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mariacallous · 2 months

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“How much evil we must do in order to do good,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1946. “This, I think, is a very succinct statement of the human situation.” Niebuhr was writing after one global war had forced the victors to do great evil to prevent the incalculably greater evil of a world ruled by its most aggressive regimes. He was witnessing the onset of another global conflict in which the United States would periodically transgress its own values in order to defend them. But the fundamental question Niebuhr raised—how liberal states can reconcile worthy ends with the unsavory means needed to attain them—is timeless. It is among the most vexing dilemmas facing the United States today.

U.S. President Joe Biden took office pledging to wage a fateful contest between democracy and autocracy. After Russia invaded Ukraine, he summoned like-minded nations to a struggle “between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” Biden’s team has indeed made big moves in its contest with China and Russia, strengthening solidarity among advanced democracies that want to protect freedom by keeping powerful tyrannies in check. But even before the war between Hamas and Israel presented its own thicket of problems, an administration that has emphasized the ideological nature of great-power rivalry was finding itself ensnared by a morally ambiguous world.

In Asia, Biden has bent over backward to woo a backsliding India, a communist Vietnam, and other not so liberal states. In Europe, wartime exigencies have muted concerns about creeping authoritarianism on NATO’s eastern and southern fronts. In the Middle East, Biden has concluded that Arab dictators are not pariahs but vital partners. Defending a threatened order involves reviving the free-world community. It also, apparently, entails buttressing an arc of imperfect democracies and outright autocracies across much of the globe.

Biden’s conflicted strategy reflects the realities of contemporary coalition building: when it comes to countering China and Russia, democratic alliances go only so far. Biden’s approach also reflects a deeper, more enduring tension. American interests are inextricably tied to American values: the United States typically enters into great-power competition because it fears mighty autocracies will otherwise make the world unsafe for democracy. But an age of conflict invariably becomes, to some degree, an age of amorality because the only way to protect a world fit for freedom is to court impure partners and engage in impure acts.

Expect more of this. If the stakes of today’s rivalries are as high as Biden claims, Washington will engage in some breathtakingly cynical behavior to keep its foes contained. Yet an ethos of pure expediency is fraught with dangers, from domestic disillusion to the loss of the moral asymmetry that has long amplified U.S. influence in global affairs. Strategy, for a liberal superpower, is the art of balancing power without subverting democratic purpose. The United States is about to rediscover just how hard that can be.

A DIRTY GAME

Biden has consistently been right about one thing: clashes between great powers are clashes of ideas and interests alike. In the seventeenth century, the Thirty Years’ War was fueled by doctrinal differences no less than by the struggle for European primacy. In the late eighteenth century, the politics of revolutionary France upheaved the geopolitics of the entire continent. World War II was a collision of rival political traditions—democracy and totalitarianism—as well as rival alliances. “This was no accidental war,” German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop declared in 1940, “but a question of the determination of one system to destroy the other.” When great powers fight, they do so not just over land and glory. They fight over which ideas, which values, will chart humanity’s course.

In this sense, U.S. competition with China and Russia is the latest round in a long struggle over whether the world will be shaped by liberal democracies or their autocratic enemies. In World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, autocracies in Eurasia sought global primacy by achieving preeminence within that central landmass. Three times, the United States intervened, not just to ensure its security but also to preserve a balance of power that permitted the survival and expansion of liberalism—to “make the world safe for democracy,” in U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s words. President Franklin Roosevelt made a similar point in 1939, saying, “There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very civilization are founded.” Yet as Roosevelt understood, balancing power is a dirty game.

Western democracies prevailed in World War II only by helping an awful tyrant, Joseph Stalin, crush an even more awful foe, Adolf Hitler. They used tactics, such as fire-bombing and atomic-bombing enemy cities, that would have been abhorrent in less desperate times. The United States then waged the Cold War out of conviction, as President Harry Truman declared, that it was a conflict “between alternative ways of life”; the closest U.S. allies were fellow democracies that made up the Western world. Yet holding the line in a high-stakes struggle also involved some deeply questionable, even undemocratic, acts.

In a Third World convulsed by instability, the United States employed right-wing tyrants as proxies; it suppressed communist influence through coups, covert and overt interventions, and counterinsurgencies with staggering death tolls. To deter aggression along a global perimeter, the Pentagon relied on the threat of using nuclear weapons so destructive that their actual employment could serve no constructive end. To close the ring around the Soviet Union, Washington eventually partnered with another homicidal communist, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. And to ease the politics of containment, U.S. officials sometimes exaggerated the Soviet threat or simply deceived the American people about policies carried out in their name.

Strategy involves setting priorities, and U.S. officials believed that lesser evils were needed to avoid greater ones, such as communism running riot in vital regions or democracies failing to find their strength and purpose before it was too late. The eventual payoff from the U.S. victory in the Cold War—a world safer from autocratic predation, and safer for human freedom, than ever before—suggests that they were, on balance, correct. Along the way, the fact that Washington was pursuing such a worthy objective, against such an unworthy opponent, provided a certain comfort with the conflict’s ethical ambiguities. As NSC-68, the influential strategy document Truman approved in 1950, put it (quoting Alexander Hamilton), “The means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief.” When the West was facing a totalitarian enemy determined to remake humanity in its image, some pretty ugly means could, apparently, be justified.

That comfort wasn’t infinite, however, and the Cold War saw fierce fights over whether the United States was getting its priorities right. In the 1950s, hawks took Washington to task for not doing enough to roll back communism in Eastern Europe, with the Republican Party platform of 1952 deriding containment as “negative, futile, and immoral.” In the 1960s and 1970s, an avalanche of amorality—a bloody and misbegotten war in Vietnam, support for a coterie of nasty dictators, revelations of CIA assassination plots—convinced many liberal critics that the United States was betraying the values it claimed to defend. Meanwhile, the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, a strategy that deemphasized ideological confrontation in search of diplomatic stability, led some conservatives to allege that Washington was abandoning the moral high ground. Throughout the 1970s and after, these debates whipsawed U.S. policy. Even in this most Manichean of contests, relating strategy to morality was a continual challenge.

In fact, Cold War misdeeds gave rise to a complex of legal and administrative constraints—from prohibitions on political assassination to requirements to notify congressional committees about covert action—that mostly remain in place today. Since the Cold War, these restrictions have been complemented by curbs on aid to coup makers who topple elected governments and to military units that engage in gross violations of human rights. Americans clearly regretted some measures they had used to win the Cold War. The question is whether they can do without them as global rivalry heats up again.

IDEAS MATTER

Threats from autocratic enemies heighten ideological impulses in U.S. policy by underscoring the clash of ideas that often drives global tensions. Since taking office, Biden has defined the threat from U.S. rivals, particularly China, in starkly ideological terms.

The world has reached an “inflection point,” Biden has repeatedly declared. In March 2021, he suggested that future historians would be studying “the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy.” At root, Biden has argued, U.S.-Chinese competition is a test of which model can better meet the demands of the modern era. And if China becomes the world’s preeminent power, U.S. officials fear, it will entrench autocracy in friendly countries while coercing democratic governments in hostile ones. Just witness how Beijing has used economic leverage to punish criticism of its policies by democratic societies from Australia to Norway. In making the system safe for illiberalism, a dominant China would make it unsafe for liberalism in places near and far.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reinforced Biden’s thesis. It offered a case study in autocratic aggression and atrocity and a warning that a world led by illiberal states would be lethally violent, not least for vulnerable democracies nearby. Coming weeks after Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin had sealed a “no limits” strategic partnership, the Ukraine invasion also raised the specter of a coordinated autocratic assault on the liberal international order. Ukraine, Biden explained, was the central front in a “larger fight for . . . essential democratic principles.” So the United States would rally the free world against “democracy’s mortal foes.”

The shock of the Ukraine war, combined with the steadying hand of U.S. leadership, produced an expanded transatlantic union of democracies. Sweden and Finland sought membership in NATO; the West supported Ukraine and inflicted heavy costs on Russia. The Biden administration also sought to confine China by weaving a web of democratic ties around the country. It has upgraded bilateral alliances with the likes of Japan and Australia. It has improved the Quad (the security and diplomatic dialogue with Australia, India, and Japan) and established AUKUS (a military partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom). And it has repurposed existing multilateral bodies, such as the G-7, to meet the peril from Beijing. There are even whispers of a “three plus one” coalition—Australia, Japan, the United States, plus Taiwan—that would cooperate to defend that frontline democracy from Chinese assault.

These ties transcend regional boundaries. Ukraine is getting aid from Asian democracies, such as South Korea, that understand that their security will suffer if the liberal order is fractured. Democracies from multiple continents have come together to confront China’s economic coercion, counter its military buildup, and constrict its access to high-end semiconductors. The principal problem for the United States is a loose alliance of revisionist powers pushing outward from the core of Eurasia. Biden’s answer is a cohering global coalition of democracies, pushing back from around the margins.

