Total number of comments: 1542 (since 2013-04-13 18:28:29)
Juan Cole
is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page
Website: http://juancole.com
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We could start with the Koch brothers and Art Pope and Richard Mellon Scaife
Oh, gee. You are right.
Thanks!
run an anti-virus program and try updating your browser. Sounds to me like something in the Twitter code hanging it up-- script running or something.
I also don't approve of the leaking of the 250,000 or so inoffensive diplomatic cables. But many of them do show the US supporting dictators, police brutality, torture, etc. The ones on helping the Israelis half-starve Gaza children are absolutely chilling. It is a mixed picture.
But the point of the post was not whether what he did was justified or not. It was like the Time magazine Person of the Year-- he had an impact on the world for good or ill.
there were people milling around: some maybe armed. Before attacked no evidence they were hostile. Cameramen were not armed, nor were children
"Homosexuality" as Foucault demonstrated is a modern phenomenon and did not exist as a social identity 2500 years ago.
tech team is working on it.
The host for some reason changed the URL and embed code after I posted it. They didn't take the video down, they just moved it.
I have restored it with the new codes. Apologies for the inconvenience, but it wasn't my fault. Should work now.
No, look at the video and read the transcript. He said that they should be witnesses so they could relay what they had seen when they get to heaven.
there are virtually no Shiites in Egypt or North Africa.
I didn't say that Libyans can't run themselves. I said that the current government is clearly not doing a very good job with security. That a post-revolutionary state would need help with security training is not an ethnic matter but universal.
The EU has committed to train some 5000 Libyan troops. I just fear it is not enough and not being done quickly enough.
And Italy.
Fox doesn't have a massive demographic. Its ratings have plummeted. Almost no one under 60 watches it, and its viewership is almost entirely made up of people who think of themselves as "white" (not a term I think will likely survive the 21st century in that sense).
Sorry, this analysis doesn't work.
1. The Brotherhood was pro-corporation and included many big businessmen. It was doing a Neoliberal deal with the IMF.
2. The US supported the Brotherhood as the elected government and attempted to forestall the coup.
for al-Sisi
No, the First Republic forbade parties with a religious basis.
Well, for what it is worth, the Ottoman Empire became a constitutional monarchy after a popular uprising insisting on the rule of law for the first time in 1876. It didn't last, but it isn't as if Turks have been strangers to democratic ideas and institutions.
Democracy is on a spectrum, not a single phenomenon. But frankly if India can do it so can Turkey-- India's literacy rates and per capita gdp are much smaller than Turkey's.
Social security taxes are only notionally separate from the rest of government income. There is no set-aside escrow bank account for them.
Yes but the colonists were not consulted about taxes, as residents of Great Britain were via the latter's parliament.
I'm saying it is up the academic with the Ph.D. and the appointment to decide what books to use. We don't know what their teaching goal is in any particular class, and you'd be surprised how little of academic teaching has anything to do with politics or culture wars.
Oh, I think the quote from Daniels goes rather beyond that limited context.
I am a professional historian and I noted the disgruntlement with the book in the profession; however, administrators don't tell the academics what books they can assign.
Germany had to slightly increase coal because it closed its nuclear plants, which I am not advocating we do in the US. Closing all the US coal plants in 10 years and replacing them with wind, solar and natural gas (as little as possible of natural gas) is entirely possible. It would just be a little expensive and take a lot of political will. But it is 'remotely' possible, in fact proximately possible.
Detroit's problem is not leadership. It is that the captains of industry substituted robots for workers and shipped whole factories overseas. And it is that the whites refused to live in the same city with African-Americans, taking their tax base to sterile suburbs. These things are structural, and the best leadership in the world is helpless before them. The question is whether Detroit and New Orleans are the future of lots of American cities, once the cheap Asian labor goes away.
Manufacturing requires raw materials and capital, which the unemployed don't have. 3-D printers cannot make things out of thin air (and the good ones will be expensive).
Well, you can't have a productive economy without making things (factory labor) by employing people to do the work and paying them for it, and by thus making things that people want to buy (consumer economy).
Robotification puts productive labor in the hands of the corporations alone, depriving people of jobs as productive laborers. It therefore also deprives them of an income. This is what we see in Detroit. Not having an income, they cannot buy consumer goods, hurting other industries (also visible in Detroit).
The Walmart solution of having cheap Chinese and other labor produce commodities so that even workers on reduced incomes can afford them is not viable in coming decades.
