#totally no particular reason for reading up on fascism recently

[itsnotabouttheapp]

For absolutely no reason at all, here's a fun graphic and associated text from the Council on Foreign Relations from their article titled "What Is Fascism?" (I do suggest reading the whole page if you can.)

Stage one: Emerging out of disillusionment

Mussolini and Hitler rose to prominence in the aftermath of World War I. The respective politicians capitalized on the political and economic fallout of the Great War by inflaming popular dissatisfaction with the countries' leaders. 

Hitler pointed to the harsh and humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles as a means to drum up popular support. The treaty forced Germany to accept blame for World War I, give up 13 percent of its European territory and overseas colonies, limit the size of its army and navy, and pay reparations (financial damages) to the war’s winners. In the aftermath of the Great War, Germany was left in economic despair, international embarrassment, and political instability. Hitler would gain followers by promising to tear up the Treaty of Versailles and restore the country’s honor.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis that followed World War I further eroded public confidence in the existing political establishment. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Germany suffered hyperinflation—a situation in which prices skyrocketed so quickly that German currency lost much of its value. Moreover, Italy experienced a two-year period of mass strikes and factory occupations, with millions unemployed.

-----

Stage two: Establishing legitimacy as a political party

Fascist leaders capitalized on popular disillusionment to source their political power. Mussolini and Hitler created their own political parties to challenge the ruling establishment through the ballot box and, often, violence in the streets.

In 1919, Mussolini created Italy’s Fascist Party, which was unabashedly pro-Italian nationalism and anti-socialism. The group attracted fervent followers who organized armed militias known as the squadrisiti (or “Blackshirts” per their uniforms). These fascist militants often skirmished with Italian socialists in the streets.

Germany’s Nazi Party (originally founded as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) also emerged in the aftermath of the war, in 1920. With many Germans shocked by the country’s defeat in World War I, the Nazis pushed a narrative that argued Germany could have won the war if not for unrest at home. This myth falsely accused Jewish people and left-wing activists of undermining the country’s war effort. The Nazis also blamed Germany’s new democratic government for abandoning the conflict and accepting harsh peace terms from the Allied Powers. Propelled by this vision, the Nazis went from winning 3 percent of the vote in the 1928 parliamentary elections to 44 percent in 1933. They were also supported by their own paramilitary group known as the Sturmabteilung (or “Brownshirts”). This militant army—like the squadristi—clashed with the party’s rivals.

-----

Stage three: Gaining power via right-wing partnerships

Interwar Europe primarily featured two political groups: conservatives and socialists. A third option—fascists—would gain power by partnering with conservatives, who advocated for traditional values, including nationalism and law and order. Conservatives recognized that fascists wanted to overthrow the political establishment; however, the two groups found common cause over their shared hatred and fear of socialists. Communist regimes were gaining influence across Europe after first coming to power in Russia in 1917 and were seen as an existential threat to conservative values.

In Italy, conservatives combined forces with Mussolini’s Fascist Party to form a governing majority in parliament following elections in 1921. Meanwhile, in Germany, the country’s conservative leaders allied with the Nazis. Both conservative parties believed a fascist coalition would be a short-term compromise to prevent socialists from taking power. After the Nazis won the largest share of votes in 1932, the country’s president appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany. Even still, conservatives expected to control government affairs while taking advantage of Hitler’s charisma. That expectation, of course, would turn out to be a miscalculation.

-----

Stage four: Using power to dominate institutions 

Upon rising to power, Fascist parties attempted to consolidate political authority.

Mussolini’s Fascist Party won elections in 1921 as part of a coalition. The following year, the Italian king appointed Mussolini prime minister after a mass fascist demonstration known as the March on Rome. As the Fascist Party gained more power, many feared civil war if Mussolini were denied power. The Fascists, however, did not seize absolute authority, as traditional institutions like the Catholic Church still retained a certain degree of independence.

The Nazis, on the other hand, took total control over government and society. Hitler removed all non-Nazis from government shortly after becoming chancellor in 1933. He would go on to pass laws stripping Jews of citizenship and expelling anti-Nazi professors from universities. To further consolidate Nazi control, Hitler banned rival political parties and enabled himself to rule by decree (meaning he could single-handedly—and without oversight—create future laws). Germany became a one-party country: the Nazis claimed to have won more than 90 percent of the vote in unfree and unfair elections in November 1933. After1938, Germany ceased holding elections altogether.

-----

Stage five: Implementing radical reforms

With near-total or absolute control over society, fascist leaders exercised their power in increasingly radical ways.

Mussolini’s Italy carried out violent colonial campaigns across Africa. In Libya, colonial troops employed chemical weapons against local resistance movements and imprisoned their members in concentration camps. And in 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), where virulent racism led to mass instances of rape and the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of thousands of people. Mussolini’s regime did not carry out the same scale of ethnic violence at home. However, his government proclaimed white, Christian Italians to be descendants of the Aryan race and banned Black and Jewish people from marrying them.

Hitler’s Nazi Germany remains the only example of full radicalization of a fascist movement. As Germany’s absolute ruler, or führer, Hitler destroyed all political opposition; ordered the genocide of millions; invaded countries across Europe; and, in partnership with Mussolini, launched World War II—the deadliest conflict in human history. Even seventy-five years after Hitler’s death, his rise to power and Germany’s fall from democracy into fascism serve as frightening reminders. If racism and extremism are left to fester in politics, no liberal democracy is safe. 

[mashounen1945]

So, I found this post [https://www.tumblr.com/mashounen1945/772060782838087680/stuffedeggplants] by @mariacallous and @sprinkledsalt with other valuable contributions by @anartificialsatellite, @smegorl, @stuffedeggplants, and @stripedroseandsketchpads. In light of the recent release of Robert Eggers' remake of the 1922 classic Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror, all these users addressed various aspects related to the problematic (for lack of a better term) legacy of the vampire sub-genre of horror in general —and movie adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula in particular— and their little-known but inescapable ties to antisemitism due to the disturbing similarity between a vampire's most usual traits and several antisemitic tropes.

This is some extremely interesting material, highly relevant to the current times, and I cannot recommend enough to read it in its entirety, that is, including everything added by others in the reblogs. When I reblogged it myself, for a moment I considered adding a comment, but ultimately decided against it: the things I was planning to talk about were barely related to that post's main topic; more importantly, it felt like I'd be joking about a very serious subject and mocking what everyone else contributed with, and I'm sure you'll understand why when I go into details later. In the end, I chose to talk about those things anyway, but on a post wholly separate from the original.

-------------------------

During the last few months, I came across a meme that has been going around a lot these days (or at least it was popular a few years ago and I'm just catching up now): a scene from Curados de Espanto (it could be literally translated as "Healed from Fright", but the context would turn it into "Helluva Healed"), a Mexican comedy movie parodying vampire stories. For reasons beyond human comprehension (or because the movie didn't become famous in any way, shape or form), the scene in question didn't leave a black mark on Mexico's reputation: a Van Helsing wannabee called "The Great Jacinto" faces a vampire and pulls out a crucifix to get rid of him, but this doesn't work and the vampire reveals he's Jewish, which is implied to render him immune to the effects Christian items and iconography would normally have on a vampire; but worry not, Dear Reader, for that The Great Jacinto is prepared for any and all contingencies (I guess) and he proves this... by pulling out a clearly shoddily-made swastika as he screams a deeply unfortunate German phrase made of two H-words, which doesn't even work either and simply scares the vampire and makes him look to the side for a few seconds (our hero, everybody: he speedran the satire-to-Fascism pipeline, and it was all for nought).

Also during the last few months, I started playing Touhou games, skipping the PC-98 era and going straight to the first title released for Windows: Touhou 6: Koumakyou ~ The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil. The main antagonist and final boss (unless you count the game's Extra Stage) is Remilia Scarlet, a little girl sporting the full package of vampire tropes and then some: she's been living for 500 years while staying young (but this makes her a very experienced adult trapped in the body of a little girl, and the Internet totally didn't get horny on main for that, no sir), can turn into a bat that's also immune to the player's special attacks, has a bunch of good-looking but also highly formidable and loyal female servants defending her mansion (who are also awesome for their own reasons), claims to be the direct descendant of Vlad Țepeș Drăculea himself (which is actually a complete lie according to TouhouWiki, but I still have to check that), etcetera. Unfortunately, that "full package" of vampire stuff also includes Remilia embodying an antisemitic trope, as her attacks are designed with an aesthetic insinuating that either she's Jewish or her being a vampire has something to do with Judaism: she's constantly summoning glyphs that are just the Star of David on a circle (and those glyphs also shoot their own bullet curtains at the player), while a bigger version of such glyphs surrounds Remilia herself during the entire battle; Flandre Scarlet (her secret younger sister, and the true final boss in the Extra Stage I mentioned earlier) does the same things, and Patchouli Knowledge (one of the earlier bosses, and the mini-boss in the Extra Stage) attacks by bringing books with a Star of David drawn on their pages and shooting from them as if they were magic turrets or something.

Both examples aged like milk, that's for sure. But on the other hand, they kind of ended up being very inconsequential.

In particular, the Touhou case could be chalked up to Japanese authors not going outside or touching some grass as much as they should, adding things to their stories that simply looked cool without sitting down and thinking about their implications for five seconds. Touhou 6 is far from being either the first or the last time this happens in popular Japanese media: the creators of Neon Genesis Evangelion openly admitted that Rule of Cool is the sole reason behind all the Christian imagery in that anime; even ZUN (the creator of the Touhou series, and the one-person team of developers for the series' mainline games) did something similar immediately after Touhou 6 since the Extra & Phantasm Stages in Touhou 7 and 8 have Ran Yakumo, Yukari Yakumo and Fujiwara no Mokou flashing their own swastikas in front of the player during their respective boss battles.

As for Curados de Espanto, I'm fairly sure people only started caring about it quite recently, when they had better access to the Internet and that scene became the meme it is now. Really, what still gets me about this whole thing is something entirely different and much more important that also happened some months ago: an amazingly high percentage of Mexicans, most likely including lots of people who laughed and still even laugh at that meme, voted for a left-wing scientific Jewish woman to be their President for the next six years while the rest of the world fell back into Fascism's hands.

[mugasofer]

It seems like many, perhaps most, people historically believed in some immanent apocalypse.

Many philosophies claim that the world is passing into a degenerate age of chaos (Ages of Man, Kali Yuga, life-cycle of civilisation), or divine conflict will shortly spill over & destroy the Earth (Ragnorok, Revelations, Zoroastrian Frashokereti), or that the natural forces sustaining us must be transient.

Yet few panic or do anything. What anyone does "do about it" is often symbolic & self-admittedly unlikely to do much.

Maybe humans evolved not to care, to avoid being manipulated?

Many cults make similar claims, and do uproot their lives around them. Even very rarely committing mass suicide or terror attacks etc on occasion. But cults exist that don't make such claims, so it may not be the mechanism they use to control, or at most a minor one. "This is about the fate of the whole world, nothing can be more important than that, so shut up" may work as as a thought terminating cliche, but it doesn't seem to work that strongly, and there are many at least equally effective ones.

Some large scale orgs do exist that seem to take their eschatology "seriously". The Aztecs committed atrocities trying to hold off apocalypse, ISIS trying to cause it. Arguably some Communist or even fascist groups count, depending on your definition of apocalypse.

But even then, one can argue their actions are not radically different from non-apocalypse-motivated ones - e.g. the Aztecs mass-executed less per capita than the UK did at times & some historians view them as more about displaying authority.

I'm thinking about this because of two secular eschatologies - climate apocalypse and the Singularity.

My view on climate change, which as far as I can tell is the scientific consensus, is that it is real and bad but by no means apocalyptic. We're talking incremental increases in storms, droughts, floods etc, all of which are terrible, but none of which remotely threaten human civilisation. E.g. according to the first Google result, the sea is set to rise by 1 decimeter by 2100 in a "high emissions scenario", not to rise by tens or hundreds of meters and consume all coastal nations as I was taught as a child. Some more drastic projections suggest that the sea might rise by as much as two or three meters in the worst case scenario.

It really creeps me out when I hear people who confess to believe that human civilisation, the human species, or even all life on Earth is most likely going to be destroyed soon by climate change. The most recent example, which prompted this post, was the Call of Cthulhu podcast I was listening to casually suggesting that it might be a good idea to summon an Elder God of ice and snow to combat climate change as the "lesser existential risk", perhaps by sacrificing "climate skeptics" to it. It's incredibly jarring for me to realise that the guys I've been listening to casually chatting about RPGs think they live in a world that will shortly be ended by the greed of it's rulers. But this idea is everywhere. Discussions of existential risks from e.g. pandemics inevitably attract people arguing that the real existential risk is climate change. A major anti-global-warming protest movement, Extinction Rebellion, is literally named after the idea that they're fighting against their own extinction. Viral Tumblr posts talk about how the fear of knowing that the world is probably going to be destroyed soon by climate change and fascism is crippling their mental health, and they have no idea how to deal with it because it's all so real.

But it's not. It's not real.

Well, I can't claim that political science is accurate enough for me to definitively say that fascism isn't going to take over, but I can say that climate science is fairly accurate and it predicts that the world is definitely not about to end in fire or in flood.

(There are valid arguments that climate change or other environmental issues might precipitate wars, which could turn apocalyptic due to nuclear weapons; or that we might potentially encounter a black swan event due to our poor understanding of the ecosystem and climate-feedback systems. But these are very different, as they're self-admittedly "just" small risks to the world.)

And I get the impression that a lot of people with more realistic views about climate change deliberately pander to this, deliberately encouraging people to believe that they're going to die because it puts them on the "right side of the issue". The MCU's Loki, for instance, recently casually brought up a "climate apocalypse" in 2050, which many viewers took as meaning the world ending. Technically, the show uses a broad definition of "apocalypse" - Pompeii is given as another example - and it kind of seems like maybe all they meant was natural disasters encouraged by climate change, totally defensible. But I still felt kinda mad about it, that they're deliberately pandering to an idea which they hopefully know is false and which is causing incredible anxiety in people. I remember when Greta Thurnberg was a big deal, I read through her speeches to Extinction Rebellion, and if you parsed them closely it seemed like she actually did have a somewhat realistic understanding of what climate change is. But she would never come out and say it, it was all vague implications of doom, which she was happily giving to a rally called "Extinction Rebellion" filled with speakers who were explicitly stating, not just coyly implying, that this was a fight for humanity's survival against all the great powers of the world.

