BRITONS interested in politics (about a third of them, apparently) face a raucous punditocracy eager to assure them that their countrymen are becoming more liberal or more conservative, more cynical or more idealistic, usually according to the personal political views of the sage in question. Those looking for something more authoritative might be interested in the annual Social Attitudes Survey, which distils the responses of over 80,000 people to a variety of questions on politics, economics and society.
The most recent, based on interviews in 2008, was published on January 26th. It describes an increasingly jaded, increasingly liberal country, still attached to big government but dubious of official attempts to help the poor.
New Posts
Re-Examining The Cold War Arms Race
Journalist David E. Hoffman’s new book The Dead Hand revisits the high stakes maneuvering that took place during the Cold War arms race and details the inner-workings of the Soviet nuclear program.
Hoffman had access to secret Kremlin documents while researching his book, which chronicles the Soviets’ internal deliberations, offers new insight into the roles of Mikhail Gorbachev and President Reagan, and describes the urgent search for nuclear and biological hazards left behind after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Hoffman, a Washington Post contributing editor, spent six years as the paper’s Moscow bureau chief. He is also the author of The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia.
Listen to his interview with Terry Gross (40 minutes)
Johnny Hodgman on the Depression
Johnny Hodgman is, well, hard to describe. He is overzealously hilarious in an understated way. He is a self-proclaimed genius who knows everything about anything. All tongue-in-cheek.
Anyhoo, here is his satire on the depression life and the films about it.
American Experience: The Depression
Here is a 60 minute documentary from our friends at PBS. It is part of the highly regarded American Experience Series. There are 6, 10 minute sections.
Poisoning the Alcohol Supply
Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.” Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that’s due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.
Read how the U.S. government poisoned untold thousands of its citizens in its “Noble Experiment”
How America Can Rise Again
Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.
Atoms of Self-Interest
Type a one-page essay in support of (yes, I am only seeking pro-arguments so get into character if need be) the following prompt and post it in the comments section below. Feel free to perform some research–draw on Ayn Rand, Nietzsche, William F. Buckley, Herbert Spencer, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, et. al. Of course, you may quote such philosophers so long as you do so sparingly.
“Man owes nothing to society and man should ask nothing from society.”
31st anniversary of the Iranian revolution
Jason Rezaian offering a dispatch from Tehran for Slate
Dispatches from Russia
Slate correspondent Masha Green offers her reflections from traveling through the parts of Russia that we conveniently overlook.
The Breakup of China and Our Interest in It
Conclusion from The Atlantic in 1899:
“Is it for the benefit of the United States to deal with China as a vast unit under her native flag, or as fragments under many flags? That is what we have to decide…It is to be hoped that our government is silently exercising the utmost vigilance in behalf of our commercial privileges on the continent of Asia. Failure to do so might not be politically disastrous to the present administration, but posterity will not forgive nor history condone faults of omission or indifference after such warning as have already been given. Surely, no American administration would seriously contemplate the establishment of a dependency or protectorate on the mainland of China, while our interests there may be safeguarded by international control and reciprocity; but it is difficult to see how these securities can be obtained without more definite engagements on the part of our State Department than our uninformed public opinion now demands. Nevertheless, the signs of a healthy and growing interest are numerous.”
The more things change…
A Nation of Racist Dwarfs: Kim Jong-il's regime is even weirder and more despicable than you thought
Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.
Explaining The American Filibuster
If high-school government class taught us anything, it’s that getting bills passed through Congress is a game of numbers: The bill with the most votes wins.
Turns out it’s not that simple. These days, the polarized state of American politics means that major bills need at least 60 votes to avoid an inevitable filibuster by the opposition.
Political scientist Gregory Koger’s new book, Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate, addresses the institutionalization of the filibuster — and describes congressional loopholes by way of which fast thinking and hard work can beat the numbers. Koger teaches American politics at the University of Miami. He joins host Terry Gross for a conversation about what has happened to simple majority rule.
