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aprossi

Robert Aaron Long: What we know about the suspect in Atlanta spa shootings - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...t-aaron-long-suspected-shooter

atlanta knowledge research education gun violence

shared by aprossi on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • What we know about Robert Aaron Long, the suspect in Atlanta spa shootings
  • State and federal investigators are scrambling to learn more about Robert Aaron Long, the suspect in a string of deadly shootings at three Atlanta-area Asian spas, and his alleged motive.
  • He is being held without bond in Cherokee County, where he faces four counts of murder and a charge of aggravated assault, according to the county sheriff's office. He also has been charged with more four counts of murder, Atlanta Police Department said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Tuesday's shootings took place at two spas in Atlanta and another in Acworth, about 10 miles west of Woodstock -- which left eight people, at least four of them Asian women, dead.
  • Authorities located Long about 150 miles south of Atlanta in Crisp County. State troopers took him into custody after using a special pursuit maneuver to spin his car out of control.
  • Sheriff Frank Reynolds of Cherokee County, where the Acworth shootings took place, told reporters Long "made indicators that he has some issues -- potentially sexual addiction -- and may have frequented some of these places in the past."Reynolds said those issues could be the motivation behind the shooting.
  • A law enforcement source said the suspect was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours on end watching pornography online.
  • Gun was purchased legally
  • Long purchased his gun legally at a local gun store, Big Woods Goods in Holly Springs, Georgia, an attorney for the company confirmed to CNN.
anonymous

Opinion | 'This Is Jim Crow in New Clothes' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ing-rights-resonstruction.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • ‘This Is Jim Crow in New Clothes’
  • Senator Raphael Warnock’s first speech on the Senate floor brought the past into the present.
  • “We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,”
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • “This is Jim Crow in new clothes
  • I submit that it is the job of each citizen to stand up for the voting rights of every citizen. And it is the job of this body to do all that it can to defend the viability of our democracy.
  • The bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was first introduced in January 1870 by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a Radical Republican and ardent opponent of slavery and race discrimination.
  • as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore pre-clearance to the Voting Rights Act, forcing covered jurisdictions to submit new voting plans for federal approval.
  • arnock is the first African-American to represent Georgia in the Senate and only the second elected from the South since Reconstruction.
  • His presence on the Senate floor is historic just on its own.
  • It represents progress — and yet it is also evocative of the past.
  • A Black lawmaker from the South, urging his mostly white colleagues to defend the voting rights of millions of Americans is, to my mind, an occasion to revisit one particular episode in the history of American democracy: the fight, in Congress, over the Civil Rights Act of 1875
  • The first Black members of the House of Representatives, some of them former slaves, were prominent in this battle
  • They saw the bill as vital in the fight against discrimination and race hierarchy.
  • Warnock argued, the Senate should pass the For the People Act, which would establish automatic voter registration nationally, provide for at least two weeks of early voting and preserve mail-in balloting,
  • “no citizen of the United States shall, by reason of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, be excepted or excluded from full and equal enjoyment” of “common schools and public institutions of learning, the same being supported by moneys derived from general taxation or authorized by law.”
  • “viewed school desegregation as a necessary component of achieving a truly colorblind nation.”
  • Their opponents saw school desegregation as collapsing a distinction between public rights and social rights that would allow the government to
  • “invade all provinces of an individual’s life.”
  • And as their fellow Republicans struggled to pass the civil rights bill, these lawmakers used the debate to devise what Francois calls a “counter narrative to white supremacy” that repudiated Black inferiority in favor of a “vision of human equality.”
  • “It is not social rights we desire,” Representative John R. Lynch of Mississippi, a former slave, said. “What we ask is protection in the enjoyment of public rights.
  • I want to say we do not come here begging for our rights. We come here clothed in the garb of American citizenship. We come demanding our rights in the name of justice.
  • The civil rights bill passed Congress in February 1875, nearly a year after Sumner’s death. It did so without the schools clause.
  • By the end of the century, Jim Crow was in place throughout most of the former Confederacy.
  • It would be over 70 years before the South would send another Black American to Washington.
  • His speech is also part and parcel of a Black tradition of calling on the government to fulfill the nation’s professed values
  • The question, as always, is whether Congress will actually act to secure democracy for all of its citizens and whether we’ll withstand the inevitable backlash if it does.
anonymous

