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Javier E

Worldly Philosophers Wanted - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...rldly-philosophers-wanted.html

economics paradigm model crisis

shared by Javier E on 07 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Keynes himself was driven by a powerful vision of capitalism. He believed it was the only system that could create prosperity, but it was also inherently unstable and so in need of constant reform. This vision caught the imagination of a generation that had experienced the Great Depression and World War II and helped drive policy for nearly half a century.
  • Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who envisioned an ideal economy involving isolated individuals bargaining with one another in free markets. Government, they contended, usually messes things up. Overtaking a Keynesianism that many found inadequate to the task of tackling the stagflation of the 1970s, this vision fueled neoliberal and free-market conservative agendas of governments around the world.
  • It took extensive government action to prevent another Great Depression, while the enormous rewards received by bankers at the heart of the meltdown have led many to ask whether unfettered capitalism produced an equitable distribution of wealth. We clearly need a new, alternative vision of capitalism. But thanks to decades of academic training in the “dentistry” approach to economics, today’s Keynes or Friedman is nowhere to be found.
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  • To refuse to discuss ideas such as types of capitalism deprives us of language with which to think about these problems. It makes it easier to stop thinking about what the economic system is for and in whose interests it is working.
  • Perhaps the protesters occupying Wall Street are not so misguided after all. The questions they raise — how do we deal with the local costs of global downturns? Is it fair that those who suffer the most from such downturns have their safety net cut, while those who generate the volatility are bailed out by the government? — are the same ones that a big-picture economic vision should address. If economists want to help create a better world, they first have to ask, and try to answer, the hard questions that can shape a new vision of capitalism’s potential.
Javier E

Is This Really the End for the Euro? - Clive Crook - Business - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...249107

euro economics europe crisis

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • This editorial in The Economist does an excellent job of explaining what is at stake in Europe.
Javier E

Military Children Outdo Public School Students on NAEP Tests - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ol-students-on-naep-tests.html

schools education performance US military research

shared by Javier E on 13 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Black fourth graders at the military base schools averaged 222 in reading, compared with 233 for whites, an 11-point gap. In fact, the black fourth graders at the military base schools scored better in reading than public school students as a whole, whose average score was 221.
  • the schools on base are not subject to former President George W. Bush’s signature education program, No Child Left Behind, or to President Obama’s Race to the Top. They would find that standardized tests do not dominate and are not used to rate teachers, principals or schools.
  • Under Mr. Obama’s education agenda, state governments can now dictate to principals how to run their schools. In Tennessee — which is ranked 41st in NAEP scores and has made no significant progress in closing the black-white achievement gap on those tests in 20 years — the state now requires four formal observations a year for all teachers, regardless of whether the principal thinks they are excellent or weak. The state has declared that half of a teacher’s rating must be based on student test scores.
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  • At schools here, standardized tests are used as originally intended, to identify a child’s academic weaknesses and assess the effectiveness of the curriculum
  • Ms. Kapiko, on the other hand, has discretion in how to evaluate her teachers. For the most effective, she does one observation a year. That gives her and her assistant principal time for walk-through visits in every classroom every day.
  • The average class in New York City in kindergarten through the third grade has 24 students. At military base schools, the average is 18, which is almost as good as it is in the private schools
Javier E

The Trouble With Debates - NYTimes.com - 1 views

douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-trouble-with-debates

debates nomination candidate US political commercial entertainment

shared by Javier E on 13 Dec 11 - Cached
  • Barnes is obviously right about the way that months and months of 3-minute replies and 30-second rebuttals tends to foreclose substantive discussion. The obvious way to operationalize that insight without losing the opportunity that a lengthy debate schedule offers to dark horses would be to hold more four-, three-, and even two-candidate forums (along the lines of the Lincoln-Douglas-style debates that Gingrich held with Herman Cain and is holding today with Jon Huntsman) in the months leading up to the primaries, and only put all the plausible contenders together in the last month or so, after some winnowing has taken place. This might mean more debates, not fewer, but it would give candidates room to genuinely prove themselves, or else to be exposed
  • But this is probably a pipe dream, because the organizers want their debates to air on major networks, the networks want to invite many candidates as possible (for the same reason that movies like having as many big-name stars as possible), and nobody wants to get stuck airing a debate without all of the frontrunners on stage. Today’s Gingrich-Huntsman debate will probably have more substance than Saturday’s six-candidate free-for-all, but there’s a reason that the latter is only airing on C-SPAN
Javier E

