MetaFilter posts tagged with imperialism

How The Left Has Won

the man of twists and turns — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 13:35:05 -0800

Or, why is there still socialism in the United States?

Why, then, would we look for evidence of socialism only where a state seized by radicals of the Left inaugurates a dictatorship of the proletariat? Or, to lower the rhetorical volume and evidentiary stakes, why would we expect to find socialism only where avowed socialists or labor parties contend for state power? We should instead assume that socialism, like capitalism, is a cross-class cultural construction, to which even the bourgeoisie has already made significant contributions – just as the proletariat has long made significant contributions to the cross-class construction we know as capitalism. What follows?

Do you have a flag?

MartinWisse — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 05:57:57 -0800

Of all the countries in the world, the British have managed to invade or attack all but 22 (Torygraph), making the US look like absolute pikers. Somewhat inflated by the fact that the authors of the study counted everywhere British forces attacking, including pirate attacks on silver ships in the Spanish Main, not just those places where the UK planted a flag.

Border crossings and shifts

the man of twists and turns — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 23:12:22 -0800

Who Draws The Borders Of Culture?(NYTimes) Cultural border, as opposed to national borders, are funny things. One country can contain many (Coke vs. Soda. Vs. Pop, previously and previously-er). Cultural borders often appear as food and drink choices, like sweet tea, forms of alcohol, or BBQ sauce. Different types of borders can run together and separate, like Protestant vs. Catholic vs. Orthodox and Romance vs. Germanic vs. Slavic, or climate and the extent of vineyards, or prevailing family structure. A region, like Brittany, can be defined in more ways than one. The place where zones meet gives rise to the edge effect in ecology, and source of conflict for humans. National borders can be odd things, slicing through people's lives. Even national borders that no longer exist bear down on the present - in what used to be the Habsburg Empire or the colonial divisions of Africa. Borders are not static, not even the ones on the map.

Pakistan ruined by language myth

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 03:08:47 -0800

Pakistan ruined by language myth .

Speak white

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 13:00:27 -0800

Speak white .

Linguistic Imperialism

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:18:07 -0800

Is the English language becoming another factor of inequality? How English shaped the academic world? (pdf). Is this linguistic imperialism?

The Only Winning Move is to Watch This

symbioid — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 18:36:29 -0800

Most of us reading on the blue lived through at least a portion of it. Forty-plus years of tension between the world's two superpowers and their allies. That's right: The Cold War. Then, they made a documentary. Aired on CNN in 1998, and never released on DVD, the 24 episode, 20 hour series features tons of archival footage, along with many interviews with individuals directly involved at some of the highest levels. You might not be able to see it on DVD, but you can watch the full series on Youtube, starting with Part 1: Comrades (1917-1945).

Why some people think Noam Chomsky is wrong

shivohum — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:09:43 -0800

It's not news that Noam Chomsky's views on foreign policy are controversial. Paul Bogdanor's The Chomsky Hoax collects links to articles critiquing those views, including the Top 200 Chomsky Lies (pdf) and economist J. Bradford Delong's My Very, Very Allergic Reaction to Noam Chomsky. Other prominent critiques include Noam Chomsky: A Critical Review (by MeFi's own Russil Wvong), George Shadriou's Dissecting Chomsky and Anti-Americanism, and David Horowitz's series of articles on Chomsky in Frontpage Magazine (Part I, Part II, response to rebuttals).

The Empire Is Dead, Long Live the Empire!

-->NMN.80.418 — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:56:53 -0800

The Age of Imperialism is over, but its impact remains, leaving behind a long-lasting legacy through cultural norms. Comparing individuals on opposite sides of the long-gone Habsburg Empire border within five countries, it shows that firms and people living in what used to be the empire have higher trust in courts and police.

What is the meaning of the assassination of OBL?

wilful — Thu, 05 May 2011 23:04:21 -0800

Guy Rundle teases out the meanings of the bin Laden assassination, in contrast to the Eichmann trial.

Conflict, Security, and Development

kliuless — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 06:32:09 -0800

Remove the scourge of conflict - "Taming mass violence is the theme of the World Bank's latest World Development Report, which focuses on 'conflict, security and development' [pdf] ... Mass violence destroys all hopes of progress. We should make a huge effort to eliminate this scourge. It seems feasible. It is desirable. So try."

The economics of Death Star planet destruction.

kipmanley — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 11:30:09 -0800

Furthermore, let’s remember that Alderaan isn’t gone. It’s just blown up. Suddenly all the metallic elements that were languishing away in the planetary core are floating around in the void, ripe for the plucking. And anyone who can plausibly claim to have owned them is dead. You can build a lot of Death Stars with that much tungsten. Well, not even a lot—but maybe one.

The Overthinking It Think Tank takes a look at “the economic calculus behind the Empire’s tactic of A) building a Death Star, B) intimidating planets into submission with the threat of destruction, and C) actually carrying through with said destruction if the planet doesn’t comply.” The extensive use of a “hyperdrive propulsion system” renders Krugman’s theories inapplicable to this analysis.

Islands, Guano, and Imperialism

Rumple — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 14:41:34 -0800

Islands, Guano, and Imperialism: Columbia University Law Professor Christina Duffy Burnett is interviewed in Cabinet Magazine. Via.

iPod, iPhone, iDal.

simulacra — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:08:00 -0800

"Every input in agriculture is a war chemical. Every agrichemical is a war chemical." Physicist Vandana Shiva on monoculture, agricultural imperialism, and protests in Delhi conscribed to the hours of 9-5.

