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peterconnelly

Wikipedia acts as a check on Putin's false view of history - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...wikipedia-hitler-putin-lavrov

wikipedia putin history

shared by peterconnelly on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Whether to call Hitler gravely immoral or evil is one of literally hundreds of discussions about this article, which is among the most viewed ever on the site — more than 125 million times over the last 15 years, twice as many as Jesus’s total and in the neighborhood of the number for the soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo.
  • Setting the record straight matters because historical misinformation walks hand in hand with current disinformation.
  • Putin has two claims he says are backed by the historical record: that there has never been a separate Ukrainian nation, and that people who claim there is a separate nation must have another motive, whether personal gain or an ideological cause like Nazism.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • She showed that accounts of so-called “aces” — fighters said to have heroically held off much more powerful enemies with a single tank or plane — were based on propaganda.
  • In making these repairs, Coffman faced resistance from a group of editors who were mainly military buffs and wanted to write about battlefield valor without too much scrutiny. She, however, kept coming back to facts and sources — how do we know what we think we know? — and an insistence that Wikipedia not be swept up in mythology.
  • In a speech last year, Putin strolled through 1,000 years of battles and alliances to justify his claim of the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
  • Just look at the rhetoric around Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, which Vladimir Putin has described as a battle to “de-Nazify” the leadership of Ukraine.
  • Since the Russian invasion, the English Wikipedia articles about the historical figures and topics Putin invoked have been racking up pop-star numbers.
  • When it comes to allegations about Nazi collaboration by prominent Ukrainian nationalists like Bandera, Wikipedia has pulled no punches. Even as Putin has emphasized these Nazi ties as a reason for his invasion, Wikipedia has resisted attempts to water down this history.
  • When Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was asked how Ukraine could be in need of de-Nazification if its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish, Lavrov replied: “I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood. [That Zelensky is Jewish] means absolutely nothing. Wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews.” It was an appalling answer that, according to the Israeli government, Putin apologized for.
  • In an unusual step, the English Wikipedia article brings up this particular falsehood to explicitly refute it.
  • The Wikipedia project comes with a stubborn confidence that facts can guide us through the darkness. In Wikipedia’s 20-year history, this belief has never been asked to do more.
Javier E

Russia's Move Into Ukraine Said to Be Born in Shadows - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aid-to-be-born-in-shadows.html

ukraine crisis putin russia groupthink

shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • the Kremlin’s strategy emerged haphazardly, even misleadingly, over a tense and momentous week, as an emotional Mr. Putin acted out of what the officials described as a deep sense of betrayal and grievance, especially toward the United States and Europe.
  • Some of those decisions, particularly the one to invade Crimea, then took on a life of their own, analysts said, unleashing a wave of nationalistic fervor for the peninsula’s reunification with Russia that the Kremlin has so far proved unwilling, or perhaps unable, to tamp down.
  • The decision to invade Crimea, the officials and analysts said, was made not by the national security council but in secret among a smaller and shrinking circle of Mr. Putin’s closest and most trusted aides. The group excluded senior officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the cadre of comparatively liberal advisers who might have foreseen the economic impact and potential consequences of American and European sanctions.
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  • Mr. Putin’s decisions since the crisis began reflect instincts, political skills and emotions that have characterized his 14 years as Russia’s paramount leader, including a penchant for secrecy, loyalty and respect, for him and for Russia. They also suggest a deepening frustration with other world leaders that has left him impervious to threats of sanctions or international isolation
  • Because of Mr. Putin’s centralized authority, Russia’s policies and actions in moments of crisis can appear confused or hesitant until Mr. Putin himself decides on a course of action
  • Mr. Putin, by his own account at a news conference on Tuesday, warned Mr. Yanukovych not to withdraw the government’s security forces from Kiev, one of the demands of the agreement being negotiated.
  • By the next day, however, Ukraine’s Parliament had stripped Mr. Yanukovych of his powers, voted to release the opposition leader Yulia V. Tymoshenko from prison and scheduled new presidential elections. Russia’s initial response was muted, but officials have since said that Mr. Putin fumed that the Europeans who had mediated the agreement did nothing to enforce it.
  • The group, the officials and analysts said, included Sergei B. Ivanov, Mr. Putin’s chief of staff; Nikolai P. Patrushev, the secretary of the security council; and Aleksandr V. Bortnikov, the director of the Federal Security Service. All are veterans of the K.G.B., specifically colleagues of Mr. Putin’s when he served in the organization in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, during the 1970s and ’80s.
  • “He has bit by bit winnowed out the people who challenged his worldview,” Mr. Galeotti said.
  • The deployment of the Russian forces — which the Ukrainian government has said ranged from 6,000 to 15,000 troops — remains a covert operation, the officials and analysts said, to sidestep international law and the need for approval by the United Nations Security Council, something that Mr. Putin and others have repeatedly insisted was necessary for any military operations against another country.
  • As long ago as 2008, when NATO leaders met in Bucharest to consider whether to invite Ukraine to begin moving toward membership, Mr. Putin bluntly warned that such membership would be unacceptable to Russia, presaging the strategy that appears to be unfolding now.
katherineharron

