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Història. Conflictes. Autoritarisme

ANTERIORS
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/10/29/121029crat_atlarge_gopnik
[Gopnik revisa alguns llibres que avaluen el paper de la geografia com a determinant.
Però la gent i les idees també compten. M’agrada la la frase final:
Tyranny flourished in the British Isles; and, when it ended, England had not drifted any closer to the Continent. Good ideas matter, as does the creation of the prosperity that good ideas need in order to flourish. Conversation shapes us more than mountains and monsoons can. Human history, like human love, is still made most distinctly face to face.
dossier planeta 19/12/2015
prevenir és molt millor que deixar podrir un conflicte. Tots ens queixem del conflicte de Síria, però segons informa Amnesty International, han rebut armes de 30 països. No es vol controlar. Igual que no es vol acabar amb el secret bancari i les zones opques de le’conimia [tanta normativa i supervisió del blanqueig que es fa als bancs, i els fabricants d’armes, yerroriostes i dictadors sempre acaben obtenint el que volen, sovint a canvi de drogues o matèries primeres]
https://llegim.ara.cat/opinio/Sant-Jordi_0_2004999551.html llibres sobre nacionalisme i independència
https://www.ara.cat/suplements/diumenge/Hey-you_0_2005599428.html el colonislisme, les posicions de Putin a Àfrica
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-influenced-hitler Alex Ross sobre la influència del racisme americà en Hitler
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/yuval-noah-harari-extract-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century el futur canviarà tant que no ens podem refiar ni de nosaltres ni dels algoritmes
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/francis-fukuyama-postpones-the-end-of-history la necessitatd e ser reconegut, més enllà de l’explicació econòmica, una generalització de la fenomenologia de Hegel i el reconeixement a través de Kojeve
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/05/a-hundred-years-after-the-armistice el final de la primera guerra mundial, les morts innecessàries, les condicions de Foch que van impulsar la segona guerra
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/jair-bolsonaros-southern-strategy Bolsonaro al Brasil, per què la gent pobra vota un populista
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-darkest-secret la terrible història d’un home detingut i torturat per error
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47643456 demografia i aliments, Mathus, Erlich i Borlaug
Economist 04/07/19 la dreta ha perdut els valors: Our cover story this week is the global crisis in conservatism. In two-party systems, like the United States and (broadly) Britain, the right is in power, but only by jettisoning the values that used to define it. In countries with many parties the centre-right is being eroded, as in Germany and Spain, or eviscerated, as in France and Italy. In Hungary the right has gone straight to nationalist populism. “To be conservative”, wrote the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant.” The new right, however, are aggrieved and discontented. They are pessimists and reactionaries. They look at the world and see what President Donald Trump once called “carnage”. You do not have to be a conservative to find that deeply troubling.
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43702764 als anys 80, un centre de submarinisme al Sudan era una operació del Mossad per extreure jueus etíops.
La Sandy comenta que a Louisiana les classes han de demanar “sponsors” particulars per tenir llapis i material.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/16/the-moral-logic-of-humanitarian-intervention l’aparent futilitat de les intervencions humanitàries, a Síria no se sabia a quin grup donar suport, Lybia va ser un desastre.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/23/the-field-guide-to-tyranny tirans, stalin, hitler, mussolini, discurs escrit, discurs parlat
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-last-time-democracy-almost-died La democràcia ba estar amenaçada als ’30 i ens en vam sortir.
In the nineteen-nineties, with the end of the Cold War, democracies grew more plentiful, much as they had after the end of the First World War. As ever, the infant-mortality rate for democracies was high: baby democracies tend to die in their cradles. Starting in about 2005, the number of democracies around the world began to fall, as it had in the nineteen-thirties. Authoritarians rose to power: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Donald J. Trump in the United States.
“American democracy,” as a matter of history, is democracy with an asterisk, the symbol A-Rod’s name would need if he were ever inducted into the Hall of Fame. Not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act can the United States be said to have met the basic conditions for political equality requisite in a democracy. All the same, measured not against its past but against its contemporaries, American democracy in the twenty-first century is withering. The Democracy Index rates a hundred and sixty-seven countries, every year, on a scale that ranges from “full democracy” to “authoritarian regime.” In 2006, the U.S. was a “full democracy,” the seventeenth most democratic nation in the world. In 2016, the index for the first time rated the United States a “flawed democracy,” and since then American democracy has gotten only more flawed. True, the United States still doesn’t have a Rome or a Berlin to march on. That hasn’t saved the nation from misinformation, tribalization, domestic terrorism, human-rights abuses, political intolerance, social-media mob rule, white nationalism, a criminal President, the nobbling of Congress, a corrupt Presidential Administration, assaults on the press, crippling polarization, the undermining of elections, and an epistemological chaos that is the only air that totalitarianism can breathe.
