#Between-country prosperity divide

[srbachchan]

DAY 6101

Jalsa, Mumbai Nov , 1, 2024/Nov 2 , Fri/Sat 12:08 am

🪔 ,

And the wishes to the Ef ..

November 02 .. birthday wishes to Ef Erlika from Indonesia 🇮🇩 .. Ef Abhijit Jagtab from Pune .. and .. Ef Dipagala Gala .. 🙏🏻❤️🚩

November 01 .. birthday wishes to Ef Vishan Lal 🪈 from Gurugram .. Ef Honey Aishu from Bangkok - Thailand 🇹🇭 .. Ef Nouranne Achraf from Egypt / France 🇪🇬🇫🇷 .. Ef Pankaj Shukla from Indore .. Ef Shubhra Rattan .. and Ef Somraj Mane from Kolhapur .. 🙏🏻❤️🚩

..

may this new year in your lives bring greater joy and prosperity ❤️🌹

Govardhan Pooja ... नमस्कार 🙏

and the festivities continue .. as do all the rituals .. and among all this Australia declares the month of October as a heritage month of Hindu festivities .. grace and divine blessings ..

But the intimacy of soft celebrations and the adherence to the control of many environmental obligations is revered .. as another year of the year of Lights ends , to another day of light ..

The intrigue of religious festivities .. their time and date and occasion still brings a wonder to many .. indeed to a great many .. and the readings of our Ef Sudhir and his dedicated research on the subject does evoke curiosity .. and awareness ...

The Calendar

There are two lunar calendars in the Jyotish Shastra… One is Purnaant and the other is Amaant…

There's a gap of 15 days between the two, although the order of the months are the same…

For instance, Deepavali's Lakshmi puja is on Purnaant Kartik Amavasya… while the same day is Amaant Ashwin Amavasya in some states…

So, the festival has a different reason in each region, and one common reason at the national level…

Like, the South, where the Lakshmi puja night of diwali is to recall the victory of Krishna over Narakaasur… In the North, it's for the return of Shri Ram to Ayodhya…

The concept of a civilisation made of many cultures dates back to the Treta Yug…

Diwali is celebrated for different days in different places… One day, three days, five days and eleven days… depending on the local history…

Yes… the different calendars, different cultures, but the same festivals, and the same civilisation…

You know, what… I think it's always an advantage when we do something that has no precedence… when there is nothing to refer…

This organisation of a nation is first envisaged in the chronicles of the satyug… each kingdom was called a country… group of countries was a region… the collective of regions was called a nation…

In Hindi - देश, प्रदेश तथा राष्ट्र…

What calendar do I follow?

I follow Rishi Varāhamihira's Brihat Samhita… In that, there is no need of dividing time into months and years…

The movements of cosmic objects don't need a calendar to have months and years… Only days are enough… Just count the days from a no-moon or a new-moon… the patterns are measurable and predictable…

Like,

The diwali always happens on the same no-moon night… regardless of which month in which state…

Thus, all the differences are dissolved in the universal medium… 🙂

About the light…

Darkness is not displaced by light… darkness is eliminated by light…

तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय।

Easiest way to do it is: Use one lamp to light the next… A series of lamps… Hence, Deepavali… Deep + Aavali - strings of light…

एक ब्रह्म है… एक सत्य है… एक ही है परमात्मा… प्राणों से प्राण मिलाते चलो.

my obsessed gratitude ..

my love and regard ...

Amitabh Bachchan

[hiswordsarekisses]

To the people with hate in their heart: I’m not a political person, but I need to say something. . . There are so many people driven by hatred in this country because of the media’s constant baiting against anything at ALL that can divide people. Race, Trump, all of it. It’s absolutely sickening.

An innocent person died today in the crossfire.

And someone in my feed recently posted that Trump is for abortion now - apparently it was yet another person who has been watching mainstream media and being fed twisted words and lies. What he ACTUALLY SAID was that he wants the authority about killing babies to go to each individual state instead of a nationwide laws like you would find in a DICTATORSHIP like we have NOW!!!!! (It is absolutely ironically that the media likes to call Trump a dictator - the one who fights for the power to go back k to the people. It is absolutely astonishing .

Why do you think this man has been under so much attack when all he wants to do is put the power back k into the hands of the people?

The evil people in government (both republican and democrat and everything in between) is terrified of losing their control and MONEY!! That’s why!!!

Right now we are starving because they want us under their thumb. They want socialism like third world countries.

We had 4 years of good times and groceries and homes, etc - now no one can afford anything.

WAKE UP PEOPLE.

WE DO NOT DESERVE IT BUT GOD THIS MAN BUT HE PROTECTED THIS MAN TODAY!!!!

He left a GOOD AND PROSPEROUS LIFE TO HELP US.

Btw, I don’t know the last time maybe that you read Isaiah 45 - but check it out sometime.

His Immediate response in this horrific situation - where he could have easily died - is the kind of guy I want on my side. He did not cower or even stumble, he thought quick and he showed strength and composure and integrity. This is a picture of strength. This is a picture of a leader.

[whencyclopedia]

The Invasion of Poland in 1939

The leader of Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) ordered the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. Hitler's refusal to withdraw brought a declaration of war from Britain and France on 3 September, and so began the Second World War (1939-45). The USSR invaded eastern Poland on 17 September, and the country was divided and occupied by two totalitarian regimes.

Warsaw after the German Invasion, 1939

Imperial War Museums (CC BY-NC-SA)

Hitler's Aggressive Foreign Policy

To understand why Poland became the country Britain and France decided to go to war over, it is necessary to trace the path of Germany's expansion from 1935. Adolf Hitler gained power in 1933, and two years later, he began a series of land grabs, each time using a combination of military manoeuvres, diplomacy, and bluff to convince world leaders that each new step into neighbouring territory would be his last. Hitler had promised the German people he would regain the territories lost after the First World War (1914-18) in the humiliating Treaty of Versailles (1919). Hitler said Germany needed Lebensraum ('living space') for its people, that is, new lands where they could prosper.

In March 1935, Hitler took back the coal-rich Saar region on Germany's western border, an area that had been governed by the League of Nations (the forerunner of today's United Nations) since the end of WWI. In March 1935, voters in the Saar decided overwhelmingly to rejoin Germany. Hitler, encouraged by the lack of an effective international response to Japan's invasion of Chinese Manchuria in 1931 and Italy's invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935, next occupied the Rhineland, an area between Germany and France which the Versailles Treaty had stipulated must remain demilitarised. German troops entered the Rhineland in March 1936. Hitler then formally repudiated the Treaty of Versailles and embarked on a programme of rearmament. In 1936, he made an alliance with Italy, the Rome-Berlin Axis. In March 1938, Hitler occupied Austria, the country of his birth. The Anschluss ('fusion') with Austria was later endorsed by a plebiscite.

Next, Hitler wanted the Sudetenland, a neighbouring region of Czechoslovakia that had a German-speaking majority. Even though France and the USSR had signed a treaty in 1935 promising to protect Czechoslovakia from outside aggression, neither was willing to go to war when it came to the crunch. The majority of the population of Britain, like in France, was against the idea of a war and even against the policy of rearmament. At the Munich Conference of September 1938, Britain, France, Italy, and Germany met. In the Munich Agreement, the four powers agreed the Sudetenland would be handed over to Germany. The governments of Czechoslovakia and the USSR had no say in the matter. Hitler had promised to respect what remained of Czechoslovakia, but this he did not do, instead, he promoted the separation of Slovakia and invaded Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. In the same month, Germany seized Memelland in Lithuania. In April, the fascist dictator in Italy, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), occupied Albania. It was now clear to even the most naive of diplomats that nothing Hitler or Mussolini signed could ever be trusted.

