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Javier E

Opinion | The Audacity of Hate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-anger-fear.html

polarization politics history trust partisan

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Karl Rove had a novel idea for how to organize President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.
  • He and the chief campaign strategist, Matthew Dowd, decided on a “base strategy.” They reallocated the bulk of the campaign’s media budget to focus on social conservatives instead of on moderates — a decision predicated on the fact that the swing, or persuadable, share of the electorate had shrunk from one in five voters to less than one in 10.
  • The result was a shift that year from a traditional centrist strategy to an emphasis on anger and fear, a shift that turned out to have profound long-term consequences.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • American politics were irrevocably transformed, polarization strategies became institutionalized and the stage was set for the explicit racial and anti-immigrant themes dominating Donald Trump’s campaigns for election and re-election.
  • Three major events over the next 10 years bridged the gap between the White House campaign of George W. Bush and the White House campaign of Donald J. Trump.
  • The economic meltdown of 2007-9 devastated faith in the American economic system and in the nation’s elected leaders — especially the Republican establishment.
  • A second response to intensifying fears, however, was the emergence of the Tea Party, which mobilized racially and financially apprehensive whites who felt abandoned by the Republican leadership.
  • The Tea Party changed what it was permissible to debate openly in contemporary politics. Within a few years, it enabled Trump to further erode the norms of political combat and more openly instigate partisan conflict based on racial and ethnic antagonism.
  • Under Trump, coded rhetoric like Reagan’s “welfare queen” and Nixon’s “silent majority,” was — and is — no longer coded.
  • Sean Trende, an election analyst at RealClearPolitics, Vox reported, “offered a different diagnosis: Romney’s real problem was ‘missing’ white voters who didn’t show up to vote,” and Trende was proved right: As the 2016 primary battle progressed, “those voters” were “no longer missing.” Trump had found them.
  • the most significant damage resulting from negative partisanship and polarization isthat the normal methods of accountability in a democratic society cease to apply. It used to be that people, regardless of party, believed government statistics about the employment rate and other metrics of progress and national well-being. Now, our interpretation of the basic facts of whether we are going in the right or wrong direction is dominated by whether expressing such an opinion is consistent with that which would advantage our tribe.
  • Partisan polarization has become hard-wired in the American political system and is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. Our constitutional system is not well matched with our current party system. Partisan asymmetry makes it even worse. The GOP has radicalized into an anti-system party that does not accept the legitimacy of its opposition and enables a slide toward autocracy. Very dangerous times for American democracy.
  • It is an environment in which negative campaigning, on TV and on social media, has become the instrument of choice, not a tool, but the beating heart of political partisanship.
  • The rise in hostile views of the opposition candidate, the two authors argue, “is not primarily due to learning about real ideological positions of the candidates and the parties.” Instead, they write, the more likely explanation is that the effectiveness of these campaigns is in reminding “partisans about the negative traits of the out-party candidate, and positive traits of her own party.”
  • When you take today’s urban-rural divide, couple it with the most engaged citizens’ tendency to live in echo chambers, and add accelerants in the forms of identity politics and misinformation campaigns, you have a house waiting to go up in flames.
  • We identify three possible negative outcomes for democracy,”
  • The three negative outcomes, according to the authors, are gridlock; democratic erosion or collapse under new elites and dominant groups; and democratic erosion or collapse under old elites and dominant groups.
  • With few exceptions, political scientists are pessimistic about both the short- and long-term prospects for amelioration of hostile partisan division.
  • More than anything, Trump intuitively understood how polarization, and with it, the intense hatred among legions of Republican voters of liberal elites and of the so-called meritocracy could be a powerful tool to win elections.
  • trust in the electoral process is now contingent on who wins. That is, losers will cry ‘fraud’ and consider the president illegitimate, even if the election is well-run. This is the kind of dynamic we see in the developing world and unstable democracies. It is a recipe for disaster.
  • it is more likely that that bygone era was the aberration and today’s hyperpolarization is what we should expect in equilibrium. In other words, we probably ought to accept the current state of affairs as the new normal.
katherineharron

Trump's post-presidency: On the attack with the help of the Fox and Newsmax propaganda ... - 0 views