Coronavirus deals blow to Putin's plans to stay in power until 2036 - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Russian President Vladimir Putin has long provided other world leaders with a template for authoritarian rule. Now he faces a new test: Whether his top-down system can survive the coronavirus pandemic.
  • "Let's not rely on our Russian luck," he said. "Please do not think, as we often do: 'Oh, this will not touch me.' It can touch everyone. And then what is happening today in many Western countries, both in Europe and overseas, could become our immediate future."
  • "We'll evaluate the situation and based only on the recommendations from doctors and specialists we will decide on a new date," Putin said.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • On Tuesday, the Russian leader paid a visit to the main Moscow hospital for monitoring suspected coronavirus patients, donning protective gear to visit the hospital in the city's suburb of Kommunarka. It was the kind of costume play we're used to seeing from the Kremlin, and reminiscent of one of his earliest moves as Russia's acting president: flying to the war-torn republic of Chechnya in 2000 in the co-pilot's seat of an Su-27 fighter jet.
sissij

The Phrase Putin Never Uses About Terrorism (and Trump Does) - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...in-donald-trump-terrorism.html

new york times language social media

shared by sissij on 02 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • once famously saying he would find Chechen terrorists sitting in the “outhouse” and “rub them out.”
  • He and President Trump, notably dismissive of political correctness, would seem to have found common language on fighting terrorism — except on one point of, well, language.
  • criticized President Obama for declining to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.”
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  • He has never described terrorists as “Islamic” and has repeatedly gone out of his way to denounce such language.
  • a group he often refers to as “the so-called Islamic State,” to emphasize a distinction with the Islamic religion.
  • Mr. Putin spoke of terrorists who “cynically exploit religious feelings for political aims.”
  • and added that “their ideology is built on lies and blatant distortions of Islam.”
  • He was careful to add, “Muslim leaders are bravely and fearlessly using their own influence to resist this extremist propaganda.”
  • Instead, Russian counterterrorism strategy focused on financing and militarily backing moderate Muslim leaders
  • “He cannot say ‘Islamic terrorism’ for a simple reason. He doesn’t want to alienate millions of Russians.”
  • In a phone call on Friday, President Trump and Mr. Putin discussed “real cooperation” in fighting terrorist groups in Syria. They could agree on an enemy. But the Kremlin statement described a “priority placed on uniting forces in the fight against the main threat — international terrorism.”
  • sissij on 02 Feb 17
     
    I find this article very interesting because it does some analysis to the language president use in politics. It sort of related to the language topic we discussed in TOK. President is a job that has to make sure he get the majority right, so what language he uses is very important. In this article, Putin's language when he addresses the terrorism of Islamic extremists is very interesting. Russia is a country with a lot of Muslims, so he has to be careful about not to labeling the entire religious groups as terrorists. Whenever he describe the group, he carefully distinguish the moderates from the extremists to keep the support from the majority of Russian. Trump should do some thinking on the language he is using since he is a president now. --Sissi (2/2/2017)
johnsonel7