Please Stop Sharing: A Tweet (Or More) Too Far - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...please-stop-sharing

social media privacy

shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 11 - Cached
  • The most encouraging part of the story were the comments from young people who went cold turkey, saying they realized that Facebook had made them less close to, even alienated from, their friends. The imperative of Facebook — maximum exposure of the personal “brand” — is by itself a form of poison to lasting relationships. It’s hard enough trying to stay close to say, five good friends. Why have surface relationships with a hundred of them?
  • The best advice I’ve heard of late is from the actor George Clooney. “I don’t tweet, I don’t go on Facebook,” he said in a profile. “I think there’s too much information about all of us out there. I’m liking the idea of privacy more and more.”
Javier E

How to Teach Students to Think Like Historians | History News Network - 1 views

hnn.us/...each-students-think-historians

history pedagogy learning historiography education

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • First, the accumulation of research has established a developmental framework for historical knowledge.  Development moves broadly from a naïve, unquestioning acceptance of the authority of historical texts and a judgment of the past by contemporary values and beliefs to a sophisticated recognition that the past is irretrievable and different (even strange), all accounts are human constructions, subject to challenge, and all sources are problematic. 
  • Second, sophisticated historical thinking can be broken into discrete cognitive “moves”  (2), which Reisman has condensed into sourcing, close reading, contextualization, and corroboration.
  • These skills seem effective for teaching at the secondary level, especially for the struggling readers in the study, but of course historians use more; for example, making connections, empathy, marshaling evidence, recognizing limits to one’s knowledge, and recognition of different perspectives.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Unlike a traditional history class, in which students are asked to master a single narrative, usually established by a textbook, Reisman’s lessons asked students to “interrogate, and then reconcile, the historical accounts in multiple texts in order to arrive at their own conclusions.” 
  • the introduction of historical thinking skills does not require the dismantling of chronological approaches to history.  Instead, they are integrated into the chronology-based curriculum already in place.
  • The fifty-minute periods were organized in a consistent, predictable structure (an important element of learning, Reisman maintains), with the teacher typically devoting ten minutes to introducing or reinforcing background information through lecturing, use of video, or textbook questions followed by thirty minutes of document work, individually or in groups.  The background presentation was designed to prepare students for the documents to come, and often to set up “straw men” that the documents could challenge.  The document work was organized around an essential question (for example, “Why did the Homestead strike of 1892 turn violent?”), and included documents offering conflicting interpretations.  Questions in the handouts were designed to direct student attention toward interrogation of the validity of the documents.  The final ten minutes were taken up with whole-class discussion, during which, Reisman hoped, students would engage in historical argument, making claims supported by specific evidence from the background material and documents. 
  • Reisman also evaluated student arguments on a scale beginning at the lowest level of analysis—judgment of historical actors by modern standards with no evidence—to judgments with minimal evidence and no regard for context, to judgments containing an awareness of context and perspective though limited in awareness of complexity, to, finally, awareness of one’s own historical subjectivity that encouraged resistance to hasty judgments.  This highest level demonstrated metacognition; these students had developed an awareness of their own thinking.
  • Reisman also noted another critical but unmeasured factor:  the role of the teacher.  It was crucial for teachers to model the thinking they asked of their students, often by putting a document up on a screen and “thinking aloud” as she read the document and reasoned her way through it, demonstrating, in the process, specific use of the various skills.  In this way, she could make metacognition concrete.  Teachers’ mastery of their subject varied, however, as did their skill in guiding a discussion.  Most of the teachers who participated in the study did not question documents sufficiently or “stabilize content knowledge” by correcting misconceptions.  Reisman pointed out the crucial role of guiding discussions, for example, to interrupt for clarification or to push student thinking toward greater rigor.  Instructional methods that permit students to explore a topic without teacher intervention run the risk of leaving errors and misconceptions—“opportunities in the search for understanding”—unexplored.
Javier E

The Great Divorce - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-the-great-divorce.html

class US upper class lower-class trends cultural conservative

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 12 - Cached
  • His story starts in 1963. There was a gap between rich and poor then, but it wasn’t that big.
  • Since then,
  • America has polarized. The word “class” doesn’t even capture the divide Murray describes. You might say the country has bifurcated into different social tribes, with a tenuous common culture linking them.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad. People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.
  • anonymous on 01 Feb 12
     
