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Comment by doone on Thursday

Racism In The World

MAY 16 2013 @ 11:56AM

First you have to find a measurement for racial prejudice. I think Swedish researchers hit upon a rather good data point:

The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society. (The study concluded that economic freedom had no correlation with racial tolerance, but it does appear to correlate with tolerance toward homosexuals.)

Leave that fascinating parenthesis behind for a moment and what do we find? Max Fisher’s map above shows us. And the racist, imperialist Western powers turn out to be among the most tolerant. Money quote:

People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The only real exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti. Scandinavian countries also scored high.

And the most racist? India, Jordan, Bangladesh and Hong Kong. There’s also one stand-out of racial intolerance in Europe: France. Duh. My favorite line from Max’s piece:

The Middle East not so tolerant.

I might also note that one common factor in the most prejudiced countries seems like Islam to me, with India and Hong Kong And Vietnam the obvious exceptions.

Comment by doone on Wednesday

Failed States

MAY 15 2013 @ 7:33AM

After examining Ukraine’s depopulation, Edward Hugh asks “whether it is not possible that some countries will actually die, in the sense of becoming totally unsustainable, and whether or not the international community doesn’t need to start thinking about a country resolution mechanism somewhat along the lines of the one which has been so recently debated in Europe for dealing with failed banks.” Joshua Keating ponders this:

I suspect that even in the bleakest, Children of Men-style population scenarios, most countries would fight to the bitter end before surrendering their sovereignty. The exception might be places like Ukraine that have a relatively recent experience as part of a larger geopolitical entity and a large ethnic population with ties to a neighboring country.

A country couldn’t be liquidated quite as neatly as a company — even if the state goes away, there’s still a chunk of land and some people living on it to deal with. The main obstacle to countries being “dissolved” may be that other countries may not want to take on the responsibility of dealing with them — what country really wants to take on a new sparsely populated, economically stagnant region?

Comment by doone on Tuesday

The EU And Its Nations

MAY 14 2013 @ 1:34PM

A fascinating graphic from Pew’s new report on the EU:

Good to see the Brits are still focused on the real threat. But Germany is obviously becoming more isolated in the EU. What we are seeing is an almost text-book case of why conservatives can be smarter than liberals. The EU is in so many ways a wonderful development. It has fostered democracy, made another European war unimaginable, and generated growth and trade. But it has always been to my mind a utopian project because the actual human beings who live in Europe do not identify with the supra-state against their actual nation-state. The nation state seems to me to be the least worst unit of democratic accountability – drawing on ineffable bonds of solidarity, history and a scale that is actually manageable. To pretend that isn’t the case, or to try to impose some new form of identity, along with a new, abstract and cold currency, was always going to end in tears. It appears we are now at the stage when the whole project itself is being reconsidered:

First, attitudes towards the EU are getting worse. While there is always going to be some noise in these kind of data, the consistency of the negative changes is noticeable. What I think is potentially most important are the two countries (France and Spain) where we’ve gone from significant majorities with a favorable view of the EU to majorities without a favorable view.

Comment by Neal on May 13, 2013 at 8:07pm

Easy to believe that northern and western MI are a bit hateful, it's the conservative parts of the state. Surprisingly the UP kind of rocks. =)

Comment by doone on May 13, 2013 at 12:12pm

Geography of hate against gays, races, and the disabled

May 13, 2013 04:18 am

In a follow-up to their map of racist tweets towards Barack Obama, the folks at Floating Sheep took a more rigorous route to get around the challenges of sentimen.... Over 150,000 geotagged tweets against races, sexuality, and disabled were manually classified and mapped.

All together, the students determined over 150,000 geotagged tweets with a hateful slur to be negative. Hateful tweets were aggregated to the county level and then normalized by the total number of tweets in each county. This then shows a comparison of places with disproportionately high amounts of a particular hate word relative to all tweeting activity. For example, Orange County, California has the highest absolute number of tweets mentioning many of the slurs, but because of its significant overall Twitter activity, such hateful tweets are less prominent and therefore do not appear as prominently on our map. So when viewing the map at a broad scale, it’s best not to be covered with the blue smog of hate, as even the lower end of the scale includes the presence of hateful tweeting activity.

Hard to believe this stuff is still around. It looks like I might want to stay clear of some parts of Virginia.