Expect Trump to fight as if his life depends on it (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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

trump perception reality language

shared by johnsonel7 on 24 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Over the decades, Trump constructed and then inhabited a public persona that is powerful but unnatural. As a businessman and TV personality, Trump was, perhaps, the greatest illusionist of our time. He has repeated, ad nauseum, his unverified claims of wealth, sexual magnetism, and brilliance -- a "very stable genius" -- in an effort to produce the image of a great man.
  • But the theatrical dynamic of the Trump presidency was threatened every time real life collided with Trump's cartoon. His failures have often come at moments when he should be guided by a moral compass. But no one who is so devoted to a false persona could possess this kind of ethical reflex
  • Then, on Monday, Trump seemed to yet again try and regain his power by implying the Ukraine scandal couldn't be significant because it revolved around a "perfect" letter he wrote to Zelensky. It's the sort of distortion of the facts one would expect from a man whose comforting false reality is falling apart. As analysts have pointed out, Trump's contact with Zelensky involved not a letter, but a telephone call which was far from perfect. Indeed it was only "perfect" if one was looking for an example of a president abusing his office.
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  • The Russian connection echoes a long-running theme of the Trump presidency, which has cast doubt on his ability to lead the nation -- from Trump's criticism of the NATO alliance to his request for Russia to be admitted to the G7 economic summit countries, to his withdrawal of American troops from Syria. Indeed, last week Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi noted that "all roads lead" to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
  • When we hear the gears of the Trump machine grind and see the decorative pieces of chrome loosen and fall, we are witnessing the results of a confrontation between reality and fantasy. This observation doesn't diminish the power of Trump's marketing method. It does, however, suggest its limits.
Javier E

Data Firm Tied to Trump Campaign Talked Business With Russians - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ambridge-analytica-russia.html

data mining trump campaign russia psychology manipulation social media

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • When the Russia question came up during a hearing at the British Parliament last month, Alexander Nix did not hesitate.“We’ve never worked in Russia,” said Mr. Nix, head of a data consulting firm that advised the Trump campaign on targeting voters.
  • “As far as I’m aware, we’ve never worked for a Russian company,” Mr. Nix added. “We’ve never worked with a Russian organization in Russia or any other country, and we don’t have any relationship with Russia or Russian individuals.”
  • But Mr. Nix’s business did have some dealings with Russian interests, according to company documents and interviews.
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  • . The firms’ employees, who often overlap, had contact in 2014 and 2015 with executives from Lukoil, the Russian oil giant.
  • Lukoil was interested in how data was used to target American voters, according to two former company insiders who said there were at least three meetings with Lukoil executives in London and Turkey.
  • Cambridge Analytica also included extensive questions about Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, in surveys it was carrying out in American focus groups in 2014. It is not clear what — or which client — prompted the line of questioning, which asked for views on topics ranging from Mr. Putin’s popularity to Russian expansionism.
  • On two promotional documents obtained by The New York Times, SCL said it did business in Russia. In both documents, the country is highlighted on world maps that specify the location of SCL clients, with one of the maps noting that the clients were for the firm’s elections division. In a statement, SCL said an employee had done “commercial work” about 25 years ago “for a private company in Russia.”
  • Asked about the Russian oil company, a spokesman for SCL said that in 2014 the firm’s commercial division “discussed helping Lukoil Turkey better engage with its loyalty-card customers at gas stations.” The spokesman said SCL was not ultimately hired.
  • But Christopher Wylie, who helped found Cambridge Analytica and develop the company’s voter-profiling technology, said Lukoil showed interest in how the company used data to tailor messaging to American voters.
  • “I remember being super confused,” said Mr. Wylie, who took part in one of the Lukoil meetings.“I kept asking Alexander, ‘Can you explain to me what they want?’” he said, referring to Mr. Nix. “I don’t understand why Lukoil wants to know about political targeting in America.”
  • “We’re sending them stuff about political targeting — they then come and ask more about political targeting,” Mr. Wylie said, adding that Lukoil “just didn’t seem to be interested” in how the techniques could be used commercially.
  • A second person familiar with the discussions backed up Mr. Wylie’s account, but spoke on the condition of anonymity because of a confidentiality agreement.
  • Though Lukoil is not state-owned, it depends on Kremlin support, and its chief executive, Vagit Alekperov, has met with Mr. Putin on a number of occasions. Reuters reported last year that Lukoil and other companies received instructions from the state energy ministry on providing news stories favorable to Russian leadership.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Putin's First Year in the White House - 0 views

nymag.com/...t-year-in-the-white-house.html

liberal democracy identity trump putin bias

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • at the end of 2017, I feel close to despair about the liberal-democratic project in the West. When it isn’t being assaulted by the identitarian thugs of the hard right, it is being corroded by the identitarian puritans of the “social justice” left. This is how liberal democracies die — or rather how they reveal that they are already, under the surface, dead.
katherineharron