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

trump

shared by katherineharron on 23 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Former President Donald Trump was audible, if not visible, all day long on Monday — and the effect is to keep him front and center in the Republican Party conversation.
  • His unwillingness, or inability, to lay low is exactly what many Trump observers expected
  • when broadcaster Rush Limbaugh died, Trump resumed his old habit of calling into TV networks, with two calls to Fox and one call each to Newsmax and One America News.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Lately Trump has been doing what comes naturally to him — dictating tweet-like statements, calling into conservative talk shows, and generally stirring up trouble. "I like this better than Twitter," he claimed on Newsmax. "Actually they did us a favor. This is better."
  • Trump has shown no courtesy to President Joe Biden since leaving the White House.
  • On the phone with one of his biggest sycophants, Newsmax's Greg Kelly, on Monday evening, Kelly speculated about Biden's mental faculties, prompting Trump to say "there's something" going on with Biden. Trump then questioned "whether or not he understands what he's signing" when bills cross his desk.
  • Trump is the first US president to lose re-election in nearly thirty years.
  • Trump, of course, proudly stands as the GOP antithesis of Bush 41. President 45, as some of his allies now call him, lest they identify him as "former," was uncharacteristically quiet upon leaving the White House. But he set up an office in Florida within days and began issuing statements that were widely picked up by the media — a cheap replacement for his account on Twitter, which banned him in the wake of the Capitol riot.
  • "The code of the presidents club is to get out of the way and let the new commander in chief have a year or two," CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said.
  • Since then, he has gradually increased his visibility, with emails to members of the media from "45 Office" so far in March, twice as many as in February
  • "Trump's unique in that he wants to make a lot of racket and garner attention after leaving the White House,"
  • Trump said "people have seen some silence" from him, "but actually, if you take a look at what's happened over the last period of time, we're sending out releases. They're getting picked up much better than any tweet."
  • Trump also teased plans for "our own platform,"
  • Trump told Boothe that he now believes official statements to the public are "much more elegant than a tweet, and I think it gets picked up better. You're seeing that."
  • "Picked up" was the key phrase. The need for pickup — meaning attention from the American news media — is at the heart of Trump's post-presidential actions.
  • And he is continuing to push the incendiary claims that led up to the January 6 riot, about winning the 2020 election and Biden stealing it from him, despite pleas even from within his own party to stop lying.
  • Trump seemed self-aware about his media approach during a podcast taping with Lisa Boothe, which was released on Monday morning. Trump was Boothe's inaugural guest — which means the podcast does not yet have a high profile or a massive following. Trump said in a statement that she has been doing "an outstanding job" on Fox, so perhaps he wanted to give her new podcast a boost.
  • Brinkley likened Trump to "an active political hand grenade, ready to blow up the US political system any way he can.
  • Last week Trump called into Fox for a live interview with Maria Bartiromo. The next day his comments to Bartiromo were in heavy rotation on other right-wing networks and outlets.
  • To Kelly, he hedged about the possibility of a new social platform, saying that "something will happen with social media if I want it to happen."
hannahcarter11

Analysis: Fox News' rivals are using the network's own dishonest tactics against it - CNN - 1 views

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

fox news news tactics cnn trump biden

shared by hannahcarter11 on 20 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • For more than two decades, Fox News has conditioned its audience to distrust news that collides with its worldview or theirs. Inconvenient facts have been dismissed and blamed on the "liberal media" or the "deep state" or one of the many other boogeymen favored by the right at any particular time. 
  • But now that strategy could be catching up to the conservative cable channel, with rising competition from networks such as Newsmax and OAN, which have positioned themselves as Trumpier than Fox.
  • the acknowledgment of reality is angering Fox's audience, some members of which are refusing to accept the truth of the matter and rebelling when it is force-fed to them. 
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Trump, who is livid at Fox for calling Arizona for Biden on Election Night and for not supporting him as slavishly as he would like, has been encouraging those viewers to change the channel and tune into Newsmax or OAN. 
  • the propagandists on Fox, like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, continue to undercut their own network's reporting by ludicrously suggesting that Trump could be correct to assert that something nefarious did actually take place to rig the election in favor of Biden.
  • Shows on Newsmax that were averaging less than 100,000 viewers are now amassing audiences several times as large. Last week, one show even crossed over one million viewers.
  • Fox has primed viewers to distrust journalists and it has disseminated disinformation and promoted conspiracy theories that support the President. Now, Trump and these fledgling networks are wielding these tactics like a weapon against Fox. In some cases they're also using former Fox personalities against them.
  • If Fox executives are frustrated or perplexed by a the portion of their audience protesting the channel, they need only to look in the mirror to understand who bears the main share of the responsibility. 
Javier E

Covering politics in a "post-truth" America | Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...litics-in-a-post-truth-america

post-truth politics journalism media fake news crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
  • Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.
  • I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • (An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)
  • Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year
  • the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
  • Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.
  • none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.
  • This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.
  • To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.
  • Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.
  • Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.
  • This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.
  • I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.
  • In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”
  • These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.
  • I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.
  • And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.
  • Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.
  • Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.
  • , we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.
  • politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth
  • Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.
  • As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.
  • And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.
  • When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.
  • when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!
  • By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.
  • in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.
  • 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.
  • So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.
Javier E

In clash between Trump and the Khans, new signs of a cultural and political divide - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-9aee-8075993d73a2_story.html

candor trump political correctness

shared by Javier E on 01 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Trump — who famously said in January that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters” — remains confident that what would be fatal breaches of political etiquette in most elections will only cement his reputation as a fearless truth-teller.
  • The more outrageous the comments, the more some voters will conclude that Trump is the candidate who would break some china and get things done, said Mark Burnett, who produced “The Apprentice,” Trump’s popular TV reality show. “People want to hear the unvarnished, that same style that he showed on ‘The Apprentice,’ ” Burnett said in an interview earlier this year, “the ability to speak his mind clearly and not tone down his voice in a politically correct, TV way.”
Javier E

