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Javier E

'Empire of Cotton,' by Sven Beckert - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-cotton-by-sven-beckert.html

cotton history economics global violence government intervention capitalism

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The history of an era often seems defined by a particular commodity.
  • The 18th century certainly belonged to sugar. The race to cultivate it in the West Indies was, in the words of the French Enlightenment writer Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal, “the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the Universe.”
  • In the 20th century and beyond, the commodity has been oil: determining events from the Allied partitioning of the Middle East after World War I to Hitler’s drive for Balkan and Caspian wells to the forging of our own fateful ties to the regimes of the Persian Gulf.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Harvard historian Sven Beckert makes the case that in the 19th century what most stirred the universe was cotton.
  • Today some 350 million people are involved in growing, transporting, weaving, stitching or otherwise processing the fibers of this plant.
  • the slave plantations that spread across the American South, a form of outsourcing before the word was invented. These showed that cotton could be lucratively cultivated in bulk for consumers as far afield as another continent, and that realization turned the world upside down. Without slavery, he says, there would have been no Industrial Revolution.
  • Beckert’s most significant contribution is to show how every stage of the industrialization of cotton rested on violence.
  • As soon as the profit potential of those Southern cotton fields became clear in the late 1780s, the transport of slaves across the Atlantic rapidly increased. Cotton cloth itself had become the most important merchandise European traders used to buy slaves in Africa.
  • Then planters discovered that climate and rainfall made the Deep South better cotton territory than the border states. Nearly a million American slaves were forcibly moved to Georgia, Mississippi and elsewhere, shattering many families in the process.
  • The search for more good cotton-­growing soil in areas that today are such states as Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma was a powerful incentive to force Native Americans off their traditional lands and onto reservations, another form of violence by the “military-cotton complex.”
  • by 1850, two-thirds of American cotton was grown on land that had been taken over by the United States since the beginning of the century.
  • Beckert practices what is known as global or world history: the study of events not limited to one country or continent.
  • another major theme of “Empire of Cotton” is that, contrary to the myth of untrammeled free enterprise, this expanding industry was fueled at every stage by government intervention.
  • it was not just in the United States that planters’ thirst to sow large tracts with cotton pushed indigenous peoples and self-sufficient farmers off their land; colonial armies did the same thing in India, West Africa and elsewhere
  • it was not only white Southerners who were responsible for the harsh regime of slave-grown cotton: merchants and bankers in the North and in Britain lent them money and were investors as well.
  • From Denmark to Mexico to Russia, states lent large sums to early clothing manufacturers. Whether it was canals and railways in Europe or levees on the Mississippi, governments jumped in to build or finance the infrastructure that big cotton growers and mills demanded
  • Britain forced Egypt and other territories to lower or eliminate their import duties on British cotton.
  • he wants to use that commodity as a lens on the development of the modern world itself. This he divides into two overlapping phases: “war capitalism” for the stage when slavery and colonial conquest prepared the ground for the cotton industry, and “industrial capitalism” for the period when states intervened to protect and help the business in other ways
  • Today, a “giant race to the bottom” by an industry always looking for cheaper labor has shifted most cotton growing and the work of turning it into clothing back to Asia
  • violence in different forms is still all too present. In Uzbekistan, up to two million children under 15 are put to work harvesting cotton each year
  • In China, the Communist Party’s suppression of free trade unions keeps cotton workers’ wages down, just as British law in the early 1800s saw to it that men and women who abandoned their ill-paid jobs and ran away could be jailed for breach of contract.
  • in Bangladesh, the more than 1,100 people killed in the notorious collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013 were mostly female clothing workers, whose employers were as careless about their safety as those who enforced 14- or 16-hour workdays in German and Spanish weaving mills a century before
Javier E

When Americans Lynched Mexicans - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mericans-lynched-mexicans.html

lynching hispanic violence history US culture law police

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • lynchers targeted many other racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, including Native Americans, Italians, Chinese and, especially, Mexicans.
  • From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases.
  • These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming.
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  • While there were similarities between the lynchings of blacks and Mexicans, there were also clear differences. One was that local authorities and deputized citizens played particularly conspicuous roles in mob violence against Mexicans.
  • Between 1915 and 1918, vigilantes, local law officers and Texas Rangers executed, without due process, unknown thousands of Mexicans for their alleged role in a revolutionary uprising known as the Plan de San Diego.
  • White fears of Mexican revolutionary violence exploded in July and August 1915, after Mexican raiders committed a series of assaults on the economic infrastructure of the Lower Rio Grande Valley in resistance to white dominance. The raids unleashed a bloody wave of retaliatory action amid a climate of intense paranoia.
  • While there are certainly instances in the history of the American South where law officers colluded in mob action, the level of engagement by local and state authorities in the reaction to the Plan de San Diego was remarkable
  • Historians have often ascribed to the South a distinctiveness that has set it apart from the rest of the United States. In so doing, they have created the impression of a peculiarly benighted region plagued by unparalleled levels of racial violence. The story of mob violence against Mexicans in the Southwest compels us to rethink the history of lynching
lenaurick

The rise of Donald Trump is a terrifying moment in American politics - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...donald-trump-terrifying

donald trump politics american crisis

shared by lenaurick on 13 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • It is undeniably enjoyable to watch Trump. He's red-faced, discursive, funny, angry, strange, unpredictable, and real. He speaks without filter and tweets with reckless abandon. The Donald Trump phenomenon is a riotous union of candidate ego and voter id. America's most skilled political entertainer is putting on the greatest show we've ever seen.
  • Trump is the most dangerous major candidate for president in memory. He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he's a racist, a sexist, and a demagogue, but he's also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante.
  • He lies so constantly and so fluently that it's hard to know if he even realizes he's lying.
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  • He's not a joke and he's not a clown. He's a man who could soon be making decisions of war and peace, who would decide which regulations are enforced and which are lifted, who would be responsible for nominating Supreme Court justices and representing America in the community of nations.
  • He climbed to the top of the polls in this election by calling Mexicans rapists and killers. He defended a poor debate performance by accusing Megyn Kelly of being on her period. He responded to rival Ted Cruz's surge by calling for a travel ban on Muslims. When two of his supporters attacked a homeless man and said they did it because "Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported," he brushed off complaints that he's inspiring violence by saying his supporters are "very passionate."
  • Behind Trump's success is an unerring instinct for harnessing anger, resentment, and fear.
  • "All the other candidates say 'Americans are angry, and I understand.' Trump says, 'I’M angry.'" Trump doesn't offer solutions so much as he offers villains. His message isn't so much that he'll help you as he'll hurt them.
  • Trump doesn't. He has the reality television star's ability to operate entirely without shame, and that permits him to operate entirely without restraint. It is the single scariest facet of his personality. It is the one that allows him to go where others won't, to say what others can't, to do what others wouldn't.
  • When MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked Trump about his affection for Vladimir Putin, who "kills journalists, political opponents and invades countries," Trump replied, "He's running his country, and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country."
  • It's a lie that if you put a frog into a pot of water and slowly turn up the heat the frog will simply boil, but it's a fact that if you put the American political system in a room with Trump for long enough we slowly lose track of how noxious he is, or we at least run out of ways to keep repeating it.
  • There is something scary in Donald Trump. We should fear his rise.
maddieireland334

U.S. prisoners Jason Rezaian, Amir Hekmati, Saeed Abedini, two others freed - CNN.com - 0 views