The Kremlin sends mixed messages on coronavirus as Russian cases spiral - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Just over a week ago, President Vladimir Putin said Russia had the spread of coronavirus "under control." Now the country is changing tactics, as authorities acknowledge they are gearing up for a major Covid-19 outbreak.
  • On the morning following his speech, the Russian government announced it would seal its borders and cancel all international flights, with the exception of repatriation planes that are expected to bring thousands more Russians home from hard-hit areas.
  • Those measures are the strictest Russia has seen so far, as its official coronavirus toll began to increase rapidly. On Thursday, health officials reported the largest one-day increase to date with 182 new cases, bringing the total number to 840. Three people have died of Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University.
tongoscar

Trump's Iran strike could present an opportunity to China - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Last June, however, world leaders flocked to the capital of Kyrgyzstan for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a key regional security and political alliance. Attendees included Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, as well as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, with whom they posed alongside in photos from the event. It was a pertinent reminder of Tehran's strong ties with two of the world's foremost powers, further underlined when the three countries held joint naval exercises near the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz in the Indian Ocean last month.
  • A statement added that Tehran hoped China could "play an important role in preventing escalation of regional tensions."Such sentiments are also likely shared well beyond Iran's borders, including among other Middle Eastern powers which are no fans of Tehran. The killing of Soleimani could present Beijing with a major opportunity, not only to prevent another disastrous war, but to increase its influence in the region, supplanting an increasingly unpredictable Washington.
  • "China's emphasis on noninterference, state-led economic development, and regional stability resonates with many autocratic leaders in the Middle East, allowing China to promote its 'alternative' model of great power leadership."
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  • So far -- in no small part thanks to its humungous checkbook -- China has managed to thread the needle of maintaining ties with traditional allies such as Iran and Syria, while also improving relations with their rivals in Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Beijing has also resisted strong pressure from Washington to ditch both Tehran and Damascus, using its role as a United Nations Security Council member to rein in some international action against them.
  • Tehran's enemies may frown at Beijing's refusal to ditch its old ally to make new ones, but this policy will appear far more attractive in the wake of Soleimani's death. And the distinct chance we could now be headed for another Middle Eastern conflict -- or at the very least a period of saber-rattling and disruption to global trade -- could prop up Beijing's ability to play all sides, perhaps indefinitely.
  • "China is not a revisionist state. It does not want to reshape the Middle East and take over the responsibility of securing it. It wants a predictable, stable region -- as much as that is possible -- in which it can trade and invest,"
  • Such a role will likely be welcomed by many players in the region. Indeed, it's difficult to think of a more pertinent example of the contrast between Chinese and US policy than Trump threatening -- just as Beijing was calling for calm -- to target Iranian cultural sites, in what could well be a war crime if it was carried out.
Javier E

The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uscism-ukraine-russia-war.html

