From the book, Who Speaks for Islam?:
When asked why they supported the [9/11] attacks, the radicals [7% of Muslims surveyed] gave political rather than religious reasons. They have a sense of political frustration and feel humiliated and threatened by the West. Those who opposed the attacks often gave religious reasons for doing so.
Because a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil, in the name of good. And I think one thing that’s very important is having some humility in recognizing that just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t mean we are going to be doing good.
Shortly before World War I, Norman Angell... argued [in "The Great Illusion"] that war had become obsolete, that in the modern industrial era even military victors lose far more than they gain. He was right — but wars kept happening anyway.
Excerpted from Cato:
From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering pulpit-pounding sermons on such topics as "Jesus the Socialist." Bellamy was devoted to the ideas of his more-famous cousin Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. Looking Backward describes the future United States as a regimented worker's paradise where everyone has equal incomes, and men are drafted into the country's "industrial army" at the age of 21, serving in the jobs assigned them by the state...Bellamy's book inspired a movement of "Nationalist Clubs," whose members campaigned for a government takeover of the economy.
But—again—the state’s intervention in the market raises almost insurmountable barriers to this form of organization. The state artificially promotes hierarchy at the expense of markets by subsidizing the input costs of large-scale enterprise and by protecting large corporations against the competitive ill effects of inefficiency. It subsidizes long-distance transportation and thus artificially inflates market and firm size. Its differential tax advantages for corporate debt and capital depreciation (or more accurately, its differential tax penalties on those not engaged in such activities) encourage mergers, acquisitions, and excessively capital-intensive forms of production with high entry costs. Its cartelizing regulations, in addition, limit competition in product features and quality. Thus the boundary between hierarchy and market is artificially shifted so that the dominant firms are far larger, more hierarchical, and more vertically integrated than they would be in a free market.Argument of harm by intellectual property too.
Some on the right wing will stress "individual responsibility" as a value when it lowers the status of the whiners (why whine when it was the victim's own fault?). Some on the left wing will stress "individual responsibility" when it is time to punish corporate wrongdoers and thus lower their status. Not everyone applies (or rejects) this value consistently.
Given this difference in rhetoric, the right wing will be identified with the monied class, even when the left often has more money. And the left wing will be identified as the whiners, even though the right at times whines as much or more. You might say that both sides are monied, high human capital whiners, on the whole. And if you compare them to Burmese rice farmers, the two sides seem somewhat alike.
Separate article with graph and link to a six-parter here.
Evidently,
There are already more Chinese living in Nigeria than there were Britons during the height of the empire.
Policy can be drafted on our categories:
Such dichotomous mental categories are regularly employed by social scientists who have taken up neuro-talk, and in the popular press: the amygdala is said to be the seat of emotion, the prefrontal cortex of reason. Yet when I get angry, for example, I generally do so for a reason; typically I judge myself or another wronged. To cleanly separate emotion from reason-giving makes a hash of human experience, and seems to be attractive mainly as a way of rendering the mind methodologically tractable, even if at the cost of realism.
From the male:
9. If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.From the female list, written by a guy, although other lists linked (available here):
23. From my late teens through menopause, for most levels of sexual attractiveness, it is easier for me to find a sex partner at my attractiveness level than it is for a man.
In conducting their study, the authors examine the turnout patterns of identical and non-identical twins—including 396 twins in
Re Democratic nomination:
Not until the morning of the caucuses did the campaign reach its goal of 97,000 Iowans pledged to support Obama that it thought it would need to win. Then came the real question: Would these people show up? Show up they did, shattering turnout records...
The Iowa playbook, as everyone now knows, hasn't always worked. In Texas, for instance, the grassroots operation counted on more African-American voters than actually turned out. In California, organizers expected more young voters. But while Obama rarely managed a clean win against Clinton in the big states — the ones that will count most in the fall — he kept winning delegates even when he lost primaries.
The U.S. doesn't really have to underperform that much compared to the past. It's just that the rest of the world is vaulting forward, jumping on the capitalism bandwagon.
Here's the problem: NAFTA contains a clause that effectively prevents us from cutting back exports of our energy to the United States – even if it means there will be energy shortages in Canada.
This "proportionality clause" is highly unusual. Indeed, according to a new report by the Alberta-based Parkland Institute, it is "unique in all the world's treaties."
From the Wikipedia entry re the Satanic Bible:
This can be compared favorably to the arguments of ethical egoism--that what sometimes benefits others can be beneficial to oneself, but that one must always have one's own interests first in mind. LaVey never suggests that love is not a natural emotion in man, and on the contrary suggests that loving select individuals is very natural, but he does claim that to love all people is not only a philosophical mistake but is in fact impossible and even damaging to the ability to truly love those few individuals who deserve it.
... like love, it is senseless to universally apply hatred to all mankind.
You see Nazi salutes and swastikas and you realize that ideologically, Russia actually lost (or is now losing) the war and Hitler won (just not in Germany). My understanding is that there is a lot of unofficial backpatting from the government. I don't have a link in this blog, but there was a time when Putin was publicly encouraging harassment of ethnic Georgians in Russia.
Previous post on more ideologically native youth militia/sex camp here.
American society can adapt to this new world. But can the American government? Washington has gotten used to a world in which all roads led to its doorstep. America has rarely had to worry about benchmarking to the rest of the world—it was always so far ahead. But the natives have gotten good at capitalism and the gap is narrowing. Look at the rise of London. It's now the world's leading financial center—less because of things that the United States did badly than those London did well, like improving regulation and becoming friendlier to foreign capital.
The social theories of Karl Marx were long ago discarded as of little value, even to revolutionaries. But he did warn that capitalism had a tendency to generate its own crises. Indeed, the spread of capitalism, and its accelerated industrialization and wealth-creation, may have fomented the food-inflation crisis — by dramatically accelerating competition for scarce resources.
