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mariedhorne

Economy Week Ahead: Election, the Fed and Employment - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...fed-and-employment-11604260801

economy election employment

shared by mariedhorne on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Strong demand for consumer goods and capital equipment has driven a manufacturing rebound after coronavirus-related disruptions depressed output this spring.
  • The U.S. election is Tuesday, with markets focused on divergent fiscal policies of President Trump and challenger Joe Biden.
  • The Bank of England is expected to respond to the drag on the economy from tightening restrictions as new coronavirus infections rise by increasing its program of bond purchases by as much as £100 billion, equivalent to $129.5 billion.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Even with the sixth straight month of job gains, payrolls will likely remain well short of their pre-pandemic peak, underscoring the severe damage from the coronavirus pandemic and policies meant to contain it.
mariedhorne

ECB Signals Further Stimulus Ahead to Prop Up Struggling Economy - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...her-stimulus-ahead-11603976353

crisis stimulus economy

shared by mariedhorne on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • FRANKFURT—The European Central Bank intends to scale up its support of the eurozone’s economy, seeking to cushion the region from the fallout of a new wave of coronavirus infections that threatens to knock back a currency area that was still recovering from spring lockdowns.
  • The eurozone is expected to report Friday that its economy grew by around 9% in the third quarter compared with the second, a torrid pace as the region reopened after the national lockdowns of the spring.
  • An ECB survey this week warned of the possibility of rising nonperforming loans and tightening credit conditions. Eurozone inflation fell to minus 0.3% in September, far from the bank’s goal of just below 2%.
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  • The bank said Thursday it would continue to buy €1.35 trillion, equivalent to $1.59 trillion, of government and corporate debt through at least June 2021, under an emergency bond-buying program unveiled in March. It also left its key interest rate at minus 0.5%.
  • Our impression is that the ECB will do what it takes to effectively absorb the bulk of public debt net issuance until at least the end of 2021, if not beyond,” said Frederik Ducrozet, an economist with Pictet Wealth Management in Geneva.
anonymous

Justice Barrett Joins Supreme Court Arguments For The First Time : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...nosha-shooter-set-at-2-million

kenoshaprotests kylerittenhouse jacobblake kenosha militia wisconsin

shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • A Wisconsin court commissioner on Monday set bail at $2 million for Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of killing protesters in Kenosha,
  • Rittenhouse is accused of fatally shooting two demonstrators and injuring a third during protests on Aug. 25 that followed the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot several times at close range by Kenosha police and is now paralyzed.
  • The charges include first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Rittenhouse's lawyers argued that because he had allegedly acted in self-defense and has no prior criminal record, the bond should be set at $750,000.
  • He noted the national network of supporters who have taken up Rittenhouse's cause and said he considered him a flight risk.
  • Rittenhouse faces up to life in prison if convicted.
  • Give Send Go, a self-described "Christian crowdfunding site," raised nearly $550,000 to help cover Rittenhouse's legal fees before organizers say they were forced to stop receiving donations.
  • "We believe that Mr. Rittenhouse has already proven that he is a significant flight risk and his reckless actions against my client who he severely injured, as well as the victims killed demonstrate that he is a significant risk to the public," Motley added.
  • Rittenhouse took off running and Rosenbaum chased after him. Videos of the incident show Rosenbaum, who was unarmed, threw a plastic bag at Rittenhouse, who responded by firing about five shots into the 36-year-old.
Javier E

Opinion | The Rotting of the Republican Mind - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republican-disinformation.html

gop paranoia conspiracy theory polarization divergence epistemic crisis politics history culture

shared by Javier E on 27 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
  • We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality
  • Many people point to the interne
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?
  • My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real.
  • In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.
  • This ecosystem, Rauch wrote, operates as a funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survive collective scrutiny.
  • We let alt-truth talk,” Rauch said, “but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.”
  • While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities.
  • In democratic, nontheocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.
  • In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending.
  • Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say, but also the so-called rules they use to say them.
  • People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers.
  • The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community.
  • conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.
  • For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools
  • For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have
  • For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals
  • If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.
  • Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set
  • He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source.
  • The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking.
  • That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it
  • second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.
  • Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.
Javier E

Opinion | White Supremacy Was Her World. And Then She Left. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-supremacy-hate-movements.html

white supremacy whitelash recruitment culture history

shared by Javier E on 19 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Many white Americans are quick to distinguish between everyday prejudice and radical bigotry, but it’s a false distinction. White nationalists make explicit ideas that are already coded or veiled in the wider white imagination. Hate is what many people would see if they looked in a fun-house mirror: a distorted but still recognizable reflection.
  • It is important to acknowledge this ugly truth if we hope to understand events now unfolding across the country.
  • There are questions about whether white lip service will translate into sustained anti-racist action, and about what the same people who condemn unlawful killings of Black Americans might have to say about less violent manifestations of racism, ones that benefit them
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  • There is also the inevitability of backlash: History shows that there are always people who turn to hate in the very moments that others find hope.
  • We know little about how to combat hate effectively; the federal government has cut funding for programs to counter right-wing extremism and blocked the dissemination of data on the subject
  • Ms. Olsen had never thought too hard about being white. Like many white Americans, she never had to. She grew up in a largely white school district in Eugene, Ore., and she did not interact meaningfully with people of other races until her late 20s, when she moved to Portland for her embalming career. She had paid such little mind to race as a concept that there was a flatness to her understanding of it, a one-dimensionality susceptible to simplified reasoning.
  • To Ms. Olsen, these people seemed smart. Just as important, she told me, “they seemed immensely interested in me and my life, and they wanted to be my friend.” To someone who “grew up without friends, that was very appealing. It made me feel like I must be doing something right.”
  • Then came the election of President Barack Obama. “Right-wing extremists are harnessing this historical election as a recruitment tool,” a Homeland Security report noted in 2009. The first year of Mr. Obama’s presidency, Stormfront registered nearly 100,000 new users.
  • The most basic definition of hate is personal animus, but there is a more useful, and frightening, description: Hate is a social bond — a shared currency — and it abhors a vacuum
  • “social camaraderie, a desire for simple answers to complex political problems, or even the opportunity to take action against formidable social forces can coexist with, even substitute for, hatred as the reason for participation in organized racist activities.”
  • So can a need for validation, visibility and purpose. For someone like Ms. Olsen, hate becomes a cure for loneliness.
  • People who are drawn to the hate movement have an acute desire to make sense of their place in the world. There’s a gap between who they are and who they think they should be, what they have and what they want. They want to seize or regain what they believe is a rightful status. They want empowerment, with minimal effort. Hate promises them that.
  • White Citizens’ Councils and other organs of resistance emerged in reaction to the civil rights movement. Hate fed on opposition to second- and third-wave feminism, the expansion of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and shifting racial demographics.
  • She wasn’t always sure that she believed what she said when she echoed her new friends’ views, but what mattered was that they wanted to keep talking to her; all she had to do was log in and start typing. If playing a part graduated to instinct, maybe they would like her even more.
  • Ms. Olsen was part of this wave, which also found fuel in the xenophobia of the post-Sept. 11 era and public disgust with the financial crisis.
  • Many people rationalize their racism — or even refuse to call it that — by insisting that it isn’t as bad as someone else’s. They could spit on immigrants instead of complaining in private about foreigners stealing American jobs. They could put Jewish people in camps instead of muttering about how they have too much power.
  • Bigotry has many branches, some bigger and stronger than others, but they all derive from the same trunk. No wonder, then, that when “somebody said he didn’t like Black people, or he told a racist joke, or he said illegal immigration is wrong,” Ms. Olsen recalled, she assumed he might be interested in becoming a neo-Nazi, too.
  • n her telling, Ms. Olsen decided to leave the hate movement because she realized that she could not tolerate violence. That may have been part of it, but when I spoke to her, it was clear that she also exited because the movement stopped giving her the meaning and camaraderie she wanted.
  • People don’t leave the hate movement because a veil lifts and they are suddenly able to see hate for what it is. The truth is more disappointing. They leave because it makes sense to them and for them, because the value hate once gave them has diminished or evaporated. Ms. Olsen seemed to know this, writing once on a blog, “The reality is, people rarely change their personality or ideals during adulthood, and if they do, it needs to be something they do on their own, for themselves.”
  • Some prominent white supremacists now point to the birth of Black Lives Matter as a pivotal moment in their radicalization
  • Perhaps more people than ever will emerge from 2020 on the side of justice. Still, there are those who will turn to hate, finding it — perversely — to be a kind of balm.
  • Research shows that a shared sense of racial identity is hardening among white Americans. The political scientist Ashley Jardina has found that some 20 percent of white Americans, roughly 40 million people, now have “strong levels of group consciousness,” meaning they “feel a sense of discontent over the status of their group.”
  • Having group consciousness does not automatically translate into prejudice, but the hate movement is poised to exploit white people’s grievances and fears.
  • What can we do to stop it? There aren’t easy answers.
  • while reporting on the hate movement, I found it difficult not to feel despondent. Magnifying my gloom were encounters with white liberals who made statements that I recognized as precisely the kind of bait white nationalists use to make their case to the mainstream.
  • The least Americans can ask of one another is to have frank conversations about whiteness, no matter how uncomfortable.
  • People concerned about the tide of hate can also work to empower minority populations, tackle inequality, foster dialogue about prejudice and root discriminatory ideas out of American life. They can vote bigots out of office. They can support the work of groups like Life After Hate, which helps people leave far-right groups.
  • First, though, combating hate requires understanding it. Not what it seems to be, but what it actually is. That includes who embraces it, and why.
  • So much of history is made up of small moves. Hope, too, dwells in increments. There is hope if white Americans can confront the true face of hate and their own complicity in bigotry. There is hope if we can see white nationalism as a crisis of individual and collective responsibility.
Javier E

