Category: philosophy & politics

Latte liberals v Dunkin Donut democrats

Latte liberals v Dunkin Donut democrats | Gerard Baker – Times Online
Among voters whose voting choice is not based on identity politics, Mr Obama’s supporters are the latte liberals. These are the people for whom Starbucks, with its $5 cups of coffee and fancy bakeries, is not just a consumer choice but a lifestyle. They not only have the money. They share the values.

They live by all those little quotes on the side of Starbucks cups about community service and global warming. They embrace the Obama candidacy because to them he transcends traditional class and economic divides. He is a transformative political figure – potentially the first black man to be president – and is seen as the one to revive America’s faith in itself and restore America’s status in the world. For these voters the defining emotion is hope.

Mrs Clinton is the candidate of what might be called Dunkin’ Donut Democrats. They do not have money to waste on multiple-hyphenated coffee drinks – double-top, no-foam, non-fat lattes and the like. Not for them the bran muffins or the biscotti. They are the 75-cent coffee and doughnut crowd. For them caffeine choice doesn’t correlate with their values but simply represents a means of keeping them going through their challenging day. Continue reading “Latte liberals v Dunkin Donut democrats”

Winston Churchill Didn’t Really Exist, says British Teens

Winston Churchill didn’t really exist, say teens – Telegraph
A fifth of British teenagers believe Sir Winston Churchill was a fictional character, while many think Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur and Eleanor Rigby were real, a survey shows.

The canvass of 3,000 under-twenties uncovered an extraordinary paucity of basic historical knowledge that older generations take for granted

Despite his celebrated military reputation, 47 per cent of respondents dismissed the 12th-century crusading English king Richard the Lionheart as fictional. More than a quarter (27 per cent) thought Florence Nightingale, the pioneering nurse who coaxed injured soldiers back to health in the Crimean War, was a mythical figure.

Sherlock Holmes, the detective, was so convincingly brought to life in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels, their film versions and television series, that 58 per cent of respondents believe that the sleuth really lived at 221B Baker Street.

Fifty-one per cent of respondents believed that Robin Hood lived in Sherwood Forest, robbing the rich to give to the poor, while 47 per cent believed Eleanor Rigby was a real person rather than a creation of The Beatles.

Continue reading “Winston Churchill Didn’t Really Exist, says British Teens”

How Voters Think

How Voters Think – New York Times
After seeing a candidate for 100 milliseconds, voters make certain sorts of judgments based on expressiveness, facial structure, carriage and attitude. Alexander Todorov of Princeton has found that he can predict 70 percent of political races just by measuring peoples’ snap judgments of candidates’ faces.

Then, having formed an impression from these thin-slice appraisals, voters rack their memory banks. Decades ago, Kahneman and Amos Tversky argued that human judgment is less a matter of calculating probabilities and more a matter of trying to fit new things into familiar patterns. Maybe John Edwards reminds one voter of the sort of person he disliked in high school. Maybe Barack Obama evokes the elevated feeling another voter felt watching John F. Kennedy. Continue reading “How Voters Think”

Two-Buck Huck

Two-Buck Huck – Outposts – Op-Extra Columnist – Opinion – – New York Times Blog
Huckabee revels in the class war. He’s Two-Buck Huck, and darn proud of it. He likes nothing better than playing the Hick from Hope. He and his wife lived in a trailer for a while, he points out. His son killed a dog one summer, “a mangy dog” at that, as Huckabee explained to the befuddled national press corps. He said he used to eat squirrels, cooking them up in his popcorn popper. Ewwwwhhh!

And what’s up with that Chuck Norris shadow, following him everywhere like a late-night rerun? To the establishment, Norris is a B-lister with a bad hair dye and a ’70s-era karate shtick. They prefer Bruce Willis – bald Republican action hero.

Huckabee has been telling people in Iowa that Republican higher-ups would never let him become the nominee because he “has a hick last name.” Wow. I’d like to be in on that focus group.

“For my family, summer was never a verb,” he says. Take that, Mitt Romney and your perfect family, costumed in Ralph Lauren casual wear down by the shore. And this: “Wall Street types are afraid to death of a guy like me.” You mean, a guy who lost 110 pounds and cooks squirrels in his popcorn popper? Thanks for Caroline Collier pointing this out.

