quotesfrommyreading

[quotesfrommyreading]

Nor can the troops on the front line be sheltered from the brutal truths about their leaders and the war itself that Prigozhin uttered on his abortive march on the Kremlin. Someone at last has said it, and the someone who did, brute though he may be, is the kind of leader who visited the front lines, paid his men and their survivors well, and has a kind of thuggish charisma that Putin lacks. Presumably, Ukrainian psychological-warfare experts are spreading the Prigozhin videos and audio recordings far and wide among their enemies.

  —  The Three Logics of Russia's Prigozhin Putsch

#eliot a. cohen #current events #politics #russian politics #warfare #russo-ukrainian war #2022 russian invasion of ukraine #wagner group rebellion #russia #yevgeny prigozhin #vladimir putin #wagner group

[quotesfrommyreading]

Far from resisting such royal parochialism, Britain should embrace Charles as the emblem of its new normal age. Very few people in the world know the names of the Dutch, Danish, or Norwegian monarchs, but their citizens are much more prosperous and their kingdoms more settled. If Charles joins them in comparative anonymity, that should be celebrated.

In 1962, a decade into Britain’s second Elizabethan age, the American grandee Dean Acheson caused real hurt and anger in London by declaring that Britain had lost an empire but had yet to find a role. The entire reign of Elizabeth was filled with her chief ministers searching for the answer to this challenge. But with her passing, Britain can cease its search. Not playing a central role in the great game is a perfectly noble aspiration, a liberating opportunity—and one that King Charles is well suited to symbolize.

  —  Queen Elizabeth's Funeral Ushers in the Era of the Hobbit King

#tom mctague #history #politics #british politics #international relations #foreign policy #imperialism #monarchy #britain #charles iii #dean acheson #elizabeth ii

[quotesfrommyreading]

It was ten years ago. It's as if it never happened, and if I hadn't gotten sick, I'd have forgotten by now.

You have to serve the motherland! Serving – that's a big deal. I received: underwear, boots, cap, pants, belt, clothing sack. And off you go! They gave me a dump truck. I moved concrete. There it was – and there it wasn't. We were young, unmarried. We didn't take any gas masks. There was one guy – he was older. He always wore his mask. But we didn't. The traffic guys didn't wear theirs. We were in the driver's cabin, but they were out in radioactive dust eight hours a day. Everyone got paid well: three times your salary plus vacation pay. We used it. We knew that vodka helped. It removed the stress. It's no wonder they gave people those 100 grams of vodka during the war. And then it was just like home: a drunk traffic cop fines a drunk driver.

Don't write about the wonders of Soviet heroism. They existed – and they really were wonders. But first there had to be incompetence, negligence, and only after those did you get wonders: covering the embrasure, throwing yourself in front of a machine gun. But that those orders should never have been given, that there shouldn't have been any need, no one writes about that. They flung us there, like sand onto the reactor. Every day they'd put out a new “Action Update”: men are working courageously and selflessly,” “we will survive and triumph.”

They gave me a medal and one thousand rubles.

  —  Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (Svetlana Alexievich), translated by Keith Gessen

#book quotes #svetlana alexievich #keith gessen #voices from chernobyl: the oral history of a nuclear disaster #history #military history #politics #russian politics #soviet politics #communism #propaganda #ww2 #chernobyl disaster #ussr #ukraine #chernobyl

[quotesfrommyreading]

One of the most famous—and famously outspoken—Egyptologists is Hawass, Egypt’s former minister of antiquities. For decades, he has worked to return a number of high-profile Egyptian artifacts to his country, including the Rosetta Stone (housed at the British Museum), the Dendera Zodiac (in the Louvre) and the bust of Nefertiti (in the Neues Museum). With the opening of the GEM imminent, Hawass in October launched an online petition asking these European museums to send the Egyptian treasures back home. So far, the petition has garnered more than 130,000 signatures.

