Agenda Quotes - page 16
The core of the Syrian tragedy consists of the fact that Assad and ISIS represent the two faces of the same coin. Both want the Syrian people, or what is left of them inside the country, scripted out of the equation. Both have enough of a popular base to hang on for some more time even if they did not receive succor from the outside which they regularly do. At the same time neither is strong enough or is ever likely to have the popular base to impose its agenda on Syria.
Amir Taheri
Erdogan may have dreamt of a one-party system with himself at the helm far into the future. That, however, is not on the cards. Going in such a direction could deal the coup de grace to Turkey's already sick economy by drying up foreign direct investment and fast developing trade links with Europe and North America. What Erdogan can do is to build a "one-and-a-half party” system in which the AKP will set the agenda for the remainder of the decade while opposition parties provide the "half” needed to maintain the appearance of parliamentary democracy. A "one-and-a-half party” system isn't unprecedented. Mexico tried it for half a century. Japan has lived with it since the end of the Second World War. It is also the model that Vladimir Putin has imposed in Russia. The failed coup has set Turkish democracy back by at least a decade. However, had it succeeded it might have caused an even longer and deeper setback.
Amir Taheri
A Christianity split into a diversity of ecclesiastical streams, the dualism implicit within its political agenda – nation-forming on the one side, universalism on the other was further accentuated. The classical eastern orthodox form stressing the power of the emperor was in principle universalist enough in its vision of Constantinople as the New Rome, but in practice Byzantium became a rather thoroughly Greek empire, alienating non-Greeks in Egypt, Syria or the west. This combined with its considerable degree of Caesaropapism led to the generation of a type of church-state relationship characteristic of eastern autocephalous churches of a highly nationalist type.
Adrian Hastings
Many pressing problems facing science and society are inherently geospatial – location matters. The availability of essential geospatial data has increased dramatically over the past decade. Both scientific progress and application of geospatial information to societal needs remains hampered, however, due to the lack of methods for transforming these data into information and for combining information from diverse sources to construct knowledge. Progress requires fundamental breakthroughs in both geovisualization and its integration with other methods for geospatial knowledge construction. The research agenda delineated in this issue is a step toward achieving these breakthroughs. Identifying the challenges is the easy part. Meeting them is unlikely without a commitment to a coordinated approach, by both individuals and organizations in multiple countries.
Alan MacEachren
Two developments of the past four decades played crucial roles in establishing a research agenda for the study of map symbolization and design. The first was Arthur H. Robinson's dissertation (published as The Look of Maps in 1952), with its call for objective research, and the second was the adoption in the 1970s of a paradigm of cartography as communication science.
Alan MacEachren
![[T]he folks who would have you believe that our climate is driven by increasing CO2 and nothing else, will continue to ignore the sun, as it serves their agenda to do so. (Anthony Watts)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/51/anthony-watts-agenda-believe-768051.webp)
A filmmaker chooses an actress keeping the best interest of the film in mind. If he doesn't cast you, it doesn't mean there's a personal agenda. Change is constant, and if you have agreed to be part of this industry, you will have to go with the change. The films and filmmakers, even the audience has changed.
Rani Mukerji