But maybe there's nothing wrong with that. I despise lying, but as I've been rambling about, this is a very common lie that most people somehow seem unaffected by. Maybe the viral tumblr posts are wrong about the source of their anxiety; maybe it's internal/neurochemical and they world just have picked some other topic to project their anxieties on if this particular apocalypse wasn't available. Maybe this isn't a particularly harmful lie, and it's hypocritical of me to be shocked by those who believe it.

Incidentally, I believe the world is probably going to end within the next fifty years.

Intellectually, I find the arguments that superhuman AI will destroy the world pretty undeniable. Sure, forecasting the path of future technology is inherently unreliable. But the existence of human brains, some of which are quite smart, proves pretty conclusively it's possible to get lumps of matter to think - and human brains are designed to run on the tiny amounts of energy they can get by scavenging plants and the occasional scraps of meat in the wilderness as fuel, with chemical signals that propagate at around the speed of sound (much slower than electronic ones), with only the data they can get from input devices they carry around with them, and which break down irrevocably after a few decades. And while we cannot necessarily extrapolate from the history of progress in both computer hardware and AI, that progress is incredibly impressive, and there's no particular reason to believe it will fortuitously stop right before we manufacture enough rope to hang ourselves.

Right now, at time of writing, we have neural nets that can write basic code, appear to scale linearly in effectiveness with the available hardware with no signs that we're reaching their limit, and have not yet been applied at the current limits of available hardware let alone what will be available in a few years. They absorb information like a sponge at a vastly superhuman speed and scale, allowing them to be trained in days or hours rather than the years or decades humans require. They are already human-level or massively superhuman at many tasks, and are capable of many things I would have confidently told you a few years ago were probably impossible without human-level intelligence, like the crazy shit AI dungeon is capable of. People are actively working on scaling them up so that they can work on and improve the sort of code they are made from. And we have no ability to tell what they're thinking or control them without a ton of trial and error.

If you follow this blog, you're probably familiar with all the above arguments for why we're probably very close to getting clobbered by superhuman AI, and many more, as well as all the standard counter-arguments and the counter-arguments to those counter arguments.

(Note: I do take some comfort in God, but even if my faith were so rock solid that I would cheerfully bet the world on it - which it's not - there's no real reason why our purpose in God's plan couldn't be to destroy ourselves or be destroyed as an object lesson to some other, more important civilization. There's ample precedent.)

Here's the thing: I'm not doing anything about it, unless you count occasionally, casually talking about it with people online. I'm not even donating to help any of the terrifyingly-few people who are trying to do something about it. Part of why I'm not contributing is, frankly, I don't have a clue what to do, nor do I have much confidence in any of the stuff people are currently doing (although I bloody well hope some of it works.)

And yet I don't actually feel that scared.

I feel more of a visceral chill reading about the nuclear close calls that almost destroyed the world in the recent past than thinking about the stuff that has a serious chance of doing so in a few decades. I'm a neurotic mess, and yet what is objectively the most terrifying thing on my radar does not actually seem to contribute to my neurosis.

[hecallsmehischild]

Recent Media Consumed

Books

The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. About ten or fifteen years ago, I tried to read this and was totally overwhelmed by it. I kept it around, hoping maybe someday I might be able to read it. I finally have, and here are my impressions: WHY SO MANY NAMES. WHY YOU HAVE TO NAME EVERYBODY, AND EVERY TRIBE OF PEOPLES, AND EVERY INANIMATE OBJECT, AND EVERY LANDSCAPE FEATURE. WHY. *ahem* So. I have a general comprehension of the events of The Silmarillion, but I dealt with it by doing what you do for an impressionist painting. I (mentally) stepped way back and let all the names flow by me, and if there were names that were repeated a lot, then I mentally attached appropriate plot points and character details to those names so I could track with who they were and what they were doing. And, actually, I found myself able to hang on and enjoy the book for the most part. This is going to lead into a re-reading of the Lord of the Rings books, since I haven’t read those in about as long…

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I haven’t read some of these books since pre-teen years, with one required re-read of The Two Towers in high school (i.e. it’s been many an age since I’ve read these and my memory of the stories has been far more heavily influenced by the movies). In re-reading the first book, I was struck by the extreme tone shift for the Elves and Dwarves. Elves seem much closer to happy, mischievous fairies than these ethereal, solemn pillars of elegance and grace the movies show them to be. And Dwarves are far more bumbling and craftsmanlike than the movies show. Aside from that, The Hobbit was a pretty solid adaptation from the book, and the book also reminded me that this story was the first time I experienced “NO, MAIN CHARACTERS DON’T DIE, HOW DARE YOU,” and probably was the first book to make me cry. I must have been 8 or 10 years old. I FORGOT HOW MUCH THIS STORY INFLUENCED ME.

A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. I have a longer-than-usual list of things to say about this book. First is that it was just that level of difficult that I was struggling to understand while reading it (on Audible), but I think I got it. Sowell has several base concepts that I see repeated throughout his books, though he does like to dedicate whole books to specific aspects of the same topic. He is pretty damn thorough that way. So, for example, I would put this book in the middle of a three-book spectrum of similar concepts: Intellectuals and Society (most concrete and easiest to read), A Conflict of Visions (next-level abstraction, a little difficult to read), Knowledge and Decisions (root abstract concept, very difficult, I have not been able to get past chapter 2). The second thing I have to say is about a couple interesting concepts it proposes. Its whole point is to help readers understand the roots of two ways of seeing the world that come into severe conflict politically, and he calls them by their root titles: the constrained and the unconstrained visions. He traces the path of each back through the intellectuals that most spoke of them (tending to contrast Adam Smith with William Godwin and Condorcet). Though he leans heavily toward the constrained vision (based on reading his other works) he does his best to make this book an academic study of both, with both of the visions' strengths and flaws and reasoning and internal consistencies fairly laid out. In doing so, he helped me understand a few things that make this situation really difficult for people on opposing sides to communicate. One of them is that root words and concepts literally mean different things to different people. I had some vague notion of this before, but he laid out three examples in detail: Equality, Power, and Justice. It was kind of astounding to see just how differently these three words can be defined. It makes me think that arguing about any specific issues rooted in these concepts is fruitless until first an understanding has been reached on terms, because otherwise two parties are endlessly talking past each other. Another really interesting idea he brought up is the existence of “hybrid visions” and he named both Marxism and Fascism as hybrid visions. This was especially fascinating to me because I have seen the accusation of “Nazi” flung around ad nauseam and I wondered how it was that both sides were able to fling it at each other so readily. Well, it’s because Fascism is actually a hybrid vision, so both sides have a grain of truth but miss the whole on that particular point. In any case, this was a little difficult to read but had some fascinating information. For people who are wondering what on earth this gap is between political visions, how on earth to bridge the gap, or why the gap even exists in the first place, this is a really informative piece.

Movies

The Hobbit & Fellowship trilogies (movies). I mean, it’s definitely not my first watch, not even my second. But I went through it with Sergey this time and that means the run-time is double because we pause to talk and discuss details. This watch came about partly due to Sergey’s contention that Gandalf’s reputation far outstrips his actual powers, so we ended up noting down every instance of Gandalf’s power to see if that was true. Conclusion: Gandalf is actually a decently powerful wizard, but tends to use the truly kickass powers in less-than-dire circumstances. That aside, this movie series was always a favorite for me. I rated The Hobbit trilogy lower the first time I saw it but, frankly, all together the six movies are fantastic and a great way to sink deep into lore-heavy fantasy for a while. And I’m catching way more easter-egg type details after having read the Silmarillion so it’s even more enjoyable. (finally, after about a week of binge-watching) I forgot how much this story impacted me. I forgot how wrenchingly bittersweet the ending is. I forgot how much of a mark that reading and watching this story left on my writing.

Upside-Down Magic. Effects were good. Actors were clearly having fun and enjoying everything. Story didn’t make enough sense for my taste, but it was a decent way to kill flight time.

Wish Dragon. So, yes, it’s basically an Aladdin rewrite, but it’s genuinely a cheesy good fluff fest that made me grin a whole lot.

Plays

Esther (Sight and Sound Theatres). < background info > This is my third time to this theatre. There are only two of these in existence and they only run productions of stories out of the Bible. The first time I went I saw a production of Noah, the second time I saw a production of Jesus. My middle sister has moved all the way out to Lancaster, PA in hopes of working at this theatre. My husband and I came out to visit her. < /background info > So. Esther. They really pulled out all the stops on the costumes and set. I mean, REALLY pulled out all the stops. And the three-quarters wrap-around stage is used to great effect. I tend to have a general problem of not understanding all the words in the songs, but I understood enough. I highly recommend sitting close to the front for immersive experiences. This theatre puts on incredible productions and if you ever, ever, EVER have the opportunity to go, take it. Even if you think it's nothing but a bunch of fairy tales, STILL GO. I doubt you'll ever see a fairy tale produced on another stage with equal dedication to immersion.

Shows

The Mandalorian (first two seasons). Well. This was pretty thoroughly enjoyable. It felt very Star-Wars, and I’d kind of given up after recent movies. Felt like it slipped into some preaching toward the end? Not sure, I could be overly sensitive about it, but I enjoyed this a lot (though I did need to turn to my housemate and ask where the flip in the timeline we were because I did NOT realize that the little green kid IS NOT ACTUALLY Yoda).

Games

Portal & Portal 2. Portal is probably the first video game I ever tried to play, back when I had no idea what I was doing. Back then, I attempted to play it on my not-for-gaming Mac laptop. Using my trackpad. Once the jumping-for-extra-velocity mechanic came into play, I just about lost my mind trying to do this with a trackpad and gave up. Later I returned to the game and played it with my then-boyfriend on a proper gaming computer. Now, after having played several games and gotten better at "reading the language" of video games, I decided I wanted to see if I could beat the Portal games by myself. Guess what. I BEAT 'EM. Yes, I remembered most of the puzzles in Portal so that's a little bit of a cheat, but I'd say a good 2/3 of Portal 2 was new puzzles to me. It is crazy how proud I feel of myself that I could beat Portal 2, especially. Learning how to play video games at this age has really knocked down the lie, "You can't learn anything." Though I still suck at platformers and games that require precision. Since I find those types frustrating, I probably won't be playing many. Games are about enjoyment, so I'll push myself a little, but not to the point where I can't stand what I'm playing.

The Observer. I like the concept and the art but I don't think I could keep trying to play this game. It's really depressing. My in-game family members all died of illness or accident or committed suicide. I also kept getting executed by the state. In order to keep us all alive I'd have to do pretty terrible things that I have a hard enough time contemplating even in a fictional setting.

Baba Is You. Fun and interesting concept, but I got stuck pretty early on. Don't think I want to push as hard on this one.

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

Hi Ralph I just want u to know I love reading your blog I learn so much and find it so interesting. So I was just wondering I understand u don’t agree with war but the poppy thing in uk is us remembering all the men and women who fought for our country and many of these people were conscripted or chose to fight against men like hitler Stalin Mussolini what is so wrong about honouring those people as without them our world might be very different

Anon 2: Forgive me if I’m totally ignorant but can you explain the problem with the poppies? I’m Canadian and all I recall about poppies is learning that In Flanders Field poem in elementary school every year and having to wear poppies on the 11th.

Anon 3: Why do you hate poppies?

********

So the most simple reason that I don’t like the culture around the wearing of poppies is that I think it misrepresents the history of war.

It’s really noticeable that in Britain (and in NZ - and I suspect other settler colonies that were part of the empire, but I don’t know for sure).  There’s been a noticeable increase in rememberence culture as those who actually remembered the first World War have all died and the number who were adults during the second World War have drastically decreased.  Rememberance culture, as it exists now, can be completely detatched from the reality of the first world war and those who experienced it.

I think the two anons do a good job of capturing how rememberance culture involves an amalglam of the two world wars in a way that doesn’t accurately represent either.  The first world war is widely known to have had a level of futility - men just sitting in trenches and eventually going over the top to be slaughtered. The Second World War, as the first anon suggests is popularly understood to have had a purpose - and defeating Nazi Germany was a worthwhile cause (although the reality was of course much more complicated).  But the running together of these two popular understandings of the war misrepresents them both - because the language use around poppies and remembrance is so often of both purpose and futility - in a way that should be incompatible - but ends up just 

And so much about both world wars ends up being forgotten by the very limited terms of rememberance.  The lambs to the slaughter imagery used around the first world war ignores the incredibly level of resistance to war on all sides.  It was mutiny by German forces that ended the first world war, but you wouldn’t know it from popular discussion.  There was also huge mutiny in the French forces in 1917 and significant resistance in the British army.  It also hides the reality that the first world war was an imperialist war - fought by imperialist countries for profit.  It was only futile for those who fought it based on a lie - it wasn’t futile for those with money and power. (It also hides a lot about the reality of the Second World War - and the actions of the allies, but this post is already wrong)

The British Legion (who sell the poppies) are advertising poppies under the heading: "Thank You to the WW1 generation for their service and sacrifice which changed the world we live in today.“ And I’m just astonished at how much that statement relies on remembering actually being a form of forgetting. I mean sure the first world war changed the world we lived in today - it was, for example, a huge contributor to the rise of fascism and the second world war. To hold those who fought in the war responsible for the world it created seems to me a slander and abomiation - but it’s presented as respect - because nothing about the popular myth of war bears any resemblance to it reality

The other aspect of this all - and what is absolutely erased - is the British armed forces were very busy outside world wars.  The British armed forces are the armed forces of empire.  They suppressed indigenous people’s resistance, stole land, massacred people - and that’s a far more recent part of the British armed forces history than teh second world war, let alone the first.  The atrocities in Malaya and Kenya were in the fifties and early 1960s. The British Army was murdering people in Ireland in my lifetime.

There are other reasons I hate poppies.  I really question why the deaths and the contributions of soldiers are treated differently from other equally dangerous and far more useful jobs (what about mothers who died in childbirth? What about workers who died at work?)  But what it comes back to is that I think it’s important to understand that the rememberance around poppies is telling a particular, untrue, story about the nature of war - and that’s an ideological project I’m opposed to.

[runningtothesea]

French novels - Rec list (part 2/2)

If you want to avoid spoilers, don't read the trigger warnings.

La nuit des temps (1968), René Barjavel

This is a science-fiction novel about scientists finding vestiges of a civilisation, as well as a woman and a man buried under the ice in Antarctica. They manage to wake the woman up and she tells them all about her civilisation, which disappeared 900 000 years prior.

Themes: science, exploring, civilisation, love, unrequited love, soulmates, misunderstandings, death, war.

Trigger warnings: some stuff is done against the consent of characters (not sex), very sad, no happy ending at all (not at all!), pretty tragic really. But it’s still worth it.

