The chart reminds us that China is a large and heterogeneous country—and, as it happens, social unrest isn’t a national referendum. You don’t need a majority vote from a whole country to get popular protest that can threaten to reorder national politics; you just need to reach a critical point, and that point can often be reached with a very small fraction of the total population. So, instead of looking at national tendencies to infer national risk, we should look at the tails of the relevant distributions to see if they’re getting thicker or longer. The people and places at the wrong ends of those distributions represent pockets of potential unrest; other things being equal, the more of them there are, the greater the cumulative probability of relevant action.
For American pundits, China isn’t a country. It’s a fantasyland. →
And because China is so vast, its successes can be attributed to whatever your pet cause is. Do you oppose free markets and privatization, like John Ross, former economic policy adviser for the city of London? Then China’s success is because of the role of the state. Do you favor free markets, like the libertarian Cato Institute? Then China’s success is because of its opening up. Are you an environmentalist? China is working on huge green-energy projects. Are you an energy lobbyist? China’s building gigantic pipeline projects. Are you an enthusiast for the Protestant work ethic, like historian Niall Ferguson, who describes it as one of his “killer apps” for civilizations? Then credit China’s manufacturing boom to its 40 million Protestants — even though they’re less than 5 percent of its 1.3 billion people.
With a massively changing country, correlation and causation are easily confused. China’s boom years in the 2000s, for instance, correspond nicely with an explosion in the number of pet dogs; perhaps some canine enthusiast is even now explaining how this is evidence that Bo, not Barack, should be making policy.
Pick-Up Artists and Pro-Family Conservatives Agree: Women Only Marry for Money →
Roosh’s suspicion of women’s work and education carries over to conservative mistrust of welfare used by women because both camps believe female independence undermines American families. Of course, rather than focusing on trying to cattle-prod women into marriage with the threat of poverty, we could always focus on the reasons women leave relationships, such as the asymmetrical division of emotional labor. We could also try to make young people more financially secure with job guarantees or a universal basic income. But these policies, alas, may be too woman-friendly to survive the currents of conservative thought, which blend, as Roosh V demonstrates, with considerably darker waters.
SEAL Team 6: A Secret History of Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines →
They have plotted deadly missions from secret bases in the badlands of Somalia. In Afghanistan, they have engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own. On clandestine raids in the dead of the night, their weapons of choice have ranged from customized carbines to primeval tomahawks.
Around the world, they have run spying stations disguised as commercial boats, posed as civilian employees of front companies and operated undercover at embassies as male-female pairs, tracking those the United States wants to kill or capture.
Those operations are part of the hidden history of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, one of the nation’s most mythologized, most secretive and least scrutinized military organizations. Once a small group reserved for specialized but rare missions, the unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been transformed by more than a decade of combat into a global manhunting machine.
That role reflects America’s new way of war, in which conflict is distinguished not by battlefield wins and losses, but by the relentless killing of suspected militants.
Almost everything about SEAL Team 6, a classified Special Operations unit, is shrouded in secrecy — the Pentagon does not even publicly acknowledge that name — though some of its exploits have emerged in largely admiring accounts in recent years. But an examination of Team 6’s evolution, drawn from dozens of interviews with current and former team members, other military officials and reviews of government documents, reveals a far more complex, provocative tale.
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When suspicions have been raised about misconduct, outside oversight has been limited. Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees SEAL Team 6 missions, conducted its own inquiries into more than a half-dozen episodes, but seldom referred them to Navy investigators. “JSOC investigates JSOC, and that’s part of the problem,” said one former senior military officer experienced in special operations, who like many others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because Team 6’s activities are classified.
Even the military’s civilian overseers do not regularly examine the unit’s operations. “This is an area where Congress notoriously doesn’t want to know too much,” said Harold Koh, the State Department’s former top legal adviser, who provided guidance to the Obama administration on clandestine war.
Is Rachel Dolezal Black Just Because She Says She Is? →
Good insight into the way race, ethnicity, and culture intersect:
Both phenomena, of blacks who chose to pass and of blacks who could but abstained, illustrate the porous reality of race, and more crucially, how it’s distinct from ethnicity. On one hand, “black” is a statement of identity. It describes a certain culture and a certain history, tied to the lives and experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants. It’s a fluid culture, with room for a huge variety of people, from whites, to blacks, to people of Latin American and Caribbean descent.
On the other hand, however, it describes the bottom rung in the American racial hierarchy. It’s a construct, but it was built from physical features, as colonial Americans took Africans, made them slaves, and made them “black.” It designates the people who could be enslaved; the people who had to live under Jim Crow; the people who could be denied mortgage loans and crammed into ghettos; the people who can be plundered by petty municipal authorities.
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What’s key is that you can’t choose your position in the hierarchy. The political designation of race is a function of power—or, put differently, you are whatever the dominant group says you are. A Nigerian immigrant might not identify with black Americans, but she’s still “black,” regardless of what she says, and if she gets pulled over by the police, that identity will matter most. And on the other end, a black American with dark skin and African features could identify as white with her friends, but in society, she’s black, regardless of how she feels.
Which brings us back to Rachel Dolezal. Is she black just because she says she is?
100 years of Iranian history, explained in 11 women's hairstyles →
Amusing proxy variable for women's rights, maybe civil rights in general.
Pope Francis Is a Christian, Not a Communist
There are several reasons why this question will never really matter, and an almost infinite plenitude of reasons it is an absurd one in the first place...
...In other words, you don’t have to actually partake in any communist politics to qualify as a communist in the United States, you just have to show insufficient satisfaction with capitalism.
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Capitalism has no special affinity with Christianity, just as socialism is not reserved strictly for atheists. (Indeed, Christian socialist parties are commonelsewhere in the world, and have enjoyed a powerful presence in the United States in past periods.) In fact, much of the philosophical underpinning of contemporary pro-capitalist arguments arose in direct opposition to traditional Christian teaching on property ownership. As Cambridge professor Peter Garnsey points out in his book Thinking About Property, Enlightenment luminary John Locke makes a fine test case: By claiming that virtually unlimited individual accumulation of private property was a natural right, Locke contradicted centuries of Christian writing on the nature and purpose of property, which identified it as a provisional and highly contingent civil right. (Unsurprisingly given this type of reversal, Locke was no fan of Catholics.)
Suspicion of the types of accumulation that characterize capitalism—including the massive build-up of wealth among a small number of unimaginably rich plutocrats—is therefore more common to Christianity than the unreserved embrace of the same that is now typical of American right-wingers. Rather than asking if Pope Francis’ positions on reducing inequality and protecting the environment are products of communism, it would be much wiser and more insightful to ask if conservative rejection of environmentalism and egalitarianism are really products of Christianity. This would at least provide context for the tidal wave of rueful tears that will undoubtedly follow the publication of Francis’ encyclical on the environment, which will rankle the pontiff’s critics not because Francis’ thought is communist, but because it is Christian.
When Americans think of vets, they rarely think of women →
Evidently America is still thinking small, even as women in uniform make strides.
Recent history is full of stories of women breaking new ground. The first woman to fly the F-35, the Air Force's "premier fighter," took to the skies last month. Years earlier she had flown combat missions in Afghanistan. The Navy's Blue Angels have their first female pilot this year.
Army Ranger school recently opened to women. No women made it through the first phase of the course. But 19 women qualified. And 42 percent of them made it through the grueling physical tests of the first four days, compared with 48 percent of men.
The gap between women's service and our perceptions has consequences; it makes female veterans' reentry into American society especially challenging.
Many do not self-identify as veterans and do not apply for the help and the services -- from housing to healthcare to job placement -- they could receive once they return home.