I'm open to other solutions to the problem; but I do insist that the problem is not in the future. It is in Detroit now.
There are neighborhoods in Detroit where I wish you would go door to door and inform people of this great good news.
That would all be very nice if in fact the factory jobs in the US had been replaced by nice new ones. They haven't. Some have been lost forever to unemployment (US unemployment figures only measure people who have looked for a job recently, so we just take structural unemployment off the statistics). Others have been replaced by McDonalds kinds of jobs. The Millennials face downward mobility, the first American generation to do so.
Capitalism promised people jobs in Detroit, then abandoned it and either robotified or sent the jobs overseas, leaving them in the lurch. It is not very nice of you to blame Detroiters for that betrayal, which was not their fault.
So your blind faith is so far misplaced.
World population growth will level off around 2050. Even Egypt has now had a demographic transition, but because it has so many young people, it will continue to grow till around then. China is already aging. South Asia is among the few remaining high-growth areas. It will all be over with mid-century.
And that my friends will produce a crisis of capitalism, since cheap and abundant labor will abruptly go away. In countries like Japan, they will either face geriatric decline or turn to ... robots.
You haven't addressed my problematic.
Detroit is as it is because of the working of industrial capitalism. 1) Robotification made many of the workers who had flocked to Detroit redundant, from the 1950s and 2) moving the factories to Texas, Mexico, etc. left even more workers unemployed.
What happened in Detroit has happened to the country. Only 20% of our economy is industrial now.
So where will Detroiters, or the people of New Orleans, or people in Miami, get jobs? Doing what? Making what?
If the jobs are taken by robots, and income remains tied to productive labor, then human beings won't have an income, and will starve, while you have rich people served by thousands of robots that they own.
It is more or less what happened to Detroit.
How would you address this problem?
They'll be easier to convince when they are unemployed and penniless and food stamps have been abolished by the GOP.
There is no such thing as a Marxist state, and Karl was just fine with democracy.
All I am saying is that the likelihood is that robots, 3-S printers, etc. will take over actual production of secondary commodities from primary commodities, and that human beings will be left unemployed and penniless. My solution is to treat the robots the way we treat water, as a common resource. What is your solution?
The idea that massive corporations who own the robots should generate all the wealth for the 1% and leave the rest of us in a Detroit-like condition of unemployment or underemployment is a much bleaker vision than having us all own the robots collectively and all benefit from the profits generated by their productive labor.
Sugrue believes that white flight was already a big phenomenon before the riot and that the latter has been exaggerated as a cause of it.
I personally think a lot of whites left because of the change in laws disallowing covenants. When they couldn't legally exclude blacks from their neighborhoods, they left. This was not just racism, though it was racism. They feared that their equity in their houses would be lost if property values fell when the neighborhood was integrated.
It just so happened that the riot occurred just before the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
Read Sugrue. Robotification began in the 1950s.
If the robots are the ones that have the jobs making things, and human beings are left unemployed (as happened in Detroit), then how will the human beings live?
There isn't anything complicated about state-owned robot factories, the profits of which are shared as dividends the way Alaska treats its oil revenues. Since we've never had robot factories in the past, it can't be a failed policy to nationalize them.
The rate of unemployment of educated Millennials in the US is 20%, and they have been put into $100,000 in debt for the privilege by our bankers and government, so "education" in and of itself doesn't resolve the labor crisis of post-industrial society. link to nationaljournal.com
Urban middle class people don't have big families. Germany and Japan are shrinking demographically. They will be joined by everyone else on the planet over the next 4 decades. It is only farming communities that have large families, and almost no one will be farming by then; the small numbers who do use combines and other robots. Robotification allows low-birth-rate urban life. The demographic trends internationally are not in dispute.
I am saying that cheap 3rd world labor is a demographic artefact of high rates of natality and lower mortality because of modern medicine in the 20th century, and that within 40 years the boom will level off. Over the next century, resolving American corporate problems by going abroad will no longer be an option. Besides, if they don't generate satisfactory employment in the US, who will buy the goods they make abroad?
Oh, I don't know. A lot of difficult economic transitions in US history have been made without political revolutions. Democracy is flexible. Marx pointed out that if Dutch workers really wanted socialism even in the 19th century, they could just vote it in. Hmmm link to links.org.au
But, of course, if the people are pushed too far and the elites are too inflexible and grasping, there will be trouble. I don't know how Detroiters put up with what was done to them (well, a lot of them voted with their feet), but I can guarantee you that the country as a whole would not.