*

Un sac de billes (1973), Joseph Joffo

This is an autobiographic novel about Joseph leaving his home with his older brother Maurice during the Second World war to join some of his family in the Zone Libre, in order to escape the Nazis.

Themes: war, Judaism, family, freedom, oppression, Nazism, death of a loved one.

Trigger warnings: obviously Nazism/fascism, death.

Difficulty level: French pupils often read this book in middle-school, so it is not very difficult when it comes to language.

*

Le soleil des Scorta (2004), Laurent Gaudé 

This novel narrates the lives of several generations of the same Italian family, living in a village that rejects it. I loved this novel because it’s really easy to get immersed in the décor and atmosphere of it.

Themes: family, friendship, rejection, life in a small town, cruelty, feuds, death, love, religion, abuse.

Trigger warnings: character deaths, abuse of many kinds.

Difficulty level: I don’t remember it being particularly difficult, then again it won the Goncourt (which is a prestigious award for novels), so the style is probably quite elaborated in some way or other.

*

Le cœur cousu (2007), Carole Martinez

I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH (sorry, it’s just THAT good). I don’t think I know anyone who read it and didn’t like it (also I had the chance to meet the author when I was in high-school and got my book signed, and I’ll forever cherish this memory, it is totally irrelevant to this post but I had to talk about it). It is about a girl narrator and her family, it is quite hard to summarise, so I hope my minor freak out will be enough to convince a few people to give it a try. I’ll just add that this book is magical (in the figurative sense, but also because there is literal magic in the world in which the story takes place), and the atmosphere is dreamy and really original imo.

Themes: family, womanhood, mother/daughter relationship, gifts/talents, magic, tradition, travelling, changes, love, depression, religion, art.

Trigger warnings: all that comes to my mind right now is a passage talking about periods at the beginning of the book (so blood tw I guess), and depression.

Difficulty level: it’s pretty recent, so the writing isn’t that complicated I think. It’s still elaborated and beautiful writing, so it might ask for some kind of effort (but it’s definitely worth it).

*

Un homme accidentel (2008), Philippe Besson

A policeman meets an actor during a murder investigation and is immediately entranced by him.

Trigger warnings: this starts with an investigation after a prostitute was murdered, so it is dark.

Themes: love, homosexuality, feelings, adultery, fame, death.

Difficulty level: I honestly can’t remember (sorry), then again it  probably mean it’s pretty standard (if it was particularly difficult, I think I would have remembered it).

*

Du Domaine des Murmures (2011), Carole Martinez

And Carole Martinez appears a second time in my list with this shorter novel set in the Middle Ages. A young woman named Esclarmonde chooses not to marry and to stay confined in a cell until she dies. However she soon gives birth, which is taken as a miracle by the population.

Themes: religion, marriage, motherhood, miracles, loss, abandonment.

Trigger warnings: abuse, rape, incest, death by fire (yes, it’s a dark story).

Difficulty level: it can be pretty difficult because there is some unusual vocabulary (since the story takes place in the Middle Ages).

*

La vérité sur l’affaire Harry Quebert (2012), Joël Dicker  

A woman disappears in 1975. Her bones are found in Harry Quebert’s garden in 2008. Marcus, a writer, decides to help prove his friend Harry’s innocence. To be honest, I’m not even sure I remember how the book ends, but I really loved it. I remember being so hyped up on it I even wrote an essay to defend this book against my literature teacher’s criticism (because she didn’t like it for some obscure reason, while every one of my friends who read it absolutely loved it… I mean, this book is like more than 600 pages and I did read most of it in one sitting).

Themes: friendship, love, treason, writer’s block, inspiration, past and present.

Tigger warnings: I think someone is disfigured in this book, and we have a scene telling how it happened, if my memory hasn’t already gone whacky at such a young age. Apart from that, keep in mind that it is an investigation story.

Difficulty level: I do think it is quite easy, so go for it guys! :D

*

Le livre des Baltimore (2015), Joël Dicker  

This book is about the Goldman family. Marcus Goldman lives in New Jersey with his parents, and he’s fascinated with the Goldman family (his aunt, uncle and cousins) from Baltimore. This part of the family is a lot richer and more successful than Marcus’ family, but a tragic event disrupts everything. Will Marcus finally be able to find out what happened to the family he admired so much in his youth? I’ll let you see for yourself ;) I remember being disappointed by that book, but to be honest my expectations were too high because of how much I had loved the author’s previous book a few years before. It’s still a pretty good book.

Themes: friendship, family, money, success, family drama.

Trigger warnings: as the summary suggests, there is a tragic event that happened at some point, so it isn’t all rainbows and butterflies. Apart from that, I can’t think of anything in particular.

Difficulty level: pretty much the same as the previous book, I think ;)

[johnfmyles]

Albinati’s The Catholic School

Albinati’s The Catholic School is a huge rambling novel, pretty much damned by Colm Toibin in a recent NYRB for its imprecision and sheer length. I found this book important because of what it conveys to the reader about western cultural, bourgeois, and general social conditions providing the grounds for rape and the deeply-ingrained misogynistic male mind-set underlying it. Although the nomination of the Catholic School in the title of the novel might suggest that this is the key institutional source for that culture of rape and violence towards women, it actually isn’t key. Rather culture, psychology of the mid-20th century male and the bourgeois family, come across as the more significant sources - the actual ‘schools’ for rape. 

At places in this novel, as it lumbers relentless along, Albinati’s narrator, a writer and sometime prison lecturer, as if to remind himself stops and states what he thinks the novel is all about:

“The story that his book is going to tell, alongside other stories, ought to show how, on at least one occasion, on the basis of groundwork laid long ago by numerous contributing factors, around the middle of the eighth decade of the last century - the 1970s - the priest’s got their formula wrong.”

This might seem to suggest that rape culture is a question of schooling, pedagogy, particularly of the catholic school variety, a view that Toibin seems to follow when he blames the institution, comparing the Catholic school to the boarding school bullying in Musil’s in Young Torless. But then:

“The central story of this book will confirm that you can be obedient students by day and nevertheless go out to kidnap and rape underage girls by night.” 

So, maybe we think this is going to be about conformity, like Moravia’s The Conformist. No, or not really, although it is about rape culture. Then he says, again trying to keep a grip on his subject:

“This book of mine also belongs to the genre of true crime exploitation, though at arms’ length, as we’ll see.”

But again, not really, or not so consciously as this suggests. So the writer/narrator’s summary posts did not help this reader and their status is like that when at one point the narrator asks himself as he rambles on:

“Does it have anything to do with the events described in this book? Yes and no.”

This is often the case, one has to plough on in the rambling reflections of the writer/narrator. But it is correct I think that that which ineluctably shapes the phenomenon of rape, is a shape which is complex, irregular, and just cannot be understood pat.

So the story of The Catholic School may seem to be about a single act - the notorious kidnapping and rape of two young girls and the murder of one of them. One might say agreeing with the narrator that this event is the ‘axis’ of the novel, appearing as it does well into it. This is the CR/M (the Circeo/Criminal rape and murder) that is constantly, fleetingly, referred to in the lead up and the aftermath sections of the novel/book (this seems to be Albinati’s own ambivalence about the genre of The Catholic School). [SPOILER ALERT FOR THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH] The CR/M is described as monstrous, a dreadful assault, notorious and widely shocking late 1970s Italy, a huge event. But, strangely, when the event actually arrives and is described it is conveyed in prose and style that is almost pedestrian and the act seems ambiguous, non-specific in depiction. It is pretty anti-climatic  and the reader feels something is missing. Certainly, by this stage any idea that the novel belongs to the genre of ‘crime exploitation’ goes totally out of the window because it isn’t lurid or graphic.

I was puzzled by what Albinati was doing. He signalled that this is a novel about the real crime, that which all of Italy knew about, but 90% of the 1200 pages hardly touch the actual crime. And many of what are presented as integral dimensions of the CR/M are also never fully developed. One would think that maybe theological-ethical questions of sin and guilt might be integral, especially as many of the elements of the story seem to arise from the Catholic school and the behaviour fostered there either by the priest/teachers or by the particularities of the cohort that included the rapists or their associates. But sin is rarely mentioned as a concept in the novel - just 92 times in all (such counts being one of the benefits of reading this as an ebook, alongside not having a doorstopper in one’s lap) and in nearly all senses is inconsequential when it does appear.

Similarly, porn, surely at its apogee in the 1970s, at least in terms of its crudest and casual forms of objectification of women and girls, although regularly addressed as an issue by the narrator, tends to take a secondary role. He notes the affinity press reporting and crime fiction, have in feeding on the porn industry:

“…the flesh trade, continues to expand limitlessly until an unbroken pornographic continuum that takes in territories of crime reporting, given that these territories are where excitement runs most unbridled, expertly camouflaged behind the mortal condemnations that we customarily reserve for true sties and events…”

Porn is thus seen as a reflection of the broader culture of abuse and hatred of women underlying the individual CR/M, but it isn’t the essential issue (as, say, 1970s feminist writers like McKinnon had it) - it has only the status of being a reflection of a much broader, institutional, problem.

Also of really only secondary consideration is the role/legacy of Fascism in the broader ‘field’ of the crime (I use 'field' in the way Bourdieu uses it. At places Albinati seems to refer to Bourdieu’s sociology. He talks, for instance, of intellectuals being the ‘dominated fraction’ of the dominant class, a phrase that echoes the French sociologist, and Albinati is very much a sociological novelist.) Fascism is discussed at some length around half-way through the novel. There seems to be an underlying epistemology at work here which privileges form over content, and in relation to fascism this is presented as:

“Fascism in fact constitutes the dilemma of unrepresentability; and perhaps for that reason, it loved to depict itself in whole healthy forms. The specificity of fascism is that it is, as we say of certain diseases, non-specific, which means that it does not consist of its ideology, but rather the way it conducts around that ideology an action and an identity.” 

This view of signfication, of significance of form over content, reveals much about how the writer sees the world. It also explains the sort of novel The Catholic School is: where any meaning of anything like the CR/M has to be situated in the widest of sociologically-understood landscapes.

So porn, fascism, sin/morality, seem to be only elements in this landscape or field of rape, rather than either central or critical figures that might explain it alone. But although the field of the CR/M is presented in the broadest, most rambling of terms, there are significant features in the field. As a sociological novel the characters are nearly all ‘flat’. Plot is also substituted with the delay and then denouement of the actual CR/M. There  are few topographical descriptions of place and little or any real feel for the flow of time. But Albinati states at one point “now we come to the bourgeois family that this book is about…” and what the novel is good at is in the analysis of the bourgeois family’s role in the field of rape, its role in setting the behaviour marking male sexuality and sexual aggression. Even in Italy the 1970s was a time when society was becoming more permissive, but the consequences were ambiguous:

“Free to do what? Many of us experienced scraps of old-style family oppression, hybridized or alternating with a permissiveness that was the product still of our parents’ specific beliefs…”

But this period is seen by the narrator as a time when fathers, ‘sires’ as he calls them, become something of a ‘nullity’, and compared to mothers in the novel, hardly figure except for (the Huck Finn' boy) Arbus’s  whose dad publicly in the Rome press announces his homosexuality and abandons his family for a gay lifestyle. Albinati develops this theme when he evokes Thomas Mann and Moravia in the sections on the role of the bourgeois family. From Mann, he argues our understanding of the centrality of the bourgeois family:

“It is therefore a class that progresses by contradicting itself, that defines itself by its opposite. Perhaps that is why as…Thomas Mann maintains, it is the class with the greatest number of points of contact and things in common with the human race as a whole.”

An overstatement, but with some element of insight, at least in regard to white 1970s’ European societies like Italy. In relation to Moravia, Albinati argues that, in fact, indifference is seen as part of the legacy of the 60s (“a new attitude surfaced in the history of family relations, namely indifference, a reluctance to interfere, to judge…”) but it is not really as significant as Moravia made it out to be:

“…if only the sin of the bourgeois was indifference…if only the Bourgeois really did let life slide off his back…Quite the contrary, there is no creature on earth more highly alert than he. His existence unfolds under the banner of an incessant comparison and measurement between himself ad others.”

The character of the male progeny of the bourgeois family, then, is located as a key factor configuring the wider culture/field of rape - this is the class figure seen by Albinati as the epicentre of the contemporary manifestation of rape as a social phenomenon. The bourgeois male is the one who is particularly ‘fucked up’ by the retrogression of father figures. So this is a very conservative position and feminist historians, analysers of patriarchy might have something to add or contest here. But, perhaps, it is balanced by the odd, strange, obsession in the novel, only indirectly addressed as a causal factor in rape culture (as is the case with most of Albinati’s opinions.)

This is the figure of the bourgeois mother (again, and aside, it is strange that Toibin did not pick up on this in his NYRB’s review, given his own perceptive work on the literary and other influences of mothers.)Throughout the novel many of the schoolboys’ mums are depicted as being sexually attractive to the boys. The boys consciously note the way mums dress, their attractiveness, their sexual allure. The boy Max’s mum is described as having “bronzed shoulders, her bronzed back, the neckline that revealed freckled flesh…”. I found it hard to believe that real boys consider their own, or their mates’ mothers in this way - surely they were more likely to see them as nonentities, like their fathers. Falling somewhat into cod-psychology Albinati directly evokes the figure of the mother as a deep psychological animus in the boys’ sexuality:

“It is the angry bite to the mother’s breast. By brutalising that breast, we escape from the figure that dominated the most important years of our lives. We take vengeance on our mother by devastating the wombs of women…”.

So, related to this, we find that Stefano, one of the rapists, is reported to have had sex with the mother of one of the other boys. But the psychology here seems weak, a bit crass, a repercussion of the general flatness of characters in this novel. But in a surprising reversal the narrator states:

“In the early years of psychoanalysis, people learned for the first time that many non-sexual acts had a hidden sexual source; now, in contrast, we realise that may sexual behaviours have a non-sexual motivation.”

But into this Freudianism gets mixed the underlying epistemology of form over content we have seen at work in the novel. So it is not the content, sexual gratification of any particular sexual form, but sex as a container for apparently non-sexual motivations. Sex between men and women is actually, then, a displacement of what Albinati calls ‘penis embarrassment’ - something that he sees as common to all (bourgeois) men. Women, in contrast, are seen by men as psychically-threatening because of they have no immediately visible sex organ. This absence is threatening to men whose sexuality is based fundamentally on symbolism that is phallic. 