    "The truth is, members of the upper tribe have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids. Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms. They live in disorganized, postmodern neighborhoods in which it is much harder to be self-disciplined and productive" (Haner). A gripping fresh look on the classes of today. I enjoyed reading about this spin on the topic of cultural corruption on behalf of the socially elite. I also liked how Haner brought up the time-old conflicting views of Democrats and Republicans. Haner is able to easily criticize both sides- unlike most of us, as we tend to automatically focus our energy on the recycled ideas of past party members.
Javier E

Two Nobelists Offer Views of Human-Driven Global Warming - NYTimes.com - 1 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...of-human-driven-global-warming

global warming

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 12 - Cached
  • Given the flurry of attention this week around what two batches of scientists of various stripes think of evidence that humans are exerting a growing and disruptive influence on climate, it’s worth checking in with two Nobel laureates who’ve long been focused on the atmosphere and climate.
Javier E

I Hate Homework. I Assign It Anyway. - NYTimes.com - 1 views

parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/...te-homework-i-assign-it-anyway

homework teaching education

shared by Javier E on 04 Feb 12 - Cached
  • The popular media tempest surrounding homework formed in 2006 with the publication of two books on the subject: “The Homework Myth,” by Alfie Kohn, and “The Case Against Homework,” by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, followed by Time Magazine’s The Myth About Homework by Claudia Wallis. Last year, Vicki Abeles’s documentary “Race to Nowhere” joined the fray.
  • my students feel that quality homework is worth the effort, I’m keeping it. With one caveat. All assignments must pass the “Ben” test. If an assignment is not worthy of my own son’s time, I’m dumping it. Based on a quick look at my assignment book from last year, about a quarter of my assignments won’t make the cut.Children need time to be quiet, play, read and imagine. Teachers who sacrifice these vital elements of childhood for anything less than the most valuable homework assignments are being derelict in their duty to their students and the teaching profession.
  • anonymous on 05 Feb 12
     
    I agree that homework is beneficial, but oftentimes can, and should, be reduced. In middle school, I had the workload my parents had in high school. In high school, I have the workload my parents had in their first two years of college. I understand that our curriculum holds pride in being demanding, and growing competition forces us to "up" our education; however, I hope that this rate does not continue in the exponential pattern it currently holds.
Javier E

Why French Parents Are Superior by Pamela Druckerman - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...4740904577196931457473816.html

parenting France US comparative patience authority

shared by Javier E on 04 Feb 12 - Cached
  • Middle-class French parents (I didn't follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me. They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes and interactive science museums.
  • Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents," one Parisian mother told me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time." French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.
  • Parents don't have to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance or save for college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their bank accounts—just for having kids.
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  • The French, I found, seem to have a whole different framework for raising kids. When I asked French parents how they disciplined their children, it took them a few beats just to understand what I meant. "Ah, you mean how do we educate them?" they asked. "Discipline," I soon realized, is a narrow, seldom-used notion that deals with punishment. Whereas "educating" (which has nothing to do with school) is something they imagined themselves to be doing all the time.
  • One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don't pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat. (French kids consistently have three meals a day and one snack around 4 p.m.)
  • Delphine said that she never set out specifically to teach her kids patience. But her family's daily rituals are an ongoing apprenticeship in how to delay gratification. Delphine said that she sometimes bought Pauline candy. (Bonbons are on display in most bakeries.) But Pauline wasn't allowed to eat the candy until that day's snack, even if it meant waiting many hours.
  • Delphine was also teaching her kids a related skill: learning to play by themselves. "The most important thing is that he learns to be happy by himself," she said of her son, Aubane. It's a skill that French mothers explicitly try to cultivate in their kids more than American mothers do. In a 2004 study on the parenting beliefs of college-educated mothers in the U.S. and France, the American moms said that encouraging one's child to play alone was of average importance. But the French moms said it was very important.
  • patience isn't a skill that we hone quite as assiduously as French parents do. We tend to view whether kids are good at waiting as a matter of temperament. In our view, parents either luck out and get a child who waits well or they don't.
  • most French descriptions of American kids include this phrase "n'importe quoi," meaning "whatever" or "anything they like." It suggests that the American kids don't have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It's the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or frame, that French parents often talk about. Cadre means that kids have very firm limits about certain things—that's the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce these. But inside the cadre, French parents entrust their kids with quite a lot of freedom and autonomy.
  • Many French parents I meet have an easy, calm authority with their children that I can only envy. Their kids actually listen to them. French children aren't constantly dashing off, talking back, or engaging in prolonged negotiations.
Javier E

