I feel like Bernie Sanders could very well turn out to be another FDR type president. It was the sort of president I was hoping and hoping Obama would eventually become, but he let me down there. We need someone who really, earnestly cares about trying to better the nation for the sake of the majority, as opposed to the plutocratic few. I just hope that he can get the nomination. If not, I hope whoever does shares at least some of his goals...

Live in Oxford. This was very, very unexpected - but I have a feeling it had to do with the weather as well, as that depressed turnout somewhat in the south and in London especially. But I think it comes down to the 'shy Tory' syndrome that we had last year, where a lot of people didn't come out as wanting to Leave (and, if you look at the map of the results in England - the heavy Leave areas are the non-affluent ones. That says enough about the state of the UK). What is not unexpected is that Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to Remain...I do have to wonder if that might mean future independence referendums. For NI in particular, having a securitized border with the rest of Ireland could be seen as a betrayal of the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement.

This place really seems like quite a quaint and small little community full of some really nice people. Reddit I think just got a bit too hectic for me - it seemed every other day was some great conspiracy or outcry, and overall the community seemed quite rabid. It would be nice to be part of something a little more serene, I guess!

Ya know, as a young Muslim brown kid in America, I had two heroes - Malcolm X (post-Nation of Islam at least) and Muhammad Ali. Two guys that were prominent in a country where their names alone should have precluded them from any greatness or celebrity that used their voices to advocate for justice and their personal values. And hey, if they could do that, then maybe I could too.

RIP Muhammad Ali. You and what you stood for really meant the world to me.

It definitely wouldn't be a fair trial and I definitely admire what Edward Snowden did to really highlight just how much we've (very wrongly) sacrificed in the name of 'security' that is actually all just bullshit anyway. But at the same time I do have to wonder if maybe he would've gotten people even more outraged by what the government and the NSA has been doing if he hadn't have fled the country to begin with.

In my mind, at least, you can't have the concept of civil disobedience without also highlighting just how unfair the system is - I think it was Henry David Thoreau that wrote about how people campaigning for emancipation would refuse to pay taxes in the belief that that would support a government that endorsed slavery, but allowed themselves to be imprisoned for that 'crime'. The idea was to stick to what was morally right, even if it meant being legally wrong, and allowing yourself to be punished by the legal system to highlight just how morally repugnant the entire thing was.

Obviously whistleblowers are important and I think they should be treated with amnesty (though, it depends on what they reveal, in my opinion). Edward Snowden shouldn't be treated as some sort of fugitive, but at the same time the media concentrates on the 'spectacle', I suppose, of his self-imposed exile as opposed to focusing on the actual issues he revealed and I feel that if were he to be given a trial, it might turn the lens back on what actually matters. Or maybe I'm just being naive (probably am, in fairness).

I think terms like 'left' and 'right' can sometimes be pretty subjective in that political philosophies and ideologies are so very complex and intricate that it's hard to get a solid definition of either 'side'.

At least for myself personally, I don't see the Reddit-strain of libertarianism as particularly leftist. I think the extent that a lot of people on Reddit go to extol the importance of free speech and individual liberties over and in opposition to pretty well-documented oppression of minorities and women screams right-wing ideology, though hidden it might well be.

I quite like #Yeehawdis myself :D.

I didn't imply any inherent supremacy on my part, but I still stand-by my comment of him being an absolute ass-hat. He can be against an encompassing representative democracy all the ding-dong day and that's fine but I'll still think he's an absolute ass-hat for thinking that, and I can be scared and/or upset that people think in a similar fashion.

My heart breaks for Paris (as well as Beirut and Baghdad). I will never understand why people resort to such vicious violence.

And as a young Muslim living in Europe, I am overwhelmed with fear. I'm gonna have to do a lot of apologizing to people for things that I have no affiliation with whatsoever. And I suspect I'll be reading a lot of vitriol online that will take pains to point out that I am incompatible with the West and Western values (even though I'm an American that heavily identifies with the West).

I suspect that Western Muslims like myself hate terrorists more than most. They continually humiliate us to the point where even mentioning my faith to people makes me deeply uncomfortable and ashamed.

Just finished The Things They Carried. It was like a better version of Phil Klay's Redeployment (also an excellent book). I can't really stress just how much of an impact that The Things They Carried had on me. The writing style was really haunting and it really serves as a reminder as to how horrific a foreign policy mistake the entire Vietnam War was, and the experiences our soldiers went through. I also read In the Footsteps of the Prophet, a nice little biography by Tariq Ramadan on the Prophet Muhammad. It was not nearly as hagiographical as I thought it would be, which was a plus.

