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Javier E

In France, New Review of 35-Hour Workweek - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-on-its-35-hour-workweek.html

france labor economics politics

shared by Javier E on 27 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • in reality, France’s 35-hour week has become largely symbolic, as employees across the country pull longer hours and work more intensely, with productivity per hour about 13 percent higher than the eurozone average. And a welter of loopholes lets many French employers outmaneuver the law.
  • The law has not improved an unemployment rate that, at 10.2 percent, hovers near a high. Nor does it address a deeper challenge in the French workplace: the rising use of part-time contracts, which employers increasingly use to avoid the risk of paying costly overtime
  • Mr. Macron, an economic centrist, told Parliament that the 35-hour rule had for too long painted France as “a country which no longer wanted to work,” sending a negative signal to foreign companies wanting to invest here. Given France’s economic challenges, Mr. Macron said, the 35 hours “should no longer be put on a pedestal.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • His remarks provoked an immediate backlash within his Socialist Party and among trade union officials, who accused the government of threatening to tear down a totem of the French state that many still cherish.
  • French workers put in an average of 39.5 hours a week, just under the eurozone average of 40.9 hours a week,
  • previous governments have already pushed through a raft of measures to weaken the law, which does not apply to white collar workers or senior executives, but caps the official workweek for government employees and workers like Ms. Saifi.
  • Various loopholes have increased the amount of extra hours that employees can work before overtime pay kicks in. And the government pays billions of euros a year in subsidies to help companies offset overtime costs. Analysts question whether the 35-hour week has brought economic benefits — or merely bureaucratic burdens.
  • critics say the rule is a reason that France’s unemployment rate is more than double Germany’s rate of 5 percent.
Javier E

Bibi Opts For Vengeance Over Justice « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...pts-for-vengeance-over-justice

israel revenge policy terrorism culture

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The return of the demolitions speaks volumes about how Netanyahu, who vowed after Tuesday’s attack to “settle the score with every terrorist”, approaches this conflict. For him, it really is about settling scores.
  • The first lesson this policy teaches Israelis is that it’s legitimate to inflict suffering on innocent people in order to discourage terrorism.
  • “A terrorist may be willing to sacrifice his own life, but maybe he will think twice if he knows the homes of his relatives will be destroyed. If the family pays the price, it’s different.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In other words, the logic of the policy is that it punishes people who don’t commit acts of terror. Terrorists want to die, so they aren’t deterred. Israel targets their loved ones, who would suffer more acutely, in the hope that this “price” will intimidate the would-be perpetrator. That is the logic of hostage taking, and of terrorism.
  • sure enough, West Bank settlers set ablaze a home in a village near Ramallah early Sunday morning, in yet another “price tag” attack. But that, of course, was an isolated incident; any attempt to link such lone-wolf terrorists to Israeli policy would be loudly denounced as guilt by association, or an outright anti-Semitic blood libel.
Javier E

Suing For An Affirmative End To Affirmative Action « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...tive-end-to-affirmative-action

affirmative action asians elite University race discrimination harvard

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The suit cites statistical evidence to claim that Harvard holds Asian applicants to a “far higher standard than other students” and that Harvard uses “racial classifications to engage in the same brand of invidious discrimination against Asian Americans that it formerly used to limit the number of Jewish students in its student body.”
  • To get into the top schools, Asians need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers. In 2008, over half of all applicants to Harvard with exceptionally high SAT scores were Asian, yet they made up only 17 percent of the entering class (now 20 percent). Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in America, but their proportion of Harvard undergraduates has been flat for two decades.
  • discrimination against an entire race of students is simply unmistakable. Fixing it could be accomplished not at the expense of racial diversity, but in curtailing affirmative action for athletes and legacy admissions.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In 2008, Asian Americans composed 27 percent of Harvard’s applicant pool, 46 percent of applicants who earned above 2200 on the SAT and 55 percent of those students who earned about 2300 and sent scores to Harvard. … “In light of Harvard’s discriminatory admissions policies, [Asian Americans] are competing only against each other, and all other racial and ethnic groups are insulated from competing against high-achieving Asian Americans,”
  • Yes, the suits seek an end to all affirmative action. But the courts could provide a less extreme remedy that both gave Asian-American candidates a fair shake and kept a race-neutral way of encouraging diversity.
  • the argument that affirmative action is categorically illegal under the Fourteenth Amendment or the Civil Rights Act is simply wrong. Neither text explicitly forbids affirmative action. And it is illogical — not to mention ahistorical — to argue that racial classifications intended to promote diversity are the legal equivalent of racial classifications that sought to uphold a white supremacist caste system. Opponents of affirmative action are hardly underrepresented in the ordinary political process, and this is where they should make their case.
  • It may well be salutary for universities to experiment with different means of achieving a diverse student body. At least some may find formally race-neutral means that work well. What these lawsuits seek, however, is not merely to encourage experimentation but to forbid taking race into account altogether. That is a different story.
  • The way Jeff Yang sees it, this lawsuit isn’t really about helping Asians in the first place. After all, “Jane Dou” – as he calls the rejected Harvard hopeful – “didn’t end up at the center of the Harvard suit accidentally”: She was discovered through a broad-based campaign conducted by SFFA founder Edward Blum — a frustrated Republican congressional candidate who has chosen to make a career out of waging war on laws and policies that give “special privileges” to minorities.
  • What this lawsuit is really is just the latest attempt to derail an apparatus that has given hundreds of thousands of blacks, Hispanics and, yes, Asians a means to climb out of circumstances defined by our society’s historical racism.
Javier E