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...3806504577181351486558984.html

adolescence teenage brain research development learning experience brain science psychology

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.
  • The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again
  • The first of these systems has to do with emotion and motivation. It is very closely linked to the biological and chemical changes of puberty and involves the areas of the brain that respond to rewards. This is the system that turns placid 10-year-olds into restless, exuberant, emotionally intense teenagers, desperate to attain every goal, fulfill every desire and experience every sensation. Later, it turns them back into relatively placid adults.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults.
  • What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers
  • In contemporary life, the relationship between these two systems has changed dramatically. Puberty arrives earlier, and the motivational system kicks in earlier too. At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups.
  • The second crucial system in our brains has to do with control; it channels and harnesses all that seething energy. In particular, the prefrontal cortex reaches out to guide other parts of the brain, including the parts that govern motivation and emotion. This is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making, that encourages long-term planning and delays gratification.
  • This control system depends much more on learning. It becomes increasingly effective throughout childhood and continues to develop during adolescence and adulthood, as we gain more experience.
  • Expertise comes with experience.
  • In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship. Children have lots of chances to practice the skills that they need to accomplish their goals as adults, and so to become expert planners and actors.
  • In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence—tuning up just the prefrontal wiring you'd need as an adult. But you'd do all that under expert adult supervision and in the protected world of childhood
  • there is more and more evidence that genes are just the first step in complex developmental sequences, cascades of interactions between organism and environment, and that those developmental processes shape the adult brain. Even small changes in developmental timing can lead to big changes in who we become.
  • The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences.
  • Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.
  • An ever longer protected period of immaturity and dependence—a childhood that extends through college—means that young humans can learn more than ever before. There is strong evidence that IQ has increased dramatically as more children spend more time in school
  • children know more about more different subjects than they ever did in the days of apprenticeships.
  • Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies.
  • this new explanation based on developmental timing elegantly accounts for the paradoxes of our particular crop of adolescents.
  • First, experience shapes the brain.
  • the brain is so powerful precisely because it is so sensitive to experience. It's as true to say that our experience of controlling our impulses make the prefrontal cortex develop as it is to say that prefrontal development makes us better at controlling our impulses
  • Second, development plays a crucial role in explaining human nature
  • Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.
  • Brain research is often taken to mean that adolescents are really just defective adults—grown-ups with a missing part.
  • But the new view of the adolescent brain isn't that the prefrontal lobes just fail to show up; it's that they aren't properly instructed and exercised
  • Instead of simply giving adolescents more and more school experiences—those extra hours of after-school classes and homework—we could try to arrange more opportunities for apprenticeship
  • Summer enrichment activities like camp and travel, now so common for children whose parents have means, might be usefully alternated with summer jobs, with real responsibilities.
  • Javier E on 06 Feb 12
     
    The two brain systems, the increasing gap between them, and the implications for adolescent education.
  • anonymous on 06 Feb 12
     
    "In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship" (Gopnik). Similarly to the way that Marx pointed out the economic shift from hunter-gatherer to farmer to (eventually) capitalist societies, Gopnik underlines the societal shift- especially in teenagers. While I think that some of the changes in teenagers are due to evolution and development (as proven through some of the medical tests mentioned in the article), I think that this issue may relate back to parenting. As the article about French parenting pointed out, it has become a very obvious fact that many (specifically American) parents simply do not have good techniques, and this could effect the way that their child develops and behaves. I also think that another possible explanation to this issue is that there is more expected of teenagers, scholarly, then before; however, as the article mentioned, the real-world experience is lacking. By raising the academic bar higher and higher, it may actually cause more students to, essentially, "burn out" before everything that they have learned can be applied: "What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?" (Gopnik)
Javier E