Comment by doone on May 10, 2013 at 10:02am

BARACK THE BUCK-PASSER

Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:

I think I have finally figured out the essence of Barack Obama's approach to foreign policy. In a word, he is a "buck-passer." And despite my objections to some of what he is done, I think this approach reveals both a sound grasp of realpolitik and an appreciation of America's highly favorable geopolitical position. 

In particular, the bedrock foundation of Obama's foreign policy is his recognition that the United States is very, very secure. That statement doesn't mean we have no interests elsewhere, but none of them are truly imminent or vital and thus they don't require overzealous, precipitous, or heroic responses. There's no peer competitor out there (yet) and apart from the very small risk of nuclear terrorism, there's hardly anything that could happen anywhere in the world that would put U.S. territory or U.S. citizens at serious risk. We will inevitably face occasional tragedies like the recent Boston bombing, but the actual risk that such dangers pose is far less than many other problems (traffic fatalities, industrial accidents, hurricanes, etc.), no matter how much they get hyped by the terror industry and our over-caffeinated media.

Instead, the greatest risk we face as a nation are self-inflicted wounds like the Iraq and Afghan wars or the long-term decline arising from a failue to invest wisely here at home. Recognizing these realities, Obama has reacted slowly and in a measured way to most international events.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 07:39 AM | Permalink

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on May 7, 2013 at 4:35pm

Barkley: ‘I played with gay players’

Comment by doone on May 6, 2013 at 10:50am

THE UNITED STATES: A PREMATURE POSTPARTUM IN FOUR PARTS

by Akim Reinhardt

The Ottoman Empire, which emerged during the beginning of the 14th century, reached its zenith some 250 years later under its 10th Sultan, Suleiman the Law Giver.  By that point, the empire held sway over more than 2 million square miles spread across parts of three continents, from Hungary in the west to Persia in the east, from the north shore of the Black Sea to the southern tip of the Red Sea. 

And then began the long, slow slog towards oblivion.  Osmanli imperial decline unfolded over the course of three and a half centuries.  There was no shortage of ups and downs along the way, but of course there were more of the latter than the former. The empire teetered into the 20th century, and by the start of World War I, had lost almost all of its holdings in Europe and north Africa.  As with the Hapsburgs and czarist Russia, the war itself proved to be the coup de grace, signaling an end to the era of classic empires.  Ottoman forces achieved mixed results during the actual fighting, but by the time the war was over, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was leading a successful revolt from within.  The sultanate was abolished in 1922, and the empire's Anatolian rump reformed as the modern nation of Turkey the following year.  After more than six centuries of rise and fall, the empire was done.

It had taken 350 years for the Ottoman empire to slip from apogee to dissolution; just its decline alone had lasted longer than many political entities exist in toto.  Indeed, the United States first gained first independence "only" 230 years ago, which means it needs well over four and a half more centuries to match the staying power of the Ottomans.

As a Historian, I know better than most how useless it is to predict the future.  I will not even hazzard a guess as to when the United States will finally dissolve or how it will occur: through bloody war, contentious rebellion, or quiet disintegration.

But it will happen eventually.  Nothing lasts forever.  Nothing.

And whenever it does happen, future historians might possibly look back to the mid-20th century as the U.S. imperial acme in much the same way they now look back to the mid-16th century as the peak of Ottoman glory.

Continue reading "The United States: A Premature Postpartum in Four...

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on May 1, 2013 at 7:43pm

What a shame! -- Dallas

Before Jason Collins, there was Justin Fashanu

Fifteen years before Jason Collins took his ground breaking steps out of the closet and into American sports history, a 37-year-old man named Justin Fashanu walked into a London storage unit and took his own life.
Fashanu, an English professional soccer player, was the Collins of his time, having revealed his homosexuality midway through a career that flirted with stardom and ended in tragedy.

But Fashanu's time wasn't ready for him. Neither England, nor the 1990s, nor soccer, were prepared to embrace an openly gay athlete, setting into motion a spiral of self-destruction that ended in a premature death.

While Collins has rightly been lauded for his bravery after his revelation earlier this week, Fashanu's sexuality made him a target in a sport that still does a shockingly poor job at tolerance. His own coaches spat homophobic epithets in his direction. His teammates made crude and insulting attempts at humor. Opposition fans concocted vile songs and chants. Even his own brother spoke out against him. [continue]

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on April 29, 2013 at 12:02am

Never mind. I don't think I want your support any more.

Unbelievable. 

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