“These are our monuments,” Hawass says. “The Rosetta Stone is the icon of our Egyptian identity. Without the Rosetta Stone, there is no archaeology of Egypt. It’s really sad to see in the [Dendera] temple a replica of the zodiac, and the original is in France.”

In September, a group of Egyptian archaeologists launched a separate petition similarly seeking to return the Rosetta Stone. Called Repatriate Rashid, the campaign demands that Egypt’s prime minister submit an official request to the British Museum. Complicating both repatriation pushes is the fact that the London institution is governed by an act of British Parliament expressly prohibiting the return of artifacts unless they are “duplicates” or “unfit to be retained in the collections of the museum.” Even in other instances when the museum wanted to return objects, court rulings and strict policies have prevented it from doing so.

While some key ancient artifacts remain abroad, Egyptian officials have had considerable luck in securing others’ return.

“Egypt is one of the countries that’s had the most consistent, driven repatriation effort,” says Alice Procter, a historian of material culture and the author of The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums and Why We Need to Talk About It. “The Egyptian government has been largely pretty successful in getting objects returned, and that’s partially due to the fact that so many pieces have been taken illegally in a very easily documented way.”

Many of these recently returned, illegally trafficked artifacts were looted in the chaos of the 2011 Arab Spring and sold to museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Following international investigations, the Met has sent dozens of pieces back to Egypt, including the golden coffin of a high-ranking priest, which is now on display at the NMEC. In May, French prosecutors charged the former president of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez, with complicity in fraud and money laundering linked to Egyptian antiquities purchased by the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The court’s decision is expected in February.

“Egypt has put in every possible effort to try to repatriate its objects,” says Ahmed Issa, Egypt’s newly appointed tourism minister. “But we’re also 100 percent committed to all the laws. Every piece that has left Egypt lawfully is owned by the person who owns it. But every piece that has left Egypt unlawfully, we’re going to exert every possible effort to return that piece to Egypt.”

  —  Who Gets to Tell the Story of Ancient Egypt?

#lauren keith #who gets to tell the story of ancient egypt? #history #archaeology #museums #colonialism #arab spring #egypt #ancient egypt #usa #france #united arab emirates #zahi hawass #alice proctor #jean-luc martinez #ahmed issa #british museum #neues museum #metropolitan museum of art #louvre #louvre abu dhabi #rosetta stone #dendera zodiac #nefertiti bust

[quotesfrommyreading]

Wendell explains that my pain feels like it's in the present, but it's actually in both the past and the future. Therapists talk a lot about how the past informs the present – how our histories affect the ways we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past. If we don't accept the notion that there's no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck. Changing our relationship to the past is a staple of therapy. But we talk far less about how our relationship to the future informs the present too. Our notion of the future can be just as powerful a roadblock to change as our notion of the past.

In fact, Wendell continues, I've lost more than my relationship to the present. I've lost my relationship to the future. We tend to think that the future happens later, but we're creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists. But if we spend the present trying to fix the past or control the future, we remain stuck in place, in perpetual regret. By Google-stalking Boyfriend, I've been watching his future unfold while I stay frozen in the past. But if I live in the present, I'll have to accept the loss of my future.

Can I sit through the pain, or do I want to suffer?

  —  Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed (Lori Gottlieb)

#book quotes #lori gottlieb #maybe you should talk to someone: a therapist her therapist and our lives revealed #psychology #memory #imagination #pain #regret #change

[quotesfrommyreading]

Although the Ukrainian public largely believed that victory was within grasp, Leshchenko began to understand that the war likely would end not in months, but in years. If the Russians were going to treat the Ukrainians they conquered as vermin, then the occupation of Ukrainian territory was an intolerable concession. And if there weren’t any tolerable concessions to offer, were there any plausible grounds for a negotiated peace?

  —  Ukraine’s War Through Sergii Leshchenko’s Eyes

#franklin foer #ukraine’s war through sergii leshchenko’s eyes #current events #politics #russian politics #diplomacy #foreign relations #russo-ukrainian war #2022 russian invasion of ukraine #ukraine #russia #serhiy leshchenko

[quotesfrommyreading]

Saving species in the 21st century isn’t just about protecting big, undeveloped parks—although we need those too. It is also about figuring out how to coexist with the many species that can thrive in the urban, suburban, exurban, and agricultural landscapes we’ve made.