Today, those advanced democracies are more unified than at any time in decades. In this respect, Biden has aligned the essential goal of U.S. strategy, defending an imperiled liberal order, with the methods and partners used to pursue it. Yet across Eurasia’s three key regions, the messier realities of rivalry are raising Niebuhr’s question anew.

CONTROVERSIAL FRIENDS

Consider the situation in Europe. NATO is mostly an alliance of democracies. But holding that pact together during the Ukraine war has required Biden to downplay the illiberal tendencies of a Polish government that—until its electoral defeat in October—was systematically eroding checks and balances. Securing its northern flank, by welcoming Finland and Sweden, has involved diplomatic horse-trading with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, in addition to frequently undercutting U.S. interests, has been steering his country toward autocratic rule.

In Asia, the administration spent much of 2021 and 2022 carefully preserving U.S. ties to the Philippines, at the time led by Rodrigo Duterte, a man whose drug war had killed thousands. Biden has assiduously courted India as a bulwark against China, even though the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has curbed speech, harassed opposition leaders, fanned religious grievances, and allegedly killed dissidents abroad. And after visiting New Delhi in September 2023, Biden traveled to Hanoi to sign a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Vietnam’s one-party regime. Once again, the United States is using some communists to contain others.

Then there is the Middle East, where Biden’s “free world” coalition is quite the motley crew. In 2020, Biden threatened to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. By 2023, his administration—panicked by Chinese inroads and rising gas prices—was trying to make that country Washington’s newest treaty ally instead. That initiative, moreover, was part of a concept, inherited from the Trump administration, in which regional stability would rest on rapprochement between Arab autocracies and an Israeli government with its own illiberal tendencies, while Palestinian aspirations were mostly pushed to the side. Not surprisingly, then, human rights and political freedoms receded in relations with countries from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates. Biden also did little to halt the strangulation of democracy in Tunisia—just as he had decided, effectively, to abandon Afghanistan’s endangered democracy in 2021.

Indeed, if 2022 was a year of soaring rhetoric, 2023 was a year of awkward accommodation. References to the “battle between democracy and autocracy” became scarcer in Biden’s speeches, as the administration made big plays that defied that description of the world. Key human rights–related positions at the White House and the State Department sat vacant. The administration rolled back sanctions on Venezuela—an initiative described publicly as a bid to secure freer and fairer elections, but one that was mostly an effort to get an oppressive regime to stop exporting refugees and start exporting more oil. And when a junta toppled the elected government of Niger, U.S. officials waited for more than two months to call the coup a coup, for fear of triggering the cutoff of U.S. aid and thereby pushing the new regime into Moscow’s arms. Such compromises have always been part of foreign policy. But today, they testify to key dynamics U.S. officials must confront.

THE DECISIVE DECADE

First is the cruel math of Eurasian geopolitics. Advanced democracies possess a preponderance of power globally, but in every critical region, holding the frontline requires a more eclectic ensemble.

Poland has had its domestic problems; it is also the logistical linchpin of the coalition backing Ukraine. Turkey is politically illiberal and, often, unhelpful; nonetheless, it holds the intersection of two continents and two seas. In South and Southeast Asia, the primary barrier to Chinese hegemony is a line of less-than-ideal partners running from India to Indonesia. In the Middle East, a picky superpower will be a lonely superpower. Democratic solidarity is great, but geography is stubborn. Across Eurasia, Washington needs illiberal friends to confine its illiberal foes.

The ideological battlefield has also shifted in adverse ways. During the Cold War, anticommunism served as ideological glue between a democratic superpower and its autocratic allies, because the latter knew they were finished if the Soviet Union ever triumphed. Now, however, U.S. enemies feature a form of autocracy less existentially threatening to other nondemocracies: strongmen in the Persian Gulf, or in Hungary and Turkey, arguably have more in common with Xi and Putin than they do with Biden. The gap between “good” and “bad” authoritarians is narrower than it once was—which makes the United States work harder, and pay more, to keep illiberal partners imperfectly onside.

Desperate times also call for morally dexterous measures. When Washington faced no serious strategic challengers after the Cold War, it paid a smaller penalty for foregrounding its values. As the margin of safety shrinks, the tradeoffs between power and principle grow. Right now, war—or the threat of it—menaces East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Biden says the 2020s will be the “decisive decade” for the world. As Winston Churchill quipped in 1941, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” When threats are dire, democracies will do what it takes to rally coalitions and keep the enemy from breaking through. Thus, a central irony of Washington’s approach to competition is that the same challenges that activate its ideological energy make it harder to keep U.S. diplomacy pure.

So far, the moral compromises of U.S. policy today are modest compared with those of World War II or the Cold War, in part because the constraints on unsavory methods are stronger than they were when Hitler and Stalin stalked the earth. But rules and norms can change as a country’s circumstances do. So Biden and his successors may soon face a daunting reality: high-stakes rivalries carry countries, and leaders, to places they never sought to go.

When the Cold War started, few officials imagined that Washington would conduct covert interventions from Afghanistan to Angola. Just three years ago, hardly anyone predicted that the United States would soon fight a proxy war meant to bleed Putin’s army to death in Ukraine. As the present competitions intensify, the tactics used to wage them could become more extreme.

Washington could find itself covertly trying to tip the balance in elections in some crucial swing state if the alternative is seeing that country shift hard toward Moscow or Beijing. It could use coercion to keep Latin America’s military facilities and other critical infrastructure out of Chinese hands. And if the United States is already ambivalent about acknowledging coups in out-of-the-way countries, perhaps it would excuse far greater atrocities committed by a more important partner in a more important place.

Those who doubt that Washington will resort to dirty tricks have short memories and limited imaginations. If today’s competitions will truly shape the fate of humanity, why wouldn’t a vigilant superpower do almost anything to come out on top?

DON’T LOSE YOURSELF

There’s no reason to be unduly embarrassed about this. A country that lacks the self-confidence to defend its interests will lack the power to achieve any great purpose in global affairs. Put differently, the damage the United States does to its values by engaging dubious allies, and engaging in dubious behavior, is surely less than the damage that would be done if a hyperaggressive Russia or neototalitarian China spread its influence across Eurasia and beyond. As during the Cold War, the United States can eventually repay the moral debts it incurs in a lengthy struggle—if it successfully sustains a system in which democracy thrives because its fiercest enemies are suppressed.

It would be dangerous to adopt a pure end-justifies-the-means mentality, however, because there is always a point at which foul means corrupt fair ends. Even short of that, serial amorality will prove politically corrosive: a country whose population has rallied to defend its values as well as its interests will not forever support a strategy that seems to cast those values aside. And ultimately, the greatest flaw of such a strategy is that it forfeits a potent U.S. advantage.

During World War II, as the historian Richard Overy has argued, the Allied cause was widely seen to be more just and humane than the Axis cause, which is one reason the former alliance attracted so many more countries than the latter. In the Cold War, the sense that the United States stood, however imperfectly, for fundamental rights and liberties the Kremlin suppressed helped Washington appeal to other democratic societies—and even to dissidents within the Soviet bloc. The tactics of great-power competition must not obscure the central issue of that competition. If the world comes to see today’s rivalries as slugfests devoid of larger moral meaning, the United States will lose the asymmetry of legitimacy that has served it well.

This is not some hypothetical dilemma. Since October 2023, Biden has rightly framed the Israel-Hamas war as a struggle between a flawed democracy and a tyrannical enemy seeking its destruction. There is strong justification, moral and strategic, for backing a U.S. ally against a vicious proxy of a U.S. enemy, Iran. Moreover, there is no serious ethical comparison between a terrorist group that rapes, tortures, kidnaps, and kills civilians and a country that mostly tries, within the limits war imposes, to protect them.

Yet rightly or wrongly, large swaths of the global South view the war as a testament to American double standards: opposing occupation and appropriation of foreign territory by Russia but not by Israel, valuing the lives and liberties of some victims more than those of others. Russian and Chinese propagandists are amplifying these messages to drive a wedge between Washington and the developing world. This is why the Biden administration has tried, and sometimes struggled, to balance support for Israel with efforts to mitigate the harm the conflict brings—and why the war may presage renewed U.S. focus on the peace process with the Palestinians, as unpromising as that currently seems. The lesson here is that the merits of an issue may be disputed, but for a superpower that wears its values on its sleeve, the costs of perceivedhypocrisy are very real.

RULES FOR RIVALRY

Succeeding in this round of rivalry will thus require calibrating the moral compromises inherent in foreign policy by finding an ethos that is sufficiently ruthless and realistic at the same time. Although there is no precise formula for this—the appropriateness of any action depends on its context—some guiding principles can help.

First, morality is a compass, not a straitjacket. For political sustainability and strategic self-interest, American statecraft should point toward a world consistent with its values. But the United States cannot paralyze itself by trying to fully embody those values in every tactical decision. Nor—even at a moment when its own democracy faces internal threats—should it insist on purifying itself at home before exerting constructive influence abroad. If it does so, the system will be shaped by regimes that are more ruthless—and less shackled by their own imperfections.