Spinoza and The First Amendment - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...zas-vision-of-freedom-and-ours

freedom Spinoza government censorship

shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 12 - Cached
  • As Spinoza points out, it is “impossible” for a person’s mind to be under another’s control, and this is a necessary reality that any government must accept. The more difficult case, the true test of a regime’s commitment to toleration, concerns the liberty of citizens to express those beliefs, either in speech or in writing.
  • No matter what laws are enacted against speech and other means of expression, citizens will continue to say what they believe (because they can), only now they will do so in secret. The result of the suppression of freedom is, once again, resentment and a weakening of the bonds that unite subjects to their government. In Spinoza’s view, intolerant laws lead ultimately to anger, revenge and sedition
  • Spinoza also argues for freedom of expression on utilitarian grounds — that it is necessary for the discovery of truth, economic progress and the growth of creativity.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Spinoza’s extraordinary views on freedom have never been more relevant. In 2010, for example, the United States Supreme Court declared constitutional a law that, among other things, criminalized certain kinds of speech. The speech in question need not be extremely and imminently threatening to anyone or pose “a clear and present danger” (to use Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ phrase). It may involve no incitement to action or violence whatsoever; indeed, it can be an exhortation to non-violence. In a troubling 6-3 decision, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Court, acceding to most of the arguments presented by President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, upheld a federal law which makes it a crime to provide support for a foreign group designated by the State Department as a “terrorist organization,” even if the “help” one provides involves only peaceful and legal advice, including speech encouraging that organization to adopt nonviolent means for resolving conflicts and educating it in the means to do so.
  • Now Spinoza does not support absolute freedom of speech. He explicitly states that the expression of “seditious” ideas is not to be tolerated by the sovereign. There is to be no protection for speech that advocates the overthrow of the government, disobedience to its laws or harm to fellow citizens. The people are free to argue for the repeal of laws that they find unreasonable and oppressive, but they must do so peacefully and through rational argument; and if their argument fails to persuade the sovereign to change the law, then that must be the end of the matter.
  • Spinoza draws the line, albeit a somewhat hazy one, between ideas and action. The government, he insists, has every right to outlaw certain kinds of actions. As the party responsible for the public welfare, the sovereign must have absolute and exclusive power to monitor and legislatively control what people may or may not do. But Spinoza explicitly does not include ideas, even the expression of ideas, under the category of “action.” As individuals emerged from a state of nature to become citizens through the social contract, “it was only the right to act as he thought fit that each man surrendered, and not his right to reason and judge.”
  • We seem ready not only to engage in a higher degree of self-censorship, but also to accept a loosening of legal protections against prior restraint (whether in print publications or the dissemination of information via the Internet), unwarranted surveillance, unreasonable search and seizure, and other intrusive measures. [2] Spinoza, long ago, recognized the danger in such thinking, both for individuals and for the polity at large
Javier E