'Its Own Domestic Army': How the G.O.P. Allied Itself With Militants - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tias-republicans-michigan.html

michigan militia extremist gop politics trump history

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Following signals from President Donald J. Trump — who had tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” after an earlier show of force in Lansing — Michigan’s Republican Party last year welcomed the support of newly emboldened paramilitary groups and other vigilantes. Prominent party members formed bonds with militias or gave tacit approval to armed activists using intimidation in a series of rallies and confrontations around the state. That intrusion into the Statehouse now looks like a portent of the assault halfway across the country months later at the United States Capitol.
  • “We knew there would be violence,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, about the Jan. 6 assault. Endorsing tactics like militiamen with assault rifles frightening state lawmakers “normalizes violence,” she told journalists last week, “and Michigan, unfortunately, has seen quite a bit of that.”
  • The chief organizer of that protest, Meshawn Maddock, on Saturday was elected co-chair of the state Republican Party — one of four die-hard Trump loyalists who won top posts.
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  • Ms. Maddock helped fill 19 buses to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally and defended the April armed intrusion into the Michigan Capitol. When Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, suggested at the time that Black demonstrators would never be allowed to threaten legislators like that, Ms. Maddock wrote on Twitter, “Please show us the ‘threat’?”“Oh that’s right you think anyone armed is threatening,” she continued. “It’s a right for a reason and the reason is YOU.”
  • The lead organizer of the April 30 armed protest, Ryan Kelley, a local Republican official, last week announced a bid for governor. “Becoming too closely aligned with militias — is that a bad thing?” he said in an interview.
  • In the first major protest in the country against stay-at-home orders, thousands of cars, trucks and even a few cement mixers jammed the streets around the Statehouse in Lansing, in what Ms. Maddock called Operation Gridlock. About 150 demonstrators left their vehicles to chant “lock her up” from the Capitol lawn — redirecting the 2016 battle cry about Hillary Clinton against Ms. Whitmer. A few waved Confederate flags. About a dozen heavily armed members of the Michigan Liberty Militia turned up as well
  • woven through Michigan’s militia timeline is a persistent strand of menace. In the early 20th century, the Black Legion, a paramilitary group that included public officials in Detroit and elsewhere, began as an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan and was linked to numerous acts of murder and terrorism.
  • Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing, were reported to have associated with militia members in Michigan, though Mr. Olson said they had been turned away because of their violent rhetoric. In the aftermath, militias were largely exiled to the fringes of conspiracy politics, preparing for imagined threats from the New World Order.
  • in recent years, as the Republican Party has drifted further to the right, these groups have gradually found a home there, said JoEllen Vinyard, an emeritus professor of history at Eastern Michigan University who has studied political extremism. Much of their cooperation is centered on defending gun ownership, she said
  • epublicans have controlled both houses of the Michigan Legislature for a decade and held the governor’s mansion for the eight years before Ms. Whitmer took office in 2019. Mr. Trump’s brash nationalism had alienated moderate Republicans and independents while pushing the party to the right.
  • Surrounded by militiamen about two weeks later in Grand Rapids, at an event also organized by Mr. Howland and Mr. Kelley, the senator said in a speech that they had taken him to task for his “jackasses” comment and he effectively retracted it.
  • Ms. Maddock declared Michigan a “tyranny” that night on the Fox News Channel, though she later distanced herself from the armed men. “Of course the militia is disappointing to me, the Confederate flag — look, they’re just idiots,
  • When local armed groups in Michigan began discussing more demonstrations, most Republicans shunned them at first. “They were scared of the word ‘militia,’” recalled Phil Robinson, a member of the Liberty Militia.
  • As the Legislature met on April 30 to vote on extending the governor’s restrictions, Mr. Kelley and his militia allies convened hundreds of protesters, including scores of armed men, some with assault weapons. One demonstrator hung a noose from the back of his pickup. Another held a sign warning that “tyrants get the rope.” Dozens entered the Capitol, some angrily demanding entrance to the lower chamber.
  • “We were harassed and intimidated so that we would not do our jobs,” said Representative Donna Lasinski, leader of the Democratic minority. Lawmakers were terrified, she added.
  • Mr. Maddock, the Republican legislator and Ms. Maddock’s husband, recognized some of the intruders and left the House floor to confer with them. “I like being around people with guns,” he later told The Detroit News.
  • Mr. Trump sided with them, too. “The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire,” he tweeted. “These are very good people.”
  • Roughly a dozen to 18 armed groups are scattered across Michigan in mostly rural counties, their membership fluctuating with political and economic currents. Estimates of active members statewide are generally in the hundreds.
  • “I was able to see that they are patriots that love their country like the rest of us,” she said, adding that they are “all Republicans.”
  • Other Republicans also came to accept the presence of armed activists. Ms. Gatt, who took part in protests organized by Mr. Kelley and Ms. Maddock, said she felt “intimidated by the militia when I first started getting involved,” but soon changed her mind.
  • The state G.O.P. quickly jumped into the fight. In June, a nonprofit group linked to the Republican Party began providing more than $600,000 to a new advocacy group run in part by Ms. Maddock that was dedicated to fighting coronavirus restrictions. A charity tied to Mr. Shirkey kicked in $500,000.
  • Critics argued that race was an unstated factor in the battle over the stay-at-home order. The Republicans who rallied against the rules were mostly white residents of rural areas and outer suburbs. But more than 40 percent of the deaths in Michigan early on were among African-Americans, concentrated in Detroit, who made up less than 15 percent of the state’s population
  • The Black Lives Matter protests in Michigan were rarely violent or destructive, and the largest took place in Detroit. But Republicans in the rest of the state reacted with alarm to the flashes of violence elsewhere around the country, and President Trump reinforced their fears with his warnings about “antifa.”
  • “Liberals look for trouble and civil unrest and conservatives PREPARE for it,” Gary Eisen, a Republican state legislator and owner of a concealed-weapon training business, wrote on his Facebook page. “I thought maybe I would load up a few more mags,” he added, later saying he had been joking
  • He accused Democrats of encouraging violence. “The Democrats have got antifa; they have got BLM,” he said. “The Democrats championed all of this stuff from a leadership level.”
  • More prominent Michigan Republicans portrayed the Black Lives Matter movement as a looming threat, too. Ms. Maddock told the news site MLive.com that the “destruction” caused by the protests was “absolutely devastating” and “inexcusable.”
  • At the peak of the protests against police violence, though, Mr. Kelley’s American Patriot Council still aimed its sharpest attacks at Governor Whitmer and her stay-at-home order. It released public letters urging the federal authorities to arrest her for violating the Constitution by issuing a stay-at-home order. “Whitmer needs to go to prison,” Mr. Kelley declared in a video he posted on Facebook in early October that was later taken down. “She is a threat to our Republic.”
  • A few days later, federal agents arrested more than a dozen Michigan militiamen, charging them in a plot to kidnap the governor, put her on trial and possibly execute her.
  • It was the culmination of months of mobilization by armed groups, accompanied by increasingly threatening language, and Mr. Trump declined to condemn the plotters. “People are entitled to say, ‘Maybe it was a problem, maybe it wasn’t,’” he declared at a rally in Michigan.
  • Hours after the Nov. 3 election, Ms. Maddock wrote on Facebook: “35k ballots showed up out of nowhere at 3 AM. Need help.” She urged Trump supporters to rush to “monitor the vote” at a ballot-counting center in Detroit. “Report to room 260 STAT.”
  • Mr. Kelley, with Mr. Howland and their armed militia allies, showed up for a rowdy protest outside the ballot counting. Later that month Mr. Kelley told a rally outside the Statehouse that the coronavirus was a ruse to persuade the public to “believe Joe Biden won the election,” The Lansing State Journal reported. One woman held a sign saying “ARREST THE VOTE COUNTERS.”
  • When attempts to stop the counting failed, Ms. Maddock in December led 16 Republican electors trying to push into the Michigan Capitol to disrupt the casting of Democratic votes in the Electoral College. During a “Stop the Steal” news conference in Washington the next day, she vowed to “keep fighting.”
  • Mr. Kelley and Mr. Howland were filmed outside the U.S. Capitol during the riot. Both men said they did not break any laws, and argued that the event was not “an insurrection” because the participants were patriots. “I was there to support the sitting president,” Mr. Kelley said.
  • Mr. Shirkey, the Michigan Senate leader who came around to work with the militias, declined to follow the movement behind Mr. Trump all the way to the end. Summoned to the White House in November, Mr. Shirkey refused the president’s entreaties to try to annul his Michigan defeat.
  • But in an interview last week, the lawmaker said he nonetheless empathized with the mob that attacked Congress.“It was people feeling oppressed, and depressed, responding to what they thought was government just stealing their lives from them,” he said. “And I’m not endorsing and supporting their actions, but I understand where they come from.”
anonymous

