Topic: Politics (Page 11)
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๐ The Dreyfus affair
The Dreyfus Affair (French: l'affaire Dreyfus, pronouncedย [lafษหส dสษfys]) was a political scandal that divided the Third French Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. "The Affair", as it is known in French, has come to symbolise modern injustice in the Francophone world, and it remains one of the most notable examples of a complex miscarriage of justice and antisemitism. The role played by the press and public opinion proved influential in the conflict.
The scandal began in December 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason. Dreyfus was a 35-year-old Alsatian French artillery officer of Jewish descent. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, and was imprisoned on Devil's Island in French Guiana, where he spent nearly five years.
In 1896, evidence came to lightโprimarily through an investigation instigated by Georges Picquart, head of counter-espionageโwhich identified the real culprit as a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. When high-ranking military officials suppressed the new evidence, a military court unanimously acquitted Esterhazy after a trial lasting only two days. The Army laid additional charges against Dreyfus, based on forged documents. Subsequently, รmile Zola's open letter J'Accuseโฆ!, stoked a growing movement of support for Dreyfus, putting pressure on the government to reopen the case.
In 1899, Dreyfus was returned to France for another trial. The intense political and judicial scandal that ensued divided French society between those who supported Dreyfus (now called "Dreyfusards"), such as Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France, Henri Poincarรฉ and Georges Clemenceau, and those who condemned him (the anti-Dreyfusards), such as รdouard Drumont, the director and publisher of the antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole. The new trial resulted in another conviction and a 10-year sentence, but Dreyfus was pardoned and released. In 1906, Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army. He served during the whole of World War I, ending his service with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He died in 1935.
The affair from 1894 to 1906 divided France into pro-republican, anticlerical, Dreyfusards and pro-Army, mostly Catholic "anti-Dreyfusards". It embittered French politics and encouraged radicalisation.
Discussed on
- "The Dreyfus affair" | 2013-06-23 | 13 Upvotes 2 Comments
๐ Joe Biden inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States
The inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States took place on January 20, 2021, before noon (EST), marking the commencement of the four-year term of Joe Biden as president and Kamala Harris as vice president. The inaugural ceremony took place on the West Front of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. and was the 59th presidential inauguration. Biden took the presidential oath of office, before which Harris took the vice presidential oath of office.
The inauguration took place amidst extraordinary political, public health, economic, and national security crises, including outgoing President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, which incited a storming of the Capitol, Trump's unprecedented second impeachment, and a threat of widespread civil unrest, which stimulated a nationwide law enforcement response. Festivities were sharply curtailed by efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and mitigate the potential for violence near the Capitol. The live audience was limited to members of the 117th United States Congress and, for each, one guest of their choosing, resembling a State of the Union address. Public health measures such as mandatory face coverings, testing, temperature checks, and social distancing were used to protect participants in the ceremony.
"America United" and "Our Determined Democracy: Forging a More Perfect Union"โa reference to the Preamble to the United States Constitutionโserved as the inaugural themes.
๐ Self-licking ice cream cone
In political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself. The phrase appeared to have been first used in 1992, in On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden about NASA's bureaucracy. James A. Vedda described it as "Why do humans go into space? So we can go farther into space!"
Since then, the term has been used to describe the habit of government funded organisations and programs spending taxpayer money to lobby for more funding from the taxpayer. Other things compared have included financial bubbles, chatshows and reality television. In The Irish Times, Kevin Courtney observed that "many organisations are also stuck in limbo, destined to keep lurching on without ever achieving their stated goal. Thatโs because their real goal is simply to carry on regardless." The Cold War infrastructure has also been compared to a self-licking ice cream cone, given that expensive projects continued to be financed long after world communism had ceased to pose a viable threat.
Richard Hoggart used the term to describe certain United Nations programmes.
In sport, the Bowl Alliance was criticised using the term.
๐ Tragedy of the Commons
In economic science, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a "common") in Great Britain and Ireland. The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968. Faced with evidence of historical and existing commons, Hardin later retracted his original thesis, stating that the title should have been "The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons".
Although taken as a hypothetical example by Lloyd, the historical demise of the commons of Britain and Europe resulted not from misuse of long-held rights of usage by the commoners, but from the commons' owners enclosing and appropriating the land, abrogating the commoners' rights.
Although open-access resource systems may collapse due to overuse (such as in overfishing), many examples have existed and still do exist where members of a community with regulated access to a common resource co-operate to exploit those resources prudently without collapse, or even creating "perfect order". Elinor Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for demonstrating this concept in her book Governing the Commons, which included examples of how local communities were able to do this without top-down regulations or privatization. On the other hand, Dieter Helm argues that these examples are context-specific and the tragedy of the commons "is not generally solved this way. If it were, the destruction of nature would not have occurred."
In a modern economic context, "commons" is taken to mean any open-access and unregulated resource such as the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, ocean fish stocks, or even an office refrigerator. In a legal context, it is a type of property that is neither private nor public, but rather held jointly by the members of a community, who govern access and use through social structures, traditions, or formal rules.