[When] I started to save seeds, and I’d try and find the English names for our dals, you know, urad dal is the black gram. ...You didn’t have black gram, red gram. You had chickpea, cowpea, horse gram, because the British didn’t know how to use it, so they treated all this as animal feed. And we still only have animal feed names for the most important part of the Indian diet. And the other day, [Mirah] came back, she’d collected this package from the local market, of a new dal called iDal. iDal. 'i' like iPod. IPhone. iDal. It literally is a dal only in imagination, because it's made of [wheat] flour and soya flour. And it’s colored yellow. And it’s extruded. And they have a whole science of this now, called analogue dals. It’ll be the same soya and flour extruded into different shapes and dyed different colors. And we will imagine we are eating different things, but it’ll be the same thing.”

This footage is from Dr. Shiva's recent talk on food and seed sovereignty at the International Meeting on Resisting Hegemony held 2-5 August 2010 in Penang, Malaysia.

Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography

kliuless — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 09:45:19 -0800

The Rehabilitation of Ernest Gellner - It is easy to imagine why Ernest Gellner would be one of the universally known figures in Anglophone intellectual life. A polymath whose work ranged across anthropology, history, philosophy, and sociology, his mind wrestled with an encyclopedia's worth of nagging questions about nationalism, modernity, civil society, imperialism, Islam, psychoanalysis, ethics and epistemology ... All of this, to repeat, should explain Gellner's monumental prominence – except for the fact that he has no such prominence. (via mr) BONUS A Combatant in the Battle of Ideas - A defender of the West when it was most embattled, a defender of reason at a time of dangerous irrationality. Farrell on McLemee on Hall on Gellner - We are currently writing a paper that could fairly be summarized as Gellner wedded to an explicitly evolutionary theory of institutional change. With network theory! And machine learning! And cognitive science! And handwaving! Lots of handwaving. Does Language Influence Culture? - New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish. cf. Sapir-Whorf [1,2] The Advantages of Being Helpless - Human brains are slow to develop--a secret, perhaps, of our success, cf. Frans de Waal on the human primate: Strength is weakness & Jonah Lehrer on the Secret of Successful Entrepreneurs

The storm in a designer teacup

infini — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 05:00:20 -0800

Bruce Nussbaum kicked off a minor hubbub in designa circles this week with his provocative article "Is Humanitarian Design the new Imperialism?" which led to this response by Frogdesign's Robert Fabricant "In Defense of Design Imperialism" and WorldChanging's Alex Steffen's "The Problem with Design: Imperialism or thinking too small?" and finally a whole slew of blog posts, opinions and commentary artfully collated here by the editors of Design Observer. But the question still remains unanswered...

The more, the merrier?

GrammarMoses — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:21:29 -0800

The Expansionist Party of the United States ("XP") is a "small, international organization founded over the telephone February 19, 1977 by two gay men in two different boros of New York City." (One of the founders is L. Craig Schoonmaker, known to some as the guiding spirit of Homosexuals Intransigent!.) XP's mission: "to enlarge the United States geographically." First step: Welcoming Canada Home. Canada could come on board as seven states and one territory, suggests one XPer. Somehow I don't think the Quebecois will be very enthusiastic about the plan... or will they?

Latin American Science

tellurian — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:02:18 -0800

History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean [flash required] – the history of science from a Latin American perspective.

Martin Luther King's Anti-Imperialism

homunculus — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 08:29:03 -0800

King's Anti-Imperialism and the Challenge for Obama.

The forgotten Holocaust

hadjiboy — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:10:41 -0800

In 1943, while the Allies were busy battling the Axis Powers and the Nazi Regime, there was another kind of war that was being waged against a helpless populace (living on the Indian Sub-continent). A war that has been largely ignored by the mass media and the history books of our time. It is known as the Great Bengal Famine, and ended up causing the death of an estimated 1.5 million to 4 million people.

US Military Presence Worldwide

homunculus — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:35:22 -0800

Mission Creep: "Bush and Rumsfeld may be history, but America's new global footprint lives on." Here's the Table of Contents for the whole series.

Bacevich speaks to Moyer about the American Empire

geos — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 07:00:56 -0800

Ret. Col. Andrew Bacevich speaks to Bill Moyers (transcript) about the American empire and his new book "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."

Who Makes the Nazis?

nasreddin — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:08:52 -0800

"By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black".

Bonaparte and Bush on Deck

homunculus — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 20:20:27 -0800

Lessons from Past Western Incursions in the Middle East. A speech by Juan Cole at the New America Foundation in which he discusses his new book, Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East, and the relevance and lessons of Napoleon's expedition in Egypt to the current American occupation of Iraq. A shorter version, covering many of the same points, is in this article: Pitching the Imperial Republic.

To the Person Sitting in Darkness

homunculus — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 15:15:36 -0800

"The Blessings-of-Civilization Trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a Daisy. There is more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty, and other kinds of emolument, than there is in any other game that is played. But Christendom has been playing it badly of late years, and must certainly suffer by it, in my opinion. She has been so eager to get every stake that appeared on the green cloth, that the People who Sit in Darkness have noticed it – they have noticed it, and have begun to show alarm. They have become suspicious of the Blessings of Civilization."