  —  You Should Build a Frog Pond

#emma marris #you should build a frog pond #environmentalism #ecology #wildlife conservation #animals #frogs

[quotesfrommyreading]

The graduate degree for librarians is not, typically, a master of arts, but a master of science—in library and information sciences. Librarians may adore books, but they are trained in the technical and data-driven work of running libraries. Unlike a privately owned bookstore, where the stock might reflect the tastes and preferences of the proprietor, at the library, books are acquired based on information about what its particular community wants and needs.

“Librarians love data,” Dudenhoffer, who now coordinates the information-science program at the University of Missouri, told me. “Knowing how to analyze your community, knowing how to look at data, knowing how to look at circulation numbers, knowing how to look at population movement, those things are becoming increasingly important in what we do, and that drives all of this.”

Public librarians, she said, are looking at such things as regional household income, age, education level, and racial and ethnic backgrounds while making their selections. They also consider patron requests. In a school library, this analysis might include information shared by students or teachers about the needs and interests of the current student body.

Librarians who showcase books about underrepresented groups, including LGBTQ people, surely believe that these stories are valuable. But the librarians I spoke with insisted that they’re making these choices because an assessment determined that there was a patron need for these books, not to push some personal social agenda. Those controversial book displays? Many, Dudenhoffer said, are a means of letting patrons know that material they might be too shy or embarrassed to ask for is in stock.

“It’s really unfair to characterize displays or programs as ‘woke,’” Dudenhoffer lamented. “That’s just such a terrible word to use right now. But it’s not about that. It’s about serving our community, and everyone in the community, to the best of our abilities.”

What seemed most painful to the librarians I spoke with—even more than the personal attacks and fear of litigation—was the way in which book bans hinder their ability to connect their patrons to information that might help them.

  —  The Librarians Are Not Okay

#xochitl gonzalez #current events #books #libraries #research #sociology #censorship #politics #american politics #usa #cindy dudenhoffer

[quotesfrommyreading]

The ideas driving the mass detentions can be traced back to Xi Jinping’s first and only visit to Xinjiang as China’s leader, a tour shadowed by violence.

In 2014, little more than a year after becoming president, he spent four days in the region, and on the last day of the trip, two Uighur militants staged a suicide bombing outside a train station in Urumqi that injured nearly 80 people, one fatally.

Weeks earlier, militants with knives had gone on a rampage at another railway station, in southwest China, killing 31 people and injuring more than 140. And less than a month after Mr. Xi’s visit, assailants tossed explosives into a vegetable market in Urumqi, wounding 94 people and killing at least 39.

Against this backdrop of bloodshed, Mr. Xi delivered a series of secret speeches setting the hard-line course that culminated in the security offensive now underway in Xinjiang. While state media have alluded to these speeches, none were made public.

The text of four of them, though, were among the leaked documents — and they provide a rare, unfiltered look at the origins of the crackdown and the beliefs of the man who set it in motion.

“The methods that our comrades have at hand are too primitive,” Mr. Xi said in one talk, after inspecting a counterterrorism police squad in Urumqi. “None of these weapons is any answer for their big machete blades, ax heads and cold steel weapons.”

“We must be as harsh as them,” he added, “and show absolutely no mercy.”

In free-flowing monologues in Xinjiang and at a subsequent leadership conference on Xinjiang policy in Beijing, Mr. Xi is recorded thinking through what he called a crucial national security issue and laying out his ideas for a “people’s war” in the region.

Although he did not order mass detentions in these speeches, he called on the party to unleash the tools of “dictatorship” to eradicate radical Islam in Xinjiang.

Mr. Xi displayed a fixation with the issue that seemed to go well beyond his public remarks on the subject. He likened Islamic extremism alternately to a virus-like contagion and a dangerously addictive drug, and declared that addressing it would require “a period of painful, interventionary treatment.”