As for this week, I will be reading Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish - short stories that help set up his Witcher series of books, which I aim to eventually read. After that, I might try out The Sorrow of War for a nice little account of the war in Vietnam from the other side's perspective.

@Shubhang, I majored in History and focused on East Asian history - even did one of my end of year projects on the Indian Mutiny. I could definitely recommend some reading if you're at all interesting in that part of the world.

I want to learn Mandarin, myself. I'll be doing a Masters in Chinese Studies so I really needa get my language skills up to scratch.

We should be cautious, I think more than anything. I think Bernie has some great ideas. I am a huge supporter. I want him to win the nomination and to then win the Presidency. And by all means we should continue to support him. But I am very afraid that frankly this country does seem to have (reasonable or not) a lot of reluctance in embracing anything 'socialist' and I don't know if a self-avowed socialist can actually win a general election. My worst nightmare would be for Bernie to win the nom only to then lose the election to a Republican. But only time will tell - we are still so incredibly early in this election season. In a bout 5-6 months, who knows what could be different?

I'm a democratic socialist, though I'm quite in favor of what people may call 'regulated capitalism' - sorta FDR or Teddy Roosevelt style economics, if that makes sense.

I don't see the CCP regime's stability being threatened at any point in the near future (Xi Jinping himself, who knows, but the guy's amassed more power than any leader since Deng Xiaoping, so things would have to go very wrong, very quickly) just because quite literally everything the CCP does is calculated to help preserve the regime. That includes everything from foreign policy to education to ethnic minorities to urban planning, etc etc. These guys are very good at preventing any sort of cross-class, cross-platform uprising or discontent, and when even a hint of that appears around the corner, they move to crush it.

It is true that the CCP's legitimacy was repaired after the Cultural Revolution by a booming economy, but they've taken steps to try and 'diversify', if that makes sense. The rise in nationalistic discourse (a lot of which is actually propagated by the PLA) and the growing blur between the idea of a Chinese state and the Party-state is no coincidence. I mean yeah, it is hard to say how nationalistic or loyal people are going to be in the face of a massive economic disaster, but I wouldn't just assume that the PLA is going to swoop in and side with some populist uprising. If anything, it'll splinter, and the country would be thrown into a second round of the CR.

I suspect the real problem that faces the CCP is just sheer demographics. Xi and his predecessors have done an alright job at actually bridging the divide between the interior and the coastal provinces (places like Anhui and the West tend to be outliers in this, granted) but the real divide is now between the urban and the rural. And, worst yet, is the divide between the people with rural hukou versus an urban one. There have been a couple hints that the government is just going to completely abolish the household registration system, which would mean a huge expansion of the relatively robust urban welfare system - but the problem is that would quickly become unsustainable, just because in about 15-20 years all those young, productive workers that fuelled the country from the 80s onwards will start to retire, and there won't be nearly enough people to replace them.

Ultimately though the Party can't outrun its people's grievances forever...but they are very good at co-opting dissent and enacting pretty impressive reforms. I dunno that it would be enough to actually save the one party state but I guess only time can tell.

So I've been freaking out a little about student debt. I always knew I'd wind up with a lot (didn't have a great deal of choice for a fair few reasons) but I guess the enormity of it all is starting to make me balk. I'm going to OXFORD of all places as a grad student in a couple weeks and I feel incredibly blessed and lucky and it's like some strange, surreal dream and all but still the idea of cost is just really bearing down on me. I sometimes wonder if it's worth it and whether or not I'd be better off just scrapping those plans and entering the workforce ASAP. But ultimately, I think I'd have more chance at success if I pursue my masters just cause it'll really open up my potential employment options - I'm doubtful that an undergrad degree in History is gonna get me far in and of itself. And I figure that I could potentially get a public sector job with the skills I gain (Mandarin), which means my loans could be forgiven in ~10 years.

I dunno. It's just all a bit nerve wracking. I need to start making money, and quickly, just to keep all that interest down. I can't complain, I knew what I was signing up for but I guess I've just a had a bit of a delayed realization, heh. All of this + actual stress from the fact that I'm going to get my ass kicked mentally and intellectually has really had me on edge for the last couple of weeks. On the bright side, though, I've had a pretty great summer. A lot of reading, a lot of writing, a lot of family-time. Can't ask for much else :). AND a new Iron Maiden album was released a couple days ago and it's GREAT. So there's that.