Julia Lyons, a 'fake flu nurse' in Chicago during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, stole ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...sh-flu-fake-nurse-1918-chicago

history US crisis

shared by anonymous on 03 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Julia Lyons portrayed herself as a busy visiting nurse in Chicago during the great flu pandemic of 1918. But “Slick Julia,” as she came to be known, was no Florence Nightingale.
  • The 23-year-old Julia, “a woman of diamonds and furs, silken ankles, gem-studded fingers and aliases by the dozens,” was posing as a “flu nurse,” ripping off home-bound patients for cash and jewelry as they suffered and even died, the Chicago Tribune reported in late 1918.
  • A century before the coronavirus crisis, the 1918 flu was a killing machine, taking the lives of more than 675,000 people in the United States and 50 million around the world.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Julia Lyons saw an opportunity. Figuring nobody would have time to check her lack of credentials, she signed on at a home-nurse registry under various names. In late 1918, the Tribune chronicled the fake flu nurse’s escapades like a dime detective novel.
  • The police tapped the phone and learned Julia lived nearby. Detectives trailed Julia. One day she set off to marry Charlie the Greek, who ran the Victory Restaurant on West Madison Avenue. Before vows could be exchanged, Julia was in handcuffs.
  • Instead of transporting Julia to the courthouse in a patrol wagon, the deputy sheriff took her on a street car. In court, some 50 victims testified against her. She was held under $13,000 bond, the equivalent of more than $190,000 today.Deputy Hickey started back to the county jail with Julia in tow. An hour and a half later he called the police and “excitedly” told them she had jumped from a moving street car and hopped into a waiting automobile. Based on the reported location, one official speculated Hickey and his prisoner had been going to cabarets.
  • Soon Julia was back at her old tricks. In March 1919, the police traced her through the nurse registry to a home on Fullerton Boulevard. When Julia answered the door, the police nabbed her.
katherineharron

Mattis tears into Trump: 'We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mat... - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis on Wednesday castigated President Donald Trump as "the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people"
  • "We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children."
  • The comments from Mattis are a significant moment for a man who has kept mostly silent since leaving the administration. The retired Marine general had been pressed many times to comment on Trump, troop policies, the Pentagon, and other current events and had always refused because he didn't want to get involved and be a contradictory voice to the troops. Instead, Mattis always insisted he had said everything he wanted to say in his resignation letter.
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  • "Probably the only thing Barack Obama and I have in common is that we both had the honor of firing Jim Mattis, the world's most overrated General. I asked for his letter of resignation, & felt great about. His nickname was 'Chaos', which I didn't like, & changed it to 'Mad Dog,' " Trump said on Twitter.
  • The adviser went on to note the Nazi reference in the statement -- Mattis said, "The Nazi slogan for destroying us...was 'Divide and Conquer.' Our American answer is 'In Union there is Strength.' We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics" -- was particularly pointed. "That will leave a mark," the adviser said.
  • "It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and are answerable to them."
  • "With regard to whether the President has confidence, I would say if he loses confidence in Secretary Esper, I'm sure you all will be the first to know," McEnany said during Wednesday's press briefing.
  • "Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside."
Javier E

UK diplomats fear end of special relationship if Trump re-elected | Foreign policy | Th... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...lationship-if-trump-re-elected

special relationship trump foreign policy uk leadership

shared by Javier E on 08 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Sir John Sawers, the former head of M16 and a former UK ambassador to the UN, also said Trump’s re-election would be problematic. “There is no doubt President Trump is the most difficult president for us to deal with,” he said.“He does not really feel that sense of being part of that transatlantic community, he does not really believe in alliances. He does not really believe in American leadership in the world. We are seeing in this pandemic for the first time what a crisis is like without American leadership. It is the first time in our lifetime we have experienced that.
  • “If he gets elected for a second time some of the changes we have seen in the past few years will become embedded and entrenched and then, absolutely Britain will not be so much a bridge between the US and Europe. We will need to be bounding closely together with our European partners”
  • n a sign of British diplomats’ despair with Trump, Sir Peter Westmacott, a former ambassador to Washington, said: “I would love to say, as we look to the future, would it not be nice to see political leadership also addressing old-fashioned principles such as accountability, respect for the rule of law, independent judiciary, telling the truth, institutional independence and indeed the importance of a free press?
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  • “That may not be what public opinion is crying out for, but they are not very far removed from the principles that … Biden believes in. Otherwise the chances of the western world retaining any sort of moral leadership and giving itself the right to call out other people when they behave badly will be gone forever.”
  • Many senior former UK ambassadors are desperately hoping Washington will lead again. One said: “I think that if you have a different, more internationally minded leadership in the US then a lot of what has happened over the past few years can be reversed. If we get another four years of this leadership, then some of the bonds and some of the cement that holds the west together, and holds Europe and America together will be broken forever. If things change in November then we can recapture things if we get the right sort of leadership in Europe.”
Javier E

