When the House and Senate budget talks got underway a few weeks ago, Paul Ryan, the GOP’s lead running dog on economic policy, reiterated the party line: The current situation is unsustainable. Negative consequences will fall hardest on the poor and the elderly. Therefore, sacrifices must be made…by the poor and the elderly. (More…)
As much as I love New Zealand, it has been increasingly difficult to ignore disturbing strands within the dominant Pakeha (European) culture here. As a liberal British import to the land also known as Aotearoa, having traversed half the globe to another democratic first world country with a proud progressive history, I expected a similar level of tolerance as that which I had encountered in my former home, London. (More…)
I was speaking to my mother about democracy, expressing wariness about European models, which many Pakistanis associate with the Soviet-inspired experiments of the Afghan Communist era. I mentioned the jirga, as a way of envisioning direct democracy, in South Asian vernacular. She found it appealing. “That’s like the old days, people coming together to talk about their problems, that isn’t from the West,” my mum replied. (More…)
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a quick deal between the P5+1 powers and Iran failed to materialize. Hopes were understandably raised by the fact that the United States wanted a deal, and that Iran declared its openness to unprecedentedly intrusive inspections of its nuclear facilities. But what is at stake in these talks goes beyond the atomic issue. It deals with the entire Western approach to the Middle East. (More…)
Our cultural fascination with decay is pervasive and profound. The visual vocabulary of ruination connects the decay of built spaces to the aging of human bodies: a death spectacle. But in the Rockaways, New York City’s thin ribbon of battered coastline, we discover that the vulgar voyeurism of the decay-seeking gaze is more closely connected to our social understanding of wealth than to our animal understanding of death. (More…)
I’d said that Afghanistan’s future had been ruined by naive leftists. The analysis visibly bothered one of my classmates. Perhaps it wasn’t as subtle as it could have been. I still stand by it. Afghan Communists blew it. Not just because their missteps allowed for foreign meddling. But also because they failed to understand democracy. (More…)
It was as good as Daily Mail headlines get. “The Guardian has handed a gift to terrorists.” Paraphrasing a speech by new MI5 Chief Andrew Parker, in which the top spy took aim at the paper for publishing Edward Snowden’s leaks, the catchy language, though designed to pimp newsprint, testified to the gravity of Britain’s GCHQ crisis. (More…)
Chris Christie is bracing himself for what is likely a landslide re-election Tuesday. Almost on cue, another video has been circulating that portrays the governor at his most infamous: rude, and confrontational, against a schoolteacher who was critical of his education reform strategy. As analysts turn their attention to New Jersey, it’s important to evaluate how Christie got to this point, and why he’s so popular. (More…)
President Lukashenko appealed to the apparatchiks. They were fearful of the literati calling for human rights reforms, and raising the divisive issue of whether or not Russian should be Belarus’ official language, an issue that rankles to this day. He also seemed to rise above the intrigues of the post-1989 legislature, with his anti-corruption agenda, though post-mortems of his first campaign show that it was light on actual investigations, but high on image management. (More…)
It was my second visit to the town of Sittwe, in Burma’s western Rakhine state this year, and my third visit to the country itself in six months. Prompted as much by what seemed like fate as opportunity, I had journeyed once again to this part of the world in order to write about the plight of the Rohingya ethnic minority, a stateless people whose suffering and increasing proximity to disaster are not well-known in the West. (More…)
Nuclear weapons negotiations between the United States and Iran are looking increasingly likely to portend a seismic shift in the Middle East. That shift, though, is not the one that was hoped for in some quarters. Especially in Riyadh and Jerusalem, who fear being sidelined by an ending of hostilities between Washington and Tehran. (More…)