Europe on the Eve of WWII, 1939

Simeon Netchev (CC BY-NC-ND)

Continue reading...

[communist-manifesto-daily]

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - Part 19

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Already in his Geneva letters, Saint-Simon lays down the proposition that “all men ought to work”. In the same work he recognizes also that the Reign of Terror was the reign of the non-possessing masses.

“See,” says he to them, “what happened in France at the time when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine.” [Lettres d’un habitant de Genève à ses contemporains, Saint-Simon, 1803]

But to recognize the French Revolution as a class war, and not simply one between nobility and bourgeoisie, but between nobility, bourgeoisie, and the non-possessors, was, in the year 1802, a most pregnant discovery. In 1816, he declares that politics is the science of production, and foretells the complete absorption of politics by economics. The knowledge that economic conditions are the basis of political institutions appears here only in embryo. Yet what is here already very plainly expressed is the idea of the future conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things and a direction of processes of production – that is to say, the “abolition of the state”, about which recently there has been so much noise.

Saint-Simon shows the same superiority over his contemporaries, when in 1814, immediately after the entry of the allies into Paris, and again in 1815, during the Hundred Days’ War, he proclaims the alliance of France and England, and then of both of these countries, with Germany, as the only guarantee for the prosperous development and peace of Europe. To preach to the French in 1815 an alliance with the victors of Waterloo required as much courage as historical foresight.

If in Saint-Simon we find a comprehensive breadth of view, by virtue of which almost all the ideas of later Socialists that are not strictly economic are found in him in embryo, we find in Fourier a criticism of the existing conditions of society, genuinely French and witty, but not upon that account any the less thorough. Fourier takes the bourgeoisie, their inspired prophets before the Revolution, and their interested eulogists after it, at their own word. He lays bare remorselessly the material and moral misery of the bourgeois world.

He confronts it with the earlier philosophers’ dazzling promises of a society in which reason alone should reign, of a civilization in which happiness should be universal, of an illimitable human perfectibility, and with the rose-colored phraseology of the bourgeois ideologists of his time. He points out how everywhere the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most high-sounding phrases, and he overwhelms this hopeless fiasco of phrases with his mordant sarcasm.

Fourier is not only a critic, his imperturbably serene nature makes him a satirist, and assuredly one of the greatest satirists of all time. He depicts, with equal power and charm, the swindling speculations that blossomed out upon the downfall of the Revolution, and the shopkeeping spirit prevalent in, and characteristic of, French commerce at that time. Still more masterly is his criticism of the bourgeois form of the relations between sexes, and the position of woman in bourgeois society. He was the first to declare that in any given society the degree of woman’s emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.

But Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the history of society. He divides its whole course, thus far, into four stages of evolution – savagery, barbarism, the patriarchate, civilization. This last is identical with the so-called civil, or bourgeois, society of today – i.e., with the social order that came in with the 16th century. He proves “that the civilized stage raises every vice practiced by barbarism in a simple fashion into a form of existence, complex, ambiguous, equivocal, hypocritical” – that civilization moves “in a vicious circle”, in contradictions which it constantly reproduces without being able to solve them; hence it constantly arrives at the very opposite to that which it wants to attain, or pretends to want to attain, so that, e.g., “under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself”. [Théorie de l’unite universelle, Fourier, 1843 and Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire, ou invention du procédé d'industrie attrayante et enaturelle distribuée en séries passionnées, Fourier, 1845]

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[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 20, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 21, 2024

At Chicago’s United Center today, the delegates at the Democratic National Convention reaffirmed last week’s online nomination of Kamala Harris for president. The ceremonial roll-call vote featured all the usual good natured boasting from the delegates about their own state’s virtues, a process that reinforces the incredible diversity and history of both this land and its people. The managers reserved the final slots for Minnesota and California—the home states of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and presidential candidate Kamala Harris, respectively—to put the ticket over the top. 

When the votes had been counted, Harris joined the crowd virtually from a rally she and Walz were holding at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Last month the Republicans held their own national convention in that venue, and for Harris to accept her nomination in the same place was an acknowledgement of how important Wisconsin will be in this election. But it also meant that Trump, who is obsessed with crowd sizes, would have to see not one but two packed sports arenas of supporters cheer wildly for her nomination. 

He also had to contend with former loyalists and supporters joining the Democratic convention. His former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, told the Democratic convention tonight that when the cameras are off, “Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers.” Grisham endorsed Harris, saying: “I love my country more than my party. Kamala Harris tells the truth. She respects the American people and she has my vote.”

Trump spoke glumly to a small crowd today at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in Howell, Michigan. 

It was almost exactly twenty years ago, on July 27, 2004, that 43-year-old Illinois state senator Barack Obama, who was, at the time, running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, gave the keynote address to that year’s Democratic National Convention. It was the speech that began his rise to the presidency.

Like the Democrats who spoke last night, Obama talked in 2004 of his childhood and recalled how his parents had “faith in the possibilities of this nation.” And like Biden last night, Obama said that “in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.” The nation’s promise, he said, came from the human equality promised in the Declaration of Independence.

“That is the true genius of America,” Obama said, “a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles.” He called for an America “where hard work is rewarded.” “[I]t's not enough for just some of us to prosper,” he said, “[f]or alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga.”

He described that ingredient as “[a]belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief—I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper—that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. ‘E pluribus unum.’ Out of many, one.”

Obama emphasized Americans’ shared values and pushed back against “those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.” He reached back into history to prove that “the bedrock of this nation” is “the belief that there are better days ahead.” He called that belief “[t]he audacity of hope.”

Almost exactly twenty years after his 2004 speech, the same man, now a former president who served for eight years, spoke at tonight’s Democratic National Convention. But the past two decades have challenged his vision.

When voters put Obama into the White House in 2008, Republicans set out to make sure they couldn’t govern. Mitch McConnell (R–KY) became Senate minority leader in 2007 and, using the filibuster, stopped most Democratic measures by requiring 60 votes to move anything to a vote. 

In 2010 the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, declaring that corporations and other outside groups could spend as much money as they wanted on elections. Citizens United increased Republican seats in legislative bodies, and in the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans packed state legislatures with their own candidates in time to be in charge of redistricting their states after the 2010 census.  Republicans controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and after the election, they used precise computer models to win previously Democratic House seats.

In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. Yet Republicans came away with a thirty-three-seat majority in the House of Representatives. And then, with the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, making it harder to protect Democratic voters.

As the Republicans skewed the mechanics of government to favor themselves, their candidates no longer had to worry they would lose general elections but did have to worry about losing primaries to more extreme challengers. So they swung farther and farther to the right, demonizing the Democrats until finally those who remain Republicans have given up on democracy altogether. 

Tonight’s speech echoed that of 2004 by saying that America’s “central story” is that “we are all created equal,” and describing Harris and Walz as hardworking people who would use the government to create a fair system. He sounded more concerned today than in 2004 about political divisions, and reminded the crowd: “The vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided,” he said. “We want something better. We want to be better. And the joy and the excitement that we’re seeing around this campaign tells us we’re not alone,” he said. 

And then, in his praise for his grandmother, “a little old white lady born in a tiny town called Peru, Kansas,” and his mother-in-law, Marion Robinson, a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago, he brought a new emphasis on ordinary Americans, especially women, who work hard, sacrifice for their children, and value honesty, integrity, kindness, helping others, and hard work. 

They wanted their children to “do things and go places that they would’ve never imagined for themselves.” “Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or somewhere in between,” he said, “we have all had people like that in our lives:... good hardworking people who weren’t famous or powerful but who managed in countless ways to leave this country just a little bit better than they found it.” 