The Virus and the Blitz - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608965

crisis culture uk blitz WWII london resilience

shared by Javier E on 13 May 20 - No Cached
  • Britain during the Blitz has gone down in history as the exemplar of national resilience—a role model for any nation going through a hard and stressful time, whether a war, terror attack, or pandemic.
  • ow did the British do it? What can we learn? What exactly are national resilience and social solidarity made of, and how are they built?
  • If you want to list the factors that contributed to the country’s indomitable resilience, start with a sense of agency. Brits needed to feel that they were not helpless or passive, that the nation was taking positive action every second of every day.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Churchill set a frenetic pace for his whole government, showering his aides with “Action This Day” memos.
  • The second element of British resilience was intense social connection. People were forced together every night in tightly packed group or family shelters.
  • In national crises, a sort of social and psychological arms race takes place. The threat—whether bombings or a pandemic—ramps up fear, unpredictability, divisiveness, fatalism, and feelings of weakness and meaninglessness. Nations survive when they can ramp up countervailing emotions and mindsets
  • Third, laughter. Brits credit themselves, accurately, for being a comic people. During the war, every disaster was turned into an occasion for humor,
  • The fourth factor in British resilience was moral purpose. Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that “he who has a why to live for can endure any how.” The Brits had a firm sense of the moral rightness of their cause, the unique evil Hitler represented, and the reason they had to endure all this
  • Finally, there was equality. During moments of threat and crisis, people are intensely sensitive to inequality, to the feeling that some people are being treated better than everybody else.
  • The pressure of the situation induced people to be frenetically social. Singers offered free concerts, which were packed. Larson reports that young women would set up dates for every night, planning weeks in advance, so as to never be alone
  • This happens when countries take actions, even if only symbolic ones, that make frightening situations feel more controllable and predictable. This happens when they foster social solidarity by paying extreme attention to fairness. This happens when they intensify social connection and create occasions for social bonding and shared work.
  • Societies that build resilience do not hide behind a wall of happy talk or try to minimize the danger.
  • Resilience is built when people confront a threat realistically, and discover that they have the resources to cope with it together.
  • Resilience is built when people tell a collective story about the danger that places the current terror they are facing within a larger redemptive context. When all this is over, we’ll be better because of it.
  • What was once a scary threat to be avoided, releasing a surge of destructive cortisol, becomes a challenge to be met, releasing a cascade of adrenaline.
  • Evolution equipped us to deal with short bursts of terror, such as getting chased by a lion, not to cope with long, unrelenting months of stress.
  • Isolation, fear, and stress send the autonomic nervous system into overdrive, and weaken the immune system. The social-distancing measures we are taking to avoid the coronavirus make us more susceptible to it when it comes.
  • in some ways, COVID-19 presents an even more dire challenge to us than the bombing did to Great Britain in 1940. A study by the Russell Sage Foundation found that what makes societies resilient during a crisis are high levels of faith in institutions, high social trust, high levels of patriotism and optimism, and high levels of social and racial integration. The United States that confronts the coronavirus pandemic has catastrophically low levels of all these things.
  • Worse, unlike the Blitz, this pandemic deprives us of the thing social resilience needs most—close physical and social connectio
  • In America, the pandemic finds a country that has already seen a recent tripling of the number of people suffering from depression, a sharp increase in mental-health issues of all varieties; a sharp rise in suicides, and record levels of tribal hostility and polarization. The dread and isolation that COVID-19 causes threaten to exacerbate all this, to drive people even farther apart.
  • Today, the world is threatened by a virus. The moral story we tell has to be less about the evil we face and more about the solidarity we are building with one another. The story we tell has to be about how we took this disease and turned it into an occasion to become a better society
katherineharron

Trump and his plan to win a second term unmasked in Michigan visit - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

trump

shared by katherineharron on 22 May 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump's debasing of fact, divide-and-rule tactics and endless quest for new political enemies may be disastrous in a pandemic. But such behavior, combined with the promise of an American comeback, still adds up to a formidable electoral arsenal.
  • The President gave every impression Thursday of battling for his political life during a visit to Michigan, a state that crystallizes the themes of his bid for a second term and that could be decisive in his clash with Democrat Joe Biden. It was his most explicit display yet of his plans to beat treacherous pandemic politics and criticism of his leadership in pursuit of an even more logic-busting victory than in 2016.
  • "A permanent lockdown is not a strategy for a healthy state or a healthy country. To protect the health of our people we must have a functioning economy,"
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • By refusing to wear a facemask on camera, Trump signaled to his core supporters that he stands with their demands to get the country back to normal, despite his public health officials' warnings about a possible return of coronavirus.
  • Trump also hit his central campaign themes, hyping his new trade deals, escalating his effort to use China as a scapegoat for not stopping a pandemic he himself long ignored and celebrating the border wall that is crucial to his bond with his supporters. And he took a new shot at Biden's mental capacity, branding the former vice president "a Democrat that doesn't even know where he is." And even before he left the White House, Trump delivered yet another carrot to his evangelical supporters, then followed up in Michigan.
  • "In Donald Trump's America, the wealthy and well-connected have gotten relief -- while small business owners have too often seen their doors shutter," he added. Around a quarter of Michigan's workers have lost their jobs, according to new employment figures, showing that this debate could be pivotal in a state where Trump pulled off a narrow win over Hillary Clinton four years ago.
  • In many ways, Trump is playing catchup since satisfaction with his performance in the state trails public approval of the job being done by Michigan's Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, with whom he has picked a political fight that he seems so far to be losing.
  • Trump falsely claimed Wednesday that Michigan's efforts to help its citizens vote by mail in November, in a bid to check a resurgence of the virus, will trigger massive voter fraud. Those claims risk alienating voters who are worried about the health implications of showing up in person to vote in November. And they threaten to distract from the purity of Trump's economic message in what is in many ways an unnecessary controversy.
  • Trump' economic reopening message offers the promise of broadening his support beyond his most loyal supporters — in the industrial Midwest especially.
  • "His base is still not the majority. On questions of timing and whether people feel comfortable going out and wearing masks, polling shows people with positions much closer to the governor," said Aaron Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan, who has written extensively about Trump and his rhetorical style.
  • Trump's decision to go after a popular Democratic governor — as he did last week in Pennsylvania with Tom Wolf -- is in some ways a sign of the President's weakness in that he needs to destroy and discredit opponents and cannot just rely on the strength of his own record to win reelection
  • Trump's few hours in Michigan also underscored his utter lack of guilt in politicizing and misrepresenting the reality of the worst domestic crisis to confront the US since World War II.
  • His cheerleading on Thursday — including on the issue of testing, where the US still trails other countries in per capita diagnostics -- was part of an aggressive White House effort to rewrite the history of the politics of the pandemic. Polls that show public satisfaction for Trump's leadership in the crisis suggest that he still has a long way to go.
Javier E