It would definitely be a ticket to reckon with to be sure. I definitely heavily disagree with both of them on certain issues but they are entirely reasonable in comparison to the rest of the Republican candidates (not that that necessarily says much). I'm just worried that the GOP has gone so far off the grid that they wouldn't actually consider either Rubio or Kasich as 'conservative' enough.

I don't really like posting topics or anything like that. Not out of some fear of doxxing, but rather because I've never really seen the point in posting - I'm not a big sharer on social media or anything like that. Even in my old-school forum days I was always the incessant comment-er, but definitely not a poster. It's strange, because I'm a pretty creative person and I tend to share that side of me (at least with people I'm close with) but I just don't really see much point in posting, necessarily.

I've been trying to stick to a good writing schedule. About 2-4k a day, if I can swing it. My goal was to hit 75k words on my current project by Sunday and it's looking like it should be pretty attainable. Might even be able to squeeze in a little extra if I'm lucky. The guy I'm working on it with will take his 'shift' afterwards and then...well, I think we should have our first draft of about ~90k words done in a week or two. I'm really excited; I think we might have something special. And hey, even if it doesn't go anywhere, it was great practice for next time and the next one.

Been studying Mandarin every day now for about a month and I'm already pretty impressed with how far I've come. It's a strange, weirdly logical language but I'm enjoying it so far. Hopefully by the time I start my Masters I'll have a decent head-start. On the luxury side of things, I've been watching a shit-ton of cartoons with my sister. Just wrapped up Steven Universe and almost down with season 1 of Gravity Falls. Not sure why, but I honestly love animated shows. I think their potential for story-telling on a 'mature' scale is actually pretty high, and I want to see more shows like Steven Universe and etc that do a good job of remaining kid-friendly while still venturing into interesting story-lines and world-building.

A good read. I will say that I am very glad that John Oliver is around to, in a sense, continue Jon's good work.

The vitriolic partisanship in American politics will never cease to depress me.

Seeing very little of Asia here, so I'll do what any Sinologist would and throw in my two cents (most of these are pretty general - I think that's the best place to start, personally, but regardless all of these books are very good and very in-depth):

A History of Modern South Asia by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal is probably one of the better texts about the modern Indian subcontinent. India: A History by John Keay is very good too, though it is far too ambitious. I will give him credit though - the dude tries to sum up about four thousand years of Indian history and does a pretty good job of it.

The Cultural Revolution at the Margins by Yiching Wu is a very different look at the Cultural Revolution - paints it as a much more nuanced, tragic occurrence as opposed to Macfarquhar or Pye and other old school historians who tend to portray it as a struggle amongst the political elites and nothing else.

Osman's Dream by Caroline Finkel rambles on a little but it is one of the few well written, comprehensive histories of the Ottoman Empire from start to finish.

Mao and the 20th Century is a great biography of Mao by Rebecca Karl - he had a pretty interesting early life and it goes into detail there, which is nice.

The Search for Modern China and The Gate of Heavenly Peace by Jonathan Spence basically serve as the core books for any class I've ever taken on Chinese history (and I've taken quite a few). He shatters the myths of an uninventive or stagnant China that we take for granted in the West - he presents the country what it was and is, a robustly dynamic if a bit reactive empire.

Japan in War and Peace and Embracing Defeat by John Dower are fantastic reads, namely because unlike 95% of all academics, Dower can actually write.

Japan at War: An Oral History by the Cooks is interesting in that many of the interviewees are soldiers that fought on the Japanese side during WWII. It really shattered the image in my head of the Japanese forces as consisting of horrible people through and through. Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers by Ohnuki-Tierney and Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies by Samuel Yamashita accomplish similar things. I read these for my dissertation and I cried. A lot.

Women in the Muslim World is a pretty fantastic compilation of essays from leading academics. I only read the essays relevant to the Ottoman Empire (that was my focus at the time) but it had a few pieces on modern Egypt and the Abbasids etc. Definitely worth a read if you're into gender history at all. Paul Bailey's Woman in 20th Century China is the Chinese history equivalent I'd say.

Mao's China and the Cold War and China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation by Chen Jian are both great reads for anyone interested in East Asian geopolitics. The main conclusion is that Zhou Enlai was one hell of a charismatic badass.

I am so, so glad that The Three-Body Problem won Best Novel cause Cixin Liu really wrote something just phenomenally different and I appreciated that.

