- Worldwide weeds
- The Mushroom That Explains the World
- …True Tales of Dharma, Demons, and Darwin
- From Spain to the New World via Florence and Vermont (be sure to scroll through the ‘comments’ thread)
- Time for Bolivians to Forget about the Sea (weak, but a good starting point for a discussion)
- Dissolution of the Templars
Links
“What every 21st century American should ‘know'”
Over at Policy of Truth, Dr Khawaja has an interesting post up on cultural literacy:
The journal Democracy is running an article revisiting E.D. Hirsch’s idea of cultural literacy, and looking for readers to help generate an updated list like the one at the end of Hirsch’s 1987 book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.
Here’s the list I came up with, completely off the top of my head (i.e., involving less than a minute of thought, since that’s all the time for thought I currently have).
- Wounded Knee 1890
- Wounded Knee 1973
- The Fort Laramie Treaty (1868)
- Russell Means and/or Dennis Banks
- AIM (American Indian Movement)
- Ayn Rand
- Atlas Shrugged
- The Fountainhead
- libertarianism
- BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions)
I added my own list in the ‘comments’ thread, but still haven’t had time to address critiques. My list:
My quick list:
1) black conservatism
2) the whole Pahlavi-Mossadegh affair
3) libertarianism (people still have trouble conceptualizing it’s right-left crossover appeal)
4) Latin America’s Western culture
5) Dutch history
6) South Asian-East African literature (lots of historical links between the two regions that could help conceptualize current US role in the world)
Lists are fun. They are an easy way to start a conversation and they are time friendly. Add your own and don’t forget to justify your positions! Here is how I justify #1: it’s a storied, intellectually-robust tradition that has suffered greatly in the public sphere due to vulgar demagogic practices associated with the black Left. #2: C’mon, why shouldn’t every American know that their government overthrew an elected government in Iran and paved the way for the current anti-American regime?#3: see what’s between the parenthesis. #4: knowing that Latin Americans are by and large Western (save for the Natives still living in the Andean highlands) would do wonders for better relations between North and South. #5: Dutch (and Swiss) history can teach us far more about our own institutions than anything the UK has to offer. #6: see parenthesis.
Lots of foreign policy implications on my list, as well as stuff that can help to better understand why the US works the way it works. (This is a charitable assumption on my part, of course.)
BC’s weekend reads
- Our own Edwin van de Haar being interviewed about Degrees of Freedom (audio interview)
- Does Gun Control Work? Ben Carson Says Yes. ADL Says No but Yes
- The Vanishing Europe of Jürgen Habermas
- Leviathan (movie review)
- Thinking Anew | What, precisely, changed in the 18th century? (book review)
- This Is What Russia REALLY Fears in Syria
BC’s weekend reads
- Introducing… Jesus and Mo
- On private property and the commons
- Why Merkel’s Kindness to Asylum Seekers Could Reflect a German Soft Spot for Islam
- Why I find the Mthwakazi monarchy restoration unjustified
- September (a song about me)
- From the Far Right to the Far Left
- Beyond Neoliberalism (book review)
“Turkish Savagery” is up at Liberty Unbound
For centuries, Europeans viewed the Turk as the most feared, yet least familiar enemy. Twice, the Ottoman hordes threatened Vienna, practically next door to Paris. For hundreds of years French Mediterranean towns and monasteries fortified themselves against Turkish pirates (who mostly never showed up). Algerian pirates, who were thought of generically as “Turks,” occasionally plundered the Irish coast. Once, a bunch of them even raided Iceland! Following his naval debacle at the Bay of Abukir, Napoleon brought Mamelukes, Turkish mercenary troops from Egypt, back to Europe. He used them as a weapon of terror against the insurgent Spaniards, a fact memorialized by Goya in his Tres de Mayo. In this atrocity painting, only the Spanish victims, who seem to be appealing to the viewer, have human faces. The Mameluke execution squad is shown from the rear, like a many-backed beast.
BC’s weekend reads
- The debt of a Pope called Francis to past Syrian refugees, Part 1 (be sure to check out parts 2 and 3, too)
- Ten Things I Want My Children To Learn From 9/11 (and also “Ten (or So) Lessons of 9/11“)
- Hellburners Were the Renaissance’s Tactical Nukes
- The Inevitable Divorce: Secular France and Radical Islam
- How Petty Traffic Fines Ruin Lives in Milwaukee (and Everywhere in America)
- Edwin and Barry both have excellent posts on current events in Europe and the Near East (Jacques has a related post); be sure to scroll through all the comments in their respective threads…
Four of my papers on South Asia
The following two are downloads:
- Water Conflicts in South Asia: India’s Transboundary River Water Conflicts with Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal (docx)
- Radicalism in Bangladesh: Causes, Consequences, and Concerns (docx)
And these two are pdfs that can also be found on my ‘About…‘ page:
- Water Disputes between Punjab and Sindh: A Challenge to Pakistan (pdf)
- Afghanistan Quagmire and India-Pakistan “Strategic” Rivalry: Is Cooperation Possible? (pdf)
I hope they can be widely circulated.