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

shared by maddieireland334 on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • A fifth American, Matthew Trevithick, is being released by Iran, but his release is not part of the negotiated prison swap, U.S. officials said Saturday.
  • So, that is an additional individual who was not a part of this negotiation given how longstanding the negotiation was, but we did indicate to Foreign Minister Zarif that it'd be important for them to try to resolve some of the other cases of Americans detained in the context of this.
  • Iran freed four U.S. prisoners on Friday, including Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, senior U.S. administration officials said, confirming reports first published in Iranian media.
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  • The announcement comes on a day when the United Nations' nuclear watchdog is expected to announce whether Iran is in compliance with a July deal to restrict its nuclear program.
  • "Based on an approval of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and the general interests of the Islamic Republic, four Iranian prisoners with dual nationality were freed today within the framework of a prisoner swap deal," the semi-official Iranian FARS news agency quoted the office of the Tehran prosecutor as saying.
  • Rezaian was detained by Iran in 2014 and eventually charged with espionage and other crimes, according to the Washington Post.
  • Hekmati was detained in 2011, weeks after arriving in Iran to visit his grandmother, according to his family's website. The former Marine infantryman and Arabic and Persian linguist was accused of espionage and other charges in 2012.
  • He appeared on Iranian television and said he was working for the CIA in a confession her mother and the U.S. State Department has said was forced and fabricated.
  • The punishment was later overturned, but Hekmati was later convicted of "cooperating with hostile governments" and sentenced to 10 years in prison, according to a website set up by his supporters.
  • Abedini, an Iran native and convert to Christinanity, was arrested in 2012 and convicted the next year on charges of attempting to undermine the Iranian government. He had been sentenced to eight years in prison.
  • The American Center for Law and Justice, a Washington-based group dedicated to protecting religious and constitutional freedoms, reported that Abedini has endured torture during his imprisonment and was beaten by fellow prisoners in June.
  • Abedini's wife, Naghmeh Abedini, said in the statement that the release was "an answer to prayer."
  • The releases appear to leave unresolved the fate of Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent and CIA contractor who disappeared after visiting Iran in 2007. As described in Iranian media, the deal does not appear to include Levinson, who is not Iranian-American.
qkirkpatrick

Donald Trump May Not Be a Fascist, But He Is Leading Us Merrily Down That Pat... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...e-a-fascist-but_b_8973768.html

donald trump history culture politics US

shared by qkirkpatrick on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • People who have studied the extremist right as a historical and sociopolitical phenomenon in depth are acutely aware of a simple truth: America has been very, very lucky so far when it comes to fascistic political movements.
  • Fascistic elements and tendencies have always been part of America's DNA. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of fascism in Europe were borrowed from their American exemplars - particularly the eliminationist tendencies, manifested first in the form of racial and ethnic segregation, and ultimately in genocidal violence.
  • Hitler acknowledged at various times his admiration for the American genocide against Native Americans, as well as the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow regime in the South (on which the Nuremberg Race Laws were modeled) and the threat of the lynch mob embodied in the Ku Klux Klan. According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler was "passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan. ... He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own." And indeed it was.
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  • Those of us who study fascism not just as a historical phenomenon, but as a living and breathing phenomenon that has always previously maintained a kind of half-life on the fringes of the American right, have come to understand that it is both a complex and a simple phenomenon
  • In many ways, Trump's fascistic-seeming presidential campaign fills in many of the components of that complex constellation of traits that comprises real fascism. Perhaps the most significant of these is the one component that has been utterl
  • There is little doubt that Trump is tapping into fascistic sentiments, which is why so many observers are now beginning to finally use the word in describing Trump's campaign.
  • Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump's appeal. His opening salvo in the campaign - the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race, poll-wise, and proved wildly popular with Republican voters - was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12 million of the United States' undocumented immigrants
Javier E

Trump and the Harsh Truth Exposed by the Midterms - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...575128

racial coalition racism nativism white supremacy

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • In the Trump era, Republicans counter economic security with cultural security. Trump promised to protect Americans from Latino murderers and women who destroy men’s lives by alleging sexual assault. And, to a significant extent, it worked. By mobilizing his white, rural base, Trump matched Democratic enthusiasm in purple states such as Florida and Ohio and overwhelmed Democratic incumbents in red states such as North Dakota, Indiana, and Missouri. It’s an old game: W. E. B. Du Bois famously called it the “psychological wage.” Instead of protecting white people from economic hardship, you protect them from the racial demons you’ve stirred up in their minds.
  • The harsh truth is this: Racism often works. Cross-racial coalitions for economic justice are the exception in American history. Mobilizing white people to protect their racial dominance is the norm.
  • The lesson of 2018 is that American politics is not reverting to “normal.” In many ways, Trumpism is normal. It’s not Trump who is running uphill against American tradition, it’s the people who are trying—bravely but with mixed success—to stop him
Javier E

Looking Back at the Economic Crash of 2008 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...adam-tooze-crashed.html

crash financial crisis great recession populism crisis trump

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • e has persisted and produced an intelligent explanation of the mechanisms that produced the crisis and the response to it. We continue to live with the consequences of both today.
  • By 2007, many were warning about a dangerous fragility in the system. But they worried about America’s gargantuan government deficits and debt
  • it was not a Chinese sell-off of American debt that triggered the crash, but rather, as Tooze writes, a problem “fully native to Western capitalism — a meltdown on Wall Street driven by toxic securitized subprime mortgages.”
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  • Tooze calls it a problem in “Western capitalism” intentionally. It was not just an American problem.
  • One of the great strengths of Tooze’s book is to demonstrate the deeply intertwined nature of the European and American financial systems.
  • In 2006, European banks generated a third of America’s riskiest privately issued mortgage-backed securities. By 2007, two-thirds of commercial paper issued was sponsored by a European financial entity.
  • “Between 2001 and 2006,” Tooze writes, “Greece, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, the U.K., France, Ireland and Spain all experienced real estate booms more severe than those that energized the United States.”
  • while the crisis may have been caused in both America and Europe, it was solved largely by Washington. Partly, this reflected the post-Cold War financial system, in which the dollar had become the hyperdominant global currency and, as a result, the Federal Reserve had truly become the world’s central bank.
  • therein lies the unique feature of the crash of 2008. Unlike that of 1929, it was not followed by a Great Depression. It was not so much the crisis as the rescue and its economic, political and social consequences that mattered most
  • The Fed acted aggressively and also in highly ingenious ways, becoming a guarantor of last resort to the battered balance sheets of American but also European banks. About half the liquidity support the Fed provided during the crisis went to European banks
  • Before the rescue and even in its early stages, the global economy was falling into a bottomless abyss. In the first months after the panic on Wall Street, world trade and industrial production fell at least as fast as they did during the first months of the Great Depression. Global capital flows declined by a staggering 90 percent
  • The Federal Reserve, with some assistance from other central banks, arrested this decline. The Obama fiscal stimulus also helped to break the fall.
  • China, with its own gigantic stimulus, created an oasis of growth in an otherwise stagnant global economy.
  • The rescue worked better than almost anyone imagined
  • The governing elite did not anticipate the crisis — as few elites have over hundreds of years of capitalism. But once it happened, many of them — particularly in America — acted quickly and intelligently, and as a result another Great Depression was averted. The system worked
  • But Tooze also convincingly shows that the European Central Bank mismanaged things from the start
  • On the left, the entire episode discredited the market-friendly policies of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Gerhard Schroeder, disheartening the center-left and emboldening those who want more government intervention in the economy
  • On the right, it became a rallying cry against bailouts and the Fed, buoying an imaginary free-market alternative to government intervention. Unlike in the 1930s, when the libertarian strategy was tried and only deepened the Depression, in the last 10 years it has been possible for the right to argue against the bailouts, secure in the knowledge that their proposed policies will never actually be implemented.
  • The crash brought together many forces that were around anyway — stagnant wages, widening inequality, anger about immigration and, above all, a deep distrust of elites and government — and supercharged them. The result has been a wave of nationalism, protectionism and populism in the West today.
  • confirmation of this can be found in the one major Western country that did not have a financial crisis and has little populism in its wake — Canada.
  • No government handled the crisis better than that of the United States, which acted in a surprisingly bipartisan fashion in late 2008 and almost seamlessly coordinated policy between the outgoing Bush and incoming Obama administrations. And yet, the backlash to the bailouts has produced the most consequential result in the United States.
  • experts are considering the new vulnerabilities of a global economy
  • we are confronting a quite different problem — an erratic, unpredictable United States led by a president who seems inclined to redo or even scrap the basic architecture of the system that America has painstakingly built since 1945. How will the world handle this unexpected development? What will be its outcome? This is the current crisis that we will live through and that historians will soon analyze.
Javier E