So the young men at the catholic school are shown to be, a little like Moravia’s conformist, shy, burdened by the cultural demands associated with masculinity, fearful of being called, for example, ‘queer’ (‘if anything what we did hate was the thought that we might be taken for queers…’) because it is the form, here queerness, rather than the actuality which is the more significant, cultural, sociological, animus. So, when the narrator goes to high school he befriends a gym teacher who is also a painter of nudes, nicknamed Courbet because of his subject matter, the nude and female sexual organ (as in Courbet’s ‘Origin of the World’.) The female sexual organ is described, though, as a ‘gross field of nothingness’ and Courbet argues that all men are basically queer or half-queer and that when having sex with women they are really in auto-erotic stimulation. They also are seen as being/becoming androgynous:

“…men who really like women sooner or later desire not only to have women, but also to be women…”

In the Catholic school it was ‘alright to be half-queers…but not an iota more’. If you were becoming identified there as a ‘faggot’, however, you had to find some other boy to bully and call a faggot. 

These are some features of the cultural and social field that Albinati situates the singular act of rape and murder in the CR/M. The purported centrality of the Catholic school, given so much significance in the novel’s title, is not really the key locus for understanding the crime. The crime itself is diminished, a mere cameo appearance in the much broader field of bourgeois culture, a culture marked by a warped form of male sexuality. The actual ‘school’, then, is not the Catholic SLM Institute, but the ‘school’ of a bourgeois familial culture that forms its young men into a perversely misogynistic mind-set, a warped psyche, a sexuality where rape and a murderous compulsion to dominate/deny women’s own sexuality is inevitable.

Yet the figures of the priests at the school are interesting in so much as they seem to represent, consolidate or configure many of the factors of bourgeois toxic masculinity that the novel traces. If actual fathers are very much absent in the novel, the priests appear in the guise of old-fashioned, Thomas Mann’ types of bourgeois respectable fathers (their tunics ‘inspire[d] respect in me…’.) This is shown to be an illusion at the end of the novel when the narrator recalls what happened at a school camp and he reflects more broadly on the priests’ ‘mutilating’ vow of celibacy: 

“what moral authority might I acknowledge, for what reason on earth should I allow myself to be guided, aided, instructed or even just advised by a man who has so horribly mutilated himself? By giving up the only thing that makes this beastly life worth living at all, namely, love?”

He goes on:

“This is not renunciation, cecil nest pas une pipe: there are times when Catholicism appears to be a forerunner of surrealism.”

The pedagogy of the Catholic school is based fundamentally on type of muscular christianity. But this ‘formula’ is seen as wrong, and perhaps allied with the perversity of the priestly life, this much at least is a part of the ‘story this book is [going] to tell…’

But sociologically the ‘school’ of rape is much larger than the school run by the priests - it is an entire social field, a moral field corrupted at its core - via the media, by salacious movies, the lurid sex-crime novel, ‘then you can see that the degree of moral involvement can stretch out to touch the whole of society’. The issue, the moral issue of rape is made up of the ‘absence’ of women; either at the catholic school, the absence of female genitalia, the absence of wives for priests, absence of women in the army (a lot in this novel about rape as an act of war):

“…in middle school it already starts to sound odd, it’s becoming increasingly clear that half the world is missing in there, but the unhappiness of developing male bodies is still thus protected from all embarrassing comparisons and can be vented almost entirely in sports and fisticuffs…”

Albinati offers no easy solutions - like a Bourdieusian (but passionate) sociologist he rather plots out the field of forces involved in the cultural, moral, political dimensions of rape culture. The contrast can be made to Ben Lerner’s Topeka School, a novel with similar concerns to The Catholic School. A recent review in the NYRB describes when the character Adam, like an avenging Adam, knocks the phone from the hand of a man who’d been abusing his female partner: the reviewer noting that the novelist’s position on western masculinity is captured in this action. But Albinati’s novel isn’t conclusive in that kind of way: it simply fizzles out. But for me, having endured the long meandering journey into the school of rape, I feel I have experienced many of the dimensions that go into making the culture of rape.

And for me this is the reason why The Catholic School is an important novel, with an important moral purpose. Yet the actual language, diction and syntax, of the writing betrays the lesson. There are long sections, particularly in the last third of the novel, when the narrator describes his sexual affairs with women. The prose in these sections is unconsciously (?) objectifying of women:

“I slid into her. She gasped. She held her breath. And with her voice in a falsetto she asked if it had excited me to hear about Romina, about the two of them together. Had she done it intentionally? ‘Do you…do you want me to tell you more…?’ ‘No. Shut up now’ - that wasn’t why. But she went on talking. And I went on fucking her…”

But maybe Albinati’s approach, mainly sociological, falters when it comes to producing a counterpoint, an alternative discursive, linguistic-syntactic, an alternative erotics to convey his argument - we have to look elsewhere (Kristeva?) for that.

[anonymoustalks]

i think the supreme court is a horrible institution tbh

(6-19-20) You both like politics.

You: hi

Stranger: hi

You: what are you interested in?

Stranger: ideology wise? leftism. discussion? whatever you want

You: leftism is an interesting word

Stranger: there are a variety of ideologies.

Stranger: what are u interested in?

You: mhm me, I guess people and the issues that affect them and their feelings

You: I guess I'm interested in what people think

Stranger: that's fair. different people believe different things for their own reasons.

You: yup

Stranger: any ideology?

You: I'm kind of like vanilla moderate-left

Stranger: hah.

Stranger: what an interesting phrase.

You: lol

You: idk I dunno if there's a particular ideology to it

You: I think I'm relatively normal though

Stranger: do you support capitalism?

You: mhm idk, we live in a capitalistic society

You: I think there are bad things that arise from capitalism

You: but I think I also benefit from it

Stranger: i suppose so.

You: what about you?

Stranger: no, i don't support capitalism

You: mhm how far left are you?

Stranger: hahaha

Stranger: definitely not center-left

Stranger: pretty far

You: lol

You: all the way to the left? (jk)

Stranger: i'm so far left i don't believe in a state

You: haha

You: I feel like there are many of you on omegle

Stranger: or u may just be talking to me over and over again

You: that could be the case

You: do you think you've talked to me before?

Stranger: i meet a lot of people who refuse labels

Stranger: but i find that funny bc in the end our ideological beliefs can be classified as being this or that

You: mhm

You: I think I'm a little bit more policy driven than ideologically driven possibly

You: ideologically I may be a hippie lol

Stranger: but policies are the result of underlying ideology

Stranger: i like hippies a bit

Stranger: free love

You: mhm, but the policies I support don't always reflect my ideology I think

You: yup!

Stranger: fair

You: I think it's important to love everyone

You: and I think its important for government to address as many people's problems as possible

You: even though somebody's problems might not be my problems

Stranger: well as fellow humans we should care for each other

You: yup

You: I like omegle because I like hearing about what people consider to be their problems

You: and I think about what they are angry about

Stranger: capitalism, post-colonial legacies, and hierarchies of power

Stranger: i guess they could all fall under the latter

You: haha ^^

You: where are you from?

Stranger: american

You: mhm

Stranger: u?

You: I think there are a lot of race narratives lately

You: us east

You: so I think about that a lot

You: a lot of difficult feelings about race

Stranger: we have never addressed the hierarchies that slavery created

You: yup

Stranger: they evolved

Stranger: and continue to ruin ppl

You: mhm

Stranger: 's lives

You: I think I try to understand where the alt-right and conservatives are coming from

You: or at least, that's what I spend a lot of my time on omegle doing

Stranger: i don't engage with them

Stranger: they lie

You: you dc?

Stranger: what?

You: disconnect

Stranger: yes. fascism does not need a platform

You: mhm

Stranger: and i don't need to hear someone try to explain white genocide to me

Stranger: it's not real

Stranger: they have created false narratives

Stranger: and i know where they come frm

You: mhm

You: I try to talk to them

You: or well, I try to understand why they're attached to their beliefs

Stranger: their narratives are violent

You: very

Stranger: be careful

Stranger: u might fall down a hole

You: fall down a hole?

Stranger: into the alt-right

You: oh haha

Stranger: i've seen it happen to too many moderate or centrists

You: mhm, thanks for the warning I guess haha

You: I just think there is so much sadness in this country

You: and I think that bothers me

Stranger: u think?

You: well it does

Stranger: i understand the sadness

Stranger: but i am not sad any longer, i am angry

You: mhm

You: are you protesting?

Stranger: yes

You: mhm that's cool

Stranger: and u?

You: no, I'm not very involved, unfortunately >.<

You: I feel like I am glued to the news constantly though

Stranger: if u are not protesting, u can donate

Stranger: or disseminate information

You: oh do you know any good organizations?

Stranger: the naacp is always good

You: yup

Stranger: don't just donate to random ones, some aren't real

You: yeah that would be bad

Stranger: it happened with this foundation based in CA

Stranger: ppl donated millions

You: that's fraud

Stranger: i mean technically in this system it's not

You: hm?

Stranger: it's a legitimate org

You: oh

Stranger: but it's owned by one man

You: ah...

Stranger: only one man

Stranger: and he's the only one who "works" there

You: yeah that seems so sketchy

Stranger: but it's also ppl's fault for not doing their research

You: off topic but I'm really happy about daca today

Stranger: i am too.

You: (was browsing through the naacp twitter)

Stranger: but still worried

You: yeah

Stranger: roberts only sided with the liberal justices bc of a technicality

You: yeah

Stranger: i think the supreme court is a horrible institution tbh

You: mhm go on

Stranger: why do they basically get lifetime appointments?

You: mhmm

You: yeah idk

You: I think in theory, they're not supposed to be political

You: but they totally are

Stranger: of course

Stranger: everything is political

You: are you involved in social media?

Stranger: not really

You: was just curious where you get your news

Stranger: i browse news sources.

Stranger: i like politico

You: ahh that's nice

Stranger: it's pretty accepted by both parties

You: yeah I'm browsing the wikipedia article

You: I feel like I end up reading them a lot when it's around election time for some reason

Stranger: i always cross-check sources tho

You: mhm you're very thorough

You: I think I usually end up reading the new york times the most, but mostly because I have it on my phone the most

Stranger: anyone can be the victim of fake news, i am no exception

You: yeah

You: I should check if there's a politico app

Stranger: i try not to have those apps, bc then i'd be tempted to keep checking

You: haha

Stranger: i limit my news intake to the morning

Stranger: and sometimes in the late afternoon

You: mhm, I should probably be more disciplined I guess

Stranger: we all have our thing

Stranger: i only recently started doing it

Stranger: i can only hand so much human suffering at one time

You: yeah

You: it's a lot to process and digest

Stranger: humans haven't evolved to handle this amount of human suffering

Stranger: the digital age overwhelms us

You: yeah

You: idk if people or more insensitive or something too

You: I gues the mean-spiritedness

Stranger: i think we become desensitized

Stranger: it's like seeing another school shooting

Stranger: you feel bad, but it's morbidly normal

Stranger: and u think "not again" but then nothing changes

You: mhm, I've been weirdly and randomly emotional over the last couple weeks

You: it's strange

Stranger: u should let yourself feel

Stranger: it's a lot

You: mhm

You: I don't know how to navigate the politico site lol

Stranger: oh?

You: I kind of like the old style where everything is just listed chronologically in order of publication lol

Stranger: Hahaha

Stranger: i understand

You: like I think I found their tag feature

You: but I just want to be able to scroll through everything

Stranger: but this might make you a better news consumer

You: mhm, efficient or something? you mean?

Stranger: not efficient.

Stranger: a more conscious consumer

Stranger: you're going to be more thoughtful in what you chose to seek out and consume

You: oh

You: idk, I kind of struggle with "top news" sections

Stranger: hah

Stranger: Well, I should go to bed. It was a pleasure chatting. Take care, and wear a mask!

You: okay, goodnight!

You: thanks for talking to me!

Stranger: No problem, it's nice chatting with people who aren't dumbass pedants.

Stranger: Goodnight.

Stranger has disconnected.

[inthatstateofgrace]

Is Information Overload Making it Harder to be Happy?

Dissatisfaction, discontentment, and out-and-out unhappiness are a surprisingly ubiquitous feature of modern life. Mental health issues are a growing public health concern, rates of stress, anxiety and depression are rising sharply among the UK’s teenage girls and the United States has become 5% unhappier over the past 10 years.

All this comes despite the fact that, objectively speaking, modern humans in wealthy countries are probably some of the luckiest people that have ever lived. There are also myriad self-help books, wellness gurus, and “Five Ways to Find Happiness” listicles crowding our cultural landscape. So why do we find it so hard to find a solution to our unhappiness, and is information overload part of the problem?

Finding the Cause

There are many theories as to what is making us unhappy. It might be how marketing creates a constant sense of unattainable desire and fear of social exclusion, the fact many of us spend much of our lives in work rather than pursuing our hobbies and seeing loved ones, or our increasing isolation from community and nature. Or, as is being increasingly suggested, we might just be looking at social media too much.

Whatever it is, many of us struggle with negative feelings  – such as stress, loneliness, envy, and worry – on a daily basis. And as many theories as there are trying to explain modern unhappiness, there are just as many suggestions to solve it.

We are bombarded from every side with ideas, advice, and instructions on how to better live our lives. Those who don’t subscribe to a particular religion can pick and choose the bits of spirituality that appeal to them, while rejecting anything that seems too at odds with how they would like to live.

Just One Too Many Ideas

With so many ideas, advice, and guidance on how to live our lives, and this unimaginably vast deluge of information all available to us at the click of a button, is it any wonder that so many of us are frozen into confused inaction? What’s more, the nature of the media and clickbait content is making this even more difficult to assess and sift through with any amount of good judgement.

There’s always the next new trend: the thing the media grabs on to and promotes beyond all sense, before subjecting it to a comprehensive backlash that ensures any good advice is utterly lost.

A couple of years ago, ‘clean eating’ was touted as the solution to all our problems, and wholeheartedly embraced. That was until the inevitable moment where the movement was completely trashed, and cited as the cause of everything from body fascism to eating disorders.

This cycle of extremes, and the Internet-borne impulse to discuss everything in the most polemic ways possible, make it difficult to trust anything. And things get even more obfuscated when you consider that with every trend and backlash, there are vested interests muddying the waters in their attempts to shape opinion one way or the other.

Seeing the Wood for the Trees

So, under the weight of all this advice, how do we find what works for us, and is truly relevant to our own lives? Unfortunately, in order to answer this question, I’ll be adding to the mountain of guidance already out there.

The first thing to do is make efforts to disengage a little. You know how kids are generally carefree and happy unless something immediately and obviously bad is happening? It’s because they have no problem existing in the moment, and tend to take life for what it is. They also only have to trust in one set of rules and ideas – that of their parents – which might not always be ideal, but certainly makes life simpler.