“The psychological impact of extremist religious thought on people must never be underestimated,” Mr. Xi told officials in Urumqi on April 30, 2014, the final day of his trip to Xinjiang. “People who are captured by religious extremism — male or female, old or young — have their consciences destroyed, lose their humanity and murder without blinking an eye.”

In another speech, at the leadership conclave in Beijing a month later, he warned of “the toxicity of religious extremism.”

“As soon as you believe in it,” he said, “it’s like taking a drug, and you lose your sense, go crazy and will do anything.”

In several surprising passages, given the crackdown that followed, Mr. Xi also told officials to not discriminate against Uighurs and to respect their right to worship. He warned against overreacting to natural friction between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group, and rejected proposals to try to eliminate Islam entirely in China.

“In light of separatist and terrorist forces under the banner of Islam, some people have argued that Islam should be restricted or even eradicated,” he said during the Beijing conference. He called that view “biased, even wrong.”

But Mr. Xi’s main point was unmistakable: He was leading the party in a sharp turn toward greater repression in Xinjiang.

Before Mr. Xi, the party had often described attacks in Xinjiang as the work of a few fanatics inspired and orchestrated by shadowy separatist groups abroad. But Mr. Xi argued that Islamic extremism had taken root across swaths of Uighur society.

In fact, the vast majority of Uighurs adhere to moderate traditions, though some began embracing more conservative and more public religious practices in the 1990s, despite state controls on Islam. Mr. Xi’s remarks suggest he was alarmed by the revival of public piety. He blamed lax controls on religion, suggesting that his predecessors had let down their guard.

While previous Chinese leaders emphasized economic development to stifle unrest in Xinjiang, Mr. Xi said that was not enough. He demanded an ideological cure, an effort to rewire the thinking of the region’s Muslim minorities.

“The weapons of the people’s democratic dictatorship must be wielded without any hesitation or wavering,” Mr. Xi told the leadership conference on Xinjiang policy, which convened six days after the deadly attack on the vegetable market.

  —  ‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims

#austin ramzy #chris buckley #‘absolutely no mercy’: leaked files expose how china organized mass detentions of muslims #current events #racism #islamophobia #politics #chinese politics #terrorism #religion #islam #uyghur genocide #xinjiang conflict #april 2014 ürümqi attack #china #xinjiang #uyghurs #xi jinping

[quotesfrommyreading]

Twenty-five years ago, when I was giving talks about the book, I always started with addressing the question of the “terrible twos.” I was talking about the not-so-terrible twos; [now] I don’t even use the term. I think the more we move away from that term, the better off we are. And I think that my audience did not miss my talking about the “terrible twos.” There is a new understanding that tantrums, oppositionalism, [and] negativism are not a sign that the child is terrible or that the child’s age is terrible. It’s a sign that the ability of the child to think through a situation has collapsed because of overwhelming feelings of fear and frustration that dysregulates their emotional composure. There is more of an awareness that when we say the “terrible twos” we’re really talking about the adult experience rather than the child’s.

  —  The Myth of the 'Terrible Twos'

#alicia f. lieberman #isabel fattal #psychology #child psychology #child development #children #toddlers

[quotesfrommyreading]

For most people, discovering a frog living in your fence post would make you feel either kind of creeped out or kind of charmed. For one guy in Australia, it was a challenge: He decided to make it the sweetest pad possible. In a now-viral two-minute TikTok video, he designs and 3-D-prints his frog an elaborate home. He keeps adding features until the lucky amphibian has an attached pool, a downstairs mating pond with a tadpole ramp, and a predator-proof safe room.