Fewer Americans are working. Don't blame immigrants or food stamps. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...lame-immigrants-or-food-stamps

working class work employment

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • The share of Americans with jobs dropped 4.5 percentage points from 1999 to 2016 — amounting to about 6.8 million fewer workers in 2016.
  • Between 50 and 70 percent of that decline probably was due to an aging population.
  • pretty much all the missing jobs are accounted for.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • trade with China and the rise of robots are to blame for millions of the missing jobs.
  • Other popular scapegoats, such as immigration, food stamps and Obamacare, did not even move the needle.
  • The era of vanishing jobs happened alongside one of the most unusual, disruptive eras in modern economic history — China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its subsequent rise to the top of the global export market.
  • this competition cost the economy about 2.65 million jobs over the period.
  • Automation also seems to have cost more jobs than it created. Guided by research showing that each robot takes the jobs of about 5.6 workers and that 250,475 robots had been added since 1999, the duo estimated that robots cost the economy another 1.4 million workers.
  • Abraham and Kearney used previous research into how teens and adults respond to rising wages to produce a high-end estimate of the impact of minimum wages over this period. Other recent research has found either a small effect or no effect. In the end, they combined those figures to find that about 0.49 million workers were lost.
  • the labor force shrank by about 0.36 million as an increasing number of workers drew disability benefits.
  • The paper’s most striking finding is not, however, speculation on idle American youths. It is that many of the topics that dominate political discourse about the labor market — such as immigration, food stamps and Obamacare — are unlikely to bring back lost jobs.
  • There were about 6.5 million former prisoners in the United States between the ages of 18 and 64 in 2014, according to the best available data. Assume that 60 percent of them served time as a result of policies implemented since the 1990s, account for their ages, time served, and pre-prison earnings, and you get a conservative estimate of 0.32 million lost jobs.
  • What did not reduce employment
  • Immigration Most research indicates that immigration does not reduce native employment rates.
  • Food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) SNAP benefits average about $4.11 per person per day. Able-bodied adults are generally cut off from benefits unless they are working.
  • The Affordable Care Act Obamacare went into effect in 2014 and has not had a noticeable impact on jobs to date.
  • Working spouses who allow men to stay home While this is a popular theory, the share of men who are not in the labor force but had a working spouse actually fell slightly between 1999 and 2015
  • other explanations are out there, pushing and pulling the estimates in either direction.
  • The economists estimated that roughly 0.15 million people were not working because of the expansion of a disability insurance program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
  • Instead, policymakers should be focusing on the forces that took those jobs in the first place: import competition, automation, incarceration and disability insurance.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Can the Republic Strike Back? - 0 views

nymag.com/...-the-republic-strike-back.html

gop immigrants stereotypes neoconservatism conservatism

shared by Javier E on 03 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • There are few historical guides. It is hard to think of a precedent for a president who endorses violence against political foes, sees the Justice Department as his own personal prosecutor, calls the press “the enemy of the people,” tears children from parents, brags of multiple sexual assaults, threatens to lock up his opponents, enthuses about war crimes, “falls in love” with the foulest dictator on the planet, refuses to divest of personal holdings in office, lambastes allies, treats the Treasury as a casino, actively endorses the poisoning of the environment, destabilizes NATO, baits minorities, lies incessantly, and oversees a resurgence of the white nationalist right. Any single gesture in any one of these areas would have been political death for most previous presidents
  • White anxiety and discomfort in the face of mass immigration is not going to disappear. As I argued last week, it will likely intensify. The global pressures that suppress wages are not waning. The despair in so much of left-behind America cannot be blotted out indefinitely with fentanyl. The collapse of local communities is not going to turn around overnight, and automation is unstoppable. Fear of change is correlated to the pace of change, and the latter shows no sign of deceleration
  • this new alignment is organized less around policy or the role of government, than on the feelings of security and confidence in the modern world. And in our current crisis, the closed, fixed, fearful view of the world is, understandably, in the ascendant
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  • Tom Edsall made a vital point yesterday in the New York Times, citing a new study. In America, a center-right country, those with “fixed views” are 42 percent of the electorate; those with “fluid views” are 32 percent; and those hybrids in the middle (which is where I find myself) are 26 percent. More to the point, the hybrids “are more like the fixed than they are the fluid.”
  • The Italian leftist, Antonio Gramsci, famously wrote, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
  • He was being deliberately provocative in his original remarks: “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men.” He suggested “we have to do something about them,” and referred to the “Muslim ban” as an analogy. It’s a dumb analogy, since it’s about immigrants from a select number of Muslim-majority countries, while “white men” is clearly about American citizens. But the Muslim analogy works in another way. We go out of our way — and rightly so, in my view — not to associate Islamist terrorists with American Muslims. And we do so because it’s grotesquely unfair to generalize from a tiny few to an entire population. If it’s unfair to do that for Muslims, why is it okay for “white men”?
  • On the facts, he insisted, he is not wrong about domestic terrorism. Right-wing terror is at least as dangerous as Islamist terror, maybe more: “Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, far-right violent extremists have killed 106 people in 62 attacks in the United States, while radical Islamist violent extremists have killed 119 people in 23 attacks.” He’s right about that — and, with Pittsburgh, there are now 11 more victims on the far-right side of the ledger
  • At what point is it legitimate to make sweeping negative generalizations about whole classes of people?
  • it seems to me important to keep the denigration of entire classes of people in check. It’s morally wrong, and it’s politically counterproductive. The issue is not the far-right terrorists’ whiteness or their maleness, but their extremism and psychology.
  • In a liberal society, we don’t judge the individual by the group or the group by the individual. It’s worth resisting the urge to do so when you feel it (as we all do from time to time). Especially when you believe your motives are good ones
  • The most striking thing about Max Boot, the former neocon who has become one of the most passionate Never Trumpers, is his naïveté. After decades of diligence in the ranks of the conservative movement, it took the emergence of Trump to make him see that almost everything he previously trusted and believed in could disappear overnight. I’m glad he has seen the light on this, and enjoyed his book, The Corrosion of Conservatism, as a memoir of that naïveté
  • He’s a first-generation immigrant, just like me. And we tend to idolize America. Unlike most people, we chose it. For us, America will always be an escape and a vision of a life made new. We look past its flaws, blur over its past, miss the racial backstory, rationalize foreign interventions in ways many native-born Americans would balk at. We immigrants are the ultimate American idealists
  • If you are also a conservative, and came here in the twilight of the Cold War, you will also have been swept away by what appeared to be the triumph of your set of ideas, the total defeat of Soviet Communism, the collapse of collectivism, and the spread of freedom around the world. And the last two decades of the 20th century, when Boot and I came of age, were as intoxicating for a conservative immigrant to America as the first two decades of the 21st have been profoundly disillusioning
  • My breaking point was the revelation that the GOP backed the brutal torture of prisoners, the total abnegation of a politics of freedom. If you didn’t recognize the barbarism that lay just beneath the Republican surface then, you were blinded by something pretty powerful.
  • But there’s a danger to Damascene moments. It’s so very tempting to replace one tribe with another, one fixed ideology for its opposite, and to make that conversion the central part of your identity.
brookegoodman

