The War Between Armenia and Azerbaijan – The Overlooked Conflict that Altered the Nature of War in the 21st century by Joshua Keating
June 3, 2024
Introduction:
(Vox) On the second day of the 2020 Armenia-Azerbaijan war, the Armenian military posted a video of one of its surface-to-air missile systems shooting down a surprising enemy aircraft: an Antonov AN-2 biplane.
As it turned out, it wasn’t a sign of desperation on Azerbaijan’s part that its military was flying a plane first produced in the Soviet Union in 1947, and today used mostly for crop-dusting. Azerbaijan had converted several AN-2s into unmanned aircraft and used them as so-called bait drones. After the Armenians shot down the planes, revealing the positions of their anti-aircraft systems, their forces came under attack from more modern drones.
It seems strangely fitting that what was also known as the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, a conflict that has been called “the first war won primarily with unmanned systems” and even the “first postmodern conflict,” could also end up being the last one in which biplanes played a significant role. The conflict between these two former Soviet republics in the Caucasus, on the border between Europe and Asia, was the culmination of tensions that had been building for more than 25 years and intercommunal dynamics that were far older than that. It was in some sense a throwback to a traditional type of war — two nation-state armies fighting over disputed territory — that was far more prevalent in previous centuries.
But it was also a hypermodern war where unmanned systems played an unprecedented role on the battlefield, and social media played an unprecedented role off it. Though it got relatively little coverage in the international media at the time — coming as it did at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a wave of global protests, and a bitter US presidential election campaign — it was in some ways a preview of the much larger war that would break out in Ukraine just two years later, and may yet be seen as the harbinger of a new and potentially devastating era of international conflict.
40 Acres and a Lie by Alexia Fernández Campbell , April Simpson, and Pratheek Rebala
Introduction:
(Mother Jones) Pompey Jackson was born in the heart of Georgia’s rice empire—the human property of one of the state’s wealthiest and most powerful families.
He and his sisters were among hundreds enslaved on a sprawling marshland estate called Grove Hill, where life was brutal. People died every month, mostly young children. Those who reached adulthood often suffered spinal injuries, lung disease, and foot rot from sloshing through flooded rice fields. Jackson survived smallpox. He was a teenager in late 1864 when Union General William T. Sherman and his soldiers advanced through the Ogeechee River low country on their way to capture Savannah.
Sherman freed thousands during his march through the South, later writing that “freedmen, in droves, old and young, followed [our troops] to reach a place of safety.” On January 16, 1865, at the urging of Savannah’s Black ministers, Sherman issued an edict called Special Field Orders, No. 15, which reserved large swaths of coastal South Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida for the formerly enslaved to live and work on and govern themselves.
Sherman’s pledge of land for the formerly enslaved—which would become known as “40 Acres and a Mule”—remains the nation’s most famous attempt to provide some form of reparations for American slavery. Today, it is largely remembered as a broken promise and an abandoned step toward multiracial democracy. Less known is that the federal government actually did issue hundreds, perhaps thousands, of titles to specific plots of land between 4 and 40 acres—before ultimately changing course and returning the land to the plantation owners. (The freedmen were not, in fact, promised a mule, though some did receive them.)
Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.
Introduction:
(Wikipedia) Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that set forth the legal test for when U.S. federal courts must defer to a government agency's interpretation of a law or statute.[1] The decision articulated a doctrine known as "Chevron deference".[2] Chevron deference consists of a two-part test that is deferential to government agencies: first, whether Congress has spoken directly to the precise issue at question, and second, "whether the agency's answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute."
The decision involved a legal challenge to a change in the U.S. government's interpretation of the word "source" in the Clean Air Act of 1963. The Act did not precisely define what constituted a "source" of air pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) initially defined "source" to cover essentially any significant change or addition to a plant or factory. In 1981, the EPA changed its definition to mean only an entire plant or factory. This allowed companies to build new projects without going through the EPA's lengthy new review process if they simultaneously modified other parts of their plant to reduce emissions so that the overall change in the plant's emissions was zero. Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmentalist advocacy group, successfully challenged the legality of the EPA's new definition.[3]
Chevron is one of the most important decisions in U.S. administrative law. It has been cited in thousands of cases since its issuance in 1984.[4] Thirty-nine years later, in May 2023, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to reevaluate Chevron in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, No. 22-451. A decision is expected in the first half of 2024. (emphasis by caltrek).[5]
(Mother Jones) Oddly enough, the original 1984 case that inspired the Chevron deference, Chevron USA v. Natural Resources Defense Council, was widely seen as a victory for conservatives. At the heart of the case was a dispute over the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to define a “stationary source” of pollution—could it be an entire coal factory? A single smokestack? The Reagan EPA interpreted the Clean Air Act in a way that favored corporations and limited curbing their power.
