Image Source “You’re ten years younger than I am, Dacha, and so the Master means more to you. We of the old guard, we were trained to depend upon ourselves, we had no use for masters, except those anointed by trust. But to the snot-nose brats of the next generation, intoxicated by the loudspeakers, no […]
TOP BILLING “The Recent Unpleasantness: Understanding the Cycles of Constitutional Time”Jack M. Balkin, Public Law Research Paper No. 648. 8 August 2018. (Indiana Law Journal, 2018 Forthcoming). Our present condition is a little like an eclipse, although much less enjoyable. To understand what is going on today in America, we have to think in terms […]
Image Source Danger is part of the friction of war. Without an accurate conception of danger we cannot understand war. —Clausewitz, On War (c. 1825) Over the last month or so we have had a few raucous discussions about Taiwan and its future here at the Scholar’s Stage. In these comment threads I have expressed […]
Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where that rule prescribes not: and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary […]
“People have to tell the crowd what their families did, just like during the Cultural Revolution.” —”Ainagul,” 52, who left Xinjiang in 2017 and whose son is in a political education camp (interviewed May 18, 2018). “A wife denounces her husband, an imam who was imprisoned for extremism, … saying something about him propagating Wahhabism; and […]
Image Source “The ultimate determinant in war is a man on the scene with a gun.” —J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control Some excellent comments were written in response to last week’s post “Taiwan’s Past Matters Less Than Taiwan’s Present.” Two of these comments were particularly excellent, and I am saddened to […]
Image Source The time was, sir, when we loved the King and the people of Great Britain with an affection truly filial. We felt ourselves interested in their glory. We shared in their joys and sorrows. We cheerfully poured the fruits of all our labour into the lap of our mother country, and without reluctance […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. TOP BILLING “The Origins of WEIRD Psychology”Jonathan Schulz, Duman Barahmi-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich. PsyArXiv. 2 July 2018. Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, […]
“The nominal form of [China’s] government… is an irresponsible autocracy; its institutions are likewise autocratic in form, but democratic in operation.” —Herbet Giles, The Civilization of China (1919) Yuhua Wang and Mark Dincecco have an interesting paper out in the Annual Review of Political Science. The paper offers and tests a new hypothesis for why […]
Yesterday’s excerpt from the Zuo Zhuan is an excellent case study in the difficulty of translating classical Chinese into English (or into modern Chinese, for that matter). Here is the sentence of interest, as translated by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Lee, and David Schaberg: Having watched from her bedchamber, the girl said, “Gongsun Hei is handsome, to be […]
