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Abenomics takes on Japan’s declining birth rate, 2015, colorized

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I'm crying this is so stupid

Just solid math here

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if you’ve never been to the united states i hope this helps you understand how absolutely fucking brainwashed the majority of this country is

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Ever since the Republic of Macedonia declared its independence in 1991, Greece has been fighting the country over its name. Today the 27-year impasse ended as two nations finally came to a resolution: The former Yugoslav republic is getting a new name, the Republic of North Macedonia.

“There is no way back,” Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev said in a press conference, Reuters reports, after he spoke with his Greek counterpart Alexis Tsipras. “Our bid in the compromise is a defined and precise name, the name that is honorable and geographically precise — Republic of Northern Macedonia.”

27 years for this

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No but seriously, Eco identifies Fascism by 14 different positions, which are:

1. The Cult of Tradition 2. The Rejection of Modernism and 1789 (and, by extension, 1776) 3. Action for Action’s Sake, and a disdain and hatred of education and intellectuals 4. A disdain of Analytic Criticism 5. Exacerbation of Natural Fear of Difference 6. Derivation from Social or Individual Frustration 7. Obsession with Conspiracy and Plot 8. Obsession with Humiliation from Wealth of the “Enemy” 9. Life as Permanent Warfare 10. Popular Elitism and disdain for both traditional elitism and pure populism 11. Everybody is Educated to be a Hero 12. Machismo 13. Selective Populism; that is, populism where an individual is without rights, but the Mass holds all rights 14. Limitation of Language in order to limit the forms of thought that can happen

tl;dr a lot of people on here are fascists by Eco’s definition (which is the finest definition available), especially if they don’t realize it

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It turns out the lowest rated movie on imdb at the moment is an AKP propaganda film 

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Mainstream media features on the anniversary of May 68 are doing my head in, they all go like this: some hippy students had a listen to Bob Dylan and suddenly realised that the times were indeed a-changing, they threw some rocks at the police and did some street theatre before getting their ass kicked by the police and calling it a day. Oh and 10 million workers went on strike

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Say it with me now: moderate autocratic monarchies

Theorists and policymakers long thought that dictators like Hafez al-Assad in Syria or Saddam Hussein in Iraq were the cause of regional instability. But since the Arab Spring, there appears to be a growing gap between moderate, Western-oriented autocrats like Sissi, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the majority of their citizenry that pulls in the opposite direction. 

note the author’s little bio:

Yoav Fromer teaches American history and politics at Tel Aviv University and Yeshiva University. He is currently at work on a book about Daniel Patrick Moynihan and American liberalism. 

moynihan is one of the the original american neoconservatives, so i’m guessing he shares this perspective. it’s nice to see them coming out and just straight up admitting that democracy is the problem here after decades of pretending its democracy that the west wants to see in the middle east. democracy has always been the biggest problem for america and israel, which is why they abrogated the 2006 palestinian elections that were such a centerpiece of bush’s foreign policy that brought hamas to power. can’t have voters voting the wrong way, after all.

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“PBS News Hour featured a quiz by Charles Murray in March that asked “Do You Live in a Bubble?” The questions assumed that if you didn’t know people who drank cheap beer and drove pick-up trucks and worked in factories you lived in an elitist bubble. Among the questions: “Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American community with a population under 50,000 that is not part of a metropolitan area and is not where you went to college? Have you ever walked on a factory floor? Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?” The quiz is essentially about whether you are in touch with working-class small-town white Christian America, as though everyone who’s not Joe the Plumber is Maurice the Elitist. We should know them, the logic goes; they do not need to know us. Less than 20 percent of Americans are white evangelicals, only slightly more than are Latino. Most Americans are urban. The quiz delivers, yet again, the message that the 80 percent of us who live in urban areas are not America, treats non-Protestant (including the quarter of this country that is Catholic) and non-white people as not America, treats many kinds of underpaid working people (salespeople, service workers, farmworkers) who are not male industrial workers as not America. More Americans work in museums than work in coal, but coalminers are treated as sacred beings owed huge subsidies and the sacrifice of the climate, and museum workers—well, no one is talking about their jobs as a totem of our national identity. PBS added a little note at the end of the bubble quiz, “The introduction has been edited to clarify Charles Murray’s expertise, which focuses on white American culture.” They don’t mention that he’s the author of the notorious Bell Curve or explain why someone widely considered racist was welcomed onto a publicly funded program. Perhaps the actual problem is that white Christian suburban, small-town, and rural America includes too many people who want to live in a bubble and think they’re entitled to, and that all of us who are not like them are menaces and intrusions who needs to be cleared out of the way.”

— Whose Story (and Country) Is This? On the Myth of a “Real” America a lithub article by Rebecca Solnit (via rubyvroom)

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HOLY SHIT

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Countries Jeff Bezos is richer than.

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The Independent, 1993

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“Imagine a world without hate”. #Love it!

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Today I learned that Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in Morocco, via the ancient city of Abyla or Ad Septem Fratres form which it is built upon, is actually home to what’s known as the only surviving Roman population of early Christian faith, or rather the only population from the Maghreb or Roman Africa where Roman heritage has continued, uninterrupted, onto present day.

Prior to muslim conquest, much of Roman north Africa had a population of latins and berbers. A pocket of Christian berbers lived in the outskirts of the city up until the time Septem (or Septa, as the Arabic transliteration went) was conquered by the Portuguese, and promptly renamed Ceuta in the 15th century.

The local Berbers have over time adopted the Spanish language but otherwise have been continuously christian for almost two millenia, giving them this distinction over that of the rest of North Africa.

This alters my perceptions of Spanish right to claim of Ceuta over that of Morocco.

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