Meditation

I would recommend meditation to help yourself live more in the now, and give your mind some space from the chattering and assault of information that has become a constant in so many of our lives. It offers clarity, and an increased insight into how your mind works — along with the thought patterns, fears, and worries that tend to dominate.

And aside from all this, it makes some space in your day to simply be. In an age when our smartphones mean there isn’t one second of our time where we needn’t be entertained, informed, or socializing, this is very rare indeed.

Switching Off

You may also consider a digital detox. Rolling news and constantly updating social media feeds are pretty addictive, and a week where you turn your smartphone off (or just turn off the WiFi and data) can help you to stop mindlessly scrolling.

With an end to this stream of information, you won’t always be taking in differing opinions, the next new trend, and what product or idea has fallen out of favor. This will give you the chance to focus, and truly concentrate on finding the things that make you happy, rather than being pulled in hundreds of different directions.

Commitment

Lastly, it���s important to commit to an idea, at least for a little while. So many of us fall into the trap of believing that an overnight overhaul will lead to a totally comprehensive lifestyle change, where we join the gym, go on a diet, and start painting. Then, when we fail to keep any of this up, we berate ourselves and promise to try again next week, week after week, sometimes for years on end.

The content of our resolutions may change as different ideas fall in and out of fashion, but so often they are ultimately doomed. Instead, it’s far easier and clearer just to pick one thing, and do it for at least two months to see whether it results in us feeling happier and better within ourselves.

This might be using your lunch break to go out for a walk everyday, rediscovering your passion for climbing/pottery/cooking by devoting two hours of your time to the pursuit each week, or promising to read a few pages of a book before bed rather than checking your phone. Yoga is also a great place to start, because it’s a practice that isn’t focused on competition or performance, and something you can dive into whatever your skill or fitness level.

The trick is focusing on and committing to one thing – and not reading 18 different articles about the relative advantages and disadvantages of each habit before finding a new trend to try.

In an age where there’s such a wealth of opinions and information available to us, the simple act of choosing something to wholeheartedly believe in can be a really powerful step towards happiness.

———————-

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Holly Ashby. Holly is a wellness writer who has worked with Will Williams Meditation, a meditation centre in London, for three years. They teach a form of transcendental meditation to help people cope with the stresses of modern life, hold meditation retreats, and help those living with issues such as anxiety and depression.

Read more on Daily Cup of Yoga

Time to Simplify and De-Junkify! Yoga for Dummies, p. 277 Yoga encourages you to cultivate the virtue of greedlessness in all matters.  The Sanskrit word for this is aparigraha, ...

Defeating Unhappiness At times I have felt defeated by life. All I ever wanted was to be peaceful, happy, and free. I went about attaining it by deconstructing myself an...

Minimizing On and Off the Mat I recently moved into a granny flat close to the yoga studio where I teach. Although the circumstances for my sudden move were complicated, it was...

10 Reasons Your Happiness is Worth It “I’m overwhelmed.” “I’m stressed.” “I’m too busy.” “I don’t have time.” You can never have time. Time just passes. Nobody can own it, have it, ...

.yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb { background: !important; -webkit-transition: background 0.2s linear; -moz-transition: background 0.2s linear; -o-transition: background 0.2s linear; transition: background 0.2s linear;;color:!important; } .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb:hover{background:#fcfcf4 !important;color:!important;} .yuzo_related_post .yuzo_text, .yuzo_related_post .yuzo_views_post {color:!important;} .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb:hover .yuzo_text, .yuzo_related_post:hover .yuzo_views_post {color:!important;} .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb a{color:!important;} .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb a:hover{color:!important;} .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb:hover a{ color:!important;} .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb{ margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 5px 5px 5px 5px; } .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb .yuzo-img{ -webkit-transition:all 0.3s ease-out; -moz-transition:all 0.3s ease-out; -o-transition:all 0.3s ease-out; -ms-transition:all 0.3s ease-out; transition:all 0.3s ease-out; } .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb .yuzo-img-wrap{ overflow:hidden; background: url(https://ift.tt/2kZUvou) no-repeat center; } .yuzo_related_post .relatedthumb:hover .yuzo-img { opacity: 0.7; -webkit-transform: scale(1.2); transform: scale(1.2); } from Daily Cup of Yoga https://ift.tt/2ILGYIk

[clubofinfo]

Expert: The world is in ruins. It is literally burning, covered by slums, by refugee camps, and its great majority is ‘controlled by markets’, as was the dream and design of individuals such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Führers like Kissinger and Brzezinski sacrificed tens of millions of human lives all over our planet, just to prevent nations from trying to fulfill their spontaneous socialist, and even, God forbid, Communist dreams and aspirations. Some of the tyrants were actually very ‘honest’: Henry Kissinger once observed, publicly, that he saw no reason why a certain country should be allowed to “go Marxist” merely because “its people are irresponsible”. He was thinking about Chile. He “saw no reason” and as a result, several thousands of people were murdered… Ruining, wiping out entire countries, just to prevent them from ‘going their own way’, has been fully acceptable in the circles of politicians, military strategists, intelligence officers and economists who are based in London, New York, Washington, Paris and in other centers of the so-called “free world”, from where almost all dispensable lives of “un-people” inhabiting Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Oceania are being controlled unceremoniously. The system of Western oppression often appears to be almost ‘perfect’. To a great extent it is certainly bulletproof. But there is always one serious obstacle blocking the way of Western imperialism – the barrier that prevents it from fully controlling and ruining the Planet. That obstacle, the barrier, is called the Great October Revolution and its legacy. Since 1917, for exactly one hundred years, there has been this ‘ghost’ haunting the European and North American empires: it is a ghost which whispers relentlessly about internationalism, about egalitarianism, about great humanistic dreams in which all people are equal, have exactly the same rights and opportunities, and cannot be exploited by one particular race, and by one economic dogma. To make things even worse, this red and somehow very optimistic ghost does much more than just whispering: it is also singing, dancing, reciting revolutionary poetry and periodically taking up arms and fighting for the oppressed, even totally desperate human beings, regardless of the color of their skin. One often wonders whether the ghost is really a ghost, or a living creature. Which makes it all even more frightening, at least for the tyrants and the imperialists. ***** The West is totally petrified! It tries to appear cool, in full control. It deploys its elaborate propaganda system, it regurgitates its dogmas everywhere; it injects them into arts, entertainment, news bulletins, school curricula, psychology, and even advertisements. It lies, twists facts, perverts history and constructs pseudo-reality. All available means are used; the ideological warfare is complete. No matter what the Western Empire does, the red ghost is still here, all around; it is inspiring millions of educated and dedicated men and women all over the world. It is tremendously resilient. It never surrenders, never gives up fighting, even in those countries where all hopes and dreams appear to be totally destroyed. And where there are only ashes left, it at least never gives up haunting – frightening both the local elites and the implanted imperialist regimes. While to many people living in the Western capitals, this red ghost is synonymous with the worst enemy, in most of the oppressed, occupied and humiliated nations, it represents the perpetual struggle against colonialism and oppression, and it symbolizes resistance, resilience, pride and the belief in a totally different world. ***** Imperialists know that unless this creature, the ghost and the hope it represents, are thoroughly destroyed, wiped out and buried somewhere deep underground, there can be no final victory, and therefore no celebration. They are doing all in their power to discredit the ghost and the ideals it professes. They are presenting it in the bleakest colors, confusing people by connecting it with fascism and Nazism (while it is them – the Western imperialists – and their own system, that have been fascist and ‘Nazi’, for decades and even centuries). They brutalize, terrorize and murder innocent people in countries that dare to decide to go Communist, socialist or simply ‘independent’. Such heinous acts are forcing the governments of embattled nations to become defensive, to protect their citizens, to take ‘extraordinary measures’. And these defensive measures are, in turn, described by the Western propaganda as oppressive, dogmatic and ‘undemocratic’. The strategy and tactics of the Empire are clear and highly effective: you keep punching, molesting and harassing an innocent person who is simply trying to live her life. When she has had enough, when she decides to punch back, even arm herself, change the lock, you describe her as aggressive, paranoid, and dangerous to the society. You claim that her behavior is giving you the right to break into her house, to beat her up, to rape her, and then to force her into thoroughly changing her beliefs and lifestyle. Right after the Revolution, 100 years ago, the Soviets gave the right to secede to all the former parts of the Russian empire. Sweeping democratic reforms were introduced. All the feudal and oppressive structures of Tsarist rule collapsed, overnight. But the young country was almost immediately attacked from abroad, by a group of nations that included the UK, the US, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Japan. Ruthless aggressions and foreign campaigns of sabotage radicalized the Soviet state, as they later radicalized Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua, Vietnam, China, Venezuela and many other revolutionary countries. It is an appalling, disgusting way of running the world, but it is highly effective; ‘it works’. And it has been done for so long, that no one is surprised, anymore. This is how the West has been controlling, manipulating and ruining the world for many centuries, enjoying absolute impunity, even congratulating itself for being ‘free’ and ‘democratic’, shamelessly using clichés such as ‘human rights’. But at least now, there is a struggle. The world used to be totally at the mercy of Europe and North America. Until the Great October Socialist Revolution! ***** Recently, I wrote a book about The Great October Socialist Revolution, its impact on the world, and on the birth of internationalism. I had to write it. I had enough of reading and watching that entire anti-Soviet, anti-Communist propaganda bordello, that fundamentalist gospel; I had enough of being bombarded with brainwashing rubbish day after day, year after year, decade after decade! The Aurora After working in more than 160 countries, in all corners of the world, witnessing the Western murderous drive against democracy and the free will of the people, I felt it was my obligation to at least explain my position on the event that took place 100 years ago in the city and in the country where I was born. And in my book I did exactly that. It is not what some would call ‘an objective’ book. It is definitely not some tiresome academic essay, full of footnotes and useless citations. I don’t believe in ‘objectivity’. Or more precisely, I don’t think that human beings are capable of being objective, or that they should even aim at that. However, I strongly believe that they should clearly and honestly say and define where they stand, without deceiving their readers. And that’s precisely what I did in my latest book: I took sides. I clarified what the Revolution means to me. I recalled what it means to hundreds of millions of oppressed and tormented human beings worldwide. I quoted some of them. The Great October Socialist Revolution was not perfect. Nothing in this world is, nothing ever should be ‘perfect’. Perfection is appalling, cold, and even imagining it is tremendously boring. Instead, the Great October Socialist Revolution made a heroic attempt to liberate people from archaic beliefs, from feudalism and blind submission, from physical, intellectual and emotional slavery. It also defined all human beings as equal, regardless of their race and sex. It did not do it through hypocritical ‘political correctness’, which only spreads some second-rate sticky honey over the surface of shit, leaving the excrement itself intact; it cut to the core; it built a brand new lexicon, understanding of the world, and it created a totally new reality. It returned hope to hundreds of millions of human beings who had already lost all faith in a better life. It gave pride and courage to slaves. It returned all colors and shades to the world, which was brutally divided between white and black, between those who had and had not, between those who were racially and ‘culturally’ destined to rule and those who were only destined to serve. The West hated the red revolutionary ghost from the start. It hates it to this very day. It is because if Communist Soviet Union had won, that would have meant the end of colonialism and imperialism, as we know it. There would be no more plunder and destruction, no monstrous annihilation of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, no ruin of Syria; no mortal threat hanging over North Korea, Iran and Venezuela, no millions of men, women and children sacrificed on the altar of global capitalism as is happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in so many other corners of the globe. There would be nothing left of a racist, post-Christian global dictatorship; no system of twisted ‘values’ and no hypocritical ‘culture’ pushed down the throat of all conquered countries of the world, by a handful of historically gangster states, mostly located in Europe and North America. The West fought the Great October Socialist Revolution from its first day. It fought the Soviet Union on all fronts, bathing it in blood, brainwashing its people and murdering its allies. It finally managed to injure it mortally in Afghanistan, breaking all the bones of the USSR first, and then of Afghanistan right afterwards. Immediately after that, a rejuvenated campaign of indoctrination began. Its goal has been to fully obliterate the great legacy of the “Great October”. The West spared no means and billions of dollars were spent. Naturally, what kind of ‘objectivity’ could one expect from a ‘culture’, from the part of the world which has been brutally tyrannizing and plundering the entire Planet for more than 500 years? How could it be lenient towards the event, towards the movement and country, which made the purpose of its existence the battle for the liberation of the world from imperialism and colonialism? ***** Now the struggle against neo-colonialist barbarity goes on, but under various banners. Red, Communist banners are still flying over China and Cuba, as well as Venezuela, Angola and other nations. There are many other colors of the resistance, as well. The coalition is broad. But what is clear and essential is that The Revolution of 1917 inspired billions, consciously and sub-consciously. What is also clear is that the West never really won. Had it won, it would not be shaking in fear, as it is now. It would not be oppressing free thought, overthrowing democratically elected governments, murdering the leaders who are struggling against its monstrous global regime. ***** To be frank, the ‘red revolutionary ghost’ is not really a ghost. It is still an extremely mighty creature. It is just hiding for now, regrouping, getting ready to raise its banners and drag to the battlefield all imperialist tyrants. The West loves to talk about peace. It loves to lecture the world about ‘peace’. But its ‘peace’ is, in fact. nothing else other than a horrid status quo, in which there are only a few rich and mighty nations that are reigning over the world, and then there is the rest of humankind, one that consists of weak, miserable, submissive and servile ‘un-people’. To hell with such ‘peace’! Such peace cannot last long; should not last long, as it is totally grotesque and immoral. It is not much better than the ‘peace’ on a slave plantation! It is only the legacy of the Great October that can finish such a status quo. And it will. The red ghost is haunting the tyrants. They are trying, but they just cannot expunge it from the hopes and dreams of the people who inhabit our Planet. The more scared the tyrants get, the more brutal are their deeds. And the more determined the people in the subjugated countries get. 100 years since the battleship Aurora fired its first salvo at the Winter Palace in Petrograd. 100 years since the world opened its eyes, realizing that a new world is possible. 100 years, and the Red October is still on the lips of people in Latin America, in Africa, Asia, everywhere. Imperialists are brutal but naive. You can murder a man or a woman, you can murder thousands of them, even millions. But you cannot murder dreams. You cannot murder the courage of the human race, unless you murder the entire human race. You can kill, but you cannot permanently turn people into slaves. During the Great October Socialist Revolution, people stood up. They rose. They smashed their chains. They will rise again. They are rising again; just look carefully. In the last 100 years, so much changed, and nothing changed. The hopes and dreams are still the same. And just as then, now, there is no peace without justice. And there is hardly any justice in the way our world is arranged. Long Live the Great October Socialist Revolution! Forward! As Hugo Chavez used to shout from his balcony: “Here no one surrenders!” The red ghost is here, the ghost of the Great Red October. It is tremendously mighty. It is the ally of all oppressed beings. One day it will lead people to victory. There can be absolutely no doubt about it. http://clubof.info/

[kristarangel-blog1]

HIST410N Entire course latest all weeks discussions all case study Midterm

http://finalexamsolutions.com/downloads/hist410n-entire-course-latest-all-weeks-discussions-all-case-study-midterm/

 HIST410N Entire course latest all weeks discussions all case study Midterm

 HIST410N Week 1 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1 1900: The Age of Hope and the Age of ‘Isms’ (graded) Here’s a statement to consider: “Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire civilizations.” Defend or condemn the argument by giving examples of the interaction between Western industrial powers and traditional, non Western societies. Were these contacts essentially positive or negative? ” DQ 2 The First Total War (graded) World War 1 is said to have been the first ‘total’ war. What does that mean? And what does it mean for people and nations trying to pick up the pieces and resume normal life?