ukraine language code code-switching russia russian

shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • As I read about Irpin, about Bucha, about Trostyanets, of the bodies crushed by tanks, of the bicyclists shot on the street, of the desecrated corpses, there it was, “рашизм,” again and again
  • Grasping its meaning requires crossing differences in alphabet and pronunciation, thinking our way into the experience of a bilingual society at war with a fascist empire.
  • “Pашизм” sounds like “fascism,” but with an “r” sound instead of an “f” at the beginning; it means, roughly, “Russian fascism.”
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • The aggressor in this war keeps trying to push back toward a past as it never happened, toward nonsensical and necrophiliac accounts of history. Russia must conquer Ukraine, Vladimir Putin says, because of a baptism a thousand years ago, or because of bloodshed during World War II.
  • The new word “рашизм” is a useful conceptualization of Putin’s worldview. Far more than Western analysts, Ukrainians have noticed the Russian tilt toward fascism in the last decade.
  • Undistracted by Putin’s operational deployment of genocide talk, they have seen fascist practices in Russia: the cults of the leader and of the dead, the corporatist state, the mythical past, the censorship, the conspiracy theories, the centralized propaganda and now the war of destruction
  • we have tended to overlook the central example of fascism’s revival, which is the Putin regime in the Russian Federation.
  • A bilingual nation like Ukraine is not just a collection of bilingual individuals; it is an unending set of encounters in which people habitually adjust the language they use to other people and new settings, manipulating language in ways that are foreign to monolingual nations
  • I have gone on Ukrainian television and radio, taken questions in Russian and answered them in Ukrainian, without anyone for a moment finding that switch worthy of mention.
  • Ukrainians change languages effortlessly — not just as situations change, but also to make situations change, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, or even in the middle of a word.
  • “Pашизм” is a word built up from the inside, from several languages, as a complex of puns and references that reveal a bilingual society thinking out its predicament and communicating to itself.
  • Putin’s ethnic imperialism insists that Ukrainians must be Russians because they speak Russian. They do — and they speak Ukrainian. But Ukrainian identity has as much to do with an ability to live between languages than it does with the use of any one of them
  • Those six Cyrillic letters contain references to Italian, Russian and English, all of which a mechanical, letter-by-letter transliteration would block
  • The best (if imperfect) way I have found to render “рашизм” from Ukrainian into English is “ruscism”
  • When we see “ruscism” we might guess this word has to do with Russia (“rus”), with politics (“ism”) and with the extreme right (“ascism”) — as, indeed, it does
  • I have had to spell “рашизм” as “ruscism” in English because we need “rus,” with a “u,” to see the reference to Russia. In losing the original Ukrainian “a,” though, we weaken a multilayered reference — because the “a” in “рашизм,” conveniently, allows the Ukrainian word to associate Russia and fascism in a way English cannot.
  • If you don’t know either language, you might think that Russian and Ukrainian are very similar. They are pretty close — much as, say, Spanish and Italian are.
  • the semantics are not that close
  • From a Russian perspective, the false friends are legion. There is an elegant four-syllable Ukrainian word that simply means “soon” or “without delay,” but to a Russian it sounds like “not behind the bar.” The Ukrainian word for “cat” sounds like the Russian for “whale,” while the Ukrainian for “female cats” sounds like Russian for “intestines.”
  • Russians do not understand Ukrainian, because they have not learned it. Ukrainians do understand Russian, because they have learned it.
  • Ukrainian soldiers often speak Russian, though they are instructed to use Ukrainian to spot infiltrators and spies. This is a drastic example of a general practice of code-switching.
  • Ukrainians are perfectly capable of writing Russian correctly, but during the war some internet commentators have spelled the occasional Russian word using the Ukrainian writing system, leaving it looking unmoored and pitiable. Writing in Ukrainian, you might spell “oсвобождение” as “aсвобaждениe,” the way it is pronounced — a bit of lexicographic alchemy that makes it (and, by extension, Russians) look silly, and mocks the political concepts being used to justify a war. In a larger sense, such efforts are a means of displacing Russia from its central position in regional culture.
Javier E

Forecasting Fox - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...brooks-forecasting-fox.html

prediction forecasting

shared by Javier E on 22 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, to hold a forecasting tournament to see if competition could spur better predictions.
  • In the fall of 2011, the agency asked a series of short-term questions about foreign affairs, such as whether certain countries will leave the euro, whether North Korea will re-enter arms talks, or whether Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev would switch jobs. They hired a consulting firm to run an experimental control group against which the competitors could be benchmarked.
  • Tetlock and his wife, the decision scientist Barbara Mellers, helped form a Penn/Berkeley team, which bested the competition and surpassed the benchmarks by 60 percent in Year 1. How did they make such accurate predictions? In the first place, they identified better forecasters. It turns out you can give people tests that usefully measure how open-minded they are.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The teams with training that engaged in probabilistic thinking performed best. The training involved learning some of the lessons included in Daniel Kahneman’s great work, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” For example, they were taught to alternate between taking the inside view and the outside view.
  • Most important, participants were taught to turn hunches into probabilities. Then they had online discussions with members of their team adjusting the probabilities, as often as every day
  • In these discussions, hedgehogs disappeared and foxes prospered. That is, having grand theories about, say, the nature of modern China was not useful. Being able to look at a narrow question from many vantage points and quickly readjust the probabilities was tremendously useful.
  • In the second year of the tournament, Tetlock and collaborators skimmed off the top 2 percent of forecasters across experimental conditions, identifying 60 top performers and randomly assigning them into five teams of 12 each. These “super forecasters” also delivered a far-above-average performance in Year 2. Apparently, forecasting skill cannot only be taught, it can be replicated.
  • He believes that this kind of process may help depolarize politics. If you take Republicans and Democrats and ask them to make a series of narrow predictions, they’ll have to put aside their grand notions and think clearly about the imminently falsifiable.
Javier E