Upon a challenge, the Supreme Court not only agreed that the Reagan administration’s reading of the law was reasonable, but it also instructed judges in future cases to generally defer to expert agencies’ interpretations of the law when statutes, like the Clean Air Act, were vague. The ruling was meant to limit liberal judges from imposing, as Justice John Paul Stevens wrote at the time, their “personal policy preferences” in decision-making. Through the Reagan and both Bush administrations, Chevron functioned as a tool for deregulation (like weakening Clean Air Act limits), explains David Doniger, a senior attorney and strategist at NRDC who argued the original case before the Supreme Court. On the flip side, he says, under Clinton and Obama, Chevron provided more leeway to enact tougher industry oversight.
Disputed U.S. Presidential Elections in History by Karen J. Greenberg and Julian Zelizer
June 27, 2024
Extract:
(Common Dreams) While there have been a handful of disputed presidential election results since the country’s founding, two stand out. In the election of 1876, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes lost the popular and electoral vote to Samuel Tilden. The Republicans protested that, in three states, the results were uncertain. To resolve the issue, Congress created a bipartisan panel, including House and Senate representatives and five Supreme Court justices. That panel then granted Hayes all 20 disputed electoral votes, giving him a one-point electoral margin over Tilden, and so making him president. Ultimately, the country found a way forward.
More than a century later, in the 2000 election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, the results again lay in dispute. Gore had won the popular vote, but the electoral vote was too close to call. All eyes focused on Florida where the results would determine the outcome. Although the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount, the Supreme Court stopped it and, in doing so, made Bush president.
In neither post-election resolution did the losing candidate contest the results, though Tilden waited four months before conceding. The day after the Supreme Court’s decision, Gore conceded, saying, “I accept the finality of this outcome”—a stark contrast to Donald Trump who still refuses to concede that the 2020 election result was legitimate.
It’s worth mentioning that both elections had major consequences. Hayes’s win, the result of a brokered deal, also ended the post-Civil War Reconstruction era and led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the South. That election would prove an integral part of efforts to undo the biggest push the nation ever had to achieve racial justice.
The Bush administration, in turn, failed to prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001, and then launched a multidecade-long “war on terror” that would destabilize parts of the globe from South Asia to the Middle East and Africa, while, according to the Costs of War Project, leading to the deaths of more than 7,000 American service members and more than 177,000 allied military and police in conflicts ranging from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Iraq and Syria, not to mention the deaths of more than 430,000 civilians.
Uk 1937: Sub-Committee for the Economic Pressure on Germany.
Mind, not for "Economic war against Germany". That year, 1937, was when the British Empire was providing such huge amount of support to another western democracy: the Spanish Republic. Of course, if English is not my first language, what should I think about the intentions of the BE towards Germany?
Anyone knows in what city Sir W. Churchill and more than a few RAF officers were tried before a German Tribunal as war criminals for the bombing of the Sorpe dams? Deliberate targeting civilian infrastructures? Killing children?
War crimes, as History goes, seems to be more Quantic than Newtonian.
Atque in perpetuum, vae victis!
caltrek wrote: ↑Sun Oct 29, 2023 10:11 pm Russia’s Slaughter of Indigenous People in Alaska Tells Us Something Important About Ukraine by Casey Michael
October 27, 2023
Introduction:
(Politico) In the racial-reckoning summer of 2020, local leaders in a small American town gathered for a contentious vote on whether to take down a statue that honored a man who was, as one assessment read, “steeped in racial division, violence and injustice.” Would they join local leaders from cities in Virginia, Alabama and other states to remove a memorial praising a figure who symbolized a “historical trauma” that still caused anguish and anger among their constituents?
The town council listened, and debated, and finally decided. By a margin of 6-1, the seven members voted to join the floodtide of decisions elsewhere to take down another symbol of historic oppression.
This statue, though, had nothing to do with the Confederacy or the Civil War. Rather, this vote took place in Alaska, in the small coastal town of Sitka (population 8,400), located on an island about halfway between Anchorage and Vancouver, British Columbia. And the statue was of a Russian, a merchant by the name of Aleksandr Baranov, a key figure in Russia’s conquest of Alaska over 200 years ago. The resolution authorizing the removal said Baranov, who was Alaska’s first colonial governor, “directly over[saw] enslavement of Tlingit and Aleut people,” a policy that was “often justified under a theory of racial and cultural superiority.” Baranov’s criminality — which included, among other things, the “violation of Native women” and “murder and theft of Indigenous property” — was so depraved that local Tlingit nicknamed him “No Heart.”