I'm saying treat robot factories without human labor the way Alaska treats oil. Make it a state asset and pay everyone a dividend.
I am aware that there will be resistance to this idea. However, a robot labor force making goods for an army of unemployed humans is not a plausible economic system, and my alternative is practical. How exactly we make this transition would depend on the wisdom of our elites. Also the survival of our elites over the next century depends on their wisdom. If they behave like the Koch brothers, they'll go the way of the French aristocracy.
What 1776, 1789, 1871, 1917, 1949, and 2011 suggest is that people don't always put up with robber barons forever.
The Petra city council circa 200 AD imposed an extra tax on any merchant who made less money in a year than they had the previous one. You would have thought it an incentive...
The forever poor is only a plausible strategy if a certain level of employment can be maintained in a post-industrial society. Detroit suggests that it cannot.
Actually, rising inequality is in fact a global phenomenon. And your point is vitiated because you can't compare an industrializing economy like India with a post-industrial one like the United States; the two situations will produce a different relationship of labor to capital. One difference, though, is that capital in the US can concentrate more easily because a post-industrial service labor force is not unionized, lacking a shop floor, and so workers cannot easily organize to resist being robbed.
Michigan is a purple state; in presidential elections it has been blue for a long time, but GOP often does well at level of state legislature and switches off with Dems on governorship. As usual, the urban areas (including a lot of relatively small towns) are mostly blue, though the West of the state is GOP even on a city basis.
Arguing is not rude, it is vital intellectual activity.
However, 3 includes the oil pipelines, which is not just the Canal.
And, there is a difference between the general importance of the Suez Canal for trade that could plausibly be directed through the Panama Canal, and its special utility (no. 2) at the moment for container ships too big for Panama or for which Panama is too expensive.
This is a silly Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy theory. The article's writer discovered that the US Democracy Promotion program gave small amounts of money to Egyptian democracy activists, going back to the Mubarak period. No information is given about recent recipients.
This hysteria about NGOs getting small outside grants from the US and Europe is shared by the military, which has the same xenophobic mindset.
The article's title implies that Tamarrud was on the take, which is not in evidence.
Sorry, but Morsi was supported by the Obama administration, and shot himself in the foot all by himself.
there is a huge difference between the Arabic & English services
Which court decision found slavery unconstitutional?
Morsi appears to have tried to reach out to Gen. Wasfy of the third army, but was rebuffed. This move by the former president may have been part of what precipitated the coup.
Yes, the Wahhabi/ Salafi strand is suspicious of the Muslim Brotherhood, and this is reflected in Saudi stance.
Such a bad analogy that I have trouble understanding the premise. The only thing I'm aware my employer shares with the Federal government is my annual income, and there is an obvious reason for the IRS to know that.
Why does the Federal government need to know who I've been calling and emailing, for how long, and where I was when I was doing it? What is the legitimate purpose of this invasion of my privacy?
The 1979 third party ruling erased the distinction between what private business knows about you and what government does, establishing a form of state corporatism, and it did so for police purposes, a form of authoritarianism. State corporatism for police purposes is the classic definition of fascism.
Oh, get a sense of humor.
The mainstream Muslim Brotherhood repudiated Sayyid Qutb from the 1960s forward and you can't use him to damn them.
Your anecdotes to the contrary, only 30% voted in the constitutional referendum throughout the country, and it was clearly because they believed that the fix was in and they did not like it. Morsi should have known better.
The speech was like 10 minutes; Morsi's speeches were usually interminable
Hi, Jim. He needed have been charged under the heretofore little-used 1917 Espionage Law, which is unconstitutional and inappropriate to this case.
He was being paid for his IT skills, which don't seem to have been so bad.
I don't understand your point. All asylum seekers have been charged with a crime, that is why they are seeking asylum.
And yes, international law holds that they have a right to seek asylum.
And, if your government won't issue you a travel document, are you really a full citizen?
The question is whether they are charged with a crime for political purposes, i.e. whether the charges are invidious. Is leaking to the press really a form of "espionage." Has the American public considered the paranoid Red Scare atmosphere in which the Espionage Act of 1917 was passed? Is it better than the Alien and Sedition Act?