This frog house was gleefully over the top, practically engineered to go viral with its renovations for “increased ribbit amplification” and a brushtail possum who occasionally likes to drink water from the pool. But frog houses as an idea are worth taking seriously. Animals don’t need much to get cozy in our backyards and balconies, as the world has already learned with birds. One ecologist found that bird feeding goes back at least 3,500 years; in the 18th century, the facades of Ottoman palaces and mosques were fitted with structures to house birds, who were seen as both holy and lucky. Birdhouses and bird feeders are so thoroughly part of human culture that purple martins in eastern North America nest almost exclusively in houses made by humans.

But why do birds get all the love? Building a little house for a frog to shelter in, or a pond where eggs can hatch and tadpoles can grow, is a great idea if you’ve got a place to put it. Even a tiny pondlet in a container on a patio can raise a whole amphibian generation. You can provide meaningful help to animals that need it, and participate in species conservation at home with very few downsides. Honestly, creating a backyard pond is probably better than putting up a birdhouse. Will someone please think of the urban amphibian?

Birds are beautiful, and they sing—it is no wonder we have long welcomed them into human spaces. At some level, it doesn’t even feel like sharing space, because birds live up high, in trees and on rooftops and telephone wires. They get the sky, and we get the land. Seems fair. But frogs? Inviting them into the garden can make you feel uneasy. Whereas birds are “so obvious and so charismatic,” Erin Sauer, an ecologist at the University of Arkansas who has studied both urban birds and urban amphibians, told me, frogs are “cryptic” and “camouflaged”—“they don't want you to find them.” Many frogs in temperate zones, including much of the United States, are brown and green, and more active at night. They are a subtle pleasure, compared with a crimson cardinal or an iridescent hummingbird.

It might not be obvious that some amphibians are probably living not too far from you, in part because they stay hidden. Frogs, newts, and salamanders exist in most cities. In New York, you can hear gray tree frogs call in Brooklyn Heights. In Los Angeles, the canyons of Griffith Park are filled with bumpy western toads. According to the biodiversity tracker iNaturalist, 28 species of amphibians have been spotted in Columbus, Ohio, including the colorful eastern red-backed salamander.

But amphibian populations are declining. Forty-one percent of amphibians are threatened with extinction, in part because of an ongoing fungal pandemic that as of four years ago had driven an estimated 90 species extinct. Frogs also have habitat needs that are “so specific,” Sauer said: They must have both water and land to complete their life cycle.

Still, if there are frogs near your home and some relatively protected route for them to travel, and you build a pond with vegetation around it, they will likely move in. An analysis of dozens of projects that created ponds for amphibians found that in every study, frogs showed up at some or all of the ponds. And many of the studies found that the number of species was similar or higher in created ponds than in natural ponds. Not all of those ponds were in cities, but another study looked at ponds in Portland, Oregon, and found similar results. The biggest predictor of how well a pond attracted frogs wasn’t whether it was real or fake, but the amount of plants growing in and around it.

Frog ponds aren’t very common residential features (yet), but it isn’t like no one thinks of amphibian-kind when designing their outdoor space. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has some advice for creating effective backyard conservation ponds for native wildlife. There are any number of guides online to building toad abodes, frog hotels, and general-purpose backyard frog ponds. Some gardeners install toad houses, hoping that a toad will move in and pay rent by eating common garden pests. You can even buy handmade toad houses on Etsy. And naturally, TikTok Frog House Guy is now selling frog houses as well.

It can be simple, and cheap, to invite amphibians over to your place. Tree frogs love to hang out inside vertical tubes, so simply pounding a few PVC pipes into the ground can create a little frog hotel. Building a cozy house for toads can be as easy as half-burying a broken pot. Making a frog pond is as straightforward as digging a hole; setting a commercial pond liner, an old bathtub, or even a plastic storage tote in the hole; and filling it with rocks and water. “You don’t need to 3-D-print some elaborate frog mansion,” Sauer told me.

I had called Sauer to set my mind at ease on one point: Would creating an artificial house or pond also create a transmission point for disease? She told me it wasn’t worth worrying about. Yes, multiple frogs might move into a pond or house, and they might touch if they mate, but frogs already gather in groups naturally, whereas birds at bird feeders can congregate in unusually high numbers. Feeders can pose a disease risk to birds, Sauer said: “You have a single place with one porthole, and they stick their faces in there and chew on things. And then their friends come over and do the same thing.” A frog pond can even bring in birds, who will use it to bathe and drink—with less chance of disease transmission.