If President Obama emphasized tonight that the nation depends on the good will of ordinary people, it was his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, who spoke with the voice of those people and made it clear that only the American people can preserve democracy.  

In a truly extraordinary speech, perfectly delivered, Mrs. Obama described her mother as someone who lived out the idea of hope for a better future, working for children and the community. “She was glad to do the thankless, unglamorous work that for generations has strengthened the fabric of this nation,” Mrs. Obama said, “the belief that if you do unto others, if you love thy neighbor, if you work and scrape and sacrifice, it will pay off. If not for you, then maybe for your children or your grandchildren.”

Unlike her husband, though, Mrs. Obama called out Trump and his allies, who are trying to destroy that worldview. “No one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American,” she said. “No one.” “[M]ost of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,” she said. “We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a business…or choke in a crisis, we don't get a second, third, or fourth chance. If things don't go our way, we don't have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead…we don't get to change the rules so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. No, we put our heads down. We get to work. In America, we do something."

And then Mrs. Obama took up the mantle of her mother, warning that demonizing others and taking away their rights, “only makes us small.” It “demeans and cheapens our politics. It only serves to further discourage good, big-hearted people from wanting to get involved at all. America, our parents taught us better than that.” 

It is “up to us to be the solution that we seek.” she said. She urged people to “be the antidote to the darkness and division.” “[W]hether you’re Democrat, Republican, Independent, or none of the above,” she said, “this is our time to stand up for what we know. In our hearts is right. Not just for our basic freedoms, but for decency and humanity, for basic respect. Dignity and empathy. For the values at the very foundation of this democracy.”

“Don’t just sit around and complain. Do something.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[cantorpike]

Dear Friend,

When I was a teenager, I told my dad I wanted to be an actor. In response, he gave me the only piece of advice he ever offered me—“Learn to play the accordion.” And he was serious. He said, “You can always make a living with an accordion.”

Because I ignored his advice, I never found out if he was right. Instead, I’ve lived 80 creative years pursuing acting and photography, and working as a director and poet.

If I had listened to my father, and hadn’t done any of those things, chances are you wouldn’t have recognized my name and you wouldn’t be reading this. Now that you are, I’d like to ask you to consider what I have to say. I reach out to you as someone who is troubled to see the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continue apparently without an end in sight.

In fact, there is an end in sight. It’s known as the two-state solution—a secure, democratic Israel as the Jewish State alongside an independent Palestinian state. Even Israel’s nationalist Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, has come to see this as the shape of the future. The problem is how to reach that end point. It’s something we should be concerned about—not only as world citizens, but as Americans.

You might recall the episode in the original Star Trek series called, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” Two men, half black, half white, are the last survivors of their peoples who have been at war with each other for thousands of years, yet the Enterprise crew could find no differences separating these two raging men.

But the antagonists were keenly aware of their differences—one man was white on the right side, the other was black on the right side. And they were prepared to battle to the death to defend the memory of their people who died from the atrocities committed by the other.

The story was a myth, of course, and by invoking it I don’t mean to belittle the very real issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians. What I do mean to suggest is that the time for recriminations is over. Assigning blame over all other priorities is self-defeating. Myth can be a snare. The two sides need our help to evade the snare and search for a way to compromise.

This is the message that Americans for Peace Now seeks to spread. I’m a strong supporter of APN and the work it does. It is a leading voice for Americans who support Israel and know that a negotiated peace will ensure Israel’s security, prosperity, and continued viability as a Jewish and democratic state.

The Middle East is only getting more tumultuous. The upheavals throughout the region show that what happens in the Middle East can’t help but affect us in the United States. This year, we’ve seen oil prices rise sharply and America become involved militarily in Libya. The cost to American lives and our economy continues to rise at a time when unemployment and deficits are sapping our country’s strength.

“If we can solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then that will make it easier for Arab states and the Gulf states to support us when it comes to issues like Iraq and Afghanistan. It will also weaken Iran, which has been using Hamas and Hezbollah as a way to stir up mischief in the region.”

Those are the words of candidate Barack Obama in 2008. And although they’re just as accurate today, time has not stood still.

We’ve also seen a marked increase in violence: a Jewish family was murdered in the West Bank and a woman was killed in a bus bombing in Jerusalem. A rocket attack on southern Israel from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip resulted in a school bus being hit and a teen died of his wounds. Israel, in turn, has retaliated. We need strong American leadership now to pivot from the zero-sum mentality of violence to an attitude that focuses on the parties shared interests: security and prosperity.

If you’ve learned something from this letter, I’ve succeeded in my preliminary task. Now I ask for your support to continue APN’s educational efforts in this country—to spread the message that there is a peace solution, and to let Congress and the White House know it’s preferable for America to be part of the solution than to be drawn into another conflict.

There is a sizable number of influential voices in Israel saying the same thing. In April, a group of 50 prominent Israelis, including the former heads of the Mossad (Israel���s CIA), the Shin Bet (its FBI), and the military, issued a call for two states for two nations. Their plan includes a Palestinian state alongside Israel with agreed-upon land swaps. The Palestinian-populated areas of Jerusalem would become the capital of Palestine; the Jewish-populated areas the capital of Israel.

These experts are not naïve. They know that even if the Palestinian pragmatists of Fatah reconcile with Hamas, there will be extremists who will try to sabotage any future peace deal. They know how to deal with violent extremists. These people were entrusted with Israel’s security and are saying that the work they did alone isn’t enough to bring Israel security. We cannot know yet what this unification of Hamas with Fatah means and we have to wait and see what emerges. Regardless, the principle of establishing two independent states, one Jewish and the other Palestinian, is still critical in this region for both Israel and the Palestinian people. That is the goal, to support the rational and moderate course.

Their action plan echoes the 348 senior Israeli reserve army officers and combat soldiers who came together in 1978 to urge their government to sign a peace treaty with Egypt. They formed Shalom Achshav, Israel’s Peace Now movement which APN provides nearly 50 percent of their funding.

Peace Now’s activities and programs—such as Settlement Watch, the ongoing monitoring of settlement construction on the West Bank—keeps peace on the world’s agenda. Peace Now gathers and publishes detailed information on settlements and is widely cited in Israeli and international media as the foremost authority on settlements. Peace Now is likewise well known for mobilizing demonstrations and organizing grassroots pro-peace activities. Innovations include an interactive online map of the settlements, “Facts on the Ground,” also available as an app for iPhone and iPad developed by APN applying Peace Now’s courageous work.

Like those Israelis who issued the peace plan, the members of Peace Now have their boots on the ground. They serve in Israel’s military reserves and see every day what life is like without a negotiated peace with the Palestinians.

That’s why I’m a supporter of APN and Peace Now.

I hope you’ll join me, and lend your voice to the influential and credible peace lobby that exists here as well as in Israel. Please give the tax-deductible contribution you can afford.

Dare I say it? It’s the logical thing to do.

Leonard Nimoy

5/11/2011

[brothermoth]

1890s America and Red Dead Redemption

Part One: Violent Delights and Violent Ends

-----

The latter half of the 1800s was a time characterized by struggle. Off the back of the Civil War, a country divided in not two but four by the rising industry to the east and the stubborn pastoralism of the west. The southern portion of the country beaten down, burned and disgraced, and the northern portion rolling in gold and prosperity. Whether they knew it or not, the common American had their life ultimately shaped by these divisions.

As the opening lines of Red Dead Redemption 2 state: "The age of outlaws and gunslingers was at its end" (Rockstar, 2018). Yet contrary to the following text, America was far from becoming a "land of laws". Laws for the poor, perhaps, but the wealthy still thrived and skirted just beyond the boundaries of human decency.