What To Make Of Ferguson? Ctd « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...what-to-make-of-ferguson-ctd

race racism police brutality polarization

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • How can you say Wilson had “no need” to shoot Brown that many times? The reason law enforcement went to high-capacity handguns and dumped the six shooters is because of the ability of people to withstand multiple gunshot wounds and continue fighting (or shooting.) The catalyst for this approach was the 1986 Miami shooting in which to FBI officers were killed AFTER they had shot two bank robbers multiple times. The robbers eventually died of their wounds, but in the meantime, they kept firing and killed the agents. Officer Wilson adhered to his training: shoot until the suspect is on the ground.
  • Mike Brown is to the Left what Benghazi is to the Right. Preconceptions are everything. Facts don’t matter. Logic doesn’t matter. There’s a narrative of racist-white-cop-kills-harmless-black-kid, and no matter what uncomfortable fact intrudes, like that so many “witnesses” admitted they didn’t actually see what they told the media they saw, the narrative must go on. Because racism.
  • Balko’s article makes clear that this is not an environment where the police are protecting and serving but instead harassing and self-serving. I am in no way justifying assailing a police officer (or anyone for that matter), verbally or physically, but you are not a young Black man living in what is still ostensibly the South and facing harassment for just being. I challenge you to invite Black males to tell you their stories of police harassment. How many times they have been detained, cuffed, kicked and threatened with death because they fit a profile, looked suspicious or were just somewhere some cop didn’t think they belonged? Yes, this is in America.
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  • I agree entirely that this should have gone to trial and realize that, statistically, nearly everything reviewed by a grand jury does. I agree that the fact Wilson will never even face charges is a mark of shame on the legal system. But I don’t get the sense that the people who are furious about this, whatever their race, are clamoring for a trial they’ll never see; it seems to me they’re clamoring for a conviction they feel they’ve been cheated out of.
  • Maybe lethal force wasn’t necessary, but science has proven that Brown turned and moved back toward Wilson (at least 20 feet) and was not shot from behind. There was undeniably an altercation at/inside the police cruiser. Does the fact that one man is alive and one is dead skew the way those facts are interpreted? Absolutely. But there exist certain physical certainties that strongly suggest this was not cold-blooded murder.
  • there is an interminable, sometimes slight, sometimes massive burden that comes with Blackness that you seem wholly oblivious to. That 12 year old that was shot in Cleveland was sitting on a swing playing with a fake gun. Two things happened due purely to his Blackness: police were called and he was murdered. Full stop. The Black man shot in the stairwell of his building in NYC for just existing while Black because a cop got scared. And that’s just since Monday.
  • Clive Bundy assails and threatens federal officers and gets invited on Fox News. Eric Frein plans and carries out an attack on state trooper barracks, killing one and seriously wounding another – again brought in alive. Ted Nugent scares the shit out of me with his racism, misogyny, anti-government and gun-humping ways, but yet he’s a hero to many White people and no one seems to have shot him yet either. White people have feared, reviled and vilified Blackness since they first laid eyes upon us. The codification and justification of our enslavement, disenfranchisement and murder is beyond primordial; it is part and parcel of what has made America and the Western world. Ferguson is just another eruption in this racist legacy and reality.
  • on of your readers claimed that, at most, Brown was guilty of petit theft, which is a misdemeanor. This is incorrect. Brown not only stole from the convenience store, he assaulted the business owner who tried to stop him from stealing. This assault escalated Brown’s theft to a strong-arm robbery, which is a second-degree felony in the State of Missouri. And it was Brown’s commission of this felony that began the chain of events that led to his death. He had nobody but himself to blame for that – not Officer Wilson, not the prosecutor, and not racism.
Javier E