The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ous-acceptance-of-donald-trump

political culture crisis culture trump lies authoritarian American idea dictator

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • “Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, / As, to be hated, needs but to be seen,” the poet Alexander Pope wrote, in lines that were once, as they said back in the day, imprinted on the mind of every schoolboy. Pope continued, “Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, / we first endure, then pity, then embrace.
  • The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump.
  • under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses
  • To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.
  • If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump.
  • we do appear to be getting, in place of the once famous Big Lie of the nineteen-thirties, a sordid blizzard of lies. The Big Lie was fit for a time of processionals and nighttime rallies, and films that featured them. The blizzard of lies is made for Twitter and the quick hit of an impulse culture. Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place.
  • The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power.
  • The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger.
  • Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis.
  • Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins
  • The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans.
  • The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak.
Javier E

Dogs, Cats and Leadership - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...dogs-cats-and-leadership.html

leadership foreign policy obama temperament cats dog

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • the performance of presidents, especially on foreign policy, is shaped by how leaders attach to problems. Some leaders are like dogs: They want to bound right in and make things happen. Some are more like cats: They want to detach and maybe look for a pressure point here or there.
  • we should be asking them a different set of questions:
  • How much do you think a president can change the flow of world events? President Obama, for example, has a limited or, if you want to put it that way, realistic view of the extent of American influence. He subscribes to a series of propositions that frequently push him toward nonintervention: The world “is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place and full of hardship and tragedy,” he told Goldberg. You can’t fix everything. Sometimes you can only shine a spotlight.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Furthermore, Obama argues, because of our history, American military efforts are looked at with suspicion. Allies are unreliable. Ukraine is always going to be in Russia’s sphere of influence, so its efforts there will always trump ours. The Middle East is a morass and no longer that important to U.S. interests.
  • Do you think out loud in tandem with a community, or do you process internally? Throughout the Goldberg article, Obama is seen thinking deeply and subtly, but apart from the group around him. In catlike fashion, he is a man who knows his own mind and trusts his own judgment. His decision not to bomb Syria after it crossed the chemical weapons red line was made almost entirely alone.
  • More generally, Obama expresses disdain with the foreign policy community. He is critical of most of his fellow world leaders — impatient with most European ones, fed up with most Middle Eastern ones.
  • When seeking a description of a situation, does your mind leap for the clarifying single truth or do you step back to see the complex web of factors? Ronald Reagan typified the single clarifying truth habit of mind, both when he was describing an enemy (Evil Empire) and when he was calling for change (tear down this wal
  • , Obama leans to the other side of the spectrum. He is continually stepping back, starting with analyses of human nature, how people behave when social order breaks down, the roots and nature of tribalism.
  • Do you see international affairs as a passionate struggle or a conversation and negotiation? Continue reading the main story 343 Comments Obama shows a continual distrust of passion. He doesn’t see much value in macho bluffing or chest-thumping, or in lofty Churchillian rhetoric, or in bombings done in the name of “credibility.”
  • He may be critical, but he is not a hater. He doesn’t even let anger interfere with his appraisal of Vladimir Putin
  • it’s striking how many Americans have responded by going for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who are bad versions of the bounding in/we-can-change-everything doggy type.
Sophia C

The Russia Left Behind - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...russia

shared by Sophia C on 05 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • gets out that the head of Russia’s state railway company — a close friend of President Vladimir V. Putin — is aboard, the st
Javier E

André Glucksmann, French Philosopher Who Renounced Marxism, Dies at 78 - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ounced-marxism-dies-at-78.html