Opinion | The Atlanta Shootings and a Religious Toxicity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-shootings-women-religion.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • I’m a Scholar of Religion. Here’s What I See in the Atlanta Shootings.
  • Did racism or theology or gender motivate the shootings in Georgia? All of the above.
  • I saw in Korean sources first that six of the dead were Asian women, four of Korean descent
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • I didn’t yet know their names; I mourned them as Daughter, Big Sister, Mother, Aunt.
  • As a child I asked my parents why we did this. They explained that who we are is inseparable from who loves us and whom we love.
  • Who are you? Where are you from? What do you believe? To move through this world as an Asian who is American is to exist under the gaze of white supremacy.
  • In other words, we have to constantly give an accounting of ourselves to justify and explain why we are here.
  • I walked through the world in a kind of haze of anger and despair.
  • So we learned early on the name of the alleged murderer.
  • Was it racism? Was it deep-rooted misogyny? Was it a fetishization of Asian women in particular? Was it toxic theology — an extreme fear of God and an equally extreme self-loathing?
  • Race, gender, religion and culture are all implicated
  • The Asian who is American is an accessory — the one you want for your group projects, or the one who makes your farms yield more.
  • And the Asian woman who is American is simultaneously translucent, a mirror and a looking glass; she is a ghost, invisible, unknowable, stripped of her identity, making her both desirable and expendable. How else to explain how easily she is attacked?
  • We learned that he is white. We learned that he is a Southern Baptist, but not his motivation.
  • All the moments I’d kept hidden for years suddenly rushed to the surface: the attacks, the looks, the vandalism, the endless stream of questions
  • The long history of anti-Asian racism is rooted in the history of American expansionism amid wide-ranging legal, cultural and military projects across the Pacific.
  • These colonial projects hypersexualized Asian women, through forced sex and sex work, casting them as docile creatures that brought comfort
  • They also shaped Asian men as submissive and feminine, objects to be conquered, dominated and consumed.
  • Even the humanitarian interventions and the religious outreach that helped to shape much of white imagination about Asian women’s bodies overseas were then continuously reproduced here in America.
  • But churches are imperfect, man-made institutions, burdened by ego and fear
  • I grew up never seeing a woman preach from the pulpit.
  • Later I discovered stories that centered on people on the margins — Black, queer, women and others.
  • These theologies radicalized my faith; I saw myriad possibilities of God in the world.
  • When I looked in the mirror, I saw the divine in myself and in the faces of those around me. This changed everything. The God of grace I proclaim from the pulpit lives in us, loves every single one of us, and this was liberation.
  • But fear is not so easily uprooted, and shame is not limited to one culture or religion.
  • Absolute moral ideals of virginity or marital sex have long been linked to conservative white Christian attempts at what is sometimes called “sexual containment” or more popularly known as purity culture.
  • Though more and more people of faith have questioned the psychological impact of purity culture, shame around sex persists.
  • The Asian women murdered in Atlanta were an explicit threat to the purported ideal; their perceived entanglement with sex work justified this violence.
  • “I just don’t see you as Asian.” Proximity to whiteness is seen as our saving grace, but we are still dying.
  • Xiaojie Tan, Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, Daoyou Feng, Paul Andre Michels, Soon Chung Park, Hyun-Jung Grant, Yong Ae Yue, Suncha Kim
  • Sister, daughter, mother, cousin, aunt, grandmother, child of God.
martinelligi

What the Pandemic Is Doing to Our Brains - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618221

pandemic brain science psychology

shared by martinelligi on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • This is the fog of late pandemic, and it is brutal. In the spring, we joked about the Before Times, but they were still within reach, easily accessible in our shorter-term memories. In the summer and fall, with restrictions loosening and temperatures rising, we were able to replicate some of what life used to be like, at least in an adulterated form: outdoor drinks, a day at the beach. But now, in the cold, dark, featureless middle of our pandemic winter, we can neither remember what life was like before nor imagine what it’ll be like after.
  • The sunniest optimist would point out that all this forgetting is evidence of the resilience of our species. Humans forget a great deal of what happens to us, and we tend to do it pretty quickly—after the first 24 hours or so. “Our brains are very good at learning different things and forgetting the things that are not a priority,” Tina Franklin, a neuroscientist at Georgia Tech, told me. As the pandemic has taught us new habits and made old ones obsolete, our brains have essentially put actions like taking the bus and going to restaurants in deep storage, and placed social distancing and coughing into our elbows near the front of the closet. When our habits change back, presumably so will our recall.
  • The share of Americans reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, or both roughly quadrupled from June 2019 to December 2020, according to a Census Bureau study released late last year. What’s more, we simply don’t know the long-term effects of collective, sustained grief. Longitudinal studies of survivors of Chernobyl, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina show elevated rates of mental-health problems, in some cases lasting for more than a decade
Javier E