Obama's Fifth Year Job Approval Ratings Among Most Polarized - 0 views

www.gallup.com/...l-ratings-among-polarized.aspx

obama polarization division partisan presidency history statistics survey approval US politics

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Obama's fifth year in office ranks as the fourth-most polarized presidential year in Gallup's records, which date back to the Eisenhower presidency. In fact, all five of Obama's years in office rank among the 10-most polarized, with his fourth year edging out George W. Bush's fourth year in office for the top overall spot.
  • Four of Bush's years in office rank among the 10-most politically polarized in terms of presidential job approval.
  • Each year since 2004, the average party gap in presidential job approval has been 60 percentage points or greater. The only other two years with that degree of polarization were Ronald Reagan's and Bill Clinton's re-election years.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Apart from Nixon, whose fifth year was marred by the Watergate scandal, most presidents got similarly high ratings from their party's supporters in their fifth year, ranging from 82% for Obama to 88% for Reagan. The differences in polarization are attributable to the ratings presidents received from supporters of the opposition party. Bush and Obama had approval ratings of 14% and 11% from Democrats and Republicans during their fifth year in office
  • Reagan, Clinton, and Eisenhower received approval ratings of at least 30% from the opposition party during the fifth year of their administrations.
  • There have always been party differences in presidential ratings, but these have become more extreme in recent decades, averaging 34 points before Reagan's presidency and 58 points after. This is due more to presidents receiving comparatively lower approval ratings from the opposition party than it is from extremely high support from their own party, though both are factors.
  • Obama's highly polarized ratings, then, may have as much to do with the era in which he is governing as they do with his actions as president. Both Obama and Bush made overtures toward bringing politically divided Americans together, but the evidence suggests neither succeeded.
Javier E

Why Obama won't give the Ferguson speech his supporters want - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...obama-ferguson-race-speech

obama speech rhetoric division partisan polarization politics

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • This all speaks to a point that the White House never forgets: President Obama's speeches polarize in a way candidate Obama's didn't. Obama's supporters often want to see their president "leading," but the White House knows that when Obama leads, his critics become even less likely to follow. The evidence political scientists have gathered documenting this dynamic is overwhelming
  • If Obama's speeches often aren't as dramatic as they used to be, this is why: the White House believes a presidential speech on a politically charged topic is as likely to make things worse as to make things better. It is as likely to infuriate conservatives as it is to inspire liberals. And in a country riven by political and racial polarization, widening those divides can take hard problems and make them impossible problems.
  • When Obama gave the first Race Speech he was a unifying figure trying to win the Democratic nomination. Today he's a divisive figure who needs to govern the whole country. For Obama, the cost of becoming president was sacrificing the unique gift that made him president.
mollyharper

Kunstmuseum Bern Obtains Trove From Gurlitt Collection - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lius-gurlitt-nazi-era-art.html

culture history

shared by mollyharper on 24 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • mollyharper on 24 Nov 14
     
    BERLIN - The Swiss museum named as the sole heir to a trove of art amassed by a Nazi-era art dealer and kept hidden for decades will accept the bequest, made by the dealer's reclusive son just before he died last May, the museum's director said on Monday. The museum would seek to set a new standard in handling Nazi-looted art, by having a privately funded team of experts comb the history of each piece before it came into the museum's possession. An agreement reached between the museum, the German government and the state of Bavaria pledged to handle the collection with a high level of transparency. The more than 1,000 works have been in the custody of the German authorities since Mr. Gurlitt died at his Munich home in May. Trustees of the museum, which is the oldest in Switzerland and has a permanent collection focused largely on the history of Swiss art, deliberated for half a year before deciding to accept the pieces. Mr. Gurlitt devoted his life to guarding the collection his father had amassed, much of it during World War II when he served as one of four art dealers commissioned to purchase pieces for a Führermuseum envisioned by Hitler.
Javier E