Guernica / The Storytellers of Empire - 1 views

www.guernicamag.com/...shamsie_02_01_2012

US fiction empire stories writing literature

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 12 - Cached
  • Hiroshima is a book about what happened in Japan, to Japan, in August 1945. It is a book about five Japanese and one German hibakusha, or bomb survivors. It is not a book which concerns itself with what the bombing meant for America in military terms, but rather what it meant for the people of Hiroshima in the most human terms.
  • Inevitably, it also contains within it two Americas. One is the America which develops and uses—not once, but twice—a weapon of a destructive capability which far outstrips anything that has come before, the America which decides what price some other country’s civilian population must pay for its victory. There is nothing particular to America in this—all nations in war behave in much the same way. But in the years between the bombing of Hiroshima and now, no nation has intervened militarily with as many different countries as America, and always on the other country’s soil; which is to say, no nation has treated as many other civilian populations as collateral damage as America while its own civilians stay well out of the arena of war. So that’s one of the Americas in Hiroshima—the America of brutal military power.
  • But there’s another America in the book, that of John Hersey. The America of looking at the destruction your nation has inflicted and telling it like it is. The America of stepping back and allowing someone else to tell their story through you because they have borne the tragedy and you have the power to bear witness to it. It is the America of The New Yorker of William Shawn, which, for the only time in its history, gave over an entire edition to a single article and kept its pages clear of its famed cartoons. It is the America which honored Hersey for his truth telling.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • How to reconcile these two Americas? I didn’t even try. It was a country I always looked at with one eye shut. With my left eye I saw the America of John Hersey; with my right eye I saw the America of the two atom bombs. This one-eyed seeing was easy enough from a distance. But then I came to America as an undergraduate and realized that with a few honorable exceptions, all of America looked at America with one eye shut.
  • I had grown up in a country with military rule; I had grown up, that is to say, with the understanding that the government of a nation is a vastly different thing than its people. The government of America was a ruthless and morally bankrupt entity; but the people of America, well, they were different, they were better. They didn’t think it was okay for America to talk democracy from one side of its mouth while heaping praise on totalitarian nightmares from the other side. They just didn’t know it was happening, not really, not in any way that made it real to them. For a while this sufficed. I grumbled a little about American insularity. But it was an affectionate grumble. All nations have their failings. As a Pakistani, who was I to cast stones from my brittle, blood-tipped glass house?
  • Then came September 11, and for a few seconds, it brought this question: why do they hate us?
  • It was asked not only about the men on the planes but also about those people in the world who didn’t fall over with weeping but instead were seen to remark that now America, too, knew what it felt like to be attacked. It was asked, and very quickly it was answered: they hate our freedoms. And just like that a door was closed and a large sign pasted onto it saying, “You’re Either With Us or Against Us.” Anyone who hammered on the door with mention of the words “foreign policy” was accused of justifying the murder of more than three thousand people.
  • I found myself looking to writers. Where were the novels that could be proffered to people who asked, “Why do they hate us?”, which is actually the question “Who are these people and what do they have to do with us?” No such novel, as far as I knew, had come from the post-Cold War generation of writers who started writing after the 1980s when Islam replaced Communism as the terrifying Other. But that would change, I told myself.
  • The writers would write. The novels would come. They didn’t. They haven’t.
  • So where are they, the American fiction writers—and I mean literary fiction—whose works are interested in the question “What do these people have to do with us?” and “What are we doing out there in the world?”
  • I grew up in Pakistan in the 1980s, aware that thinking about my country’s history and politics meant thinking about America’s history and politics. This is not an unusual position. Many countries of the world from Asia to South America exist, or have existed, as American client states, have seen U.S.-backed coups, faced American missiles or sanctions, seen their government’s policies on various matters dictated in Washington. America may not be an empire in the nineteenth century way which involved direct colonization. But the neo-imperialism of America was evident to me by the time I was an adolescent and able to understand these things.
  • why is it that the fiction writers of my generation are so little concerned with the history of their own nation once that history exits the fifty states. It’s not because of a lack of dramatic potential in those stories of America in the World; that much is clear.
  • The stories of America in the World rather than the World in America stubbornly remain the domain of nonfiction. Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won’t. The unmanned drone hovering over Pakistan, controlled by someone in Langley, is an apt metaphor for America’s imaginative engagement with my nation.
  • Where is the American writer who looks on his or her country with two eyes, one shaped by the experience of living here, the other filled with the sad knowledge of what this country looks like when it’s not at home. Where is the American writer who can tell you about the places your nation invades or manipulates, brings you into those stories and lets you draw breath with its characters?
  • why, when there are astonishing stories out in the world about America, to do with America, going straight to the heart of the question: who are these people and what do they have to do with us?—why are the fiction writers staying away from the stories? The answer, I think, comes from John Hersey. He said of novelists, “A writer is bound to have varying degrees of success, and I think that that is partly an issue of how central the burden of the story is to the author’s psyche.” And that’s the answer. Even now, you just don’t care very much about us. One eye remains closed. The pen, writing its deliberate sentences, is icy cold.
  • Javier E on 09 Feb 12
     
    Asks why American fiction writers don't write stories about America's effect on countries where it has intervened.
Javier E

Republicans need more than rhetoric on defense - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQA5SF1zQ_story.html

republicans rhetoric defense poicy foreign

shared by Javier E on 10 Feb 12 - Cached
  • Javier E on 10 Feb 12
     
    Astonishing admission of the poverty and mendacity of the current Republican party defense policy platform, by a central pillar of the Republican punditocracy.
Javier E

Is China Ripe for a Revolution? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ina-ripe-for-a-revolution.html

