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from Conciliar Post
In 2013, a headline at The Guardian by Tristram Hunt read, “History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought.” Hunt likely had no idea how prescient this was. More specifically, the great contemporary battles are over historical or cultural memory. That is to say, battles over our collective identity, values, and aspirations—a form of cultural sparring, it must be said, that can only emerge in a society that has been enveloped by expressive individualism and the psychological self. It is now a high crime to be inauthentic, that is, to be forced to identify as or with something that does not coincide with an internal sense of self. Most obviously, the hullabaloo surrounding the New York Times‘ 1619 Project evidences this deeper societal distress—the loss of shared cultural memory, values, and aspirations, all of which are intricately connected to societal narratives and, well, history. The central contention of the Project is that “Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.” What America claims to be is a lie. The true American ethos is not liberty and justice for all but white supremacy and black subjugation and genocide. As Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, it is one thing to say that the ideals of the American founding were not fully realized at the time, but quite another to say they were “false.”
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from DEBKAfile
Media/News Company in Jerusalem, Israel
True to his neo-Ottoman worldview, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan referred to Israel’s capital in a speech opening the new parliament session, declaring, “Jerusalem is ours, Jerusalem is from us. In this city that we had to leave in tears during the First World War, it is still possible to come across traces of the Ottoman resistance.” Occupied by the Ottoman Empire from 1516, Jerusalem was captured by the British army in 1917 and held under League of Nations mandate until it was proclaimed the capital of the new Jewish state in 1948. Ignoring the Jews’ historic claim to the Holy City, Erdogan charged that the Palestinians were now “occupied despite living in Jerusalem for thousands of years.”
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from FiveThirtyEight
LEFT-CENTER BIAS, HIGH, Media/News Company owned by ABC NewsTo anyone following American politics, it’s not exactly news that Democrats and Republicans don’t like each other. Take what happened in the presidential debate last week. President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden did little to conceal their disdain of one another. And although the debate marked a low point in our national discourse, it was a crystallization of a long-developing trend: loathing the opposing party. This is hardly a new trend; in fact, it’s increasingly common among American voters. However, this level of hatred — which political scientists call “negative partisanship” — has reached levels that are not just bad for democracy, but are potentially destructive. And extreme partisan animosity is a prelude to democratic collapse.
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from HumanProgress.org
Education Website
The very incentives that drive private sector innovation also drive ever-greater economic and environmental efficiency. It is a truth universally acknowledged that we live in a world of finite resources. However, this rather basic assertion is often misleadingly used by some climate activists. Take the “de-growth” crowd: they presume that indefinite growth, in a world of finite resources, is literally impossible. This is the basis of Extinction Rebellion’s self-proclaimed mission to overthrow capitalism: human progress and prosperity are considered intrinsically evil, and economic growth must first be halted, then reversed. Yet, as the British businessman Michael Liebreich has pointed out, as long as we have both solar and nuclear energy, which are virtually infinite, the supposed fairytale of eternal growth has real scientific backing.
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from NPR (& affiliates)
Nonprofit Broadcasting & Media Production Company
Regal Movie Chain Will Close All 536 U.S. Theaters On Thursday
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Regal Movie Chain Will Close All 536 U.S. Theaters On Thursday
More than 7,000 movie screens will be dark in the U.S. this weekend as the Regal theater chain said it will shut down all 536 locations on Thursday. The closure reflects "an increasingly challenging theatrical landscape" due to the COVID-19 pandemic and is temporary, the chain said. Regal is shutting down theaters again less than two months after it started to reopen U.S. locations in late August. The decision was announced after the James Bond franchise's No Time to Die was shelved until 2021, further pushing back a release that had already been delayed. Regal is the second-largest film exhibitor in the U.S., after AMC Theatres.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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