Pakistan’s General Election Is a Generals’
Election

Since the Country’s Founding, the Military Has Ruled Over Civilian Affairs—This Vote Won’t Change That

Maybe it’s best to ask if Pakistan’s 2024 election is to be called a general election, or a generals’ election.

As a lawyer and rule of law consultant for different development and non-government organizations, I think that despite the country’s robust court system, its elections exert rule by generals’ rule—not law.

Since Pakistan’s inception in 1947, rarely has an election result here truly conveyed the people’s will. The establishment—comprising of military higher-ups and the occasional inclusion of a few top officials from the civil bureaucracy—has already stolen the people’s mandate to elect …

A tight crowd of men and women, some sitting down, some standing. Political banners and pictures are seen above the people.

In Dhaka, the Roadblocks to Democracy Are Roadblocks

As the Election Looms in Bangladesh, Blockades Are More Than a Metaphor for the Obstacles Facing Voters

It’s election season in Bangladesh—the roads are closed, vehicles are burning, and the threat of violence is close.

As I write these sentences, the country’s chief opposition party—the Bangladesh Nationalist Party …

2024 Will Be the Biggest Election Year in World History | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

2024 Will Be the Biggest Election Year in World History

And That’s Not Good News for Democracy

2024 will be the biggest election year in history. Some 4.2 billion people, or more than half of humanity, live in the 76 countries that are scheduled to …

New York’s First New Year’s Eve Countdown Was Thanks to 19th-Century U.S. Navy Timekeeping

Lovely article. It would appear that your author is not familiar with Ian Bartky’s Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford University Press 2000). In it, she would find that the concept of counting down to an event had its origin in the telegraphic dissemination of time, which began with the Navy in the 19th century. The concept became a public event when the Navy installed a time ball on Manhattan in the early 20th century for the ships in New York Harbor. It connected that ball to the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. To mark that event, it publicized a public event for New Year’s Eve with the idea that New Yorkers would know exactly when the new year began. I haven’t looked at the book for several years but I believe the year was 1906.

David Alan Grier

Elliot’s Exercise in Empathy Was Right on Point

Thank you for publishing your recent essay by Stephen G. Bloom, detailing Jane Elliott’s brown-eye/blue-eye exercise (which he incorrectly referred to as an “experiment”). So many of Mr. Bloom’s observations proved how effective Ms. Elliott’s exercise was and continues to be.

In sharing how many people left the exercise feeling disturbed, violated, and confused, it revealed just how insidious racism is to people who experience it firsthand. The people attending her exercise might have felt picked on for a few hours, and have every right to feel upset.

However, the kindness, compassion, and empathy that Bloom is looking for should have come from those very people, at the very moment they realized that people of color, women, LGBT people, and other marginalized minorities go through that experience every single day, often for decades or a lifetime. They constantly feel ridiculed, falsely accused, and manipulated. Racism, sexism, and homophobia are an unbelievable breach of trust and obscene.

If those participants are, 30 years later, still only remembering their own pain and grievances, then it’s not likely that Ms. Elliot or any other educator can impart to them what it takes to generate sufficient empathy and compassion. That is not the fault of Ms. Elliott or her powerful exercise.

Steven Reeder


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