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Please read this letter from 38 professors who are dogged defenders of free speech, and
‘s contribution to that deontological cause. With colleagues such as these, perhaps academia is not a lost cause.
https://castroluciano.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Public-Letter-Against-Censorship.pdf
By IDN
By Jonathan Power
Eleven hundred years ago Europe was a backwater. There were no grand cities, apart from Cordoba in Spain which was Muslim. The Middle East was much further ahead, still absorbing the intellectual delights and challenges of Greek science, medicine and architecture which Europeans were largely ignorant of. In southern China agriculture advanced and trade in tea, porcelain and silk flourished.
By 1914 it was a totally different world. The Europeans ruled 84% of the globe and they had colonies everywhere. How was it that Europe and its offspring, the United States, became the dominant dynamic force in the world, and still are today in most things?
If I walk around my university town in Sweden and stop the first ten students, I meet and ask them why this was so they would probably say because of the Industrial Revolution. But in 1800 when the Industrial Revolution was only just beginning Europeans already ruled 35% of the world and had armed ships on every ocean and colonies on every continent.
If they didn’t say that they might say it was the way the Europeans spread their fatal diseases, smallpox and measles, to which they had gained a good deal of immunity, and this enabled them to lay low native peoples. But in fact, all the major Middle Eastern and Asian civilizations had this same advantage. In Africa it was local diseases that attacked the Europeans more than vice versa.
Maybe one of the ten students would say it was because the Europeans were ahead in the development of gunpowder technology. After all, the military revolution preceded the Industrial Revolution. But I doubt that, even though on the right track, this one student could explain why.
Gunpowder was invented in China and by the sixteenth century the Ottomans were making high quality artillery. But they could not keep up with the pace of European technological development. Europe had military competition and thus innovation baked into it.
Europe, unlike the Ottoman Empire or China, was a very un-unified kind of place. Since the fall of Charlemagne there was no one strong enough to hold Europe together. Moreover, the popes preferred divide and rule and did not want a single strong European leader to diminish their power. In Europe dozens of small states and principalities, often each vying to be top dog, were stimulated to nurse their competitive instincts. This pushed research and gunpowder technology forward at a much faster pace than anywhere else in the world.
In contrast, China was a massive hegemon, Japan and the Ottoman Empire sizeable ones. A hegemon inevitably comes to believe that since it is politically dominant far and wide it doesn’t have to work so hard at maintaining superior arms. But when it came to gunpowder technology and its adaptation to warships the smaller European powers, each seeking to outscore each other, could often call the shots against Asia’s hegemons.
Philip Hoffman, professor at the California Institute of Technology, argues in his book, “Why Did Europe Conquer the World?” that Europe’s pace of innovation was driven by a peculiar form of military competition which he calls a “tournament”- the sort of competition that under the right conditions, can drive contestants to exert enormous effort in the hope of earning a prize.
This is what happened in Europe, but not elsewhere. European rulers raised taxes and lavished resources on armies, navies, gunpowder technology and pushed forward research. Moreover, unlike in Asia, private entrepreneurs faced few legal, financial or political obstacles to launching expeditions of conquest and exploration. This is why the British East India Company could conquer much of India.
Some historians add into the mix the immense profits from the Caribbean and North American slave trade which provided much of the capital needed to build machines and factories. Others would add the long European tradition of the separation of church and state. Hoffman himself stresses the importance of Britain’s uniform legal and fiscal system and Parliament’s control of the purse.
It would be good to think that human society has advanced sufficiently that a bit of a confrontational debate could turn out to be a good thing if only it could be done without another round of gunpowder technology and within the legal framework of the Charter of the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation.
Thus, the world must prepare for another step forward—perhaps an earthquake of a step—in its political and economic evolution. We see the beginnings of it now. To me it has all the makings of long-term self-destruction.
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IDN-InDepthNews offers news analyses and viewpoints on topics that impact the world and its peoples. IDN-InDepthNews serves as the flagship of the International Press Syndicate Group
Telegram said it would hand over user information including IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities with “valid legal requests”, marking a major shift for the encrypted messaging platform.
Until now, Telegram has only been willing to provide user data on terror suspects.
Pavel Durov, the chief executive, wrote on his Telegram channel that a team of moderators had also removed “problematic content” from the platform’s search feature.
Durov said the new policies “should discourage criminals”, but whistleblowers and democracy activists who rely on private communication may fear being caught in the crosshairs.