France philosophers marxist right conservatism intellectual

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • In 1975, in “The Cook and the Cannibal,” Mr. Glucksmann subjected Marxism to a scalding critique. Two years later, he broadened his attack in his most influential work, “The Master Thinkers,” which drew a direct line from the philosophies of Marx, Hegel, Fichte and Nietzsche to the enormities of Nazism and Soviet Communism. It was they, he wrote in his conclusion, who “erected the mental apparatus which is indispensable for launching the grand final solutions of the 20th century.”
  • An instant best seller, the book put him in the company of several like-minded former radicals, notably Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pascal Bruckner. Known as the nouveaux philosophes, a term coined by Mr. Lévy, they became some of France’s most prominent public intellectuals, somewhat analogous to the neoconservatives in the United States, but with a lingering leftist orientation.
  • Their apostasy sent shock waves through French intellectual life, and onward to Moscow, which depended on the cachet afforded by Jean-Paul Sartre and other leftist philosophers
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • “It was André Glucksmann who dealt the decisive blow to Communism in France,”
  • “In the West, he presented the anti-totalitarian case more starkly and more passionately than anyone else in modern times,
  • “He was a passionate defender of the superoppressed, whether it was the prisoners of the Gulag, the Bosnians and Kosovars, gays during the height of the AIDS crisis, the Chechens under Putin or the Iraqis under Saddam,” he said. “When he turned against Communism, it was because he realized that Communists were not on the same side.”
  • After earning the teaching degree known as an agrégation from the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud in 1961, Mr. Glucksmann enrolled in the National Center for Scientific Research to pursue a doctorate under Raymond Aron — an odd matchup because Aron was France’s leading anti-Marxist intellectual.
  • His subsequent turn away from Marxism made him a reviled figure on the left, and former comrades looked on aghast as he became one of France’s most outspoken defenders of the United States. He argued for President Ronald Reagan’s policy of nuclear deterrence toward the Soviet Union, intervention in the Balkans and both American invasions of Iraq. In 2007, he supported the candidacy of Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency.
  • “There is the Glucksmann who was right and the Glucksmann who could — with the same fervor, the same feeling of being in the right — be wrong,” Mr. Lévy wrote in a posthumous appreciation for Le Monde. “What set him apart from others under such circumstances is that he would admit his error, and when he came around he was fanatical about studying his mistake, mulling it over, understanding it.”
  • In his most recent book, “Voltaire Counterattacks,” published this year, he positioned France’s greatest philosopher, long out of favor, as a penetrating voice perfectly suited to the present moment.
  • “I think thought is an individual action, not one of a party,” Mr. Glucksmann told The Chicago Tribune in 1991. “First you think. And if that corresponds with the Left, then you are of the Left; if Right, then you are of the Right. But this idea of thinking Left or Right is a sin against the spirit and an illusion.”
kushnerha

The Next Genocide - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-next-genocide.html

climate change war nytimes

shared by kushnerha on 19 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • But sadly, the anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding their growing populations or maintaining a rising standard of living.
  • The quest for German domination was premised on the denial of science. Hitler’s alternative to science was the idea of Lebensraum.
    • kushnerha
      kushnerha on 19 Sep 15
       
      "Lebensraum linked a war of extermination to the improvement of lifestyle." Additionally, "The pursuit of peace and plenty through science, he claimed in "Mein Kampf," was a Jewish plot to distract Germans from the necessity of war."
  • Climate change has also brought uncertainties about food supply back to the center of great power politics.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • China today, like Germany before the war, is an industrial power incapable of feeding its population from its own territory
    • kushnerha
      kushnerha on 19 Sep 15
       
      And "could make China's population susceptible to a revival of ideas like Lebensraum."
  • The risk is that a developed country able to project military power could, like Hitler’s Germany, fall into ecological panic, and take drastic steps to protect its existing standard of living.
  • United States has done more than any other nation to bring about the next ecological panic, yet it is the only country where climate science is still resisted by certain political and business elites. These deniers tend to present the empirical findings of scientists as a conspiracy and question the validity of science — an intellectual stance that is uncomfortably close to Hitler’s.
  • The Kremlin, which is economically dependent on the export of hydrocarbons to Europe, is now seeking to make gas deals with individual European states one by one in order to weaken European unity and expand its own influence.
  • Putin waxes nostalgic for the 1930s, while Russian nationalists blame gays, cosmopolitans and Jews for antiwar sentiment. None of this bodes well for Europe’s future
  • The Nazi scenario of 1941 will not reappear in precisely the same form, but several of its causal elements have already begun to assemble.
  • not difficult to imagine ethnic mass murder in Africa
    • kushnerha
      kushnerha on 19 Sep 15
       
      also no longer difficult to imagine the "triumph of a violent totalitarian strain of Islamism in the parched Middle East," a "Chinese play for resources in Africa or Russia or Eastern Europe that involves removing the people already living there," and a "growing global ecological panic if America abandons climate science or the European Union falls apart"
  • Denying science imperils the future by summoning the ghosts of the past.
    • kushnerha
      kushnerha on 19 Sep 15
       