  HIST410N Week 2 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1 The Rise of Totalitarianism (graded) Compare and contrast the two types of totalitarian governments that arose after 1917, that is, communism and fascism. What were the origins of these governments, their accomplishments, and their failures? What accounts for the fact that the masses mobilized to support these movements? Elaborate. DQ 2 Nationalism and the Treaty of Versailles (graded) What were reasons that led to the ultimate failure of the Treaty of Versailles? What were the challenges facing the newly-formed League of Nations, and why was it so difficult to form a lasting agreement that would prevent another war? Elaborate.

  Devry HIST410N Week 3 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 Dictatorship and Democracy (graded) Analyze Adolph Hitler’s rise to power and the policies he used to rule Germany. Textbook tyrant? Overheated Nationalist? Or the right man for at the right time for the right job? DQ 2

 World War II and the Holocaust (graded) The following statement was taken from a contemporary account of Germany in 1939: “Though the Fuhrer’s anti-Semitic program furnished the National Socialist party in the first instances with a nucleus and a rallying-cry, it was swept into office by two things with which the “Jewish Problem” did not have the slightest connection. On the one side was economic distress and the revulsion against Versailles: on the other, chicanery and intrigue…Hitler and his party promised the unhappy Germans a new heaven and a new earth, coupled with the persecution of the Jews. Unfortunately a new heaven and earth cannot be manufactured to order. But a persecution of the Jews can…”How do you interpret this contemporary account of the persecution of people who are Jewish? Elaborate.

  Devry HIST410N Week 4 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 The Cold War: Who Shot First? (graded) The United States accused the Soviet Union of breaking all its wartime pledges and holding Eastern Europe hostage while trying to subvert governments in the west. The Soviet Union accused the US and its allies of trying surround and ultimately destroy it. War of words? Or was somebody telling the truth? And where do our ‘Isms’ fit in? In particular nationalism? DQ 2

 Cold War Buzz Words (graded) The Cold War its very own verbiage. The West had more than its share: Cold War, Iron Curtain, Containment, Domino Theory were just a few. What did they mean in this strange new post-war environment?

  Devry HIST410N Week 5 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 Africa and the West (graded) What accounts for the rather late emergence of African countries as independent nation-states? Is there something peculiar about Africa that delayed its drive for independence? (Begin with a specific African country, and argue your case.) DQ 2

 Israel and the Middle East (graded) Why has the Arab-Israeli conflict been so persistent? What religious and cultural factors have contributed to the persistent state of unrest in the Middle East and, in particular, in what some people refer to as the Holy Land?

  Devry HIST410N Week 6Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 The End of the Cold War (graded) What impact did Mikhail Gorbachev’s ideas of glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring) and demokratizatsiia (democratization) have on Communist society? Were these principles compatible with collectivization and a command economy? Did Communist leaders favor these principles or did they feel that their hand were tied once they were introduced into Communist society? DQ 2

 The not so Cold War (graded) It would be easy to dismiss the Cold War simply as proof that Capitalism was a better theory than Communism. Easy, but not the whole story. In order for Communism to be relegated to the dustbin of history, it first had to be proven that its struggle against Capitalism unecessary and thus irrelevant. How do the US and the USSR close the gap in the last quarter of the 20th Century to allow Communism to go out with a whimper and not a bang?

  Devry HIST410N Week 7 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 Cold War Nostalgia (graded) In the years after the Cold War and the collapse of the bipolar order, the world has undergone significant changes. Chief among those changes has been a perceived deterioration of world stability, not only in terms of economics but also in terms of security. What indicators could lead one to conclude that in the years following the collapse of the Communist world, things have gotten more dangerous? DQ 2 Brave New World (graded) So…the Cold War is over. Time to do a victory lap and celebrate the primacy of American power. But the celebration seemed short-lived, as there were plenty of other concerns. Nothing is as it should be. Our adversaries are now our allies, and our allies are now competitors. The end of the Cold War knocked down the Iron Curtain, but it also destroyed conventional economic patterns. Is the end of the Cold War proving to be good for world peace, but not so good for world business?

  Devry HIST410N Week 1 Case Study Latest 2016  Case Study # 1: Jules Ferry Jules Ferry was Prime Minister of France as that nation launched its imperial expansion. In a debate with member of the French Parliament, Ferry Defends the decision to expand. Read his remarks and respond to the following questions: 1. According to Ferry, what recent developments in world trade have made it urgent for France to have colonies? 2. What arguments against imperialism have been raised by Ferry’s critics? How does he counter them? 3. What non-economic arguments does Ferry offer in favor of imperialism? This 2-3 page assignment is to be submitted to the Week 1 Dropbox, located at the top of this page. For instructions on how to use the Dropbox, read these Devry HIST410N Week 2 Case Study Latest 2016  Case Study #2: Versailles: The Allies’ “Last Horrible Triumph” This week, you will read the comments of the German Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference on the conditions of the peace which ended World War 1. You will find that document in the webliography. Many have argued that it was the way World War 1 ended which made World War 2 inevitable. Read the document and answer the following questions: 1. According to the authors of Germany’s complaint, how will various provisions of the treaty hurt Germany’s economy? 2. In Germany’s view, how would the country have been treated differently if the principles they attribute to President Wilson had been applied? 3. To what higher “fundamental laws” does the document appeal to in order to strengthen German assertions? 4. Do you agree with the authors of the document that Germany was being poorly treated? What response to their complaints might defenders of the treaty have made? http://college.cengage.com/history/primary_sources/world/conditions_of_peace.htm Submit your assignment to the Week 2 Dropbox, located at the top of this page. For instructions on how to use the Dropbox, read these Case Study: The Democrat and The Dictator Franklin Roosevelt and Adolph Hitler both came to power in 1933. They found themselves in charge of nations still suffering from the consequences of World War 1 and the Great Depression. Unemployment in the US was nearly 25%, while nearly one-third of Germany’s workforce had been idled. Americans and Germans had opted for new leadership in 1933 and were now looking to their new leaders for solutions, and perhaps a new vision of the future. Both FDR’s Inaugural address and Hitler’s first address as Chancellor of Germany have been analyzed for their similarities and differences. Now it’s our turn! In 2-3 pages, do the following: 1. Read both speeches and give an assessment of what these two leaders thought was the cause of the problems their countries faced. Provide quotes to support your view. 2. Using quotes from both speeches, tell how each leader intended to deal with: 1. Unemployment 2. Banking, finance and in general, the economy 3. Agriculture 4. Foreign Policy 3. Finally, in a concluding statement, tell where think these leaders find common ground in terms of their proposed solutions, and what you think their vision is with regard to the power of their position. Complete your Case Study in a Word document, approximately 300–400 words in length. Submit your assignment to the Dropbox, located at the top of this page. For instructions on how to use the Dropbox, read these See the Syllabus section “Due Dates for Assignments & Exams” for due date information. Devry HIST410N Week 5 Case Study Latest 2016  Case Study: Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech There are many ways to get a feel for the events of the 20th Century. One way is through the analysis of primary source documents. Few documents set the stage for the second half than Winston Churchill’s 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri. Officially entitled “The Sinews of Peace”, it came to be known as “The Iron Curtain Speech”, in which Churchill laid out the challenges for the West in general, and the US and Britain in particular, regarding what would soon be known as the Cold War. Your assignment this week is to not just read Churchill’s speech, but read between the lines to answer the following questions in a well written 2-3 page document: 1. Churchill believes the Soviet Union “desires the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” How might those expansionist desires challenge the Western principle of national political self determination, a cause it championed during World War 2? 2. Churchill’s speech acknowledges “Russia’s need to be secure on her western borders,” but at the same time it raises concerns about Soviet actions in Eastern Europe. Is Churchill being inconsistent? Or does he provide concrete justifications for those concerns? 3. In his speech, Churchill asserts “There is nothing they (the Russians) admire so much as strength, and nothing for which they have less respect for than military weakness.” If he isn’t advocating a direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union, then what is he saying? 4. Churchill delivered this speech to an American audience, but after reading it one might conclude it could have been given in any western country. Why did he pick the US? Devry HIST410N Week 6 Case Study Latest 2016  Case Study: Ho Chi Minh and Vietnamese Independence Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist? To many Americans he was. But to many Vietnamese he was a nationalist hero, and to even a few Americans he was that as well, plus a friend, and ally and a comrade in arms during World War 2. It may be hard to paint Ho with any color other than gray, and now, nearly 50 years after his death and 40 years after the end of the American war in Vietnam, even that color has faded with time. What we do have are his words. The link below will take you the speech Ho Chi Minh gave on September 2, 1945, in which he proclaimed Vietnam’s independence, and its arrival on the world stage. Your assignment will be to read the speech and provide answers to the following questions: Complete your Case Study in a Word document, approximately 300-400 words in length. Questions for exploration: 1. Ho’s speech proclaiming Vietnam’s independence contains a demand that the free world support that independence in part as payment for services rendered during World War 2. What ‘service’ did Vietnam render during that conflict? 2. Ho claims that Vietnam’s independence is consistent with the philosophical principles which the Allies claimed were paramount during World War 2. What principles was Ho referring to, and does he make references to occasions where those principles were reasserted? 3. In the speech, Ho mentions crimes committed by the French during their occupation of Vietnam. Which crimes, as you read them, were in your opinion most severe and justified Vietnamese independence? Devry HIST410N Week 7 Case Study Latest 2016 Case Study: Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1988 UN Speech If the pace of improving US-Soviet relations seemed rapid, Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly would shift the process into overdrive. In this remarkable oration, which you can find by clicking on the link below,Gorbachev emphatically declared that all nations must have the freedom to choose their own destiny, that ideology had no place in foreign affairs, and that great powers should renounce the use of force in international relations. Review his speech and answer in essay form the following questions: 1. Why did Gorbachev choose the United Nations as his forum for this speech? 2. What did Gorbachev mean by “de-ideologizing relations among states? What implications did this have for superpower relations? 3. Why did he say that “force no longer can…be an instrument of foreign policy”? What implications did this have for the Soviet bloc? 4. What did he foresee as the future role of the superpowers in the world and the future relationship between them?

  HIST410N Week 4 Midterm Examination

 1.     Question : (TCO 1, 2) Analyze how World War 1 changed the economic, social, and political landscapes in the affected nations. Use examples to explain how the war affected men and women, government power, and the economy. Question 2. Question : (TCO 5, 6) Identify and describe the major cultural changes in the Soviet Union from 1917–1932. Give special attention to the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921–1928 and the first Five-Year Plan of 1928–1932. Use historical examples to support your answer. How successful were Stalin’s collectivization policies and the first Five-Year Plan by 1932–1933? Question 3. Question : (TCO 5, 11) Describe the rise of fascism in Germany. Indicate the conditions present in Germany that made it possible for Hitler to come to power. Then describe the Nazi persecution of German Jews leading up to WW2. Analyze how the Nazi government translated its hatred of the Jews into policies and practicies that in 1938 had forced over 100,000 Jews to flee. Question 4. Question : (TCO 5, 11) Compare and contrast the empires of Germany and Japan before the outbreak of World War II. Identify and describe the leadership qualities of their respective leaders. Make sure you use enough historical details to support your answer.

[goldrolloverira]

Historical inevitability and gold and silver ownership

In the end, it’s the times that need to be hedged.

by Michael J. Kosares, USAGOLD

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial writer, Daniel Henninger, registers some very important observations in the wake of the troubling events in Charlottesville.  Charlottesville, he attempts to point out, is symptomatic of something much deeper ingrained in the American psyche. “Some may say.” writes Henninger, “the Charlottesville riot was the lunatic fringe of the right and left, with no particular relevance to what falls in between. But I think Charlottesville may be a prototype of a politics that is drifting away from traditional norms of behavior and purpose.”  Aptly, the editorial is titled, “The Politics of Pointlessness.”

Any thoughtful individual who has witnessed the chaos in Washington would say that something has gone fundamentally wrong with our system of governance and it began way before Donald Trump entered the White House.  Through all of this I keep coming back to the seminal book published in 1997 by William Strauss and Neil Howe titled The Fourth Turning.  In that book the authors predicted much of what has happened in America over the past twenty years.

Fourth turnings are a time of crisis that can last 20-23 years

The fourth turning is a time of crisis – an overturning of the existing social and economic order. The start date of the current fourth turning, according to Neil Howe, is 2008.  Since turnings typically last 20-23 years, it will end sometime between 2028 and 2031.  So a lot of water will run under the bridge before its all over.

I listened to a compelling, recent interview of Neil Howe at the MacroVoices website – a thorough review of the ideas in the book and a lengthy look at what might be next. (The full interview transcript is linked below.)  To elaborate on my short description immediately above, here is Mr. Howe’s own description  of a fourth turning along with a few other important quotes from that interview:

 –– “The fourth turning is the final season of history, if you will, the final generation. And that is the period of crisis. That is the period when we tear down institutions that we’ve built, everything that’s dysfunctional. And we sort of rebuild things from scratch again. And it usually follows a period where—it’s bound up in a period where there’s complete disgust, complete distrust with what we have.”

–– “And I would say these are strong parallels that we see between the decade we’ve been living through and the 1930s. Because it isn’t just what happens to/in the economy. I mean, you consider so many ways in which this last decade has recapitulated the 1930s, starting off with a financial crisis, worries about deflation, worries about declining fertility rates, and currency wars, and beggar thy neighbor policies, and radical attempts by monetary and ultimately fiscal policy to remedy the situation.”