Women trailblazers who inspire us right now (opinion - CNN - 0 views

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

us history

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • (CNN)In 2020, Women's History Month comes amid a time of social upheaval and global fear over the coronavirus pandemic and resulting political turmoil. While for many the 2020 presidential race is now an afterthought, this Women's History Month does also mark the departure of the last remaining women candidates from the 2020 presidential field -- during an election year that also marks the centennial of women's suffrage.
  • Here is a glimpse at those inspiring stories and figures—who they are, what they've meant to these women in the past and what they mean to them now, looking forward in 2020 and beyond. As trailblazing tennis legend Billie Jean King once said to me, "Whatever you care about, you can make a difference. You really can. Don't ever underestimate yourself. Do not underestimate the human spirit."
  • Madeleine Albright is the first woman to serve as US Secretary of State. She is the author of multiple books, including the shortly forthcoming "Hell and Other Destinations: A 21st-Century Memoir."
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  • In the United States, this story is perhaps best exemplified by Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross and one of the most celebrated figures in the nation's history. Her lifesaving work on Civil War battlefields and her lasting contributions to the betterment of society are a reminder of how much a determined woman can do.
  • In this historic year of celebrating the 19th Amendment giving women the power of the vote, I'm still a believer in Bella's prediction because I have witnessed what can happen when women bring forward the full scope of our experiences as mothers, daughters and sisters, individually and collectively, to redefine power by how we use it and share it. From negotiating peace to leading toward climate justice, we have, as a global women's community, the opportunity to fully actualize Bella's faith in us.
  • Although recent victories against these companies are encouraging, there is a long fight ahead of us still, and Rachel will continue to inspire. Because she never gave up, and she succeeded in banning DDT despite the vested interests of corporations and the government—despite the fact that she was secretly battling the cancer that killed her. In addition, I was always supported and encouraged by my mother.
  • My first reaction to learning about Claudette Colvin was, "How did I not know about her until now?" In 1955, Claudette was 15 and living in Montgomery, Alabama. On her ride home from school one day, the driver ordered her to give up her seat to a white woman. Claudette refused, and two police officers dragged her off the bus in handcuffs.
  • When I first met Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, I was a young, single mom on public assistance and food stamps. I was active in the community—serving as president of the Black Student Union, volunteering with the Black Panther Party, while raising two young boys. The time I spent on her campaign deeply impacted my life.
  • As soon as she finished her speech, I offered to do anything I could for her campaign. But when she asked me if I was registered to vote, I admitted that I was not. She was not pleased. She looked at me and said: "Little girl, you can't change the system if you're on the outside looking in. Register to vote."
  • Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm remains an inspiration to little girls and women everywhere, including myself, reminding us to strive for what's possible, unburdened by what's been. As my mother—another hero in my eyes—used to say, "You may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last."
  • When the New York Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights passed 10 years ago, I knew I was both witnessing a massive historical achievement in that moment and riding the crest of a longer historical arc, lifted up by millions of women who have been fighting for respect and dignity for generations.
  • Along with nearly one thousand other women from all over the world, I traveled to Brussels in May of 1989 for the first-ever international peace conference convened by women. Proudly hanging on the front of the European Parliament building was a banner: "WOMEN: GIVE PEACE A CHANCE."
  • One of the people who has inspired me is Mariame Kaba, one of the nation's leading prison abolitionists and the founder of the organization Project NIA, which works to end youth incarceration. She's truly remarkable. One of the attributes I most admire about her is the resilience she embodies and the genuine sense of hope she exudes. She is deeply principled and warm hearted in her pursuit of justice. She said something years ago that has stayed with me: "Hope is a discipline." When things feel bleak, I come back to these words to maintain perspective and to persevere.
  • In 1962, after two years studying chimpanzees, I went to Cambridge University to read for a PhD in ethology. There I was told there was a difference in kind between humans and other animals, that only we humans had personalities, minds, and emotions. But I had learned that this was not true from my childhood teachers, my wonderful mother and my dog, Rusty! So I refused to comply with this reductionist thinking. Eventually, because the chimpanzees are so similar to us biologically as well as behaviorally, most scientists accepted that we are part of the animal kingdom. But I received much criticism.
  • Amelia Earhart broke the barrier for women in aviation, then Jackie Cochran founded the WASP, a WWII Women Pilots Service, paving the way for Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.
  • And finally, suffragists rallied and marched for women's equality starting in 1848, seeking the basic right to vote and assure their voices were counted. It took over 50 years before their dream was realized and none of the brave early leaders lived to celebrate or exercise this important right. It opened so many doors for the next steps to true equality.
  • More than 20 years ago in Beijing, Hillary Clinton stood in front of the United Nations World Conference on Women and declared that "human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights." Although Hillary's history-making speech was directed at the world, it felt like she was speaking directly to me. At the time, I was a young lawyer, but Hillary's words forced me to ask myself tough questions about what I was doing to make the world a better place.
  • During times of uncertainty, it's important to reach for inspiration as a way to stay connected to what's possible. I'm grateful for my own mother, Lynette Schwartz, who taught me from a young age to always expect the unexpected and be prepared for the things that you cannot see. When I was growing up, I used to think that my mother was unnecessarily worried about everything and overly prepared. Her advice and habits have become especially helpful in the last few weeks as uncertainty spreads. Because of her, our home has become a sanctuary for those who don't have the same.
  • The women of color who founded the movement we carry forward today are my inspiration. Their persistence to be seen and heard gives me strength to carry on in uncertain times. The term "women of color" was born in 1977 in Houston, Texas, at the first and only National Women's Conference. There, among more than 20,000 mostly white women, a cadre of Black, Latina, Asian American and Native women redefined the women's agenda to include race, class and solidarity. They inspired entire generations of us to step fully into our collective leadership and power. Now women of color—a majority of women in several states—are leading progressive reforms as voters, organizers and courageous elected leaders.
  • I can still remember standing with my mother, Ann Richards, on the floor of the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. It was the first time we'd done anything like this together. As State Treasurer of Texas, Mom had been asked to give a speech seconding Walter Mondale's nomination for the presidency, and she asked me to go along. Even though her speech was the next day, it was the furthest thing from our minds while we waited for Mondale's running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, to take the stage. That night, she would become the first woman ever nominated as vice president on a major party ticket.
  • As a young girl impacted by over-policing and over-incarceration in my communities, I was particularly grateful when I learned about the abolitionist movement that helped support enslaved Africans to gain their freedom. I would learn and relearn the brilliant story of Harriet Tubman—a young enslaved woman who would free herself from slavery and eventually free so many others including her entire family. This kind of bravery helped me assess the life I was living and created a courage in me that translated into the work I currently do today.
  • In my life, I have had many moments of self-doubt when I have felt that I lacked the knowledge, the background, the expertise necessary to deal with vexing issues. Most women have had such experiences.
  • Born into slavery and orphaned as a young woman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was an uncompromising and courageous voice for race and gender justice. She resisted not just the terror of racism and the suffocation of sexism, but also the conventions that artificially limited advocacy against these "isms."
  • When I wrote "American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country" an observation jumped out: in many instances in the remarkable progress of women in history, the first barrier breakers worked for years to be recognized in their fields, but never saw their success.
  • We went out into one of the tiny rice-paddy villages, a cluster of six tin open-sided lean-to huts. It's a day's trek, by minibus from the little town of Bontoc, then by foot up and down steep hillsides and across fragile rope bridges, then teetering along thin strips of earth that divide the paddies. Finally we sit on the mud floor of one of the huts, drinking peanut coffee from a shared tin cup. Urban Filipinas speak English, some Spanish and only a little Filipino (Tagalog); the tribal people of the North have their own languages. One woman translates.
  • Later that afternoon, each of us clutching at the ropes of a swaying bridge, my activist translator shouted to me that somehow, she must find the funding to start an adult literacy program for the women of this rice paddy. And so we all did. But Gunnawa is always with me. Because all of us need to know how to read the signs that tell us where we are. So we can know where we're going.
mimiterranova