From the 1870s to the 1920s, miners and railroad workers unionized and carried out often violent protests in the hopes of gaining better working conditions. The poor had little but their fists, and they had no qualms about using them. It is in this turmoil we find Dutch Van Der Linde with his Robin Hood-esque visions of a crumbling elite and prospering poor. The struggle between workers and their iron-fisted overseers was bloody, and Dutch would not have it any other way. Those he took under his wing were the beaten down lowest tiers of society. How could they not see him as a shining idol of American idealism? What he wants, what he fights for, it is for them. Outcasts with nowhere else to turn, given a cause and a home and something that perhaps felt real to them for the first time in a long time.

Race is a topic not wholly explored, but touched on certainly within the game. Tensions rose as racial divisions were made even clearer, black Americans fighting for their own foothold in a world that has just opened up to them and their children. Lenny Summers is the first in generations to be born free of slavery. Javier comes from a country that has been terrorized by colonialism and corruption, yet he still dreams of returning. 1890s Mexico (and what we see in RDR1) is a topic of its own, though the spirit of people downtrodden by colonialism is echoed throughout both games. Sean, who was chased from the country his father fought for. Whose father was killed in his own bed, likely in the same room as his son. Violence in this world is inescapable, a swirling vortex that consumes everything in its path.

Dutch embraced this, as many leaders of the past and future have. If you cannot fight with peace, then sticks and stones make for much better conversation. I can't say I disagree with him, in all honesty, and that is what makes him so fascinating. He's right. He has a point, a cause. What went so wrong? Do heroes not get a happy ending?

In 1892, railroad employees of Carnegie Steel in Pennsylvania's Homestead plant went on strike when chairman Henry Frick cut their pay dramatically. 300 agents of the Pinkerton detective agency arrived, escalating tensions. Violence erupted, the Pennsylvania national guard was called. Sixteen men were killed.

Leviticus Cornwall is Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Carnegie is Leviticus Cornwall. The Pinkertons are rightful villains in our narrative, the gang is a thorn in their side which must be cut free. Law and order, right? Dutch was right, his killing of Cornwall was arguably deserved. Yet what makes it so wrong?

Dutch's actions are selfish, in the end. Not because he doesn't care for the people around him, as I believe he truly does. He sees things getting worse and worse and only digs in his heels. Dutch is the American Dream. The bloody messiah to the poor and disadvantaged. He guts them the same as any railroad magnate. Power corrupts, this is what we learn. Power and vitriol and paranoia. The people left struggling in his wake are the common folk who get caught in the crossfire, used and abused only to prove a point. They know nothing but violence, and who is to tell them otherwise? Even Arthur in his end of life maturation cannot pry himself free. He kills and kills and in the end he dies for it. Even John, who tried to leave it behind. Even Sadie, who was ruined by it, embraced it in the end.

The American dream is indecipherable from the American nightmare. They are lovers and companions. There is nothing to do but fight, and even then you have no hope of winning. It's a beautiful tragedy, is it not? All these people who never had a chance, yet who tried anyway. Workers who gained little and lost everything still took their signs and marched for what was right. Black Americans who were beaten down again and again still got up each and every day and did whatever it was they had to do. Native Americans, who were nearly erased. Who still cling to their heritage and claw back what has been stolen. Red Dead Redemption is about the small people. The forgotten in the annals of American history.

[brostateexam]

By now, the suburbs’ origin story seems familiar. In the mid-twentieth century, the federal government and its chosen mass developers, like Levitt and Sons and American Home Builders, plowed colossal financial resources and political will into building new towns across the country. Each was situated beyond city boundaries and was accessible primarily by cars navigating freshly laid highway asphalt. The developers divided suburban towns into fractions of an acre. On each sat a freestanding house designed for two parents and two or more children, a lawn to show a neat face, and a driveway for a car manufactured by General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler. The suburbs tied these standard model homes and families to strong local schools. Together, modest shelter, steadily increasing in value, and favorable education promised flourishing futures for both parents and children.For the young, white families who were able to access low-cost mortgages that subsidized their moves, the clapboard and concrete sealed in the promise.

Of course, the suburbs never delivered the sanctuary they pledged, even for those people they were supposed to favor, and less so with each passing decade. This well-recognized slippage between suburbia’s polished surface and its dark emotional core itself spawned a film genre that flourished in the 1990s and early 2000. Those movies erupt in horror, disgust, or dark humor as they peer through the suburbs’ fraying assurances. Early in American Beauty, 2000’s best picture and best screenplay Oscar winner, beleaguered wife and real estate agent Carolyn Burnham (played by Annette Bening) strips off her tailored beige power suit to squeegee grimy windows, dispel dust bunnies, and buff worn kitchen tile, all while intoning her mantra, “I will sell this house today!” When, plaster-smiled, she greets her potential purchasers—a mixed white-Asian couple, a Black couple, and a lesbian couple—they slide secret sideways glances, stare perplexedly, and outright demand that Carolyn justify the illusion she is struggling to sell them.

[writingmochi]

a terra incognita introduction

cast: jake ✗ fem.reader

synopsis: as the world entered the middle of the 21st century, many things have changed for the better or for worse in the newly united korea peninsula: the preparation for the succession of the new conglomerates of the past decade, the uprising of deviant androids, and the new layer of life shield by walls of codes. in the middle of it, two beings are trying to understand each other and the situation of the world they live in; an unknown territory

genre: cyberpunk, cyber noir, psychological thriller, science fiction, dystopian future, politics and philosophies regarding artificial intelligence and humanity, romance, drama, angst, mature content (war and revolution, explicit smut)

based on: video game cyberpunk 2077 (2020) and detroit: become human (2018), anime serial experiments lain (1998), and tv show succession (2018-2023)

masterlist

united korea

the united republic of korea (known as "united korea") is an east asia nation on the korean peninsula. as a result of the reunification agreement back in 2025 of the former north and south korea, the state has now prospered in terms of sociopolitical and economic issues from the korean war. it now excels technologically as one of the firsts in the world to introduce commercialized androids along with other east asian countries such as japan and china. in the aftermath of the social media collapse and the cyber world war of 2027-2030, the private conglomerates of the state have released a new way to connect to the information superhighway.

FLAG

(flag link to r/alternatehistory on reddit)

INFORMATION

capital cities: neo seoul | neo pyongyang

population: 65.5 million

language: korean | english | japanese | chinese

>> HISTORY

>> GEOGRAPHY

>> GOVERNMENT

>> SOCIETY

>> ECONOMY

>> MILITARY

>> MAJOR CITIES

neo seoul

one of the capital cities of united korea and the former capital of south korea, neo seoul is a metropolis for the state's bustling life from the most traditional to the most modern. neo seoul is known for six districts that are divided by the han river flowing in the middle, known as the division of north seoul and south seoul

north seoul encapsulates the traditional side of neo seoul and the center for the city's and state's government administration

south seoul lies the center of neo seoul's economy where conglomerates build their headquarters. a distinct living cost gap can be seen to compare those living in the north and those in the south where it is connected to incheon, a major city of transportation with its international seaports and airport

neo pyongyang

one of the capital cities of united korea and the former capital of north korea, neo pyongyang is the capital of the parliament of united korea. it's located on the taedong river kilometers upstream from the yellow sea. it is known as the city where the declaration of unification was signed along with its establishment as half of the capitals of the unified countries. much of the population of neo pyongyang are citizens coming from the southern of the peninsula as they migrate to fill in the spaces and utilize materials. it is also a growing industrial hub where conglomerates built their factories, along with kaesong.

with the rise of deviancies from androids made by shim laboratories, journalists have made observations and assume that neo pyongyang is the main hub of the rebellion between androids and their creator (as one human equates to two androids), creating unrest between the two parties. yet, they also say that neo pyongyang is a better refuge for deviant androids than neo seoul.

taglist: @raeyunshm @endzii23 @fluffyywoo @camipendragon @hiqhkey @wccycc @cha0thicpisces @y4wnjunz @yeehawnana @beansworldsstuff @kimipxl @blurryriki @reallysmolrenjun @frukkoneeeeg

© writingmochi on tumblr, 2021-2024. all rights reserved

[maaarine]

India overtakes China to become world’s most populous country (Hannah Ellis-Petersen, The Guardian, April 24 2023)

“It is also the first time since 1950, when the UN first began keeping global population records, that China has been knocked off the top spot.

