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How a French Bank Captured Haiti - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...french-banks-haiti-cic.html haiti france imperialism exploitation financial bank history policy economics caribbean
shared by Javier E on 21 May 22 - No Cached
  • The documents help explain why Haiti remained on the sidelines during a period so rich with modernization and optimism that Americans dubbed it the Gilded Age and the French called it the Belle Époque. This extraordinary growth benefited both faraway powers and developing neighbors, yet Haiti had vanishingly little to invest in basics like running water, electricity or education.
  • The damage was lasting. Over three decades, French shareholders made profits of at least $136 million in today’s dollars from Haiti’s national bank — about an entire year’s worth of the country’s tax revenues at the time, the documents show.
  • The financial historian Éric Monnet of the Paris School of Economics summed up the national bank’s role as “pure extraction.”
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  • Had the wealth siphoned off by Haiti’s national bank stayed in the country, it would have added at least $1.7 billion to Haiti’s economy over the years — more than all of the government’s revenues in 2021.
  • “Isn’t it funny,” the Haitian politician and economist Edmond Paul wrote of the national bank in 1880, “that a bank that claims to come to the rescue of a depleted public treasury begins not by depositing money but by withdrawing everything of value?”
  • But while Haitians themselves were poor, Haiti could make you rich. As a British diplomat, Spenser St. John, wrote in 1884: “No country possesses greater capabilities, or a better geographical position, or more variety of soil, of climate, or of production.”
  • Slaveholders had taken that wealth for themselves, first with the whip, then with a flotilla of French warships, demanding compensation for plantations, land and what France considered its other lost property: the Haitian people. It was the first and only instance in which generations of free people had to pay the descendants of their former slave masters.
  • Beyond bricks and steel, Haiti earmarked about 20 percent of the French loan to pay off the last of the debt linked to France’s original ransom, according to the loan contract. “The country will finally come out of its malaise,” the Haitian government’s annual report predicted that year. “Our finances will prosper.”
  • None of that happened. Right off the top, French bankers took 40 percent of the loan in commissions and fees. The rest paid off old debts, or disappeared into the pockets of corrupt Haitian politicians.
  • The 1875 loan from Crédit Industriel and its partner left two major legacies. First is what the economist Thomas Piketty called the transition from “brutal colonialism” to “neocolonialism through debt.”
  • Haiti took on millions in new interest, hoping to finally shed the burden of paying its former slave masters. In that way, the loan helped prolong the misery of Haiti’s financial indentureship to France. Long after the former slaveholding families considered the debt settled, Haiti would still be paying — only now to Crédit Industriel.
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They Did Their Own 'Research.' Now What? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...do-your-own-research.html new york times US research
shared by lilyrashkind on 31 May 22 - No Cached
  • Cryptocurrencies are notoriously volatile, but this wasn’t your average down day: People who thought they knew what they were getting into had, in the space of 24 hours, lost nearly everything. Messages of desperation flooded a Reddit forum for traders of one of the currencies, a coin called Luna, prompting moderators to share phone numbers for international crisis hotlines. Some posters (or “Lunatics,” as the currency’s creator, Do Kwon, has referred to them) shared hope for a turnaround or bailout; most were panicking, mourning and seeking advice.
  • But in the context of a broad collapse of trust in institutions and the experts who speak for them, it has come to mean something more specific. A common refrain in battles about Covid-19 and vaccination, politics and conspiracy theories, parenting, drugs, food, stock trading and media, it signals not just a rejection of authority but often trust in another kind.
  • DYOR is an attitude, if not quite a practice, that has been adopted by some athletes, musicians, pundits and even politicians to build a sort of outsider credibility. “Do your own research” is an idea central to Joe Rogan’s interview podcast, the most listened to program on Spotify, where external claims of expertise are synonymous with admissions of malice. In its current usage, DYOR is often an appeal to join in, rendered in the language of opting out.Nowhere are the contradictions of DYOR on such vivid display as in the world of crypto, where the phrase is a rallying cry, a disclaimer, a meme and a joke — an invitation to a community as well as a reminder of its harsh limits.
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  • Melissa Carrion, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies the rhetoric of health and medicine, spoke to 50 mothers who had refused one or more vaccines for their children for a study published in 2017.“Across the board, every single one of them gave some variation of the advice that a mother ‘should do her own research,’” she said in a phone interview. “It was this kind of worldview that was less about the result of the research than the individual process of doing it themselves.”
  • One of the enticing aspects of cryptocurrencies, which pose an alternative to traditional financial institutions, is that expertise is available to anyone who wants to claim it. There are people who’ve gotten rich, people who know a lot about blockchains and people who believe in the liberating power of digital currencies. There is some recent institutional interest. But nobody’s been around very long, which makes the idea of “researching” your way to prosperity feel more credible.
  • Cryptocurrency trading, in contrast to medicine, might represent DYOR in pure no-expert form. Virtually everyone is operating in a beginners’ bubble, whether they’re worried about it or not, betting with and against one another, in hopes of making money.
  • ere, so-called research materials are often limited to a white paper, marketing materials and testimonials, the “due diligence” posts of others, the reputations of a currency’s creators and the general sentiment of other possible buyers. Will they buy-in, too? Will we take this coin to the moon?In that way — the momentum of a group — crypto investing isn’t altogether distinct from how people have invested in the stock market for decades. Though here it is tinged with a rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak: We’re outsiders, in this together; we’re doing something sort of ridiculous, but also sort of cool. Though DYOR may be used to foster a sense of community, what it actually describes is participation in a market.
  • A year ago, Luna boosters (and a few skeptics) in online forums offered the same advice to gathered audiences of potential buyers reading their posts, looking for tips: just DYOR. Thousands invested in both Luna and TerraUSD. The price of Luna climbed from around $5 to over $100. After the crash, at least one Reddit user suggested that the situation highlighted the “limit” of DYOR; the coin’s price had fallen to nearly zero.
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Rodolfo Hernández is Colombia's Trump and He May Be Headed for the Presidenti... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-election-hernandez-petro.html
shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The Colombian establishment is lining up behind Rodolfo Hernández, a populist businessman with an incendiary streak, to defeat the leftist former rebel Gustavo Petro.
  • For months, pollsters predicted that Gustavo Petro, a former rebel-turned-senator making a bid to be the nation’s first leftist president, would head to a June presidential runoff against Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative establishment candidate who had argued that a vote for Mr. Petro amounted to “a leap into the void.’’
  • Rodolfo Hernández, a former mayor and wealthy businessman with a populist, anti-corruption platform whose outsider status, incendiary statements and single-issue approach to politics have earned him comparisons to Donald Trump.
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  • But it also remade the political calculus for Mr. Petro. Now, it is Mr. Petro who is billing himself as the safe change, and Mr. Hernández as the dangerous leap into the void.
  • “There are changes that are not changes,” Mr. Petro said at a campaign event on Sunday night, “they are suicides.”
  • The story line was: left versus right, change versus continuity, the elite versus the rest of the country.
  • Still, Colombia’s right-wing establishment has begun lining up behind him, bringing many of their votes with them, and making a win for Mr. Petro look like an uphill climb.
  • “The Colombian right has reached such an extremely disastrous stage,” said Mr. Posada, “that they prefer a government that offers them nothing as long as it is not Petro.”
  • At 77, Mr. Hernández built much of his support on TikTok, once slapped a city councilman on camera and recently told The Washington Post that he had a “messianic” effect on his supporters, who he compared to the “brainwashed” hijackers who destroyed the twin towers on 9/11.
  • Until just a few days ago, Colombia’s political narrative seemed simple: For generations, politics had been dominated by a few wealthy families, and more recently, by a hard-line conservatism known as Uribismo, founded by the country’s powerful political kingmaker, former president Álvaro Uribe.
  • But voter frustration with poverty, inequality and insecurity, which was exacerbated by the pandemic, along with a growing acceptance of the left following the country’s 2016 peace process with its largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, seemed to shift the dynamic.
  • Mr. Hernández once called himself a follower of Adolf Hitler,
  • It also reveals that the narrative was never so simple.