Facebook and Twitter Dodge a 2016 Repeat, and Ignite a 2020 Firestorm - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...itter-nypost-hunter-biden.html

facebook social media algorithm censorship editorial decision technology bias

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • It’s true that banning links to a story published by a 200-year-old American newspaper — albeit one that is now a Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid — is a more dramatic step than cutting off WikiLeaks or some lesser-known misinformation purveyor. Still, it’s clear that what Facebook and Twitter were actually trying to prevent was not free expression, but a bad actor using their services as a conduit for a damaging cyberattack or misinformation.
  • These decisions get made quickly, in the heat of the moment, and it’s possible that more contemplation and debate would produce more satisfying choices. But time is a luxury these platforms don’t always have. In the past, they have been slow to label or remove dangerous misinformation about Covid-19, mail-in voting and more, and have only taken action after the bad posts have gone viral, defeating the purpose.
  • That left the companies with three options, none of them great. Option A: They could treat the Post’s article as part of a hack-and-leak operation, and risk a backlash if it turned out to be more innocent. Option B: They could limit the article’s reach, allowing it to stay up but choosing not to amplify it until more facts emerged. Or, Option C: They could do nothing, and risk getting played again by a foreign actor seeking to disrupt an American election.
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  • Perhaps the strangest idea to emerge in the past couple of days, though, is that these services are only now beginning to exert control over what we see. Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, made this point in a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, in which he derided the social network for using “its monopoly to control what news Americans have access to.”
  • That leaves the companies in a precarious spot. They are criticized when they allow misinformation to spread. They are also criticized when they try to prevent it.
  • On Wednesday, several prominent Republicans, including Mr. Trump, repeated their calls for Congress to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that shields tech platforms from many lawsuits over user-generated content.
  • The truth, of course, is that tech platforms have been controlling our information diets for years, whether we realized it or not. Their decisions were often buried in obscure “community standards” updates, or hidden in tweaks to the black-box algorithms that govern which posts users see.
  • Their leaders have always been editors masquerading as engineers.
  • What’s happening now is simply that, as these companies move to rid their platforms of bad behavior, their influence is being made more visible.
  • Rather than letting their algorithms run amok (which is an editorial choice in itself), they’re making high-stakes decisions about flammable political misinformation in full public view, with human decision makers who can be debated and held accountable for their choices.
  • After years of inaction, Facebook and Twitter are finally starting to clean up their messes. And in the process, they’re enraging the powerful people who have thrived under the old system.
mshilling1

How We Assess Risks With An Invisible Threat Like The Coronavirus : Consider This from ... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...o-make-sense-of-covid-19-risks

shared by mshilling1 on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Because COVID-19 is a largely invisible threat, our brains struggle to comprehend it as dangerous. Dr. Gaurav Suri, a neuroscientist at San Francisco State University, explains how habits can help make the risks of the virus less abstract.
  • But what is normally a simple bureaucratic step on the road to inaugurating a new president may drag on for many hours this year and feature more drama than usual, as many Republicans have signaled a willingness to go along with President Trump's false claims about election fraud.
  • He explains how the QAnon story is not all that different from digital marketing tactics, and how followers become detached from reality.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In doing so, they may lean on a number of debunked conspiracy theories that Trump has been pushing, some of which he has been tweeting about and some of which he mentioned in his now-public phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
  • Still, experts worry that more high-profile bickering over the results will only lead to more Americans doubting the fairness of the process.
  • "When you have a fifth of the Senate and maybe 150 representatives saying that the system is rigged or is untrustworthy, then it begins to erode the basis for how a democratic republic is supposed to work,"
jmfinizio