China’s population decline follows decades of strict laws to bring the country’s booming birthrate under control, including the introduction of a one-child policy in the 1980s.

This included fines for having extra children, forced abortions and sterilisations.

While initially highly effective in controlling the population, these policies became a victim of their own success, and the country is now grappling with an ageing population in steep decline, which could have severe economic implications.

Part of the problem is that because of a traditional preference for boys, the one-child policy led to a massive gender imbalance.

Men now outnumber women by about 32 million. “How can the country now shore up birth rates, with millions of missing women?” asks Mei Fong, the author of One Child, a book about the impact of the policy.

Recent policies introduced in China trying to incentivise women to have more children have done little to stimulate population growth.

Women still have only 1.2 children and the population is expected to fall by almost 10% in the next two decades.

According to projections, the size of the Chinese population could drop below 1 billion before the end of the century.

In India, the population has grown by more than a billion since 1950. Though growth has now slowed, the number of people in the country is still expected to continue to rise for the next few decades, hitting its peak of 1.7 billion by 2064. (…)

India’s demography is far from uniform across the country.

One third of predicted population growth over the next decade will come from just two states, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, in the north of the country, which are some of India’s poorest and most agricultural states.

Uttar Pradesh alone already has a population of about 235 million, bigger than Nigeria or Brazil.

Meanwhile states in India’s south, which is more prosperous and has far higher rates of literacy, population rates have already stabilised and have begun to fall.

In the next decade, states in the southern states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu are likely to start grappling with an ageing population, and by 2025, one in five people in Kerala will be over 60.

The divide in population growth between India’s north and south could also have political implications.

After 2026, India’s electoral lines are due to be revised and redrawn based on census data, in particular relating to the number of people in constituencies.

Many politicians in southern states have expressed concern that their successes in bringing down population numbers, through education programmes, family planning and high literacy, could result in a reduction in their political representation in parliament, and a further political domination of the northern states that continue to have a population boom.

Currently the average age in India is just 29, and the country will continue to have a largely youthful population for the next two decades.

A similar “demographic dividend” proved highly useful in China, leading to an economic boom, particularly in manufacturing.

While India has one of the world’s fastest-growing economies in the world, and recently overtook the UK as the fifth-largest, experts have stressed that the country needs more investment in education and employment to seize the opportunity presented by a young population over the next few decades.

India continues to struggle with high youth unemployment and less than 50% of working-age Indians are in the workforce.

The figure for women is even lower, with just 20% of women participating in the formal labour market, a figure that is decreasing as India develops.”

[letterstotheuniversepage]

Celebrating Cultural Diversity: A Filipino Perspective

Culture is a perfect manifestation of the art of what it means to be a human being living in this world. It illustrates the way of life of every person in a community, tribe, or country. Culture isn’t something that can be described with just a few words; I believe that to fully grasp it, one must be a part of the flow and actively get involved. Tradition and culture are inseparable. One cannot exist without the other. But the most important element is the people themselves who shape the culture and tradition that have existed up until today.

As a Filipino, our culture comprises many wonderful aspects that amaze me every time I think about them. One cultural custom that I find fascinating is our resilience: our ability to get up after a downfall and smile in any situation or with any person we interact with. This world is not always sunny, but we Filipinos always find it in our hearts to dance in the middle of the storm, and that is truly beautiful. Another cultural value that I am most proud of is our faith in God. I don’t want to sound biased, but this is the truth. This quality is the foundation of our resilience. We survive and prosper because we never lose hope. We get up each day with the thought, “This is just a bad day but never an awful life. God will send me His divine grace to help me get by.” Once again, I am proud to be a Filipino, and living in this society while engaging in this culture gives me a unique identity worthy of being known.

As I have stated in the previous paragraph, I greatly appreciate our own culture. But just like all other traditions, nothing is perfect. There are no superior or inferior values and heritage, but if I had to alter two specific norms in our country, perhaps it would be gossiping and the crab mentality. I want to change these aspects because they can cause more negative effects than positive ones. These traits can be self-destructive and may badly affect others as well. As a concerned citizen, I suggest that changing them is the right thing to do for the betterment of the community, to keep the lifestyle of everybody in harmony.

Culture is undeniably diverse. Many kinds of ethnicities, races, and nationalities are spread out all over the globe. As I continue my journey in life, meeting individuals with different cultures and philosophies is part of it. There are no specific steps to flawlessly communicate with people who practice unfamiliar traits and values, but I can strive to be more empathetic, open-minded, and sensitive in dealing with them. I believe that our differences are not the reason we are divided, nor why there are conflicts. The true reason behind societal divergence is our lack of capacity to accept new ideas and ways of living.

Every person is a complex being, and as we live together in this world, certain issues like conflicts and misunderstandings between countries or in a community are almost impossible to avoid. But this must not always be the case, because after all, we are breathing the same air, and we are under the same sky. Our goal is to be at peace amidst diversity, not at war.

Written by: Amaranthine Briar / Akahana

𝐋𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐞

Content Copyright © Rose R. Sales All rights reserved.

[georgefairbrother]

Areas that relied largely upon heavy industry, like the Northeast of England, were hit particularly hard by the Great Depression. On the southern bank of the River Tyne, Jarrow was just one of many industrial communities ravaged by unemployment, poverty, disease and starvation in the 1930s. Meanwhile, the National Coalition Government under Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, appeared to be looking the other way.

'One Nation' Conservatism had seen Baldwin steer the Tory ideology toward a much more compassionate, inclusive and interventionist position, at least in theory. Nineteenth Century Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli had contended that the divide between rich and poor had rendered Britain 'two nations', between which there was 'no intercourse and no sympathy'. 

In a speech in 1924, Baldwin said;

"…We stand for the union of those two nations of which Disraeli spoke two generations ago: union among our own people to make one nation of our own people at home which, if secured, nothing else matters in the world..."

According to Conservative Historian, Lord Alistair Lexden;

"…Tory policy was reshaped to advance the cause of 'One Nation'. Social reform became the Party’s dominant preoccupation for the first time in its history. The Conservative Party, Baldwin declared at the 1929 election, regards the prosperity of trade and industry, not as an end in itself, but as a means to improve the condition of the people…"

In 1986, a Jarrow resident during this period recalled to the BBC;

"…Pathetic. The Jarrow of those days was a filthy, dirty, fallen down consumptive area in which the infantile death rate was the highest in the country, and TB was a general condition…"

Jarrow Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson later wrote;

"…There was no work. No one had a job except a few railwaymen, officials, the workers in the co-operative stores, and a few workmen who went out of the town…The plain fact is that if people have to live and bear and bring up their children in bad houses on too little food, their resistance to disease is lowered and they die before they should…"

Palmer’s Shipyard, the principal source of employment since 1851, had closed down in 1934. Government unemployment benefits in those days lasted six months, after which responsibility was handed to the Unemployment Assistance Board, from which any tangible support was difficult to access and ultimately far from adequate. Eligibility was also subject to the controversial Means Test, first introduced in 1931. This meant that the combined wages and assets of all members of the household were taken into account when deciding whether or not individual unemployment relief should be forthcoming. In the context of the time, this was particularly humiliating for unemployed men who saw it as their duty to be the family provider.