Opinion | The Elite Needs to Give Up Its G.D.P. Fetish - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-gdp-coronavirus.html

gdp prosperity elite needs working class

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • For Americans living through the recent months of crisis, some of the latest economic data may come as a surprise. Gross Domestic Product (G.D.P.) over the past six months remained far above what we could have achieved even a decade ago.
  • But rarely have such economic indicators been so entirely beside the point. Seriously: Who cares?
  • By Senator Toomey’s and Dr. Strain’s standards, the past few months were the greatest in human history to be alive. The pandemic has allowed more time than ever to enjoy air-conditioning and color televisions, computers and phones. One can joy ride for hours streaming podcasts.
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  • The calamity we're now all living through offers the professional class an opportunity to reconsider assessments of the national condition issued so confidently pre-pandemic: Economists focus on material living standards partly for ease of quantification, but also because that is what free markets most reliably produce
  • But “material living standards,” measured in dollars of consumption (or inches of flat-screen TV), are not the same thing as “quality of life.” They say little about relationships, dignity, agency, or life satisfaction.
  • Ask yourself what matters to you right now. Consider whether new apps on your smartphone compensate for the loss of control, sense of powerlessness, and strain of unpredictability.
  • Speaking in March at the Heritage Foundation, Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican said, “many nuclear families are struggling, that families don’t have the community support that they once had, extended families live apart,” and “civil society” is in “decline.” Still, he argued, “the standard of living of middle-class and working class Americans has improved,” citing larger houses, better computers, and cars that are not only safer but also equipped with satellite radio and seat warmers.
  • Weighing these competing factors, he concluded, “For all the problems that we undoubtedly have, the fact is life is better today than it has ever been for the vast majority of the American people.”
  • What good does G.D.P. do, if people we love are falling seriously ill and dying in unprecedented numbers; if the rhythms of daily life vital to our happiness have gone haywire and our social connections have atrophied?
  • How much of that technology would you trade to erase the coronavirus? Put another way, how far back in history would you have to travel to find a time when Americans’ true quality of life was lower than today’s?
  • That this is even a question serves as damning refutation of Senator Toomey’s confidence that an improved standard of living more than compensates for weakened family bonds and waning community support.
  • While the right-of-center often dismisses working-class frustration with claims of economic prosperity, the left-of-center tends to dismiss their frustration as backward or racist.
  • America could slow, or partially reverse, elements of globalization that have most disrupted working-class lives, if that were our priority.
  • We could reorient our education system toward serving the majority of young people who still don’t earn even a community-college degree.
  • We could reform our system of organized labor to provide workers a genuine seat at the table and an institution in the community.
  • We could emphasize geography when we talk about diversity, aiming to distribute talent and investment more widely.
  • These are forms of social redistribution. The task is not to write a larger check but to relinquish power and realign institutions on behalf of those who have been left behind for decades.
Javier E

Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...612031

maturity immature trump adolescence culture masculinity crisis

shared by Javier E on 26 May 20 - No Cached
  • Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency?
  • the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.
  • They are, as an American Psychological Association feature describes them, men who adhere to norms such as “toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors.”
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  • they are men like my late father and his friends, who understood that a man’s word is his bond and that a handshake means something. They are men who still believe in a day’s work for a day’s wages. They feel that you should never thank another man when he hands you a paycheck that you earned.
  • courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.
  • yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard
  • As the writer Windsor Mann has noted, Trump behaves in ways that many working-class men would ridicule: “He wears bronzer, loves gold and gossip, is obsessed with his physical appearance, whines constantly, can't control his emotions, watches daytime television, enjoys parades and interior decorating, and used to sell perfume.”
  • To reduce all of this to sexual inadequacy, however, is too facile. It cannot explain why millions of men look the other way when Trump acts in ways they would typically find shameful. Nor is arguing that Trump is a bad person and therefore that the people who support him are either brainwashed or also bad people helpful. He is, and some of them are. But that doesn’t explain why men who would normally ostracize someone like Trump continue to embrace him.
  • one must first grasp how deeply they are betraying their own definition of masculinity by looking more closely at the flaws they should, in principle, find revolting.
  • Is Trump honorable? This is a man who routinely refused to pay working people their due wages, and then lawyered them into the ground when they objected to being exploited. Trump is a rich downtown bully, the sort most working men usually hate.
  • the fact of the matter is that Trump is an obvious coward. He has two particular phobias: powerful men and intelligent women.
  • Whenever he is in the company of Russian President Vladimir Putin, to take the most cringe-inducing example, he visibly cowers.
  • he is eager to criticize China, until he is asked about Chinese President Xi Jinping.
  • This is related to one of Trump’s most noticeable problems, which is that he can never stop talking.
  • Is Trump a man who respects women?
  • Women clearly scare Trump. You don’t have to take my word for it. “Donald doesn’t like strong women,” Senator Ted Cruz said back in 2016
  • Trump never seems more fearful and insecure than when women question him
  • Does Trump accept responsibility and look out for his team? Not in the least. In this category, he exhibits one of the most unmanly of behaviors: He’s a blamer.
  • Stern’s observation opens the door to a better explanation of why—despite all of his whiny complaints, his pouty demeanor, and his mean-girl tweets—Trump’s working-class voters forgive him.
  • Trump’s lack of masculinity is about maturity. He is not manly because he is not a man. He is a boy.
  • Trump is a hero to a culture in which so many men are already trapped in perpetual adolescence.
  • especially for men who feel like life might have passed them by, whose fondest memories are rooted somewhere in their own personal Wonder Years from elementary school until high-school graduation, Trump is a walking permission slip to shrug off the responsibilities of manhood.
  • so many of the men who support Trump have morphed into childish caricatures of themselves. They, too, are little boys, playing at being tough but crying about their victimization at the hands of liberal elites if they are subjected to criticism of any kind.
  • Trump’s base of support among working-class white women. (Those numbers are now declining.) But perhaps these women, too, regard Trump as just one more difficult and mischievous man-child in their lives to be accommodated and forgiven.
  • The best example of women giving him a pass was after the Access Hollywood tape came to light in the fall of 2016.
  • Female Trump supporters were interviewed on national television and—in a tragic admission about the state of American families—seemed confused about why Trump would be considered any worse than the men around them.
  • In the end, Trump will continue to act like a little boy, and his base, the voters who will stay with him to the end, will excuse him. When a grown man brags about being brave, it is unmanly and distasteful; when a little boy pulls out a cardboard sword and ties a towel around his neck like a cape, it’s endearing. When a rich and powerful old man whines about how unfairly he is being treated, we scowl and judge; when a little boy snuffles in his tears and says that he was bullied—treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, even—we comfort.
  • Donald Trump is unmanly because he has never chosen to become a man. He has weathered few trials that create an adult of any kind. He is, instead, working-class America’s dysfunctional son, and his supporters, male and female alike, have become the worried parent explaining what a good boy he is to terrorized teachers even while he continues to set fires in the hallway right outside.
  • Howard Stern, of all people, said it best: “The oddity in all of this is the people Trump despises most, love him the most. The people who are voting for Trump for the most part … He’d be disgusted by them.” The tragedy is that they are not disgusted by him in return.
Javier E

How Covid-19 Signals the End of the American Era - Rolling Stone - 0 views

www.rollingstone.com/...merican-era-wade-davis-1038206

decline us collapse American Century history crisis trump culture pandemic

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.
  • Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in history.
  • But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America.
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  • At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.
  • For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.”
  • As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.
  • Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.
  • More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding.
  • With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families
  • The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis.
  • Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.
  • At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing
  • But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the promise of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories close and corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken.
  • The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.
  • COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease
  • s a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average.
  • The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care.
  • What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.
  • How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community?
  • Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied, “I think that would be a good idea.” Such a remark may seem cruel, but it accurately reflects the view of America today as seen from the perspective of any modern social democracy.
  • The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose.
  • American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the United States. In truth, social democracies are successful precisely because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit every tier of society.
  • That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization.
  • even should Trump be resoundingly defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward. For better or for worse, America has had its time.
  • The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is no occasion for celebration, no time to gloat.
Javier E