  • Mr. Hernández, who won 28 percent of the vote, has attracted a broad swath of voters eager for change who could never get on board with Mr. Petro.
  • Mr. Hernández, with his fuzzy orange hair and businessman’s approach to politics, has also attracted voters who say they want someone with Trumpian ambition, and are not troubled if he is prone to tactlessness. (Years after saying he was a follower of Adolf Hitler, Mr. Hernández clarified that he meant to say he was a follower of Albert Einstein.)
  • Two of the country’s biggest issues are poverty and lack of opportunity, and Mr. Hernández appeals to people who say he can help them escape both.
  • “Political people steal shamelessly,” said Álvaro Mejía, 29, who runs a solar energy company in Cali.
  • He says he prefers Mr. Hernández to Mr. Petro, a longtime senator, precisely because of his lack of political experience.
  • If Mr. Hernández can walk that difficult line — courting the establishment’s votes without tarnishing his image — it could be difficult for Mr. Petro to beat him.
  • As the results became clear, Mr. Hernández’s supporters rushed to his campaign headquarters on one of the main avenues in Bogotá, the capital.
  • Many wore bright yellow campaign T-shirts, hats and ponchos, which they said they’d bought themselves instead of being handed out free by the campaign, in keeping with Mr. Hernández’s cost-cutting principles.
  • “He is a phenomenon,” he said. “We are sure that we are going to win.”
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Putin's Threats Highlight the Dangers of a New, Riskier Nuclear Era - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nuclear-arms-treaties.html
shared by criscimagnael on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • After generations of stability in nuclear arms control, a warning to Russia from President Biden shows how old norms are eroding.
  • “We currently see no indication that Russia has intent to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, though Russia’s occasional rhetoric to rattle the nuclear saber is itself dangerous and extremely irresponsible,” Mr. Biden wrote in a guest opinion essay in The New York Times. “Let me be clear: Any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict on any scale would be completely unacceptable to us as well as the rest of the world and would entail severe consequences.”
  • With the Biden administration stepping up the flow of conventional weapons to Ukraine and tensions with Russia high, a senior administration official conceded that “right now it’s almost impossible to imagine” how the talks might resume before the last treaty expires in early 2026.
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  • The Chinese are “watching the war in Ukraine closely and will likely use nuclear coercion to their advantage” in future conflicts, the commander, Adm. Charles A. Richard, told Congress.
  • Others are learning their own lessons. North Korea, which President Donald J. Trump boasted he would disarm with one-on-one diplomacy, is building new weapons.
  • What is fast approaching, experts say, is a second nuclear age full of new dangers and uncertainties, less predictable than during the Cold War, with established restraints giving way to more naked threats to reach for such weapons — and a need for new strategies to keep the atomic peace.
  • the dawning era would feature “both a greater risk of a nuclear arms race and heightened incentives for states to resort to nuclear weapons in a crisis.”
  • President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia opened the Ukraine war with a declaration that he was putting his nuclear abilities on some kind of heightened alert — a clear message to Washington to back off.
  • In the years leading up to the Ukraine invasion, Mr. Putin regularly punctuated his speeches with nuclear propaganda videos, including one that showed a swarm of warheads descending on Florida.
  • They are designed by the Russians to blur the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons, which strategists fear makes their use more thinkable.
  • escalate to de-escalate.”
  • “There are a lot of things that he would do in the context of escalation before he would get to nuclear weapons,” Ms. Haines said.
  • The White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies are examining the implications of any potential Russian claim that it is conducting a nuclear test or the use by its forces of a relatively small, battlefield nuclear weapon to demonstrate its ability.
  • The idea would be to “signal immediate de-escalation” followed by international condemnation, said one administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide insight into classified topics.
  • Henry Kissinger noted in a recent interview with The Financial Times that “there’s almost no discussion internationally about what would happen if the weapons actually became used.” He added: “We are now living in a totally new era.”
  • The simplest theory is that if China is going to be a superpower, it needs a superpower-sized arsenal. But another is that Beijing recognizes that all the familiar theories of nuclear balance of power are eroding.
  • “China is heralding a paradigm shift to something much less stable,” Mr. Krepinevich wrote, “a tripolar nuclear system.”
  • “They’re up to something,” Mr. Albright said of Saudi Arabia, “and they’re rich.”
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We Are All Realists Now - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...622812 realism justice idealism human rights activism
shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • in the past decade or so, human rights have pretty much disappeared from our politics. Throughout the 9/11 wars, the grotesque contradiction between the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of tortured prisoners, civilian casualties, and grinding conflict corrupted the cause beyond remedy
  • After Iraq and Afghanistan, no president can send young men and women to war by invoking human rights. When Barack Obama refrained from punishing Bashar al-Assad of Syria for murdering thousands of innocent people with poison gas, there was no outcry from the general public.
  • With the eclipse of U.S. prestige and power, the decay of liberal democracy, and the rising appeal of authoritarian regimes, there’s no longer any mechanism—neither military force nor threat of sanctions and isolation, nor global pressure campaigns by civil-society groups—to make the world’s dictators hesitate before they throw people into concentration camps.
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  • Privately, Obama told his aide Ben Rhodes that not even the 1994 Rwandan genocide merited a strong U.S. response. Without announcing a new era of foreign-policy “realism,” Obama brought it into being.
  • the demise of these mechanisms has soured Americans on the idea of human rights itself. Because we no longer think we can change the behavior of the world’s oppressors—because the cost of trying will be too high—we no longer think much about human rights at all.
  • When they come up as a policy issue, we look for ways to justify doing nothing. We are all realists now.
  • the mind stops seeking and absorbing news of them, and so, in a sense, they cease to exist. Their nonexistence stems from and reinforces the profound self-absorption into which Americans have sunk in the past decade.
  • When Chamath Palihapitiya said that Americans should “take care of our own backyard” before pointing fingers at other countries, he was voicing a widespread belief.
  • The idea that solidarity with the oppressed here should naturally extend to the oppressed everywhere—an internationalist idea that long ago defined the left—has died,
  • along with the global system in which the U.S. played an intermittent, usually two-faced, often incompetent, occasionally effective role as the self-proclaimed upholder of human rights as a universal value.
  • But instincts have a way of outlasting ideas. Within most Americans lies a buried feeling that they should care about the torment of the Uyghurs.
  • This is Kanter’s style of activism—it’s personal. He gets in a dictator’s face, nose to nose, chest to chest, as if Xi Jinping is a bully throwing cheap shots and committing flagrant fouls and everyone else is afraid to call him out. “Someone had to do it,” Kanter told me.
  • some players asked him to unfollow them on social media, and not one has spoken out on his behalf. “Maybe they don’t know enough about it,” he told me. “But I feel like the fear of losing money, the fear of losing business, the fear of losing endorsement deals …” He didn’t complete the obvious thought. “And also, sometimes they do not care enough about what’s going on outside America.”
  • indifference, and not the pervasive influence of Chinese contracts and sneaker endorsements, is the most interesting thing about the league’s unfriendly response to Freedom’s campaign for global human rights. Of course young players want to win lucrative deals while they can, but most people in the league don’t even experience a conflict between money and principle. The latter has disappeared. It’s as if Freedom is putting all that money in jeopardy for a self-indulgent whim—as if he’s taken a tactless interest in matters that don’t concern him.
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Reality Is a Tank - The Triad - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...reality-is-a-tank hegemony foreign policy international relations order policy politics
shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • It is men and women like Bildt, who believe that the international order is secured by pen and ink, who have been living in a fantasy land. They have spent a generation inviting catastrophe into their sitting rooms.
  • They watched Putin jail and destroy Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia.They watched Putin assassinate dissidents on the ground in NATO countries.They watched Putin’s army commit war crimes in Chechnya.They watched his 2007 Munich speech in which he literally said, out loud, that he wanted to roll back the Westernization of Eastern Europe and restore Russia’s dominance.They watched the invasions of Georgia and then Ukraine.