The Party Still Decides - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-party-still-decides.html

demagogue party nomination gop 2016 culture responsibility

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • As Donald Trump attempts to clamber to the Republican nomination over a still-divided opposition, there will be a lot of talk about how all these rules and quirks and complexities are just a way for insiders to steal the nomination away from him, in a kind of establishment coup against his otherwise inevitable victory.
  • We can expect to hear this case from Trump’s growing host of thralls and acolytes. (Ben Carson, come on down!) But we will also hear it from the officially neutral press, where there will be much brow-furrowed concern over the perils of party resistance to Trump’s progress, the “bad optics” of denying him the nomination if he arrives at the convention with the most delegates, the backlash sure to come if his uprising is somehow, well, trumped by the party apparatus.
  • Americans speak and think in the language of democracy, and so these arguments will find an audience,
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • But they cut against the deeper wisdom of the American political tradition. The less-than-democratic side of party nominations is a virtue of our system, not a flaw, and it has often been a necessary check on the passions
  • That check has weakened with the decline of machines, bosses and smoke-filled rooms. But in many ways it remains very much in force — confronting would-be demagogues with complicated ballot requirements, insisting that a potential Coriolanus or a Sulla count delegates in Guam and South Dakota, asking men who aspire to awesome power to submit to the veto of state chairmen and local newspapers, the town meeting and the caucus hall.
  • Goldwater and McGovern were both men of principle and experience and civic virtue, leading factions that had not yet come to full maturity. This made them political losers; it did not make them demagogues.
  • But if that exercise is painful, it’s also the correct path to choose. A man so transparently unfit for office should not be placed before the American people as a candidate for president under any kind of imprimatur save his own. And there is no point in even having a party apparatus, no point in all those chairmen and state conventions and delegate rosters, if they cannot be mobilized to prevent 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate from imposing a Trump nomination on the party.
  • Denying him the nomination would indeed be an ugly exercise, one that would weaken or crush the party’s general election chances, and leave the G.O.P. with a long hard climb back up to unity and health.
  • Trump, though, is cut from a very different cloth. He’s an authoritarian, not an ideologue, and his antecedents aren’t Goldwater or McGovern; they’re figures like George Wallace and Huey Long, with a side of the fictional Buzz Windrip from Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here.” No modern political party has nominated a candidate like this; no serious political party ever should.
  • What Trump has demonstrated is that in our present cultural environment, and in the Republican Party’s present state of bankruptcy, the first lines of defense against a demagogue no longer hold. Because he’s loud and rich and famous, because he’s run his campaign like a reality TV show, because he’s horribly compelling and, yes, sometimes even right, Trump has come this far without many endorsements or institutional support, without much in the way of a normal organization
  • So in Cleveland this summer, the men and women of the Republican Party may face a straightforward choice: Betray the large minority of Republicans who cast their votes for Trump, or betray their obligations to their country.For a party proud of its patriotism, the choice should not be hard.
  • Ross, you got to the right conclusion, but you still can't bring yourself to connect all the dots. The disease is not Donald Trump. He's merely a symptom, albeit a malignant one. Rather, it is the party itself (and its enablers) that is sick unto death. Why not come clean and admit that you set sail on a pirate ship and now find yourself lost at sea?
  • Ross, you act as though Trump threatens to become the GOP's first "man unfit for office". In fact, the House and Senate are full of them.Please feel free to defend the "fitness" of Tom Cotton, Louis Gohmert, Jim Inhofe, Trey Gowdy and countless others. This is what your party has become. It's far, far worse than just Trump.
  • Oh, "the passions that mass democracy constantly threatens to unleash." As if Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Dick Armey -- in the service of Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and the Kochs et al. -- hadn't spent the last 40 years whipping up nasty passions and unleashing the beast. Well, now it's got you.
  • if you really want to go down an anti-democratic path to wrest the power from the people, be careful where that path takes you. You may be in for some blowback even worse than the blowback you're seeing now, in the form of Trump, from the right wing's years of fomenting ethnic animosity and pitting the working man against himself. Be careful about removing the last fig leaf of democracy. I can think of a place where a form of patriotic, faith-based, big-nation, orderly "democracy" has been perfected. That place is Vladimir Putin's Russia.
  • The other three Republican candidates stood there on that stage after Trump was reviled as a fraud and a con-man and repeated their pledge that they would support him if he won the nomination.Patriotism indeed!!
  • Ross Douthat's eloquent stop-Trump plea to what's left of the Republican party deserves to be taken seriously, not jeered at. Let's hope he's listened to, especially on the right.
  • So Mr. Douthat, your only answer to the candidacy of DT is for your Party to commit ritual suicide.But it is probably too late. to do the honorable thing. Your candidates and other Party leaders have committed to supporting him if he gains the nomination. and how can you deny the monster you have created. His lust for power is no different than that of Ted Cruz or Carl Rove who lords it over anyone who steps out of line.
  • An honest appraisal.Next week, maybe you could do an honest assessment of how the Republican Party strayed so far from its agenda.Those of us on the Left already know the answer to that question.You claim to be of the Party and the Faith that finds redemptive value in acknowledging personal transgressions. We look forward to Part Two.
  • my bet is, and its as good as anybody's for now, is that if elected (after the laughing and hand-wringing was over) is he'd cut deals on taxes on 1%, create jobs, global warming, start multiple trade wars and stop immigration of muslims. And I'm OK w/that.
  • Ross,We are a minority of commenters, but many applaud you. We have all made mistakes and should reflect upon them, but what is important now is for Americans to band together in order to stop a threat to the life of our Republic.
  • "That toothpaste is never going back in the tube."(I screenshot the exchange for my FB and Twitter page.)Even now, Chris Matthews, who interrupts everyone; didn't interrupt Trump.More disturbing? Reporters ignore Trump grading questions! If Trump doesn't like a question he attacks. Reporters respond by turing into slack-jawed statutes.But when Trump decides to answer, it's never with plausible detailsHard follow ups? Never happen.So make no mistake; the reason for the monster is media.The Republican Party is secondary.We need a dozens of Rachel Maddows.God help us.
  • Lets first put the blame where it belongs, considering Trump is a wholly, media-created monster. For six months all media invested not one Moment, digging in and reporting on Trump's background. For six months all media didn't earn their salaries as the political show pundits. each and every one, sat around desks saying,"Well, Trump *is* entertaining," and "I can't believe he gets away with that" as media continued allowing Trump to ignore questions. CBS's Les Moonves is on the record saying,"Trump may not be good for the country, but's he's very good for TV."Next, Joe Scarborough entered with his daily slobber over Trump's greatness; becoming an unofficial advisor, as MSNBC and NBC executives continued looking the other way. When I asked Chuck Todd about any chance of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, (for the good of the country) would bring back the Fairness Doctrine, Chuck said,
  • Block him and the Party is torn apart. Too bad that when the Democrats should be nominating their strongest candidate they are left with a flawed "congenital liar" and a fringe leftist. If they can only get someone like Biden to run, they'll take back the Senate, and maybe even the House. Otherwise, they're taking a hell of a chance
Javier E