The Predicate Is Fear - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...616009

trump crisis politics loyalty

shared by Javier E on 05 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • it helps to understand the predicate embraced by many Trump supporters: If Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidency, America dies.
  • it allows Trump and his followers to tolerate and justify pretty much anything in order to win. And “anything” turns out to be quite a lot.
  • This is just the latest installment in a four-year record of shame, indecency, incompetence, and malfeasance. And yet, for tens of millions of Trump’s supporters, none of it matters. None of it even breaks through. At this point, it appears, Donald Trump really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his voters.
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  • in the minds of Trump’s supporters lingers the belief that a Biden presidency would usher in a reign of terror. Many of them simply have to believe that. Justifying their fealty to a man who is so obviously a moral wreck requires them to turn Joe Biden and the Democratic Party into an existential threat
  • As Amy Chua, the author of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, has argued, the tribal instinct is not just to belong, but also to exclude and to attack. “When groups feel threatened,” Chua writes, “they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.”
  • “Motivation conditions cognition,”
  • Trump is given carte blanche by his supporters because they perceive him as their protector, transforming his ruthlessness from a vice into a virtue.
  • Many shift the topic immediately back to Democrats, because offering a vigorous moral defense of Donald Trump isn’t an easy task. It’s like asking people to stare directly into the sun; they might do it for an instant, but then they look away
  • But if you do succeed in keeping the topic on Trump, they often twist themselves into knots in order to defend him, and in some cases they simply deny reality.
  • That works both ways. Fear strengthens tribalistic instincts, and tribalistic instincts amplify fear. Nothing bonds a group more tightly than a common enemy that is perceived as a mortal threat.
  • Very few Trump supporters I know are able to offer an honest appraisal of the man. To do so creates too much cognitive dissonance.
  • They are similarly unable to admit they are defending an ethic that is at odds with what they have long championed. They have accepted, excused, and applauded Trump’s behavior and tactics, allowing his ends to justify his means. In important respects, this is antithetical to a virtue ethic.
  • As the conservative writer David French has put it, with Donald Trump and his supporters we are seeing “negative partisanship in its near-pure form, and it’s the best way to explain Trump’s current appeal to the Republican party.” His ideology is almost entirely beside the point, according to French: “His identity matters more, and his identity is clear—the Republican champion against the hated Democratic foe.”
  • if there is a line Donald Trump could cross that would forfeit the loyalty of his core supporters—including, and in some respects especially, white evangelical Christians—I can’t imagine what it would be. And that is a rather depressing thing to admit.
Javier E

Trump's GOP is Increasingly Racist and Authoritarian-and Here to Stay - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/authoritarian-and-here-to-stay

trump gop analysis 2020 election trumpism

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • he inflicted on us a presidency which was ignorant, cruel, reckless, lawless, divisive, and disloyal.
  • Mendacity and bigotry became the mode of communication between America’s president and his party’s base.
  • Not only did he worsen a deadly pandemic—by immersing an angry and alienated minority in his alternate reality, he is sickening our future.
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  • He rose from a political party bent on thwarting demographic change by subverting the democratic process; a party whose base was addicted to white identity politics, steeped in religious fundamentalism, and suffused with authoritarian cravings—a party which, infected by Trumpism, now spreads the multiple malignancies metastasized by Trump’s personal and political pathologies.
  • Since the civil rights revolution triggered an influx of resentful Southern whites, the GOP has catered to white grievance and anxiety.
  • Trump’s transformative contribution has been to make racial antagonism overt—a badge of pride that bonds him to his followers in opposition to a pluralist democracy that threatens their imperiled social and political hegemony.
  • Take the poll released last week by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) measuring the attitudes of “Fox News Republicans”—the 40 percent of party adherents who trust Fox as their primary source of TV news. The survey found that 91 percent oppose the Black Lives Matter movement; 90 percent believe that police killings of blacks are “isolated incidents”; and 58 think that whites are victimized by racial discrimination, compared to 36 percent who think blacks are.
  • He comprehends his audience all too well
  • Their animus toward immigration is equally strong. Substantial majorities believe that immigrants consume a disproportionate amount of governmental services, increase crime in local communities, and threaten our cultural and ethnic character.
  • That sense of racial and cultural besiegement pervades the 73 percent of Fox News Republicans who, the survey found, believe that white Christians suffer from “a lot” of societal discrimination—more than double the number who say that blacks do
  • Another key subgroup of the GOP base, white evangelicals, harbors similar attitudes. The poll found that the majority adamantly disbelieve that the legacy of racial discrimination makes it difficult for African Americans to succeed
  • The head of the PRRI, Robert P. Jones, concludes that Trump arouses white Christians “not despite, but through appeals to white supremacy” based on evoking “powerful fears about the loss of White Christian dominance.”
  • In 2016, Vox reports, Trump carried whites by 54 to 39 percent; in 2020, by 57 to 42 percent (per the raw exit polls)
  • Tucker Carlson serves as a cautionary tale. When Carlson dismissed, as gently as possible, the crackpot allegations of Trump lawyer Sidney Powell about a sweeping conspiracy using rogue voting machines, he was savaged across the right-wing echo chamber as a spineless quisling. Lesson learned.
  • fear of displacement helps explain the profound emotional connection between Trump and Republican voters. Their loyalty is not to the political philosophy traditionally embraced by the GOP, but a visceral sense of racial, religious, and cultural identity—and the need to preserve it—which is instinctively authoritarian and anti-democratic.
  • Bartels surveyed respondents regarding four statements which, taken together, read like a blueprint for Trump: The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it. A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands. Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done. It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.
  • Reports Bump: “Most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed with the first statement. . . . Nearly three-quarters agreed that election results should be treated with skepticism.” Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were also “significantly more likely to say they agreed with the other two statements than that they disagreed.”
  • This lies at the heart of Trump’s appeal: his shared sense of victimization by an insidious elite; his unvarnished denunciation of white America’s supposed enemies; and his promise to keep them at bay—if necessary, by force. For many in the Republican base, he fulfills a psychic longing for an American strongman.
  • In the New York Times, Katherine Stewart describes the growth of “a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world.”
  • “Christian nationalism is a creation of a uniquely isolated messaging sphere. Many members of the rank and file get their main political information not just from messaging platforms that keep their audiences in a world that is divorced from reality, but also from dedicated religious networks and reactionary faith leaders.”
  • As Republican strategists well appreciate, a party whose appeal is confined to conservative whites is, over the demographic long term, doomed to defeat. The GOP’s design is to postpone as long as possible their electoral day of reckoning.
  • In launching his naked attempt to disenfranchise the majority of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin through assertions of fraud unprecedented in their speciousness and scope, Trump took the GOP’s distaste for free and fair elections to its logical conclusion: the abrogation of American democracy at the highest level.
  • Trump justified his anti-democratic sociopathy by proliferating a plethora of groundless and preposterous falsehoods calculated to delegitimize our electoral processes. He claimed that millions of phony mail-in ballots had been cast for Biden; that voting machines had been re-engineered to exclude millions more cast for him; and that Republican election observers had been excluded from many polling places by a host of local officials bent on serving a labyrinthine conspiracy to purloin the White House.
  • Never once did he or his lawyers cite a shred of evidence supporting any material impropriety. Rather his purpose was to convince the Republican base that they were being cheated of their leader by the insidious “other.” Numerous polls confirm that it’s working; typical is a Politico/Morning Consult survey showing that 70 percent of Republicans don’t believe the election was fairly conducted.
  • As Trevor Potter, a Republican who formerly headed the Federal Election Commission, told the New York Times, Trump “is creating a road map to destabilization and chaos in future years. . . . What he’s saying, explicitly, is if a party doesn’t like the election result they have the right to change it by gaming the system.”
  • Support for Trump’s wall is nearly unanimous (96 percent); two-thirds (66 percent) favor barring refugees from entering the United States; and a majority (53 percent) support separating children from their parents when a family enters the country without permission.
  • Ultimately, this otherworldly obduracy stems from Trump’s manifest psychological illness: his imperishable narcissism; his ineradicable drive to be noticed; his relentless need to dominate; his comprehensive carelessness of all considerations save what pleases him in the moment. Television turned this moral pygmy into a mythic figure—and he cannot let go.
  • Republican elites want very much to turn the page on Donald Trump following his loss. But . . . they do not have any say in the matter, because their party now belongs to him. And the party belongs to Donald Trump because he has delivered to Republican voters exactly what they want.
  • a notable phenomenon of Trump’s presidency is the degree to which financially embattled working-class whites imagined, contrary to observable reality, that their economic situation had improved—or soon would. There are few better examples of how politics mirrors psychology more than lived experience.
  • This fidelity is why some Republican gurus remain committed to Trump’s strategy of maximizing support among middle-class and blue-collar whites. After all, they argue, despite Trump’s defeat the GOP did better than expected in senatorial and congressional races. Why risk tinkering with his formula?
  • Finally, economic populism is antithetical to the donor classes who, in truth, did better under Trump than did anyone else. They got their tax cuts and their judges—the GOP’s pipeline for judicial nominees, the Federalist Society, is dedicated to advancing pro-corporate jurisprudence. This is not the prescription for worker-friendly policies.
  • For the foreseeable future, Trumpism will define the GOP. The path to regeneration runs not through reform but, one fears, must proceed from self-destruction. The wait time will be painful for the party, and fateful for the country.
hannahcarter11