These changes come a month after Durov was arrested in Paris on charges that Telegram had been used for criminal activities and refused to cooperate with authorities. Durov is under formal investigation and currently banned from leaving France.
| 25th September 2024 |
 Hezbollah: shapeshifter of the Middle East |
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| On Monday, as Israel bombed targets across southern Lebanon in airstrikes that killed more than 500 people, Iran’s new president said he didn’t want to go to war. So what? That is not what Hezbollah wanted to hear. As noted here, Hezbollah has been called the world’s most heavily-armed non-state actor. It is also a political party; a state within a state; dedicated to the destruction of Israel; dependent on Iran for finance and weaponry; and recoiling from the most devastating wave of Israeli attacks in its 42-year history. Western and Israeli officials say Hezbollah has asked Iran to attack Israel in the last few days, only to be told “the timing wasn’t right”. The timing may never be right for Iran to attack Israel on Hezbollah’s behalf. One of its defining roles has been to attack Israel on Iran’s behalf, and it has many other roles besides: Proxy. “Hezbollah’s budget, its income, its expenses, everything it eats and drinks, its weapons and rockets, are from the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said during the Syrian civil war. That hasn’t changed, but an important detail has since come into focus: those weapons include precision-guided Iranian missiles for use only if Iran’s nuclear facilities are threatened. For now, they aren’t. Party. Hezbollah emerged within three years of the Iranian revolution and killed 60 people in the US embassy bombing in Beirut in 1983. It was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the US in 1997, but its non-military wing is a political party with 13 MPs, in alliance with a fellow Shia Muslim faction and the (Christian) Free Patriotic Movement. It maintains open if uneasy relations with the Lebanese state, which is weak, although Christian, Druze and Muslim sectarian groups are strong and all have to tolerate a freelance Hezbollah foreign policy that has dragged the country into Iran’s “axis of resistance” along with Hamas, Syria and the Houthis; the Lebanese army, which is bigger than Hezbollah but defers to it in large parts of the country; and the rest of Lebanese society, from Beiruti billionaires to ordinary citizens in the south, where Hezbollah takes responsibility for welfare, schools, hospitals and sometimes debt relief. Its largesse is funded with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash transfers from Iran, topped up with what it can skim off Syria’s $10 billion drug trade. Partner. Hezbollah affirmed its support for Hamas immediately after the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, and has been firing rockets into northern Israel ever since. Some 60,000 Israelis have been evacuated. Last week Netanyahu added to his list of war aims by saying it was time for them to go home. The ordnance raining down on Hezbollah-linked targets in Lebanon for six of the past eight days is partly a result – although each side is also trying to lure the other into a trap. Full-blown war would unite Lebanon behind Hezbollah but leave Iran’s nuclear sites unprotected, which is why Tehran is talking peace. The $7 million man. On Friday an Israeli airstrike on southern Beirut killed Ibrahim Aqil – founder of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force. The US State Department had offered $7 million for information on his alleged role in the 1983 embassy bombing. Before that, in blowing up Hezbollah’s communications network, Israel had succeeded where the Lebanese state had tried and failed. Since then Israel has doubled down; yet another airstrike yesterday killed the head of Hezbollah’s missile and rocket force. Does it come back from this? Almost certainly. Israel and the US want to force Iran to give up on a strategy of mutual solidarity with its proxies that it calls the Unity of Arenas, and pin Hezbollah back outside a UN buffer zone established in 2006. But that won’t happen except as part of a larger diplomatic deal involving Gaza, Lina Khatib of Chatham House says. What’s more… The Lebanese political scientist Elia Ayoub says it won’t happen at all: “The more there is a sense of all or nothing, the more Hezbollah is the only game in town.” And it still has more than 100,000 rockets. |
Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) posted at 10:36 am on Tue, Sept 24, 2024:
If the drugging of children had existed in my boyhood would my teachers have forced me to take pills for ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’? (I still have it, by the way). 26,000 have now watched this amazing debate on ‘ADHD’ https://t.co/NRHGweMIlx via @YouTube
https://x.com/ClarkeMicah/status/1838512716119503089?t=Sm-Yhm64hrSJS4AE-rQGTg&s=03
28,510 views Sep 22, 2024There has been a surge in ADHD diagnoses in the UK, and a record number of people in England are taking medication to treat the condition. ADHD is prolific online; billions of hits on TikTok, online tests, and easy-access diagnoses. But is all of this what it seems? Mary Wakefield, commissioning editor of The Spectator, is joined by columnist and author Peter Hitchens, and journalist and author of ‘It’s Not A Bloody Trend: Understanding Life as an ADHD Adult’, Kat Brown. They debate ADHD, its prevalence, and what’s behind its sudden surge in popularity.