Trump and the Madness of Crowds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...and-the-madness-of-crowds.html

2016 gop voters demagogue

shared by Javier E on 29 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • only luck and randomness can save “it won’t be Trump” punditry now.
  • So it’s time to start reckoning with what we got wrong.
  • The best place to start isn’t with the Republican Party’s leaders — the opportunists, the cowards, the sleepwalkers — but with its voters, and the once-reasonable assumptions about voter psychology that Trump seems to have disproved.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • One such assumption, that voters follow the signals sent by party elites and officeholders, is the basis of the famous “party decides” thesis in political science, which was invoked early and often to explain why Trump couldn’t possibly end up as the Republican nominee.
  • While his progress has undercut that thesis, it hasn’t been fully disproved, since the “party decides” conceit doesn’t tell us about what happens when the party simply can’t decide. Whether you look at endorsements or fund-raising or any other metric, that’s what happened this time
  • before the Trump experience it was reasonable to assume that there was a consistent logic to primary voting — that regardless of what party elites decided, a kind of “wisdom of crowds” thesis could suffice to explain why major political parties don’t nominate people like, well, Donald Trump.
  • They are engaged partisans, a more distinct group. They often have to be registered with their party, they have to care enough to vote on a random Tuesday in February, March or April, in some cases they have to set aside the time to show up and caucus. By definition, they tend to be more interested in both policy and politics than the average citizen
  • On the evidence of past campaigns, this engagement inclines them (in the aggregate) to balance ideology and electability when they vote
  • there was also a fair amount of political-science evidence that the Republicans really were a more ideological party than the Democrats, less inclined to view compromise in favorable terms, more inclined to regard politics through a philosophical rather than an interest-group service lens.
  • Yes, Trump has adopted conservative positions on various issues, but he’s done so in a transparently cynical fashion, constantly signaling that he doesn’t really believe in or understand the stance that he’s taking, constantly suggesting a willingness to bargain any principle away
  • Until Donald Trump blew this model up
  • Except for immigration hawks, practically every ideological faction in the party regards Trump with mistrust, disgust, suspicion, fear. Pro-lifers, foreign-policy hawks, the Club for Growth, libertarians — nobody thinks Trump is really on their side. And yet he’s winning anyway.
  • perhaps Trumpism can be understood as a coup by the G.O.P.’s ideologically flexible minority against the conservative movement’s litmus tests; indeed to some extent that’s clearly what’s been happening.
  • he’s untrustworthy and unelectable — a combination that you’d normally expect engaged partisans to consider and reject. And yet he’s winning anyway.
  • But here the model isn’t completely broken, because a majority of Republican voters don’t actually believe that Trump faces long odds,
  • Instead, since last fall Republican voters have consistently told pollsters that they think Trump is the candidate most likely to win in November. So the party’s voters are choosing electability — as they see it — over ideology; they’re just in the grip of a strong delusion about Trump’s actual chances against Hillary Clinton.
  • The reason for this delusion might be the key unresolved question of Trump’s strange ascent. Is it the fruit of Trump’s unparalleled media domination — does he seem more electable than all his rivals because he’s always on TV
  • Is it a case of his victor’s image carrying all before it — if you win enough primary contests, even with 35 percent of the vote, people assume that your winning streak can be extended into November? Is this just how a personality cult rooted in identity politics works — people believe in the Great Leader’s capacity to crush their tribe’s enemies and disregard all contrary evidence?
  • Or is it somehow the pundits’ doing? Did the misplaced certainty that Trump couldn’t win the nomination create an impression that all projections are bunk, that he’ll always prove his doubters wrong?
qkirkpatrick

Dutch MP Geert Wilders to show Muhammad cartoons on TV - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-32997038

Muhammed culture religion

shared by qkirkpatrick on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders has said he will show cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a TV slot allocated to his party.
  • The cartoons were shown at an event in Texas last month which was attacked by two gunmen. Mr Wilders was a keynote speaker at the event.
  • Mr Wilders, who leads the Party for Freedom (PVV), has often expressed his distaste for Islam and mass immigration and has called for the Koran to be banned in the Netherlands.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In December 2014 it was announced he would be prosecuted over allegations that he incited racial hatred against the country's Moroccan community.
  • There were widespread protests in 2006 when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad.
Javier E