Aidan Ellison: Oregon man arrested in fatal shooting of Black teenager - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...6474024002

shooting Black Lives Matter oregon

shared by hannahcarter11 on 02 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • An Oregon community group is calling for change to address racism after the fatal shooting of a Black teenager by a white man in an incident that police said began as an argument over loud music. 
  • Aidan Ellison, 19, was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the chest early Nov. 23 after officers responded to reports of a shooting in the parking lot of a hotel, according to police in Ashland, a predominantly white community near the state's California border.
  • Robert Paul Keegan, 47, was arrested on a murder charge, though he said he was in fear for his physical safety
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  • At about 4 a.m. on the day of the shooting, Keegan was awakened by "loud music" in the parking lot of the Stratford Inn, where he was staying. He asked Ellison to turn the music down and Ellison refused
  • Keegan got dressed, grabbed a semiautomatic handgun and went to the hotel’s front desk to complain to a clerk
  • Ellison and Keegan argued, and Keegan said Ellison punched him in the face several times, according to the report. Keegan shot Ellison once, striking him in the chest, the affidavit said.
  • An autopsy revealed no injuries to Ellison’s hands that would be indicative of him punching Keegan
  • A local community organization condemned the shooting as an act of racism. Southern Oregon Black Leaders, Activists, and Community Coalition released a statement expressing outrage and saying “racism continues to endanger Black bodies and Black lives.”
  • The case has also drawn the attention of civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who raised the prospect of hate crime charges against Keegan on Twitter.
  • In a Facebook post, O'Meara said Ellison was killed "because the suspect chose to bring a gun with him and chose to use it, 100% on him, not the poor young man that was murdered."
  • According to the Oregon Department of Justice, “A hate crime happens when somebody intentionally uses offensive physical contact, threatens physical injury or threatens to cause damage to the property of another person because of their actual or perceived race, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin.” 
  • Keegan is also charged with first-degree manslaughter, reckless endangering and unlawful carrying or concealment of a firearm and is being held without bond.
  • Ashland is a city of about 21,000. Its population is 92.5% white and 1.4% Black, according to the U.S. Census.
  • Julie Akins, the city’s newly elected mayor, called on residents to “take stock of systemic racism which continues to cause the death of our brothers and sisters of color” in a statement posted to Facebook. 
  • “There is no other way of speaking about this but bluntly: white supremacy and racism is embedded in language, culture, and the zeitgeist of the United States and every community therein. Until we face this reality, apologize for it and make amends – these acts of violence will continue to bind us to our historic and continued oppression.”
clairemann

AOC and Rashida Tlaib's Public Banking Act, explained - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...a-tlaib-aoc-public-banking-act

US politics election banking economics pandemic

shared by clairemann on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • A public option, but for banking. That’s what Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are proposing in a new bill unveiled on Friday.
  • would foster the creation of public banks across the country by providing them a pathway to getting started, establishing an infrastructure for liquidity and credit facilities for them via the Federal Reserve, and setting up federal guidelines for them to be regulated.
  • at some point it’s just hitting a wall where it doesn’t carry them along and they’re looking for options,” said Tlaib, who represents Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, the third-poorest congressional district in the country. “So I’m putting this on the table as an option.”
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  • The proposal lands in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has shed light on many inefficiencies in the American system, including banking. Take the Paycheck Protection Program, for example: It used the regular banking system as an intermediary, which ultimately meant that bigger businesses and those with preexisting relationships with those banks were prioritized over others.
  • guarantee a more equitable recovery by providing an alternative to Wall Street banks for state and local governments, businesses, and ordinary people,
  • The public banking bill also does double duty as a climate bill: It would prohibit public banks from investing in or doing business with the fossil fuel industry.
  • “Public banks empower states and municipalities to establish new channels of public investment to help solve systemic crises.”
  • But, he said, this proposal is particularly comprehensive and supportive.
  • If Democrats keep control of the House come 2021 and manage to flip the Senate and win the White House, they’ll be able to take some big legislative swings, including and perhaps especially on issues related to the economy.
  • which theoretically would be more motivated to do public good and invest in their communities than private institutions, which are out for profit.
  • To be clear, the Public Banking Act isn’t creating a federal public bank.
  • encourage and enable the creation of public banks across the US. It provides legitimacy to those who are pushing for more public banking, and it also includes regulators as key stakeholders who can support and provide guidance for how those banks should operate.
  • though different public banks would likely have different areas of emphasis.
  • They could also facilitate easier access to funds for state and local governments from the federal government or Federal Reserve.
  • “It’s basically a way to finance state and local investment that doesn’t go through Wall Street and doesn’t leave the community and turn into a windfall for shareholders,
  • Public banks need the FDIC to provide assurances that it will recognize them in accordance with the bond rating of the city or state they represent.
  • Tlaib recalled hearing from her constituents when the $1,200 coronavirus stimulus checks went out this spring — people waiting days and weeks for direct deposits, or getting a check in the mail only to lose a substantial portion of it cashing it at the store down the street.
  • The Public Banking Act allows the Federal Reserve to charter and grant membership to public banks and creates a grant program for the Treasury secretary to provide seed money for public banks to be formed, capitalized, and developed.
  • “This is more about community development.”
  • McConnell said the FDIC issuing guidance that it recognizes the city’s — and the state’s — public banks as an AAA rating would send a clear direction to the state financial regulators that the public bank is considered low risk.
  • The bill would also provide a road map for the FDIC, which insures bank deposits of up to $250,000, to insure deposits for public banks, so people feel assured they won’t lose all their money by choosing to open an account with their state bank instead of, say, Wells Fargo.
  • the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has historically been charged with chartering national banks in the US, not the Fed, meaning this is a fairly novel idea.
  • It prohibits the Fed and Treasury from considering the financial health of an entity that controls or owns a bank in grant-making decisions.
  • So here is the thing about private companies, including, yes, banks: The point of them is to make money, and that drives their decisions. It’s not necessarily evil (though sometimes it kind of is), but it’s just how they work.
  • The idea behind public banking isn’t that Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley go away; it’s that they have to compete with a government-owned entity — and one that’s a little fairer and more ethical in how it does business.
  • Public banks, as imagined in the Tlaib/Ocasio-Cortez proposal, would provide loans to small businesses and governments with lower interest rates and lower fees.
  • Student loans are facilitated directly with BND, but other loans, called participation loans, go through a local financial institution — often with BND support.
  • According to a study on public banks, BND had some $2 billion in active participation loans in 2014. BND can grant larger loans at a lower risk, which fosters a healthy financial ecosystem populated by a cluster of small North Dakota banks.
  • Democrats have a lot of ideas, and if they take power come January 2021, there’s a lot they can do.
  • The Public Banking Act is meant to complement ideas such as the ABC Act and postal banking. And, of course, it’s linked to the Green New Deal, not only because it would bar public banks from financing things that hurt the environment, but also because the idea is that public banks would play a major role in financing Green New Deal and climate-friendly projects.
  • If former Vice President Joe Biden wins the White House and Democrats control both the House and the Senate come 2021, the talk around these ideas becomes a lot more serious.
rerobinson03

