Thursday, October 11, 2012

Bits and Pieces - October 11, 2012

On the theme of trying to get outside our own heads:
The blindness of privilege
How Jim Crow worked
Voter registration, Mississippi 1960
The last two are particularly excellent in evoking a time and place that must be utterly alien to today's college students.

Continuing that theme, one of the distinguishing characteristics of libertarianism seems to be an inability to understand that other people have interests that may not align with one's own. So a group of libertarians can't get together on forming one of their isolated paradises where they can enjoy only the company of the, er, like-minded. Via Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice.

Sunnis in Iran

This month is the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Lots of material coming out that refutes some of the common wisdom about that incident. Kennedy didn't back Khrushchev down; it was a trade of missiles out of Cuba for missiles out of Turkey, and the Soviet Union kept the bargain over their client's protests. Khrushchev put the missiles in Cuba out of a feeling of the Soviet Union's weakness, not America's. Nice summary by Fred Kaplan. But I suppose Mitt will keep rolling with the chest-pounding his base loves so dearly. 

And, speaking of anniversaries, this is one year for Nuclear Diner, my other enterprise with two partners who have their own areas of expertise in such things. Go on over and check it out!

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