China 19C revolution history US support Manchu

shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 12 - Cached
  • it is instead the Taiping Rebellion, which nearly toppled the Qing Dynasty 50 years earlier, that bears the strongest warnings for the current government. The revolt, which claimed at least 20 million lives before it was quelled, making it the bloodiest civil war in history, suggests caution for those who hope for a popular uprising — a Chinese Spring — today.
  • The Taiping Rebellion exploded out of southern China during the early 1850s in a period marked, as now, by economic dislocation, corruption and a moral vacuum. Rural poverty abounded; local officials were wildly corrupt; the Beijing government was so distant as to barely seem to exist. The uprising was set off by bloody ethnic feuds between Cantonese-speaking Chinese and the minority Hakkas over land rights.
  • Beijing has learned its lessons from the past. We see this in the swift and ruthless suppression of Falun Gong and other religious sects that resemble the Taiping before they became militarized. We can see it in the numbers of today’s “mass incidents.” One estimate, 180,000 in 2010, sounds ominous indeed, but in fact the sheer number shows that the dissent is not organized and has not (yet) coalesced into something that can threaten the state
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The greatest fear of the government is not that violent dissent should exist; the fear is that it should coalesce.
  • For all of the West’s contempt for China’s government in the 19th century, when the Taiping Rebellion actually drove it to the brink of destruction, it was Britain that intervened to keep it in power. Britain’s economy depended so heavily on the China market at the time (especially after the loss of the United States market to the American Civil War in 1861) that it simply could not bear the risk of what might come from a rebel victory. With American encouragement, the British supplied arms, gunships and military officers to the Manchu government and ultimately helped tip the balance of the war in its favor.
  • Given the precarious state of our economy today, and America’s nearly existential reliance on our trade with China in particular, one wonders: for all of our principled condemnation of China’s government on political and human rights grounds, if it were actually faced with a revolution from within — even one led by a coalition calling for greater democracy — how likely is it that we, too, wouldn’t, in the end, find ourselves hoping for that revolution to fail?
Javier E

'Downton Abbey' and How PBS Got Cool - The Daily Beast - 1 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...bbey-and-how-pbs-got-cool.html

TV public cultural values

shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 12 - Cached
  • Not since Ken Burns’s The Civil War documentary, which aired in 1990, has PBS been at the center of national cultural conversation as it is now. Masterpiece’s Downton Abbey, which finishes its second season U.S. run on Sunday and will return in January 2013, has generated critical acclaim, audience enthusiasm, and impressive ratings, and garnered six Emmys and one Golden Globe, ending HBO’s dominance over the movies and miniseries category. Downton is ranked No. 3 in terms of overall audiences in all Masterpiece presentations since 1990,
  • “What’s interesting about the show is that as our culture’s protocol and etiquette deteriorates, we get to watch this show where it’s in full swing from the turn of the century, where people actually honor their place in society and live there,” said RuPaul, explaining the show’s universal appeal. “That’s why it’s so interesting to watch Downton Abbey because these people know their place and they thrive in their place.”
  • anonymous on 15 Feb 12
     
    As an avid Downton fan, it is really great to know that I'm watching a show that can teach me something. Usually, when the words "educational" and "television" are used in the same sentence, it conjures up an image of long-winded documentaries or people from the '70s trying to disguise themselves in period costumes (let's face it, that mustache is not tricking any of us...). Downton, though occasionally melodramatic (the death of Mr. Pamuk, anyone?), is really a refreshing take on T.V. with a purpose.
Javier E

For London Youth, Down and Out Is Way of Life - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...wn-and-out-is-way-of-life.html

unemployment Europe government economic policy youth

shared by Javier E on 16 Feb 12 - Cached
  • Perhaps the most debilitating consequence of the euro zone’s economic downturn and its debt-driven austerity crusade has been the soaring rate of youth unemployment. Spain’s jobless rate for people ages 16 to 24 is approaching 50 percent. Greece’s is 48 percent, and Portugal’s and Italy’s, 30 percent. Here in Britain, the rate is 22.3 percent, the highest since such data began being collected in 1992. (The comparable rate for Americans is 18 percent.)
  • The lack of opportunity is feeding a mounting alienation and anger among young people across Europe — animus that threatens to poison the aspirations of a generation and has already served as a wellspring for a number of violent protests in European cities from Athens to London. And new economic data on Wednesday, showing much of Europe in the doldrums or recession, does little to bolster hopes for a better jobs picture anytime soon
Javier E