Trump Nation - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...473955

crisis economic politics working class men culture fascism mussolini

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • This fall I read Joe Bageant’s book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, which opened my eyes (and heart) to people I would not normally have given much thought to: working class men and women from Winchester, Virginia, Joe’s hometown. To put it bluntly, these are not my people but Joe paints a sympathetic portrait of men and women who have paid the real price of our current economy, the ones who get knocked to the ground when corporate decisions are made far, far from their doorsteps. These are people who are seen as consumers or digits on a spreadsheet. And when they are no longer valued as “assets” they disappear entirely from our radar.
  • And clearly, until Trump galvanized them, they have been (and to a large degree remain) invisible to the talking classes and, perhaps, more crucially, to themselves. The parade of shiny, happy people my mother sees on her TV in commercials and the shows themselves do not reflect the circumstances of their lives and when they do it is often in reality tv shows where their antics are remarkable only because they are so odd to the talking classes. They are fodder for entertainment. From this perspective any appeals to reason, ideology, true Christian values or whatever, will fall on deaf ears. Trump has made them visible to the talking classes and to themselves. They will not be denied. I’d like to say one more thing that seems critical to me. Capitalism takes care of the talking classes in a way most of us take for granted: it confers dignity to their labors. There might have been a time when a man who worked with his hands could also count on that as well but not in my memory. The phrase that keeps recurring to me is this one: “a place at the table.” This is what working class men and women have not had in some time.
  • “From the very beginning, for example, the relation between words and deeds among Mussolini and his followers was very peculiar, and words were used not to state any firm conviction, nor to outline a definite political program but, rather, to arouse emotions that would generate support for a changeable line of action.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “Language, that is, was used by fascists not as an instrument of persuasion but as a means of deception. As a result, the fascist movement from its inception presented itself as a purely political phenomenon-that is to say, as a movement created for action which acquired national relevance through a skillfully executed plan ending with the seizure of power.
  • when in October 1922 Mussolini became Italy's prime minister, his contemporaries had no idea of what was in store for them. There was no such thing as a fascist blueprint for government, simply because fascism was not an intellectual movement with anything comparable to a doctrine; and, in fact, among the fascist rank and file one finds at that time the most bizarre and varied collection of people.”
Javier E

Denmark Election Is Fueled by Anger on Climate and Immigration - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ction-climate-immigration.html

climate immigration election denmark crisis culture climate change

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • It was the sort of campaign appearance that Mette Frederiksen, leader of the left-leaning Social Democrats, would have ordinarily considered friendly terrain — a gathering of environmentally minded students in her hometown, Aalborg, in Denmark. Except the students demanded whether Ms. Frederiksen knew the carbon footprint of the red roses her party gave away at campaign stops.She didn’t. And the students — who also criticized her climate policy for failing to mention the Paris accord — didn’t let her forget it.
  • “We want action. Something must happen,” said Mathilde Christiansen, a senior.
  • Four years ago, climate change barely registered as an election concern in Denmark. But in a nation that juts into the North and Baltic Seas, polls now show that 46 percent of voters rank climate change as their top concern, compared to 27 percent in 2017.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Mr. Madsen, the political analyst, said that many parties were only recently waking up to the climate rebellion, which is happening among the broader electorate as well as among students and other younger voters.
  • In a recent survey of 9,000 Danish respondents, more than 50 percent said they were willing to make “significant reductions” in consumption and wealth to mitigate the climate problem, while four out of five predicted that future generations would suffer from environmental change.
  • “I was doubting if I could allow myself to have children in this world which could collapse in 30 to 40 years,” Frederik Sandby, 26, said.
  • Pia Kjaersgaard, a leader of the Danish People’s Party and the speaker of Parliament, recently dismissed environmentally focused voters as “climate fools,” while her party’s chairman, Kristian Thulesen Dahl, warned that critics who criticized the agricultural sector for its carbon emissions were guilty of “climate hysteria.”
  • Martin Krasnik, editor in chief of Weekendavisen, a weekly newspaper, said their appearance on the scene was part of a trend. “For 30 years, everybody’s been moving to the right, right, right,” he said
  • Figures show the number of asylum seekers has actually dropped to the lowest level in Denmark in a decade. Even as the Danish People’s Party warns that the Social Democrats could loosen immigration policies, the reality is that both parties have largely supported the tougher line in parliamentary votes in recent years.
  • Ms. Frederiksen, the leader of the Social Democrats, has been ahead in the polls and has said that she would mostly maintain a tough stance on migrants, creating a highly unusual policy mix for a European left-wing party. She said such an approach was a necessity, “if we want this society to function.”
  • Mr. Madsen, the analyst, noted that the tactics could provide a template. “What we’re seeing is a laboratory for what the center-left can be,” he said.
Javier E