His oath was to the constitution, which he maintains he upheld. His contract was with Booz Allen, which is what he violated.
Well, to begin with, urbanization, size of middle class, literacy and internet connectivity rates all provide basic social platforms for such collective action, and those indices are low in Afghanistan.
You can't distinguish between domestic and international. TEMPORA sweeps up as much or more domestic US electronic data than PRISM.
Turkey's and Egypt's politics are not similar. Erdogan's legislative record would put him substantially to the left of any Egyptian religious party including al-Wasat.
Religious ethnicity is a small part of all this. The 10% Copts in Egypt don't trust the Muslim Brotherhood. The 20% Alevis in Turkey lean to the left and don't trust Erdogan.
But no, mostly it is class-culture, i.e. the politics coming out of urbane urban youth versus that of rural towns and smaller cities.
No, I wasn't talking about wind needing a baseline source of steady power. I was referring to a crazy conspiracy theory that all the turbines have natural gas installations on them that mean that they are not actually low-carbon. There are no such installations.
Solar energy is not limited the way hydrocarbons are! Desertec would power Morocco as well as Europe. There is enough sunshine to go around.
That question has long since been settled. Both wind and solar are net reductions over time in carbon generation even with production considered. The right wing urban myth that wind turbines need natural gas supplements is ridiculous.
Look at real-world examples of Denmark, Scotland.
The Sahara can power Europe. But the grid has to be built and the venture capital has to be risked. Probably Europe has to come out of economic doldrums first.
Mark, the ruling that struck down blue laws did so on the grounds that legislation has to have a rational, secular purpose, and making businesses close on Sunday doesn't.
The language in this ruling about banning gay marriage at the Federal level having no rational purpose accords with this principle. The court was clearly troubled by the Feds over-ruling states on the grounds of "Judeo-Christian values". The problem is not with the latter when they accord with general US values or some principle from them is in accord with government rationality. But they cannot *alone* justify legislation that otherwise seems invidious.
Well the National Salvation Front parties would have to decide to run in parliamentary elections and would have to get up to speed about campaigning.
Otherwise those disillusioned with the Muslim Brotherhood might turn to the Salafi Nur party.
the Brotherhood took it as a threat aimed at them
those naturalizations are political and at the margins, won't affect millions of guest workers.
You are the one who is naive. They don't bring the Arabs to the Gulf because the latter's claim on citizenship would be much stronger than that of the South Asians. They prefer Hindus to their brethren.
This issue may someday be resolved in the same way as Roman slavery was.
I doubt there are effective protections. I'd be more worried about an ability to blackmail or otherwise penetrate members of the House Intelligence Committee (if it had happened, it might why so many of them loudly defend PRISM
Chiquita
It isn't like you add a correction with a simultaneous accusation of bad faith. I was unaware of the distinction.
The GCHQ/ NSA Tempora program rather has left that story in the dust anyway.
Wouldn't you say exploring your genetic structure is a tad more intrusive?
Libya was also an air campaign
There were also widespread demonstrations against.
But anyway I write these things the previous evening, so couldn't have included Nasr City. Will try to comment tomorrow.
If the coal plants are contributing in any way to an increase in autism, that is a tort.
Unfortunately destroying the world with CO2 is not a tort.
So actually even a small increase in the incidence of autism as a result (and by the way for mercury exposure it was 2%) is a better legal case.
There are many real-world examples of states and countries getting 15% and 20% from renewables in just 6 or 7 years. Iowa, e.g. Or Portugal (and no, the *increases* there are not from hydro).
In much of the US that would cut coal by half in that period. Solar and wind are falling in price so fast that getting rid of the rest of the plants in the following 3-4 years would be entirely feasible.
The Great Lakes are estimated to have 700 gigawatts wind energy generation potential.
link to mlive.com
Michigan wind projects now in train, when they come to fruition, will generate 3 gigawatts:
link to nrdc.org
The problems here are not technical. They are a matter of political will and willingness to pass the right legislation and spend a little public money now (miniscule amounts) rather than a lot of public money later.
And, sure I am cheerleading. You can't touch the clouds unless you reach for the stars.
There is only a slight social cost in going straight to solar and wind, which are grid parity in many markets. We don't need the gas, Joe, and it only cuts C02 in half, which isn't good enough. Moreover, there are still questions about methane leakage, which would put it on a par with coal.
Here in Michigan, we just need to build the grid out to the northern Lake Michigan coast and put a couple thousand new large wind turbines. Could be done tout suite.