Facing indifference from Westminster, the local Borough Council initiated a non-partisan campaign to try to bring employment, in the form of a new steelworks, back to the area. Two hundred unemployed men, selected from a pool of around 1400 volunteers, would march more than 280 miles to London to petition the government to establish new industries.

The marchers set off at 11 am on October 5th, 1936. As The Manchester Guardian reported, it wasn’t a hunger march, but a protest march. This was an important distinction in the context of the time, as the hunger march movement was seen as a communist initiative, one short step away from revolution, and a movement from which the mainstream Labour Party was keen to keep its distance. The Guardian also pointed out that at that time, less than 15% of the eligible Jarrow workforce was actually in work.

The Manchester Guardian;

"…There is no political aspect to this march. It is simply the town of Jarrow saying send us work. In the ranks of the marchers are Labour men, Liberals, Tories, and one or two Communists, but you cannot tell who's who..."

"...With the marchers goes, prominently carried, the Jarrow petition for work, a huge book with about 12,000 signatures, which Miss Ellen Wilkinson, MP for Jarrow, is to present at the bar of the House of Commons on November 4th..."

One marcher later recalled to the BBC, in 1977;

"…The spirit of the men was such that we were expecting something. We were expecting to prove to the capital, at that time, that here’s men from Jarrow. The spirit they had shown all the way down…Here we are, we want work and we are going to put our case that we must have work for the benefit of our wives and children…"

The marchers reached London by the end of October. A rally was held in Hyde Park, followed subsequently by the official presentation of the petition to Parliament by Ellen Wilkinson MP. The government remained unmoved, and there proved to be little or no immediate effect on economic or industrial policy. The men returned home by train, courtesy of donated tickets.

According to the UK National Archives;

"...To add insult to injury, the Unemployment Assistance Board officials in Jarrow docked the dole of the marchers because they had not been available for work. After the Jarrow March the Cabinet resolved to convince organisers that marches were unhelpful and caused unnecessary hardship to those taking part..."

Other reports suggest that the Cabinet's attitude was more about deterring any future protest marches, rather than concern for the marchers' welfare. Even the Labour Party itself was, at best, lukewarm in its support. Ellen Wilkinson had addressed their Edinburgh conference on the issue of Jarrow, but had found the agenda dominated by discussions of the Spanish Civil War and issues surrounding rearmament. There was even criticism of the idea of the march itself, and the physical burden it placed on unemployed and starving men.

Marcher Sam Rowland suggested that while the majority of politicians seemed unconcerned, public opinion was markedly different;

"…If the march achieved anything…it made the condition and lives of people a factor that should always be brought into consideration at the top level… and not left to work out their own salvation…"

The Guardian, BBC News and multiple other sources name the last surviving Jarrow Marcher as Con Shiels, who died in 2012, and who had felt that the march had made 'not one hap’orth of difference'.

For some additional context on this, @robbielewis has a fascinating article on Con Whalen, who passed away in 2003. He was the last surviving marcher who had completed the march in its entirety.

https://www.tumblr.com/robbielewis/716998502772785152/cornelius-whalen-the-last-jarrow-marcher?source=share

The next general election was held nearly a decade later, in 1945, as World War Two was coming to an end. Memories of the Depression era National Government and the desperate times of the interwar years would be a key factor in the landslide victory for the Labour Party.

References include BBC News, Liverpool Echo, Manchester Guardian archives, Spartacus Educational, Lord Lexden (Official Historian of the Conservative Party) (Website), BBC Radio 4 - Great Lives (Ellen Wilkinson), BBC Witness -The Great Depression and The Jarrow March, BBC History-Referencing Ellen Wilkinson’s The Town that was Murdered

[mariacallous]

Fifteen years ago, when Europe went through a financial crisis, an economic depression, and a euro crisis, most political fights between European countries were about money. As a result, a deep divide emerged between northern and southern countries on debt and government deficits. At some point, the disputes got so fierce that some northerners proposed breaking the euro in two: a “neuro” for the north and a “zeuro” for the south.

In 2015, when hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees came to Europe, the money issue subsided, and European countries began having disputes about asylum and migration instead. This time, the divide many speculated about was not between the north and the south but between Europe’s east and west.

And what is today’s divide? Well, as the French say: comme ça change. It is not debt or even migration—it is security.

With a war on its doorstep and hybrid attacks on its public infrastructure, businesses, and media on the increase, Europe’s priorities are once again shifting fast. Many Europeans feel that the peace and prosperity they have built and enjoyed since the early 1950s are at stake.

European citizens often complain about what Europe is doing wrong. But with Europe’s public space flooded with fake news from Russian troll factories, its external borders violated by Russian and Belarusian armed men pushing refugees in, and its hospitals, businesses, and municipalities hacked for ransom, many feel vulnerable and have realized they have a lot to lose.

As a result, there seems to be a kind of reappraisal going on about European integration. The Eurobarometer, the opinion poll that asks citizens in all member states every six months whether membership is a good thing for their country, confirms this. In the mid-2000s, 50 percent of Europeans said yes. Today, it is 72 percent. This is probably why during the European elections in June, contrary to the predictions and expectations of many pollsters, the Euroskeptic far right hardly made any gains. Instead, the big winner of the elections was the European People’s Party (EPP), the family of European center-right parties.

Across Scandinavia and the east—in other words, in European Union member states bordering Russia and/or Ukraine—most Euroskeptic far-right parties even received a beating. So close to the fire, voters appear much less in the mood for political experiments than in countries further west such as France or Germany, where extremist parties came in first and second, respectively.

Moreover, in recent months, several EU member states have been rocked by scandals brought to light by the Czech intelligence service, showing how the Kremlin pays far-right politicians across Europe to undermine the social and political fabric in their countries by, among other things, spreading Russian propaganda. That some of them had been in Russia’s pocket was no secret. The warm ties between Moscow and France’s National Rally and the Freedom Party of Austria have been meticulously documented, for example in Anton Shekhovtsov’s Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir, published in 2017.

In different times, when European governments bickered over budget deficits or refugee quotas, citizens could perhaps afford to be less upset about these ties. But now, with a war raging at Europe’s external border and Russian President Vladimir Putin regularly threatening EU countries with nuclear war, Russian money flows to far-right politicians elicit more controversy. Are Dutch far-right conspiracy theorist Thierry Baudet, Belgian far-right politician Filip Dewinter, and others actually undermining security in Europe? Who are their backers, and what are their real agendas? Ten years ago, far-right politicians got away with vague answers and conspiratorial rants about the “deep state” and “woke” media. No longer.

The new security discourse is drawing a fresh dividing line through European politics. Increasingly, it separates those who are supportive of a strong EU, trans-Atlantic relations, and Ukraine from those who are not.

In France, this divide shaped both the European elections and the parliamentary elections that President Emmanuel Macron triggered afterward in an attempt to overturn the far-right victory. But the winner of the parliamentary elections was a left-wing alliance including La France Insoumise, which is almost as Euroskeptic, anti-American, anti-NATO, and unsupportive of Ukraine as the far right. Now, the political center, severely damaged, seeks to form a government with moderate elements of the left-wing and right-wing blocs. Whether it will manage remains to be seen.

Even in Austria, which is notoriously Russia-friendly, finally some limit seems to have been reached. Vienna is still considered a hub for Russian spies taking advantage of diplomatic immunity and has Europe’s laxest anti-spy legislation. Nevertheless, in late March, former Austrian intelligence officer Egisto Ott, who sent sensitive information to Moscow about journalist Christo Grozev and others on Russia’s hit list, was finally arrested. Ott’s arrest warrant was 86 pages long.

