One
of the main dangers facing the international community in the modern age is the
threat of Islamic extremism and the willingness of its believers to sacrifice
their lives to strike at the “infidels” embodied by Western and secular
societies. Islamophobia has become more
prevalent in the past decade, particularly in America due to the events on
September 11, 2001. This completely
irrational has struck everywhere in American society, from the heights of
government, where former Attorney General John Ashcroft stated that Islam is a
religion in which “God requires you to send your son to die for him,” to the
everyday people, as highlighted by a 2006 Gallup poll which found that 39% of
Americans felt Muslims should be required by the government to carry special
identification which marked them as Muslims.
If that does not sound familiar, I suggest you look up the early stages
of the Holocaust.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Saturday, October 27, 2012
The Cycle of Social Issues
Every topic
discussed in election cycles can be broken down into one of three
categories: economic issues, foreign
policy issues, or social issues. While
many of these will inevitably overlap, the fundamental “elements” are always
present within political stories of any kind.
However, the three topics vary in intensity of emotions they
elicit. Economic issues, while arguably
the most important of the elements, are abstract and complicated to a degree
where most of the electorate, although they will have opinions, do not fully
understand them. For a clear
illustration of this, view my previous post about national debt. Foreign policy, especially in the age of
American predominance on the international stage, also carries significant
political weight; although this is tempered by a certain degree of unity within
the American populace. While differing
ideologies certainly vary on priorities, there is a certain sense of
unification “at the water’s edge.” Social
issues are a completely different story.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Capital Punishment's Detrimental Impact on American Foreign Policy
In
recent years the news, across the differing mediums of newspapers, magazines,
television shows and websites, has been dominated by various issues such as the
economy, our two undeclared wars, Arab uprisings, WikiLeaks, and the death
penalty. While it may not appear so at
first, all of these news topics are connected by their impact on international
relations. The one which would most
likely draw second glances from the above list is the death penalty, but it
does indeed affect our dealings with other nations.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Globalization and National Economy
Globalization as a process has occurred
in waves throughout human society, beginning as far back as the “Out of Africa”
migration many millennia ago. While
political and social integration on a national scale have occurred in varying
intensities over human history, economic globalization has only recently begun
to impact the world in a day to day manner.
While many social scientists, namely Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels
Petersson, believe that the height of economic integration came in the period
leading up to the first World War (1880-1910), I will focus on the current wave
of economic globalization which came in the wake of the second World War.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Socialism or Patriotic Duty?
While my
goal at the Federalist Farmer is to be as unbiased and non-partisan as
possible, there is a current debate milling around this election which I would
like to briefly discuss. A point that
President Obama has brought in both debates, as well as at several speeches and
rallies, is the tax rate on the wealthy two percent of Americans. He, along with many other Democrats, believes
that the “mega-rich” have a duty to pay more taxes to support their unfortunate
countrymen. Former Massachusetts governor
Mitt Romney, along with a large faction of the Republican party, believes that
such a tax increase would punish success, reward laziness, and take a big step
towards a socialist United States.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
National Debt and the Mythical Creditor Nation
National
debt is a staple of global society in the current age of economic and political
interconnectivity. The conventional
wisdom holds that acquiring debt is fairly cheap, leading nations to
essentially sell their debt to other nations.
Virtually every single nation on the planet has a national debt, whether
it be America’s nearly twelve trillion dollars or Poland’s three hundred eighty
billion dollar debt. Even China, much
maligned as it is today as “owning America’s future” has a large national debt,
most of which in fact is owed to the United States, after the Chinese
government defaulted on a loan provided them in 1990. In this entry, I would like to argue that,
theoretically, a nation would be much better off without debt.
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