At Spain's Door, a Welcome Mat for Entrepreneurs - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...me-mat-for-entrepreneurs-.html

entrepreneur spain visa chile

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • He emphasized that businesses in Spain could now easily hire foreign nationals, bring in employees from overseas and train clients in Spain. “It’s a radical change,” he said.
  • about 3,800 foreigners, including investors, professionals and their family members, have received residency via the new immigration rules, according to the Economy Ministry, and more than €280 million has been invested, primarily in real estate. An additional €265 million has been pledged for business projects.
  • “The law is on the right track but needs measures that would make it a little more revolutionary,” he said, noting that the Chilean government’s popular Start-Up Chile program grants $34,000, along with one-year residency, to founders who relocate to that nation.
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  • Chile’s effort, started as a pilot program in 2010, has attracted nearly 2,000 entrepreneurs, whose businesses have raised more than $100 million in financing.
  • Mr. Wadhwa described Chile’s initiative as the world’s most aggressive effort to lure entrepreneurs and said it was putting Chile on the map as a destination for start-ups.
  • A sweetener that the Spanish government should highlight, he said, is its unsecured lending program, which has about €100 million, or $125 million, to lend to innovative small and midsize companies annually. The loans, from €25,000 to €1.5 million, are available to all entrepreneurs, regardless of nationality, who have a business based in Spain
  • Last year, it made more than 600 unsecured loans to entrepreneurs, with an average amount of about €131,000.
Javier E

Obama Immigration Policy Explained - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...383037

immigration policy obama

shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Under the plan, the bulk of the estimated 5 million people who could be protected from deportation would be parents of U.S. citizens or green card holders who have lived in the country for more than five years. According to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, as many as 3.7 million undocumented immigrants could fall into this category; beginning next spring, they could register with the government, undergo a background check, start paying taxes, and gain protected status for up to three years.
  • Another 290,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children would also be newly protected under an expansion of Obama's original Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The administration is eliminating the age cutoff for DACA, which had been open only to people under 31, and it is allowing immigrants to apply if they have lived in the U.S. since 2010, not 2007 as before. The changes will increase the number of people eligible for that program to about 1.5 million,
  • another 1 million immigrants would be newly protected from deportation under the other reforms in the president's directive.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • the total number of undocumented immigrants now in the U.S. is 11.4 million people.
  • unlike the Senate-passed immigration bill ignored by the House, those protected from deportation will get only a temporary reprieve that could be reversed by Obama's successor, not a clear path to citizenship or permanent legal status.
  • Obama is also directing the Department of Homeland Security to make significant changes to how it enforces immigration laws. There will be more agents at the border, as well as structural changes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to make its personnel closer in line with traditional law enforcement officers.
  • Legal immigrants will also have more flexibility to travel to their countries of origin, and those who are working under H-1B visas will be able to change jobs more easily and get employment visas for their spouses.
  • The administration plans to move cases involving immigrants and families with no criminal history down the list of deportation priorities so that the government can focus on "national security threats, serious criminals, and recent border crossers."
  • "We’re going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security," Obama said in his speech on Thursday night. "Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids. We’ll prioritize, just like law enforcement does every day."
Javier E

Obama Immigration Speech: The President Fulfills His Promise to Progressives - The Atla... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...383022

obama immigration speech activism bipartisan politics history progressive

shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • In his decision to act, by himself, on immigration, President Obama chose between two sides of his political self.
  • It wasn’t just that he promised both bipartisan reconciliation and progressive change. It’s that Obama understood American history well enough to know that progressive change only arrives through bitter, divisive, even ugly, struggle.
  • The part of Barack Obama that knows how change really happens in America has long been quietly at war with the part that wanted to stay on good terms with Republicans, and with powerful elites in the business and financial worlds.
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  • Now, in what may prove the most consequential decision of his second term, he has done the same. He has decided once again to trigger the hatred of defenders of the status quo because, I suspect, he knows American history well enough to know that real moral progress doesn’t happen any other way.
  • In the most consequential decision of his first term, when he decided to pass healthcare reform via reconciliation, Obama chose identity No. 1 over identity No. 2.
  • In his youth, he wasn’t an aspiring politician. He was an aspiring activist. And it wasn’t politicians who inspired him.
  • The King that inspired Obama was not the sanitized, Disneyfied figure whom everyone now claims. In his youthful passion for the civil-rights movement, Obama discovered the real King
  • Yes, Obama is a pragmatist. Yes, he is professorial. Yes, he wants to be liked by his ideological opponents and by the powers that be. But he also knows that were he in his twenties today—a young man of color with a foreign parent and a foreign-sounding name—he might be among those activists challenging the vicious injustice of America’s immigration system.
  • For progressives, this was always the real promise of Barack Obama. It was the promise that a black man with a Muslim name who had worked in Chicago’s ghettos—a man who had tasted what it means to a stranger in America—would bring that memory with him when he entered the White House. It’s a promise he fulfilled on Thursday night.
Javier E

