
  • Second, one needs the skills of the advanced military historian not simply to outline strategy and tactics after war breaks out, and to recount the movements of troops and the joining of battle, but also to link these with the political direction (or, sometimes, lack of it) of the chancelleries of Europ
  • The book went through several editions in the first few months of the conflict as governments made available correspondence and documents that presented each nation’s justification for its course of action – Britain’s Blue Book, the German White Book, the Russian Orange Book and the Belgian Grey Book.
  • Of the general histories still read today the first truly rigorous one that probed more deeply was Captain Basil Liddell Hart’s. He was a veteran of the Somme; his The Real War was published in 1930 and is still in print today under the title History of the First World War.
  • Wars are fought in cabinet rooms as well as on battlefields, and Repington’s eyewitness accounts of both make his book an essential source today. He was also the man who first used the term “the First World War”, in September 1918: not so much to coin a phrase to describe a conflict involving international empires and, since the previous year, America, but to warn that there might one day be a second one. 
  • The modern school of First World War history has its origins in the 1960s, at around the time of the 50th anniversary of the conflict. It is from this time onwards that popular history – that is, books written with the intention of being read by an intelligent general public, rather than just a small circle of elevated academics – begins to evolve to its present sophisticated state, and standards of scholarship rise considerably
  • the new vogue for popular history of the First World War began with a book that displays none of these qualities – Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, published in 1961.
  • Sir Michael Howard called it “worthless” as history because of its “slovenly scholarship”. Unlike later historians, Clark did not attempt to explore whether there might be two sides to the story of apparently weak British generalship.
  • The book is a clever piece of propaganda and manipulation of (usually) the truth, and its revisionism created an entirely new view of the war and how it was fought. It is, however, a view that more reputable historians have sought to correct for the past half-century.
  • The BBC’s landmark documentary series of 1964, entitled The Great War, stimulated great interest in the subject, not least because of the realisation that the generation that survived it was beginning to die. The series filmed numerous veterans and prompted a vogue for oral history; the Imperial War Museum undertook an enormous, and hugely valuable, project. For the rest of that generation’s life oral history was given more emphasis than documentary records
  • In America, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August had appeared in 1962. George Malcolm Thomson covered similar ground in his highly acclaimed The Twelve Days, published in 1964, a detailed account of the diplomatic activity between 24 July and 4 August 1914.
  • A J P Taylor, the highest-profile historian of the time, published in 1969 War by Timetable, which argued that the mobilisation timetables of all the great powers – whose generals had prided themselves on being able to mobilise faster than their potential enemies – led to an inevitable drift towards a war no one actually wanted.
  • led to the birth of the two rival schools of thought that have dominated the study of the war in recent years: one that says Germany was hell-bent on world domination, the other that says the war happened by accident.
  • In 1998 two serious British historians of different generations published authoritative histories of the conflict. Sir John Keegan’s The First World Warwas based almost entirely on secondary sources, but written with a measured expertise that made it the perfect entry-level guide to the fighting, taking into account almost all of the scholarship since 1914
  • Professor Niall Ferguson’sThe Pity of War was a different beast; a more political book, making greater use of primary sources, and offering a more controversial judgement: that the kaiser had not wanted war, and Britain’s security did not rely on Germany’s defeat.
  • The next great landmark of British war studies – and in one respect the most frustrating – was the first volume of Sir Hew Strachan’s The First World War, published in 2001
  • The anniversary has prompted not just more publications, but also a renewed argument about the necessity of fighting such a horrendous conflict.
  • In a magisterial review in the Times Literary Supplement last autumn of Sir Max’s and two other books – Professor Margaret MacMillan’s bizarrely titled but widely acclaimed The War That Ended Peace and Brigadier Allan Mallinson’s 1914: Fight the Good Fight – William Philpott, professor of the history of warfare in the world-renowned war studies department at King’s College London, drew some distinctions between rigorous and populist histor
  • Of all the recent works of history, one stands far above all others, and should be regarded as an indispensable read for anyone who wishes to understand why the war happened: Christopher Clark’s Sleepwalkers, published in 2012
  • relying on a grasp of the main languages involved and a serious study of foreign archives, Clark gets to the heart of the two principal questions: why Gavrilo Princip felt moved to shoot Franz Ferdinand and his wife when they went to Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, and why the ensuing quarrel could not be contained to one between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. After much inquiry, presentation of evidence and discussion, he reaches a judgement: that the kaiser didn’t want war, and that a war occurred was largely down to the bellicosity, incompetence and weaknesses of others.
