By: inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/
Great Britain is a democracy and a country dedicated to helping spread liberty around the world.
At least today. There used to be a time when Great Britain was not a friend to democracy. Indeed, there used to be a very undemocratic thing called the British Empire.
One of the last great British colonies was a city called Hong Kong.
More below.
The Obama administration will be remembered in history as the one that brought Osama bin Laden to justice. Its handling of the situation was practically flawless.
Nevertheless, there are two things in which the government erred slightly. With respect to these two matters, the Obama administration’s mistake was to tell the truth. In this cases, it would have been better for the United States if the government had told lies.
Have you ever heard of the 1990s Kansas City desegregation case? If you haven’t, Paul Ciotti of the CATO Institute provides a remarkable summary of this little-known episode:
For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” The education establishment and its supporters have replied, “No one’s ever tried.” In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil-more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
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By: inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/
In an important world event that far too few Americans knew or probably cared about, Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou was recently re-elected with 51.6% of the vote.
The election itself was quite interesting; there are several fascinating patterns that occur in Taiwanese politics. But this post will focus mainly on the travails of third-party candidate James Soong Chu-yu.
More below.
By: inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/
It’s popular amongst the media to characterize North Korea as an irrational state run by a madman. North Korea continuously provokes the West, it is said, for no apparent reason. Proof that it’s an unpredictable, irrational actor that could do anything.
There are in fact very few states in history that could actually can be said to have behaved irrationally.
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By: inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/
I recently had the pleasure of watching my first Bollywood movie, a title called Lagaan: Once upon a time in India. The movie’s plot was fairly conventional yet unconventional at the same time. India is straining under the rule of the evil British Empire. A rebellious young man with striking green eyes attempts to defy the British. How? By beating them in a cricket match! The local village quickly forms a cricket team, the British team is defeated, and the local village’s crushing tax burden is reduced for the next several years.
There were some fairly interesting things about this movie (with respect to politics).
More below.
By: inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/
It’s said that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi presents an excellent example of this tendency.
More below.
By: inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/
In February of 2011, Libya was convulsing with revolution against autocrat Muammar Gaddafi. Many Westerners were certain that Gaddafi would fall within days.
He did not. Rather, with the help of African mercenaries and loyalists, Gaddafi retook control of the streets of Tripoli. Rebel offensives in the east petered out, and Gaddafi’s armed forces began advancing towards the rebel capital Benghazi. Then the West intervened, and the rest is history.
It did have not to be this way, in fact. One main – and frequently underestimated – thing that caused Western intervention was Gaddafi’s rhetoric.
More below.
This is the second part of two posts describing a fascinating election in Georgia: the 1980 Senate election, in which Republican Mack Mattingly beat scandal-ridden Democrat Herman Talmadge. This was the first time that a Republican Senator was elected in Georgia for more than a century. Even more interestingly, the areas that the Democratic candidate won tend to vote strongly Republican today, and vice versa.
The Black Vote in 1980
The previous post ended by bringing up the role of the black vote:
In 1980 Republican candidate Mack Mattingly won areas with substantial black populations, most notably the heavily-black city of Atlanta itself. Surely Democratic Senator Herman Talmadge’s dedicated support to segregation wouldn’t have appealed to the black vote.
So did Republicans win the black vote in this 1980 election?
More below.
By: inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/
One of the more fascinating television features produced is the PBS series “Black in Latin America.” This series, produced by Professor Henry Louis Gates, explores (perhaps unsurprisingly) the experience of people of African descent in America.
An especially interesting episode is titled Brazil: A Racial Paradise? Professor Gates explores the experience of “blacks” in Brazil, a country with second-largest population of African descent in the world (including Africa).
More below.