The 3-Word Tweet That Cost a Politician Her Job - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...383036

social class UK cultural language image symbol decode

shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • To the uninitiated, the Twitter message looks utterly banal and harmless: an image of a white van parked in a driveway under a flag-draped window, with pretty much the most straightforward description imaginable: "Image from #Rochester."
  • The subtext of this story is social class.
  • "Best explanation for my fellow Americans—a Congresswoman from Massachusetts sending a picture from South Carolina of a pickup truck with a shotgun rack sitting in front of a mobile home draped in the confederate (Stars and Bars) flag," one commenter offered. "Maybe add a car up on cinder blocks sitting in the yard."
johnsonma23

BBC News - Republicans savage Obama immigration executive order - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-30150391

US policy crisis culture obama

shared by johnsonma23 on 21 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Mr Obama's plan means more than 4m illegal immigrants in the US will be allowed to apply for work permits.
  • "We have a broken immigration system and the American people expect us to work together to fix it,
  • The Republican leader added Mr Obama's actions make it impossible to work together on a host of issues, and fail to to take into account the wishes of the American people.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "The action by the president yesterday will only encourage more people to come here illegally,"
jlessner

U.N. Urges Arab World to Denounce Islamic State - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...o-denounce-islamic-state-.html

arab world politics crisis

shared by jlessner on 19 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • His comments come as an American-led coalition expands military action against Islamic State strongholds in Iraq and Syria, but has so far been unable to stop its killing rampage. On Sunday, the Islamic State announced the beheading of an American, Peter Kassig.
  • We are not looking at a collapse of Iraqi state. We’ve turned the tide,” he said.
  • Iraq, however, has paid a heavy price already. Since the beginning of the year, he said, 10,000 civilians have been killed and 20,000 injured.
Javier E

Inequality, Unbelievably, Gets Worse - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-unbelievably-gets-worse.html

US economics inequality crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Inflation-adjusted earnings of the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell between 2010 and 2013, with those near the bottom dropping the most. Meanwhile, incomes in the top decile rose.
  • Before the impact of tax and spending policies is taken into account, income inequality in the United States is no worse than in most developed countries and is even a bit below levels in Britain and, by some measures, Germany.However, once the effect of government programs is included in the calculations, the United States emerges on top of the inequality heap.
  • And income taxes for the highest-earning Americans have fallen sharply, contributing meaningfully to the income inequality problem. In 1995, the 400 taxpayers with the biggest incomes paid an average of 30 percent in taxes; by 2009, the tax rate of those Americans had dropped to 20 percent.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • in reality, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, total tax revenues in the United States this year will be smaller on a relative basis than those of any other member country.
  • That’s because our taxes, while progressive, are low by international standards and our social welfare programs — ranging from unemployment benefits to disability insurance to retirement payments — are consequently less generous.
  • Lower taxes means less for government to spend on programs to help those near the bottom. Social Security typically provides a retiree with about half of his working income; European countries often replace two-thirds of earnings.
  • Similarly, we spend less on early childhood education and care. And another big difference, of course, is the presence of national health insurance in most European countries.
  • other governments help their less fortunate citizens to a greater extent than we do in ways that are not captured in the income statistics. The United States, which is the only developed country without a national paid parental leave policy, also has no mandated paid holidays or annual vacation; in Europe, workers are guaranteed at least 20 days and as many as 35 days of paid leave.
  • Critics from the right argue that doing more to level the income pyramid would hurt growth. In a recent paper, the International Monetary Fund dismissed that concern and suggested that a more equal distribution of income could instead raise the growth rate because of the added access to education, health care and other opportunities.
Javier E

The Truth About the Wars - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-in-iraq-and-afghanistan.html