How policy decisions spawned today's hyperpolarized media - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ed-todays-hyperpolarized-media

media fairness bias partisan polarization culture politics industry tv

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • it’s worth stepping back to remember that this is a recent development, and that the polarization of the media stems in large part from public policy decisions. Such polarization was not inevitable or in any way natural.
  • In the decades that followed World War II, the big three television networks dominated the news. Together with a few major metropolitan newspapers, they set the tone for the national conversation.
  • on virtually all these programs, journalists steered clear of a partisan perspective.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Much of this approach was shaped by the Fairness Doctrine. A policy of the Federal Communications Commission beginning in 1949, the doctrine was based on the notion that the television networks were “public trustees.” Licensed by the federal government, they ought to serve the entire nation, the argument went, by airing competing perspectives on controversial issues. While the policy had been intended to foster a full and fair debate, in practice it led networks to avoid employing anchors or reporters with obvious biases and to play most issues down the middle.
  • Almost overnight, the media landscape was transformed. The driving force was talk radio. In 1960, there were only two all-talk radio stations in America; by 1995, there were 1,130. While television news on the old networks and the cable upstart CNN still adhered to the standard of objectivity, radio emerged as a wide-open landscape
  • In the 1980s, all of this changed. President Ronald Reagan believed the marketplace, not the government, was the best arbiter for competing viewpoints (and for much else).
  • Reagan’s FCC promptly killed it. The Democratic Congress tried to restore the doctrine, but Reagan vetoed the bill.
  • In the landmark Red Lion Broadcasting Co. Inc. v. FCC in 1969, the court ruled that the Fairness Doctrine was constitutional. Free speech, the justices held, was “the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters.” Therefore, the networks had to provide “ample play for the free and fair competition of opposing views.”
  • By 1995, conservatives accounted for roughly 70 percent of all talk-radio listeners
  • By 1994, he had an audience of 20 million Americans tuning in on some 650 stations. “What Rush realizes, and what a lot of listeners don’t,” an Atlanta station manager explained, “is that talk-radio programming is entertainment, it is not journalism.”
  • President George H.W. Bush courted the radio giant in the hope of winning over his right-wing listeners. In June 1992, the president invited Limbaugh to the White House for an overnight stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. In a telling detail, Bush insisted on carrying Limbaugh’s bag into the White House himself. In exchange for such self-abasement, Limbaugh threw his full support behind the president.
  • For conservatives, the success of their ideology on talk radio proved that their suspicions about the Fairness Doctrine had been right. Conservative voices had long been ignored in the mainstream media, they claimed, but now that the free market had been unchained, it was clear what the people wanted.
  • Rush Limbaugh emerged as a national conservative celebrity. With regular attacks on “commie-libs,” “feminazis” and “environmentalist wackos,” Limbaugh quickly cultivated a loyal audience of self-styled “Dittoheads.” Others in the industry took their cues from him. “I’m not sure where the business is going,” Bill O’Reilly told a friend in 1993. “But my gut says it’s going in the direction of Rush, and, man, I’m going to be there.”
  • The end of the Fairness Doctrine had drastically changed the standards of news.
  • cable television entrepreneurs realized that they, too, could thrive by providing the news from a partisan perspective. In 1996, Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News,
  • “Talk-radio shows started to go crazy” with coverage of Clinton’s misdeeds, NBC network president Bob Wright remembered. “We were not paying much attention to it at NBC News. And MSNBC wasn’t. CNN wasn’t. And what Fox did was say, ‘Gee, this is a way for us to distinguish ourselves. We’re going to grab this pent-up anger — shouting — that we’re seeing on talk radio and put it onto television.' ”
  • After 9/11, the network flourished as a full-throated supporter of the war on terrorism. In contrast to its rival CNN, which consciously framed its coverage for a diverse international audience, Fox News increasingly played to conservative viewers at home with nationalistic and populist themes.
  • “Am I slanted and biased?” Fox anchor Neil Cavuto once said in response to critics. “You damn well bet. … You say I wear my biases on my sleeve. Well, better that than pretend you have none, but show them clearly in your work."
  • nder Trump, the merger of the media giant and modern conservatism has been completed. Several of its hosts serve as informal advisers to the president, while some Fox-affiliated figures, such as former network executive Bill Shine and on-air host Heather Nauert, have taken formal roles in the Trump administration.
  • Liberals have had their news outlets, too, of course. Late in the Bush presidency, MSNBC became a left-leaning operation, and the liberal “blogosphere” flourished online
  • But liberals never replicated in scale or scope anything like Fox News or Limbaugh. In the end, none of the liberal outlets formed as cohesive a loyal alliance with the Democratic Party as conservative broadcasters did with the GOP.
  • And that fracturing and polarization can be traced, in large part, to the end of the Fairness Doctrine
  • Though some now seek to revive it, the doctrine is a relic of the past. Today’s communication landscape — including cable, social media and both traditional and satellite TV — is far too unruly for federal officials to regulate. Nor should they try.
  • Polls reveal that the public dislikes the form our media have taken and might be receptive to new models that push back against the partisan tide. If the public demands new models of information, including some that reflect the evenhandedness that ruled during the heyday of the Fairness Doctrine, we may yet see another media revolution.
Javier E

The Majestic Untruths of 'The Crown' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617278

historical fiction video series TV tv shows UK royals

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The real source of unease with The Crown comes from the dissonance between the high naturalism of the program’s costumes, staging, and set design and the liberties taken with its plotlines. The current discussion would not be happening if the show were not so rigorously faithful to the historical record in every department except for its script.
katherineharron

Fact check: Trump continues to use a misleading video to claim Biden is not fit for off... - 0 views