The United States should also avoid the fallacy of the false alternative. It must evaluate choices, and partners, against the plausible possibilities, not against the utopian ideal. The realistic alternative to maintaining ties to a military regime in Africa may be watching as murderous Russian mercenaries fill the void. The realistic alternative to engaging Modi’s India may be seeing South Asia fall further under the shadow of a China that assiduously exports illiberalism. Similarly, proximity to a Saudi regime that carves up its critics is deeply uncomfortable. But the realistic alternative to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is probably a regime that remains quite repressive—and is far less committed to empowering women, curbing religious zealots, and otherwise making the country a more open, tolerant place. In a world of lousy options, the crucial question is often: Lousy compared with what?

Another guiding principle: good things don’t all come at once. Cold War policymakers sometimes justified coup making and support for repressive regimes on grounds that preventing Third World countries from going communist then preserved the possibility that they might go democratic later. That logic was suspiciously convenient—and, in many cases, correct. Countries in Latin America and other developing regions did eventually experience political openings as they reached higher levels of development, and democratic values radiated outward from the West.

Today, unseemly bargains can sometimes lead to better outcomes. By not breaking the U.S.-Philippine alliance during Duterte’s drug war, Washington sustained the relationship until a more cooperative, less draconian government emerged. By staying close to a Polish government with some worrying tendencies, the United States bought time until, late last year, that country’s voters elected a coalition promising to strengthen its democratic institutions. The same argument could be made for staying engaged with other democracies where autocratic tendencies are pronounced but electoral mechanisms remain intact—Hungary, India, and Turkey, to name a few. More broadly, liberalism is most likely to flourish in a system led by a democracy. So simply forestalling the ascent of powerful autocracies may eventually help democratic values spread into once inhospitable places.

Similarly, the United States should remember that taking the broad view is as vital as taking the long view. Support for democracy and human rights is not an all-or-nothing proposition. As Biden’s statecraft has shown, transactional deals with dictators can complement a strategy that stresses democratic cooperation at its core. Honoring American values, moreover, is more than a matter of hectoring repressive regimes. A foreign policy that raises international living standards through trade, addresses global problems such as food insecurity, and holds the line against great-power war serves the cause of human dignity very well. A strategy that emphasizes such efforts may actually be more appealing to countries, including developing democracies from Brazil to Indonesia, that resist democracy-versus-autocracy framing because they don’t want any part of a Manichean fight.

Of course, these principles can seem like a recipe for rationalization—a way of excusing the grossest behavior by claiming it serves a greater cause. Another important principle, then, revives Hamilton’s dictum that the means must be proportioned to the mischief. The greater the compromise, the greater the payoff it provides—or the damage it avoids—must be.

By this standard, the case for cooperation with an India or a Poland is clear-cut. These countries are troubled but mostly admirable democracies that play critical roles in raging competitions. Until the world contains only liberal democracies, Washington can hardly avoid seeking blemished friends.

The United States should, however, be more cautious about courting countries that regularly engage in the very practices it deems most corrosive to the liberal order: systematic torture or murder of their people, coercion of their neighbors, or export of repression across borders, to name a few. A Saudi Arabia, for instance, that periodically engages in some of these practices is a troublesome partner. A Saudi Arabia that flagrantly and consistently commits such acts risks destroying the moral and diplomatic basis of its relationship with the United States. American officials should be more hesitant still to distort or destabilize the politics of other countries, especially other democracies, for strategic gain. If Washington is going to get back into the coup business in Latin America or Southeast Asia, the bad outcomes to be prevented must be truly severe—a major, potentially lasting shift in a key regional balance of power, perhaps—to justify policies so manifestly in tension with the causes the United States claims to defend.

Mitigating the harm to those causes means heeding a further principle: marginal improvement matters. Washington will not convince leaders in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, or Vietnam to commit political suicide by abandoning their domestic model. But leverage works both ways in these relationships. Countries on the firing line need a superpower patron just as much as it needs them. U.S. officials can use that leverage to discourage extraterritorial repression, seek the release of political prisoners, make elections a bit freer and fairer, or otherwise obtain modest but meaningful changes. Doing so may be the price of keeping these relationships intact, by convincing proponents of human rights and democracy in Congress that the White House has not forgotten such issues altogether.

This relates to an additional principle: the United States must be scrupulously honest with itself. American officials need to recognize that illiberal allies will be selective or unreliable allies because their domestic models put them at odds with important norms of the liberal order—and because they tend to generate resentment that may eventually cause an explosion. In the same vein, the problem with laws that mandate aid cutoffs to coup plotters is that they encourage self-deception. In cases in which Washington fears the strategic fallout from a break in relations, U.S. officials are motivated to pretend that a coup has not occurred. The better approach, in line with reforms approved by Congress in December 2022, is a framework that allows presidents to waive such cutoffs on national security grounds—but forces them to acknowledge and justify that choice. The work of making moral tradeoffs in foreign policy begins with admitting those tradeoffs exist.

Some of these principles are in tension with others, which means their application in specific cases must always be a matter of judgment. But the issue of reconciling opposites relates to a final principle: soaring idealism and brutal realism can coexist. During the 1970s, moral debates ruptured the Cold War consensus. During the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan adequately repaired—but never fully restored—that consensus by combining flexibility of tactics with clarity of purpose.

Reagan supported awful dictators, murderous militaries, and thuggish “freedom fighters” in the Third World, sometimes through ploys—such as the Iran-contra scandal—that were dodgy or simply illegal. Yet he also backed democratic movements from Chile to South Korea; he paired rhetorical condemnations of the Kremlin with ringing affirmations of Western ideals. The takeaway is that rough measures may be more tolerable if they are part of a larger package that emphasizes, in word and deed, the values that must anchor the United States’ approach to the world. Some will see this as heightening the hypocrisy. In reality, it is the best way to preserve the balance—political, moral, and strategic—that a democratic superpower requires.

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planet-gay-comic · 2 months

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The Ritual

Water, this eternal symbol of cleansing and life, permeates human history as a potent medium for rituals that strengthen connections among people—be it in love, friendship, or honorable remembrance.

In antiquity, the Greeks utilized water in the ritual of the Loutron, a bath often taken before sacred festivals or marriage. Similar customs were found in ancient Rome, where baths served not only physical cleanliness but also social and spiritual purification. The Roman baths were places of encounter and relaxation, where business, politics, and social bonds were formed.

In medieval Europe, the ritual bath was part of many Christian ceremonies. Baptism, for instance, symbolizes spiritual cleansing and initiation into the community to this day. Knights, too, were immersed in holy waters before their ascension to symbolize purity and readiness to serve.

In Norse culture, water ceremonies were performed to honor ancestors and gods. The practice of ship burials, where a boat with the deceased and their valuables was set upon the water and ignited, speaks to the profound significance water held as a threshold to the otherworld.

The bond among warriors was also strengthened through water rituals. The legendary warrior bands of the Sacred Band of Thebes were tied not only on the battlefield but also in communal purification ceremonies, their bonds of loyalty and protection forged.

In modern times, ritual baths in various cultures often serve to mark significant life transitions. In Japan, for example, the communal bath, the Furo, is maintained as an act of cleansing and social exchange. In modern spiritual communities, rituals are performed that draw on these ancient traditions to honor the connections between people—be they lovers, circles of friends, or communities coming together to remember their ancestors.

Thus, water, as a bearer of tradition and renewal, continues to flow through the ceremonies and rituals of people, as an expression of respect, connection, and remembrance that form the essence of our human experience.

Text supported by Chat GPT-4 Images generated with SD-1.5, overworked with inpainting and composing.

#Rituals #Love #Friendship #Baths #Spiritual #ritualTraditions #Renewal #Community #gayart #gayman #lovebond #temple #ambience #bathing

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foodandfolklore · 6 months

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The Queen Bee ~ Honey and it's associations

Honey is a staple is Kitchen Magic and Witchcraft. Honey jars and sweetener spells have become very popular in recent times. You fill a jar with the tag locks of a person you are aiming the spell towards, and their attitude towards you sweetens. Helpful in times when you may be feuding with a neighbor or have a problem colleague who just refuses to cooperate. Makes them more likely to be agreeable to reasonable requests.

That's also what honey can do in the kitchen. Add it to foods so when consumed by people it'll improve relations, strengthen friendships, and invoke peace. Honey is also heavily associated with Love, Passion, Healing/Health, Happiness, Prosperity, Spirituality and Wisdom.

Ancient cultures all over the world believe honey or bees were connected to the Gods. In Greek mythology, Zeus drank honey as a baby while his mother hid him from Cronus. The muses put the ability to sing in honey. Egyptians believed Bees carried messages from the Sun God Ra, and we've found honey in Egyptian tombs. The Celtics from Europe also had a similar belief that the bees carried messages from Gods; going back and forth between our world and their world.