There are very few downsides to catering to your local frogs, the biggest of which is that your backyard might have more mosquitoes—mosquitoes, like frogs, breed in water. To avoid that, you either need animals that will eat all of the mosquitoes (such as dragonflies or some tadpoles) or you need to keep the water moving. A solar-powered aerator costs about $30.

It is very possible that the frogs that show up to your patio water feature won’t be critically endangered species, but that’s okay. “We want to keep common species common so they don’t decline,” Sauer said. It all helps. Providing habitat for amphibians is important, but researchers are also working on frog houses that will actually help save frogs from the fungal pathogen. These houses would be like little greenhouses: hot enough to kill the fungus but not too hot for the frog’s comfort.

Not everyone can or wants to build a frog house. But they might be interested in putting a pot full of wildflowers for pollinators on their balcony. Saving species in the 21st century isn’t just about protecting big, undeveloped parks—although we need those too. It is also about figuring out how to coexist with the many species that can thrive in the urban, suburban, exurban, and agricultural landscapes we’ve made. That we’ve shared space with birds for thousands of years proves we can do it.

There’s evidence that this is already happening, and birdhouses and frog houses are just the beginning. People are adding bee hotels and bat houses, and planting milkweed for endangered monarch butterflies to lay their eggs on. It can be dizzying to think about all the species that need help right now, but engaging in everyday conservation can also just be fun, helping to turn neighborhoods into corridors of habitat for creatures such as frogs. Our cities can be wetlands too, at least in spots. Our kids can watch tadpoles on summer days. And in the spring, we can listen to the frogs sing at dusk.

  —  You Should Build a Frog Pond

#emma marris #you should build a frog pond #environmentalism #ecology #wildlife conservation #history #animals #frogs #salamanders #newts #toads #gray treefrog #western toad #red-backed salamander #mosquitoes #dragonflies #ottoman empire #erin l. sauer

[quotesfrommyreading]

It’s difficult to estimate with any precision the volume of trade flowing between Rome and Gaul. But the number of shipwrecks found off the Gaulish coast surges after 150 BC, peaking at about 100 BC. This suggests an exponential rise in the volume of trade over that half century.

For the most part, the vessels’ cargos were dominated by wine. The Madrague de Giens wreck was carrying around 7,000 amphorae when it sank off Hyères (south-eastern France) in about 50 BC. The quantity of amphorae discovered on the wreck suggests that the annual export of wine to the Gauls had reached about 100,000 hectolitres a year by the first century BC – a volume that would have generated about 40 million amphorae over the century. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Roman stereotype of a Gallic man was of a drunkard slurping wine through his long, drooping moustache.

The wine was transported along two major trade routes. One started at Narbo (modern-day Narbonne, founded in 118 BC), snaked along the river Aude and then overland to Tolosa (Toulouse) on the Garonne. The other travelled up the Rhône to Cabillonum (Chalon-sur-Saône) in the territory of the Aedui.

From these major transhipment centres, the wine was then taken into Gaulish territory to the principal settlements within easy reach of the frontier – places such as Bibracte, Jœuvres, Essalois and Montmerlhe. Roman traders may well have been resident in these native centres to oversee the exchanges. There were certainly Italian merchants in Cabillonum as late as 52 BC. These men were charged with ensuring a steady flow of slaves to markets in a bid to meet the Roman estates’ demand for a staggering 15,000 Gaulish slaves every year.

  —  The Celts: were they friends or foes of the Romans?

