Following the 1960s, that decade's focus on consciousness-raising transformed into an array of intellectual projects far afield of movement politics. The mind's powers came to preoccupy a range of ...thinkers and writers: ethicists pursuing contractual theories of justice, radical ecologists interested in the paleolithic brain, seventies cultists, and the devout of both evangelical and New Age persuasions. In Ideal Minds, Michael Trask presents a boldly revisionist argument about the revival of subjectivity in postmodern American culture, connecting familiar figures within the seventies intellectual landscape who share a commitment to what he calls "neo-idealism" as a weapon in the struggle against discredited materialist and behaviorist worldviews. In a heterodox intellectual and literary history of the 1970s, Ideal Minds mixes ideas from cognitive science, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, deep ecology, political theory, science fiction, neoclassical economics, and the sociology of religion. Trask also delves into the decade's more esoteric branches of learning, including Scientology, anarchist theory, rapture prophesies, psychic channeling, and neo-Malthusianism. Through this investigation, Trask argues that a dramatic inflation in the value of consciousness and autonomy beginning in the 1970s accompanied a growing argument about the state's inability to safeguard such values. Ultimately, the thinkers Trask analyzes—John Rawls, Arne Naess, L. Ron Hubbard, Hal Lindsey, Philip Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Edward Abbey, William Burroughs, John Irving, and James Merrill—found alternatives to statism in conditions that would lend intellectual support to the consolidation of these concepts in the radical free market ideologies of the 1980s.
The war of 1971 that created Bangladesh was the most significant geopolitical event in the Indian subcontinent since partition in 1947. It tilted the balance of power between India and Pakistan ...steeply in favor of India. Srinath Raghavan contends that the crisis and its cast of characters can be understood only in a wider international context.
Death Wasn't Painful is a true account of the experiences of a former Indian fighter pilot, who was taken prisoner during the 1971 Indo-Pak/Bangladesh Liberation War. While depicting the intrepid ...life of fighter pilots in active combat, the book also has an introspective side where it portrays the soldier's reactions to the terrifying realities of war. The experiences of prisoners of war are finely drawn, as we share the emotions of war-death, alienation, loneliness and grief. Through heart-warming anecdotes and conversational passages of interactions with Pakistani interrogators, attendants, jailors and civilians, the book juxtaposes the metaphor of physical battles in the sky with the conflict of minds between two nations.
This book gives a detailed political analysis of nationbuilding processes and how these are closely linked to statebuilding and to issues of war crime, gender and sexuality, and marginalization of ...minority groups.
With a focus on the Indian subcontinent, the author demonstrates how the state itself is involved in the construction of a gendered identity, and how control of women and their sexuality is central to the nationbuilding project. She applies a critical feminist approach to two major conflicts in the Indian subcontinent - the Partition of India in 1947 and the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971 - and offers suggestions for addressing historical injustices and war crimes in the context of modern Bangladesh. Addressing how the social and political elites were able to construct and legitimize a history of the state that ignored these issues, the author suggests a critical re-examination of the national narrative of the creation of Bangladesh which takes into account the rise of Islamic rights and their alleged involvement in war crimes.
Looking at the impact that notions of nation-state and nationalism have on women from a critical feminist perspective, the book will be an important addition to the literature on gender studies, international relations and South Asian politics.
Bond Risk Premiums with Machine Learning Bianchi, Daniele; Büchner, Matthias; Tamoni, Andrea
The Review of financial studies,
02/2021, Letnik:
34, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Abstract
We show that machine learning methods, in particular, extreme trees and neural networks (NNs), provide strong statistical evidence in favor of bond return predictability. NN forecasts based ...on macroeconomic and yield information translate into economic gains that are larger than those obtained using yields alone. Interestingly, the nature of unspanned factors changes along the yield curve: stock- and labor-market-related variables are more relevant for short-term maturities, whereas output and income variables matter more for longer maturities. Finally, NN forecasts correlate with proxies for time-varying risk aversion and uncertainty, lending support to models featuring both channels.
How are foreign policy objectives and priorities formulated by decision makers in the U.S. government? Dan Haendel answers this question by examining the decision-making process during the ...Indo-Pakistani War, focusing on the behavior of government institutions and individuals as they attempted to cope with the events of 1971. After a discussion of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy in South Asia, the area's importance to the United States during the Cold War, and the internal crisis in Pakistan leading up to its war with India, the author considers the U.S. government's response to the Indo-Pakistani clash. He discusses the organizational structure for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, the relative importance of the various governmental decision-making units, and the impact of an individual such as Kissinger within the organization. Using, as his basic source, information gathered in interviews with the participants, he provides an account of deliberations with the U.S. government. This work introduces to the field of foreign policy analysis the concept of priority formulation, Examining the argument that a decision maker establishes a subjective and personal scale, the author points out that beliefs and values are likely to determine the approach used by the decision maker in coping with complex stimuli and in structuring problems.