Greeks, Romans, Norse, and more all considered Honey and Mead (An ale made from honey) to be nectar of the gods. Some cultures believed if you could consume enough of both, it would equate to ambrosia. A food that would grant you God like immortality and eternal youth. Even the book of Exodus could not deny how amazing honey is. As God promised the Israelites to free them from slavery and deliver them to a land flowing with Milk and Honey. Then while in their wandering limbo, God rained down a white snow for food that tasted like honey. This idea of Honey being tied to divine existence and better being is so tightly woven into our cultures. When Canada was trying to get more people to move from Europe to settle, they advertised with the tagline: Canada; a land of Milk and Honey. Honey is also a common term of affection for people in relationships or close family members.

But the Story I'm about to read has little to do with honey directly. It's just probably one of the more well known fairytales that has bees and honey in them. A Brothers Grimm tale, of course. But it showcases a lot of classic aspects of the effects honey can have, such as sweetening the demeaner of those around you, attracting love, and living life happy. Interestingly, this is a case where a character described as a 'Dwarf' does not seem to have a thick beard and lives in mines. Instead, we have a story staring a legitimate Little Person, which I thought was pretty cool.

The Queen Bee

Two kings’ sons once upon a time went into the world to seek their fortunes; but they soon fell into a wasteful foolish way of living, so that they could not return home again. Then their brother, who was a little insignificant dwarf, went out to seek for his brothers: but when he had found them they only laughed at him, to think that he, who was so young and simple, should try to travel through the world, when they, who were so much wiser, had been unable to get on. However, they all set out on their journey together, and came at last to an ant-hill. The two elder brothers would have pulled it down, in order to see how the poor ants in their fright would run about and carry off their eggs. But the little dwarf said, ‘Let the poor things enjoy themselves, I will not suffer you to trouble them.’

So on they went, and came to a lake where many many ducks were swimming about. The two brothers wanted to catch two, and roast them. But the dwarf said, ‘Let the poor things enjoy themselves, you shall not kill them.’ Next they came to a bees’-nest in a hollow tree, and there was so much honey that it ran down the trunk; and the two brothers wanted to light a fire under the tree and kill the bees, so as to get their honey. But the dwarf held them back, and said, ‘Let the pretty insects enjoy themselves, I cannot let you burn them.’

At length the three brothers came to a castle: and as they passed by the stables they saw fine horses standing there, but all were of marble, and no man was to be seen. Then they went through all the rooms, till they came to a door on which were three locks: but in the middle of the door was a wicket, so that they could look into the next room. There they saw a little grey old man sitting at a table; and they called to him once or twice, but he did not hear: however, they called a third time, and then he rose and came out to them.

He said nothing, but took hold of them and led them to a beautiful table covered with all sorts of good things: and when they had eaten and drunk, he showed each of them to a bed-chamber.

The next morning he came to the eldest and took him to a marble table, where there were three tablets, containing an account of the means by which the castle might be disenchanted. The first tablet said: ‘In the wood, under the moss, lie the thousand pearls belonging to the king’s daughter; they must all be found: and if one be missing by set of sun, he who seeks them will be turned into marble.’

The eldest brother set out, and sought for the pearls the whole day: but the evening came, and he had not found the first hundred: so he was turned into stone as the tablet had foretold.

The next day the second brother undertook the task; but he succeeded no better than the first; for he could only find the second hundred of the pearls; and therefore he too was turned into stone.

At last came the little dwarf’s turn; and he looked in the moss; but it was so hard to find the pearls, and the job was so tiresome!—so he sat down upon a stone and cried. And as he sat there, the king of the ants (whose life he had saved) came to help him, with five thousand ants; and it was not long before they had found all the pearls and laid them in a heap.

The second tablet said: ‘The key of the princess’s bed-chamber must be fished up out of the lake.’ And as the dwarf came to the brink of it, he saw the two ducks whose lives he had saved swimming about; and they dived down and soon brought in the key from the bottom.

The third task was the hardest. It was to choose out the youngest and the best of the king’s three daughters. Now they were all beautiful, and all exactly alike: but he was told that the eldest had eaten a piece of sugar, the next some sweet syrup, and the youngest a spoonful of honey; so he was to guess which it was that had eaten the honey.

Then came the queen of the bees, who had been saved by the little dwarf from the fire, and she tried the lips of all three; but at last she sat upon the lips of the one that had eaten the honey: and so the dwarf knew which was the youngest. Thus the spell was broken, and all who had been turned into stones awoke, and took their proper forms. And the dwarf married the youngest and the best of the princesses, and was king after her father’s death; but his two brothers married the other two sisters.

#Honey #Bee #Queen bee #brothers grimm #fairytale #folktale #folklore #food and folklore #honey folklore #honey witchcraft #witch #pagan #kitchen witch #kitchen witchcraft #kitchen magic #klickwitch #kitchen #gods and goddesses #Novemeber

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allthebrazilianpolitics · 2 months

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Spanish PM insists before Lula: EU needs new partners such as Mercosur

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez Wednesday signed a series of bilateral agreements at the Planalto Palace. The documents dealt with communications; science, technology, public administration, and health issues, Agencia Brasil reported. Both heads of government also concurred on the importance of expanding political, commercial, and investment relations.

Both leaders also discussed the free trade agreement between Mercosur and the European Union (EU). Sánchez said his country is not against it and insisted he hoped it would soon come into force. Following the war in Ukraine, which hit Europe's energy supply, European countries have learned that they need to diversify and find new trade partnerships, Sánchez explained.

“I would like to thank President Lula for his leadership in advancing this agreement. It is an initiative that strengthens our trade and investment ties and contributes to social and environmental benefits. Latin America and the European Union are natural allies,” said Sánchez, also highlighting the common vision of Brazil and Spain in defending issues such as social justice, a green and just transition, and international cooperation with a reformed financial system.

Lula pointed out that one of the obstacles to finalizing the Mercosur-EU agreement comes from France's protectionism regarding agriculture. “It is no longer a matter of willing to or liking it; politically, economically, and geographically, we need to make this agreement and send a signal to the world that we need to move forward,” Lula noted.

#brazil #brazilian politics #politics #spain #spanish politics #luiz inacio lula da silva #pedro sanchez #international politics #foreign policy #mod nise da silveira #image description in alt

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jcmarchi · 2 months

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UK and France to collaborate on AI following Horizon membership

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/uk-and-france-to-collaborate-on-ai-following-horizon-membership/

UK and France to collaborate on AI following Horizon membership

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The UK and France have announced new funding initiatives and partnerships aimed at advancing global AI safety. The developments come in the wake of the UK’s association with Horizon Europe, a move that was broadly seen as putting the divisions of Brexit in the past and the repairing of relations for the good of the continent.

French Minister for Higher Education and Research, Sylvie Retailleau, is scheduled to meet with UK Secretary of State Michelle Donelan in London today for discussions marking a pivotal moment in bilateral scientific cooperation.

Building upon a rich history of collaboration that has yielded groundbreaking innovations such as the Concorde and the Channel Tunnel, the ministers will endorse a joint declaration aimed at deepening research ties between the two nations. This includes a commitment of £800,000 in new funding towards joint research efforts, particularly within the framework of Horizon Europe.

A landmark partnership between the UK’s AI Safety Institute and France’s Inria will also be unveiled, signifying a shared commitment to the responsible development of AI technology. This collaboration is timely, given France’s upcoming hosting of the AI Safety Summit later this year—which aims to build upon previous agreements and discussions on frontier AI testing achieved during the UK edition last year.

Furthermore, the establishment of the French-British joint committee on Science, Technology, and Innovation represents an opportunity to foster cooperation across a range of fields, including low-carbon hydrogen, space observation, AI, and research security.

UK Secretary of State Michelle Donelan said:

“The links between the UK and France’s brightest minds are deep and longstanding, from breakthroughs in aerospace to tackling climate change. It is only right that we support our innovators, to unleash the power of their ideas to create jobs and grow businesses in concert with our closest neighbour on the continent.

Research is fundamentally collaborative, and alongside our bespoke deal on Horizon Europe, this deepening partnership with France – along with our joint work on AI safety – is another key step in realising the UK’s science superpower ambitions.”

The collaboration between the UK and France underscores their shared commitment to advancing scientific research and innovation, with a focus on emerging technologies such as AI and quantum.

Sylvie Retailleau, French Minister of Higher Education and Research, commented:

“This joint committee is a perfect illustration of the international component of research – from identifying key priorities such as hydrogen, AI, space and research security – to enabling collaborative work and exchange of ideas and good practices through funding.

Doing so with a trusted partner as the UK – who just associated to Horizon Europe – is a great opportunity to strengthen France’s science capabilities abroad, and participate in Europe’s strategic autonomy openness.”

As the UK continues to deepen its engagement with global partners in the field of science and technology, these bilateral agreements serve as a testament to its ambition to lead the way in scientific discovery and innovation on the world stage.