  • In response these same men and women decommissioned nuclear power plants in Europe and built gas pipelines to Russia so that they could have good feelings about “environmentalism” while also pocketing economic windfalls.They crossed their fingers and closed their eyes.You tell me who “lost contact with reality.”
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  • A one-war doctrine, on the other hand, invites conflict.
  • Our presidents were not alone. Much of Conservatism Inc. has become functionally pro-Russia.
  • much of the American foreign policy establishment decided that it could live in whatever reality it preferred. Their signal accomplishment was killing America’s two-war doctrine.
  • The goal of the two-war doctrine was to prevent America from having to fight any major wars. Because when you have the ability to fight two conventional ground wars, you deter all of your enemies.
  • it’s not just the lotus-eating Europeans. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both got rolled by Putin. Donald Trump was practically Putin’s gofer.
  • both China and Russia are emboldened to pursue their interests: They know that we are unlikely to respond to aggression because in any given instance we will be paralyzed by the need to be able to deter a second aggressor.
  • The two-war doctrine was a victim of its own success. It was so effective at deterring large-scale aggression that Americans became convinced it wasn’t needed. That we could pocket the savings and get the same level of security through norms and agreements and economic interdependence.
  • Here is a thing everyone except Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping seems to have forgotten: Reality is a tank. Not a memorandum. Not a summit. Not a promise.
  • Over the last 20 years, Americans experienced the very real costs of being the global hegemon and decided that, all things being equal, we’d rather not have the job.We are about to experience the very real costs of not being the hyperpower.
  • I would like to think the American people will survey the situation and come to the hard conclusion that while it is expensive and arduous to be the enforcer of the international order, it’s ultimately cheaper and safer than the alternative. And that we will then select leaders who will carry out this brief.
  • But I’ve lived through the last three years, just like you. I’ve watched half of America whine like children over being asked to wear a KN-95 at the grocery store. I’ve seen a third of this country refuse to get a life-saving vaccine because they are so detached from reality.
  • In my darker moments I suspect that Vladimir Putin has taken our measure quite precisely.
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Is Ukraine ready for a Russian attack? Yes and no : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ine-russian-attack-preparation ukraine russian war
shared by kennyn-77 on 04 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Over the months that Russia amassed more than 100,000 troops on the borders of Ukraine
  • Ukraine is vulnerable to a major cyber attack
  • Ukraine has repeatedly been a target of cyberattacks, especially since the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea. In the years since Crimea's annexation — which is unrecognized by the international community — near-constant cyber warfare, much of it from Russia, has targeted almost every sector in Ukraine, from its power grid to its treasury to its media companies.
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  • Since 2014, the U.S. has spent tens of millions of dollars toward arming Ukraine with hardware, software and training to secure its critical infrastructure. Those efforts have ramped up in recent months.
  • But Russian disinformation has become less effective
  • When war broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, fake news from Russia flooded over the border with the aim of instilling panic in parts of the country with greater sympathy for Russia, like Crimea, turning them away from the Ukrainian government and toward Russia.
  • Russian state-owned TV broadcast false stories about "fascists" in the streets of Kyiv, a ban on the Russian language in Ukraine, and looming food riots and rationing. One story, broadcast on Russian state TV, claimed that Ukrainian soldiers had brutally murdered and crucified a three-year-old boy.
  • Authorities in Kyiv are working to prepare the city
  • One example: A series of bomb scares were called into Ukrainian schools in recent weeks, but many parents shrugged them off.
  • Although an invasion feels unlikely to many who live in Kyiv, city officials say they are not as prepared as they'd like to be.
  • Kyiv has thousands of bomb shelters that date back to the Soviet era, when some of the USSR's nuclear arsenal was based in Ukraine. Over the past several months, authorities have been working to bring as many shelters as possible back into operation. But many are still unusable. Some have been flooded, others are inaccessible. Some shelters have even been taken over by barbershops or bakeries that have set up shop inside. "Authorities will have to take care of this situation and take it more seriously," Mykhailova said.
  • Ukraine's military has strengthened since 2014
  • "Ukrainian troops are well-trained, they're well-equipped and they're very motivated. Ukrainians in general and the Ukrainian military are very patriotic. They love Ukraine. They're willing to fight to save it," said Kristina Kvien, the top U.S. diplomat in Kyiv, in an interview with All Things Considered on Friday.
  • That improvement has come with major help from international donors, primarily the United States. The U.S. has committed more than $5.4 billion in aid to Ukraine since 2014, according to the State Department. About half that total has been security assistance, with the Biden administration announcing another $200 million on Wednesday. Over the years, that military aid has taken many forms: Humvees, patrol boats, counter-artillery radar, a joint training center in western Ukraine.
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Opinion | This Is What Happened When the Authorities Put Trump Under a Microscope - The... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ump-mueller-ukraine-jan-6.html trump reports analysis
shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The two highest-profile congressional investigations of Trump that followed — the 2019 report by the House Intelligence Committee on Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine as well as the recently released report by the select committee on the Jan. 6 attack — read like deliberate contrasts to the document produced by Robert Mueller and his team.
  • Their presentation is dramatic, not dense; their conclusions are blunt, not oblique; their arguments are political as much as legal. And yet, the Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports seem to follow the cues, explicit or implied, that the Mueller report left behind.
  • The Mueller report also notes in its final pages that “only a successor administration would be able to prosecute a former president,” which is what the Jan. 6 special committee, with its multiple criminal referrals, has urged the Biden administration’s Justice Department to do.
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  • ALL THREE REPORTS INCLUDE quintessentially Trumpian scenes, consistent in their depictions of the former president’s methods, and very much in keeping with numerous journalistic accounts of how he sought to manipulate people, rules and institutions.
  • The three investigations tell different stories, but the misdeeds all run together, more overlapping than sequential
  • Still, each investigation offers a slightly different theory of Trump. In the Mueller report, Trump and his aides come across as the gang that can’t cheat straight — too haphazard to effectively coordinate with a foreign government, too ignorant of campaign finance laws to purposely violate them, often comically naïve about the gravity of their plight.
  • The Ukraine report, by contrast, regards Trump as more strategic than chaotic, and it does not wallow in the netherworld between the president’s personal benefit and his public service. “The president placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security,”
  • All three reports show Trump deploying the mechanisms of government for political gain.
  • The Mueller report argues that viewing the president’s “acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance.” The Ukraine report shows that the conversation that Trump described as “a perfect call” was not the ask; it was the confirmation. When Trump said, “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” Zelensky and his aides had already been notified of what was coming. The Ukraine scandal was never about a single call, just as the Jan. 6 report was not about a single day.
  • The Jan. 6 report takes seriously the admonition to view the president’s actions collectively, not individually; the phrase “multipart plan” appears throughout the report, with Trump as the architect.
  • Even more so than the Ukraine report, the Jan. 6 report repeatedly emphasizes how Trump knew, well, everything
  • There is no room here for the plausible deniability that the Mueller report entertained, for the notion that Trump didn’t know better, or that, in the immortal words of Attorney General William P. Barr when he creatively interpreted the Mueller report to exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice, that the president was “frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency.”
  • This alleged sincerity underscored the president’s “noncorrupt motives,” as Barr put it. In the Jan. 6 report, any case for Trumpian sincerity is eviscerated in a six-page chart in the executive summary, which catalogs the many times the president was informed of the facts of the election yet continued to lie about them. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump told top Department of Justice officials in late December 2020, the report says.
  • Just announce an investigation into the Bidens. Just say the 2020 election was rigged. Trump’s most corrupt action is always the corruption of reality.
  • The studious restraint of the Mueller report came in for much criticism once the special counsel failed to deliver a dagger to the heart of the Trump presidency and once the document was so easily miscast by interested parties
  • for all its diffidence, there is power in the document’s understated prose, in its methodical collection of evidence, in its unwillingness to overstep its bounds while investigating a president who knew few bounds himself.
