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The Netflix of Brave Old World
The other day, Guruforhire said he’d gladly invest in this idea:
[A] predictive engine serving up political content. People will pay [you] to screen and present content they want to see. Brand identities used to provide this via a signaling mechanism. Today there is just too much content. If you wanted to start a kickstarter to build the netflix of political blog traffic, I would gladly invest.
Your wish being my command, I built one this morning. It’s called “me.” Here are the most interesting articles I came across in the course of my morning’s reading — all geared toward the general themes of Brave Old World. Inclusion on the list doesn’t imply endorsement. It means only that I thought you might click on it. (Since I did.)
Give the engine a whirl!
- Donald Tusk: EU needs ‘tough’ migration policies
- French govt to propose extending state of emergency to cover Euro 2016
- Merkel’s Blunder Doesn’t Justify U.K. Exit
- Is Poland A Failing Democracy?
- No hope for Hollande if he stands for re-election, poll finds
- HM Treasury analysis: the long-term economic impact of EU membership and the alternatives
- The Future of Schengen
- Still credible? Critics round on ‘Up All Night’ movement after violence
- EU report ruffles Turkey’s feathers
- Macron: UK likely to pay for single market access after Brexit. A Britain outside the EU would be ‘completely killed’ in trade talks, French economy minister warns.
- Opinion: America’s Election Shame
- Avoiding the New Cold War With Russia. With two risky flyovers of U.S. military assets in a week, tensions with Moscow are high. We need to tone things down, before flyovers become bombing runs.
- Will Brexit make the EU more pro-Russian?
- The French Conundrum
- Outnumbered, outranged, and outgunned: How Russia defeats NATO
- Dangerous times’ for Europe’s journalists. Free speech at risk as EU grapples with the migration crisis and terrorism threat.
- Donald Trump’s Rise Terrifies World Leaders. And Obama’s reassurances aren’t calming them down.
- With Friends Like These … Erdogan’s Assault on Freedom and Democracy
- France’s economy minister Macron suggests ending wealth tax
- How David Cameron got Barack Obama to fight Brexit. The British prime minister made a direct appeal for the presidential visit ahead of the June referendum.
- Spain summons French ambassador over wine attack. French farmers poured 90,000 bottles of wine down the drain in protest over pricing.
- Sharia Villages: Bosnia’s Islamic State Problem
- Italian prime minister suggests common debt issuance to fund the response to the refugee crisis.
- The Budding Autocrats of the Balkans. From Montenegro to Macedonia, a new generation of leaders has learned to tell the West what it wants to hear while crushing democracy back home.
- Europe Stretched to Its Limits … (a long but very comprehensive report) …
I know: Come on, Claire, wasn’t there any good news?
Well, no. Not a lot.
But here’s a video of Jesper, the skiing Norwegian cat, to lift your spirits:
To make the predictive engine work better, you have to up- or down-vote today’s content. So tell me which articles you liked. I’ll tweak the algorithm based on your feedback, and I’ll see if I can screen and present even more pleasing content tomorrow.
What do you think of the prototype? Ready to invest in it yet? You know what to do!
Published in General
Would you please post the source code of the search engine and algorithm?
Claire,
I’ve got a quick comment on this one.
OUTNUMBERED, OUTRANGED, AND OUTGUNNED: HOW RUSSIA DEFEATS NATO
This is incredibly appalling. This has been war-gamed and verified by top U.S. Military people. What they are saying is Putin could go through the Baltic states like a knife through butter.
This is total irresponsibility. The EU useless bureaucrats sit in Brussels economically threatening Britain, the U.S. and anybody else these childlike nitpicking fools want to. They imagine they’ll just go on strangling everyone in their hopeless red tape and high taxes. If they actually had the responsibility of a single European Nation they would be screaming about the defense of their eastern frontier. They would be willing to invest some of that central banking generated capital in an effective fighting force.
Instead, a boring weasel like Cameron invites the trivial Marxist brained Obama to spin the flying dutchman fantasy of an eternally centralizing transnationalism. This magical fantasy land will allow the EU to plunge its head ostrich style into the ground for a few more years (months?).
Marine Le Penn realizes she’s been wasting her time chasing after a bad boy. She needs a White Knight in her life for a change. I think she and Boris will soon be seen together. One can listen to pure crap for only so long. One way or another it’s going to be Brexit Baby.
Regards,
Jim
The politico article reinforces the perception that we are in a lot of one sided relationships, and that this needs to change.
Hank Reardon’s family cannot behave poorly forever.