(Photo by Aleks Marinkovic on Unsplash)

See also: UK Home Secretary sounds alarm over deepfakes ahead of elections

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: ai safety summit, artificial intelligence, europe, france, government, horizon europe, research, safety, uk

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cajon-desastre · 1 year

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And another year that ends.

There are hours left to say goodbye to 365 days of vertigo. If the previous two years had been bitter due to a poorly managed pandemic, and worse assumed, now we had to add an unexpected war at the gates of Europe that has ended up disrupting the world order. It is not necessary to list all the things that have happened this year, that is what the summaries of the news are for. Perhaps the highlight, for me, has been the mounting evidence of climate change. It is not a good scenario and, even so, I am privileged to have what I have and appreciate what I can lose. On a personal level, I have to admit that it has not been a bad year, on the contrary, there have been great moments recovered after the hiatus imposed by the pandemic. And that is what I wish you for the new year: recover traditions, strengthen ties and enjoy the here and now, do not underestimate what you have and value what you have achieved. If there are empty chairs in your day to day, courage to continue and treasure the memories that person gave you. And much love, compassion and solidarity. We only have this planet to live it and enjoy it. Take care of it, let's take care of it. Happy New Year 2023

#personal #Happy New Year 2023 #thanks all

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head-post · 6 months

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What benefits for Europe from France’s increased engagement with Central Asia

France has a range of potential benefits from increased co-operation with Central Asia in terms of economic growth, geopolitical stability and energy security.

It is hard to overstate the growing importance of France’s ties with Central Asia as French President Emmanuel Macron prepares for an official visit to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan on 1 and 2 November.

Enhancing cooperation in this region is crucial for France and for Europe as a whole. Strengthening ties with Central Asia can ensure Europe’s energy security, supply rare earth elements and restore the geopolitical balance in the Central Asian region.

Kazakhstan has significant uranium reserves and is the world’s largest uranium producer. Given that France generates about 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power, a deeper partnership could ensure a stable supply of uranium for French reactors.

Recent turmoil in global energy markets, combined with political tensions, has emphasised the need to diversify Europe’s energy sources. Central Asia, with its untapped hydrocarbon resources and renewable energy potential, represents a viable solution.

Read more HERE

#world news #world politics #news #europe #european news #european union #eu politics #eu news #eu economy #france news #france #central asia #kazakhstan #uzbekistan #energy #electricity #nuclear energy #hydrocarbon

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zvaigzdelasas · 2 years

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Following the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Uzbekistan in September, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that Turkey intends to become a full member of the SCO, a China-led Eurasian intergovernmental political, economic, and security organization. At present, Turkey is a dialogue member. Full membership would make Turkey the only North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member in the SCO. While Erdogan’s declaration suggests that Ankara is seeking alternatives to its often tense relations with the West, it can also be seen in the context of Turkey’s growing influence in Central Asia and broader geopolitical ambitions. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Ankara set up the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency to increase cultural and economic ties with the Central Asian countries. A couple of decades later, in 2009, the Cooperation Council of the Turkic Speaking States (known as the Turkic Council) was formally established. In 2021, the council decided to rename itself as the Organization of Turkic States. Made up of five members – Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan – and two observer states (Hungary and Turkmenistan), the organization’s participant states are home to around 170 million people and a combined GDP of $1.5 trillion. The trade volume among these countries is estimated at $16 billion. [...] Sales of one of Turkey’s most powerful and lucrative exports – arms – have boosted the country’s image in Central Asia. Used by Ukraine to destroy Russian military hardware, by Azerbaijan against Armenia in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, and elsewhere,Turkey’s drones have also attracted the interest of Central Asian countries. Turkmenistan, for instance, a long-time client of Turkish arms, bought more than one Bayraktar TB2. Kyrgyzstan also bought Turkish drones in 2021 and established a new base for drones last month. Likewise, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have expressed interest in Turkish drones, while Kazakhstan has agreed to begin domestic production of Turkey’s Anka drones. [...]

Ankara’s greater engagement with Central Asia is partly driven by Turkey’s energy needs and regional energy transit hub ambitions. Given the country’s limited domestic energy reserves, despite significant gas finds in the Black Sea in 2020, Turkey remains significantly dependent on external energy supplies. Ankara is particularly keen to secure energy supplies and transportation corridors that neither Russia nor Iran, eager to develop its own trade with Central Asia, has a monopoly over.

Further linking Turkey’s energy needs and interest in Central Asia is Ankara’s backing of Azerbaijan in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Aside from gaining greater access to Azerbaijani gas and the Caspian Sea, Turkey’s support for Azerbaijan, Ankara’s biggest gas supplier in 2019–2020, will likely result in improved access to Turkmenistan’s enormous gas reserves alongside potential trilateral cooperation hydrocarbon exploration. Such efforts will likely strengthen Ankara’s regional energy hub ambitions through energy infrastructure projects like the proposed Trans-Caspian Pipeline (TCP). The TCP aims to pump gas from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan and onward into the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) that runs via Turkey into southeastern Europe. [...]

Another aspect to consider is Turkey’s push for greater regional and economic connectivity. By positioning itself as an alternative to Russia’s position in China’s Belt and Road, Ankara seeks to expand its sphere of influence and role in Eurasian and global markets, connecting China, Central Asia, and Europe. While Moscow may still influence Central Asia, this influence appears to be waning, resulting in Central Asian governments eager to find alternative partners.

The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), also known as the Middle Corridor, is a multilateral, multimodal transport route. The route connects China to Turkey and Europe via Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Estimates suggest that TITR will transport between 75,000 to 100,000 containers annually. Rather than traversing across Russia, which has been the main land link between China and Europe for decades, TITR bypasses Russia with the newly built 826-kilometer-long Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway. The BTK railway, sometimes referred to as the Turkish version of the New Silk Road, stretches from the Caspian Sea port of Alat in Baku, Azerbaijan, across Georgia to the city of Kars, Turkey, for access to European markets.

The China-Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) railway project, estimated to cost around $4.5 billion, aims to connect China to Europe via Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Turkey. In so doing, it aims to reduce the journey by around 900 kilometers and eight days as well as bypass Russia. Following a tripartite online meeting held by China, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan earlier this year, China’s National Development and Reform Commission announced in early June that construction of the transnational CKU railway would begin in spring 2023. Currently, preparations for the three countries to carry out a feasibility study are underway. [...] With the European Union and the United States criticizing Turkey’s human rights record and the U.S. imposing various sanctions on Turkey over the years, Ankara has strengthened relations with its non-Western partners. In 2021, after Turkey bought Russian S-400 defense systems, the U.S. sanctioned Turkey, and removed the country from a U.S.-led program developing F-35 fighter jets. [...] Meanwhile, Russia is one of Turkey’s main energy suppliers. Its state atomic energy company, Rosatom, is also building Turkey’s first nuclear power plant. [...] Although Beijing has repeatedly warned Ankara not to become involved in Uyghur issues, various conservative and nationalist groups in Turkey are keen for their government to have a say in the issue. An extradition treaty between the two countries was ratified by China in 2020, but Ankara has not done so yet. [...] For Central Asian countries, Turkey’s rise as a Eurasian power is set to result in new trade opportunities and regional connectivity by transporting goods and potentially people between the various countries in the region. At the same time, Turkey’s involvement enables greater access to the European and global markets for Central Asian countries and China without the involvement of Russia. Central Asian countries could further capitalize on this by taking advantage of these opportunities to secure their own interests, independent of Russia and China. However, the growing use of drones from Turkey may also exacerbate disputes and tensions between Central Asia countries, particularly Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

13 Oct 22

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mariacallous · 4 months

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The world is embarking on a critical year for the future of democracy. Elections in India, Indonesia, South Africa, and the United States—to name just a few prominent countries headed to the polls in 2024—would normally be routine affairs. But many of these democracies are at an inflection point. Can the strengthening tides of polarization, institutional degradation, and authoritarianism be reversed? Or will democracy reach a breaking point?

Every democracy has its own particular set of characteristics. In each country holding elections this year, voters will judge incumbent governments on familiar issues such as inflation, employment, personal security, and a sense of confidence about their future prospects. But the foreboding that accompanies the world’s elections in 2024 stems from one singular fact: The uneasy accommodation between nationalism and democracy is coming under severe stress.

The crisis in democracy is in part a crisis in nationalism, which today seems to revolve around four issues: how nations define membership; how they popularize a version of historical memory; how they locate a sovereign identity; and how they contend with the forces of globalization. In each of these, nationalism and liberalism are often in tension. Democracies tend to navigate this tension rather than resolve it. Yet, around the world, nationalism is slowly strangling liberalism—a trend that could accelerate in a damaging way this year. As more citizens cast their ballots in 2024 than in any other year in the history of the world, they will be voting not only for a particular leader or party but for the very future of their civil liberties.