  • The Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports came at a time when Trump’s misconduct was better understood, when Mueller-like restraint was less in fashion and when those attempting to hold the chief executive accountable grasped every tool at hand. For all their passion and bluntness, they encountered their own constraints, limits that are probably inherent to the form
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Is the Marriage Between Democracy and Capitalism on the Rocks? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ooks-democracy-capitalism.html democracy capitalism compatibility analysis books
shared by Javier E on 16 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Wolf, the chief economics commentator for The Financial Times, worries that after an efflorescence of democratic capitalism, “that delicate flower” is beginning to wither. Most of his ire is directed at an unhinged financial system that has encouraged a “rentier capitalism” and a “rigged” economy.”
  • “Capitalism cannot survive in the long run without a democratic polity, and democracy cannot survive in the long run without a market economy,” he writes. Capitalism supplies democracy with resources, while democracy supplies capitalism with legitimacy
  • Not so, insists Martin Wolf in his new book, “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.
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  • What Friedman believed in was capitalism, or what he called “economic freedom.” Political freedom might come — but capitalism, he said, could do just fine without it.
  • the corporate funders of “Free to Choose” set out to make their case.
  • it was still a time when capitalism’s most enthusiastic supporters evidently felt the need to win the public over to a vision of free markets and minimal government
  • The documentary series “Free to Choose,” which aired on public television in 1980
  • He and other observers are trying to make sense of what might happen next — and, befitting our current bewilderment, they offer a range of perspectives. Some, like Wolf, hope the relationship can be repaired; others argue that the pairing has always been fraught, if not impossible.
  • he has also read his Marx and Engels, looking askance at their solutions while commending them for how “brilliantly” they described capitalism’s relentlessness and omnivorousness. Left to its own devices, capitalism expands wherever it can, plowing its way through national boundaries and local traditions — making it marvelously dynamic or utterly ruinous, and not infrequently both.
  • In Wolf’s case, his anguished tone reflects the scale of his own disillusionment. Born in 1946 in postwar England, he recalls in his preface how “the world seemed solid as I grew up.” He describes the feelings of “confidence” in democracy and capitalism that flourished with the collapse of the Soviet Union
  • Yet the “democratic capitalism” that Wolf wants to preserve was, even by his own lights, short-lived. Democracy itself — or “liberal democracy” with universal suffrage, which Wolf says is the kind of democracy he means — is a “political mayfly.” Democratic capitalism ended, in his account, with the financial crisis of 2008
  • Robert Reich has offered another measure, arguing that democratic capitalism, at least in the United States, began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and ended with Reagan, when “corporate capitalism” took over.
  • The left-wing German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck stakes out a decidedly different position, suggesting that the tendency to equate “democratic capitalism” with a few decades of postwar plenty is to misinterpret a “historical compromise between a then uniquely powerful working class and an equally uniquely weakened capitalist class
  • In “How Will Capitalism End?” (2016), Streeck argues that it’s not compromise but the cascade of crises following the postwar boom — inflation, unemployment, market crashes — “that represents the normal condition of democratic capitalism.” Where Wolf wistfully invokes a “delicate flower,” Streeck writes contemptuously of a “shotgun marriage.”
  • the historian Gary Gerstle explores in his fascinating and incisive “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order” (2022). Before the New Deal order started to falter in the late 1960s and ’70s, Gerstle writes, a majority of Americans believed that capitalism should be managed by a strong state; in the neoliberal order that followed, a majority of Americans believed that the state should be constrained by free markets. Each order began to break down when its traditional ways of solving problems didn’t seem to work
  • capitalism, according to Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, has obtained the status of civic religion. In “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market,” the authors argue that industry groups and wealthy donors have engaged in a concerted campaign to promote “market fundamentalism” — “a vision of growth and innovation by unfettered markets where government just gets out of the way.”
  • The main implication of “The Big Myth” seems to be that “market fundamentalism” is so horrifically egregious — enriching the few and despoiling the planet — that Americans had to be plied with propaganda to believe in it.
  • as Gerstle’s book shows, neoliberal ideas proved so seductive because they also happened to dovetail with the stories that Americans wanted to tell about themselves, emphasizing individuality and freedom.
  • A new generation of swashbuckling billionaires entertain the prospect of secession, using their money to realize fantasies of escape, whether through seasteading or spaceships. The book quotes one seasteading enthusiast declaring, “Democracy is not the answer,” but merely “the current industry standard.”
  • Slobodian’s excellent if discomfiting new book, “Crack-Up Capitalism” (forthcoming in April), explores other neoliberal evasions of the nation-state: tax havens, special economic zones, gated communities — enclaves that are “freed from ordinary forms of regulation.
  • in “Globalists” (2018) the historian Quinn Slobodian argues that neoliberals have found ways not just to liberate markets but to “encase” them in international institutions, thereby shielding capitalist activities from democratic accountability. He observes that neoliberals were especially alarmed after World War II by decolonization, adopting a condescending “racialized language” that pitted “the rational West,” with its trade rules and property laws, against a postcolonial South, “with its ‘emotional’ commitment to sovereignty.”
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Unconscious bias training is 'nonsense', says outgoing race relations chair | Race | Th... - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The outgoing chair of the Institute of Race Relations has decried the widespread use of “nonsense” unconscious bias training, claiming it is an obvious sidestepping of tackling racial injustice.
  • In a wide-ranging interview, the sociologist and cultural activist said he was proud of the role that his institute had played in putting institutional racism on the national agenda several decades ago, but was dismayed at the rise of terms such as unconscious bias.
  • “We made arguments to the state even when we’re on platforms alongside them saying this was nonsense. It’s racism we want to talk about, it’s systemic behaviour we want to talk about, institutionalised racism we want to talk about, not unconscious bias or racial awareness,”
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  • “It’s the stuff that kills that we want to talk about, the stuff that stunts lives that we want to talk about, the stuff that deforms lives that we want to talk about.”
  • The outgoing chair pointed to the increasing concern of a school-to-prison pipeline in the UK, where young minority ethnic children excluded from schools are forced into pupil referral units where they are groomed by criminal gangs – a clear example of systemic racism, he claims.
  • “To talk about unconscious biases is an obvious sidestepping of the matter. And it’s also wanting to let people off,” Prescod said.
  • The institute “insistently” talked about institutional racism then, but was in the minority and faced significant opposition, Prescod said. “In the end, it stuck because we then had the Macpherson report amongst others using a term which was not invented by them, but by communities of resistance.”
  • : “Ambalavaner Sivanandan [former director of IRR] and we at the institute were taking our cue from what the communities of resistance were saying. Institutionalised racism was not invented in the academy. It’s not invented by the politicians, it comes off the ground.
  • “It comes out of slow realisation where you start with one case that shows you injustice and after a while you pull that out and you realise that you’re looking at a whole string of things that tell you there’s something more than simply a wrongdoer in this situation.”
  • Prescod was not surprised at the government’s recent decision to drop crucial reform commitments made after the Windrush scandal. “This is not unlike what happened after the Macpherson report, which says very clearly institutionalised racism exists. And this is not just in the police. Any number of institutions have been looked at in this kind of way
  • When asked what he felt was the most significant change in Britain in terms of race, Prescod turned to a lyric from the British jazz band Sons of Kemet: “Don’t wanna take my country back, mate. I wanna take my country forward.” He said he finds it powerful black youth have claimed the country as their own.
  • “We now have populations here who are not thinking of themselves from some other place or going to some other place, but here, and are aware of their history of struggle. When Sons of Kemet says something like ‘we want to take our country forward’, notice all the words in the phrase.” He believes it shows a significant cultural shift of “new generations [of black Britons] born here, belonging here, speaking with a different kind of authority”.
  • Prescod said while there was no room for “triumphalism” when looking at racial progress, he was leaving his position with some hope. “There is always resistance. It’s only too clear. If you look at any situation in which somebody starts to be down-pressed, you will realise that there is somebody who is saying: get off my back, get off my throat. We don’t simply curl up.”
