Sunday February 13th 2011
carefully chosen name's comments
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- This week's caption competition: Caption competition 5
- Germany's economy: Angela in Wunderland
- The EU's foreign policy: The test for Ashton and Europe
- China's reaction: Build a wall
- Climate change: Why don't Americans believe in global warming?
- Egypt's revolution: Mubarak toppled
- China, India and the Karmapa Lama: The Karmapa's comeuppance?
- Rhetoric and rationality: The fallacy of careless contrarianism
- Daily chart: Arab unrest index: The Shoe Thrower's index
- Lexington: A marriage of inconvenience
Over the past five days
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- Democracy in the Arab world: Egypt rises up
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Didomyk "Arab" isn't a religion. Most Muslims (about 80%) are not native speakers of Arabic.
renewabill Dunnno if you're German, but you do seem to have the German knack for whining and complaining down.
Enjoy Bild.
TheGrimReaper What do you mean when you say wind is not as "efficient" or "effective" as nuclear energy?
So our vaulted policy of spreading democracy in the Middle East depends on enslaving the biggest country in the region?
Seriously, this shows what a huge lie Bush (and all the American media) told when they claimed it was OK to kill hundreds of thousands and waste trillions "bringing democracy" to Iraq.
Right. Now we can get it for free in much bigger Egypt and we don't want it.
Two cheers to the E for this belated but correct take.
In defense of the US, the Egyptians themselves have been amazingly passive about the misgovernment there until now. I happen to have personal connections to Egypt, so this stuff isn't too surprising, but for most outsiders it must be a shock.
The Obama bashers look a bit silly trying to pin it on him.
I'm curious to see if Turkey can play a role in a (possible) post-Mubarak scenario. T & E seem like natural allies.
If I were PM of Greece I'd invite the two leaders to Crete.
Julia N.
Actually Egypt has shown pretty strong economic growth in recent years.
A'Day:
buffoons-dictators
I happen to know a family with several high ranking Egyptian police officers personally. They've done well from this regime, but they've been hoping for this day for years.
So all the future of 80m people is worth is the faint hope of continuing America's dumb Israel policy. Nobody seems to care about democracy in Egypt. As for the "disaster for America's reputation in the region", I think we already managed to engineer that.
kxbxo:
Tax 'em all. Let God sort them out. That's what disestablishmentarianism is all about.
Luo
My wife comes from a village in Kyushu (same Southern Japanese island as Nagasaki) and the collapse of the population is pretty shocking. The village is really dying out. Most of the houses are either empty or inhabited by widows. Young people invariably move away. And as the article mentions, a lot of them are going to Tokyo or Osaka, not to nearby Kitakyushu or Fukuoka.
Politically, Obama's best bet is to do everything to get the Mideast out of the news. As Berlusconi put it, it it isn't on TV is doesn't happen.
The best example for Obama is the way Bush caved in to bin Laden's demands and "cut 'n' run" from Saudi Arabia. It wasn't on TV, so America didn't notice.
The USG has proven that it has nothing to contribute to the Mideast -- like Saudi Arabia we're too sclerotic (politically) and too knotted up in our domestic disputes to be effective.
This is one of two reasons why talk of an "American Empire" is just talk. Incidentally, the same thing happened in the nineteenth century. People like Franklin and Jefferson fully expected the US to spread to everywhere North of Panama. But the South didn't want free states carved out of Canada and the North didn't want slave states carved out of Mexico and the Caribbean. Polk (a Tennessean) surrendered to the British in the Oregon dispute but fought the Mexicans for the Southwest. Both policies infuriated Northerners. Then came the Civil War, and the end of US expansion.
The same thing is happening in the Mideast. Bush tried to create an empire, Obama is trying to shuck it off just a few years later. The net result is less than nothing.
The other reason why the "American Empire" is just talk is that the USG has no skills at all in spreading its ideals. Bush scoffed at nation building, and the result was the wreck of Iraq. We've occupied Afghanistan for years but the rubble still isn't cleared and the roads still aren't paved in the capital. So military conquest doesn't look like a way forward. Furthermore America lacks the EU's knack of spreading its way of doing things to neighboring countries using peaceful persuasion. For example, our Cuba policy is a hopeless mess.
In conclusion, foreign affairs are best kept out of the US news, and Obama should save energy to fight domestic battles.
The melting pot has probably frozen up. English will remain the predominant trade language, but modern media lend themselves better to multilingual cities than the old broadcast-a-few-channels media did.
Language is really the key to nationalism because it provides a shared medium for national discourse.
This is really embarrassing.
Well since the Blue Dogs opposed his policies, and they got beat, I don't see what he's got to be penitent about.
I seem to recall some rule about showing the zero on the vertical chart axis.
Over a tenth would even welcome a Führer who would govern with “a strong hand”—a sign that the embers of extremism still glow.
I doubt this. Führer just means leader, and the question was poorly phrased at best. The same question asks if the government should be effective and rule in everyone's interest. It's amazing that anyone would say no.
It was a push poll designed to exaggerate the significance of extremism and generate funding for the anti-extremist project (run by the Social Democrats)that funded the poll. It was probably also intended to be a jab at any Christian Democrat attempt to woo the right.
The truth is that Germans just don't see international politics as a football league any more.
These protesters don't actually seem to be offering any alternative ideas, just making noise. Also I doubt that the people who are protesting were actually duped into voting for Sarkozy by his alleged campaign lies. They were probably opposed to him even then. He did't get in on the union vote, and the unions are backing this.
Apple's claims to openness are a carefully crafted lie. Most users are not developers. You can't even copy a media file onto one of their mobile devices without installing their ghastly intrusive iTunes. Their technical updates are all about preventing jailbreaks not about providing things users want. Most common media types don't work, because the marketing department dumbed down the product. And so on.
Apple isn't really a technology company, it's a marketing organization. If Apple were a technology company the geeks would focus on things like better signal reception and battery life, which Apple never seems to get right. But Jobs's mobile vision is that winning mobile products are products that lock in customers and squeeze revenue out of them, not products that do nice things for customers.
Assuming the markets remain freeish his vision will be limited to a minority market share, and requiring constant innovation away from the commodity "me too" producers to survive. But even a small share of this huge market is more than enough to fill Apple'S coffers. There's no right way and wrong way, just different niches to fill.
Get rid of the spam please