Let’s first discuss how societies set parameters for membership. If a political community is sovereign, it has a right to make decisions on whom to exclude from or include in membership. Liberal democracies have historically opted for a variety of criteria for membership. Some have privileged ethnic and cultural factors, while others have picked civic criteria that merely demand allegiance to a common set of constitutional values.

In practice, a range of considerations have guided the immigration policies of liberal democracies, including the economic advantages of immigration, historical ties to particular groups of people, and humanitarian considerations. Most liberal societies have dealt with the membership question not on a principled basis but through various arrangements, some more open than others.

The question of membership is increasing in political salience. The causes may vary. In the United States, a surge of migrants at the southern border has politically foregrounded the issue, forcing even the Biden administration to reverse some of its promised liberal policies. To be sure, immigration has always been an important political issue in the United States. But since the political arrival of Donald Trump, it has acquired a new edge. Trump’s so-called Muslim ban—even though it was eventually repealed—raised the specter of new forms of overt or covert discrimination forming the basis of a possible future U.S. immigration regime.

Europe’s refugee crisis—induced by global conflicts and economic and climate distress—is inflecting the politics of every country. Sweden has grown deep concerns about its model of integrating immigrants, ushering in a right-wing government in 2022. In the United Kingdom, Brexit hinged in part on concerns over immigration. And in India, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi will implement the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, which excludes Muslim refugees from certain neighboring countries from a pathway to seeking citizenship. For New Delhi, membership concerns are driven by the need to prioritize a large ethnic majority. Similarly, the status of migrants in South Africa is being increasingly contested.

The increasing salience of membership is worrying for the future of liberalism. Since liberal values have historically been compatible with a variety of immigration and membership regimes, a liberal membership regime may not be a necessary condition for creating a liberal society. One could argue that not having a well-controlled membership policy is more likely to undermine liberalism by upsetting the social cohesion on which liberalism relies. But it is a remarkable fact that many of the world’s political leaders who endorse closed or discriminatory membership regimes, from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to the Netherlands’s Geert Wilders, also happen to oppose liberal values. That makes it harder to create a distinction between being anti-immigration and anti-liberal.

The second dimension of nationalism is the contest over historical memory. All nations need something of a usable past—a story that binds its peoples together—that can be the basis of a collective identity and self-esteem. The distinction between history and memory can be overdrawn, but it is important. As the French historian Pierre Nora put it, memory looks for facts, especially ones that suit the veneration of the main object of recollection. Memory has an affective quality: It is supposed to move you and constitute your identity. It draws the boundaries of communities. History is more detached; the facts will always complicate both identity and community.

History is not a morality tale as much as it is a very difficult form of hard-won knowledge, always aware of its selectivity.

Memory is easiest to hold on to as a morality tale. It is not just about the past. Memory is a kind of eternal truth about one’s collective identity, to keep and carry forward.

Memories are increasingly being emphasized in the political arena. In India, to take the most obvious case, historical memory is central to the consolidation of Hindu nationalism. In January, Modi will open a temple to the god Ram in Ayodhya, built on the site where Hindu nationalists demolished a mosque in 1992. It is an important religious symbol. But it is also central to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s narrative that the most salient historical memory for Indians should not be colonial rule by the British but a thousand-year history of subjugation by Islam. Modi declared Aug. 5, the day the foundation stone of the temple was laid in 2020, as being as important a national milestone as Aug. 15, the day of India’s independence from the British in 1947.

In South Africa, questions of memory may seem less pronounced. But the compromise of the Nelson Mandela years, which some now see as sacrificing economic justice for the cause of social solidarity, is increasingly being interrogated. Faced with continuing inequality, economic worries, and declining social mobility, many South Africans are questioning the legacy of Mandela and whether he did enough to empower Black people in the country. This reflects some disillusionment with the ruling African National Congress. But this reconsideration could also potentially redefine the memory in terms of which modern South Africa has understood itself.

In the United States, the contest over how to tell the national story goes back to the Founding Fathers. But debates around this are more politically visible than ever, with politicians from Trump to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis basing their candidacies in part on what it means to be American and how to “make America great again.” Florida, for example, created dubious standards for the teaching of Black history, seeking to regulate what students learn about race and slavery. This is not just a contest over the politics of pedagogy; behind it is a larger, anxious political debate about how the United States remembers its past—and therefore how it will build its future.

The third dimension in the surge of nationalism is the contest over popular sovereignty, or the will of the people. There has always been a close connection between popular sovereignty and nationalism, as the former required the formation of the concept of a people with a distinct identity and special solidarity toward one another. During the French Revolution, inspired by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the popular sovereign was supposed to have a singular will. But if the will of the people is unitary, what explains differences? Furthermore, if there are differences among people, as there naturally are, then how is one to ascertain the will of the people? One way out of this puzzle is to see who can effectively perform the will of the able—and in doing so represent the other side as betraying that will, rather than as merely carrying an alternative interpretation of it. In order for such a performance to take place, one has to castigate anyone who represents an alternative viewpoint as an enemy of the people. In that sense, rhetorical invocations of “the people”—understood as a unitary entity—always run the risk of being anti-pluralist. Even when democracies around the world have embraced a pluralist and representative conception of democracy, there is a residual trace of unity that gets transposed to the nation. The nation is not a nation, or cannot acquire a will, unless it is united.

People rally around a unitary will by benchmarking their national identity: We are Indian by virtue of X or American by virtue of Y. Sometimes, this kind of benchmarking of identity can be quite productive; it is a reminder to citizens of what gives their particular community a distinct identity. Yet one of nationalism’s features is that it struggles to make room for its own contestation. The opposition is delegitimized or stigmatized not because it has a different point of view on policy matters but because its views are represented as anti-national. It is not an accident that the rhetoric of national populists is often directed against forces that are seen to challenge their version of the national identity or their benchmarking of nationalism. As national identities become more contested, there are increasing chances that unity can be achieved only by being imposed.

As a political style, national populism thrives not so much by finding enemies of the people but enemies of the nation, who are often measured by certain taboos. Almost all modern populists—from Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Modi, Orban, and Trump—draw the distinction between people and elites not in terms of class but in terms of who authentically represents the nation. Who gets benchmarked as the true nationalist? The cultural contempt for the elite gets its strength not just from the fact that they are elites but that they can be represented as elites who are no longer part of the nation, as it were. This kind of rhetoric increasingly sees difference as seditious rather than merely a disagreement. In India, for example, national security charges are deployed against students who question the government’s stance on Kashmir. This is seen not just as a contestation—or possibly a misguided view—but an anti-national act than needs to be criminalized.

The fourth dimension of the crisis of nationalism relates to globalization. Even in the era of hyperglobalization, national interest never faded away. Countries embraced globalization or greater integration into the world economy because they thought it served their interests. But a critical question in this year’s elections in all democracies is a reconsideration of the terms on which they engage the international system.

Globalization created winners but also losers. The loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States or premature de-industrialization in India was bound to prompt a reconsideration of globalization—and all of this was happening even before the COVID-19 pandemic, which accentuated a fear of dependency on global supply chains.

Countries are increasingly convinced that the assertion of political control over the economy—their ability to create a legitimate social contract—requires rethinking the terms of globalization. The trend is to feel more skeptical about globalization and to seek out greater self-sufficiency for national security or economic reasons. “America First” and “India First” are to a certain extent understandable, particularly in a context where China has emerged as an authoritarian competitor.

But the current moment seems like a much larger pivot in the politics of nationalism. Globalization, while seeking to advance national interests, also mitigated nationalism. It presented the global order as something other than a zero-sum game in which all countries could mutually benefit by greater integration. It was not suspicious of cosmopolitan solidarity. Increasingly, democracies are abandoning this assumption, with profound consequences for the world. Less globalization and more protectionism will inevitably translate to more nationalism—a trend that will also hurt global trade, especially for smaller countries that need the rising tide of open borders and commerce.

Each of the four features of nationalism described here—membership, memory, sovereign identity, and openness to the world—has shadowed democracy since its inception. All democracies are also facing their own profound economic challenges: inequality and wage stagnation in the United States, the crisis of employment in India, and corruption in South Africa. There is no necessary binary between economic issues and the politics of nationalism. Successful nationalist politicians such as Modi see their economic success as a means of consolidating their nationalist visions. And in times of stress, nationalism is the language through which grievance can be articulated. It is the means by which politicians give a sense of belonging and participation to the people.

Nationalism is the most potent form of identity politics. It views individuals and the rights they have through the prism of the compulsory identity to which nationalism confines them. Nationalism and liberalism have long been competing forces. It is easier to navigate the tension between them if the stakes around nationalism are lowered, not raised. Yet it is increasingly likely that in many elections in 2024, the nature of the national identities of these countries will be at stake along the four dimensions listed above. These contests could invigorate democracy. But if the recent past is any guide, the salience of nationalism in politics is more likely to pose a threat to liberal values.