Western Roman Empire - Ancient History Encyclopedia - 0 views

www.ancient.eu/Western_Roman_Empire

shared by rerobinson03 on 31 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The Western Roman Empire is the modern-day term for the western half of the Roman Empire after it was divided in two by the emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305 CE) in c. 285/286 CE.
  • At its height (c. 117 CE), the Roman Empire stretched from Italy through Europe to the British Isles, across North Africa, down through Egypt and up into Mesopotamia and across Anatolia.
  • Soon after coming to power, Diocletian made a fellow-officer named Maximian (r. 285/286-305 CE) his co-emperor and, in doing so, divided the empire into halves with the Eastern Empire’s capital at Byzantium (later Constantinople) and the Western Empire governed from Milan (with Rome as a “ceremonial” or symbolic capital).
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  • The Eastern Empire flourished while the Western Empire struggled and finally fell c. 476 CE.
  • it became the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire (962-1806 CE) - seen as a revival of the values and order of the Roman Empire at its height - first under the reign of Charlemagne
  • The Holy Roman Empire steadily lost cohesion and authority as an outmoded institution incapable of governing in a modern age, becoming increasingly corrupt and ineffectual, until it was finally dissolved in 1806 CE.
  • The Roman Empire was founded by the first emperor Augustus (r. 27 BCE-14 CE) and steadily grew in power through the reigns of the Five Good Emperors
  • After Commodus was assassinated, Rome experienced a year of confusion (known as The Year of the Five Emperors) during which five different men took power and were deposed until Septimius Severus (r. 193-211 CE) founded the Severan Dynasty and restored order.
  • In 235 CE, the emperor Alexander Severus (r. 222-235 CE) was assassinated by his own troops who felt he was not acting in their best interests. This plunged Rome into the era known as the Crisis of the Third Century (also the Imperial Crisis, 235-284 CE) during which 20 emperors would come and go in almost 50 years,
  • Charlemagne became the preeminent Christian champion of his time, extending his empire while at the same time launching crusades against the Muslim Saracens as he had previously done against the pagan Saxons (through the Saxon Wars of 772-804 CE).
  • After the division, Diocletian instituted his tetrarchy – rule of four – whereby the empire was further divided between four men who ruled their own distinct sections.
  • Under the reign of Constantine the Great (324-337 CE), the empire as a whole flourished but it was never as cohesive as it had been under the Five Good Emperors. The Eastern Empire established lucrative trade and prospered while the Western Empire struggled and, since the two sections tended to view the other as competition, they worked as separate entities who shared a common bond but served their own interests.
  • At the Battle of Adrianople in 378 CE, the Eastern Emperor Valens (r. 364-378 CE) was defeated by Fritigern (d. c. 380 CE) of the Goths and many historians agree that this marks the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire.
  • This is not at all to claim that Theodosius I’s reign led to the end of the Western Roman Empire. There is no single cause for the decline and fall of Rome. A steady deterioration in power and prestige had been ongoing prior to the Roman defeat at Adrianople and all these challenges and pressures culminated in the deposition of the emperor Romulus Augustulus (r. 475-476 CE) by the Germanic king Odoacer on 4 September 476 CE, prior to Adrianople.
  • While c. 476 CE is the traditionally accepted date for the end of the Western Roman Empire, that entity did continue on under the rule of Odoacer
  • By this time, most Lombards had assimilated with the people of Italy and the neighboring Franks and Charlemagne’s victory simply accelerated this process. Christianity was now the dominant religion of Europe and, since it had been legitimized and spread under Roman rule, there were many Christians who refused to let the concept of the Roman Empire disappear.
  • Charlemagne of the Franks was proclaimed Western Roman Emperor in 800 CE by Pope Leo III and entrusted with protecting and perpetuating the Christian message.
  • When Diocletian came to power, he restored order and divided the empire’s rule between himself in the east and Maximian in the west.
  • Charlemagne set the foundation for the new empire but, as with many powerful and effective rulers, his successors could not maintain his same level of efficiency and the realm fell apart. It was reunited by Otto I of Germany who had followed Charlemagne’s example of the path to power through crusades against non-Christians (in this case, the Magyars).
  • Otto I then continued the policies of maintaining a Christian nation following Charlemagne’s example throughout his reign and set the standard for those who would follow him. The Holy Roman Empire continued to see itself in this role as an entity championing Christian truth through warfare until, in a steady decline involving political intrigue, corruption, almost incessant war, and constant internal strife, it was dissolved in 1806 CE.
Javier E

Is It Wicked to Feel Glee Because the President Is Sick? - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...it-wicked-to-feel-glee-because

schadenfreude empathy trump illness justice emotion

shared by Javier E on 03 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Is schadenfreude ever justifiable? Why do people feel it? And should they be ashamed?
  • we are calling experts for insight into news stories. In this case: Tiffany Watt Smith, a historian of emotions at Queen Mary University of London, and the author of Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune.
  • Watt Smith:
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  • From research in psychology and neuroscience, there is a lot of evidence that we get a pleasurable kick from seeing justice done.
  • But that is not quite what is at stake with the Trump situation. It’s not that you’re enjoying seeing someone suffer in a random way. And it’s not that you’re enjoying a moment of slapstick. It comes down to this question of justice and just desserts.
  • Thinkers like William James in the 19th century thought a lot about why we might enjoy seeing someone else suffer in a visceral, bloody way. He thought it was an evolutionary throwback to our more violent past, a glitch
  • But the question of what is justice and who deserves what—of course that is based on our own perspectives and the groups we form.
  • Research has shown that schadenfreude is experienced very strongly when people divide themselves into camps or tribes because you’re using that schadenfreude to denigrate your rival, and also using it to bond your group, and give yourself a feeling of swagger and triumph.
  • Persuasion:If people are experiencing schadenfreude, should they suppress it?
  • Watt Smith:There is a question about how we share it and how we act on it.Face-to-face, it’s much harder to confess to your schadenfreude. Online, it is incredibly easy. So this mob sense can evolve fast and at no cost. I encourage people to take a breath and pause before being triumphant and gleeful on Facebook or Twitter—that’s the moment when it rolls out of private experience into something that has serious consequences.
  • Watt Smith: One of the motivations for writing my book was: “Are we living in an age of schadenfreude?” It’s a lot to do with the internet and the new social environments through which we’re navigating life. But it also has to do with this growing interest in empathy.
  • Empathy has become a hugely significant and loaded term in public discourse. In the last 10 to 15 years, it’s taught in our schools, seen as an unquestioned public good—something that we should all cultivate. In a lot of research on empathy, people say the opposite of empathy is schadenfreude, or that schadenfreude is the emotion felt by psychopaths.
  • [this emotion] is a window into parts of human life that are understandable and normal and relatable: things that make us most human, like justice—wanting to see hypocrites and queue dodgers taught a lesson.
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