“Do you think that political democracy is now on the wane?” the editors asked each writer. The series’ lead contributor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, took issue with the question, as philosophers, thankfully, do. “I call this kind of question ‘meteorological,’ ” he grumbled. “It is like asking, ‘Do you think that it is going to rain today? Had I better take my umbrella?’ ” The trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. “We need solely to make up our own minds and to act.”
preservar el patrimonio de la història afroamericana
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-03-18/coronavirus-could-reshape-global-order Xina està responent a la crisi: When no European state answered Italy’s urgent appeal for medical equipment and protective gear, China publicly committed to sending 1,000 ventilators, two million masks, 100,000 respirators, 20,000 protective suits, and 50,000 test kits. China has also dispatched medical teams and 250,000 masks to Iran and sent supplies to Serbia, whose president dismissed European solidarity as “a fairy tale” and proclaimed that “the only country that can help us is China.”
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/2019-ATA-SFR—SSCI.pdf informe de valoració d’amenaces de l’ahgència d’intel·ligència USA
1. Globalization of White Supremacy
2. Attacks on Trust and Truth
3. Biosecurity
4. Technological Disruption
5. Nukes
6. Climate Change
7. Covid-19’s Next Level Impact
8. Catastrophic Earthquakes
9. Unknown Unknowns
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-disappeared xina segrestant ciutadans oposats al règim, a l’estranger
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a32851975/police-surveillance-tools-protest-guide/ les tecnològiques com amazon els convencen d’invertir en una tecnologia que no funciona, subornant-los amb regals.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/africa-s-lost-kingdoms civilitzacions a l’àfrica a l’edat mitjana, mali i senegal
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/29/in-search-of-king-davids-lost-empire la discutible evidència arqueològica sobre l’existència del regne de David
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/29/mr-jones-remembers-when-stalin-weaponized-famine Stalin i el Holodomor fent morir de gana 4 milions d’ucranians
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/museum-of-toxic-statues-berlin en lloc d’esborrar el passat eliminant estàtues, posar-les en context [és el que s’hauria de fer amb el Valle de los caidos]
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/24/the-militias-against-masks gups d’extrema dreta amb teories de conspiració i armes, contra l’estat
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/ Turchin analitza l’evolució de les societats. El fet que estem generant molta gent que vol ocupar llocs d’elit i que no n’hi ha portarà discòrdia; tenim problemes fins 2025 o més.
https://elcaso.elnacional.cat/ca/noticies/veins-torredembarra-cabrejats-robatoris-ataquen-xalet-ocupa_46130_102.html com que la societat no garanteix la seguretat dels veins, acaben votant a la ultradreta
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/when-constitutions-took-over-the-world un estudi de les constitucions revela que no neixen tant per protegir els súbdits com per legitimar el poder i les guerres, en alguns cassos per exemple, la situació de les dones empitjora quan la constitució les discrimina legalment.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-56580788 els monjos budistes de myanmar donen suport a la violència
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56770570 USA deixa Afganistan després de 20 anys. Ha valgut la pena per controlar el terrorisme?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/remembering-walter-mondale Walter Mondale era prou honest per dir la veritat, encara que tingués un cost polític.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210505-how-cities-will-fossilise com fossilitzaran les ciutats d’aquí a milions d’anys
com ajudar Palestina sense armar Hamas
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/02/the-spyware-threat-to-journalists Pegasus spyware de dictadors contra periodistes i independentistes
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210808-the-mayas-ingenious-secret-to-survival els maies tenien tecnologia de fer reserver d’aigua i purificar-la amb pedra volcànica
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/mandelas-dream-for-south-africa-is-in-ruins la corrupció a Sudàfrica ha desfet els somnis de Mandela
la corrupció d’afganistan que es queden els diners per un exèrcit que no existeix
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-58466528 els nazis van enviar 5 científics a la Índia en cerca dels orígens de la raça aria
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-58557994 Rússia ja no és una democràcia
  sobre les generacions [ veure nota més àmplia ]
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/11/china-xi-jinping/620645/ LA xina de Xi-jinping vol controlar la població fins al punt que els adolescents no poden jugar online a l’ordinador més de tres hores a la setmana. August brought a mandate for all schools to provide instruction in “Xi Jinping Thought,” a compendium of his sayings and teachings and an echo of Mao’s famous Little Red Book. // The same month, Xi told a high-level committee about the importance of “common prosperity,” which he called a requirement of socialism. To combat income inequality—a serious problem in China—the meeting participants pledged to promote rural development, improve social services, and “adjust excessive incomes,” according to Xinhua, the country’s official news agency. Quick to sniff the political winds, the rich and mighty began opening their wallets. Companies such as Tencent and the e-commerce outfit Alibaba pledged fresh billions to Xi’s cause.//Xi’s goals for his campaign may extend beyond China, and into his widening confrontation with the United States. Xi and his propaganda machine are presenting China’s authoritarian governance as a more appropriate model for the world than democratic capitalism, better able to create a more harmonious, just, and prosperous society, and more capable of achieving great tasks, such as conquering the coronavirus pandemic, than a dysfunctional, decadent, and declining America. His new decrees could be part of this ideological offensive. As Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote in a recent essay, Xi “may believe the recent wave of crackdowns is necessary to bring about socialism at home to differentiate from capitalism as practiced in the West.” // The West is convinced that political and social freedoms and economic progress are inseparable. Xi and his Communist cadres do not agree, and, in their minds, they have China’s four-decade record of triumphs to prove their point. China’s leader appears to believe that greater top-down control will ensure his country’s continued ascent, not derail it.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-libyan-prisons-that-keep-migrants-out-of-europe Incapaços de gestionar la inmigració Europa paga a milícies a Líbia per que els detingui i els mantingui en presons.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/29/pompeii-still-has-buried-secrets
The journey from Naples to the ruins of Pompeii takes about half an hour on the Circumvesuviana, a train that rattles through a ribbon of land between the base of Mt. Vesuvius, on one side, and the Gulf of Naples, on the other. The area is built up, but when I travelled the route earlier this fall I could catch glimpses of the glittering sea behind apartment buildings. Occasionally, the mountainous coast across the bay came into sight, in the direction of the old Roman port of Misenum—where, in 79 A.D., the naval commander and prolific author Pliny the Elder watched Vesuvius erupt. Pliny, who led a rescue effort by sea, was killed by one of the volcano’s surges of gas and rock; his nephew, Pliny the Younger, provided the only surviving eyewitness account of the disaster.