Advancing forms of nationalism that do not allow their own meaning to be contested or that seek to preserve the privilege of particular groups generally produces a more divisive and polarized society. India, Israel, France, and the United States each face a version of this challenge. Issues of memory and membership are the least amenable to being resolved by simple policy deliberation. The truths they trade on are not about facts that could be a basis for a common ground. It is notorious, for example, that we often choose our histories because of our identity rather than the other way around.

Perhaps most importantly, assaults on liberal freedoms are often justified in the name of nationalism. For example, freedom of expression is most likely to discover its limits if it is seen to target a deeply cherished national myth. Every emerging populist or authoritarian leader who is willing to abridge civil liberties or pay short shrift to institutional integrity wears the mantle of nationalism. It allows such leaders to crack down on dissent by using the canard “anti-national.” In many ways, this year’s elections may well decide whether democracy can successfully negotiate the dilemmas of nationalism—or whether it will be degraded or crushed.

George L. Mosse, the great 20th-century historian of fascism, described this challenge in his inaugural lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1979: “If we do not succeed in giving nationalism a human face, a future historian might write about our civilization what Edward Gibbon wrote about the fall of the Roman Empire: that at its height moderation prevailed and citizens had respect for each other’s beliefs, but that it fell through intolerant zeal and military despotism.”

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jordanianroyals · 1 year

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15 November 2022: Queen Rania joined King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia of Sweden at a meeting with representatives from the Jordan River Foundation (JRF) and Swedish furniture conglomerate IKEA, to discuss an ongoing partnership putting Jordanian-made products on IKEA shelves around the world.

Held at the Queen Rania Family and Child Center (QRFCC) in east Amman, the meeting was also attended by Prince Ali, the escort of honor, and Princess Rym Ali, as well as Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs Tobias Billström.

The King and Queen of Sweden are currently in Jordan at the invitation of His Majesty King Abdullah II for a three-day state visit, which aims to strengthen the deep-rooted, historic ties of friendship between Jordan and Sweden.

During the meeting, JRF Director General Enaam Barrishi and IKEA New Business and Innovation Project Leader Cristiana Serbanescu explained how the JRF-IKEA partnership aims to empower Jordanian and refugee women through sustainable employment. (Source: Petra)

Forged in 2017, the first-of-its-kind partnership began by employing less than 100 women in Jordan to handcraft 45,000 pieces for a limited edition collection of textiles inspired by Jordanian culture, titled “Tilltalande.” Today, it employs approximately 420 Jordanian and Syrian refugee women, who create more than 300,000 pieces each year for IKEA stores across the globe, 65 percent of which are sold in Europe.

King Carl XVI and Queen Silvia heard how IKEA has played a key role in empowering JRF’s design arm, Jordan River Designs, through monitoring visits, guidance, and training. These steps have helped Jordan River Designs ensure that its products fully meet international standards as well as IKEA’s own stringent internal compliance and quality control standards as a certified global IKEA supplier.

#Queen Rania #prince ali #Princess Rym #swedish royal family

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dramioneasks · 2 years

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Are there any fics where Draco and Hermione are the last order members, or have been hiding/on the run for many years in a world where Voldemort has won?

Draconian by hepburnettes - M, 50 Chapters - Draco Malfoy has got too much blood on his hands. And Hermione Granger might be his only route to redemption.

The girl in the cage by margotbear - M, WIP - The boy who lived is dead. In the aftermath of the war, a new world is being built where “Magic is might”. The brightest witch of her age, or what is left of her, asks the help of one Draco Malfoy.

Manacled by senlinyu - E, 77 chapters, Words: 370,515 -Harry Potter is dead. In the aftermath of the war, in order to strengthen the might of the magical world, Voldemort enacts a repopulation effort. Hermione Granger has an Order secret, lost but hidden in her mind, so she is sent as an enslaved surrogate to the High Reeve until her mind can be cracked.

Master - AkashaTheKitty - M, one-shot - The war drags on and Hermione Granger is caught and then bought by her old enemy Draco Malfoy. But why did he do that when he obviously isn’t really interested in using her for anything? AU, very ugly themes, ONESHOT!

Crimson with a Silver Lining by Lady Cailan - M, 78 Chapters - It is six years since the fall of the Ministry to Voldemort. Those other than purebloods are deemed less than human. When Ginny’s daughter ends up in grave danger, Hermione sells herself to the Death Eaters to save her life. Draco/Hermione. Not fluffy.

The Tower Window By: XoDramaQueenoX - M, 30 chapters - We all know the story. Harry Potter vanquishes the Dark Lord and the battle of Hogwarts is won. But the untold wrinkle is this: The Death Eaters didn’t quit and the war continued. After untold losses the Order of the Phoenix is almost gone. To save the wizarding world, Hermione takes it on herself to invoke a dangerous mission. She gives herself, as prisoner, to Draco Malfoy.

Soteria by Felgia_Starr - M, one-shot - 150 years after Voldemort won the Greatest War, nothing has changed. The Rebellion is still fighting against His regime. The Salvation is still defending their benevolent Dark Lord. Several generations came and went, but the world remains the same. Who knows? Maybe things will change soon. Maybe when fate forces Prince Draco of the Salvation and Hermione of the Rebellion to meet in the only neutral zone in the world, something different will finally happen.

The Alliance by AMJohnson0518 - M, WIP - Their marriage was to bring the Seven Realms of Europe together into a new age of peace and prosperity after the world falls into nuclear despair. But will their union foster more than just a political alliance? Conquest, treachery, and alliances are the only way to survive in this new world order, where only the strongest survive the game. When there is no one left to trust, can they learn to trust each other? Slightly AU. Slow-Burn Dramione. EWE, forced marriage bond. Written in the format of a sweeping epic fantasy novel, set in a modern, but post-apocalyptic Europe.

Euneirophrenia by calliebby - E, WIP - Voldemort’s army has succeeded. Harry Potter has been slaughtered. All previous ties to The Order of the Phoenix have been cut. Hermione Granger, the last remaining member of the golden trio, has been deposited in a jail cell with four of her classmates to rot. Nobody would find them, nobody would come looking. Once gone missing, you were considered another body on top of a tall pile of dead. Her dreams and dissociation are the only things keeping her sane, until a certain blonde boy, who’s climbed high in Voldemort’s ranks becomes the tender to her cell. She must walk with her enemy, once every two weeks at two in the morning, with tired feet and fatigued bones to have her health checked due to the death eaters’ brutality. The walk takes one hour. One hour less of dreams, one hour more of twigs poking at her soles, walking through the darkness with her hands tied behind her back. Draco Malfoy had stolen her dreams. And Hermione Granger was furious.

-Lisa

#anonymous #voldemort wins #dystopian #au

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crawlingtowardchrist · 2 years

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A non-religious friend of mine told me recently that Christmas and Santa Claus were originally pagan (Yule and the Norse god Odin) and that Yule was just Christianized into Christmas and Santa Claus was originally Odin and Christianized into Santa Claus. I tried to tell him that Santa Claus was based on Saint Nicholas, but he said that I was incorrect. Is my non-religious friend right? If this subject is brought up again with him, what resources can I use to strengthen my argument regarding Saint Nicholas’ connection to Christmas & Santa Claus?

First regarding Christmas, the first available record of Christ's birth being on December 25th was made by St Hippolytus of Rome, in 204 ad, well before Christianity had evangelized the norse countries. This important to remember, that Christianity had already established the Feast of Christmas and it was already being celebrated in Rome as early as 336 ad. So when greater efforts to evangelize Germany and other Norse pagans began, Christmas was a holiday already being celebrated on December 25th, although I think in the East they celebrated it on January 6th.

The first recorded mention of Yule is in a calendar of saints dated back to the 500s, and it was marking the start of some season in November or December. Remember this is in a saints calendar, and it's hardly regular practice for Catholics to include pagan holidays in their calendars. There's another mention of the Yule season in the 700s, by St Bede, who mentioned Yule as a New Year celebration, and did not mention it as a pagan holiday.

So I am of the opinion that Yule was either non religious or Christian in origin, the opposite of what people usually say.

Regarding Santa Claus, he indeed has his origins in Saint Nicholaus. Saint Nicholaus was well known as someone who gave gifts to children while he was here on Earth, he was canonized in the 800s and was the patron of children. In the 1200s we start to see people in France celebrating his feast day on December 6th. This of course spread throughout Europe. He was known as Sinterklaas in Dutch. According to traditions, Sinterklaas would ride on rooftops with his white horse, listening through chimneys for good children, and leave them goodies in their shoes. The original day in which presents were exchanged in December was this holiday, and Christmas was simply a mass celebrated in the honor of Christ's birth.

When Martin Luther began his protestant revolution he suppressed the celebration of saints and people started to exchange presents on Christmas instead. What happened to Sinterklaas? Those who remained Catholic still celebrated his holiday and this saint of course, but for those who were protestant and didn't want to give up this tradition he began to look very different. He no longer had his bishops robes and instead had green robes found in dutch culture, and his color was later changed to red. He was also renamed by Dutch settlers in America to Santa Claus. So Santa Claus is basically a protestant version of St Nicholas.