      Americans must make the "crucial choice between science and ideology"
jmfinizio

Can America still promote democracy? Yes, and it should start with Ukraine - CNN - 1 views

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

ukraine democracy america cnn

shared by jmfinizio on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • strong democracy emerged badly damaged.
  • "The United States lost all the rights to pursue the democratic path and lost their rights to impose it on other countries,"
  • The images of mobs attacking sacred institutions of government or coup attempts are familiar to people living in states ruled by dictators and autocrats.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Trump's administration has repeatedly attacked the rules-based multilateral system, on the basis that America has been shortchanged by unfair rules and a disproportionate burden of cost.
  • Ukraine.
  • . It remains an important country in an important region for the US, sitting as it does on the dangerous fault line between Putin's Russia and US-allied Europe.
  • Ukraine has been in crisis.
  • Ukraine needs American assistance
  • Trump has contradicted US policy.
  • "the people of Crimea, from what I've heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were."
  • If Biden wants to return to the source of all those ills, Ukraine is the place to start.
  • send an unambiguous signal to Putin that the US has Ukraine's back
  • The November election was anything but a mass repudiation of Trumpism and his America-first policies
  • Biden needs to act quickly to salvage America's reputation overseas, lest the void be filled by other world leaders less interested in the promotion of values we hold so dear.
katherineharron

Trump's absurd projection reveals his anxiety (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Let's talk about projection, the psychological impulse to project on other people what you're actually feeling. Webster's dictionary defines it, in part, as: "the externalization of blame, guilt, or responsibility as a defense against anxiety." Here's one recent, relevant example: "The one who's got the problem is Biden, because if you look at what Biden did, Biden did what they would like to have me do except there's one problem: I didn't do it."
  • Cruz was pretty quick to diagnose the problem: "This man is a pathological liar. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And he had a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook. His response is to accuse everybody else of lying."
  • When Clinton raised questions about Trump's erratic and impulsive behavior, he called her unstable, unhinged, lacking the "judgment, temperament and moral character to lead this country." And who can forget his, "No puppet ... You're the puppet," response when she accused him in a debate of being a puppet for Vladimir Putin.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Because tone comes from the top, you see the President's surrogates and even Cabinet officials echo it. But sometimes they go too far and give away the game. Case in point, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on "Face The Nation":
  • "If there was election interference that took place by the Vice President, I think the American people deserve to know."
  • An analysis by The Washington Post's Philip Bump found that his top five insults were "fake," "failed," "dishonest," "weak" and "liar."
tongoscar

Did China capitulate to the US on 'beautiful monster' trade deal? | Trade War | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...rade-deal-200118112844311.html

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Three years ago Chinese President Xi Jinping stood in front of the world's business elite in Davos, defending the post-war international liberal order as President Donald Trump railed against globalisation.
  • China's treatment of 13 million Uighur Muslims, tactics against democracy protesters in Hong Kong, and removal of presidential term limits - giving Xi indefinite power to stay as leader - have created uncertainty, cramping growth both at home and abroad.
  • "They did lose the battle politically, there's not a lot of support. They have basically isolated themselves for a number of reasons and I think President [Trump] has done a really good job of exposing some of the flaws or some of the real problems with the Chinese model," Swenson says.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • First came the opening of a $55bn pipeline to supply gas to China, completing Putin's so-called pivot to the East. And this month, Russia opened a pipeline through Turkey to supply southern Europe, further punishing Ukraine, which now stands to lose billions in transit fees, for strained relations between the two neighbours.
  • Russia currently supplies 40 percent of Europe's gas. The proposed pipeline will provide more gas for Turkey and open up markets in Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary. It comes as Russia's biggest gas company, Gazprom, was forced to halt construction of another pipeline under pressure from the US.
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