mideast war strategy iraq surge obama history

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Here’s a legend that’s going around these days. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq and toppled a dictator. We botched the follow-through, and a vicious insurgency erupted. Four years later, we surged in fresh troops, adopted improved counterinsurgency tactics and won the war. And then dithering American politicians squandered the gains. It’s a compelling story. But it’s just that — a story.
  • The surge in Iraq did not “win” anything. It bought time. It allowed us to kill some more bad guys and feel better about ourselves. But in the end, shackled to a corrupt, sectarian government in Baghdad and hobbled by our fellow Americans’ unwillingness to commit to a fight lasting decades, the surge just forestalled today’s stalemate. Like a handful of aspirin gobbled by a fevered patient, the surge cooled the symptoms. But the underlying disease didn’t go away. The remnants of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgents we battled for more than eight years simply re-emerged this year as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
  • We did not understand the enemy, a guerrilla network embedded in a quarrelsome, suspicious civilian population. We didn’t understand our own forces, which are built for rapid, decisive conventional operations, not lingering, ill-defined counterinsurgencies. We’re made for Desert Storm, not Vietnam.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • As a general, I got it wrong. Like my peers, I argued to stay the course, to persist and persist, to “clear/hold/build” even as the “hold” stage stretched for months, and then years, with decades beckoning. We backed ourselves season by season into a long-term counterinsurgency in Iraq, then compounded it by doing likewise in Afghanistan. The American people had never signed up for that.
  • those who served deserve an accounting from the generals. What happened? How? And, especially, why? It has to be a public assessment, nonpartisan and not left to the military. (We tend to grade ourselves on the curve.) Something along the lines of the 9/11 Commission is in order.
  • Today we are hearing some, including those in uniform, argue for a robust ground offensive against the Islamic State in Iraq. Air attacks aren’t enough, we’re told. Our Kurdish and Iraqi Army allies are weak and incompetent. Only another surge can win the fight against this dire threat. Really? If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I think we’re there.
  • I’d like to suggest an alternative. Maybe an incomplete and imperfect effort to contain the Islamic State is as good as it gets. Perhaps the best we can or should do is to keep it busy, “degrade” its forces, harry them or kill them, and seek the long game at the lowest possible cost. It’s not a solution that is likely to spawn a legend. But in the real world, it just may well give us something better than another defeat.
Javier E

150 Years Later, Wrestling With a Revised View of Sherman's March - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-view-of-shermans-march.html

history culture Civil War mythology

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Historians have increasingly written that Sherman’s plan for the systematic obliteration in late 1864 of the South’s war machine, including its transportation network and factories, was destructive but not gratuitously destructive. Instead, those experts contend, the strategy was an effective and legal application of the general’s authority and the hard-edged masterstroke necessary to break the Confederacy.
  • “What is really happening is that over time, the views that are out there are being challenged by historical research,” said John F. Marszalek, a Sherman biographer and the executive director of the Mississippi-based Ulysses S. Grant Association. “The facts are coming out.”
  • To that end, the marker in Atlanta mentions that more than 62,000 soldiers under Sherman’s command devastated “Atlanta’s industrial and business (but not residential) districts” and talks of how, “contrary to popular myth, Sherman’s troops primarily destroyed only property used for waging war — railroads, train depots, factories, cotton gins and warehouses.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “It has not been a legend that white Southerners have been particularly eager to surrender because it was all part of their sense of grievance, that they had been so severely wronged during the Civil War,”
  • The reassessment of Sherman comes at a time when the South continues to weigh how to recognize its complex racial history. Earlier this year, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights opened in Atlanta, the same city where Gov. Nathan Deal last year ordered the removal of a statue of an avowed white supremacist from the grounds of the State Capitol. (Officials said that the relocation of Thomas E. Watson’s likeness was to accommodate a construction project and that the state could not afford to return the statue to its former position.)But the Confederate battle emblem still flies on the grounds of the South Carolina State House, and there is a push underway in Mississippi to amend its Constitution to enshrine “Dixie” as the state song.
  • Sherman’s aggressiveness, the marker concludes, “demoralized Confederates, hastening the end of slavery and the reunification of the nation.”
  • “The old stereotype is a long way from disappearing. There’s this sort of instinctive sense of Sherman embodying the whole Yankee cause and the presumed vindictiveness and unrelenting harshness that the white South was subjected to.”
  • The enduring nature of that lore, Dr. Marszalek said, was in itself a testament to Sherman’s maneuvers.“His whole concept was psychological warfare,” Dr. Marszalek said. “He did such a good job getting into people’s minds, he’s still there in many ways.”
qkirkpatrick

Washington Cathedral's first Muslim prayer service interrupted by heckler - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-a31c-77759fc1eacc_story.html

muslim christian religion politics

shared by qkirkpatrick on 15 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • In a corner of Washington National Cathedral, several hundred Muslim worshipers and other invited guests gathered Friday afternoon for a first-ever recitation of weekly Muslim prayers at the iconic Christian sanctuary and to hear leaders of both faiths call for religious unity in the face of extremist violence and hate.
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