Biggest Under-reported Story of the Year

TERROR ON THE RUN

The greatest media story of 2007 was the one you never read : The year was a strategic catastrophe for Islamist terrorists – and possibly a historic turning point in the struggle against al Qaeda and its affiliates.

That fundamental change in outlook, especially among Sunni Arabs, may well mark last year as Islamist terrorism’s high-water mark, the point at which fellow Muslims by the tens of millions publicly rejected the message and methods of self-styled holy warriors who revel in the slaughter of the innocent.
But 2007 may have been to the struggle against Islamofascism what 1943 was to the Second World War: the year in which it became clear that, no matter how long the war lasted, civilization’s enemies couldn’t win.

The lack of attention paid to the disaster that befell the terrorist cause – essentially acknowledged by Osama bin Laden’s “holiday” audio tape – is as if, in 1943, the Allied media hadn’t reported any Axis defeats.

Why 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Linger

 Tinfoil Nation: Why 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Linger
A majority of Americans say it is “likely” that their government knew about the September 11 attacks in advance and ignored the warning, a recent poll revealed: more evidence that what were once considered loony fringe theories have penetrated the U.S. mainstream. Richard Miniter examines the roots of the claims and debunks them.

Why does this conspiracy theory linger? Historian Joseph E. Persico argues that it is simply human nature. Persico is an acknowledged expert on the last surprise attack on the American homeland, the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor. He notes that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had some inkling of Japan’s dark designs before the December 7, 1941 attack. Relations between Washington and Tokyo had been souring for years and the U.S. was opposed to Japan’s bloody invasion and occupation of eastern China. So FDR knew that Japan might attack at some point. But there was no intelligence suggesting that Japan would attack at Pearl Harbor or when it would attack or how. Still FDR’s critics and many others continue to suspect that he knew all along and that he allowed Pearl Harbor to happen as a “backdoor to war.”

“Why do conspiracy theories keep sprouting?” Persico asks. “Neat, suspenseful plots create high drama, while the truth is often messy, contradictory, even dull.”

Unfortunately, the same is true today. Bush’s critics are as misguided as FDR’s.

Obama to End the Culture Wars?

Goodbye to All That

Consevative blogger Andrew Sullivan comes out for Obama with this week’s “Atlantic” magazine’s Cover Story, as the cure for our ongoing, self-destructive 60’s Boomers Culture War.
The Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.

Holocaust survivor trumps Dutch

Don Surber » Blog Archive » Holocaust survivor trumps Dutch
The Dutch are threatening to remove their 1,600 troops from Afghanistan to protest Gitmo. Dutch politicians face growing problems with Islamic youths and likely fear a L’Intifada like France suffered in 2005.

Peters said: “We have to close Guantanamo because it symbolizes for me everything that is wrong with this war on terror.”

To which Lantos apparently replied: “Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay”

He also said: “You have to help us, because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany.” The liberal Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos of California, the only Holocaust survivor in Congressis far from a friend of Gitmo. The Dutch sent these politicians here to bitch about Gitmo.

Where Globalization Should Take Us

U.S. must establish a new global narrative | ScrippsNews

Part of a recent article by the most prescient geo-political thinker doing the PowerPoint circuit.
Think back to this country’s settling of the American West across the 19th century. There were leading security issues (episodic Indian Wars) and trailing questions of political integration (states joining the Union through 1912), but the towering bulk of activity fell between those two milestones.

The functioning core of today’s global economy is defined as: the old West of North America, Europe and Japan; the rising East led by India, China and Russia; and the emerging South exemplified by Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa. This two-thirds of humanity — and roughly 90 percent of world GDP — engages in deep and systemic integration.

In stark contrast are globalization’s poorly integrated regions, or that one-third of humanity stretching from the equatorial Americas across Africa and Central/Southwest Asia to the littoral states of Southeast Asia. Globalization’s “gap” population survives on about 10 percent of the global GDP, and suffers all of its wars, instability, and virtually all of its terrorism too.

If the core suffers too much globalization too soon, the gap suffers too little and too late. Continue reading “Where Globalization Should Take Us”