About a third of the ancient city has yet to be excavated, however; the consensus among scholars is that this remainder should be left for future archeologists, and their presumably more sophisticated technologies.I had come to Pompeii to explore one such boundary, at the abrupt terminus of the Vicolo delle Nozze d’Argento—the Street of the Silver Wedding—in a corner of what archeologists have designated as Regio V, the city’s fifth region. For many years, the formal excavations stopped here, just past one of Pompeii’s grandest mansions: the House of the Silver Wedding..The new excavations in Regio V—conducted with the latest archeological methods, and an up-to-the-minute scholarly focus on such issues as class and gender—have yielded powerful insights into how Pompeii’s final residents lived and died. As Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, a professor emeritus at Cambridge University and an authority on the city, told me, “You only have to excavate a tiny amount in Pompeii to come up with dramatic discoveries. It’s always spectacular.”
The thermopolium, which opened to visitors in August, is a delight. A masonry counter is decorated with expertly rendered and still vivid images: a fanciful depiction of a sea nymph perched on the back of a seahorse; a trompe-l’oeil painting of two strangled ducks on a countertop, ready for the butcher’s knife; a fierce-looking dog on a leash. The unfaded colors—coral red for the webbed feet of the pitiful ducks, shades of copper and russet for the feathers of a buoyant cockerel that has yet to meet the ducks’ fate—are as eye-catching now as they would have been for passersby two millennia ago. (Today, they are protected from the elements and the sunlight by glass.) Another panel, bordered in black, is among Pompeii’s most self-referential art works: a representation of a snack bar, with the earthenware vessels known as amphorae stacked against a counter laden with pots of food. A figure—perhaps the snack bar’s proprietor—bustles in the background. The effect is similar to that of a diner owner who displays a blown-up selfie on the wall behind his cash register.
–
“Up until this bar was excavated, people who study these things have gone around believing that the dolia contained only dry foodstuffs,” she told me. “There are Roman laws that said bars shouldn’t serve this kind of warm food, like hot meat, so we’ve been guided by the classical sources. Then, suddenly, there is this one bar that is definitely serving hot food. And is it the only bar in the Roman world to have done this? Unlikely. So that is huge.” A new story appears to be emerging from the lapilli: of a cunning bar owner who reckons that an authority from distant Rome isn’t likely to shut down his operation, or who is confident that the local authorities—the kind of Pompeiians who live in grand houses—will turn a blind eye to an illegal takeout business that keeps their less affluent neighbors fed with cheap but tasty fish-and-snail soup.
–
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/29/the-cost-of-sentimentalizing-war-elizabeth-d-samet-looking-for-the-good-war
Elizabeth D. Samet finds such familiarity endlessly familiar. “Every American exercise of military force since World War II, at least in the eyes of its architects, has inherited that war’s moral justification and been understood as its offspring: motivated by its memory, prosecuted in its shadow, inevitably measured against it,” she writes in “Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A professor of English at West Point and the author of works on literature, leadership, and the military, Samet offers a cultural and literary counterpoint to the Ambrose-Brokaw-Spielberg industrial complex of Second World War remembrance, and something of a meditation on memory itself.
Those who forget the past may be condemned to repeat it, but those who sentimentalize the past are rewarded with best-seller status.
–
The war in Vietnam, Samet suggests, still functions as a counterweight to the legacy of Good War mythology in America’s national-security discussions. President George H. W. Bush, in expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, believed that he had also exorcised the demons of that bad war. “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” he exulted in a White House speech.
–

Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War,” in which Robert McNamara, L.B.J.’s Secretary of Defense, says, “We all make mistakes.” It’s not much as regrets go, though it tops the Rumsfeldian “Stuff happens” response to the looting that took place in Baghdad in 2003.

LA PEDRA DE ROSETTA
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/29/how-the-rosetta-stone-yielded-up-its-secrets-edward-dolnick-the-writing-of-the-gods
Napoleon brought with him not just soldiers but some hundred and sixty so-called savants—scientists, scholars, and artists, with their compasses and rulers and pencils and pens—to describe what they could of this fabled old realm.
