Monthly Archives: July 2017

How Killing The Iran Nuclear Deal Would Hurt US Power

Donald Trump has proved that he is only capable of destruction. That’s not always a bad thing. On his first day he did away with the TPP, , and a couple months back he did took the US out of the Paris Climate Change accords,. But it’s the prospect of his taking us out of the Iran Nuclear Deal, as he almost did last week, that is the most frightening.

The conventional fox news narrative of the Nuclear Deal does not acknowledge the diplomacy that was necessary to force Iran to the table. To truly break the deal in a way that has any impact on Iran we need all the same international partners on board. If we don’t have that, we risk making the United States look foolish and weak. Foolish is nothing new. Weak is, and it would be a real problem. explains the stakes.

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Correction: Half An Apology For The Shah Of Iran | ELAI 17.b

My writing process varies. Some things I research rigorously, and some things I just think I know. Usually I’m pretty good at double checking these assumptions, and verifying that what I’m publishing is correct and worth putting out there. Last week I screwed up. For the first time in five years I published something that is . As I mention in there are occasionally small errors. I mention some of the recent ones that have been caught by viewers, and there are probably many more that go unnoticed.

Last week though I . I claimed that the Shah of Iran killed “10s of thousands” of his own citizens. If you believe the current government of Iran that’s true, but they are not trustworthy on this topic. The consensus is probably more along the lines of thousands, but it’s impossible to be sure. When I uploaded the video last week the response was immediate. Four or five viewers commented on the statistic. After a week of looking into it, I have to conclude that I was wrong.

One of the most annoying things about US news media is its inability to acknowledge when it has screwed up. A correction might be issued on page 30, but most folks just move on and pretend that they never did anything. I’d like to do better. acknowledges the problem, and will be linked directly to the video that needs correcting. I hope I don’t screw up again, but if I do I think this is the right way to deal with it.

Apologies.

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Thank You! And What’s Next For The More Freedom Foundation…

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Wow! Two months ago . The goal was to hit 250 bucks a video, which would get me to US minimum wage, more or less. Well we did it! I’m tremendously grateful. . With I lay out the projects that I have in mind for the next year or so, now that I know I’ll be able to continue.

Woo Hoo!

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Why Turkey Will Never Be Iran | Everybody’s Lying About Islam 17

Last month I uploaded a video entitled ““. Multiple viewers commented in a similar way. “OK, but what about Iran?” The idea that Turkey could go down a similar path and experience an Islamic revolution like Iran was very appealing. Many saw Ataturk, Turkey’s modernizing founder, as somehow similar to the modernizing Shah of Iran, who was deposed in 1979. This doesn’t make any sense at all. With I attempt to fully explain why that is.

One of the things I noticed with this video is the way that I seemed to interchange “Westernization” and “Modernization”. This isn’t right. These two things are not the same. The experience of multiple Asian countries, and to some extent Turkey, shows that there are real differences. I clearly haven’t sorted this out in my own head, which is why I confuse the two in . I need to give this a lot more thought. I hope it doesn’t interfere with your viewing pleasure.

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Literacy Beats Empire | Literacy II

explains one of literacy’s most important effects. I’ve long been puzzled by the “Long Peace” we’ve been experiencing since the end of the second World War. Despite what our media tells us, the world is much more peaceful than it has ever been. There has been very little war between great powers since WWII, and the pace of civil wars has slackened greatly since the end of the Cold War as well. Even more importantly, the great powers have not been able to exploit this period of peace to beat up on everybody else they way they have in the past.

Europe experienced a great period of peace from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 until the Crimean War in the 1850’s. Even that war was a relatively quick, if costly, break in a period of peace stretching up until World War I (1914). During that period of time however, Europe extended over the whole world, crushing indigenous peoples and empires all around the globe. It was peace for Europe, and suffering for everybody else. This time it has been different. lays out why Literacy has a lot more to do with this than is currently recognized.

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