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The Blindboy Podcast (@bbboatclub) posted at 1:53 pm on Mon, Sept 23, 2024:
I’m reading about how in 1607, two years before the Ulster plantation. There was a proposal to King James that Ulster should be settled as a Jewish homeland instead of sending Scottish Protestants there
https://t.co/YC0wSNc1Cg
(https://x.com/bbboatclub/status/1838200081704484936?t=-VPNOJLQt_c9IjwdUhURIA&s=03)
Further source: JSTOR
The Jewish Historical Society of England was founded in 1893. It is the oldest historical and learned society of its kind in Europe. The society, based in London, has active branches throughout England. It holds regular meetings in London and elsewhere with lectures on a wide range of subjects relating to British Jewish history. The aim of the society is to make the results of historical scholarship interesting to both a general and specialist audience.
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For years, meaningful reform of the UN Security Council was considered an impossible pipe dream that could never happen. But with so many ongoing global crises, now is the time to reform institutions to meet the political and economic realities of today’s world. On GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, UN Secretary-General António Guterres says he’s most concerned with a lack of accountability, growing impunity, and countries fragmenting further into coalitions and blocs, which is at odds with everything the UN stands for. The world has changed dramatically since the UN was formed in 1945, and it’s time to reform outdated, unfair institutions, like the Security Council, that concentrate power in the hands of a few wealthy countries and don’t reflect current reality. Guterres says giving an African country a permanent seat on the Council “must be done,” but admits extending veto power to an African member will be a major challenge.
104,241 views Jul 8, 2024
Is liberalism obsolete? Two great political philosophers debated this question on 22 March 2022. Professor Francis Fukuyama was joined in conversation by John Gray, the British political philosopher, who rejects the idea of universal liberal values and human progress. Despite the view held by many that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marks the end of the post-Cold War era, Fukuyama believes that it is a wake-up call for the West to rekindle the spirit of 1989, while Gray argues that the triumph of liberalism is far from inevitable. About Intelligence Squared: Intelligence Squared has established itself as the leading forum for live, agenda-setting debates, talks and discussions around the world. Our aim is to promote a global conversation that enables people to make informed decisions about the issues that matter, in the company of the world’s greatest minds and orators. Click here to subscribe on Apple Podcasts and receive our audio podcasts as soon as they are released: https://apple.co/3nKUHV4
Compulsive sexual behavior is sometimes called hypersexuality or sexual addiction. It’s an intense focus on sexual fantasies, urges or behaviors that can’t be controlled. This causes distress and problems for your health, job, relationships or other parts of your life.
Compulsive sexual behavior may involve different kinds of commonly enjoyable sexual experiences. Examples include masturbation, sexual arousal by using a computer to communicate, multiple sexual partners, use of pornography or paying for sex. But when these sexual behaviors become a major, constant focus in your life, are difficult to control, cause problems in your life, or are harmful to you or others, that’s likely compulsive sexual behavior.
No matter what it’s called or the exact nature of the behavior, untreated compulsive sexual behavior can damage your self-esteem, relationships, career, health and other people. But with treatment and self-help, you can learn to manage compulsive sexual behavior.
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Some signs that you may have compulsive sexual behavior include:
Ask for help if you feel you’ve lost control of your sexual behavior, especially if your behavior causes problems for you or other people. Compulsive sexual behavior tends to get worse over time without treatment, so get help when you first notice a problem.
As you decide whether to seek professional help, ask yourself:
Getting help for compulsive sexual behavior can be difficult because it’s such a deeply personal and private matter. Try to:
Ask a health care provider for help right away if:
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Although the exact causes of compulsive sexual behavior are not clear, possible causes may include:
Compulsive sexual behavior can happen in both men and women, though it may be more common in men. It can affect anyone, regardless of sexual orientation. Factors that may increase the risk of compulsive sexual behavior include:
Also, the risk of compulsive sexual behavior may be higher in people who have:
Compulsive sexual behavior can cause many problems that affect both you and others. You may:
Because the cause of compulsive sexual behavior isn’t known, it’s not clear how to prevent it. But a few things may help you keep control of problem behavior:
April 19, 2023
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