So it was that, on a hot day in July of 1799, a team of laborers, working under a French officer to rebuild a neglected fort near the port city of Rosetta—now known as Rashid—discovered a stone so large that they could not move it. Under a different officer, the men might have been told to maneuver around it somehow. But their supervisor, Pierre-François Bouchard, was one of Napoleon’s savants, trained as a scientist as well as a soldier. When the dirt had been cleaned off the front of what is now known as the Rosetta Stone, he realized that it might be something of interest.
It was a slab of granodiorite (a cousin of granite), about four feet tall, two and a half feet wide, and a foot thick, inscribed on its front with three separate texts. The topmost text, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, was fourteen lines long. (It was probably about twice that length originally; the top of the slab had broken off.) The middle section, thirty-two lines long, was in some other script, which nobody recognized. (Called Demotic, it turned out to be a sort of shorthand derived, ultimately, from hieroglyphs.) But—eureka!—the bottom section, fifty-three lines long, was in Ancient Greek, a language that plenty of Napoleon’s savants had learned in school. One can only imagine what these men felt when they saw the third inscription, like a familiar face in a room full of strangers.
It went on public display in 1802. From that time on, the Rosetta Stone has been the most prized object in the British Museum, and the subject of any number of close studies. Now there is a new one, “The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone” (Scribner), by Edward Dolnick, a former science writer for the Boston Globe and the author of several books on the intersections of art, science, and detection. According to Dolnick, the Rosetta Stone was not only, as its discoverers suspected, a key to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and thereby to a huge swath of otherwise inaccessible ancient history. It was also a lesson in decoding itself, in what the human mind does when faced with a puzzle.
Then, too, no one was sure, early on, which way hieroglyphic writing ran: from left to right, as in European languages, or, like Hebrew, from right to left, or even going back and forth between those two, like ribbon candy.
The other scholar was Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832), seventeen years Young’s junior. Champollion grew up in southwestern France, the youngest of seven children. His father was a bookseller; his mother couldn’t read or write. He had little money. Until he was middle-aged and had already, more or less, founded Egyptology, he could not afford to go to Egypt. But, from an early age, he had shown an extraordinary gift for languages. While still in his teens, he acquired not only Greek and Latin but also Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, Sanskrit, Syriac, Persian, Chaldean. Most important for his future work, he set about learning Coptic, the language of the Egyptian Orthodox Church, which was thought (correctly, as it turned out) to be descended from Ancient Egyptian.
In time, Champollion wrested from the Rosetta Stone most of its secrets. First, he showed that Young was right: hieroglyphs did communicate through sound, like English and French. But, whereas Young believed that this was true only with names, and only foreign ones, Champollion showed that it was also the case with many other words. Furthermore, phonetic communication did not rule out its supposed alternatives. A hieroglyph might be phonetic (sounding out a word), or it might be pictographic (giving you a picture of the thing being indicated, as in “I ♥ NEW YORK”), or it might be ideographic (giving you an agreed-upon symbol, such as “XOXO” or “&,” for the thing indicated). As Champollion wrote, a passage in hieroglyphs was a script “at the same time figurative, symbolic and phonetic, in one and the same text, in one and the same sentence, and, if I may put it, in one and the same word.” Going further, Champollion showed that the system also used rebuses, a kind of linguistic pun simultaneously pictorial and phonetic. An example in English is “👁CU” for “I see you.” Dolnick asks us to imagine writing “Winston Churchill” by drawing a pack of cigarettes followed by a picture of a church, then a picture of a hill.
That’s not all. The phonetic values of hieroglyphs, as with the Hebrew alphabet, included consonants but not vowels. What if a reader encountered “bd”? Did it mean “bad” or “bed” or “bud” or “bid”? Writers of hieroglyphs solved this problem by following the ambiguous word with a so-called “determinative,” a hieroglyph saying, in effect, “I know that looks confusing, but here’s what I mean.” Dolnick explains, “Old and praise look identical, but the hieroglyphs for old are followed by a hieroglyph of a bent man tottering along on a walking stick; praise is followed by a man with his hands lifted in homage.”
Diu:
The lord of the sacred uraeus-cobras whose power is great, who has secured Egypt and made it prosper, whose heart is pious towards the gods, the one who prevails over his enemy, who has enriched the lives of his people, lord of jubilees like Ptah-Tanen [the god of Memphis], king like Pre [the sun god], ruler of the upper and lower provinces, the son of the gods who love their father, whom Ptah chose and to whom the Sun gave victory, the living image of Amun, the son of the Sun, Ptolemy, who lives for ever, beloved of Ptah, the god manifest whose beneficence is perfect.
The inscription then catalogues the pharaoh’s benefactions to his people. The list sounds a bit like something out of a reëlection campaign. The great man, it says, has lowered taxes, secured benefits for soldiers, amnestied prisoners, made splendid offerings to the gods, and put down rebellions, impaling the rebels on stakes. The decree goes on to specify the processions to be performed, the libations to be poured, the garlands to be donned, and the statues to be venerated in recognition of the pharaoh’s accession and his birthday. It ends with the instruction that this text is to be copied and installed in Egypt’s important temples. (Other stones have since been found, with various fragments of the Rosetta text.)
