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Day: December 16, 2016
What were the long-range effects of Nixon’s foreign policy?
The world was blessed, that a US president should take so much interest in foreign policy, and stake his posterity on it. The world was cursed, that Nixon was that president, and he squandered so much of his foreign policy on political point-scoring. From my reading: His biggest legacy was opening up China, and he […]
Was the Ottoman empire the ISIS of the 14th century?
Matthew Franklin, Jakub Handlíř and Tomas Rocha Martins are completely correct. If you’re looking for an equivalent to ISIS in the 13th or 14th century, you’re looking for an agent that is not abiding by the then extant international rules of conduct, and that is reviled universally, by coreligionists and outsiders alike, as being beyond […]
The phrase “everyone’s entitled to their opinion” annoys me. What can I do?
There are people on this thread who are calling you a snob, too. Screw ’em. You have an aesthetic. You have a grounding for that aesthetic, that you can (I hope) articulate and defend. Hopefully, it’s an aesthetic that’s also aware of its own contingency and situatedness, and has no pretensions of immutable truth. People […]