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The world has become a toxic prison - and a volcanic winter lurks on the horizon | The ... - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 26 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Peter Frankopan’s story of our relationship to the world across all planetary space and human time is necessarily vast – 660 pages of text, with footnotes relegated to 212 pages online – in which the grand cycle is enacted again and again
  • Volcanoes are the unexpected killers. Their spewing of ash into an atmosphere whose winds distribute it around the globe has repeatedly destroyed summers, devastated crops, induced famines and collapsed societies
  • From the very beginning, human beings have been actors in their own drama and responsible for large parts of their fate. Elasticity and inventiveness always win. Rigidity always fails, and so, for example, when the Qing dynasty began to collapse in late 18th-century China, beset by climate-induced crop failures, hunger and massive popular discontent, the contemporary administration in Japan, experiencing the same physical conditions, survived with no such difficulty.
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  • Riding the waves of mutability has always been possible if the frame of mind in government and society is adequately supple and responsive. Reliance on ancient nostrums, and expectations that old solutions will remain good enough, are almost inevitably fatal.
  • Civilisations that become dependent on large, widespread and complex supply networks and reciprocal markets usually generate their own fragilities. If one part of such a network fails, the effects cascade in a series of chain reactions through all apparently powerful participants in the system
  • The end of the Bronze Age c.1200 BC, perhaps triggered by drought in Anatolia, may have precipitated one such domino collapse, as the Hittite empire, the Mycenaeans, the Mesopotamian states and Pharaonic Egypt all either fell apart or shrank to an unrecognisable impotence.
  • The stability and good weather of the 18th century had allowed Qing, Mughal, Bourbon and Hanoverian regimes all to thrive, but China and India, more settled and less anxiously aggressive than Europe, did not take off in the way that the Continent’s empires did.
  • In his hands, the triumph of the West, with the unconscionable horrors of the Atlantic slave trade at its heart, takes on the appearance of an alarming fusion of Faust and Midas. For centuries, Europeans felt they could do no wrong. They could use the world, its people and beauties. They could transform it as they wished, shifting its plants, animals and populations where they wanted, and there would be no consequences. Or at least, as in those two myths of the cult of ‘entitlement’ – a word Frankopan repeatedly uses of the transforming empires – the consequences were hidden from the perpetrators.
  • His story of destruction over the past two centuries is one of arrogant myopia which led in the 20th century to ‘a sequence of catastrophes unparalleled both in human history and in that of the natural world. The suffering of the past 100 years has been by far the greatest in recorded history in terms of its scale and its horror’.
  • The assumption that man must conquer nature was allied to the capital and industrialised capacity to bring it about. Humanity became its own climate. Its own actions created the world in which it lived
  • The value of this book is as an act of deep understanding, recognising not only scientifically but culturally and philosophically that we are epiphenomena – not dominators of the Earth but products of it
  • Bleakly and soberingly, Frankopan recognises from the long line of precedents that the prospects are for a world of war and suffering. The destructive changes are already ‘baked in’. Success does not breed success, he says, but more often than not ‘sows the seeds of ruin’.
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Our Nation Cannot Censor Its Way Back to Cultural Health - 0 views

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  • The Supreme Court could not be more clear about the special importance of the First Amendment in the university setting. Cohn quotes these famous words from Sweezy v. New Hampshire:
  • The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.
  • Yet even when a state agency can regulate the expression of ideas, should it? After all, most cancel culture incidents don’t implicate the First Amendment either. Employers can fire you for your speech. Social media can block any of us from access to their platforms. But in law as in culture, the question of “can” is separate from the question of “should.”
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  • For example, a school board can remove the book Maus from its eighth-grade curriculum (because of profanity and mouse nudity), but should it? A school board can remove To Kill a Mockingbird (for alleged racial insensitivity) from a required reading list, but should it? 
  • In Board of Education v. Pico, a 1982 Supreme Court case that cast doubt on the ability of public schools to ban library books on the basis of their ideas alone, the court’s plurality described a purpose of public education as preparing “individuals for participation as citizens," and as vehicles for "inculcating fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system.”
  • I mounted a Christian defense of American classical liberalism, and I made the case that–while no system of government is perfect–American classical liberalism does possess two cardinal virtues. Its protections of liberty recognize both the dignity and the imperfection of man. 
  • Our nation is a diverse pluralistic constitutional republic, and as James Madison noted in Federalist No. 10, we cannot respond to the inevitable rise of competing factions by suppressing liberty, tempting as that always is. Madison was shrewd and realistic enough to recognize that liberty empowers factions. As he put it, “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires.”
  • At the same time, however, “it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”
  • Systematically suppressing ideas in public education does not help our students learn liberty, nor does it prepare them for pluralism. It teaches them to seek protection from ideas and that the method for engaging with difference is through domination. 
  • And few liberties encompass both that dignity and imperfection more than the right to speak. The violation of that right–the deprivation of that dignity–can inflict a profound moral injury on a citizen and it can help perpetuate profound injustices in society and government. As Douglass noted, free speech is the “dread of tyrants.”
  • Moreover, as John Stuart Mill’s argument for free speech demonstrates, free speech rests on a foundation of humility.
  • Summarizing Mill, Greg articulates “three possibilities in any given argument:
  • You are wrong, in which case freedom of speech is essential to allow people to correct you.
  • You are partially correct, in which case you need free speech and contrary viewpoints to help you get a more precise understanding of what the truth really is.
  • You are 100% correct, in which unlikely event you still need people to argue with you, to try to contradict you, and to try to prove you wrong. Why? Because if you never have to defend your points of view, there is a very good chance you don’t really understand them, and that you hold them the same way you would hold a prejudice or superstition. It’s only through arguing with contrary viewpoints that you come to understand why what you believe is true.
  • In short, I value free speech, not so much because I’m right and you need to hear from me, but rather because I’m very often wrong and need to hear from you. Free speech rests upon a foundation of human fallibility.
  • As American animosity rises, we simply cannot censor our way to social peace or unity. We can, however, violate the social compact, disrupt the founding logic of our republic, and deprive American students and American citizens of the exchange of ideas and of the liberty that has indeed caused, as Douglass prophesied, “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong” to tremble in the face of righteous challenge.
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What Spotify and the 'Audio Industry' Are Doing to Musicians - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • At its best, Spotify is an elegant tool—a conduit between artist and art and listener. But at its worst, it’s a bad actor in a worse industry that historically treats artists miserably
  • Even though the small number of streaming services have access to almost every bit of music that’s ever been recorded, and even though they strike near-monopolistic deals with near-monopolistic major labels, there isn’t quite enough money for anyone to make a good profit on streaming music. Too many middlemen take their share, and there’s a limit to how much people are willing to pay for music now that the internet exists.
  • The biggest tech companies have other ways to make money: Apple sold music by the song before starting a streaming service but always generated most of its earnings off hardware; Google has a seemingly infinite array of mysterious revenue sources.
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  • Spotify doesn’t have those things to turn to. So it’s been turning to podcasts. Besides enticing new subscribers with Spotify-branded podcasts—Rogan and Gimlet Media at the forefront of these—Spotify gets a new place to run ads. The podcast-advertising ecosystem is still lush enough to support additional harvesting. Spotify is betting that what used to be known as the music industry is in fact dead but that maybe the company can make money in the “audio industry.” But that shift involves decisions that disappoint even people jaded by years of experience with the recording business.
  • In the context of the devaluation of so many artists’ work, the backing of Rogan feels like a particularly nihilistic move. Spotify didn’t sign him for his talent or care at all about his impact—good or ill—on the world; with a heartless, almost video-game sensibility, they signed him to take market share from Apple and Google
  • Complaints against bloodless businessmen are hardly new. But what’s happening in music today feels less like individual acts of exploitation and more like the razing of an ecosystem.
  • When Rogan announced his signing, he emphasized that Spotify would have no creative control over his podcast. He was agreeing to a licensing deal, but he wouldn’t be an employee. “It will be the exact same show,” Rogan claimed
  • His comments fell somewhere between the gentle vibe of “Look, man, they’re offering me $100 million, so, uh, what am I supposed to do?” and a more aggressive “Spotify doesn’t own me, man. They are renting me for a certain period of time for $100 million—that’s different.” It’s infuriating that Rogan’s podcast has the trappings of counterculture while finding itself in such particular proximity to money and tech power. But I don’t know that, if I were Rogan, I would do much different.
