Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto was re-released in a new, highly annotated academic edition, in German. With 3,500 footnotes and nearly 2,000 pages in two volumes, the new book is more than twice as long as Hitler’s 782-page original.
.. It’s time for the long-taboo book to face the harsh light of common scrutiny by a German public that is three generations removed from the war. And it is high time, even long overdue, that German schoolchildren and university students have the benefit of direct access to the early raw material of Hitler’s madness, just as they have long been able to read his speeches and see him perform in old film clips... Hitler’s original, aggressively marketed by his Munich publisher, sold more than 12 million copies.. With the footnotes snaking throughout the text, the new Mein Kampf more closely resembles a theological treatise than a political tract. “Ironically, [the newly annotated Mein Kampf] will look like the Talmud,” noted Dan Michman, head of international research at Yad Vashem museum in Israel... The Talmudic analogy flows from the decision by the Mein Kampf academic team to “encircle” Hitler’s words with the analytical and deconstructing footnotes. “We wanted to surround the text to demystify it and destroy it,” says Hartmann. Since 2009, his team of five scholars—with help from several dozen others—has traced and dissected the origins of Hitler’s complex, sometimes outrageous thinking almost sentence-by-sentence... The conference of state justice ministers, who enforce laws like incitement to hatred, have said they will prosecute anyone who publishes a non-annotated version of Mein Kampf.
Paul Krugman Reviews ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth’ by Robert J. Gordon
“Except in the rural South, daily life for every American changed beyond recognition between 1870 and 1940.” Electric lights replaced candles and whale oil, flush toilets replaced outhouses, cars and electric trains replaced horses. (In the 1880s, parts of New York’s financial district were seven feet deep in manure.)
Meanwhile, backbreaking toil both in the workplace and in the home was for the most part replaced by far less onerous employment. This is a point all too often missed by economists, who tend to think only about how much purchasing power people have, not about what they have to do to get it, and Gordon does an important service by reminding us that the conditions under which men and women labor are as important as the amount they get paid.
.. Urban life in America on the eve of World War II was already recognizably modern; you or I could walk into a 1940s apartment, with its indoor plumbing, gas range, electric lights, refrigerator and telephone, and we’d find it basically functional. We’d be annoyed at the lack of television and Internet — but not horrified or disgusted.
By contrast, urban Americans from 1940 walking into 1870-style accommodations — which they could still do in the rural South — were indeed horrified and disgusted. Life fundamentally improved between 1870 and 1940 in a way it hasn’t since.
.. Gordon suggests that the future is all too likely to be marked by stagnant living standards for most Americans, because the effects of slowing technological progress will be reinforced by a set of “headwinds”: rising inequality, a plateau in education levels, an aging population and more.
Why They Love Trump
Trump is especially popular among veterans
.. Hearst was downright radical in championing the Bonus Army, that aggregation of 20,000 threadbare veterans of Mr. Wilson’s War to End All Wars who camped in Washington during the summer of 1932 before Douglas MacArthur routed them.
.. William Randolph Hearst and American Foreign Policy, “like all effective demagogues he had a knack of putting his finger on the real resentments and grievances of the people to whom he catered and on whom he depended.”
.. ’Tis bizarre that the hopes of so many decent American patriots repose in this celebrity deal-maker, but this is what we are left with after the collapse of the mystifying campaigns of Jim Webb and Rand Paul, the men who ought to have been appealing to those Trump voters.
Positivism
Positivism asserts that all authentic knowledge allows verification and that all authentic knowledge assumes that the only valid knowledge is scientific.[2] Thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) and Auguste Comte (1798–1857) believed the scientific method, the circular dependence of theory and observation, must replace metaphysics in the history of thought.[citation needed] Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) reformulated sociological positivism as a foundation of social research.[13]
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), in contrast, fought strenuously against the assumption that only explanations derived from science are valid.[9] He reprised the argument, already found in Vico, that scientific explanations do not reach the inner nature of phenomena[9] and it is humanistic knowledge that gives us insight into thoughts, feelings and desires.[9]
.. German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate for pioneering work in quantum mechanics, distanced himself from positivism by saying:
The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.[16]
.. In historiography the debate on positivism has been characterized by the quarrel between positivism and historicism.[10] (Historicism is also sometimes termed historism in the German tradition.)[17]
Arguments against positivist approaches in historiography include that history differs from sciences like physics and ethology in subject matter and method.[18] That much of what history studies is nonquantifiable, and therefore to quantify is to lose in precision. Experimental methods and mathematical models do not generally apply to history, and it is not possible to formulate general (quasi-absolute) laws in history.[18]