In environmental science, the "tragedy of the commons" is often cited in connection with sustainable development, meshing economic growth and environmental protection, as well as in the debate over global warming. It has also been used in analyzing behavior in the fields of economics, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, game theory, politics, taxation, and sociology.
๐ Late Capitalism
Late capitalism, late-stage capitalism, or end-stage capitalism is a term first used in print by German economist Werner Sombart around the turn of the 20th century. In the late 2010s, the term began to be used in the United States and Canada to refer to perceived absurdities, contradictions, crises, injustices, inequality, and exploitation created by modern business development.
Later capitalism refers to the historical epoch since 1940, including the postโWorld War II economic expansion called the "golden age of capitalism". The expression already existed for a long time in continental Europe, before it gained popularity in the English-speaking world through the English translation of Ernest Mandel's book Late Capitalism, published in 1975.
The German original edition of Mandel's work was subtitled in "an attempt at an explanation", meaning that Mandel tried to provide an orthodox Marxist explanation of the post-war epoch in terms of Marx's theory of the capitalist mode of production. Mandel suggested that important qualitative changes occurred within the capitalist system during and after World War II and that there are limits to capitalist development.
Discussed on
- "Late Capitalism" | 2023-05-20 | 12 Upvotes 3 Comments
๐ Whataboutism
Whataboutism, also known as whataboutery, is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument. It is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda. When criticisms were leveled at the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the Soviet response would often be "What about..." followed by an event in the Western world. As Garry Kasparov noted, it is a word that was coined to describe the frequent use of a rhetorical diversion by Soviet apologists and dictators, who would counter charges of their oppression, "massacres, gulags, and forced deportations" by invoking American slavery, racism, lynchings, etc. It has been adopted by other politicians and countries.
๐ Intermarium
Intermarium (Polish: Miฤdzymorze, Polish pronunciation:ย [mสฒษndอกzษจหmษสษ]) was a geopolitical project conceived by politicians in successor states of the former PolishโLithuanian Commonwealth in several iterations, some of which anticipated the inclusion as well of other, neighboring states. The proposed multinational polity would have extended across territories lying between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas, hence the name meaning "Between-Seas".
Prospectively a federation of Central and Eastern European countries, the post-World War I Intermarium plan pursued by Polish leader and former political prisoner of the Russian Empire, Jรณzef Piลsudski (1867โ1935), sought to recruit to the proposed federation the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The Polish name Miฤdzymorze (from miฤdzy, "between"; and morze, "sea"), meaning "Between-Seas", was rendered into Latin as "Intermarium."
The proposed federation was meant to emulate the PolishโLithuanian Commonwealth, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, that, from the end of the 16th century to the end of the 18th, had united the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Intermarium complemented Piลsudski's other geopolitical vision, Prometheism, whose goal was the dismemberment of the Russian Empire and that Empire's divestment of its territorial acquisitions.
Intermarium was, however, perceived by some Lithuanians as a threat to their newly established independence, and by some Ukrainians as a threat to their aspirations for independence, and while France backed the proposal, it was opposed by Russia and by most other Western powers. Within two decades of the failure of Piลsudski's grand scheme, all the countries that he had viewed as candidates for membership in the Intermarium federation had fallen to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, except for Finland (which suffered some territorial losses in the 1939โ40 Winter War with the Soviet Union).
๐ The Californian Ideology
"The Californian Ideology" is a 1995 essay by English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron of the University of Westminster. Barbrook describes it as a "critique of dotcom neoliberalism". In the essay, Barbrook and Cameron argue that the rise of networking technologies in Silicon Valley in the 1990s was linked to American neoliberalism and a paradoxical hybridization of beliefs from the political left and right in the form of hopeful technological determinism.
The original essay was published in Mute magazine in 1995 and later appeared on the nettime Internet mailing list for debate. A final version was published in Science as Culture in 1996. The critique has since been revised in several different versions and languages.
Andrew Leonard of Salon called Barbrook & Cameron's work "one of the most penetrating critiques of neo-conservative digital hypesterism yet published."
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- "The Californian Ideology" | 2021-09-01 | 11 Upvotes 3 Comments
๐ Red Scare
A Red Scare is the promotion of a widespread fear of a potential rise of communism, anarchism or other leftist ideologies by a society or state. The term is most often used to refer to two periods in the history of the United States which are referred to by this name. The First Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War I, revolved around a perceived threat from the American labor movement, anarchist revolution, and political radicalism. The Second Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War II, was preoccupied with the perception that national or foreign communists were infiltrating or subverting American society and the federal government. The name refers to the red flag as a common symbol of communism.
Discussed on
- "Red Scare" | 2023-03-01 | 11 Upvotes 3 Comments
๐ World Game
World Game, sometimes called the World Peace Game, is an educational simulation developed by Buckminster Fuller in 1961 to help create solutions to overpopulation and the uneven distribution of global resources. This alternative to war games uses Fuller's Dymaxion map and requires a group of players to cooperatively solve a set of metaphorical scenarios, thus challenging the dominant nation-state perspective with a more holistic "total world" view. The idea was to "make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone," thus increasing the quality of life for all people.