Stimulus checks: Biden puts $2,000 payments back in play - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

stimulus checks biden

shared by jmfinizio on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A $2,000 stimulus check will be at the heart of a $2 trillion Covid relief plan that President-elect Joe Biden is set to unveil Thursday evening.
  • Congress included payments of $1,200 in its initial stimulus when shutdowns because of the coronavirus began last spring.
  • Current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected a standalone bill on increasing the value of the checks, but with Democrats about to take control of the chamber -- and of Congress -- following victories in two Georgia Senate runoff elections, Biden will likely have the votes to approve increased relief spending.Read More
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "Democrats wanted to do much more in the last bill and promised to do more, if given the opportunity, to increase direct payments to a total of $2,000,"
  • Undocumented immigrants who don't have Social Security numbers are ineligible for the payments
  • their spouses and children are now eligible as long as they have Social Security numbers.
anonymous

Trump's Twitter ban renews calls for tech law changes by many who don't get tech or the... - 1 views

www.nbcnews.com/...h-law-changes-many-ncna1253627

shared by anonymous on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • There is no way Wednesday's events could have happened without the convenience and ease afforded to white supremacists — and almost everyone else — by the openness of the modern consumer internet.
  • It's ironic, then, that the insurrection unfolded on the heels of President Donald Trump's continual efforts to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which makes it difficult to sue online platforms over the content they host (or don't) — or how they moderate it (or don't).
  • Section 230 is, of course, the rare law that is disliked by Republicans and Democrats. Biden hates it, having said: "I think social media should be more socially conscious in terms of what is important in terms of our democracy. ... Everything should not be about whether they can make a buck."
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • It's one of the most consequential laws governing the internet, and it provided a crucial liability shield for technology companies for content they didn't themselves create, like comment threads.
  • and it has never even been updated to take into account any of the technological changes that have happened since.
  • What Rule 230 isn't (though it's often portrayed that way) is a bedrock for free speech protections: It's simply a rule that permits internet companies to moderate what other people put on their platforms — or not — without being on the hook legally for everything that happens to be there
  • There is an opportunity to use technology to protect people's ability to safely participate in democracy and enable a different America — the America we witnessed in Georgia on Tuesday — and a different world.
  • After Republicans lost the White House, the House and then the Senate, technology companies no longer feel pressure to cozy up to conservatives to keep their prerogatives.
  • But don't mistake the technology industry's lobbying points about free speech as being related to any real care for American democracy.
  • The major technology platforms enabling hate speech all have one thing in common with our 45th president: self-interest.
  • Freedom of speech is truly a value to cherish, but we cherish it through facilitating the expression of truth, not the unfettered right to spew lies and incite violence without consequence.
adonahue011

In a Swing County in a Swing State, the Verdict Is In: It's Going to Be Close - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...wing-vote-pinellas-county.html

bias new york times swing

shared by adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Hillary could not win over Pinellas County the same way Obama could, she did resonate with middle-class voters. This seems to be a common theme when referring to the election in 2016. It seemed that Trump appealed to the middle class more so that Hillary.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      The county also reflects the sate in terms of being a "swing"
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      The county also reflects the sate in terms of being a "swing"
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Important demographic of the area
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Important demographic of the area
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • with most polls indicating that it’s anyone’s guess who will carry Florida
  • held rallies in nearby Tampa on Thursday that underlined the polar-opposite realities each candidate now inhabits:
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      I like how the article highlights the way the two candidates went about trying to win a swing state like Florida. Biden being focused on Coronavirus and actual problems. While Trump went on to make Biden look bad instead of focusing on problems and policy.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      I like how the article highlights the way the two candidates went about trying to win a swing state like Florida. Biden being focused on Coronavirus and actual problems. While Trump went on to make Biden look bad instead of focusing on problems and policy.
  • a conservative who said he had blocked Fox News on social media for being “too mainstream,”
  • “felt that it would be a good learning experience, so she could learn about some history and politics firsthand.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Interesting that he took his daughter out of school to be apart of history. It makes me think about the question of "what side of history do you want to be on?"
  • Does he have a locker-room mentality?
  • “Yeah, sure, but I’m not hiring him to be nice.”
  • once overshadowed by Clearwater’s beach-retirement hub — has been transformed by recent years that have brought a mix of gentrification and progressive politics.
  • get-out-the-vote rally in honor of Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and voting rights champion who died over the summer
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      It is so interesting how areas so close to each other are so drastically different in politics and beliefs.
  • One in five Black Floridians is thought to have a felony conviction and could be unable to vote because of it.
  • “I’m not encouraging anyone to break the law, but today is a day for some ‘good trouble,’” she added, using one of Mr. Lewis’s signature phrases from his civil rights struggles
  • Mr. Overcast sighed. He said that living in the same county as the Church of Scientology’s headquarters had taught him how to tolerate almost any point of view, even that of the neighbor, who he suspected had stolen the Trump sign from his lawn.Mr. Overcast said his home security system had filmed the culprit making off with it. But rather than confront the neighbor, Mr. Overcast just bought another sign.“But with this one I tied 90 pounds of fishing line on it and tied it to a tree in my yard,” he said.
  • Billy Overcast — “spelled like the weather,” said Mr. Overcast, pointing up, however, to a typically clear day with one hand, a “Trump 2020” flag in the other.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Once again so close but so drastically different
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      Interesting how they are comparing Florida being a swing state to the flying of flags on jeeps
  • Clearwater
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 02 Nov 20
       