Listen to Koger discuss the filibuster in an interview with Terry Gross
Top 100 Most Influential Americans
Who are the most influential figures in American history? The Atlantic recently asked ten eminent historians. The result was The Atlantic’s Top 100—and some insight into the nature of influence and the contingency of history. Was Walt Disney really more influential than Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Benjamin Spock than Richard Nixon? Elvis Presley than Lewis and Clark? John D. Rockefeller than Bill Gates? Babe Ruth than Frank Lloyd Wright?
Nietzsche's Ubermensch Applied
I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something to be surpassed. What have you done to surpass mankind? –Nietzsche
Analyze the following sources and come to our next session with written responses to the questions below.
Required Sources:
- The Wiki entry on the ubermensch just to get started
- A short passage from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathrusta, Towards the Ubermensch
- A passage from Blood Meridian, pages 248-249 or a professional reading of this passage (for you aural learners)
Optional Sources:
- A Wiki entry which summarizes Blood Meridian
- A link from the University of Virginia which describes the real Glanton Gang
- A video discussion of Blood Meridian from an undergraduate class at Yale (The American Novel Since 1945 with Professor Hungerford)
- Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathrusta (entire book online for free)
Response Questions:
1. Define and describe the concept of the ubermensch.
2. Apply the definition and description from #1 to characters throughout history, both real and imagined. Think: Omar from The Wire, Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, Tyler Durden in Fight Club, Dexter, etc.
3. Assess the functions and dysfunctions of the pragmatic applications of the ubermensch philosophy.
4. How does Judge Holden personify the Nietzsche’s ubermensch?
Progressive Party Platforms
Here is the Party Platform of 1912 and here is the Party Platform of 1924
Lecture: The Progressive Era
Here are my class lecture notes which detail the domestic arena of the Progressive Era.
Google Exits China
A note from Google:
Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.
Farhad Manjoo from Slate weighs in
On the eve of Hillary Clinton’s speech in response to Google’s decision, Atlantic correspondent and New America board member James Fallows moderated a discussion involving Open Society Institute fellow Rebecca MacKinnon, Foreign Policy contributing editor Evgeny Morozov, Columbia Law School professor and Slate contributor Tim Wu, and Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation, Alec Ross. Watch this lively panel debate.
Nigerian Oil Protests at Peace, Still Much Work to be Done
As militants lay down their arms in the Niger Delta, the battle is on to tackle Nigeria’s other massive ills…
Over the past three months the militants have been giving up both themselves and their guns in unprecedented numbers. The federal government has promised them an unconditional pardon for past crimes, a small stipend to live on and the promise of retraining in order to “reintegrate” into society.
Local Politics and Nuclear Power in the UK
BRITAIN, and especially England, is occasionally compared to North Korea (only half-jokingly) as one of the most heavily centralised states in the world. Whitehall bureaucrats micromanage schools and hospitals; local government is dependent on the Treasury for most of its funding. But one bastion of local power has for years stood apart from the trend towards central control: planning, the process by which building projects are granted or denied permission to proceed. Objections from stubborn locals can derail or delay everything from small wind farms and shopping centres to huge projects of national importance. The most notorious example is probably Heathrow airport’s fifth terminal, which languished in the planning system for year upon year before eventually being approved in 2001.
On November 9th all that seemed set to change, as Ed Miliband, the energy and climate-change secretary, delivered the first of the government’s “National Policy Statements” on infrastructure. These will inform the work of the Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC), an independent body set up last month. Led by Sir Michael Pitt, a veteran planner and local-authority boss, it will take over responsibility for planning nationally important projects from March 2010. Decisions that used to take years will, in theory, take just months or even weeks, with public involvement drastically curtailed.
Salmond, SNP and Bluffing
TO JUDGE from the awe with which he is regarded by his rivals, Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) is a politician of wizard-like cunning. Look, they say, at the scandal over the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Saltires were waved in Tripoli and brickbats hurled from Washington; yet, even as he insisted the decision was Scotland’s alone, Mr Salmond contrived to deflect much of the blame onto Gordon Brown. Their deep fear is that Mr Salmond will conjure Scotland into independence.
This is a rick editorial that dances across many of our APCG themes.