  • Others in the “audio industry” face more discouraging trends. I suspect that the big record companies would dissolve if they weren’t still making so much money off the music of the 20th century.
  • I knew a lot of bands in the early 2000s whose members could quit their day job for a few years and make a living on relatively small amounts of record sales coupled with touring
  • Today, fewer artists are crossing the bar of being able to live purely off making and performing music. A lot of artists are failing to find a place in an “audio industry” that ever more efficiently mines smaller veins for what little cash can be extracted, or in a broader entertainment industry that has more in common with Marvel-movie spectacle than any particular sort of artistry.
  • My deep dread, though, is that this ability to tune out and focus on art becomes an aristocratic luxury; that a lack of money for music means a lack of money for musicians; that new ways of doing business are destroying the possibility of a creative middle class.
  • Solidarity is a tempting response to technological change, but my tired brain just can’t see the mechanism for it in this era. I honestly feel like a master sock weaver at the start of the industrial revolution. People will still get their socks, maybe worse than the ones before. And in the end, technology will plow us over.
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6 takeaways from the Texas primaries | CNN Politics - 0 views

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  • Texas is set for a heavyweight match-up between Abbott, a prolific fundraiser with a $50 million war chest, and O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman who has been his party’s only hope at winning statewide in recent years.
  • Abbott, who is seeking a third term, was always the favorite to win his party’s nomination despite far-right criticism of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic in its early days. But he spent $15 million to be sure of it, fending off former Florida congressman and Texas Republican Party chairman Allen West and former state Sen. Don Huffines.
  • O’Rourke, meanwhile, is seeking office for the third time in five years. His near-miss in the 2018 race against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz ignited Texas Democrats’ hopes that the state, with a diverse and growing population and suburbs that have moved leftward, would soon become a battleground.
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  • Texas Attorney General Paxton was unable to reach the 50% support he needed to avoid a runoff, and will face a head-to-head match-up with a member of the state’s best-known political family.
  • The efforts to oust him center on his legal troubles: Paxton has been under indictment since 2015 on securities fraud charges, and is being investigated by the FBI after former aides accused him of abusing the power of his office to help a political donor.
  • Progressives did have one victory to celebrate Tuesday night: Greg Casar, a former Austin city councilman, was projected to win the 35th Congressional District primary outright, avoiding a runoff.
  • he most competitive US House race in Texas this year could come in the 15th District, a South Texas district that stretches from towns east of San Antonio to the Rio Grande Valley.
  • Republican Monica De La Cruz, who came within 3 percentage points of defeating Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in 2020, will win the Republican nomination, CNN projected. Gonzalez, meanwhile, is running in the neighboring 34th District.
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U.S. announces new Russian sanctions, plans to admit thousands of Ukrainian refugees - 0 views

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  • BRUSSELS — The United States announced a package of new sanctions against Russia and further aid for Ukrainian refugees as President Joe Biden looked to rally the leaders of some of the world’s most powerful democracies to increase their efforts to help Ukraine in a series of high-stakes meetings.
  • with a focus on those who are most vulnerable. The administration is also prepared to offer more than $1 billion in additional funding toward humanitarian assistance and $11 billion over the next five years to address worldwide food security threats after the disruptions to the Russian and the Ukrainian agricultural industries.
  • While the U.S. announced new efforts around sanctions and refugees, it made no new military commitments — despite pleas from Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
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  • But Ukrainians never thought that the alliance and the allies were different."Zelenskyy told NATO that his country still needs more military equipment, specifically tanks and fighter jets, and chided them for not establishing a no-fly zone.
  • Biden has committed $2 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the start of his presidency, including an $800 million military package last week.
  • The NATO summit was followed by a meeting with leaders of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations and an address to European Union leaders, the White House said.
  • The U.S. also said that international organizations and multilateral corporations should no longer conduct their activities with Russia in a business-as-usual manner, the second official said. “Our purpose here is to methodically remove the benefits and privileges Russia once enjoyed as a participant in the international economic order,” the official said.The new sanctions include 328 Duma members; Herman Gref, the head of Russia’s largest financial institution Sberbank and a Putin adviser since the 1990s; member of the Russian elite Gennady Timchenko, his companies and his family members; 17 board members of the Russian financial institution Sovcombank; and 48 large Russian defense state-owned enterprises
  • As the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II enters its second month, the discussions here could be among the most consequential of Biden’s presidency. When Biden was asked as he was leaving the White House for Brussels how likely he thought the threat of chemical warfare was, he said, “I think it’s a real threat.”  
  • “We are united in condemning the Kremlin’s unprovoked aggression and in our support for Ukraine sovereignty and integrity," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said ahead of the meeting. The group would also discuss efforts to strengthen the military alliance's defenses in the short and the long term, he said.
  • Biden plans to travel to Poland on Friday to offer support as it deals with millions of refugees who are fleeing the conflict and to thank U.S. troops stationed there.
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Opinion | I'm What's Wrong With the Humanities - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and a professor in the English department. She was one of several academics who described, in Heller’s phrase, an “orientation toward the present” among contemporary college students so powerful that they “lost their bearings in the past.”
  • “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’” she told him, “I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences — like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb … Their capacities are different, and the 19th century is a long time ago.”
  • I flatter myself that I can mostly follow the sentence structure in these books, but in every other way I am the reader described by Claybaugh, too attached to the distracting present to enter fully the complex language of the past.
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  • let’s shift from self-flagellation to prescription
  • The essence of the humanities’ failure, over the last generation but especially in the internet era, 0c 0cis a refusal to accept that a similar kind of separation is necessary for what the guardians of the liberal arts are trying to preserve.
  • The quest, understandably enough, has always been to sustain relevance and connection — to politics, to professional life, to whatever trends appear at the cutting edge of fashion, to the idea of progress
  • But that quest can end only in self-destruction when the thing to which you’re trying so desperately to bind yourself (the culture and spirit of the smartphone-era internet, especially) is actually devouring all the habits of mind that are required for your own discipline’s survival. You simply cannot sustain a serious humanism as an integral part of a digitalized culture; you have to separate
  • “The humanities sealed their own fate,” the Temple University professor Jacob Shell tweeted in response to the Heller article, “when they refused to adjust to playing the needed role of intellectual ‘rightist’ critique of soc science, technocracy.”
  • a more modest version of Shell’s argument would be just that the humanities need to be proudly reactionary in some way, to push consciously against the digital order in some fashion, to self-consciously separate and make a virtue of that separation.
  • at the very least it would involve embracing an identity as the modern multiversity’s internal exiles — refusing any resentment of lavishly funded STEM buildings because that funding is corruption and your own calling is more esoteric and monastic, declining any claim to political relevance because what you’re offering is above and before the practical business of the world
  • It would mean banishing every token of the digital age from classrooms and libraries, shutting out the internet, offering your work much more as an initiation into mysteries, a plunge into the very depths. It would mean cultivating a set of skills even less immediately useful to technocratic professional life than reading a dense 19th-century text — memorization and recitation, to your classmates if possible
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Opinion | The Unsettling Truth About Trump's First Great Victory - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • The authors combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.”“Strongly related” is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level
  • We assess claims that Donald Trump received a particularly large number of votes from individuals with antagonistic attitudes toward racial outgroups
  • however, we show that in 2016 Trump’s largest gains in support, compared to Mitt Romney in 2012
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  • How could these two seemingly contradictory statements both be true?
  • respondents in 2016 and 2020 reported more moderate views, on average, than in previous elections. As a result, Trump improved the most over previous Republicans by capturing the votes of a larger number of people who report racially moderate views
  • the number of people scoring at moderate levels of racial resentment increased. Trump was not as popular among this voting bloc, compared to those with high racial resentment. But because this group is larger, whites with moderate racial resentment scores ended up contributing more net votes to Trump.