      He is showing his beliefs even though the majority of his club fly Trump flags, not Biden flags. The picture at the beginning of the article shows how much pride he has for his beliefs
  • The Confederate flag also bothered him, he told his fellow Jeep enthusiasts, as did the systemic racism
  • decorated with red, white and blue balloons; an American flag; a Black Lives Matter flag; another flag with an L.G.B.T. rainbow he found on Amazon; and lots of Biden-Harris campaign paraphernalia.
  • n the all-important question of who flies what flag on which Jeep.
  • in the swing state that crowned past presidents by small margins, much in this country is riding o
  • St. Petersburg and conservative Clearwater, the vacation hub and base of the Church of Scientology.
  • Pinellas County, about three-quarters of which is white, includes a good number of older retirees and suburban women
  • favor Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee.
  • 256,000 are registered as Democrats
  • 252,000 as Republicans.
  • a swing county in a swing state
  • Donald J. Trump narrowly triumphed here by roughly 6,000 votes, out of about half a million cast
  • But postelection observers said her appeals to middle-class voters in Pinellas County didn’t resonate as well as Mr. Obama’s had.
katherineharron

Central Park confrontation sends an ugly message (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • he story of Amy Cooper, the white woman who called the police on an African American man who was bird watching in Central Park and who asked her to leash her dog in accordance with park rules, is about racism, yes. But it's also about how racism is more than just whites' hostility toward people of color. Racism is more than a feeling; it's a system in which white people can and do exploit their own social positions, assumptions about their innocence, and the presumption that they're telling the truth.
  • That a black man has to rely on videotaped wrongdoing to be believed -- to protect himself from an agitated stranger advancing up on him, and to ultimately see something resembling justice
  • She refused to leash the dog, and, according to Christian Cooper's account on Facebook (where he posted a video of part of their encounter), he told her "Look, if you're going to do what you want, I'm going to do what I want, but you're not going to like it."
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Instead she stayed and would then escalate what Christian Cooper said had been a polite request into a conflict. That's an odd reaction for someone scared for her life.
  • Yet she walked toward him quickly, filling the video screen as she reaches toward his phone camera, with dog leash and her own phone in hand. He asked her to back away: "please don't come close to me," he said twice in a calm, firm voice.
  • "I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life." Christian Cooper responded, telling her to "please tell them whatever you like." And so she does: "There's a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet," she said into her phone, her tone breathless and urgent. "He is recording me and threatening me and my dog."
  • "I'm being threatened by a man in the Ramble!" she cried into the phone. "Please send the cops immediately!"
  • Amy Cooper's decision to summon the police against a man who did nothing more than ask her to follow the rules reads as nothing short of a potential threat to his life.
  • She, a white woman (and she didn't have to even say that explicitly; she knew it would be grasped by whoever had answered the phone) would be seen as vulnerable and in need of protection, and her story would be believed on its face; he, a black man, would be seen as menacing and potentially dangerous, and his version of events would be doubted or disregarded.
  • Ahmaud Arbery, a black man in Georgia, was just out for a run last February when, authorities say, Gregory and Travis McMichael, two white men (one of them a former police officer, as it happened), grabbed their guns, chased him down, and shot him to death. They faced no criminal penalties and were simply let off the hook until a video emerged of their attack, and public outcry forced law enforcement to act. (The two have not been asked by a judge for a plea, and attorneys for the men have told reporters they committed no crimes, according to CNN reporting.) Without the video, the wheels of justice would likely never have even begun to turn.