In another sign, Hungary’s recent decision to loosen restrictions on visitors from Russia elicited an exceptionally strong rebuke from EPP leader Manfred Weber. For years, the EPP had turned a blind eye to Hungary’s violations of EU values and laws because the country’s ruling party, Fidesz, was a member. In 2021, after many conflicts, Fidesz left the group, but Weber still avoided publicly escalating rows with Hungary, such as over its blockage of Sweden’s NATO membership or its refusal to allow EU weapons deliveries to Ukraine. This time, however, the reaction was immediate and sharp. Weber condemned Hungary’s lax visitation restrictions, saying they raised “serious national security concerns” and called for Europe’s national leaders to “adopt the most stringent measures” to protect Europe’s border-free Schengen Area, which Hungary could soon be flooding with undesirable Russian individuals.

These examples show how within political families, within EU member states, and between European countries security is becoming the major concern. In European politics, cards are reshuffled as a result. The center right, as the winner of June’s European elections, is taking full advantage of it.

Already last year, Klaus Welle, a former secretary-general of the European Parliament who was an influential political strategist within the EPP, wrote an essay for Le Grand Continent arguing that in an increasingly dangerous world, Europe’s center right must categorically exclude cooperation with all parties that are pro-Russian, anti-American, anti-NATO, and anti-EU. “Putinism,” Welle wrote, “is no longer a workable option in a civilized Europe.”

By contrast, in his view, cooperation was possible with those far-right parties that agree Europe must be protected from Russia’s 19th-century imperial ambitions, support NATO and good trans-Atlantic relations, and recognize the rule of law in Europe, which he called a “necessary complement to the nation-state.” In the article, the parties of the prime ministers of Italy and the Czech Republic were mentioned as examples. Both have, though stemming from the far right, moved to the center of the European political spectrum on these issues—at least, until this summer.

During the European Parliament’s first working weeks in July, Welle’s mechanism was already in full swing. The Euroskeptic, Russophile far right, including members from Fidesz and the National Rally, did not get influential positions in the political committees, barred by a large block of centrist political families including the now all-powerful center right. But the EPP refused to join a similar cordon sanitaire to block more so-called moderate far-right parties (such as Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy) from acquiring those positions.

The new security divide in European politics, then, appears to be a great occasion for the center right to broaden its dominance. As Europe’s security challenge has only just started, with Russia stepping up its hybrid attacks, that dominance will probably last a long while.

[old-school-butch]

What factors do you think contribute to Islamists forming the majority of the world's extremists right now? Do you think there’s anything that can be done to stop or reverse this trend?

Thank you as always for sharing your knowledge and insights. I appreciate you taking the time to do so for us internet randos :)

Ya know... I'm not sure. I feel like ideals bring people together in ways we don't entirely understand. There's a theory that some universal rules are found in every culture:

help your family

help your group

return favors

be brave / willing to sacrifice the self for the greater good

defer to superiors/leaders

divide resources fairly

respect others’ property

There are many different interpretations about, for example, what a fair division of resources is, and who is the superior, but these rules form the basis of fundamental human society. Other ideals flesh these rules out to help create a story people can rally around. Us and them is pretty basic, how we define 'us' depends on the morals of society. For much of human history, that was tribal/extended family. But religion makes a great story and that quickly grew from being a reason things were the way they were (the divine right of kings for example) to a story that demanded loyalty and society in itself, part of how humans decided who was us and them. The oldest prohibitions about slavery, for example, was that Christians shouldn't enslave Christians and Muslims shouldn't enslave Muslims. (It sounds nice when I say it like that, but it was actually part of colonial conquest - convert to my religion or be killed/enslaved. Oh, and being part of my religion means you have to obey me.).

Anyway, in the last few hundred years the star of the West has been shining bright, often at the expense of other groups subjugated in conquest. Capitalism is its child that has catapulted whole societies into unimaginable amounts of wealth, and what is there for those left behind? Communism was the second child of the West, meant to restrain its elder beast, but it misunderstands human nature and can't work on its own. There are many former Empires around the world who sullenly remember their own glory days and want to recreate them - China, Russia, Persia, the Caliphates all come to mind. But new stories are needed to breathe life into these ideas. For a while it was nationalism, which was evident in the numerous declarations of independence after World War 2 and the 'third world, third way' movement. But nationalism alone can't answer the West, and joining in the West's prosperity has proven difficult to replicate. Many countries that experimented with a variety of economic theories ended up stuck in poverty. Meanwhile, capitalism is spinning out the wealth of king's to entire nations. What's that quote from Marx (that Jenny probably actually wrote)?. Something about a house in the countryside is a house, a house next to a castle is a hat. Income inequality is more absolute when it's the difference between starving and living and the dead can't complain, so it paradoxically breeds far more resentment when it's the difference between subsistence farming and going on space voyages.

Enter religion as a new, galvanizing force. The secular West, and young people living in our society, simply cannot fathom how profound, energetic and deeply personal a comprehensive religious society can be. It's everything. It's your life and afterlife too. It's your soul. You have wealth, spiritual wealth, that the decadent West can never understand. You can hold your head up high again. It is the only answer to the West that people can hold onto with any real hope. Christianity has moderated in the West but accepted its fall from secular power. Other religions have not, and perhaps don't need to. I look at some countries sitting on incredible wealth, that isn't developed because they are too corrupt, or simply don't care to improve the lives of their people. Becoming a suicide bomber is much less appealing when you have a happy, comfortable life. And I'm not going to just pick on Islam here, for centuries the Catholic church argued - with a straight face - that regular tithes to the Church helped keep people too poor to indulge in sinfulness. Anyway, for people who want something else beyond individualism or materialism, that they might not get anyway, religion gives them purpose and principle.

I'm open to hearing other theories, especially around what can be done to extend the principles of democracy, secular statehood and religious freedom around the globe.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 1, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 02, 2024

Almost one hundred and forty-two years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.

Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored. 

Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity. But for all that the war had seemed to be about defending men against the rise of an oligarchy that intended to reduce all men to a life of either enslavement or wage labor, the war and its aftermath had pushed workers’ rights backward.   

The drain of men to the battlefields and the western mines during the war resulted in a shortage of workers that kept unemployment low and wages high. Even when they weren’t, the intense nationalism of the war years tended to silence the voices of labor organizers. “It having been resolved to enlist with Uncle Sam for the war,” one organization declared when the war broke out, “this union stands adjourned until either the Union is safe, or we are whipped.” 

Another factor working against the establishment of labor unions during the war was the tendency of employers to claim that striking workers were deliberately undercutting the war effort. They turned to the government to protect production, and in industries like Pennsylvania's anthracite coal fields, government leaders sent soldiers to break budding unions and defend war production.

During the war, government contracting favored those companies that could produce big orders of the mule shoes, rifles, rain slickers, coffee, and all the other products that kept the troops supplied. The owners of the growing factories grew wealthy on government contracts, even as conditions in the busy factories deteriorated. While wages were high during the war, they were often paid in greenbacks, which were backed only by the government’s promise to pay. 

While farmers and some entrepreneurs thrived during the war, urban workers and miners had reason to believe that employers had taken advantage of the war to make money off them. After the war, they began to strike for better wages and safer conditions. In August 1866, 60,000 people met as the National Labor Union in Baltimore, Maryland, where they called for an eight-hour workday. Most of those workers calling for organization simply wanted a chance to rise to comfort, but the resolutions developed by the group’s leaders after the convention declared that workers must join unions to reform the abuses of the industrial system. 

To many of those who thought the war would create a country where hard work would mean success, the resolutions seemed to fly in the face of that harmony, echoing the southern enslavers by dividing the world into people of wealth and workers, and asking for government intervention, this time on the side of workers. Republicans began to redefine their older, broad concept of workers to mean urban unskilled or semi-skilled wage laborers specifically.

