Who framed George Lakoff? This noted linguist’s foray into Democratic
politics has been, well, a little bit exciting... more»
Study:
Parents Encourage Tots to Watch TV
CBS News - 14 hours
ago
By LAURAN NEERGAARD AP Medical Writer.
(AP) Eight in 10 of the nation's youngest children _ babies up to age 6 _ watch
TV, play video games or use the computer for about two hours on a typical day. A
third live in homes where the TV is on most of the time. ...
Ottawa
Citizen - The meetings of a secretive global think-tank would bring 100 of
the world's most powerful and influential figures to Ottawa next month and make
an Ottawa hotel the host of deliberations on such weighty issues as the
direction of global oil markets and potential military action against Iran.
Reports circulating on the Internet say this year's Bilderberg Conference
will be held June 8-11 at the Brookstreet Hotel a rumour the hotel would not
confirm.
But, if a gathering in Ottawa is anything like past Bilderbergs, invitees
will be drawn from the pages of International Who's Who, with a emphasis on
political and corporate leadership and strong representation of the oil and
banking industries. Guest lists typically include names like Kissinger,
Rockefeller and Soros.
Economics and Its Ethical
Assumptions
by Roderick T. Long
[Posted on
Saturday
If economics is value-free in the sense that it doesn't presuppose any
particular values, as Mises and Rothbard both seem to agree about economics, you
might wonder how economics can serve as a basis for advice. Economists are often
called upon to give advice; how can they do that? Well, there are several
different possibilities.
And if all your values have to fit together, then it doesn't really make
sense to think that you can sort of separate one off and completely decide it
without paying attention to any of the rest of them. I think each part of your
value system has to have its content at least responsive to the other
parts.
And this is what the Greeks called "unity of virtue." Now people often say
that the unity of virtue just means that if you have one virtue, you have to
have them all; but I think the real core of the view is that the content of any
one virtue is partly determined by, or responsive to, the content of the other
virtues. Your account of what justice requires can't be completely independent
of your account of what courage requires, or your account of what generosity
requires, or your account of any other virtue.
Britain’s “Euston Manifesto”: Ex-liberals for imperialism and war
By Chris Marsden and Julie Hyland
24 May 2006
In truth, the Euston group has nothing but contempt for what they choose to
describe as the “socialist Left.” The manifesto is largely made up of
denunciations of unspecified left groups and individuals for supposedly
betraying the democratic ideals that the authors alone continue to uphold. They
complain that they are a “constituency [that] is under-represented...in much of
the media and the other forums of contemporary political life,” given that the
rest of the “left” has “lately shown themselves rather too flexible about these
values.”
“Leftists who make common cause with, or excuses for, anti-democratic forces
should be criticised in clear and forthright terms,” they state, portraying
opponents of the occupation of Iraq as de facto allies of Islamic
fundamentalists.
No such condemnation is made of the political right for supporting
anti-democratic forces. On this front, the Euston group is preoccupied with
finding only light amidst the darkness. “Conversely,” the manifesto continues,
“we pay attention to liberal and conservative voices and ideas if they
contribute to strengthening democratic norms and practices and to the battle for
human progress.”
There could not be a more damning exposure of the Euston group’s political
pretensions than Kristol’s endorsement. A co-founder of “Project for the New
American Century” and a long-time member of the American Enterprise Institute,
both notorious right-wing think tanks, Kristol advocated war against Iraq to
bring about regime change as early as 1998, pointing to Iraq’s possession of “a
significant portion of the world’s supply of oil.”
Kristol has no difficulty recognising, behind the Euston group’s “democratic”
window dressing, the movement of a layer of former liberals firmly into the camp
of imperialist reaction.
Russia on the couchRobert
Conquest
| |
 |
Geoffrey Hosking RULERS AND
VICTIMS The Russians in the Soviet Union 436pp. Belknap Press. $35. 0
674 02178 9 | |
in Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union, a uniquely rewarding
overview: not history in the formal sense, but a profound look at the whole of
the Russian phenomenon. A central theme is that Russia has generated two
"messianisms", and that the two proved incompatible, indeed bitterly opposed to
each other. Furthermore, each of them overlapped only partially with the
community spirit of the Russian people. Hosking’s point about the absence from
both his messianisms of even a residual feeling for community, let alone for a
civic or plural order, is crucial. In the twentieth century, the conflict
between these three powerful forces burst into the open and reached its climax.
That is why Russian twentieth-century history has been so turbulent. The
problems – to this day – are not primarily economic or even political. Nor can
they be fully or fruitfully understood by uninclusive analytics.
Hosking expertly examines and illustrates all aspects, past and present, of
Russia’s and Russians’ behaviour, thought and feelings. What emerges is the big
picture achieved through smaller brushstrokes, as he considers and often
reconciles the contradictory views of the Russian experience. Much of the story
over the whole epoch is given by Russia’s writers, on whom (among other good
witnesses) a great variety of direct support for the narrative devolves. This is
shown here as true of past centuries, as also of the Stalinist, and Suslovist,
attempted suppressions of such memory or thought, as with the post-war campaign
against Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova. And it is good to see here, for
example, the record of Joseph Brodsky’s day in court to be sentenced as a
"drone" for being an unregistered poet.