  • The point about Trump voters being less racially resentful on average than voters for previous Republican candidates, while likely true, should, I think, be interpreted as a statement about why it’s important to be mindful of over-time changes in groups’ sizes in the population,
  • Trump’s supporters were less xenophobic than prior Republican candidates’, less sexist, had lower animus to minority groups, and lower levels of racial resentment. Far from deplorables, Trump voters were, on average, more tolerant and understanding than voters for prior Republican candidates.
  • The data, Grimmer continued,point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it.
  • Several pieces of research into the 2016 election, including our book, “Identity Crisis,” and this interesting paper by Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau, find that people’s vote choices in that election were more strongly related to their views on “identity-inflected issues” than they had been in prior elections. That is why our book argues that these issues are central to how we interpret the outcome in 2016.
  • the Grimmer paper in fact provides a key corrective to the debate over the 2016 election. In an email, Kane pointed to a key section that reads:
  • election-night pundits and even some academics have claimed that Trump’s victory was the result of appealing to white Americans’ racist and xenophobic attitudes. We show this conventional wisdom is (at best) incomplete
  • understanding election outcomes requires not just understanding what contributes to vote choice (e.g., racial group attachments, racial prejudice), but also how many people with that particular attitude turned out to vote and what share of the electorate that group makes up.
  • The Grimmer paper, Engelhardt continued, “encourages us to take a step back and focus on the big picture for understanding elections: where do most votes come from and are these patterns consistent across elections?”
  • Trump, Westwood concluded, “found support from both racists and moderates, but with the pool of racist voters shrinking, it is clear this is not a path to future victory.”
  • Discussion of racial resentment driving support for Trump could miss how folks low in racial resentment were actually critical to the election outcome. The paper makes just this clarifying point, noting, for instance, that White Democrats low in racial resentment were even more influential in contributing votes to Clinton in 2016 than to Obama in 2012. Change between 2012 and 2016 is not exclusively due to the behavior of the most prejudiced.
  • “It is a nice reminder for scholars and, especially, the media, that it is important to think carefully about base rates.”
  • Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was a stress test for Republican partisanship, and Republican partisanship passed with flying colors
  • The election was close enough for Trump to win because the vast majority of G.O.P. voters found the idea of either sitting it out or voting for a Democrat they had spent 20+ years disliking so distasteful that Trump’s limitations, liabilities and overt racism and misogyny were not a deal-breaker.
  • Theodoridis noted that his oneminor methodological and measurement critique is that this sort of analysis has to take seriously what the racial resentment scale actually means
  • It may be that race is actually quite salient for those in the middle part of the scale, but they are just less overtly racist than those at the top of the scale.
  • Also, the meaning of the racial resentment scale changes over time in ways that are not independent of politics, and especially of presidential politics. Position on the scale is not immutable in the way some descriptive characteristics may be.
  • It is an interesting academic exercise to predict who will win the vote within a specific group, but it is more fundamental to elections to understand how many voters candidates will gain from each group
  • the important contribution from Grimmer et al is that there was a big change in the attitudes of the white electorate. A small number of whites with high levels of racial resentment did support Trump in 2016 at a higher rate than in prior elections, but the bulk of support for Trump came from more moderate whites. Trump managed to pull in support from racists, but he was able to pull in much more support from economically disadvantaged whites.
  • The Grimmer paper, according to Westwood, has significant implications for those making “general claims about the future Republican Party,” specifically challenging those who believe
  • that Republicans can continue to win by appealing to white Americans’ worst attitudes and instincts. While it is true Trump support is largest for the most racist voters, this group is a shrinking part of the electorate
  • Republicans, as Grimmer et al. show, must figure out how to appeal to moderate whites who hold more moderate attitudes in order to win
  • and NOT as a statement about Trump being successful in attracting racially liberal voters (indeed, those lowest in racial resentment turned away from him, per Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-Lau’s own findings).
  • it’s critical to avoid the idea that there is a single skeleton key that can explain all the varied undercurrents that led to Trump’s 2016 victory, or that any one paper will provide a definitive explanation
  • One clear benefit emerging from the continuing study of Trump’s 2016 victory is a better understanding of the complexity and nuance of what brought it about.
  • the presence of racial resentment among Republican voters emerged long before Trump ran for president, while such resentment among Democratic voters has been sharply declining
  • racial resentment didn’t do more for Trump than it did for Romney. The highly racially resentful have, with reason, been voting for Republicans for a long time
  • Trump’s more explicit use of race didn’t make supporters more racially resentful. Levels of racial resentment among Republicans are no higher now than they were before Trump. In fact, they are slightly lower
  • And the highly racially resentful already knew full well that their home was in the G.O.P.
  • While the focus of attention has been on those who fall at the high end of the distribution on racial resentment
  • Almost all the change has taken place among Democrats, as they moved to lower and lower levels of resentment
  • In a statistical sense, the fact that there are now so many more people at the low end of the distribution than before will produce a larger coefficient for the effect of racial resentment on voting behavior.
  • that does not mean that those high in racial resentment are now even more likely to vote for Republicans or that there are more people high in resentment
  • there are more people low in resentment than before and that they are even less likely to vote for Republicans than before. So the low end of the scale is doing the work.
  • my own view is that Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau have made a significant contribution to understanding the Trump phenomenon.
  • Most important, they make the case that explanations of Trump’s victory pointing to the role of those at the extremes on measures of racial resentment and sexism, while informative, are in their own way too comforting, fostering the belief that Trump’s triumph was the product of voters who have drifted far from the American mainstream.
  • In fact, the new analysis suggests that Trumpism has found fertile ground across a broad swath of the electorate, including many firmly in the mainstream. That Trump could capture the hearts and minds of these voters suggests that whatever he represents beyond racial resentment — anger, chaos, nihilism, hostility — is more powerful than many recognize or acknowledge
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Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz Spars With Democrats at Senate Hearing - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tz-starbucks-union-senate.html starbucks Democratic party senate unions economics politics
shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a former chief executive, said it was “somewhat rich that you’re being grilled by people who have never had the opportunity to create a single job.” He suggested that while a union might be necessary at companies “that are not good employers,” that was not the case at Starbucks.
  • Democrats’ response came at two levels of elevation. First, they said the company was excluding unionized stores from the benefits that Starbucks had introduced since the union campaign began, such as faster accrual of sick leave and a credit-card tipping option for customers, showing that its commitment to such benefits was tenuous.
  • More broadly, Democrats argued that unions acted as a corrective to a basic power imbalance between workers and management. A company might treat workers generously under one chief executive, then harshly under another. Only a union can ensure that the favorable treatment persists
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  • in illustrating how far the politics of labor have changed in Washington in recent decades, there was perhaps no better bellwether than Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado, a former business owner and self-described “extreme moderate.”
  • Mr. Hickenlooper conducted himself more respectfully and deferentially than most of his Democratic colleagues, applauding Mr. Schultz for “creating one of the most successful brands in American history” and declaring that “you know more about economics than I will ever know.” But in his questioning he aligned himself squarely with his party, pointing out that the rise of inequality in recent decades had coincided with the weakening of unions.
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We've Lost the True Meaning of Cynicism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...621314 life lessons cynicism history culture ethic satisfaction discipline self-sufficiency cosmopolitan
shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Cynicism—the belief that people are generally morally bankrupt and behave treacherously in order to maximize self-interest—dominates American culture.
  • Since 1964, the percentage of Americans who say they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” has fallen 53 points, from 77 to 24 percent. Sentiments about other institutions in society follow similar patterns.
  • the modern cynical outlook on life is terrible for your well-being. It makes you less healthy, less happy, less successful, and less respected by others.
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  • Instead of assuming that everyone and everything sucks, we should all live like the ancient Greek cynics, who rebelled against convention in a search for truth and enlightenment.
  • original cynicism was a philosophical movement likely founded by Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, and popularized by Diogenes of Sinope around the fifth century B.C. It was based on a refusal to accept the assumptions and habits that discourage people from questioning conventional dogmas, and thus hold us back from the search for deep wisdom and happiness.