  • I suspect that Clark’s view will gain more adherents, not least as a more nuanced and thoughtful understanding of this abominable conflict becomes more possible now that those who remember it are dead
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OS GUINNESS: Religious equality can combat religious terrorism - Washington Times - 0 views

www.washingtontimes.com/...s-equality-can-combat-religiou religious equality terrorism
shared by Hannah Caspar-Johnson on 17 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • How do 7 billion people on a tiny blue ball of a planet live with their differences when the deepest of those differences are religious and ideological?
  • In short, how do we respect diversity, and still promote liberty and maintain harmony?
  • Today, even when we are not talking to the world, we can be heard by the world, and the world can organize its response, frequently violent.
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  • The basic level is unquestionably one of security and
  • taking the necessary steps to counter the violence that no civilized society can tolerate
  • And at the highest level of all, it raises the question of whether we are able to protect and expand political and social freedom for everybody, with all our rich human diversity
  • we must set out and pursue a positive vision of the way in which religions and ideologies should relate constructively in the public square
  • The alternative to these extremes is the vision of a civil public square
  • Thus, a right for one citizen is a right for another and a responsibility for both
  • Free societies not only need the structures of freedom, such as the Constitution and the law, but the spirit of freedom,
  • America’s crying need is not for more scholarly research, for longer or louder talk show debates, or for another presidential commission
  • The truth is that the United States is squandering its proud heritage of both freedom and freedom of conscience
  • E Pluribus Unum was once not only America’s motto, but its greatest accomplishment. It could be so again
  • That is the heart of the blood-red challenge raised by the Islamist slaughters in Paris. We must live together or die.
  • Hannah Caspar-Johnson on 17 Jan 15
     
    Discusses the ingrained issues of religious violence such as the Paris terrorist attacks.  
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Terrorism With a Human Face - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...387163 ISIS Evil crisis politics Middle-East
shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • It’s all in the face, apparently. Just check out that terrifying mug shot of Mohammad Atta, the so-called “ringleader” of the 19 hijackers who staged the 9/11 attacks. His face, wrote the novelist Martin Amis in a short story about Atta, was “gangrenous” and “almost comically malevolent.”
  • The idea that human evil is inscribed into the body and face of the criminal offender has deep rootsThe idea that human evil is inscribed into the body and face of the criminal offender has deep roots, and is in fact the animating throb behind modern scientific criminology and its founding document, Cesare Lombroso’s The Criminal Man, published in 1876
  • It is also an underlying assumption in much of the news coverage of the Kuwaiti-born Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, who was exposed recently as the ISIS executioner “Jihadi John.”
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  • Emwazi challenges the social and moral order. To put it mildly. Far more than, say, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the reportedly Iraqi-born ISIS leader challenges the social and moral order.
  • This is because Emwazi spent most of his life in Britain, in the secular West. Despite his Kuwaiti background and heritage, he was socialized or “acculturated” here, not over there. He went to school here, played football here, went to university here, talked London-street tough here, and wore baseball caps here.
  • Killers, too, can act in decent and humane ways. It is just that we rarely like to admit it—unless of course they kill in defense of the good, as we subjectively define it.
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The Fading Spectacle of Black Friday - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...383240 commercial holiday class
shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Black Friday is insulated, in a way many other pseudo-holidays are not, from the Culture Wars, because what could be more implicitly agreeable to an American—or to anyone, for that matter—than the simple promise of a good deal?
  • But Black Friday is also, as pseudo-holidays go, more class-conscious than most. It is thus more divisive than most. If you can't normally afford a flat-screen/iPad/Vitamix/Elsa doll/telephone, Black Friday discounts could offer you the opportunity to purchase those items. If you can normally afford those things, though, you may well decide that the trip to the mall, with its "throngs" and its "masses" and its sweaty inconvenience, isn't worth the trouble.