It is sometimes said that the German consciousness never fully recovered from
the Thirty Years War. Modern Russia had a comparable experience. One – again
hardly "analysable" – result is that, as Richard Pipes once put it (and as is
still largely true), the country is "utterly exhausted".
The Russian State, as it emerged after the defeat of the Mongols, had an
intensely Christian and national character, but was firmly set in the political
ways it had learnt from the khans. Thereafter, the Great Russians lived in an
almost permanent state of mobilization, as the frontier against the continual
menace from the steppe. As Pavel Miliukov wrote, "Compelling national need
resulted in the creation of an omnipotent State on the most meagre material
foundation; this very meagreness constrained it to exert all the energies of its
population – and in order to have full control over these energies it had to be
omnipotent". There is nothing, or nothing much, "ethnic" in such descriptions of
the Russian past.
Five generations have seen an extraordinary amount of sheer bad luck, beginning
with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, which enabled reactionaries to
procure the abandonment of the Loris Melnikov reforms tending towards a civic
order: the first of so many such failures. Geoffrey Hosking is not exactly
optimistic: but he still gives us some hope of a better future, with the
Russians perhaps evolving into a "community". At least, as he concludes, "they
are now building a nation state few of them wished for. They have no choice,
though". That would be a start.
President Bush was right to withdraw the United States from the cumbersome
Kyoto greenhouse treaty, which even most signatories are ignoring. But Mr. Bush
should speak to history by proposing a binding greenhouse-credit trading system
within the United States. Waiting for science no longer justifies delay, as
results are now in.
Gregg Easterbrook, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the
author of "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel
Worse."
| China’s Silver Bullet |
|
By Thomas Bender |
Tuesday, May 23, 2006 |
In the 14th century, the Empire of Mali was at its height, recognized for its
wealth and power throughout the Mediterranean world.
Across the Atlantic, the Aztec Empire consolidated its power, ruling over a
vast region of client states with a capital, Tenochtitlán, that in 1325 had
perhaps a quarter-million residents. It was the world’s largest city when
Cortes arrived early in the 16th century.
While Europe brought its new energy to the ocean, the house of Osman
consolidated its massive Ottoman land empire — and the Muscovy Empire began
its expansion to the east, reaching the Pacific in 1639.
Japan had supplied China with silver, but China — with about a quarter of the
world’s population and perhaps 40% of its economy — had an enormous demand
for it. The demand was eventually supplied by the silver mines of America, which
between 1500 and 1800 produced roughly 85% of the world’s silver. Between 1527
and 1821, as much as half of the output went to China
Without silver from the Spanish colonies in South America and the Ming
dynasty’s policy that gave it trade value in exchange for the sophisticated
manufactured goods from China (and, to a lesser extent, India), it is unlikely
that Europeans could have become such successful global traders.
Excerpted from "A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History"
by Thomas Bender, published by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, LLC. Copyright (c) 2006 by Thomas Bender. All rights reserved.
Not
So Fast
From our June issue: In The Good
Fight, Peter Beinart wants us to follow him into the future. But there are
questions about the past yet to be settled.
By Michael
Tomasky
Web Exclusive: 05.23.06
Print
Friendly | Email
Article
The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the
War on Terror and Make America Great Again
by Peter Beinart
(HarperCollins, 304 pages, $25.95)
Perhaps so. But to go back and read through Beinart’s “TRB” columns, unsigned
TNR editorials, and other articles the magazine published in 2002 and
2003 is to be reminded afresh that, while TNR disagrees with the right
most of the time, its real enemy is the left. So, on Iraq, TNR was
intellectually pro-war, but emotionally anti–anti-war. The paroxysmal contempt
for the war’s opponents combined with the docile credulousness toward Bush
administration pro-war assertions (especially about Saddam Hussein’s alleged
nuclear capability) render “perfervid” an entirely fair modifier.
Beinart’s central thesis -- as it were, the answer to the question raised in
his subtitle -- is that today’s liberals can learn from the great era of Cold
War liberalism the specific lesson that liberalism made America great precisely
because it understood America’s potential to do harm. The narrative of that
liberalism, Beinart writes:
begins not with America’s need to believe in itself, but with
America’s need to make itself worthy of belief. Around the world, America does
that by accepting international constraints on its power. For conservatives --
from John Foster Dulles to George W. Bush -- American exceptionalism means that
we do not need such constraints. America’s heart is pure. But in the liberal
vision, it is precisely our recognition that we are not angels that makes us
exceptional. Because we recognize that we can be corrupted by unlimited power,
we accept the restraints that empires refuse.
From that thesis, Beinart shows -- in telling the story of the creation of
Americans for Democratic Action, of the Marshall Plan, of Kennedy’s vision that
winning the Cold War abroad required getting closer to living up to our
professed ideals at home -- how liberalism up through Vietnam adhered (enough of
the time, anyway) to this Niebuhrian doctrine of self-restraint, and how fealty
to that principle, combined with a clear-eyed recognition of the nature of the
external threat, succeeded both in maintaining liberalism’s political
pre-eminence and in keeping the totalitarian enemy at bay.
— A majority of the minority will be in their hearts for higher taxes,
universal health care, a heightened emphasis on civiil liberties, and a dramatic
and swift reduction of troops from Iraq. They know it, the RNC, NRCC, NRSC, and
The Note all know it — the Democrats just have to hope that the American people
don't find out until February. |
|