Champollion was forty-one, the world’s first professor of Egyptology, at the Collège de France, in Paris. On his deathbed, he grieved that he hadn’t finished his “Egyptian Grammar.” “So soon,” he said, as he felt the end coming. Putting his hand to his forehead, he exclaimed, “There are so many things inside!” After Jean-François’s death, Jacques-Joseph completed his brother’s “Egyptian Grammar” (1836-41) and then his “Egyptian Dictionary” (1841-43): a life, two lives, well spent.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59740324 Kosovo lloga cel·les de presó a Dinamarca
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-60108274 l’extrema dreta hindu mata els intocables que treballen als escorxadors i prohibeix matar vaques, que es tornen salvatges i acaben atacant persones
https://www.eldiario.es/economia/asume-agujero-40-000-millones-decisiones-gobierno-rajoy_1_8698118.html el que ha costat la gestió dels bancs i les trampes comptables del govern del PP de Mariano Rajoy
https://restofworld.org/2022/tech-india-caste-divides/ les castes a la Índia continuen a la indústria IT
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60047328 els drones en la guerra moderna (US + Israel  ara Turquia, Iran i disponibles per tothom)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60458300 Putin reescrivint la història d’Ucraïna per justificar la invasió
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine crisi provocada per la pretensió de la NATO d’expandir-se a l’est [ + els assessors informant malament a Putin] desastre absolut
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60767454  In 1992, Serb nationalists launched a war to strangle the newly independent state of Bosnia at birth. They argued that Bosnian identity was bogus, that Bosnian statehood had no historical legitimacy, that it was really part of Serbia. It is exactly Putin’s view of Ukraine.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61001524 els nacionalistes hindus no poden arreglar les coses, però poden atacar els musulmans. EL mateix que fa el PP a España, com que no poden millorar la vida dels espanyols, els ofereixen fotre els catalans.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-61040359 Síria s’ha convertit en un narco estat
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/18/the-people-who-decide-what-becomes-history-richard-cohen-making-history
It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” Those are the words of Edward Gibbon, and the book he imagined was, of course, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” The passage is from Gibbon’s autobiography, and it has been quoted many times, because it seems to distill the six volumes of Gibbon’s famous book into an image: friars singing in the ruins of the civilization that their religion destroyed. And maybe we can picture, as in a Piranesi etching, the young Englishman (Gibbon was twenty-seven) perched on the steps of the ancient temple, contemplating the story of how Christianity plunged a continent into a thousand years of superstition and fanaticism, and determining to make that story the basis for a work that would become one of the literary monuments of the Enlightenment.
Does it undermine the gravitas of the moment to know that, as Richard Cohen tells us in his supremely entertaining “Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past” (Simon & Schuster).
“Making History” is a survey—a monster survey—of historians from Herodotus (the father of lies, in Plutarch’s description) to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sketching their backgrounds and personalities, summarizing their output, and identifying their agendas. Cohen’s coverage is epic. He writes about ancient historians, Islamic historians, Black historians, and women historians, from the first-century Chinese historian Ban Zhao to the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard. He discusses Japanese and Soviet revisionists who erased purged officials and wartime atrocities from their nations’ authorized histories, and analyzes visual works like the Bayeux Tapestry, which he calls “the best record of its time, pictorial or otherwise,” and Mathew Brady’s photographs of Civil War battlefields. (“In effect,” he concludes, “they were frauds.”)
He covers academic historians, including Leopold von Ranke, the nineteenth-century founder of scientific history; the Annales school, in France; and the British rivals Hugh Trevor-Roper and A. J. P. Taylor. He considers authors of historical fiction, including Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Dickens, Tolstoy, Toni Morrison, and Hilary Mantel. He writes about journalists; television documentarians (he thinks Ken Burns’s “most effective documentaries rank with many of the best works of written history from the last fifty years”); and popular historians, like Winston Churchill, whose history of the Second World War made him millions, even though it was researched and partially written by persons other than Winston Churchill.
“Making History” is a loaf with plenty of raisins. We learn (or I learned, anyway) that Vladimir Putin’s grandfather was Lenin’s and Stalin’s cook, that Napoleon was about average in height, that Ken Burns is a descendant of the poet Robert Burns, and that when the Marxist critic György Lukács was arrested following the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution and was asked if he was carrying a weapon, he handed over his pen. (That anecdote is a little neat. I had to take it with a grain of salt—but I took it.)
It’s striking how often this concept—“what it felt like”—turns up in “Making History” as the true goal of historical reconstruction. “The historian will tell you what happened,” E. L. Doctorow said. “The novelist will tell you what it felt like.” Cohen quotes Hilary Mantel: “If we want added value—to imagine not just how the past was, but what it felt like, from the inside—we pick up a novel.”