  • "Black Friday highlights the contrast between rich and poor." As a spectacle, it may be celebrated by all, but it is participated in, increasingly, by a few.
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  • Black Friday stands, both temporally and culturally, in stark contrast to Thanksgiving, which is not a Hallmark holiday so much as a Williams-Sonoma one, and which involves, at its extremes, people who can afford heritage turkeys/disposable centerpieces/vessels designed solely to pour gravy congratulating themselves on how wonderfully non-commercial the whole thing is.
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Lee Kuan Yew, the Man Who Remade Asia - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...man-who-remade-asia-1427475547 Singapore history modernization Chinese authoritarian development economic role model asians
shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Left with no other allies, he turned to Singapore’s own people, who were immigrants like himself. Because they were so divided by what he called “the most hideous collection of dialects and languages,” he quickly concluded that, if full democracy were implemented, everyone would simply vote for their own ethnic group and overlook the common interests of the country.
  • Impressed by the economic growth enjoyed by Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and finally China, Lee began wondering if their common Confucian heritage was not the foundation of their success. He was soon propounding the Confucian virtues that came to be known as “Asian values”—family, diligence, filial piety, education and obedience to authority. He viewed these values as binding agents for developing countries that needed to find a way to maintain order during times of rapid change.
  • there was an irony in Lee’s latter-day conversion to Chinese traditionalism and Asian authoritarianism, especially in his insistence that they could serve as agents of modernization. After all, it was only a few decades earlier that reform-minded Chinese intellectuals (including Communists like Mao Zedong) had identified such Confucian “Asian values” as the very cause of their country’s backwardness and weakness, and then sought to extirpate them from Chinese thinking.
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  • Then, just as Lee was extolling his notion of “Asian values” abroad, something unexpected happened in China. Faced with social upheaval brought about by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, leaders in Beijing began groping for new ways to maintain order themselves. Intrigued by what Lee had been doing in Singapore, they too began reviving aspects of their old cultural edifice as a stabilizing force. The cultural vacuums in Singapore and China may have had different origins, but some version of “Asian values” suddenly felt like a comfortable remedy for both.
  • “I consider Deng a greater leader who changed the destiny of China and the world,” he said. He was deeply gratified by the way that Deng had brought wealth, power, order and pride back to China—still his racial homeland—as well as to all Chinese.
  • Deng’s admiration of Lee was just as deep. He appreciated Lee’s pragmatism and friendship, especially his refusal to criticize China for its undemocratic form of statecraft, even after the infamy of 1989. And, because “the Singapore model” proved that a country could modernize without surrendering to “wholesale Westernization,” Deng (and all subsequent leaders in Beijing) celebrated it. “If I had only Shanghai, I too might be able to change Shanghai as quickly,” he once wistfully lamented of his success. “But I have the whole of China!”
  • For Lee, the Chinese aphorism that best captured the uniquely Asian/Confucian view of the individual’s role in society was: Xiushen, qijia, zhiguo, pingtianxia: “Bringing peace under heaven first requires cultivating oneself, then taking care of one’s family, and finally looking after one’s country.”
  • Various people have described today’s supremely well-ordered Singapore as “a think tank state,” “a paradise designed by McKinsey” or “Disneyland with the death penalty.”
  • Modern Singapore boasts the world’s second-busiest port, its most celebrated airline and an airport that hosts 15 million visitors a year. With an annual average growth rate of almost 7% since 1976, it now has a per capita income of well over $50,000, making it the wealthiest country in Asia. And it has the second most entrepreneurs per capita in the world, trailing only the U.S.
  • Where did his enormous commitment and energy come from? How was he able to create such an unusual success story from virtually nothing?
