U.S. Shrugs as World War III Approaches - WSJ - 0 views
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The news from abroad is chilling. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reports from Kyiv that Ukraine is “bleeding out” as its weary soldiers struggle against a numerically superior Russia. The New York Times reports that China is expanding the geographical reach and escalating violence in its campaign to drive Philippine forces from islands and shoals that Beijing illegitimately claims. And Bloomberg reports that Washington officials are fearful that Russia will help Iran cross the finish line in its race for nuclear weapons.
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China, Russia and Iran are stepping up their attacks on what remains of the Pax Americana and continue to make gains at the expense of Washington and its allies around the world.
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recently released report of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy. This panel of eight experts, named by the senior Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services committees, consulted widely across government, reviewing both public and classified information, and issued a unanimous repor
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Vance, Trump, and The Politics of Hate - 0 views
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“I think our people hate the right people,” a relaxed JD Vance confided to an interviewer three years ago.
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By “the right people,” Vance meant liberal elites.
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it was also clear that Vance knew one couldn’t foster hatred for liberal elites without the collateral damage of hatred for immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, cultural nonconformists, and any of the groups whom those elites were supposedly elevating at the expense of “our people.”
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How the War on Terror Warped the American Left - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Throttled by fear, America lost its mind. An overwhelming majority now agree on this point—a Pew poll in 2019 found that 62 percent of respondents thought the Iraq War was “not worth fighting” (even 64 percent of veterans concurred). So scarring were the failed attempts at nation building that strong isolationist strains run through both major American political parties today.
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The War on Terror reinforced a paranoid style on the left that has stunted progressive politics, a Chomskyite turn that sees even the democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as too incremental.
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If America is irredeemable, this thinking goes, then justice demands no less than a complete reboot of the country.
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Alexandre Lefebvre on Liberalism as a Way of Life - 0 views
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Our liberalism runs a lot deeper than perhaps we are prepared to admit.
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I think that's especially true for people who identify as liberals. So people who are card-carrying liberals typically think about it as a political or institutional kind of thing, having to do with such things as rights, division of power, constitutions, and the like
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what I'm trying to suggest is that, for a lot of us, our liberal values may run very deep in the sense that they may be at the heart of who we are, informing how we navigate all kinds of different walks of life—friendship, romance, parenting, how we are in the workplace, extending to the kinds of words we use and don't use, the kind of stuff we laugh at. All that stuff might be a liberal package.
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How a Naked Man on a Tropical Island Created Our Current Political Insanity - 0 views
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If reality television began as a crude simulacrum of real life, today the opposite can feel true — that actual life is approximating reality television, and we’ve all been conscripted as cast members. We have arrived at the final stage of the genre’s cultural logic: people with no connection whatsoever to the genre living as if they are reality stars
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The contagion has leaked from the lab. We are in a period of unchecked community spread.
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Some of the most successful people in the world — like Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — now prefer to parade around crudely constructed reality-villain alter egos instead of simply being whoever it is they actually are.
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How Joe Rogan Remade Austin - The Atlantic - 0 views
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the essence of the Joe Rogan brand: He is bawdy around his fans, respectful of his wife, loyal to his friends, and indulgent with his golden retriever, who has 900,000 followers on Instagram. He maintains a self-deprecating sense of humor that’s rare among men who could buy an island if they wanted one
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His politics defy easy categorization—he hates Democratic finger-wagging but supports gay marriage and abortion rights. (“I’m so far away from being a Republican,” he said on a podcast in 2022.) He voted for a third-party candidate in 2020, and in early August expressed his admiration for Robert F. Kennedy Jr
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He sees himself as an outsider, nontribal, just an average Joe. The best way to think of him, one of my friends told me, is as if “Homer Simpson got swole.”
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Book Review: 'Reagan,' by Max Boot - The New York Times - 0 views
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Max Boot’s gripping new biography, “Reagan,” which reminds us that liberals once hated the 40th president of the United States as much as they now hate Trump.
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Reagan’s detractors called him cruel and callous for cutting social programs, mocked the soaring deficits that belied his talk of fiscal responsibility and genuinely feared he would spark nuclear holocaust with his bellicose rhetoric and his “Star Wars” missile defense system. Yet today, he is wreathed in a cloud of nostalgia, and many historians have judged him both consequential and effective.
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“Reagan” dives straight into the contradictions that defined the man. He was the voracious critic of the federal government who presided over its vast expansion; the arch-conservative who liberalized abortion law as the governor of California; the Great Communicator who tended toward monologue and repetitive anecdotes; the divorced champion of family values with a painfully dysfunctional blended household.
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The Willkommen is turning frosty even in Germany's integration capital - 0 views
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Nationally, immigrants make up about 17 per cent of the population, according to official statistics, almost double the EU average.
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Offenbach, long a centre of Germany’s leather-making trade, has been a magnet for foreigners since Protestant Huguenots fled there from France in the late 17th century.
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These days, Turks, Romanians, Greeks and Bulgarians together make up about a third of the non-indigenous population, but the city is also home to at least a dozen more nationalities, according to detailed figures published by the council as part of its policy of “integration monitoring”.
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'Emancipation' Review: Abolition and Its Aftermath - WSJ - 0 views
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At roughly the same time, in the early 1860s, the U.S. liberated nearly four million enslaved black Americans, and Alexander II of Russia freed some 23 million serfs.
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“In many ways, Russian serfdom was similar to American slavery,” writes Mr. Kolchin, a history professor emeritus at the University of Delaware. “They had similar lifespans, emerging in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, growing and solidifying over the course of the eighteenth century, reaching maturity in the early nineteenth century, and perishing in the 1860s.”
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In both countries, emancipation initially seemed to herald a heyday of even greater reforms as stagnant, hierarchical societies based on compulsory labor appeared to be ready to reinvent themselves as vibrant ones celebrating free labor and free markets.
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'Nexus' Review: Prognosis Apocalyptic - WSJ - 0 views
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the Israeli historian-philosopher Yuval Noah Harari divides us into a naive and populist type and another type that he prefers but does not name. This omission is not surprising. The opposite of naive and populist might be wise and pluralist, but it might also be cynical and elitist
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A dollop of historical anecdote is seasoned with a pinch of social science and a spoonful of speculation, topped with a soggy crust of prescription, and lightly dusted with premonitions of the apocalypse that will overcome us if we refuse a second serving
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“Nexus” divides into three parts. The first part describes the development of complex societies through the creation and control of information networks.
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Elon Musk's Creepy Politics of Birthing - by Alan Elrod - 0 views
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Across today’s hard right, white procreation is being held up as a solution to both America’s demographic challenges and its political and cultural ones
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This marks a drastic shift from the old conservative politics of family values, which emphasized principles of freedom and dignity
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Musk believes that immigration will lead to civil war in Europe, recklessly posting about the inevitability of such violence during the far-right riots that erupted across the United Kingdom in August. It’s worth pointing out that these riots were fueled in part by anti-immigrant misinformation that many participants found through Musk’s own platform.
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