We expect novelists to make this claim. They can describe what is going on in characters’ heads and what characters are feeling, which historians mostly cannot, or should not, do. But historians want to capture what it felt like, too. For what they are doing is not all that different from what novelists are doing: they are trying to bring a vanished world to life on the page. Novelists are allowed to invent, and historians have to work with verifiable facts. They can’t make stuff up; that’s the one rule of the game. But they want to give readers a sense of what it was like to be alive at a certain time and place. That sense is not a fact, but it is what gives the facts meaning.
This is what G. R. Elton, the historian of Tudor England, seems to have meant when he described history as “imagination, controlled by learning and scholarship, learning and scholarship rendered meaningful by imagination.” A German term for this (which Cohen misattributes to Ranke) is Einfühlungsvermögen, which Cohen defines as “the capacity for adapting the spirit of the age whose history one is writing and of entering into the very being of historical personages, no matter how remote.” A simpler translation would be “empathy.” It’s in short supply today. We live in a judgy age, and judgments are quick. But what would it mean to empathize with a slave trader? Is understanding a form of excusing?
History writing is based on the faith that events, despite appearances, don’t happen higgledy-piggledy—that although individuals can act irrationally, change can be explained rationally. As Cohen says, Gibbon thought that, as philosophy was the search for first principles, history was the search for the principle of movement. Many Western historians, even “scientific” historians, like Ranke, assumed that the past has a providential design. Ranke spoke of “the hand of God” behind historical events.
Marxist historians, like Hobsbawm, believe in a law of historical development. Some writers of history, such as those in the Annales school, think that political events do happen pretty much higgledy-piggledy (which is why they are notoriously difficult to predict, although commentators somehow make a living doing just that), but that there are regularities beneath the surface chaos—cycles, rhythms, the longue durée.
Still, history is not a science. Essentially, as A. J. P. Taylor said, it is “simply a form of story-telling.” It’s storytelling with facts. And the facts do not speak for themselves, and they are not just there for the taking. They are, as the English historian E. H. Carr put it, “like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use—these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.”
It’s interpretation all the way down. The lesson to be drawn from this, I think, is that the historian should never rule anything out. Everything, from the ownership of the means of production to the color that people painted their toenails, is potentially relevant to our ability to make sense of the past. The Annales historians called this approach “total history.” But, even in total history, you catch some fish and let the others go. You try to get the facts you want.
And what do historians want the facts for? The implicit answer of Cohen’s book is that there are a thousand purposes—to indoctrinate, to entertain, to warn, to justify, to condemn. But the purpose is chosen because it matters personally to the historian, and it is, almost always, because it matters to the historian that the history that is produced matters to us. As Cohen says, it is a great irony of writing about the past that “any author is the prisoner of their character and circumstances yet often they are the making of him.”
[la sensació que és una dialèctica perversa inevitable, que sempre intentem fere servir la força per consolidar la nostra posició, i quan arriba un nou poder, aquest esdevé despòtic, també inevitablement perquè els que s’hi oposen tampoc ens deixen alternativa]
Ciutat que falla per política progressista d’esquerres mal entesa. Plena de gent sense sostre i drogadictes. This approach to drug use and homelessness is distinctly San Franciscan, blending empathy-driven progressivism with California libertarianism. The roots of this belief system reach back to the ’60s, when hippies filled the streets with tents and weed. The city has always had a soft spot for vagabonds, and an admirable focus on care over punishment.
It may not have been so clear until now, but San Franciscans have been losing patience with the city’s leadership for a long time. Nothing did more to alienate them over the years than how the progressive leaders managed the city’s housing crisis.
Consider the story of the flower farm at 770 Woolsey Street. It slopes down 2.2 acres in the sunny southern end of the city and is filled with run-down greenhouses, the glass long shattered—a chaos of birds and wild roses. For five years, advocates fought a developer who was trying to put 63 units on that bucolic space. They wanted to sell flowers there and grow vegetables for the neighborhood—a kind of banjo-and-beehives utopian fantasy. The thing they didn’t want—at least not there, not on that pretty hill—was a big housing development. Who wants to argue against them? In San Francisco the word developer is basically a slur, close to calling someone a Republican. What kind of monster wants to bulldoze wild roses?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-62215620  l’ús del jijab baixa, es va estendre el 2011 com a reaació al secularisme imposat des de dalt.  [i a Tunísia han aprovat unreferèndum atorgant més poder a un president en detriment d’una democràcia que no ha aportat més benestar ni progrés.
Half the population today is represented by eighteen senators, the other half by eighty-two. The Senate also packs a parliamentary death ray, the filibuster, which would allow forty-one senators representing ten per cent of the public to block legislation supported by senators representing the other ninety per cent.
But the House of Representatives—that’s the people’s house, right? Not necessarily. In the 2012 Presidential election, Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney by five million votes, and Democrats running for the House got around a million more votes than Republicans, but the Republicans ended up with a thirty-three-seat advantage. Under current law, congressional districts within a state should be approximately equal in population. So how did the Republicans get fewer votes but more seats? It’s the same thing that let Stephen A. Douglas retain his Senate seat in 1858: partisan gerrymandering.
We have two Dakotas in part because Republicans were in power in Washington, and they figured that splitting the Dakota territory in two would yield twice as many new Republican senators.