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

biden trump

shared by katherineharron on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump and his campaign have leaned in heavily on a video that misleadingly suggests Democratic nominee Joe Biden doesn't know who he is running against.
  • The Trump campaign has posted the video to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube -- where it has racked up millions of views. None of the companies are taking any action against the video.
  • Trump's team has repeatedly pushed misleading videos trying to support this point.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • before a Trump event in West Salem, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, a woman interviewed by CNN said Biden would not be capable of running the country due to his mental capacity.
  • The videos appear to be gaining traction among Trump supporters.
  • In August, White House social media director Dan Scavino shared a video that purported to show Biden falling asleep during a TV interview. Expect the TV interview never happened; the whole thing was fake.
  • the misleading clip the Trump campaign has been pushing all this week that purported to show the former vice president saying he was running against Bush.
  • The full interview was part of a virtual "I Will Vote" concert, which was hosted by comedian George Lopez and Ana Navarro, a CNN political commentator. The 27-second isolated video that was widely shared on social media failed to contextualize Biden's response to Lopez's question, giving the impression that Biden had confused Trump with George W. Bush.
  • About 12 minutes into the event, Lopez asked Biden, "If someone is undecided, or maybe thinking about not voting, why should they vote, and why should they vote for you?"
  • "Well, first of all, the reason they should vote is that there's a lot on the ballot this year. I mean this is the most consequen- not because I'm running, but because of who I'm running against. This is the most consequential election, uh, in a long, long, long time. And the character of the country, in my view, is literally on the ballot. What kind of country we're going to be."
  • "Four more years of George, uh, George, uh, he, uh gonna find ourselves in a position where if, uh, Trump gets elected, we're gonna be, we're gonna be in a different world."
  • The video sent by the Trump campaign does not inform viewers that Biden was answering a question from George Lopez.
Javier E

Russell Brand on revolution: "We no longer have the luxury of tradition" - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...russell-brand-on-revolution

revolution activism conservativism crisis politics spiritual

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
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  • The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.
  • This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Biomechanically we are individuals, clearly. On the most obvious frequency of our known sensorial reality we are independent anatomical units. So we must take care of ourselves. But with our individual survival ensured there is little satisfaction to be gained by enthroning and enshrining ourselves as individuals.
  • For me the solution has to be primarily spiritual and secondarily political.
  • By spiritual I mean the acknowledgement that our connection to one another and the planet must be prioritised. Buckminster Fuller outlines what ought be our collective objectives succinctly: “to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone”. This maxim is the very essence of “easier said than done” as it implies the dismantling of our entire socio-economic machinery. By teatime.
  • The price of privilege is poverty. David Cameron said in his conference speech that profit is “not a dirty word”. Profit is the most profane word we have. In its pursuit we have forgotten that while individual interests are being met, we as a whole are being annihilated. The reality, when not fragmented through the corrupting lens of elitism, is we are all on one planet.
  • Suffering of this magnitude affects us all. We have become prisoners of comfort in the absence of meaning. A people without a unifying myth. Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, says our global problems are all due to the lack of relevant myths.
malonema1

Why We Should Honor the Military with a Parade - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...552854

US trump

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • President Trump asked the Pentagon “to explore a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation” for America’s military, so we might be seeing the first national military parade since 1991. Will it cost millions? Probably. Will there be counter-demonstrations? Sure. Is there a risk of terrorist attacks? Of course. Should it happen? Absolutely, and here’s why.
  • What about the cost? Americans love parades—and advertisers do too. Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade attracts 3.5 million attendees, and almost 50 million television viewers. The TV advertising revenue alone was worth more than $41 million in 2016. The Rose Bowl parade has a much smaller crowd, but nearly the same number of television viewers. CNBC says that participation in that parade “comes with a hefty price tag, but corporate sponsors say the chance to get their company's message out to millions is worth the expense.”
  • Unfortunately, military service never even occurs to many of America’s best and brightest. Since retiring from the military in 2010, I’ve run across quite a few people—young and old, but especially young—who have never personally seen, let alone spoken with, an active duty member of the armed forces (or even any veterans—who now comprise just 7.3% of the population).   
Javier E

TikTok is the new Facebook - and it is shaping the future of tech in its image | Chris ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-tech-future-chinese-video-app

facebook TikTok tech social media social network Culture crisis psychology education trends

shared by Javier E on 16 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • It has even started ripping off other apps’ best features, an art pioneered by Facebook that ByteDance is taking to another level. TikTok Stories was announced earlier this month.
  • ts videos were once no more than 15 or 60 seconds long. Now they can last up to three minutes. Until February, TikTok was predominately a mobile app. Now you can watch videos through your web browser, or even your smart TV. It once had a single video format, then incorporated live streaming. It allows you to buy products through the app, and to tip your favourite creators.
  • With its 732 million monthly active users, TikTok is the app of the moment, and likely the app of the future. It’s the new Facebook.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • in March 2020 alone, users spent as much time on it as there has been since the stone age: 2.8bn hours, or nearly 320,000 years.
  • TikTok became the first app not owned by Facebook to cross the 3bn download mark. For context, there are 5.3bn mobile phone users worldwide.
Javier E