–– “I think we can be too mesmerized by the fact that the last fourth turning we had started with the Great Depression and ended with World War II. I think there are more possibilities. We could be defeated on a fourth turning. We could completely unravel on a fourth turning, giving the amazing popularity of these dystopian or alternative history drama shows on HBO and Netflix today really spelling out those scenarios.”

–– “And then the crisis, when all of these problems begin to coalesce into one huge problem. It’s when the Great Recession met all of these—the rise of fascism both in Asia and in Europe, and everything came together, currency wars, everything became part of a huge problem. Which, by the resolution, you see—and this is what happens at every fourth turning. All the little problems come together into a giant problem. And the giant problem gets completely solved.”

–– “So in politics we see volatility is incredibly high. If there were a political index—there is a political index, there’s a political uncertainty index which actually you can go on FRED and look at it, which is amazingly high levels compared to where it was for the last 20 or 30 years. There is a political index, but it’s very high right now as opposed to the market index which is very low. So, if you’re doing valuation divided by some measure of volatility, which is kind of your basic complacency index, that’s at record high levels now in markets. But you’d have to say complacency is at record low levels in our political and civic life. We’re totally nervous. We even, I think, to some extent, fear that we’ve lost any kind of public square, the ability to even have a public discourse on every issue. I think that that is a real problem.

[End quotes]

Historical inevitability and portfolio preparation: Gold and silver ownership

There is a certain amount of inevitability in Howe’s analysis that a good many will have a hard time accepting, but I am among the group that believes that we are carried on great waves of history whether we like or not.  That is why cycle theory has always appealed to me since my early days in the investment business.  I chose to become a gold and silver broker (back in 1973) because I have always believed that there are good and bad times economically, and when the bad times roll around, that is when you want to be sure that you have made preparation, and most advisedly well ahead of the trouble. Markets cycle.  Politics cycles.  Economies cycle.  Nature, by the way, cycles.  And when you really put on your thinking cap, that tells you why everything else cycles.

Gold and silver, unequivocally, remain the best choice to preserve capital during the secular downslopes – in times like these.  Whenever we watch what’s going on out there and you can’t seem to figure out why people are behaving the way they are, just remember that we are in the grips of a fourth turning and this is the way it is going to go and, as Howe points, it could get considerably worse.

If you have an abiding interest in the kind of analysis you are now reading, you might appreciate our monthly newsletter compiled and written by Michael J. Kosares, the author of the popular investor guideline,  The ABCs of Gold Investing: How to Protect and Build Your Wealth with Gold (Third Edition).  You can sign-up for it here.  Always timely.  Written for gold and silver owners or for those thinking about it.  Thank you.

My concern is getting across the bridge between the great crisis that may still be ahead of us and the resolution that comes at the end of fourth turning.  That is why I own gold personally and why I think every thinking, well-established individual financially should own it as well.  The name of the game is to protect wealth and not leave your life work on the table when the crisis hits with full force.  A diversification of about 10%-30%, in my view, will get the job done. How high you go within that range depends upon on how strongly you feel about what is going on.

Why I put so much stock in the book, The Fourth Turning

You may wonder why I put so much stock in Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning.  Besides making a great deal of sense as a view of how we as human beings move through history from one generation to the next, the authors presciently predicted the 2008 financial crisis eleven years before it happened.

From The Fourth Turning:

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire.”

Talk about hitting the nail on the head.  The last two sentences tell it all as we now live through the experience.  I have always said that the gold and silver owner can afford to sit back and watch the show with a certain amount of detachment and comfort knowing you have done your best to protect your assets.  Gold certainly worked for its owners during the first stage of the fourth turning when gold went from roughly $700 per ounce to nearly $2000 at its peak before working back to current price levels. Silver did equally well going from roughly $16.50 to over $50 at its peak.

It is likely to work in the next stage of the cycle as well.  As we watch the social, economic and political implosion unfolding around us, you begin to wonder whether or not it has come time for the great middle of America to kick back a bit and take a more detached approach to the problems, and that is what Daniel Henninger is driving at in his editorial.

Neil Howe in his interview mentions a “political uncertainty” chart in the final quote in that section above available at FRED.  I think he may have been talking about this chart, but even if it isn’t it tells the same story.  As you can see in the following chart, economic uncertainty has been running at a high level since the year 2000 and in direct correlation to gold’s secular bull market. Since 2008, for good reasons, the uncertainty has been running at consistently high levels and on a hair trigger. The current lull might simply be the calm before the next storm which, in my opinion, is already visible on the horizon.

I will end by returning to Daniel Henninger’s thoughtful editorial this morning and recommend that you read it in full along with Neil Howe’s interview.  Howe’s interview transcript and Henninger’s editorial are both linked immediately below.  Unfortunately, Henninger’s full article is not published in the clear, but Fox posted the beginning with a link to the full article.  Here is the thought with each he ends the piece.  It’s a good one.

“Amid the torrent, an odd paradox emerges:  People are consuming more content and detail about politics than ever and more content and detail about politics than ever, and more people than ever are saying, “I have no idea what is going on.” Someone is at fault here, and it is not the absorbers of the information.Charlottesville is being pounded into the national psyche this week as paroxysm of white nationalism.  On current course, the flight from politics is going to look like rational behavior.”

Neil Howe interview (Courtesy of MacroVoices/Audio version can be accessed at the MV link.)

Daniel Henninger editorial (Wall Street Journal, 8/17/17)

[homeworklanceblr-blog]

HIST410N Entire course latest all weeks discussions all case study Midterm

https://homeworklance.com/downloads/hist410n-entire-course-latest-all-weeks-discussions-all-case-study-midterm/

 HIST410N Entire course latest all weeks discussions all case study Midterm

 HIST410N Week 1 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1 1900: The Age of Hope and the Age of ‘Isms’ (graded) Here’s a statement to consider: “Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire civilizations.” Defend or condemn the argument by giving examples of the interaction between Western industrial powers and traditional, non Western societies. Were these contacts essentially positive or negative? ” DQ 2 The First Total War (graded) World War 1 is said to have been the first ‘total’ war. What does that mean? And what does it mean for people and nations trying to pick up the pieces and resume normal life?

  HIST410N Week 2 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1 The Rise of Totalitarianism (graded) Compare and contrast the two types of totalitarian governments that arose after 1917, that is, communism and fascism. What were the origins of these governments, their accomplishments, and their failures? What accounts for the fact that the masses mobilized to support these movements? Elaborate. DQ 2 Nationalism and the Treaty of Versailles (graded) What were reasons that led to the ultimate failure of the Treaty of Versailles? What were the challenges facing the newly-formed League of Nations, and why was it so difficult to form a lasting agreement that would prevent another war? Elaborate.

  Devry HIST410N Week 3 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 Dictatorship and Democracy (graded) Analyze Adolph Hitler’s rise to power and the policies he used to rule Germany. Textbook tyrant? Overheated Nationalist? Or the right man for at the right time for the right job? DQ 2

 World War II and the Holocaust (graded) The following statement was taken from a contemporary account of Germany in 1939: “Though the Fuhrer’s anti-Semitic program furnished the National Socialist party in the first instances with a nucleus and a rallying-cry, it was swept into office by two things with which the “Jewish Problem” did not have the slightest connection. On the one side was economic distress and the revulsion against Versailles: on the other, chicanery and intrigue…Hitler and his party promised the unhappy Germans a new heaven and a new earth, coupled with the persecution of the Jews. Unfortunately a new heaven and earth cannot be manufactured to order. But a persecution of the Jews can…”How do you interpret this contemporary account of the persecution of people who are Jewish? Elaborate.

  Devry HIST410N Week 4 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 The Cold War: Who Shot First? (graded) The United States accused the Soviet Union of breaking all its wartime pledges and holding Eastern Europe hostage while trying to subvert governments in the west. The Soviet Union accused the US and its allies of trying surround and ultimately destroy it. War of words? Or was somebody telling the truth? And where do our ‘Isms’ fit in? In particular nationalism? DQ 2

 Cold War Buzz Words (graded) The Cold War its very own verbiage. The West had more than its share: Cold War, Iron Curtain, Containment, Domino Theory were just a few. What did they mean in this strange new post-war environment?

  Devry HIST410N Week 5 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 Africa and the West (graded) What accounts for the rather late emergence of African countries as independent nation-states? Is there something peculiar about Africa that delayed its drive for independence? (Begin with a specific African country, and argue your case.) DQ 2

 Israel and the Middle East (graded) Why has the Arab-Israeli conflict been so persistent? What religious and cultural factors have contributed to the persistent state of unrest in the Middle East and, in particular, in what some people refer to as the Holy Land?

  Devry HIST410N Week 6Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 The End of the Cold War (graded) What impact did Mikhail Gorbachev’s ideas of glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring) and demokratizatsiia (democratization) have on Communist society? Were these principles compatible with collectivization and a command economy? Did Communist leaders favor these principles or did they feel that their hand were tied once they were introduced into Communist society? DQ 2

 The not so Cold War (graded) It would be easy to dismiss the Cold War simply as proof that Capitalism was a better theory than Communism. Easy, but not the whole story. In order for Communism to be relegated to the dustbin of history, it first had to be proven that its struggle against Capitalism unecessary and thus irrelevant. How do the US and the USSR close the gap in the last quarter of the 20th Century to allow Communism to go out with a whimper and not a bang?

  Devry HIST410N Week 7 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 Cold War Nostalgia (graded) In the years after the Cold War and the collapse of the bipolar order, the world has undergone significant changes. Chief among those changes has been a perceived deterioration of world stability, not only in terms of economics but also in terms of security. What indicators could lead one to conclude that in the years following the collapse of the Communist world, things have gotten more dangerous? DQ 2 Brave New World (graded) So…the Cold War is over. Time to do a victory lap and celebrate the primacy of American power. But the celebration seemed short-lived, as there were plenty of other concerns. Nothing is as it should be. Our adversaries are now our allies, and our allies are now competitors. The end of the Cold War knocked down the Iron Curtain, but it also destroyed conventional economic patterns. Is the end of the Cold War proving to be good for world peace, but not so good for world business?

  Devry HIST410N Week 1 Case Study Latest 2016  Case Study # 1: Jules Ferry Jules Ferry was Prime Minister of France as that nation launched its imperial expansion. In a debate with member of the French Parliament, Ferry Defends the decision to expand. Read his remarks and respond to the following questions: 1. According to Ferry, what recent developments in world trade have made it urgent for France to have colonies? 2. What arguments against imperialism have been raised by Ferry’s critics? How does he counter them? 3. What non-economic arguments does Ferry offer in favor of imperialism? This 2-3 page assignment is to be submitted to the Week 1 Dropbox, located at the top of this page. For instructions on how to use the Dropbox, read these Devry HIST410N Week 2 Case Study Latest 2016  Case Study #2: Versailles: The Allies’ “Last Horrible Triumph” This week, you will read the comments of the German Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference on the conditions of the peace which ended World War 1. You will find that document in the webliography. Many have argued that it was the way World War 1 ended which made World War 2 inevitable. Read the document and answer the following questions: 1. According to the authors of Germany’s complaint, how will various provisions of the treaty hurt Germany’s economy? 2. In Germany’s view, how would the country have been treated differently if the principles they attribute to President Wilson had been applied? 3. To what higher “fundamental laws” does the document appeal to in order to strengthen German assertions? 4. Do you agree with the authors of the document that Germany was being poorly treated? What response to their complaints might defenders of the treaty have made? http://college.cengage.com/history/primary_sources/world/conditions_of_peace.htm Submit your assignment to the Week 2 Dropbox, located at the top of this page. For instructions on how to use the Dropbox, read these Case Study: The Democrat and The Dictator Franklin Roosevelt and Adolph Hitler both came to power in 1933. They found themselves in charge of nations still suffering from the consequences of World War 1 and the Great Depression. Unemployment in the US was nearly 25%, while nearly one-third of Germany’s workforce had been idled. Americans and Germans had opted for new leadership in 1933 and were now looking to their new leaders for solutions, and perhaps a new vision of the future. Both FDR’s Inaugural address and Hitler’s first address as Chancellor of Germany have been analyzed for their similarities and differences. Now it’s our turn! In 2-3 pages, do the following: 1. Read both speeches and give an assessment of what these two leaders thought was the cause of the problems their countries faced. Provide quotes to support your view. 2. Using quotes from both speeches, tell how each leader intended to deal with: 1. Unemployment 2. Banking, finance and in general, the economy 3. Agriculture 4. Foreign Policy 3. Finally, in a concluding statement, tell where think these leaders find common ground in terms of their proposed solutions, and what you think their vision is with regard to the power of their position. Complete your Case Study in a Word document, approximately 300–400 words in length. Submit your assignment to the Dropbox, located at the top of this page. For instructions on how to use the Dropbox, read these See the Syllabus section “Due Dates for Assignments & Exams” for due date information. Devry HIST410N Week 5 Case Study Latest 2016  Case Study: Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech There are many ways to get a feel for the events of the 20th Century. One way is through the analysis of primary source documents. Few documents set the stage for the second half than Winston Churchill’s 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri. Officially entitled “The Sinews of Peace”, it came to be known as “The Iron Curtain Speech”, in which Churchill laid out the challenges for the West in general, and the US and Britain in particular, regarding what would soon be known as the Cold War. Your assignment this week is to not just read Churchill’s speech, but read between the lines to answer the following questions in a well written 2-3 page document: 1. Churchill believes the Soviet Union “desires the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” How might those expansionist desires challenge the Western principle of national political self determination, a cause it championed during World War 2? 2. Churchill’s speech acknowledges “Russia’s need to be secure on her western borders,” but at the same time it raises concerns about Soviet actions in Eastern Europe. Is Churchill being inconsistent? Or does he provide concrete justifications for those concerns? 3. In his speech, Churchill asserts “There is nothing they (the Russians) admire so much as strength, and nothing for which they have less respect for than military weakness.” If he isn’t advocating a direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union, then what is he saying? 4. Churchill delivered this speech to an American audience, but after reading it one might conclude it could have been given in any western country. Why did he pick the US? Devry HIST410N Week 6 Case Study Latest 2016  Case Study: Ho Chi Minh and Vietnamese Independence Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist? To many Americans he was. But to many Vietnamese he was a nationalist hero, and to even a few Americans he was that as well, plus a friend, and ally and a comrade in arms during World War 2. It may be hard to paint Ho with any color other than gray, and now, nearly 50 years after his death and 40 years after the end of the American war in Vietnam, even that color has faded with time. What we do have are his words. The link below will take you the speech Ho Chi Minh gave on September 2, 1945, in which he proclaimed Vietnam’s independence, and its arrival on the world stage. Your assignment will be to read the speech and provide answers to the following questions: Complete your Case Study in a Word document, approximately 300-400 words in length. Questions for exploration: 1. Ho’s speech proclaiming Vietnam’s independence contains a demand that the free world support that independence in part as payment for services rendered during World War 2. What ‘service’ did Vietnam render during that conflict? 2. Ho claims that Vietnam’s independence is consistent with the philosophical principles which the Allies claimed were paramount during World War 2. What principles was Ho referring to, and does he make references to occasions where those principles were reasserted? 3. In the speech, Ho mentions crimes committed by the French during their occupation of Vietnam. Which crimes, as you read them, were in your opinion most severe and justified Vietnamese independence? Devry HIST410N Week 7 Case Study Latest 2016 Case Study: Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1988 UN Speech If the pace of improving US-Soviet relations seemed rapid, Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly would shift the process into overdrive. In this remarkable oration, which you can find by clicking on the link below,Gorbachev emphatically declared that all nations must have the freedom to choose their own destiny, that ideology had no place in foreign affairs, and that great powers should renounce the use of force in international relations. Review his speech and answer in essay form the following questions: 1. Why did Gorbachev choose the United Nations as his forum for this speech? 2. What did Gorbachev mean by “de-ideologizing relations among states? What implications did this have for superpower relations? 3. Why did he say that “force no longer can…be an instrument of foreign policy”? What implications did this have for the Soviet bloc? 4. What did he foresee as the future role of the superpowers in the world and the future relationship between them?