VIOLÈNCIA RELIGIOSA
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-62206585 mestra hindu assassinada al Kashmir
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-62678403 dones que porten hijab discriminads a Egipte
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/12/cant-we-come-up-with-something-better-than-liberal-democracy-two-cheers-for-politics-isonomia-and-the-origins-of-philosophy
l’ideal d’unir el poble lliure d’interferències del capital no sap veure que, en general, el poble no està d’acord i no té un punt de vista únic.
The art historian Kenneth Clark recalled appearing in those years on a popular BBC radio quiz program, “The Brains Trust,” and fumbling a question on the best form of government. The “right” answer, given by all the other panelists, was “democracy,” but this seemed to Clark “incredibly unhistorical”; he had, after all, studied the rise of Botticellian beauty in the Medici-mafia state of Florence, and of Watteau and rococo under the brute dynastic rule of France, and generally valued those despotic regimes where more great art and music got made than has ever been created under a bourgeois democracy.
These days, liberal, representative democracy—moribund in Russia, failing in Eastern Europe, sickened in Western Europe, and having come one marginally resolute Indiana politician away from failing here—seems in the gravest danger.
“Two Cheers for Politics” (Basic Books), by the political essayist and law professor Jedediah Purdy
Reagan and Thatcher, or their financiers, brought about an era of plutocratic planetary rule, which hasn’t been reformed since. Blair and Clinton were mere handmaidens of the market, neoliberals making their peace with globalization and its inequality.
Yet Purdy does think that Trump’s campaign, like those of Obama and Sanders, signalled an appetite for democratic renewal, and a revival of “political energies that had receded far from the center of public life”.
He is angry at the élites who supervise the bureaucratic capitalist state on behalf of their overlords while keeping up an elaborate masquerade of equality of opportunity. Harvard gets hit particularly hard here: slots at Harvard College, he tells us, are bought and sold, while its Crimson meritocrats go on to staff “Democratic administrations,” the Times, and, well, The New Yorker.
Purdy blames “market colonization” for the Supreme Court’s reactionary decision-making, but the Court’s most reactionary decisions have little to do with the desires of capitalism or, anyway, of capitalists: the Goldman Sachs crowd is fine with women’s autonomy, being significantly composed of liberal women, and would prefer fewer gun massacres. And though the struggle to maintain democratic institutions within a capitalist society has been intense, the struggle to maintain democratic institutions in anti-capitalist countries has been catastrophic. We do poorly, but the Chinese Communist Party does infinitely worse, even when it tilts toward some version of capitalism.
But the greatest service of politics isn’t to enable the mobilization of people who have the same views; it’s to enable people to live together when their views differ. Politics is a way of getting our ideas to brawl in place of our persons. Though democracy is practiced when people march on Washington and assemble in parks—when they feel that they have found a common voice—politics is practiced when the shouting turns to swapping. Politics was Disraeli getting one over on the nineteenth-century Liberal Party by leaping to electoral reform for the working classes, thereby trying to gain their confidence; politics was Mandela making a deal with de Klerk to respect the white minority in exchange for a peaceful transition to majority rule. Politics is Biden courting and coaxing Manchin (whose replacement would be incomparably farther to the right) to make a green deal so long as it was no longer colored green. The difficulty with the Athenian synecdoche is that getting the part to act as the whole presupposes an agreement among the whole. There is no such agreement.
The perennial temptation of leftist politics is to suppose that opposition to its policies among the rank and file must be rooted in plutocratic manipulation, and therefore curable by the reassertion of the popular will. The evidence suggests, alas, that very often what looks like plutocratic manipulation really is the popular will. Many Munchkins like the witch, or at least work for the witch out of dislike for some other ascendant group of Munchkins. (Readers of the later L. Frank Baum books will recall that Munchkin Country is full of diverse and sometimes discordant groupings.) The awkward truth is that Thatcher and Reagan were free to give the plutocrats what they wanted because they were giving the people what they wanted: in one case, release from what had come to seem a stifling, union-heavy statist system; in the other, a spirit of national, call it tribal, self-affirmation.
————
Purdy’s vision of democracy would, of course, omit the bugs in the Athenian model: the misogyny, the slavery, the silver mines. But what if the original sin of the democratic vision lies right there—what if, by the time we got to Athens, democratic practice was already fallen and hopelessly corrupted, with the slaves and the silver mines and the imperialism inherent to the Athenian model? This is the hair-raising thesis advanced by the illustrious Japanese philosopher Kōjin Karatani. In his book “Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy,” Athenian democracy is exposed as a false idol.
His ideal is, instead, “isonomia,” the condition of a society in which equal speaks to equal as equal, with none ruled or ruling, and he believes that such an order existed around the Ionian Islands of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., before the rise of Athens.
If Purdy is susceptible to the Munchkinland theory of social change, Karatani is tempted by what might be called the Atlantis theory of political history. Once upon a time, there was a great, good place where life was beautiful, thought was free, and everyone was treated fairly. This good place was destroyed by some kind of earthquake—perhaps visited from outside, perhaps produced by an internal shaking of its own plates—and vanished into the sea, though memories of it remain.