  • We see again and again that African Americans who are victims of serious crimes need unimpeachable video evidence to be believed. Overwhelmingly, though, crimes are not caught on video. And even when they are, we have seen repeatedly that law enforcement often doesn't act until they are compelled by a huge public outcry. Without reliably fair law enforcement, there are simply few avenues for justice.
  • To be sure, it's easy to find legitimate criticism of Twitter "justice." But this only raises the more important question of why our formal mechanisms for justice are so often so inept at providing justice across racial lines -- why the very people and institutions we should be able to trust are instead often threats to the lives and safety of African Americans. When calling the cops is understood as a threat to a black person -- and sometimes even a threat to that person's life-- that's not just an indictment of the cop-caller, that's an indictment of the police, of prosecutors, of juries and of too many in a white American public willing to accept this reality.
  • Amy Cooper has issued an apology (she told CNN she wanted to "publicly apologize to everyone"), but in explaining her egregious actions, said "I'm not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way." How do you not mean to harm someone when you call the police and falsely claim he is threatening you? "I think I was just scared," Amy Cooper said. "When you're alone in the Ramble, you don't know what's happening. It's not excusable, it's not defensible."
  • Her woe-is-me complaints are a bit hard to swallow given her own actions, which could have damaged or destroyed the life of an innocent man.
  • let's keep our eyes on the prize: a justice system that works, rather than one which so often accepts the word of white people at the expense of black lives and freedom.
katherineharron

Police officers are joining protesters for prayers and hugs in several US cities - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 02 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • While tensions between police and demonstrators have heated up in many places, some officers have shown solidarity with the movement by hugging protesters, praying with them, mourning with them, and taking a knee to honor Floyd.
  • n Atlanta, Georgia, a line of police officers holding shields during a protest Monday near Centennial Olympic park kneeled in front of demonstrators
  • an officer wearing a gas mask, helmet and vest was seen embracing a demonstrator in a hug on the fourth day of protests in the southern city.
katherineharron

Another 3 million Americans file for unemployment benefits - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

crisis

shared by katherineharron on 14 May 20 - No Cached
  • Millions of Americans are relying on unemployment benefits for their livelihoods after losing their jobs to the coronavirus crisis.
  • Another 3 million people filed initial unemployment claims last week on a seasonally adjusted basis,
  • It was the eighth week in a row that the number for initial claims decreased after peaking at 6.9 million in the final week of March
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • But now that initial claims have been falling for two months straight, economists are beginning to shift their focus to continuing jobless claims, which count people who are filing multiple weeks in a row. That number stood at 22.8, up slightly from the prior week.
  • Federal and state outlays totaled just under $102 billion, as of May 12, up from $12.7 billion at the beginning of March.
  • In April, the federal government paid out nearly $27 billion in unemployment benefits as the money from Congress' historic enhancement to the program started to flow, Treasury Department data shows.
  • Lawmakers in late March approved a $600 boost to weekly payments for up to four months and added 13 weeks to benefits, both compliments of the federal government
  • States, meanwhile, delivered just over $21 billion in benefits in April, up from about $4 billion the month before.
  • As more Americans join and remain on the unemployment insurance program, spending will continue to skyrocket. The outlays to date show that states have struggled to handle the surge in claims and to implement the federal provisions, said Ernie Tedeschi, an economist at Evercore ISI and former Treasury official.
Javier E