#barry cunliffe #the celts: were they friends or foes of the romans #history #classics #economics #trade #commerce #transport #maritime history #food and drink #alcohol #archaeology #slavery #ancient rome #gaul #roman gaul #celts

[quotesfrommyreading]

...the Church, in the decades after 1789, dogmatically opposed modernity, while making practical accommodations to the changing societies in which its members lived. Pope Pius VII signed a concordat with Napoleon (whose troops controlled Rome) and traveled to Paris for his coronation as emperor in 1804. Yet newly cut off from state power and dismayed by the Enlightenment’s stress on individualism, Catholic leaders in France, especially, responded to an urbanizing industrial age by erecting what McGreevy calls a “milieu” of schools, seminaries, hospitals, and orphanages as a rigidly ordered parallel world set against unruly civil society. Those “Reform Catholics” (McGreevy’s term) who did strive to fit their local churches into the new order of nation-states met with resistance from the “ultramontanists,” who regarded the pope as a pan-European absolute monarch and the Church as a bulwark against surging democracy.

The conflict came to a head at the First Vatican Council, in 1869. McGreevy cites a French observer’s account of the gathering’s anti-worldly spirit: “The church, through its supreme pastor, says to the lay world, to lay society, and to lay authorities: It is apart from you that I want to exist, to take action, to make decisions, and to develop, affirm, and understand myself.” The ultramontanists prevailed, and the Catholicism then exported to the Americas through mass emigration was leery of democracy—and of citizens’ efforts to expand the right to vote to women and to allow moral issues to be decided by majority rule (or vulgar haggling in the statehouse).

Over time, hostility to modern ideas became the default position of an institution that cleaved to an image of itself as premodern and unchanging. Again and again, the Church’s certainty about what it was against clouded its sense of what it should support, as it adapted to circumstances in ways that seem glaringly inconsistent today. Although the Church criticized the slave trade in Africa, Catholic leaders were slow to support the abolition of slavery in the United States—“so opposed were they to the individualist (at times anti-Catholic) rhetoric they associated with liberal Protestant or secular abolitionists,” McGreevy writes. They fiercely denounced anti-Catholic quotas and discrimination in the United Kingdom, where Anglicanism was the state religion; meanwhile, they ensured that the new republics in Latin America recognized Catholicism as the “national religion,” and often condoned exclusionary practices against Jews and Protestants. Strangely, the Church lined up against both industrial capitalism and working-class socialism—with many Catholics believing that both were controlled by Jews.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 prompted the Church to recognize democracy as a form of government more favorable to belief than atheistic communism was. But the Church’s rejection of Bolshevism led it—in enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend style—to back unjust regimes: Mussolini’s Fascists in Italy, Franco’s Falangists in Spain (where the Loyalists were violently anti-Catholic), and the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler, whom the Vatican praised for his anti-Bolshevism before adopting its notorious neutrality during World War II. “In majority Catholic states such as Brazil, Portugal, and Austria,” McGreevy observes, politicians and Church leaders together articulated “a distinct Catholic authoritarian vision,” made up of “a fierce anti-communism, an underlying drumbeat of anti-Semitism, and skepticism about democratic politics.”

After the war, the Church boosted Christian Democratic parties in Italy, France, and Germany; endorsed an independence movement led by the Catholic Léopold Senghor in Senegal; backed the Catholic Ngô Ðình Diệm’s postindependence regime in South Vietnam; and propped up antidemocratic oligarchies in Latin America—all as fire walls against communism. It kept up its opposition to postwar stirrings of inclusion—of Catholics in public schools, women in the workplace, sex in the movies.

Yet great ferment was under way in Catholic intellectual life, as theologians at still-robust seminaries in Europe merged Church traditions with continental philosophy. New approaches to liturgy (shifting from Latin to vernacular languages), biblical interpretation (undertaking fresh scrutiny of the Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic sources), and interreligious dialogue (challenging the idea that Catholics were duty-bound to oppose other faiths) thrived. In response, John XXIII called the world’s Catholic bishops to Rome for reflection on the state of the Church in an ecumenical council—Vatican II—and appointed vanguard theologians to advise them.

