davel

Paywall bypass: https://archive.today/NytYP

As the leaders of the United States and China met in Beijing on Thursday, Xi Jinping had a much older rivalry on his mind.

The Chinese president invoked a warning from the Classical world, when the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta went to war, saying that the United States and China should beware the “Thucydides Trap” in their own relations.

Mr. Xi cited the concept, popularized in recent decades, as he warned that Beijing and Washington could enter an “extremely dangerous place” if President Trump sought to impede China as it asserted itself over Taiwan.

The trap referred to by Mr. Xi was named for Thucydides, the ancient Athenian general, whose account of the Second Peloponnesian War (431 B.C. to 404 B.C.) is considered one of the first written military histories.

In it, Thucydides argued that the war between Athens and Sparta was driven by the threat posed to an established power by one gaining strength. “The rise of Athens frightened Sparta and forced them into war,” wrote Thucydides. (The precise translation is contested among classicists).

For some scholars, the war — and the explanation offered for it in that ancient passage — presaged nearly every major conflict to follow. The international relations theorist Graham Allison dubbed it the “Thucydides Trap” in the early 2010s.

“The idea is that when an established, great power is met with a rising power, conflict between the two is certainly likely if not inevitable,” said Daniel Sutton, a classicist at the University of Cambridge who studies Thucydides, on Thursday.

In Mr. Xi’s version of the analogy, an emboldened China is the Athens to an American Sparta.

To demonstrate his theory, Professor Allison identified 16 times in history that a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. According to his tally, which is subjective, 12 of the 16 rivalries ended in a conflict.

This month-old instance has three communities. One is for testing and the other two are anti-trans.

Room 641A, which housed the “Big Brother machine,” inside AT&T’s Folsom Street building in San Francisco, California.

On January 20, 2006, the front doorbell rang at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s offices on Shotwell Street in the Mission District of San Francisco. At the time, Shotwell Street wasn’t the glamorous part of the Mission. Our offices sat between two auto repair shops, across the street from a utility substation.

[I]t was with friendliness but some caution that our executive director, Shari Steele, answered the bell.

“Do you folks care about privacy?” the guy asked. He was in a tan trench coat, looked to be in his early 60s, with gray hair, intense eyes, and a raspy voice.

“Why yes, we do,” Shari answered.

“Then I have some information for you. I am a retired AT&T technician. I know how the NSA is tapping into the internet at an AT&T facility downtown.”

“Well, come on in.”

Shari found EFF attorney Kevin Bankston in his tiny office. They talked for a long time. After the man left, Kevin and Lee Tien, another EFF attorney, burst into my office.

“This guy named Mark Klein, who just came to the door, has something,” Kevin said, with more excitement than I had seen from him in a long time. I was immediately intrigued, but what they told me blew past my highest expectations. Mark had presented us with unequivocal evidence that the National Security Agency was engaged in mass, untargeted spying in the U.S. by tapping into the internet backbone. And it was doing this from an AT&T building just a short distance from our offices.

Edit to add: Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
http://archive.today/2026.04.20-185455/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/business/infowars-alex-jones-the-onion.html

The Onion Has a New Plan to Take Over Infowars

A new deal, which would allow The Onion to use the Infowars name and website address, must be approved by a Texas judge.

When Infowars, the website founded by the right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones, came up for sale two years ago, an unlikely suitor stepped up. The Onion, a satirical news outlet, planned to convert the site into a parody of itself.

That sale was scuttled by a bankruptcy court. Now, The Onion has re-emerged with a new plan: licensing the website from Gregory Milligan, the court-appointed manager of the site.

On Monday, Mr. Milligan asked Maya Guerra Gamble, a judge in Texas’s Travis County District Court overseeing the disposition of Infowars, to approve that licensing agreement in a court filing. Under the terms, The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, would pay $81,000 a month to license Infowars.com and its associated intellectual property — such as its name — for an initial six months, with an option to renew for another six months.

The licensing deal has been agreed to by The Onion and the court-appointed administrator. But it is not effective until Judge Gamble approves it, and Mr. Jones could appeal any ruling. That means the fate of Infowars remains in limbo until the court rules, probably sometime in the next two weeks. Mr. Jones continues to operate Infowars.com and host its weekday program, “The Alex Jones Show.”

Mr. Jones had no immediate comment.

Of Mosques and Men

Early into the campaign against China, scholars such as Zenz began to accuse the government not of genocide per se, but of “cultural genocide”—namely, the crime of erasing the cultural world of a people. Two accusations should be taken seriously: first, that there is a population decline amongst the Uyghurs and second, that there is an attack on mosques in China. According to the 2020 Chinese national census, the Uyghur population in Xinjiang grew from 10 million to 11.6 million, an increase of 1.6 million over the past decade. The data offered in the census show that the Uyghur population grew at 1.67 percent per year from 2000 to 2020, a growth rate double that of other ethnic minorities in China. With the poverty eradication program in full swing, it should be expected that this growth rate will not be maintained as families with higher incomes often choose not to have many children, and so it will be likely that the growth rate will decline. This is a normal process in human history known as the demographic transition. By 2020, poverty rates had fallen sharply in XUAR, Uyghur life expectancy has increased, and overall data on education and health has improved modestly but certainly improved. On the issue of attacks on mosques, there is very interesting data. According to the last official Chinese government source (the State Council white paper of 2016), there are 24,800 venues for religious activities in Xinjiang (and out of those, 24,400 mosques); this compares to fewer than 2,000 mosques in the 1980s. Leibold’s Strategic Policy Institute released a report in 2020 saying that 16,000 mosques had been damaged or destroyed, with only 15,500 still standing. This report was based largely on analysis of satellite imagery. Since the Australian report is largely without details, it is difficult to go mosque by mosque to verify its claims.

However, there is another interesting demographic detail that should be considered. There are 813,000 Muslims in Australia, and there are around 600 mosques in the country, which means that there is a mosque for 1,355 Australian Muslims. The Muslim population in XUAR is roughly 13 million (11.6 million Uyghurs), and, using 2020 data, with 24,400 mosques. This means that there is a mosque for every 533 Muslims, and, with the alleged reduction to 15,500, there is a mosque for every 839 Muslims. In both cases, the density of mosques in China’s XUAR is greater than in Australia, and in Australia there have been a spate of attacks against mosques, as well as campaigns to prevent mosques being opened (the most famous being the Bendigo and Ballarat mosques in the state of Victoria). No report about these atrocities came from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. In the United States, in constrast, attacks against mosques and prevention of the building of mosques have become normal, with elected officials on the record with statements against Muslims and particularly against Islam in the United States. No report about these atrocities has come from the Jamestown Foundation.

Wang Hui, who teaches at Tsinghua University, has argued that ethnic governance in China since the Reform and Opening period of 1978 has undergone a process of “depoliticization,” in which ethnic relations have been recast as problems of administration, development, and security. Political questions that involve historical difference, institutional pluralism, equality, and trust amongst peoples have been set aside. For Wang, ethnic relations cannot be reduced to technical problems — to poverty, insufficient integration, or extremism. Structural inequalities are obscured by this approach, which fails to see the political implications involved in ethnic relations: dialogue is necessary to build trust in a diverse country, and ethnic unity cannot be secured through technocratic management but only through recognition of cultural difference and substantive equality. This is a fundamental point, namely, that even though the development strategy has lifted millions of Chinese minority groups out of poverty, the lack of understanding and the lack of trust across populations must be dealt with politically. What this will come to mean in practice is not easy to imagine.