Some on the Left Turn Against the Label 'Progressive' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sive-liberal-term-defined.html

progressive label terminology language bias liberal left

shared by Javier E on 27 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • Christopher Lasch, the historian and social critic, posed a banger of a question in his 1991 book, “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics.”
  • “How does it happen,” Lasch asked, “that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”
  • A review in The New York Times Book Review by William Julius Wilson, a professor at Harvard, was titled: “Where Has Progress Got Us?”
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  • Essentially, Lasch was attacking the notion, fashionable as Americans basked in their seeming victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, that history had a direction — and that one would be wise to stay on the “right side” of it.
  • Francis Fukuyama expressed a version of this triumphalist idea in his famous 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” in which he celebrated the notion that History with a capital “H,” in the sense of a battle between competing ideas, was ending with communism left to smolder on Ronald Reagan’s famous ash heap.
  • One of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most frequently quoted lines speaks to a similar thought, albeit in a different context: “T​he arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Though he had read Lasch, Obama quoted that line often, just as he liked to say that so-and-so would be “on the wrong side of history” if they didn’t live up to his ideals — whether the issue was same-sex marriage, health policy or the Russian occupation of Crimea.
  • The memo goes on to list two sets of words: “Optimistic Positive Governing Words” and “Contrasting Words,” which carried negative connotations. One of the latter group was the word “liberal,” sandwiched between “intolerant” and “lie.”
  • So what’s the difference between a progressive and a liberal?To vastly oversimplify matters, liberal usually refers to someone on the center-left on a two-dimensional political spectrum, while progressive refers to someone further left.
  • But “liberal” has taken a beating in recent decades — from both left and right.
  • In the late 1980s and 1990s, Republicans successfully demonized the word “liberal,” to the point where many Democrats shied away from it in favor of labels like “conservative Democrat” or, more recently, “progressive.”
  • “Is the story of the 20th century about the defeat of the Soviet Union, or was it about two world wars and a Holocaust?” asked Matthew Sitman, the co-host of the “Know Your Enemy” podcast, which recently hosted a discussion on Lasch and the fascination many conservatives have with his ideas. “It really depends on how you look at it.”
  • None of this was an accident. In 1996, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia circulated a now-famous memo called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.”
  • The authors urged their readers: “The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible.”
  • Republicans subsequently had a great deal of success in associating the term “liberal” with other words and phrases voters found uncongenial: wasteful spending, high rates of taxation and libertinism that repelled socially conservative voters.
  • Many on the left began identifying themselves as “progressive” — which had the added benefit of harking back to movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that fought against corruption, opposed corporate monopolies, pushed for good-government reforms and food safety and labor laws and established women’s right to vote.
  • Allies of Bill Clinton founded the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank associated with so-called Blue Dog Democrats from the South.
  • Now, scrambling the terminology, groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee agitate on behalf of proudly left-wing candidates
  • In 2014, Charles Murray, the polarizing conservative scholar, urged readers of The Wall Street Journal’s staunchly right-wing editorial section to “start using ‘liberal’ to designate the good guys on the left, reserving ‘progressive’ for those who are enthusiastic about an unrestrained regulatory state.”
  • As Sanders and acolytes like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have gained prominence over the last few election cycles, many on the left-wing end of the spectrum have begun proudly applying other labels to themselves, such as “democratic socialist.”
  • To little avail so far, Kazin, the Georgetown historian, has been urging them to call themselves “social democrats” instead — as many mainstream parties do in Europe.“It’s not a good way to win elections in this country, to call yourself a socialist,” he said.
Javier E

For Chat-Based AI, We Are All Once Again Tech Companies' Guinea Pigs - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-are-tech-guinea-pigs-647d827b