Then in 1867, a misstep by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio made the party step back from workers. Wade had been a cattle drover and worked on the Erie Canal before studying law and entering politics, and he was a leader among those who saw class activism as the next step in the party’s commitment to free labor. His fiery oratory lifted him to prominence, and in March 1867 the Senate chose him its president pro tempore, in effect making him the nation’s acting vice president in those days before there was a process for replacing a vice president who had stepped into the presidency.

Wade joined a number of senators on a trip to the West, and in Lawrence, Kansas, newspapers reported—possibly incorrectly—that Wade predicted a fight in America between labor and capital. “Property is not equally divided,” the reporter claimed Wade said, “and a more equal distribution of capital must be worked out.” Congress, which Wade now led, had done much for ex-slaves and must now address “the terrible distinction between the man that labors and him that does not.”

Republican newspapers were apoplectic. The New York Times claimed that Wade was a demagogue. Every hard worker could succeed in America, it wrote. “Laborers here can make themselves sharers in the property of the country,—can become capitalists themselves,—just

as nine in ten of all the capitalists in the country have done so before them,—by industry, frugality, and intelligent enterprise.” Trying to get rich by force of law would undermine society.

Congress established an eight-hour day for federal employees in June 1868, but in that year’s election, voters turned Wade, and others like him, out of office. In 1869, Republican president Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation saying that the eight-hour workday of "laborers, workmen, and mechanics" would not mean cuts in wages.

Then, in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. The transatlantic cable had gone into operation in 1866, and American newspapers had featured stories of the European war. Now, hungry for dramatic stories, they plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by crazed women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows. 

The Communards were a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who planned to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to associations of workmen, American newspapers wrote. In their telling, the Paris Commune brought to life the chaotic world the elite enslavers foresaw when they said it was imperative to keep workers from politics. 

Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.” Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace looked at the rising numbers of industrial workers and the conditions of city life, and warned Americans, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”

At the same time, it was also clear that wealthy industrialists were gaining more and more control over both state and local governments. In 1872 the Credit Mobilier scandal broke. This was a complicated affair, and what had actually happened was almost certainly misrepresented, but it seemed to show congressmen taking bribes from railroad barons, and Americans were ready to believe that they were doing so. Then, in July 1877, after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages 20 percent and strikers shut down most of the nation’s railroads, President Rutherford B. Hayes sent U.S. soldiers to the cities immobilized by the strikes. It seemed industrialists had the Army at their beck and call.

By 1882, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government so far toward men of capital that it seemed there was more room for workingmen to demand their rights. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.” 

The workers marching in New York City in the first Labor Day celebration in 1882 carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.” 

Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.” 

In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….” 

Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”

As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).

They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday. Each year, the first Monday in September would honor the country’s workers.  

In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.”

Happy Labor Day.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[yourreddancer]

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

September 1, 2024 (Sunday)

Almost one hundred and forty-two years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.

Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored.

Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity. But for all that the war had seemed to be about defending men against the rise of an oligarchy that intended to reduce all men to a life of either enslavement or wage labor, the war and its aftermath had pushed workers’ rights backward.

The drain of men to the battlefields and the western mines during the war resulted in a shortage of workers that kept unemployment low and wages high. Even when they weren’t, the intense nationalism of the war years tended to silence the voices of labor organizers. “It having been resolved to enlist with Uncle Sam for the war,” one organization declared when the war broke out, “this union stands adjourned until either the Union is safe, or we are whipped.”

Another factor working against the establishment of labor unions during the war was the tendency of employers to claim that striking workers were deliberately undercutting the war effort. They turned to the government to protect production, and in industries like Pennsylvania's anthracite coal fields, government leaders sent soldiers to break budding unions and defend war production.

During the war, government contracting favored those companies that could produce big orders of the mule shoes, rifles, rain slickers, coffee, and all the other products that kept the troops supplied. The owners of the growing factories grew wealthy on government contracts, even as conditions in the busy factories deteriorated. While wages were high during the war, they were often paid in greenbacks, which were backed only by the government’s promise to pay.

While farmers and some entrepreneurs thrived during the war, urban workers and miners had reason to believe that employers had taken advantage of the war to make money off them. After the war, they began to strike for better wages and safer conditions. In August 1866, 60,000 people met as the National Labor Union in Baltimore, Maryland, where they called for an eight-hour workday. Most of those workers calling for organization simply wanted a chance to rise to comfort, but the resolutions developed by the group’s leaders after the convention declared that workers must join unions to reform the abuses of the industrial system.

To many of those who thought the war would create a country where hard work would mean success, the resolutions seemed to fly in the face of that harmony, echoing the southern enslavers by dividing the world into people of wealth and workers, and asking for government intervention, this time on the side of workers. Republicans began to redefine their older, broad concept of workers to mean urban unskilled or semi-skilled wage laborers specifically.

Then in 1867, a misstep by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio made the party step back from workers. Wade had been a cattle drover and worked on the Erie Canal before studying law and entering politics, and he was a leader among those who saw class activism as the next step in the party’s commitment to free labor. His fiery oratory lifted him to prominence, and in March 1867 the Senate chose him its president pro tempore, in effect making him the nation’s acting vice president in those days before there was a process for replacing a vice president who had stepped into the presidency.

Wade joined a number of senators on a trip to the West, and in Lawrence, Kansas, newspapers reported—possibly incorrectly—that Wade predicted a fight in America between labor and capital. “Property is not equally divided,” the reporter claimed Wade said, “and a more equal distribution of capital must be worked out.” Congress, which Wade now led, had done much for ex-slaves and must now address “the terrible distinction between the man that labors and him that does not.”

Republican newspapers were apoplectic. The New York Times claimed that Wade was a demagogue. Every hard worker could succeed in America, it wrote. “Laborers here can make themselves sharers in the property of the country,—can become capitalists themselves,—just as nine in ten of all the capitalists in the country have done so before them,—by industry, frugality, and intelligent enterprise.” Trying to get rich by force of law would undermine society.

Congress established an eight-hour day for federal employees in June 1868, but in that year’s election, voters turned Wade, and with others like him, out of office. In 1869, Republican president Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation saying that the eight-hour workday of "laborers, workmen, and mechanics" would not mean cuts in wages.

Then, in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. The transatlantic cable had gone into operation in 1866, and American newspapers had featured stories of the European war. Now, hungry for dramatic stories, they plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by crazed women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows.

The Communards were a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who planned to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to associations of workmen, American newspapers wrote. In their telling, the Paris Commune brought to life the chaotic world the elite enslavers foresaw when they said it was imperative to keep workers from politics.

Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.” Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace looked at the rising numbers of industrial workers and the conditions of city life, and warned Americans, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”

At the same time, it was also clear that wealthy industrialists were gaining more and more control over both state and local governments. In 1872 the Credit Mobilier scandal broke. This was a complicated affair, and what had actually happened was almost certainly misrepresented, but it seemed to show congressmen taking bribes from railroad barons, and Americans were ready to believe that they were doing so. Then, in July 1877, after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut wages 20 percent and strikers shut down most of the nation’s railroads, President Rutherford B. Hayes sent U.S. soldiers to the cities immobilized by the strikes. It seemed industrialists had the Army at their beck and call.

By 1882, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government so far toward men of capital that it seemed there was more room for workingmen to demand their rights. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.”

(SOUND FAMILIAR????)

The workers marching in New York City in the first Labor Day celebration in 1882 carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.”

Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.”

(AND REMAIN SO TODAY, THANKS TO THE RETHUGLIKKKONS!)

In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….”

Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”

As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).

They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday. Each year, the first Monday in September would honor the country’s workers.

In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.”

Happy Labor Day.