  • Lee was a very different leader from his confreres in Beijing, but he shared something important with them: a mutual sense that, despite the long, painful and humiliating history of the Chinese people’s modern weakness, it was their destiny to make something of themselves
  • Lee once described the Chinese as burdened by “a sense of frustration that they were down for so long” and as “enormously ambitious to catch up.” As this rebirth finally began in the 1990s, it allowed Lee to proudly proclaim that China’s “reawakened sense of destiny is an overpowering force.” In making such utterances, he seemed to be speaking as a Chinese who identified as much with his race as with his nation
  • When Lee’s ancestors joined the great Chinese diaspora, they were stripped of their culture and national identities. This defoliating process created, in them and later generations of overseas Chinese, a strange kind of hunger for advancement
  • in Singapore, Lee could begin to satisfy that longing for progress uninhibited by the conservative traditions that have so often clashed with modernizing impulses around the world. His new country may have been an almost synthetic nation, without a coherent cultural core, but this relative vacuum ended up being a blessing in disguise when it came to the challenges of creating a completely new state from the bottom up.
  • China faced a similar situation in the wake of its own tectonic revolutionary upheavals. Mao Zedong once spoke of his people as possessing “two remarkable peculiarities.” They were, he said, “first poor and secondly blank,” which meant that they were inclined to “want revolution.” As he observed, “a clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.”
  • Mao’s savage Cultural Revolution destroyed even more of his country’s cultural legacy. But he was fond of reminding his followers that, “Without destruction there can be no reconstruction.” By the time Deng came to power in the late 1970s, his own reforms met with little resistance from those traditional forces that had so obstructed change earlier in the century. Like Lee in Singapore, Deng was aided by the fact that traditional culture had already been demolished.
  • Lee Kuan Yew not only made Singaporeans proud; he also made Chinese and other Asians proud. He was a master builder, a sophisticated Asian nationalist dedicated not only to the success of his own small nation but to bequeathing the world a new model of governance
  • Instead of trying to impose Western political models on Asian realities, he sought to make autocracy respectable by leavening it with meritocracy, the rule of law and a strict intolerance for corruption to make it deliver growth.
  • He saw “Asian values” as a source of legitimacy for the idea that authoritarian leadership, constrained by certain Western legal and administrative checks, offered an effective “Asian” alternative to the messiness of liberal democracy. Because his thinking proved so agreeable to the Chinese Communist Party, he became the darling of Beijing. And because China has now become the political keystone of the modern Asian arch, Beijing’s imprimatur helped him and his ideas to gain a pan-Asian stature that Singapore alone could not have provided.
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How the Monuments Men Saved Italy's Treasures | History | Smithsonian - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...ved-italys-treasures-180948005 saved italy treasures history
shared by aqconces on 19 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • As Allied Forces fought the Nazis for control of Europe, an unlikely unit of American and British art experts waged a shadow campaign
  • It was the fall of 1943. A couple of months earlier, the Sicilian landings of July 10 had marked the beginning of the Allied Italian campaign.
  • The idea of safeguarding European art from damage was unprecedented in modern warfare.
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  • The brainchild of experts associated with American museums, the concept was embraced by President Roosevelt, who established the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas.
  • The commission assisted the War Department by providing maps of European cities and towns where significant monuments and religious sites were highlighted, to be used by bombing crews and commanders when planning operations.
  • In Britain, Prime Minister Churchill approved a parallel committee in the spring of 1944. Like all sections of the Allied military government, the MFAA would be composed nearly equally of American and British officers.
  • The commission selected a few enlisted men to serve in Italy with the Allied armies—MFAA ranks would increase to more than 80 as the war progressed across Europe and reached France, Austria and Germany—and charged them to report on and bring first aid to damaged buildings and art treasures, and indoctrinate troops on the cultural heritage of Italy.
  • The Italian campaign, predicted to be swift by Allied commanders, turned into a 22-month slog. The whole of Italy became a battlefield.
  • In Sicily, Monuments Officers encountered utter destruction in the main coastal towns, while the interior of the island, and its ancient Greek temples, were unscathed.
  • In December 1943, after repeated reports of Allied soldiers’ vandalism reached Supreme Headquarters, General Eisenhower addressed a letter to all Allied commanders. He warned his men not to use “the term ‘military necessity’...where it would be more truthful to speak of military convenience or even personal convenience.” Military necessity, Eisenhower insisted, should not “cloak slackness or indifference.”