So the question to the foreign policy elite too stupid to know who their stakeholders are, how do they intend to mend fences with middle Americans? Seems like if they are sincere and are acting in good faith, they would start engaging in some relationship building.
Friends mend fences, deadbeats recriminate.
I’m afraid it’s proprietary. I’ve applied for a patent.
Which one? I posted links to a few different pieces from them. (Politico.eu is a pretty good site, by the way, for people who want a site that gives them a quick daily overview of the main stories from Europe. I like it better than the US version.)
What advice would you give countries like Latvia or Greece about how to do that?
While you make a good point, that the relationship may be irreparable.
I will have to give that some thought, marketing isn’t my strongest suit, I would start by seriously consider not talking to washington bureaucrats, and take your message directly to the people. Probably talk about the shared experiences, common interests, and why the guy working at a truck stop in kansas should have some sort of in group relationship with the people of greece. Social trust is collapsing everywhere the postwar world order touched. I mean the entire freakin thing is coming down, because it wasnt built on rock, it was built on the shifting sands of stupid and wishful thinking, but that aside. There has to be a relationship between the peoples, a real 2 way relationship of shared experience and sacrafices. And people have to know about it, and you have to mean it. You actually have to demonstrate you LIKE them.
Our government is not much more legitimate than the assad regime, and using them as a proxy isn’t in their interests. So expecting that you can deal with them and have them be representative of the united states is pretty foolish.
Third is think about the information system of the people you need to influence, from whom do they get their information, and what institutions that you have access to do they trust.
Basically, good propoganda.
Another Claire link-a-lanche.
Posts like this play hell with my OCD, you know.
Is it useful? It’s basically what I bookmarked in my “Brave Old World” folder this morning. I’m doing a lot of reading right now, trying to figure out how best to clarify in my mind what this book is about and how to shape it–because it can’t be about everything happening in Europe; that’s just too much for one book.
So it occurred to me, “Why not share what you’re reading?” That’s part of writing a book, too.
Ms. Claire, I don’t know enough to parse any of these links. All I can say is that it looks like you are on the right track.
It is very useful. I’ve been plowing through “Is Poland a Failing Democracy.” Parts of this I remember, but when I read the word “purged” and it turns out that people were not being frog-marched into the basement of the headquarters for State Security, shot in the head, and their corpses buried in unmarked graves in the dead of night, I feel the urge to buy somebody a thesaurus.
I’ve never been to Poland, speak not a word of Polish, and don’t claim any expertise. I do have a Polish acquaintance here in Paris, though, whose judgment strikes me as sound — maybe because we agree about all the things I know more about. Like Reagan and communism and Putin.
And he is appalled by Duda. Just horrified. He says, I quote, “It’s just like it used to be under the communists.” Basically, his opinion is exactly what Adam Zamoyski wrote in that article:
He didn’t put it in such academic language, but that’s exactly what he said, in essence. My guess about parties like this is that they’re apt to follow the new authoritarian model: The “frog-marching into the basement of the headquarters for State Security and shooting in the head” stuff is out of date. For new-style authoritarians it’s less about the terror, more about getting control over the media and the ability to grant government tenders.
Claire,
So far I’ve read the first 5 articles. These I could easily understand after looking up anything in them I didn’t know or understand. However, the HM Treasury analysis is too far beyond my limited knowledge base for me to be able to easily do that. I’ll start reading through the rest of the articles tonight, and I’ll let you know if anything else was as daunting as the HM Treasury analysis.
Thanks for comment #11, because, after reading ” Is Poland a Failing Democracy?”, I was wondering what else you had heard about the PiS. And there it was.
Thank you for the link to the judiciary issue. That is serious. It sounds like the previous administration tried to pull a fast one, and Duda and the PiS pulled a faster one. Nobody gets to pack the courts. Put it back to the way it was to the best that it can be done and leave it there. No pulling legitimately placed judges, and no replacing judges just before their terms expire either.
As far as the media issues go:
The US has been at it twice as long and we haven’t managed to do it either. If you are going to have “public” media, the public needs to be in charge of them. The opposition can start the Polish version of MSNBC for all I care. That shouldn’t face government interference. Beat their blather with your own blather or lose.
Was that it as far as the issues with media go? Because that magazine was raided by the police shortly after Radek Sikorski was opining on the value of being a US ally, but that was the prior administration again. I don’t recall the EU or anyone else getting all hot and bothered about censorship or police state tactics at that time.
The ‘analysis’ was formulated with two purposes in mind: to come up with a Big Scary Number; and to be resistant to analysis. It is not a serious piece of economic forecasting.