Armas Weekend Reader
This week: Russian war crimes, Mexican criminality, we’d rather have Finns and Swedes as allies than Turks, thousands of parental decisions, war poetry, life on a U.S. Navy destroyer, moth existentialism. Let’s go —
1) “Democrats have been bragging that ‘demographics is destiny’ for years. But a more diverse electorate isn’t voting the way they’d hoped.”
2) “Every member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has enthusiastically welcomed Finland and Sweden except one: Turkey, which on Wednesday blocked an early vote to begin accession talks. For reasons that are political, parochial and irrelevant to the decision, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken a hard line in his efforts to derail the prospective members. This should raise the question of whether Turkey under Mr. Erdogan’s leadership belongs in the alliance.”
3) “The growth of the conservative comedy industry isn’t just important in the context of the culture war. According to Sienkiewicz and Marx, conservatives are also using comedy to bring new voters into the conservative coalition and build ideological cohesion among existing right-leaning constituencies. In other words, the left’s unwavering belief in its comedic monopoly isn’t just wrong — it’s also bad political strategy.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/13/liberals-should-worry-conservative-comedy-00031907
4) “As Californians pack up and head east, Texas seems to receive them with open arms. I spoke with 10 former Californians about the good, the bad and the just-plain-unexpected they found in the Lone Star State.”
https://news.yahoo.com/why-moved-texas-103023168.html
5) “The conciliatory words for cartel thugs contrasts with the scorn AMLO routinely shows law-abiding Mexicans. They include the businessmen, the middle class, civil society, scientists (31 of whom are being pursued on organized crime charges), physicians, the political opposition and feminist collectives – whom he’s branded ‘conservatives’ for demanding action of feminicides. But AMLO has never had a cross word for narcos.”
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