The removal of Baranov’s statue never cracked into the national news cycle. And maybe that’s understandable, given the protests rocking the rest of the country at the time. But it’s also understandable for a related reason: Russia’s colonization of Alaska — and the rampant violence, spiraling massacres and decimation of local Alaska Native populations that came along with it — is hardly well-known among the broader American body politic. Even with new reassessments of European colonization of North America, as well as the recent spike in scholarship regarding the U.S.’s bloodied imperialism across the American West, Russia’s role in smothering and seizing Alaska stands apart as an overlooked chapter of colonialism on the continent.
(Common Dreams) This weekend marked the surrender of the Confederate Army under "that genteel butcher Bobby Lee" to Ulysses S. Grant, and the end of a Civil War that in the sordid name of Southern white supremacy cost four years and 630,000 lives. On Sunday April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate Army of North Virginia, fighting for the unholy right to own other human beings as property, to General Ulysses S. Grant; the ceremony at the home of Wilmer and Virginia McLean in the town of Appomattox Court House, VA took an hour and a half. Days before, Grant had ridden west to ask Lee's cornered band to surrender, declaring any "further effusion of blood" would be solely on Lee's traitorous hands. Lee declined, but did ask about a possible peace agreement; the gentlemanly Grant offered a possible military surrender instead. On that Sunday, writes Heather Cox Richardson, admirably bringing the historic down to human scale, Grant woke with a migraine, having spent the night treating it with mustard plasters that didn't work: "In the morning, Grant pulled on his dirty clothes and rode out to the head of his column with his head throbbing." Lee, ever the brutal but elegant plantation owner, had dressed grandly in dress uniform, expecting to be taken prisoner; instead, under the surrender's generous terms, his military leaders were spared criminal trials, and handsomely fed. Notes Thomas Levenson, "Looking forward, not back, is no new trope in American politics."
Though the war dragged on for several months, Appomattox marked the inevitable victory of the Union. About 150 miles away, President Abraham Lincoln spent the day steaming up a peaceful Potomac River with a small family party. His guests recalled him sitting in the cabin, reading aloud from Macbeth and stopping to ponder a passage about the slain king Duncan:
"After life's fitful fever he sleeps well
Treason has done its worst
...Malice domestic, foreign levey, nothing
Can touch him further.
Five days later, Lincoln was killed. Appotomattox was lauded in one image with a noble eagle and the declaration, "Lee has surrendered! Slavery and treason buried in the same grave!"
A lot of fantasy there. Any legal justification to force, by invasion (good old USA), what it was and old agreement without Article 50?
The war for States Rights, Independence and Freedom (Mind, their Freedom)? Lincoln using the war for his personal interests?
caltrek wrote: ↑Sun Oct 29, 2023 10:11 pm Russia’s Slaughter of Indigenous People in Alaska Tells Us Something Important About Ukraine by Casey Michael
October 27, 2023
Introduction:
Once again, we see a deflection of the point being made with more "what-abouts." Yes, about the Ukraine where Russia is carrying out a slaughter of that nation's people. Just as a story about the U.S. slaughter of indigenous people might tell us something about U.S. foreign policy, etc.
Not about western civilization?
I suppose you can look upon Russia as belonging to a subset under the more encompassing "western civilization." That does not mean one should only write about "western civilization" without focusing in upon Russia just as one can focus in upon the United States.
Colonial powers behaved badly. Correcting that bad behavior involves an honest appraisal of that past. Deflection and what aboutism makes such an appraisal more difficult for no good reason. Noting colonialism was widespread is fair game. Refusing to focus upon a certain and specific colonial power is not.
caltrek wrote: ↑Sun Oct 29, 2023 10:11 pm Russia’s Slaughter of Indigenous People in Alaska Tells Us Something Important About Ukraine by Casey Michael
October 27, 2023
Introduction:
Read more here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine ... 0123352
About Ukraine? Not about US, UK, Spain, France...
Once again, we see a deflection of the point being made with more "what-abouts." Yes, about the Ukraine where Russia is carrying out a slaughter of that nation's people. Just as a story about the U.S. slaughter of indigenous people might tell us something about U.S. foreign policy, etc.
Not about western civilization?
I suppose you can look upon Russia as belonging to a subset under the more encompassing "western civilization." That does not mean one should only write about "western civilization" without focusing in upon Russia just as one can focus in upon the United States.
Colonial powers behaved badly. Correcting that bad behavior involves an honest appraisal of that past. Deflection and what aboutism makes such an appraisal more difficult for no good reason. Noting colonialism was widespread is fair game. Refusing to focus upon a certain and specific colonial power is not.