GOP group 'Stop Stacey' targets Abrams ahead of expected 2022 run | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...ams-ahead-of-expected-2022-run

Politics Georgia targets

shared by mimiterranova on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • GOP group 'Stop Stacey' targets Abrams ahead of expected 2022 run By Julia Manchester - 02/01/21 09:19 AM EST 863 17,083 AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookFacebookFacebookShare to TwitterTwitterTwitter Share   Just In... Fauci: CDC will release new guidance for vaccinated Americans 'very soon' Healthcare — 2m 39s ago Veteran PAC slams Tucker Carlson for comments on female service members BriefingRoom BlogRoll — 24m 3s ago US officials debating sending millions of AstraZeneca doses awaiting clearance overseas: report Administration — 48m 11s ago Biden denounces hate, violence against Asian Americans: 'It must stop' News — 1h 29m ago Biden administration to implement testing programs in schools as part of reopening effort field
  • publican strategists aligned with Georgia Gov. Brian KempBrian KempGeorgia Senate votes to repeal no-excuse absentee voting Two Republicans can stop voter suppression Trump fires back at WSJ editorial urging GOP to move on MORE (R) on Monday launched an outside group aimed at stopping a potential 2022 gubernatorial run by Democrat Stacey Abrams.
  • "We will do whatever it takes to expose Stacey Abrams’ radical network, highlight her dangerous agenda, and ultimately defeat her — and her left-wing candidates — at the ballot box," the group's senior strategist, Jeremy Brand, said in a statement. "There is no time to waste: We must stand up, fight back, and Stop Stacey.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In the two years since Abram's first run, her group Fair Fight has registered tens of thousands of voters in the Peach State and raised $100 million.
aleija

Opinion | The New C.D.C. Chief Rochelle Walensky's Pledge on Public Health - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lle-walensky-cdc-director.html

pandemic US health opinion

shared by aleija on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Last Wednesday, the same day our nation’s Capitol was in the grips of an insurrection, the United States recorded 3,964 deaths from Covid-19, a record high. That day, Covid-19 claimed a life every 22 seconds. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts that this month the country will surpass more than 400,000 deaths from Covid.
  • On Jan. 20, I will begin leading the C.D.C., which was founded in 1946 to meet precisely the kinds of challenges posed by this pandemic.
  • I will do so by leading with facts, science and integrity — and being accountable for them, as the C.D.C. has done since its founding 75 years ago.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Restoring the public’s trust in the C.D.C. is crucial. Hospitals and health care providers are beyond tired, beyond stretched.
  • We also face the need for the largest public health operation in a century, vaccinating the population — twice — to protect ourselves and each other from a surging pandemic. Because the impact of Covid-19 does not fall equally on everyone, we must redouble our efforts to reach every corner of the U.S. population.
  • Our successful recovery from this virus requires us to make sure that those who have suffered disproportionately are no longer left behind. As the C.D.C. director, I will work to address inequities that have left African-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans hospitalized and dying at disproportionately higher rates from Covid-19, by focusing on the health conditions that are prevalent in communities of color.
  • I promise to work with my colleagues at the C.D.C. to harness the power of American science and confront these challenges.
Javier E

Opinion | The Age of Aquarius, All Over Again! - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rology-occult-millennials.html

spiritual change crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 11 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • astrology. According to a 2018 Pew poll, 29 percent of Americans say they believe in astrology. That’s more than are members of mainline Protestant churches.
  • 44 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds say that astrology is somewhat or very “scientific.”
  • in 2017 the typical horoscope got 150 percent more traffic than it had the year before.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • witchcraft. In 1990, only 8,000 Americans self-identified as Wiccans. Ten years later there were 134,000, and today, along with other neo-pagans, there are over a million
  • “Wicca, by that estimation, is technically the fastest-growing religion in America.”
  • The third great rising spiritual force is mindfulness
  • The fourth is wokeness, what some have called the Great Awokening. Burton’s essay is really about how astrology and witchcraft have become important spiritual vocabularies within parts of the social justice movement.
  • These surging movements are people’s attempts to solve the major needs of the current moment
  • The first need is simply to find a way to be spiritual. People are always saying we live in a more secular age, but secularism never really comes
  • Humans are transcendent creatures who have spiritual experiences and instinctively appeal to supernatural powers.
  • Second, there is a widespread need to slow down, to escape the pace of life technology wants and to live at a human pace.
  • Third, there is a widespread need to express alienation
  • Political alienation manifests itself in the alt-right and the energized radical left. It makes sense that it would manifest itself in the spiritual realm, too.
  • Fourth is the need for identity markers
  • Astrology tells you who you are and what traits you have. In a highly diverse society, it also tells you what sort of people you’re likely to be compatible and incompatible with. When I hear people talk about astrology, this is how they are using it.
  • Fifth is the desire to live within a coherent creed and community, but without having that creed impinge on your individual autonomy
  • The emerging spirituality is a hodgepodge spirituality. Each person borrows practices from, say, Native American, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish and SoulCycle tradition
  • Finally, many people seem to want to be alternative without actually leaving the mainstream world
  • The people I know who talk about astrology sort of believe it, but they sort of don’t. Their attitude is ironical, attached and detached all at once.
  • I doubt it’s possible to have tight community and also total autonomy, that it’s possible to detach spiritual practices from the larger narratives and cultures and still have something life-shaping
  • We really are living through a moment of major transitional change.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Is There a Way to Acknowledge Our Progress? - 0 views