As Amartya Sen argues, good primary schools contribute as much to democracy as strong political parties do, and, as Robert Putnam has shown many times, the presence of choral groups and cafés in an Italian town tells us more about its prospects than the wisdom of the laws in its statute book does.
If Purdy is susceptible to the Munchkinland theory of social change, Karatani is tempted by what might be called the Atlantis theory of political history. Once upon a time, there was a great, good place where life was beautiful, thought was free, and everyone was treated fairly.
Reeves writes. “Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls.” “As far as I can tell, nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly, so comprehensively, or so consistently around the world,” Boys, meanwhile, are at least twice as likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and twice as likely to be suspended; their dropout rates, too, are considerably higher than those of their female counterparts. Young men are also four times as likely to die from suicide.
This story pushes to the side the male-favoring disparities in the world of work. The gender pay gap is usually described by noting that a woman earns eighty-four cents for every dollar earned by a man (though this is up from sixty-four cents in 1980). Barely one-tenth of the C.E.O.s in the Fortune 500 are women (and that is itself a twenty-six-fold increase since 2000, when only two women were in the club). The #MeToo movement began just five years ago; the sexual harassment that women face has hardly been extinguished. Even in the workplace, however, gender convergence may be arriving sooner than anticipated.
Within occupations, there’s often no wage gap until women have children and reduce their work hours. “For most women, having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite,” Reeves observes. “For most men, it barely makes a dent.”
White men experienced a specific blow that Black men had felt earlier and even more acutely. In a classic study, “The Truly Disadvantaged,” the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued that early waves of deindustrialization after the Second World War devastated the lives of working-class African Americans, who were buffeted both by economic forces, in the form of greater rates of joblessness, and by social ones, including worsened prospects for marriage. Later came the effects of the so-called China shock—the contraction of American manufacturing, a male-skewing sector, as a result of increased trade. David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., estimates that normalizing trade relations with China in 2001 cost as many as two million American jobs, often in places that had not recovered even a decade later.
[molts homes deixen la feina. In 2017, the late Alan Krueger, who chaired President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, calculated that nearly half of all nonworking men were taking pain medication on a daily basis, and argued that the increased prescribing of opioids could explain a lot of the decline in the male labor force.]
His signature idea, though, is to “redshirt” boys and give them all, by default, an extra year of kindergarten. The aim is to compensate for their slower rates of adolescent brain development, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, which controls decision-making. Reeves, who places great stock in this biological difference, also places great stock in his proposed remedy: “A raft of studies of redshirted boys have shown dramatic reductions in hyperactivity and inattention through the elementary school years, higher levels of life satisfaction, lower chances of being held back a grade later, and higher test scores.”
[A college athlete who is allowed to practice with the varsity team but is kept out of competition for one year in order to extend the athlete’s period of eligibility.]
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230320-the-great-debate-about-mummies-should-we-unwrap-them  Les mòmies a Egipte no eren per preservar els cadàvers sinó per ajudar-los a ser déus en el més enllà
ECONOMIST 24/3: Mr Xi believes in the inexorable decline of the Amer­ican-led world order, with its professed concern for rules and human rights. He aims to twist it into a more transactional system of deals between great powers. Do not underestimate the perils of this vision—or its appeal around the world.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65015289 un pare rus perd la custòdia de la filla que havia fet un dibuix contra la guerra.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-64300442 les xarxes socials permeten orgnitzar manifestacions però aquestes protestes són més vulnerables a la repressió. I a més no tenen darrere un moviment.
https://bigthink.com/the-past/cleopatra-perfume-mendes/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/29/the-world-a-family-history-of-humanity-simon-sebag-montefiore-book-review Nepo babies, la història seguint el poder de les famílies
Europa no té presència a Ucraina, al conflicte de Gaza i es deixa manipular per la dreta. Barberta. (El Nacional 24/12/23)
La treva de Nadal a la WWI. Els soldats van intercanviar cigarrets i van fer un partit de futbol. Els comandaments la van prohibir després. (BBC)
2024
Trump, com el rei d’Espanya, reclama immunitat BBC

https://www.vox.com/24055522/israel-hamas-gaza-war-strategy-netanyahu-strategy-morality?utm_source=pocket_mylist No hi ha un pla per després de la guerra

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/ukraines-democracy-in-darkness la guerra ha fet retrocedir la democràcia a Ucraïna

https://www.vox.com/world-politics/24160779/inside-indias-secret-campaign-to-threaten-and-harass-americans?utm_source=pocket_mylist
El món gira cap a l’autoritarisme: Rússia, Xina, Índia, esclafant l’oposició … però passa que en democràcia els partits no miren el bé comú sinó només com destruir l’adversari, sabotejant pressupostos només per fer caure el govern.

Autoritarisme

Xina amonesta unes escoles per que no canten l’himne amb prou entusiasme BBC
Corea del nord executa un home per escoltar i difondre KPop. El Nacional.

els palestins només volen destruir Israel, no un estat propi. (el Nacional)

 

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