While We Weren't Looking, Snapchat Revolutionized Social Networks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...utionized-social-networks.html

social network social media culture

shared by Javier E on 01 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Snap’s business model, which depends on TV-style advertising that (so far) offers marketers fewer of the data-targeted options pioneered by web giants like Google, feels refreshingly novel. And perhaps most important, its model for entertainment and journalism values human editing and curation over stories selected by personalization algorithms — and thus represents a departure from the filtered, viral feeds that dominate much of the rest of the online news environment.
  • Before Snapchat, the industry took for granted that everything users posted to the internet should remain there by default. Saving people’s data — and then constantly re-examining it to create new products and advertising — is the engine that supports behemoths like Google and Facebook.
  • Snapchat’s “ephemeral” internet — which has since been imitated by lots of other companies, including, most recently, Instagram — did not just usher in a new idea for online privacy. It also altered what had once been considered a sacred law of online interaction: virality.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • There is, instead, a practiced authenticity. The biggest stars — even Kylie Jenner — get ahead by giving you deep access to their real lives. As a result, much of what you see on Snapchat feels less like a performance than on other networks. People aren’t fishing for likes and follows and reshares. For better or worse, they’re trying to be real.
  • The diminution of personalization algorithms and virality also plays into how Snapchat treats news. Snapchat’s primary format is called a Story, a slide show of a user’s video clips that are played in chronological order. This, too, is an innovation; before Snapchat, much online content, from blogs to tweets, was consumed in reverse chronological order, from the most recent to the oldest. Snapchat’s Stories, which have since been widely copied, ushered in a more natural order — start at the beginning and go from there.
  • insiders at Snapchat noticed that Stories were an ideal vehicle for relaying news. They could be crowdsourced: If a lot of people were at a concert or sporting event or somewhere that breaking news was occurring, a lot of them were likely to be snapping what was happening. If Snapchat offered them a way to submit their clips, it could spot the best ones and add them to a narrative compilation of the event.
  • Snapchat began hiring producers and reporters to assemble clips into in-depth pieces.
  • Every day, Snapchat offers one or several stories about big and small events happening in the world, including football games, awards shows and serious news.
  • Snapchat has said that it thinks of itself as a camera company rather than a social network. This sounds like marketing puffery (after all, it only just started making its first actual camera, Spectacles), but I think its determination to set itself apart from the rest of the tech industry is important to note. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Javier E

Amy Chua Profiles Four Female Tycoons in China - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...r-female-tycoons-in-china.html

women China entrepreneur success

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 12 - Cached
  • Zhang sees a lack of innovation as a persistent problem for China. “Going forward, we need people who can invent. The reason China doesn’t have a Steve Jobs is because of the education system, which needs reform, along with health care and the political system. China does not train enough people to think.”
  • “In China nowadays, teachers are desperate,” Yang Lan told me over lunch. With her upswept hair and porcelain skin, Yang radiated celebrity power. “They’re worried that all the only children—‘little emperors’—are spoiled and self-centered and no longer appreciate their parents.” She told me how one school had invited 1,000 parents to sit on chairs on the playground, “then asked the kids to wash their parents’ feet in front of everyone—a sign of filial piety.”
  • China’s “little emperors” are coddled in a distinctly Chinese way. While doted on and catered to, they are also loaded up with the expectations of parents who have invested all their dreams—not to mention money—in their only child. These “spoiled” children often study and drill from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • at least in business, women and men in China operate largely on a level playing field. “Sixty years of communism,” said Yu, “did one really good thing: bring true equality between the sexes. I think people in China are brought up believing that women are just as capable as men.”
  • China’s political sphere remains male-dominated: women are starkly underrepresented in China’s Parliament and the Communist Party’s Central Committee. In fact, many young Chinese women, disillusioned about their prospects in an economy many see as navigable only by those with money or connections, say the best hope for a woman is “to marry a rich man.” On a popular TV dating show, a model rebuffed an endearing but poor suitor by saying, “I’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back seat of a bicycle.” In a survey of more than 50,000 single women, as reported in China Daily, 80 percent agreed that “only men who make more than 4,000 yuan [$634] a month deserve to have a relationship with a woman.”
  • the Mao era was a deviation for China: anti-intellectual, anti-Confucian, collectivist rather than family-oriented. Thus, as China sheds its communist mantle, it is not only Westernizing but also Sinicizing, rediscovering its traditional values.
  • These values, however, are mutating. The traditional Chinese family, for example, was a pyramid, with a few revered elders at the pinnacle and many younger generations below. In a typical Chinese family today, the pyramid has been inverted, with a “little emperor” only child at the bottom, doted on and catered to by parents and grandparents. At the same time, while the intense competitive pressures of Confucian China have returned, the countervailing Confucian values—selflessness, compassion, honor, and rectitude—have not. As a result, many worry that the China emerging from communism will know no values other than wealth and materialism.
  • “When we were growing up,” says Yang, “we wanted to be nurses, doctors, astronauts, teachers. Today people are suspicious of anything noble or grand. Kids just want to be rich or powerful.” In 2009, schoolchildren in Guangzhou City were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. A viral Internet video—later blocked and deleted—showed an adorable 6-year-old giving her answer: “A corrupt official.”
  • the four women I interviewed are a new breed. Progressive, worldly, and open to the media, they are in many ways not representative of China, past or present. Perhaps they are merely the lucky winners of the 1990s free-for-all in China, a window that may already be closing. Or perhaps they are the forerunners of a China still to come, in which paths to success are far more open.
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