The Electoral Wasteland - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-electoral-wasteland

Republican president nomination process

shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 12 - Cached
  • the small fraction of Americans who are trying to pick the Republican nominee are old, white, uniformly Christian and unrepresentative of the nation at large.
  • The nine states that have held caucuses or primaries to date are home to roughly 28 million total registered voters, of all political persuasions.
  • So far, three million voters have participated in the Republican races, less than the  population of Connecticut.  This means that 89 percent of all registered voters in those states have not participated in what is, from a horse-race perspective, a very tight contest
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Less than 1 percent of registered voters turned out for Maine’s caucus. In Nevada, where Republican turnout was down 25 percent from 2008, only 3 percent of total registered voters participated.
  • In Florida, the largest and most diverse state among the nine, turnout was down 14 percent from 2008. And 84 percent of the state’s total registered voters  did not participate in the Republican contest.
  • In the Palmetto State, 98 percent of primary voters were white, 72 percent were age 45 or older and nearly two-thirds were evangelical Christian, according to exit polls. From this picture, you may think South Carolina is an all-white, aging state, full of fervent churchgoers. But the Census says the state is only 66 percent white, with a median age of 36. Exit polls from 2008 put the evangelical vote at 40 percent of total.
  • Whites are 63.7 percent of the total population of the United States; in 1900, they were 88 percent — still more diverse than Republican primary voters today.
Javier E

The Weekend Interview With Norman Davies: The Emperor of Vanished Kingdoms - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...3918304577240984211126416.html

governance Europe integration collapse political US historical gradualism crisis

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Norman Davies, Britain's pre-eminent historian of Europe. From where he sits, Europe's problem is one of failed governance. "It all started, I guess, in the 1990s, with the Yugoslav wars and the inability of the Europeans to do anything basic about a war in their backyard."
  • "I now feel that the thing that is being proved wrong is what some people call the 'gradualist fallacy'—that . . . you drive European integration forward by economic means," he says. "And it's just wrong."
  • After World War II, Europeans set about forming a union along three axes: politics, defense and economics. Britain quickly rejected political union, however, and soon enough NATO came along to become the only defense union Western Europe needed. An economic union—the European Economic Community, established in 1957—was the only remaining pillar of integration left to pursue.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Europe has had only four years since the war when it didn't have its hands full—not much time to make a functioning union for 500 million people.
  • Instead, Mr. Davies says, the EU has become a vehicle by which the stronger countries promote their interests—led, for the moment, by the tag team of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "So although all the member states have to be democracies—this is one of the conditions for entry—they're not required to act democratically once they're in."
  • "There are one or two people around," he says, "who might, at the meeting of the Council of Ministers, instead of doing [the] horse-trading which goes on all the time, say, 'Enough of all of this. We are all going to lose the European Union unless we do something today.'"
  • "A lot of this crisis is to do with a period of economic growth, limitless money, people not worrying about getting into debt—mind-sapping comfort." He adds, "Western Europeans to a large extent are still in that comfort zone, whereas East Europeans have lived through much harder times and are much more appreciative of the degree of freedom and prosperity that they have got, that 20 years ago they didn't."
  • "Europe 100 years ago was bullish," he says, and there's something in the American psyche that bears uncanny resemblance to Europeans' optimism, in the years before World War I broke out in 1914, about their peaceful, prosperous future. Does pride come before the fall? "The United States is this late-19th-century, 20th-century power which has a lot of those attitudes," he says.
  • "It's like an avalanche, where you've got a huge frozen snowfield, which on the surface looks absolutely ideal. . . . All the changes in the ice field come from the sun shining on them, and the water melts underneath. But you can't actually see it. And you equally can't see which part of the snowfield is going to move first."
  • "But it happens in a second. Before the avalanche, the sun shines, it looks beautiful, and there's a sound like a gunshot, where the ice cracks. And the whole damn lot falls into the valley."
Javier E

The Poor Lives of Rich People - Entertainment - The Atlantic Wire - 1 views

www.theatlanticwire.com/...49287

rich cultural values crisis

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Bloomberg's Max Abelson recently interviewed a bunch of Wall Street folks who got smaller bonuses this year, and as their comments indicate, more money either really does mean more problems, or it means that a wealthy person's sense of reality is just that much further off.
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