Keep the gas in the ground.
According to the 4th amendment my personal effects are safe from unreasonable search and seizure, and who I call on my phone is a personal effect.
They have been unreasonably and unlawfully searched and seized, which is a form of theft.
Since the NYT was told by CIA whistleblowers that there were people in the agency attempting to discredit me by surveillance, I suspect the records were examined by more than a computer program. I suspect a Snowden type analyst snooped into them.
You are being terminally naive if you think the government can store all those records and that there won't be abuses of our rights.
No, Peter, I don't have to give up my constitutional rights. They are in the constitution. I have a right to them. You can't even 'give up' your constitutional rights. You are stuck with them.
Our rights can be unconstitutionally taken away from us but we cannot give them up.
You went to the passive mood. My phone records didn't 'get dumped.' They were stolen by the government, which then stored them permanently. Snowden maintains that the analysts all have direct access to them at will, and he would know.
Maybe it is too late and they are all being blackmailed.
Yes, but metal moveable type he did invent; that is different from wood block printing, and the metallurgy is complicated.
Yes, it is safe, according to my American friends there. Just don't go to Taksim.
Many, many thanks for a highly informed comment!
Oh, I think machine-gunning down men women and children is very Baathist.
The British were perfectly capable of keeping colonial populations down by massively bombing them, which is how Bomber Harris spent the 1920s in Iraq.
Churchill suggested poison gas for the Iraqis.
My point is that nonviolent noncooperation succeeded because enough people joined in to make India ungovernable, not because the British Empire was incapable of massive brutality.
I don't think we can know about public opinion under these circumstances. People will be afraid of Baathi retaliation, and there is a war going on.
Opinion polls have to be done with scientific sampling and people have to be comfortable answering truthfully. Doesn't apply in the middle of a civil war with an authoritarian government massacring people.
I lived through that era and remember the Washington think tank rats constantly suggesting we try to get up a Muslim insurgency in the Soviet Stans. We wouldn't have liked the results if we had.
Mr. Cole, being a historian, does not think the British perpetrators of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre were 'nice' and that is why nonviolent noncooperation succeeded (it took 30 years by the way).
There are lots of Christians, Alawites and Druze who don't like the Baath who could over time be convinced to turn on it. But they can't be so convinced by guys wearing those black al-Qaeda headbands talking about killing infidels and waving around rpgs.
The point of long-term nonviolent resistance is that in some situations it is the only practical way of proceeding.
No, I am saying that Clinton is being hypocritical because he wants Obama to do in Syria what he did not in Algeria.
The reasons for which the civil war broke out had nothing or almost nothing to do with religion per se, and there are people of lots of religious persuasions on both sides. Nusra bulks large as a fighting force but is very atypical of Syrian Sunnis.
Hi, friend. Thanks for writing and I don't mean to discourage people from commenting. But this is an academic site devoted to argument and evidence, and none of your three objections is valid.
I have spent a fair amount of time with Syrian oppositionists, in Istanbul and Paris, and there are lots of secular-minded ones. Syria under the Baath educated students to be secular, and it is the Muslim conservatives who are the minority in the country.
The big surprise of anthropological work in Sunni Islam in Syria is the continued importance of Rifa'i, Naqshbandi and other Sufi shaikhs. The Salafis are tiny in comparison.
The term Nusayri may be derogatory from a Sunni point of view, but it is a historically more accurate way of describing Alawites than Alawites. They trace themselves to a companion of Imam Hasan al-Askari named Nusayr. All Shiites are Alawites, after all, and the term creates confusions with totally unrelated movements like the Turkish Alevis.
That was just a cookie! You don't have to keep those; Mozilla has private browsing.
We don't know with whom the data base is shared, but interagency cooperation on such matters is common now and a facility in Virginia allows FBI/ CIA cross-access.
We don't know of abuses because the whole thing is secret, not because there aren't abuses.
The NSA program may or may not always be used for its announced purposes.
The United States of America is founded on the principle of being suspicious of people in power and ensuring that they are checked and balanced. This program is not, and is therefore Actonian.
I'm not intolerant of dissent, as demonstrated by my having posted the comment, which is full of derision and which repeatedly misstates my argument.
You are confusing my having upbraided the commenter for poor reading skills with intolerance. It is just tough love. Maybe he'll learn something and read more carefully next time.