A very interesting analysis. I used to be a pretty avid user of Tumblr, but I stopped because 1. People I knew in real life were using it as a soapbox for personal issues and there was all sorts of drama there, and 2. As you mentioned, there was a very, very virulent strain of group-think.

I think that second issue is actually becoming a big problem all over the Internet, in a sense. It seems to me that not only are people very willing to fall in line with a certain view (and, bear in mind, I'm a lefty that definitely agreed with a lot 'mainstream' Tumblr thinking, sure) without necessarily critically thinking about it, but also people are very keen on absolutely demolishing others' views in a pretty ad-hominem manner. It's pretty worrying to me actually.

I think Hubski is probably one of the better places that I've found where you can have a discussion with someone who has a differing view without it turning into flinging shit at each other, but there's still some of that same condescension to be seen.

(This post is a bit ramble-y and very off-topic so apologies for that but I've just been having thoughts about race and gender for quite a while now so I figure I might as well get it off my chest)

As people have pointed out, it definitely just comes down to white men being angry because suddenly their great privileges are waning. If we're just talking about America and leaving the rest of the West out, the population is becoming much, much more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity and religion and so we're basically seeing a slow transformation of the status quo. And by slow I mean slow - the average white person (not even man, to be honest - obviously white women are worse off but they still benefit from huge racial privileges) will probably have a much, much easier time than me, for example, being an Indian-American that's also Muslim.

But then I would suggest that it is hard to just say that 'white men' have it better and are thus very angry when the privileges are infringed upon. How do we define that term, really? I'm probably willing to bet that, say, a Polish or Eastern European immigrant coming over to the States would be treated worse than a WASP man or woman from, I dunno, upstate New York. And then when you look at it from a European perspective, fuck, the state of brown/black people could be considered even worse - but at the same time Northwestern Europeans (Low Countries, Scandinavia, France, Germany...) in say the UK are looked upon in a much better light than someone from Poland or Lithuania. Or heck, even Greece or Italy or Spain.

And then when you look at it in a general world perspective the lines between gender and racial privilege start to get even more bloody confusing. I'm staying with my parents at the moment in the UAE, and I've sort of lived in the Middle East for about ~8 years give or take, and stuff is weird here. Arabs from certain 'bad' countries with light skin, even Egyptians and Syrians, people who for all intents and purposes almost look a little European, are discriminated against by the ruling elite in Gulf countries - and Africans with darker skin are treated in a subhuman manner unless they have some Emirati or Qatari blood in them. White people, broadly speaking, including those white people that face huge discrimination in Western Europe and the States, are venerated as these sort of divine beings with incalculable knowledge - both genders, in fact. They are seen as people that should be the faces of companies and deserve the highest pay (even if they don't work as hard as other people) and most importantly, these people are seen as expats. To be an expat is to live the life - free accommodation, company provided car, your children's education paid for, the works. Whereas a guy like my Dad, who is Indian-American and is thus the wrong sort of American and most certainly the wrong shade of brown in the eyes of his employers, would get paid much less and is not seen as an expat.

I'm steering way off course right now but I guess my point is, racial relations are bloody weird and incredibly confusing to me, and often intersect and supersede gendered hierarchies and are just altogether an odd state of affairs. I'd go into East Asia and their view on race as well and stuff gets even more confusing but then this post would become even more convoluted, so I should probably stop, haha.

I do sort of think that the West (and I'm saying this as a Westerner) sometimes takes traditions from other cultures and strips away a lot of the meaning behind them in the name of making these traditions purely utilitarian or material. I guess this isn't a bad thing in and of itself - meditation does help with overcoming a lot of negative feelings and the like, that's for certain - but I can see why people from other cultures do feel a bit irritated or even worried when they see how watered down their teachings can become.

This was a really good read, yeah. My favorite so far was the interview that Vox did - it really dug into the meat of all of Bernie's viewpoints and politics and was just generally really, really interesting: http://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9014491/bernie-sanders-vox-conversation

+1 for FTL. What a bloody great game and a fantastic, fantastic soundtrack to boot.

I am excited to see what a renewed and invigorated Iran will look like. Having lived in the UAE for a while I know that there is quite a lot of fear there amongst the Emiratis that the country will become more belligerent or aggressive, but then there's the fact that they've not been involved in an aggressive war throughout the modern era.

And, hell, I'm gonna love seeing the Saudis slowly fade into obscurity, too (though that is perhaps more of a pipe-dream than anything for the moment).

I am reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. Some pretty fantastic writing, gotta say.

Rush is soothing my soul.