nymag.com/...-acknowledge-our-progress.html

perception threat progress human psychology bias perspective pessimism

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • picking someone who has bent the truth so often about so many things — her ancestry, her commitment to serving a full term as senator, the schools her kids went to, the job her father had (according to her brother), or the time she was “fired” for being pregnant — is an unnecessary burden.
  • The Democrat I think is most likely to lose to Trump is Elizabeth Warren.I admire her ambition and grit and aggression, but nominating a woke, preachy Harvard professor plays directly into Trump’s hands
  • Pete Buttigieg’s appeal has waned for me.
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  • over time, the combination of his perfect résumé, his actorly ability to change register as he unpacks a sentence, and his smoothness and self-love have begun to worry me. My fear is that his appeal will fade
  • Klobuchar, to my mind, is the better midwestern option. She is an engaging and successful politician. But there’s a reason she seemingly can’t get more traction. She just doesn’t command a room
  • I so want Biden to be ten years younger. I can’t help but be very fond of the man, and he does have a mix of qualities that appeal to both African-Americans and white working-class midwesterners. What I worry about is his constant stumbling in his speech, his muddling of words, those many moments when his eyes close, and his face twitches, as he tries to finish a sentence
  • Sanders has been on the far left all his life, and the oppo research the GOP throws at him could be brutal. He’s a man, after all, who sided with a Marxist-Leninist party that supported Ayatollah Khomeini during the hostage crisis in 1979. He loved the monstrous dictator Fidel Castro and took his 1988 honeymoon in the Soviet Union, no less, where he openly and publicly criticized his own country and praised many aspects of the Soviet system
  • On two key issues, immigration and identity politics, Bernie has sensibilities and instincts that could neutralize these two strong points for Trump. Sanders has always loathed the idea of open borders and the effect they have on domestic wages, and he doesn’t fit well with the entire woke industry. He still believes in class struggle, not the culture war
  • Biden has an advantage because of Obama, his appeal to the midwestern voters (if he wins back Pennsylvania, that would work wonders), and his rapport with African-Americans. But he also seems pretty out of it.
Javier E

Which States Have Coronavirus Travel Restrictions? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617321

quarantine

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Hawaii has one of the strictest quarantine laws in the country.
  • The state’s geographic isolation has helped and hurt its efforts to control the virus. On one hand, the state would be completely unequipped to deal with a coronavirus surge. There are no states nearby from which to borrow doctors or ICU capacity. The island of Kauai has just 15 ventilators. On the other hand, everyone enters Hawaii through its airports, which makes enforcing a quarantine easier there than in almost every other state.
  • There’s no national database of quarantine noncompliance, but in U.S. states other than Hawaii, quarantine violations rarely result in fines or jail time—or, really, any consequences at all,
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Yet quarantine compliance is essential for the combination of testing, contact tracing, and isolation of sick people to work. Simply telling people they’ve been exposed and letting them loose on the nation’s Outback Steakhouses is not sufficient
  • Public-health departments are reluctant to seem like bad cops—or cops at all.
  • Hawaii created its quarantine law as a travel quarantine, stopping everyone at the airport. These types of quarantines are logistically easier to implement—they don’t require contact tracers—than medical quarantines, in which the state orders a certain individual to stay in isolation
  • Some other countries have imposed much tougher travel restrictions and quarantine policies. At one point, Greeks were required to text authorities to explain why they needed to go out. Norway quarantined its own citizens under threat of a fine or imprisonment. Most foreigners still can’t fly to Vietnam.
  • Keen believes that Hawaii residents are on such high alert because of long-ago pandemics that came to the islands and killed large percentages of the population
  • “Generations of stories you hear, from great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, that the pandemics nearly killed off Native Hawaiians,” she told me. “So there is a great fear here of outsiders coming in and bringing it with them.”
  • On the mainland, states cite a combination of COVID-19 denial, logistical hurdles, and funding and personnel shortages to explain why they haven’t been willing or able to enforce quarantines.
  • scofflaws: Some people stay inside for three or four days, then decide, “I’m bored with staying home,”
  • Even if a North Dakotan wants to do the right thing, she might not be able to without going hungry or losing her job. Grocery delivery isn’t available in parts of the large and rural state
  • Some states can’t quarantine people, because they have too many cases to trace
  • In fact, many COVID-exposed Americans who want to stay home and quarantine have an intractable problem: Their bosses won’t let them
  • The Families First Coronavirus Response Act granted paid leave to recover from COVID-19 to many Americans. But the law doesn’t cover everyone: Large companies aren’t included, and small companies can claim an exemption. Because of these exemptions, only 47 percent of private-sector workers have guaranteed access to coronavirus-related sick leave,
  • The U.S. is the only country out of 193 nations to exclude workers from sick-leave benefits based on the size of the company they work for, according to a recent UCLA study.
  • “We don’t really pay people to stay at home to quarantine,” Polly Price, a global-health professor at Emory University, says. But that’s exactly the problem: In a study in Israel, people were more likely to quarantine after exposure to COVID-19 if they were paid during their isolation.
  • Months into the pandemic, half of Americans didn’t know they might have the right to stay home with pay if they contracted the coronavirus.
  • even if they did, employers might have pressured them to come to work if they were no longer showing symptoms,
  • “After testing positive, employees are being scheduled and expected to work as long as they don’t show symptoms and [are] not placed in quarantine,” a worker at a Georgia taco restaurant complained in July. OSHA has formally inspected just 11 of the employers in these incidents. “Under the Trump administration, OSHA decided to do almost no enforcement,”
  • America’s laissez-faire federal pandemic response has, in effect, treated each state like its own country
  • When it comes time to isolate sick people, though, it becomes painfully clear that states aren’t countries. Wisconsin can’t stop Iowans from driving into it. North Dakota doesn’t have enough health workers to trace all of its infected citizens. The governor can’t help you when your employer is—legally—dragging you back into the office.
  • the reason Hawaii has been so ruthlessly effective at quarantine is that it in some ways still acts as its own country with its own border controls.
  • The state consistently has some of the lowest case numbers in the nation. As with so many other pandemic rules, Americans might not like quarantine, but it works.
lilyrashkind

7 Common Foods Eaten in the 13 Colonies - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...13-colonies-food-drink

colonies history

shared by lilyrashkind on 16 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • What people ate in colonial America largely depended on where they lived. Due to differences in climate, available natural resources and cultural heritage of the colonists themselves, the daily diet of a New Englander differed greatly from his counterparts in the Middle Colonies—New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware—and even more so from those in the South.
  • In an era long before refrigeration, popular methods of food preservation included drying, salting, smoking and brining, or some combination of these. Another method used to preserve meat was potting. This involved cooking the meat and packing it tightly into a jar, then covering it with butter, lard or tallow (beef fat) before capping it. Potting kept meat safe for weeks or even months; cooks would then open the pot and slice off pieces to serve for a meal.
  • With its multicolored white, blue, red and brown hues, flint corn—also known as Indian corn—is one of the oldest varieties of corn. It was a staple food for Native Americans, who essentially saved the earliest colonists from starvation by teaching them how to plant the crop, when to harvest it and how to grind it into meal. Corn became a dietary staple across all 13 colonies, with cornmeal used in favorite recipes such as hasty pudding (corn boiled in milk) and johnnycakes, a fortifying and highly portable food similar to pancakes
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  • in fact, that the birds eventually went extinct; the last known passenger pigeon died in 1914.
  • The Compleat Housewife would likely have been found in any well-to-do household in the late colonial era, when the mid-day “dinner” could consist of three courses, with multiple dishes per course.
  • Though regional, seasonal and other differences make it difficult to generalize about a typical colonial diet, the following seven foods and beverages are a small sample of what might have been found on many colonial tables.
  • Pickles
  • umble cookies—sometimes spelled “jumbal”—can be considered the ancestors of modern sugar cookies, though far less sweet. Recipes appeared in cookbooks in England as early as 1585, and the cookies became a popular staple in the colonies. “You will find recipes for jumble cookies by the thousands,” says Nahon; even Martha Washington was said to have her own.
  • Black pepper’s antibacterial properties make it a good preservative, and this imported spice took center stage in the pepper cake, a gingerbread-like loaf flavored with black pepper and molasses and studded with candied fruits.
  • Colonial Americans drank a lot of alcohol, and this popular drink-dessert dating to the 18th century combined sweetened whipped cream with wine or hard cider. The resulting frothy concoction was often served on special occasions. Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, which in 1796 became the first cookbook by an American to be published in the United States, included a recipe for syllabub that called for the cook to flavor cider with sugar, grate nutmeg into it—and milk a cow directly into the liquor. 
Javier E