Ian Bremmer’s American Foreign Policy Quiz
Ian Bremmer, a political scientist at NYU (and numerous think tanks), has teamed up with Time to put together this quiz on what you think the proper role for the US (“America”) is in the world today. According to Bremmer, a neoconservative, there are three basic points of view with regard to the US’s role in the world: Independent, Indispensable, and Moneyball (you can read his explanation for these three types, as well as his analysis of how major presidential candidates fit into these categories, here).
I ended up being “caught between Independent and Moneyball America,” just like Rand Paul. Leave your scores in the ‘comments’ thread! Bremmer got his PhD in political science from Stanford back in 1994.
A Different Kind of Pork (in France)
There is a big government crisis in France following the arson of several trucks and blocking of traffic on several main national arteries for several days. The problem is that the French don’t eat enough pork. Pig farmers are angry at the government, of course. (You read this right.)
It’s worth learning French just to read about this, our future under Bernie Sanders.
Silent Majorities: Mass Incarceration Edition
What vexed [political scientist Michael] Fortner was that The New Jim Crow seemed to be two different books. One did a powerful job showing how mass incarceration undermines black communities and perpetuates racial inequality. The other — and this was the vexing part — advanced a political theory about how we got here. That history stressed the resilience of white supremacy. First came slavery; when slavery ended, a white backlash brought Jim Crow segregation; when Jim Crow crumbled, a backlash to the civil-rights movement spawned yet another caste system, mass incarceration. Each time, writes Alexander, an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, proponents of racial hierarchy achieved their goals “largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites.”
“I remember feeling like, where are the black folks in this story?” Fortner says. “Where are their voices? They’re constantly victimized. They’re not powerful. And then I thought about, well, who the hell brought down the original Jim Crow? It was black power. It was black folk organizing, mobilizing successfully against racial structures in the South, in the North. And what happened to all that power? What happened to all that agency? It sort of disappeared.”
Except it didn’t. By examining historical records, Fortner found that black people had retained their power when it came to crime policy. At one place, in one moment, their voices were critical: Harlem in the years leading up to the Rockefeller drug laws. It was there that residents were besieged by heroin addiction and social disorder — what a late-1960s NAACP report called a “reign of criminal terror.” And it was there that a “black silent majority” of working- and middle-class residents rallied to reclaim their streets. New York’s ambitious governor seized on their discontent to push for harsh narcotics policies that would enhance his standing within the Republican Party. The result: some of the strictest drug statutes in the country, mandating long minimum sentences for a variety of drug crimes.
More here. By Marc Perry writing in the Chronicle Review.
Around the Web
- GOP Presidential Candidates: The More the Scarier; I didn’t think that political competition could be a bad thing, though. Perhaps it’s only scary to those who are (and especially have been) active, willing participants in GOP machinations…
- Paul’s Gospel
- Sanders is not like Trump. Sanders is like Rand Paul.
- Postcards from Abu Dis: Checking out the Checkpoints (Part Nine); Dr Khawaja has been teaching philosophy in the West Bank this summer, and while I’ve linked to his latest installment, the whole series (nine parts so far) is well worth the read.
- Must religious bakers bake cakes for gay weddings?
Don’t Let Me Design Your Retaining Wall!
The State of California says I’m qualified to practice civil engineering. That means you can trust me to design structures that achieve a high degree of safety, economy, reliability, and maintainability. I even have an official rubber stamp that I can apply to drawings or calculations. It is supposed to guarantee that I know what I’m doing and that I follow generally accepted best practices.
But I haven’t practiced engineering in decades. I used my license perhaps half a dozen times in the 1970s. My rubber stamp has sat idle ever since. More …
Around the Web: Greece Edition
- Tyler Cowen has been owning this debate.
- Unfortunately, Greek citizens have been too fed up with the rest of the world to listen.
- (Perhaps libertarians and their arguments were just late to the party.)
- This is still the best concise sociological analysis of Greece and the EU I’ve come across.
It’s worth noting here that the overwhelming majority of ‘No’ voters – the ones who just rejected the EU after their elected, far Left leader walked out of talks days before said talks were scheduled to end – don’t want to leave the EU. Confused? See the Cowen link.
Matthew and I had a dialogue on Greece awhile back here at NOL that might be of interest.
Fiscal Watch Dog, The Dutch Way
I still have not found a way to make a living out of international political theory that also satisfies my demands as consumer at numerous markets, not least the housing market. At this moment this means I make a living at the Dutch fiscal watchdog. I recently wrote a piece about in Contemporary Social Science, which can be seen here.
Below is the abstract, drop me a mail if you’re interested in the full text.
CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis: Dutch (economic) policy-making
As one of the oldest independent fiscal institutions in the world, the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) has a long history of providing evidence for policy-making. Uniquely, its activities include the analysis of election manifestos, the national budget and the coalition agreement, as a derivative from its provision of leading macroeconomic forecasts. This paper analyses the CPB’s role within the Dutch political system, its place in public administration and the different methods it employs to provide evidence for policy-makers. It then focuses on two different types of activities, the costing of election manifestos and ageing studies, using a multi-methods approach to illustrate how the CPB’s influence extends to setting policy agendas and policy targets, and to reveal critical factors for success and failure. Although the CPB model cannot easily be transposed to other countries, a number of general principles can be deduced from it for application elsewhere.
Notes On Liberty 