  HIST410N Week 4 Midterm Examination

 1.     Question : (TCO 1, 2) Analyze how World War 1 changed the economic, social, and political landscapes in the affected nations. Use examples to explain how the war affected men and women, government power, and the economy. Question 2. Question : (TCO 5, 6) Identify and describe the major cultural changes in the Soviet Union from 1917–1932. Give special attention to the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921–1928 and the first Five-Year Plan of 1928–1932. Use historical examples to support your answer. How successful were Stalin’s collectivization policies and the first Five-Year Plan by 1932–1933? Question 3. Question : (TCO 5, 11) Describe the rise of fascism in Germany. Indicate the conditions present in Germany that made it possible for Hitler to come to power. Then describe the Nazi persecution of German Jews leading up to WW2. Analyze how the Nazi government translated its hatred of the Jews into policies and practicies that in 1938 had forced over 100,000 Jews to flee. Question 4. Question : (TCO 5, 11) Compare and contrast the empires of Germany and Japan before the outbreak of World War II. Identify and describe the leadership qualities of their respective leaders. Make sure you use enough historical details to support your answer.

[peggydecker-blog]

HIST410N Entire course latest all weeks discussions all case study Midterm

https://homeworklance.com/downloads/hist410n-entire-course-latest-all-weeks-discussions-all-case-study-midterm/

 HIST410N Entire course latest all weeks discussions all case study Midterm

 HIST410N Week 1 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1 1900: The Age of Hope and the Age of ‘Isms’ (graded) Here’s a statement to consider: “Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire civilizations.” Defend or condemn the argument by giving examples of the interaction between Western industrial powers and traditional, non Western societies. Were these contacts essentially positive or negative? ” DQ 2 The First Total War (graded) World War 1 is said to have been the first ‘total’ war. What does that mean? And what does it mean for people and nations trying to pick up the pieces and resume normal life?

  HIST410N Week 2 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1 The Rise of Totalitarianism (graded) Compare and contrast the two types of totalitarian governments that arose after 1917, that is, communism and fascism. What were the origins of these governments, their accomplishments, and their failures? What accounts for the fact that the masses mobilized to support these movements? Elaborate. DQ 2 Nationalism and the Treaty of Versailles (graded) What were reasons that led to the ultimate failure of the Treaty of Versailles? What were the challenges facing the newly-formed League of Nations, and why was it so difficult to form a lasting agreement that would prevent another war? Elaborate.

  Devry HIST410N Week 3 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 Dictatorship and Democracy (graded) Analyze Adolph Hitler’s rise to power and the policies he used to rule Germany. Textbook tyrant? Overheated Nationalist? Or the right man for at the right time for the right job? DQ 2

 World War II and the Holocaust (graded) The following statement was taken from a contemporary account of Germany in 1939: “Though the Fuhrer’s anti-Semitic program furnished the National Socialist party in the first instances with a nucleus and a rallying-cry, it was swept into office by two things with which the “Jewish Problem” did not have the slightest connection. On the one side was economic distress and the revulsion against Versailles: on the other, chicanery and intrigue…Hitler and his party promised the unhappy Germans a new heaven and a new earth, coupled with the persecution of the Jews. Unfortunately a new heaven and earth cannot be manufactured to order. But a persecution of the Jews can…”How do you interpret this contemporary account of the persecution of people who are Jewish? Elaborate.

  Devry HIST410N Week 4 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 The Cold War: Who Shot First? (graded) The United States accused the Soviet Union of breaking all its wartime pledges and holding Eastern Europe hostage while trying to subvert governments in the west. The Soviet Union accused the US and its allies of trying surround and ultimately destroy it. War of words? Or was somebody telling the truth? And where do our ‘Isms’ fit in? In particular nationalism? DQ 2

 Cold War Buzz Words (graded) The Cold War its very own verbiage. The West had more than its share: Cold War, Iron Curtain, Containment, Domino Theory were just a few. What did they mean in this strange new post-war environment?

  Devry HIST410N Week 5 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 Africa and the West (graded) What accounts for the rather late emergence of African countries as independent nation-states? Is there something peculiar about Africa that delayed its drive for independence? (Begin with a specific African country, and argue your case.) DQ 2

 Israel and the Middle East (graded) Why has the Arab-Israeli conflict been so persistent? What religious and cultural factors have contributed to the persistent state of unrest in the Middle East and, in particular, in what some people refer to as the Holy Land?

  Devry HIST410N Week 6Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 The End of the Cold War (graded) What impact did Mikhail Gorbachev’s ideas of glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring) and demokratizatsiia (democratization) have on Communist society? Were these principles compatible with collectivization and a command economy? Did Communist leaders favor these principles or did they feel that their hand were tied once they were introduced into Communist society? DQ 2

 The not so Cold War (graded) It would be easy to dismiss the Cold War simply as proof that Capitalism was a better theory than Communism. Easy, but not the whole story. In order for Communism to be relegated to the dustbin of history, it first had to be proven that its struggle against Capitalism unecessary and thus irrelevant. How do the US and the USSR close the gap in the last quarter of the 20th Century to allow Communism to go out with a whimper and not a bang?

  Devry HIST410N Week 7 Discussion DQ 1 & DQ 2 Latest 2016  DQ 1

 Cold War Nostalgia (graded) In the years after the Cold War and the collapse of the bipolar order, the world has undergone significant changes. Chief among those changes has been a perceived deterioration of world stability, not only in terms of economics but also in terms of security. What indicators could lead one to conclude that in the years following the collapse of the Communist world, things have gotten more dangerous? DQ 2 Brave New World (graded) So…the Cold War is over. Time to do a victory lap and celebrate the primacy of American power. But the celebration seemed short-lived, as there were plenty of other concerns. Nothing is as it should be. Our adversaries are now our allies, and our allies are now competitors. The end of the Cold War knocked down the Iron Curtain, but it also destroyed conventional economic patterns. Is the end of the Cold War proving to be good for world peace, but not so good for world business?

  Devry HIST410N Week 1 Case Study Latest 2016  Case Study # 1: Jules Ferry Jules Ferry was Prime Minister of France as that nation launched its imperial expansion. In a debate with member of the French Parliament, Ferry Defends the decision to expand. Read his remarks and respond to the following questions: 1. According to Ferry, what recent developments in world trade have made it urgent for France to have colonies? 2. What arguments against imperialism have been raised by Ferry’s critics? How does he counter them? 3. What non-economic arguments does Ferry offer in favor of imperialism? This 2-3 page assignment is to be submitted to the Week 1 Dropbox, located at the top of this page. For instructions on how to use the Dropbox, read these Devry HIST410N Week 2 Case Study Latest 2016  Case Study #2: Versailles: The Allies’ “Last Horrible Triumph” This week, you will read the comments of the German Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference on the conditions of the peace which ended World War 1. You will find that document in the webliography. Many have argued that it was the way World War 1 ended which made World War 2 inevitable. Read the document and answer the following questions: 1. According to the authors of Germany’s complaint, how will various provisions of the treaty hurt Germany’s economy? 2. In Germany’s view, how would the country have been treated differently if the principles they attribute to President Wilson had been applied? 3. To what higher “fundamental laws” does the document appeal to in order to strengthen German assertions? 4. Do you agree with the authors of the document that Germany was being poorly treated? What response to their complaints might defenders of the treaty have made? http://college.cengage.com/history/primary_sources/world/conditions_of_peace.htm Submit your assignment to the Week 2 Dropbox, located at the top of this page. For instructions on how to use the Dropbox, read these Case Study: The Democrat and The Dictator Franklin Roosevelt and Adolph Hitler both came to power in 1933. They found themselves in charge of nations still suffering from the consequences of World War 1 and the Great Depression. Unemployment in the US was nearly 25%, while nearly one-third of Germany’s workforce had been idled. Americans and Germans had opted for new leadership in 1933 and were now looking to their new leaders for solutions, and perhaps a new vision of the future. Both FDR’s Inaugural address and Hitler’s first address as Chancellor of Germany have been analyzed for their similarities and differences. Now it’s our turn! In 2-3 pages, do the following: 1. Read both speeches and give an assessment of what these two leaders thought was the cause of the problems their countries faced. Provide quotes to support your view. 2. Using quotes from both speeches, tell how each leader intended to deal with: 1. Unemployment 2. Banking, finance and in general, the economy 3. Agriculture 4. Foreign Policy 3. Finally, in a concluding statement, tell where think these leaders find common ground in terms of their proposed solutions, and what you think their vision is with regard to the power of their position. Complete your Case Study in a Word document, approximately 300–400 words in length. Submit your assignment to the Dropbox, located at the top of this page. For instructions on how to use the Dropbox, read these See the Syllabus section “Due Dates for Assignments & Exams” for due date information. Devry HIST410N Week 5 Case Study Latest 2016  Case Study: Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech There are many ways to get a feel for the events of the 20th Century. One way is through the analysis of primary source documents. Few documents set the stage for the second half than Winston Churchill’s 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri. Officially entitled “The Sinews of Peace”, it came to be known as “The Iron Curtain Speech”, in which Churchill laid out the challenges for the West in general, and the US and Britain in particular, regarding what would soon be known as the Cold War. Your assignment this week is to not just read Churchill’s speech, but read between the lines to answer the following questions in a well written 2-3 page document: 1. Churchill believes the Soviet Union “desires the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” How might those expansionist desires challenge the Western principle of national political self determination, a cause it championed during World War 2? 2. Churchill’s speech acknowledges “Russia’s need to be secure on her western borders,” but at the same time it raises concerns about Soviet actions in Eastern Europe. Is Churchill being inconsistent? Or does he provide concrete justifications for those concerns? 3. In his speech, Churchill asserts “There is nothing they (the Russians) admire so much as strength, and nothing for which they have less respect for than military weakness.” If he isn’t advocating a direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union, then what is he saying? 4. Churchill delivered this speech to an American audience, but after reading it one might conclude it could have been given in any western country. Why did he pick the US? Devry HIST410N Week 6 Case Study Latest 2016  Case Study: Ho Chi Minh and Vietnamese Independence Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist? To many Americans he was. But to many Vietnamese he was a nationalist hero, and to even a few Americans he was that as well, plus a friend, and ally and a comrade in arms during World War 2. It may be hard to paint Ho with any color other than gray, and now, nearly 50 years after his death and 40 years after the end of the American war in Vietnam, even that color has faded with time. What we do have are his words. The link below will take you the speech Ho Chi Minh gave on September 2, 1945, in which he proclaimed Vietnam’s independence, and its arrival on the world stage. Your assignment will be to read the speech and provide answers to the following questions: Complete your Case Study in a Word document, approximately 300-400 words in length. Questions for exploration: 1. Ho’s speech proclaiming Vietnam’s independence contains a demand that the free world support that independence in part as payment for services rendered during World War 2. What ‘service’ did Vietnam render during that conflict? 2. Ho claims that Vietnam’s independence is consistent with the philosophical principles which the Allies claimed were paramount during World War 2. What principles was Ho referring to, and does he make references to occasions where those principles were reasserted? 3. In the speech, Ho mentions crimes committed by the French during their occupation of Vietnam. Which crimes, as you read them, were in your opinion most severe and justified Vietnamese independence? Devry HIST410N Week 7 Case Study Latest 2016 Case Study: Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1988 UN Speech If the pace of improving US-Soviet relations seemed rapid, Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly would shift the process into overdrive. In this remarkable oration, which you can find by clicking on the link below,Gorbachev emphatically declared that all nations must have the freedom to choose their own destiny, that ideology had no place in foreign affairs, and that great powers should renounce the use of force in international relations. Review his speech and answer in essay form the following questions: 1. Why did Gorbachev choose the United Nations as his forum for this speech? 2. What did Gorbachev mean by “de-ideologizing relations among states? What implications did this have for superpower relations? 3. Why did he say that “force no longer can…be an instrument of foreign policy”? What implications did this have for the Soviet bloc? 4. What did he foresee as the future role of the superpowers in the world and the future relationship between them?

  HIST410N Week 4 Midterm Examination

 1.     Question : (TCO 1, 2) Analyze how World War 1 changed the economic, social, and political landscapes in the affected nations. Use examples to explain how the war affected men and women, government power, and the economy. Question 2. Question : (TCO 5, 6) Identify and describe the major cultural changes in the Soviet Union from 1917–1932. Give special attention to the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921–1928 and the first Five-Year Plan of 1928–1932. Use historical examples to support your answer. How successful were Stalin’s collectivization policies and the first Five-Year Plan by 1932–1933? Question 3. Question : (TCO 5, 11) Describe the rise of fascism in Germany. Indicate the conditions present in Germany that made it possible for Hitler to come to power. Then describe the Nazi persecution of German Jews leading up to WW2. Analyze how the Nazi government translated its hatred of the Jews into policies and practicies that in 1938 had forced over 100,000 Jews to flee. Question 4. Question : (TCO 5, 11) Compare and contrast the empires of Germany and Japan before the outbreak of World War II. Identify and describe the leadership qualities of their respective leaders. Make sure you use enough historical details to support your answer.