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White America's 'Broken Heart' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ite-americas-broken-heart.html American idea white supremacy white despair election 2016 justice history culture crisis
shared by Javier E on 04 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • We are going to share the future. The only question is: What will be the terms of the sharing?
  • Much of the energy on both the left and the right this cycle is coming from white Americans who are rejecting the direction of America and its institutions. There is a profound disappointment. On one hand, it’s about fear of dislocation of supremacy, and the surrendering of power and the security it provides. On the other hand, it’s about disillusionment that the game is rigged and the turf is tilted. It is about defining who created this country’s bounty and who has most benefited from it
  • White America is wrestling with itself, torn between two increasingly distant visions and philosophies, trying to figure out if the country should retreat from its present course or be remade.
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  • America has a gauzy, romanticized version of its history that is largely fiction
  • According to that mythology, America rose to greatness by sheer ruggedness, ingenuity and hard work. It ignores or sidelines the tremendous human suffering of African slaves that fueled that financial growth, and the blood spilled and dubious treaties signed with Native Americans that fueled its geographic growth. It ignores that the prosperity of some Americans always hinged on the oppression of other Americans.
  • Those systems persist to this day in some disturbing ways, but the current, vociferous naming and challenging of those systems, the placing of the lamp of truth near the seesaw of privilege and oppression, has provoked a profound sense of discomfort and even anger.
  • Much of America’s past is the story of white people benefiting from a system that white people designed and maintained, which increased their chances of success as it suppressed those same chances in other groups.
  • In Sanders’s speech following the Iowa caucuses, he veered from his position that this country “in many ways was created” on “racist principles,” and instead said: “What the American people understand is this country was based and is based on fairness.” Nonwhite people in this country understand that as a matter of history and heritage this simply isn’t true, but it is a hallowed ideal for white America and one that centers the America ethos
  • the current urgency about inequality as an issue is really about how some white Americans are coming to live an experience that many minorities in this country have long lived — structural inequity has leapt the racial barrier — and that the legacy to which they fully assumed they were heirs is increasingly beyond their grasp.
  • the MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes tweeted: “This campaign is starting to feel more and more like a long, national nervous breakdown.” For white America, I believe this is true.
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Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-an-isis-that-has-made-it.html saudi arabia wahhabism islamist culture history terrorism
shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things
  • Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it.
  • The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world’s chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture
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  • One has to live in the Muslim world to understand the immense transformative influence of religious television channels on societ
  • There are thousands of Islamist newspapers and clergies that impose a unitary vision of the world, tradition and clothing on the public space, on the wording of the government’s laws and on the rituals of a society they deem to be contaminated.
  • It is worth reading certain Islamist newspapers to see their reactions to the attacks in Paris. The West is cast as a land of “infidels.” The attacks were the result of the onslaught against Islam. Muslims and Arabs have become the enemies of the secular and the Jews
  • Since ISIS is first and foremost a culture, not a militia, how do you prevent future generations from turning to jihadism when the influence of Fatwa Valley and its clerics and its culture and its immense editorial industry remains intact?
  • Is curing the disease therefore a simple matter? Hardly. Saudi Arabia remains an ally of the West in the many chess games playing out in the Middle East. It is preferred to Iran, that gray Daesh. And there’s the trap. Denial creates the illusion of equilibrium
  • Jihadism is denounced as the scourge of the century but no consideration is given to what created it or supports it. This may allow saving face, but not saving lives.
  • Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex.
  • Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books.
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95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump's Tongue - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...from-donald-trumps-tongue.html language trump rhetoric demagogues speech
shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months.
  • The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns
  • The most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use
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  • He has a particular habit of saying “you” and “we” as he inveighs against a dangerous “them” or unnamed other — usually outsiders like illegal immigrants (“they’re pouring in”), Syrian migrants (“young, strong men”) and Mexicans, but also leaders of both political parties.