Nations don't get rich by plundering other nations - 0 views

www.noahpinion.blog/...ns-dont-get-rich-by-plundering

imperialism exploitation international economics politics history growth wealth national investment

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • One idea that I often encounter in the world of economic discussion, and which annoys me greatly, is that nations get rich by looting other nations.
  • This idea is a pillar of “third world” socialism and “decolonial” thinking, but it also exists on the political Right. This is, in a sense, a very natural thing to believe — imperialism is a very real feature of world history, and natural resources sometimes do get looted. So this isn’t a straw man; it’s a common misconception that needs debunkin
  • it’s important to debunk it, because only when we understand how nations actually do get rich can we Americans make sure we take the necessary steps to make sure our nation stays rich.
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  • The first thing to notice is that in the past, no country was rich.
  • even allowing for quite a bit of uncertainty, it’s definitely true that the average citizen of a developed country, or a middle-income country, is far more materially wealthy than their ancestors were 200 years ago:
  • If you account for increasing population and look at total GDP, the increase is even more dramatic.
  • What this means is that whatever today’s rich countries did to get rich, they weren’t doing it in 1820.
  • Imperialism is very old — the Romans, the Persians, the Mongols, and many other empires all pillaged and plundered plenty of wealth. But despite all of that plunder, no country in the world was getting particularly rich, by modern standards, until the latter half of the 20th century.
  • Think about all the imperial plunder that was happening in 1820. The U.S. had 1.7 million slaves and was in the process of taking land from Native Americans. Latin American countries had slavery, as well as other slavery-like labor systems for their indigenous peoples. European empires were already exploiting overseas colonies.
  • But despite all this plunder and extraction of resources and labor, Americans and Europeans were extremely poor by modern standards.
  • With no antibiotics, vaccines, or water treatment, even rich people suffered constantly from all sorts of horrible diseases. They didn’t have cars or trains or airplanes to take them around. Their food was meager and far less varied than ours today. Their living space was much smaller, with little privacy or personal space. Their clothes were shabby and fell apart quickly.
  • At night their houses were dark, and without air conditioning they had trouble escaping the summer heat. They had to carry water from place to place, and even rich people pooped in outhouses or chamberpots. Everyone had bedbugs. Most water supplies were carried from place to place by hand.
  • They were plundering as hard as they could, but it wasn’t making them rich.
  • although Africa, Latin America, and Asia were closer to Europe in terms of living standards back then, they were all very, very poor by modern standards.
marleymorton

Old Treaties and New Alliances Empower Native Americans - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-empower-native-americans.html

politics US

shared by marleymorton on 15 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • marleymorton on 15 Nov 16
     
    "The tribal voice, and their concerns and what happens on those lands - that's accelerating right now, and where it's going to go I don't know," said John Freemuth, a professor of public policy at Boise State University who studies public lands. "It's a big story and a growing story," he added.
alexdeltufo

Whose Fascism Is This, Anyway? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...se-fascism-is-this-anyway.html

shared by alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • “Trump is a fascist,”
  • “We are here faced by fascists,” Hilary Benn, the Labour Party’s foreign affairs spokesman, declares to the House of Commons,
  • That was George Orwell, in 1944. He had heard the epithet “fascist” applied, he said, to fox-hunting, Kipling, Gandhi, homosexuality, “astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • “And what we know about fascists,” he went on, “is that they need to be defeated.”
  • by 1945 the ideology lay shredded on the battlefield, apart from a few holdovers in Spain and Latin America.
  • with a rather confused etymology, from armed gangs in Sicily called fasci, but also invoking “fasces,”
  • As the symbol of Mussolini’s regime, it was emblazoned on flags and military aircraft, although its recognizable silhouette
  • When the word was first coined, fascism was a rather incoherent ideology, a response to — though bred out of
  • Hitler called himself a National Socialist, and Mussolini had in fact been a socialist of the extreme left.
  • “the word ‘fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” So has it acquired any more useful meaning in the 70 years since? The latest
  • ut is your fascism my fascism, or his or her fascism?
  • ome years ago he was writing with perplexity about the political situation he found in his native England, where “dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries” were warning against American hubris,
  • anti-fascist tradition.”
  • Since then we have been warned about “Islamofascism,” and Al Qaeda and ISIS are denounced by Western politicians and commentators as “fascists.”
  • but something pan-Islamic, entirely unlike the central European definition of fascism as ultranationalism.
  • from France to Poland and Hungary, where far-right governments tinged with xenophobia are already in power.
  • they only want Christian refugees, not Muslims.
  • But the whole Islamic world is in the throes of a vast crisis quite unlike anything Europe underwent in the past century.
  • American tradition of know-nothing bigotry and nativism that Mr. Trump adorns
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Javier E

Can Liberal Democracy Survive Social Media? | by Yascha Mounk | NYR Daily | T... - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...democracy-survive-social-media