Curiously enough, I see the "deflection", the "whataboutism", at pointing the finger at only that country, at only that moment in History.
ibm9000 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2024 11:23 pm
About Ukraine? Not about US, UK, Spain, France...
Once again, we see a deflection of the point being made with more "what-abouts." Yes, about the Ukraine where Russia is carrying out a slaughter of that nation's people. Just as a story about the U.S. slaughter of indigenous people might tell us something about U.S. foreign policy, etc.
Not about western civilization?
I suppose you can look upon Russia as belonging to a subset under the more encompassing "western civilization." That does not mean one should only write about "western civilization" without focusing in upon Russia just as one can focus in upon the United States.
Colonial powers behaved badly. Correcting that bad behavior involves an honest appraisal of that past. Deflection and what aboutism makes such an appraisal more difficult for no good reason. Noting colonialism was widespread is fair game. Refusing to focus upon a certain and specific colonial power is not.
Curiously enough, I see the "deflection", the "whataboutism", at pointing the finger at only that country, at only that moment in History.
Come on. You cannot take in all of history in one article. To think that one can do otherwise is totally unreasonable.
caltrek wrote: ↑Sat Jul 13, 2024 3:02 pm
Once again, we see a deflection of the point being made with more "what-abouts." Yes, about the Ukraine where Russia is carrying out a slaughter of that nation's people. Just as a story about the U.S. slaughter of indigenous people might tell us something about U.S. foreign policy, etc.
I suppose you can look upon Russia as belonging to a subset under the more encompassing "western civilization." That does not mean one should only write about "western civilization" without focusing in upon Russia just as one can focus in upon the United States.
Colonial powers behaved badly. Correcting that bad behavior involves an honest appraisal of that past. Deflection and what aboutism makes such an appraisal more difficult for no good reason. Noting colonialism was widespread is fair game. Refusing to focus upon a certain and specific colonial power is not.
Curiously enough, I see the "deflection", the "whataboutism", at pointing the finger at only that country, at only that moment in History.
Come on. You cannot take in all of history in one article. To think that one can do otherwise is totally unreasonable.
That's the point - Putin's puppets have to be totally unreasonable because they're defending the indefensible.
caltrek wrote: ↑Sat Jul 13, 2024 3:02 pm
Once again, we see a deflection of the point being made with more "what-abouts." Yes, about the Ukraine where Russia is carrying out a slaughter of that nation's people. Just as a story about the U.S. slaughter of indigenous people might tell us something about U.S. foreign policy, etc.
I suppose you can look upon Russia as belonging to a subset under the more encompassing "western civilization." That does not mean one should only write about "western civilization" without focusing in upon Russia just as one can focus in upon the United States.
Colonial powers behaved badly. Correcting that bad behavior involves an honest appraisal of that past. Deflection and what aboutism makes such an appraisal more difficult for no good reason. Noting colonialism was widespread is fair game. Refusing to focus upon a certain and specific colonial power is not.
Curiously enough, I see the "deflection", the "whataboutism", at pointing the finger at only that country, at only that moment in History.
Come on. You cannot take in all of history in one article. To think that one can do otherwise is totally unreasonable.
The Russian Empire was doing what Empires do, that citizen was doing what a lot of citizens were doing. I don't think he was doing it because he was Russian; so, no lesson to be learned from Russia. The article could point that out too.
I started to watch a BBC documentary about J. Caesar... The only point seemed to be to categorized him as the incarnation of evil, when Caesar was doing politics as politics were done in Rome. My opinion is that the documentary was distorting History, purposely; not "all history", just the part of history it was actually talking about.
Talking about context and "as everyone knows"...
The UK could be the first "truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon". JD Vance (Next US Vice-President?).
You just need to define Pakistan as "not-truly", specially compare to UK.
ibm9000 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 15, 2024 1:22 pm
Curiously enough, I see the "deflection", the "whataboutism", at pointing the finger at only that country, at only that moment in History.
Come on. You cannot take in all of history in one article. To think that one can do otherwise is totally unreasonable.
The Russian Empire was doing what Empires do, that citizen was doing what a lot of citizens were doing. I don't think he was doing it because he was Russian; so, no lesson to be learned from Russia. The article could point that out too.
I started to watch a BBC documentary about J. Caesar... The only point seemed to be to categorized him as the incarnation of evil, when Caesar was doing politics as politics were done in Rome. My opinion is that the documentary was distorting History, purposely; not "all history", just the part of history it was actually talking about.
Talking about context and "as everyone knows"...
The UK could be the first "truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon". JD Vance (Next US Vice-President?).
You just need to define Pakistan as "not-truly", specially compare to UK.
Except the age of empires has moved on and we're supposed to be better - except Putin hasn't got the memo and still feels like it's the early-mid 1900s.