  • Mr. Trump appears unrivaled in his ability to forge bonds with a sizable segment of Americans over anxieties about a changing nation, economic insecurities, ferocious enemies and emboldened minorities (like the first black president, whose heritage and intelligence he has all but encouraged supporters to malign).
  • “ ‘We vs. them’ creates a threatening dynamic, where ‘they’ are evil or crazy or ignorant and ‘we’ need a candidate who sees the threat and can alleviate it,”
  • “He appeals to the masses and makes them feel powerful again: ‘We’ need to build a wall on the Mexican border — not ‘I,’ but ‘we.’ ”
  • In another pattern, Mr. Trump tends to attack a person rather than an idea or a situation, like calling political opponents “stupid” (at least 30 times), “horrible” (14 times), “weak” (13 times) and other names, and criticizing foreign leaders, journalists and so-called anchor babies
  • The specter of violence looms over much of his speech, which is infused with words like kill, destroy and fight.
  • “Such statements and accusations make him seem like a guy who can and will cut through all the b.s. and do what in your heart you know is right — and necessary,
  • And Mr. Trump uses rhetoric to erode people’s trust in facts, numbers, nuance, government and the news media, according to specialists in political rhetoric.
  • “Nobody knows,” he likes to declare, where illegal immigrants are coming from or the rate of increase of health care premiums under the Affordable Care Act, even though government agencies collect and publish this information.
  • He insists that Mr. Obama wants to accept 250,000 Syrian migrants, even though no such plan exists, and repeats discredited rumors that thousands of Muslims were cheering in New Jersey during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
  • And as much as he likes the word “attack,” the Times analysis shows, he often uses it to portray himself as the victim of cable news channels and newspapers that, he says, do not show the size of his crowds.
  • This pattern of elevating emotional appeals over rational ones is a rhetorical style that historians, psychologists and political scientists placed in the tradition of political figures like Goldwater, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Huey Long and Pat Buchanan,
  • “His entire campaign is run like a demagogue’s — his language of division, his cult of personality, his manner of categorizing and maligning people with a broad brush,”
  • “If you’re an illegal immigrant, you’re a loser. If you’re captured in war, like John McCain, you’re a loser. If you have a disability, you’re a loser. It’s rhetoric like Wallace’s — it’s not a kind or generous rhetoric.”
  • “And then there are the winners, most especially himself, with his repeated references to his wealth and success and intelligence,”
  • Historically, demagogues have flourished when they tapped into the grievances of citizens and then identified and maligned outside foes, as McCarthy did with attacking Communists, Wallace with pro-integration northerners and Mr. Buchanan with cultural liberals
  • Mr. Trump, by contrast, is an energetic and charismatic speaker who can be entertaining and ingratiating with his audiences. There is a looseness to his language that sounds almost like water-cooler talk or neighborly banter, regardless of what it is about.
  • he presents himself as someone who is always right in his opinions — even prophetic, a visionary
  • It is the sort of trust-me-and-only-me rhetoric that, according to historians, demagogues have used to insist that they have unique qualities that can lead the country through turmoil
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Sanders pushes new gun regulations - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html gun regulations politics US crisis policy
shared by lenaurick on 07 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called for gun safety legislation.
  • The Vermont Senator called for legislative measures addressing gun violence -- including expanded instant background checks, an assault weapons ban and improved mental health capabilities, a push he first called for in a statement from his Senate office after the shooting.
  • "Who in America does not believe that it is a dumb idea to allow people to own guns who should not have them because of the criminal background or because of mental illness?" Sanders said.
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  • "In Vermont, New Hampshire and all over this country we have a lot of people who hunt. I support people's rights to hunt, it's part of our cultural heritage. But people do not go hunting with assault weapons."
  • But I say that we are a great enough country and a smart enough country that we can destroy ISIS at the same time as we rebuild a disappearing middle class, we can do both," Sanders said to cheers as he closed his remarks.
  • On Saturday ISIS hailed the two shooters who killed 14 people in Southern California as "supporters," after U.S. investigators said they suspect one of the shooters professed loyalty to the Islamist network.
  • She spoke about how the shooting is now being considered "an act of terrorism."
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