ai chatbot generative experiment evaluation justification debate

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  • The companies touting new chat-based artificial-intelligence systems are running a massive experiment—and we are the test subjects.
  • In this experiment, Microsoft, MSFT -2.18% OpenAI and others are rolling out on the internet an alien intelligence that no one really understands, which has been granted the ability to influence our assessment of what’s true in the world. 
  • Companies have been cautious in the past about unleashing this technology on the world. In 2019, OpenAI decided not to release an earlier version of the underlying model that powers both ChatGPT and the new Bing because the company’s leaders deemed it too dangerous to do so, they said at the time.
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  • Microsoft leaders felt “enormous urgency” for it to be the company to bring this technology to market, because others around the world are working on similar tech but might not have the resources or inclination to build it as responsibly, says Sarah Bird, a leader on Microsoft’s responsible AI team.
  • One common starting point for such models is what is essentially a download or “scrape” of most of the internet. In the past, these language models were used to try to understand text, but the new generation of them, part of the revolution in “generative” AI, uses those same models to create texts by trying to guess, one word at a time, the most likely word to come next in any given sequence.
  • Wide-scale testing gives Microsoft and OpenAI a big competitive edge by enabling them to gather huge amounts of data about how people actually use such chatbots. Both the prompts users input into their systems, and the results their AIs spit out, can then be fed back into a complicated system—which includes human content moderators paid by the companies—to improve it.
  • , being first to market with a chat-based AI gives these companies a huge initial lead over companies that have been slower to release their own chat-based AIs, such as Google.
  • rarely has an experiment like Microsoft and OpenAI’s been rolled out so quickly, and at such a broad scale.
  • Among those who build and study these kinds of AIs, Mr. Altman’s case for experimenting on the global public has inspired responses ranging from raised eyebrows to condemnation.
  • The fact that we’re all guinea pigs in this experiment doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be conducted, says Nathan Lambert, a research scientist at the AI startup Huggingface.
  • “I would kind of be happier with Microsoft doing this experiment than a startup, because Microsoft will at least address these issues when the press cycle gets really bad,” says Dr. Lambert. “I think there are going to be a lot of harms from this kind of AI, and it’s better people know they are coming,” he adds.
  • Others, particularly those who study and advocate for the concept of “ethical AI” or “responsible AI,” argue that the global experiment Microsoft and OpenAI are conducting is downright dangerous
  • Celeste Kidd, a professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley, studies how people acquire knowledge
  • Her research has shown that people learning about new things have a narrow window in which they form a lasting opinion. Seeing misinformation during this critical initial period of exposure to a new concept—such as the kind of misinformation that chat-based AIs can confidently dispense—can do lasting harm, she says.
  • Dr. Kidd likens OpenAI’s experimentation with AI to exposing the public to possibly dangerous chemicals. “Imagine you put something carcinogenic in the drinking water and you were like, ‘We’ll see if it’s carcinogenic.’ After, you can’t take it back—people have cancer now,”
  • Part of the challenge with AI chatbots is that they can sometimes simply make things up. Numerous examples of this tendency have been documented by users of both ChatGPT and OpenA
  • These models also tend to be riddled with biases that may not be immediately apparent to users. For example, they can express opinions gleaned from the internet as if they were verified facts
  • When millions are exposed to these biases across billions of interactions, this AI has the potential to refashion humanity’s views, at a global scale, says Dr. Kidd.
  • OpenAI has talked publicly about the problems with these systems, and how it is trying to address them. In a recent blog post, the company said that in the future, users might be able to select AIs whose “values” align with their own.
  • “We believe that AI should be a useful tool for individual people, and thus customizable by each user up to limits defined by society,” the post said.
  • Eliminating made-up information and bias from chat-based search engines is impossible given the current state of the technology, says Mark Riedl, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology who studies artificial intelligence
  • He believes the release of these technologies to the public by Microsoft and OpenAI is premature. “We are putting out products that are still being actively researched at this moment,” he adds. 
  • in other areas of human endeavor—from new drugs and new modes of transportation to advertising and broadcast media—we have standards for what can and cannot be unleashed on the public. No such standards exist for AI, says Dr. Riedl.
  • To modify these AIs so that they produce outputs that humans find both useful and not-offensive, engineers often use a process called “reinforcement learning through human feedback.
  • that’s a fancy way of saying that humans provide input to the raw AI algorithm, often by simply saying which of its potential responses to a query are better—and also which are not acceptable at all.
  • Microsoft’s and OpenAI’s globe-spanning experiments on millions of people are yielding a fire hose of data for both companies. User-entered prompts and the AI-generated results are fed back through a network of paid human AI trainers to further fine-tune the models,
  • Huggingface’s Dr. Lambert says that any company, including his own, that doesn’t have this river of real-world usage data helping it improve its AI is at a huge disadvantage
  • In chatbots, in some autonomous-driving systems, in the unaccountable AIs that decide what we see on social media, and now, in the latest applications of AI, again and again we are the guinea pigs on which tech companies are testing new technology.
  • It may be the case that there is no other way to roll out this latest iteration of AI—which is already showing promise in some areas—at scale. But we should always be asking, at times like these: At what price?
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