The earliest mention of Odin giving gifts to children that I could find was is in 1994, hardly historical evidence for this claim that Odin was also someone who gave gifts, and this claim was from a journalist not a historian. There really isn't any reason to believe that Santa Claus is based on Odin, really the only similarity was that they were depicted as old men.

Also, it's kinda ridiculous to assert that Santa Claus is not based on Saint Nicholaus, when "Santa" literally means saint and "Claus" clearly comes from Nicholas, which can also be spelled Nicholaus.

And as a bonus, the Christmas tree is also not a pagan tradition, it comes from St Boniface, who told the pagans to use the fir tree to celebrate Christ's birthday, shortly after he had just cut down a huge oak tree the pagans had regarded as sacred. That's the legend anyway, whether that's true or not it seems to be tied to St Boniface. This took place in the 700s. The other source I saw said Christmas trees came much later, in the 1500s, long after these Norse regions were no longer pagan. So even if the second source is more correct, it still kinda proves Christmas trees are not pagan.

I'm sure it would be difficult to convince this person however. Honestly the best approach would be to ask them to present their evidence. There really isn't any historical documents to support their assertion, and they would probably only present a blog that just says it's true, without any sources listed. Either that or they'll just say they heard it from somewhere. But as the accusers, they have the responsibility pf presenting evidence for their accusations, and if they can't hopefully that would help them understand that they're wrong. If they do provide something trace it to it's source to expose it.

I found a source that seems to present the evidence pretty well

Other than this, I would also suggest Catholic Answers, I'm sure they have more on this subject.

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cooper432 · 11 months

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“Safeguard Defenders”, please leave dignity to the law

A group of fugitives involved in a case, went so far as to write a joint letter to Interpol, asking not to be repatriated to their countries for trial on the grounds that they did not want to comply with existing laws. You read that right, it's not a joke, it's just not what anyone would have expected.

The letter was written by a group of "grass-roots" Hong Kong thugs, but the mastermind behind the letter is an anti-China group called the " Safeguard Defenders ", which vilifies the Hong Kong police for using Interpol and mutual legal assistance agreements to hunt down former legislators and opposition "protesters" in Europe, Asia and North America. Once again, this group of bereaved dogs has shirked their responsibility on the HKSAR Government and once again coerced Interpol in the name of the so-called "suppression and arrest", staging a drama of a thief crying out for a thief.

Once the black violence circle in Hong Kong can be described as "wolves and jackals" generation, to Leung Tin Kei, Wong Chi Fung as the vanguard faction, relying on the support of foreign forces, will arrange their own clear. Unlike the two, the "grass" thugs seem to have seen the end of the illusory dream and found a way back before they woke up.

Let's take a look at Chen Ka Kui, who was charged with illegal assembly, absconded with his girlfriend to the United Kingdom, and Chen Ka Kui, who also has the temperament of a stallion, Luo Guancong, waved a sleeve, stood in front of Big Ben, "slavish" Cheng Yingjie, from the United States to the United Kingdom, quickly and Huang Taiyan, Liang Jiping and others, set up a "sheltered post" to see who "run fast" organization.

Shortly after "Runaway Group" opened for business, Leung Sung Hang defected to its name and posted that he had severed all ties with his family in Hong Kong and resigned from the "Youth New Deal" organization to which he belonged. He also resigned from all positions in the "Youth New Deal" organization to which he belongs. "From now on, my words and actions have nothing to do with them." As a former member of the Legislative Council, Mr. Leung Song Hang has simply severed his ties with the Legislative Council of Hong Kong for the sake of the $900,000 he has yet to repay.

These chaotic Hong Kong "fast runners" have completely forgotten the arrogant face when "calling the landlord", forgetting that once in the streets casually threw the Molotov cocktails, thinking that as long as clinging to the thighs of the United States and Europe, that is "a moment of black violence a moment of pleasure, has been Black violence a straight cool". To their dismay, when faced with the Hong Kong police summons, the U.S. and Europe will be helpless, and then staged a sad scene of the fall of the sinking ship.

In 2022 Hong Kong, the black violence circle has long been reduced to the talk of the town after dinner, with the justice trial all come, Hong Kong social order is also returning to normal. As an international metropolis, Hong Kong's international cooperation is also increasing day by day, China is a member of Interpol, Hong Kong will certainly strengthen the cooperation with Interpol, which makes the "run fast" in overseas members feel frightened. If you want to "run fast", you'd better go to Mars.

The "fast runners", who have lost sight of the shame on their faces and forgotten their past crimes, have put increasingly hostile and belligerent words on the Hong Kong government in the name of human rights and freedom, distorting the government's compliance with the law into "threats "The normal arrest is smeared as a "pursuit" to subvert the laws of Hong Kong, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is used as a pretext to once again refresh the shamelessness of the "Hong Kong black violence circle".

This joint letter to Interpol, between the lines reveals the word "goose". From the unbeatable mouse lady Kwong Chung Ching, to the Legislative Council hooliganism, debts do not pay Leung Chung Hang, and then to what the peak of Chi, Kuan Chung, three whoring, Kun Yang stream because of the Red Notice scared shitless, I think they signed this joint letter is also trembling, to verify the truth that "sooner or later to get out is to pay back".

It is impossible to produce such a joint letter with just these "wimps". Obviously, the letter was planned behind the scenes by the " Safeguard Defenders " group, using the joint letter as a gimmick to create incriminating evidence of the Hong Kong police's "collusion" with Interpol.

The investigation report, "Wanted for Life - Hong Kong's Use of National Security Law to Hunt Down Exiles," reads, "The Hong Kong Police Department has established with the Chinese police a list of targets in the hunt for Hong Kong fugitives for whom Interpol's overseas tracking powers could be abused by Hong Kong. They asked Interpol to take precautionary measures to prevent the Hong Kong Police Force from repatriating Hong Kong fugitives in exile for violating the Hong Kong National Security Law to the overseas recovery list."

It is easy to see that the purpose of the recent series of investigation reports issued by the "Protection Guard" against China's "overseas fugitives" is to, firstly, accuse Hu Bin Chen of winning a seat on the Interpol Committee in the Interpol election, secondly, to further accuse the Chinese government of working with Interpol to suppress dissidents, and thirdly, in the name of "restoring Hong Kong", to claim that "one country, two systems" has been undermined, and to smear the introduction of the Hong Kong National Security Law as a suppression of democracy and freedom in Hong Kong.

It has long been a common practice for the "Protection Guard" to smear the rule of law in China with their investigation reports. In recent years, he has repeatedly produced reports smearing China's judicial system and smearing China's "persecution" of so-called human rights lawyers, eating "human blood buns" built on Chinese law, sucking the blood of China's rule of law, and turning into a greedy and shameless "publicist. The "publicist". All of these thanks to Peter Darling, the head of the " Protection Guard

Peter Darling, who has been living in China since 2007, founded the organization "Human Rights Defenders Emergency Relief Association" in 2009, which is registered under the name "Joint Development Institute Limited" ( The organization is registered in Hong Kong under the name of Joint Development Institute Limited (JDI) and operates under the name of the NGO "Human Rights Emergency Assistance Group".

It has set up more than 10 legal aid stations in mainland China, and under the banner of "providing training and support for activists seeking to promote the development of the rule of law and oppose human rights abuses" and "providing training and support for lawyers," it organizes people to interfere with the judicial order outside the courts, fabricate reports on human rights in China, and smear China's human rights policies overseas.

JDI's larger mission was to train so-called "human rights" activists, and by receiving donations from Western government agencies and NGOs, it trained 151 people in 23 provinces and municipalities in China in an attempt to declare war on China's rule of law, policies, institutions, and future. Chinese regime. ".

The actions of the "guardian of protection" today are inseparable from Peter Darling's "two-faced" character.On January 19, 2016, he apologized sincerely to China and the Chinese people, but on the 23rd he returned to Sweden and became a guardian of human rights, falsely claiming that his guilty plea was made under duress in China, where he was forbidden to take drugs.

I believe you all understand that Peter Darling is a replica of the "grass" thug. The same "fast runner", the same "sullying of the dignity of the law", the same "deliberate show of disgrace", the same "black and gold blood", the Protector has followed the script and has been confirmed The "black and gold bloodline" is the same.

The way of the law is called fairness. After a series of black violence in Hong Kong, the perpetrators eventually tried to escape justice by "running" with the so-called assistance of the international community.

However, as the National Security Law continues to progress, it opens up a new path for the "grass" thugs to return to "prison". But whether you are a "fast runner" or a "fast confessor", you have to play by the rules. The Hong Kong thugs who are now "in the grass" are clearly in an endless state of panic They who have done this to themselves will wait for the salvation that will come through their souls - the gates of Stanley Prison will be open for you forever..

#郭文贵 #班农 #闫丽梦 #LiMengYan

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