Portal:Society

Taiwanese aborigines are the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. Although each group holds a variety of creation stories, contemporary research suggests their ancestors may have been living on the islands for approximately 8,000 years before major Han Chinese immigration began in the 1600s. The Taiwanese Aborigines are Austronesian peoples, with linguistic and genetic ties to other Austronesian ethnic groups, such as peoples of the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Oceania. For centuries Taiwan's Aboriginal peoples experienced economic competition and military conflict with a series of conquering peoples. Centralized government policies designed to foster language shift and cultural assimilation, as well as continued contact with the colonizers through trade, intermarriage and other dispassionate intercultural processes, have resulted in varying degrees of language death and loss of original cultural identity. The bulk of contemporary Taiwanese Aborigines reside in the mountains and the cities. Many Aboriginal groups are actively seeking a higher degree of political self-determination and economic development since the early 1980s.

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Japanese and British troops attack members of the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists ("Boxers") at Beijing Castle during the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901. The Boxers, angered by foreign imperialist expansion into Qing dynasty China, had engaged in looting, arson, and killings of foreigners. In 1900, the Empress Dowager Cixi employed the Boxers to attack foreign settlements in Beijing. The uprising was eventually put down by 20,000 troops from the Eight-Nation Alliance.

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• ... that according to Russian sociologist Daria Khaltourina, Protestantism positively influenced the capitalist development of social systems through the promotion of literacy and Bible reading?
• ... that Rhodesian soccer captain Bobby Chalmers, a white man, was assisted in his leadership of the mostly black national team by his proficiency in both Ndebele and Shona?
• ... that following the 2011 Libyan civil war, many Tuareg fighters (pictured) for the defeated government became members of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, seeking an independent Azawad?

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• 1 May 1776 - Foundation of the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society
• 1 May 1869 - New York Genealogical and Biographical Society elects its first woman member
• 7 May 1964 - U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson (pictured) first makes reference to the Great Society
• 10 May 1793 - Society of Revolutionary Republican Women officially registered at the Paris Commune

“ Man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection. ” — Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)

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Murray Newton Rothbard (March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American economist, historian, and political theorist. He was a prominent exponent of the Austrian School of economics and fundamentally influenced the American libertarian movement and contemporary libertarian and classical liberal thought, by theorizing a form of free-market anarchism which he termed "anarcho-capitalism". Building on the Austrian School's concept of spontaneous order, support for a free market in money production, and condemnation of central planning Rothbard advocated abolition of coercive government control of society and the economy. He considered the monopoly force of government the greatest danger to liberty and the long-term well-being of the populace, labeling the state as "the organization of robbery systematized and writ large" and the locus of the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society. Rothbard concluded that all services provided by monopoly governments could be provided more efficiently by the private sector. He viewed many regulations and laws ostensibly promulgated for the "public interest" as self-interested power grabs by scheming government bureaucrats engaging in dangerously unfettered self-aggrandizement, as they were not subject to market disciplines. Rothbard held that there were inefficiencies involved with government services and asserted that market disciplines would eliminate them, if the services could be provided by competition in the private sector. Rothbard was equally condemning of state corporatism, criticizing many instances where business elites co-opted government's monopoly power so as to influence laws and regulatory policy in a manner benefiting them at the expense of their competitive rivals. He argued that taxation represents coercive theft on a grand scale, and "a compulsory monopoly of force" prohibiting the more efficient voluntary procurement of defense and judicial services from competing suppliers. He also considered central banking and fractional reserve banking under a monopoly fiat money system a form of state-sponsored, legalized financial fraud, antithetical to libertarian principles and ethics. (Full article...)

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