democracy liberal social media myth politics

shared by Javier E on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • the basic deal that traditional elites offered to the people at the inception of our political system: “As long as you let us call the shots, we will pretend to let you rule.”
  • Today, that deal is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, and the reason is both unlikely and counterintuitive
  • Until a few decades ago, governments and big media companies enjoyed an oligopoly over the means of mass communication. As a result, they could set the standards of acceptable political discourse.
  • ...47 more annotations...
  • In one of the most subtle early analyses of what he tellingly called “Liberation Technology,” Larry Diamond argued that new digital tools would empower “citizens to report news, expose wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest, monitor elections, scrutinize government, deepen participation, and expand the horizons of freedom.” Diamond’s article was published in the summer of 2010.
  • Twitter, Andrew Sullivan wrote in The Atlantic, had proven to be a “critical tool for organizing.” In twenty-first-century conflict, Nicholas Kristof echoed in The New York Times, “government thugs firing bullets” would increasingly come up against the resistance of “young protesters firing ‘tweets.’”
  • As Clay Shirky argued in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, even in longstanding democracies like the United States the power of digital technology made it much easier for activists to coordinate
  • thanks to Twitter, Donald Trump did not need the infrastructure of traditional media outlets. Instead, he could tweet messages directly to his millions of followers. Once he had done so, established broadcasters faced a stark choice: ignore the main subject of conversation and make themselves irrelevant—or discuss each tweet at length, thereby amplifying Trump’s message even as they ostensibly scrutinized it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they chose the latter course of action.
  • Breathless claims about digital technology’s liberating potential turned into equally breathless prognostications of doom. Social media was declared the most dangerous foe of liberal democracy.
  • The truth about social media is not that it is necessarily good or bad for liberal democracy. Nor is it that social media inherently strengthens or undermines tolerance.
  • On the contrary, it is that social media closes the technological gap between insiders and outsiders.
  • At times, this meant marginalizing passionate critics of the status quo—and thus making it harder for the weak and powerless to make their voices heard. At other times, it meant declining to publish conspiracy theories, outright lies, or racist rants—and thus stabilizing liberal democracy
  • The credibility of those claims depends on what they are compared to. So long as the memory of absolute monarchy was recent, and a more directly democratic system seemed unfeasible, liberal democracies could claim to empower the people.
  • One response has been to put pressure on Twitter and Facebook to change their algorithms and enforce stricter community guidelines; this is the tack that most tech critics have taken in the United State
  • Another response has been to limit what can be said on social media platforms by coercive legislation; this is the stance that European governments have adopted, with remarkable speed.
  • it seems at least as plausible to think that Americans won’t be willing to compromise on their First Amendment rights; that they will decamp to more freewheeling alternatives if existing social media platforms are tamed; and, indeed, that more subtle, yet no less powerful, forms of hate will continue to spread on existing platforms even if its most outrageous manifestations are suppressed.
  • There is, then, a very real possibility that the rise of digital technology, and the concomitant spread of essentially costless communication, have set up a direct clash between two of our most cherished values: freedom of speech and the stability of our political system.
  • the challenge is even more fundamental.
  • Rather, the daily experience of liking and sharing posts on social media may habituate users to a simulated form of direct democracy that makes the existing institutions of representative democracy appear intolerably outmoded.
  • Could digital natives—reared on the direct efficacy of social media—simply be less willing to tolerate the slow, indirect workings of analogue institutions designed in the eighteenth century?
  • And might they therefore be more resistant to accepting the democratic myth that has long underwritten the stability of the American Republic?
  • The political systems of countries like Great Britain and the United States were founded not to promote, but to oppose, democracy; they only acquired a democratic halo in retrospect, thanks to more recent claims that they allowed the people to rule.
  • the rise of the Internet and social media is making the ideological foundation of liberal democracy—which has had a tight hold over our imagination for the better part of two centuries—look increasingly brittle.
  • This held true for the century or so during which democracy enjoyed an unprecedented ideological hegemony. In the age of the Internet, it no longer does. As a result, the democratic myth that helped to make our institutions look uniquely legitimate is losing its hold.
  • The undemocratic roots of our supposedly democratic institutions are clearly on display in Great Britain. Parliament was not designed to put power in the hands of the people; it was a blood-soaked compromise between a beleaguered monarch and the upper echelons of the country’s elite
  • Because the US was founded in a more ideologically self-conscious manner, the same history is even more evident here. For the Founding Fathers, the election of representatives, which we have come to regard as the most democratic way to translate popular views into public policy, was a mechanism for keeping the people at bay
  • In short, the Founding Fathers did not believe a representative republic to be second best; they found it far preferable to the factious horrors of a true democracy.
  • It was only in the nineteenth century, as egalitarian sentiment rose on both sides of the Atlantic, that a set of entrepreneurial thinkers began to dress an ideologically self-conscious republic up in the unaccustomed robes of a born-again democracy.
  • Only gradually did the US make real improvements to its democratic process.
  • And crucial to that transformation was a story about the limits of democratic governance under modern conditions.
  • In ancient Athens, so the story went, the people—or at least those who were regarded as the people, which is to say adult male citizens—could rule directly because there were relatively few of them, because the territory of the state was so small, and because they had leisure to govern since so many of them owned slaves who took care of their daily needs
  • As John Adams noted, the people “can never act, consult, or reason together, because they cannot march five hundred miles, nor spare the time, nor find a space to meet.” In industrial nations that expanded over a huge territory direct democracy was thought to be impossible.
  • While representative institutions had been founded in ideological opposition to democracy, they were now re-described as the closest instantiation of that ideal possible under modern conditions. Thus, the founding myth of liberal-democratic ideology—the improbable fiction that representative government would facilitate the rule of the people—was born.
  • we have not even started to address the issue of how to make the democratic promise of our political system ring true for a new generation.
  • or a long century, the founding myth of liberal democracy retained sufficient footing in reality to keep a deep hold over the popular imagination, and help one political system conquer half the globe. But that basis is now crumbling
  • With the advent of the Internet, John Adams’s worry about the people’s inability to deliberate together has come to seem quaint
  • The physical agora of ancient Athens could be replaced by a virtual agora that would allow millions to debate and vote on policy proposals with even greater ease. As a result, citizens now have a much more instinctive sense that our democratic institutions are highly mediated.
  • They know that if we wanted to design a system of government that truly allowed the people to rule, it would not look much like the representative democracy of today.
  • The rise of the Internet and social media has thus created a giant mismatch between the direct efficiency of our digital lives and the cumbersome inefficiency of our formal institutions—and that has accentuated the contrast between our system’s promise to let the people rule and the reality that the people rarely feel as though they can have a real impact on the most important decisions facing their country
  • The Internet threatens to end the hegemony of liberal democracy not only by amplifying the voice of a small band of haters and extremists, but also by alienating a much larger number of digital natives from the decidedly analogue institutions by which they are governed.
  • We have only just begun to face up to the first big corrosive influence of digital technology on our politics: the way in which social media has helped to mainstream extremists
  • We’re only beginning to understand how we can stop vast platforms like Facebook and Twitter from spreading hate and fake news—and whether that will even prove possible without sacrificing constitutive elements of our political system
  • The rising tide of egalitarian sentiment during the nineteenth century should, by rights, have come into conflict with a set of avowedly aristocratic institutions. Instead, its fresh packaging gave the representative institutions of the United States and the United Kingdom a new lease on life. It pleased the elites who continued to get their way on the most important issues as much as it pleased the egalitarians who came to see it as a realization of their aspirations.
  • the widespread frustration with the state has less to do with excessive bureaucracy or overly cumbersome processes than it does with the underlying reality of the economy and the welfare state: what political scientists call the “performance legitimacy” of our political system has suffered from a combination of rising living costs, stagnating real wages, growing inequality, and dwindling social services.
  • More important, the real barrier to public participation in politics has always been interest, time, and expertise as much as it has been technology
  • Even if it were easy to weigh in, even vote, on every decision made at the local, county, state, and federal level, most citizens would hardly marshal the enthusiasm to be so intimately engaged with such a wide variety of questions of public policy.
  • Nor would most citizens miraculously develop the expertise to assess, for example, what kinds of regulations are needed to keep a power plant safe
  • A dozen years after the invention of Facebook, by contrast, the new technology has spread to every corner of the globe. Some two billion people actively use the platform.
  • there can be little doubt that, in the short run—which is to say, for the rest of our lives—it will make for a more chaotic world.
  • Unfettered by the constraints of the old media system, and buoyed by a growing popular cynicism about democracy’s promise, the demagogues have been willing to say whatever it takes to get elected—to flatter and deceive, to obfuscate, and even to incite hatred of their fellow citizens. Perhaps their rhetoric will prove to be unstoppable. As one state legislator recently pointed out to me, it is difficult for a rational politician to win a debate with a three-sentence answer when his rival is offering a one-sentence answer—especially when the other candidate can blast his simplistic take all over Twitter and Facebook.
  • All is not lost. But to revitalize liberal democracy in the digital age, it will not be enough to think carefully about how to enforce privacy rights or stifle the most hateful voices on the Internet. We must also think anew about how to fill the democratic promise with meaning for a new generation that has lost the belief in the democratic myth that long provided legitimacy for our political system.
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