  • Modern cynics also suffer poorer health than others. In 1991, researchers studying middle-aged men found that a cynical outlook significantly increased the odds of death from both cancer and heart disease—possibly because the cynics consumed more alcohol and tobacco than the non-cynics
  • The modern cynic rejects things out of hand (“This is stupid”), while the ancient cynic simply withholds judgment (“This may be right or wrong”)
  • “Modern cynicism [has] come to describe something antithetical to its previous meanings, a psychological state hardened against both moral reflection and intellectual persuasion,”
  • We can most definitely conclude, however, that modern cynicism is detrimental. In one 2009 study, researchers examining negative cynical attitudes found that people who scored high in this characteristic on a personality test were roughly five times more likely to suffer from depression later in life. In other words, that smirking 25-year-old is at elevated risk of turning into a depressed 44-year-old.
  • Whereas a modern cynic might say, for instance, that the president is an idiot and thus his policies aren’t worth considering, the ancient cynic would examine each policy impartially.
  • cynical attitudes lead to being treated disrespectfully—possibly because cynics tend to show disrespect to others, leading to a vicious cycle
  • Scholars writing in 2015 found that, even after correcting for gender, education, and age, the least cynical people saw an average monthly increase in income of about $300 over nine years
  • The most cynical saw no significant income increase at all. The authors explain this pattern by noting that cynics “are more likely to forgo valuable opportunities for cooperation and consequently less likely to reap the benefits of joint efforts and mutual help.” In other words, being a misanthrope is costly.
  • you shouldn’t merely try to avoid cynicism in all its forms. Instead, work to become a true cynic, in its original sense.
  • The ancient cynics strove to live by a set of principles characterized by mindfulness, detachment from worldly cravings, the radical equality of all people, and healthy living
  • If this sounds like Christianity or even Buddhism, it should:
  • in the following centuries, the ideas of cynicism and its offshoot stoicism heavily influenced early Christian thought.
  • To pivot from the modern to the ancient, I recommend focusing each day on several original cynical concepts, none of which condemns the world but all of which lead us to question, and in many cases reject, worldly conventions and practices.
  • 1. Eudaimonia (“satisfaction”)
  • The ancient cynics knew that lasting satisfaction cannot be derived from a constant struggle for possessions, pleasures, power, or prestige.
  • Happiness can come only from detaching ourselves from the world’s false promises.
  • Make a list of worldly rewards that are pulling at you—such as a luxury item or the admiration of others—and say out loud, “I will not be subjugated by this desire.”
  • 2. Askesis (“discipline”)
  • We cannot clear our mind of confusion and obfuscation until we stop anesthetizing ourselves, whether it be with drugs and alcohol or idle distractions from real life
  • Each day, forgo a detrimental substance or habit. Instead of watching television after dinner, go for a walk. Instead of a cocktail, have a glass of water
  • This discipline promises to strengthen your will and help you adopt routines that improve your happiness.
  • 3. Autarkeia (“self-sufficiency”)
  • Relying on the world—especially on getting approval from the world—makes equanimity and true freedom impossible.
  • Refuse to accept your craving for the high opinions of others. Think of a way that you habitually seek validation, be it for your looks, your cleverness in school, or your material prosperity. Make a plan to ignore this need completely
  • Note that this is not a modern-cynical practice of rejecting everything about the world; rather, you will simply be refusing to accept its conventional standards.
  • 4. Kosmopolites (“cosmopolitanism”)
  • Seeing ourselves as better or worse than others sets us against one another and makes love and friendship difficult, which is self-destructive.
  • Start each day by reminding yourself that the world belongs equally to everyone, and resolve not to treat anyone differently because of her status
  • he modern cynic is miserable because he is enchained to the outside world, which oppresses him because it is corrupt
  • The ancient cynic, by contrast, is happy—not because she thinks the outside world is perfect (it obviously is not) but because she chooses to focus on the integrity of her interior world, over which she has control.
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Book Review: 'Freedom's Dominion,' by Jefferson Cowie - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-dominion-jefferson-cowie.html freedom racism south confederacy history culture politics gop white supremacy
shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Cowie, a historian at Vanderbilt University, traces Wallace’s repressive creed to his birthplace, Barbour County, in Alabama’s southeastern corner, where the cry of “freedom” was heard from successive generations of settlers, slaveholders, secessionists and lynch mobs through the 19th and 20th centuries. The same cry echoes today in the rallies and online invective of the right
  • though Cowie keeps his focus on the past, his book sheds stark light on the present. It is essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand the unholy union, more than 200 years strong, between racism and the rabid loathing of government.
  • “Freedom’s Dominion” is local history, but in the way that Gettysburg was a local battle or the Montgomery bus boycott was a local protest.
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  • The book recounts four peak periods in the conflict between white Alabamians and the federal government: the wild rush, in the early 19th century, to seize and settle lands that belonged to the Creek Nation; Reconstruction; the reassertion of white supremacy under Jim Crow; and the attempts of Wallace and others to nullify the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s.
  • Throughout, as Cowie reveals, white Southerners portrayed the oppression of Black people and Native Americans not as a repudiation of freedom, but its precondition, its very foundation.
  • Following the election of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 and the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, the federal presence in the South was finally robust. So was the spirit of local defiance. In post-bellum Barbour County, Cowie writes, “peace only prevailed for freed people when federal troops were in town” — and then only barely
  • White men did all this in Barbour County, by design and without relent, and Cowie’s account of their acts is unsparing. His narrative is immersive; his characters are vividly rendered, whether familiar figures like Andrew Jackson or mostly forgotten magnates like J.W. Comer, a plantation owner who became, in the late 19th century, the architect of a vast, sadistic and extremely lucrative system of convict labor
  • Thus were white men, in the words of the scholar Orlando Patterson, whom Cowie quotes, “free to brutalize.” Thus were they free “to plunder and lay waste and call it peace, to rape and humiliate, to invade, conquer, uproot and degrade.”
  • the chaos in Alabama offended Jackson’s sense of discipline and made a mockery of his treaties with the Creeks. Beginning in 1832, and in fits and starts over the following year, federal troops looked to turn back or at least contain the white wave. Instead, their presence touched off a series of violent reprisals, created a cast of martyrs and folk heroes, and gave rise to the mythology of white victimization. Self-rule and local authority — rhetorical wrapping for this will to power — had become articles of faith, fervid as any religious belief.
  • The federal government is a character here, too — sometimes in a central role, sometimes remote to the point of irrelevance, and all too often feckless in the defense of a more inclusive, affirmative model of freedom.
  • When Grant stepped up the enforcement of voting rights, whites in Eufaula, Barbour County’s largest town, massacred Black citizens and engaged in furious efforts to manipulate or overturn elections. As in the 1830s, the federal government showed little stamina for the struggle. Republican losses in 1874 augured another retreat, this time for the better part of a century. In the vacuum, Cowie explains, emerged “the neoslavery of convict leasing, the vigilante justice of lynching, the degradation and debt of sharecropping and the official disenfranchisement of Blacks” under Jim Crow.
  • Wallace, as Cowie makes clear, had bigger ambitions. Instinctively, he knew that his brand of politics had an audience anywhere that white Americans were under strain and looking for someone to blame. Wallace became the sneering face of the backlash against the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, against any law or court ruling or social program that aimed to include Black Americans more fully in our national life. Racism was central to his appeal, yet its common note was grievance; the common enemies were elites, the press and the federal government. “Being a Southerner is no longer geographic,” he declared in 1964, during the first of his four runs for the White House. “It’s a philosophy and an attitude.”
  • That attitude, we know, is pervasive now — a primal, animating principle of conservative politics. We hear it in conspiracy theories about the “deep state”; we see it in the actions of Republican officials like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who built a case for his re-election in 2022 by banning — in the name of “individual freedom” — classroom discussions of gender, sexuality and systemic racism.
  • In explaining how we got here, “Freedom’s Dominion” emphasizes race above economics, but this seems fitting. The fixation on the free market, so long a defining feature of the Republican Party, has loosened its hold; taxes and regulations do not boil the blood as they once did. In their place is a stew of resentments as raw as any since George Wallace stirred the pot.
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