As the council progressed from 1962 to 1965, the image of Catholicism as a bulwark against modernity was replaced by a vision of a “pilgrim Church” providing humble service to a world in which war, migration, the spread of state-sponsored atheism, and rapid changes in technology had left people desperately in need of a religious perspective. It was time, in McGreevy’s words, “for Catholics and the church to take on the world’s problems as their own,” living their faith (as Pope John had proposed) “in such a way as to attract others less by doctrine than ‘by good example.’ ”

  —  The Reinvention of the Catholic Church

#paul elie #john mcgreevy #the reinvention of the catholic church #history #religion #christianity #catholicism #theology #politics #american politics #misogyny #philosophy #antisemitism #fascism #totalitarianism #slavery #abolitionism #french revolution #enlightenment #first vatican council #russian revolution #ww2 #second vatican council #vatican city #france #usa #ussr #pope pius vii #pope john xxiii

[quotesfrommyreading]

Clinicians may see tens of thousands of patients during their career, but there will be one or two cases strange enough that they call the health department for assistance. This is especially important in developing or low- to middle-income countries where there's not necessarily great diagnostic support, and autopsies are rare. You really are depending completely on clinical acumen, and intuition, to discover the anomalies. Once there's a big outbreak everybody realizes it, but the initial ones – you need to find them and put prevention measures in place if you want to decrease the size of the outbreak before it gets out of hand.

  —  The Next Pandemic: On the Front Lines Against Humankind’s Gravest Dangers (Ali S. Khan)

#book quotes #ali s. khan #the next pandemic: on the front lines against humankind’s gravest dangers #healthcare #medicine #public health #epidemiology

[quotesfrommyreading]

As a therapist, I know a lot about pain, about the ways in which pain is tied to loss. But I also know something less commonly understood: that change and loss travel together. We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.

  —  Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed (Lori Gottlieb)

#book quotes #lori gottlieb #maybe you should talk to someone: a therapist her therapist and our lives revealed #psychology #therapy #loss #change #fear

[quotesfrommyreading]

Even though they wore their Guide uniform and were learning English fast, the Kindertransport girls were constantly reminded that they were foreigners in a remote part of Britain. Some of the adult villagers made it very clear that they were not sure about these foreign children. When Miss Payne asked the senior class to sing the hymn 'Glorious things of thee are spoken', the girls refused. It wasn't because they were Jews, but because the hymn shared the tune with the German national anthem.  Only when the teacher threatened them with punishment did they comply. When a passer-by heard them singing, he complained: “First the British children sing God Save the King, and then the Germans sing their national anthem. Are they spies?” One of the London evacuee children called the girls 'Nazis', and others followed his taunting. “We just ignored them,” said Celia, “but it hurt.” The path the girls took to school ran through a wood in which a Scottish army battalion was camping. When the soldiers heard them speak in a mixture of broken English and German, Ruth felt even more alien when she heard one say, “Who are those children?” His friend replied, “Oh, they're prisoners of war.”

  —  How the Girl Guides Won the War (Janie Hampton)

#book quotes #janie hampton #how the girl guides won the war #history #military history #antisemitism #immigration #refugees #evacuation #children #education #ww2 #home front #britain #england #scotland #germany #nazi germany

[quotesfrommyreading]

But there’s a darker spin. Humor, of course, is a coping mechanism; jokes about AI are on some level an expression of the anxiety around these tools. Bots are already replacing some jobs, and surely will replace more: Just last week, the National Eating Disorders Association announced that it was firing the humans who run its hotline and using a chatbot. The labor issues surrounding AI are also a big tension in the ongoing Hollywood writers’ strike, even as the public jokes about lackluster scripts being the work of AI. One picketer held up a poster that said A.I. THIS SIGN WROTE. Even a bad version of AI can take jobs, Whittaker argued, “not because it’s competent, but because it will allow companies to justify degrading their position, paying them less, offering fewer benefits, turning them into contractors—all of this.”

  —  AI Has Become One Big Joke

#caroline mimbs nyce #current events #technology #digital technology #computing #artificial intelligence #employment #capitalism #exploitation