Ketanji Brown Jackson: Key takeaways from the Supreme Court confirmation hearings - CNN... - 0 views
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Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson spent three days in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- two of them marathon sessions of questioning -- where she described herself as an impartial and transparent jurist, while taking a calm but forceful tone to push back at GOP claims about her record. The dueling themes that Democrats and Republicans wanted to present about her nomination were punched up in a final day of testimony from outside witnesses Thursday.
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While she may pick up a few Republican votes, several GOP senators have sought to paint her as a soft on crime, "activist" judge, as they've used her hearings to showcase their messaging themes against Democrats heading into November's midterms.
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"I am here, standing on the shoulders of generations of Americans who never had anything close to this kind of opportunity," Jackson said Tuesday. She highlighted how her grandparents received little formal education and that her parents went to segregated lower schools in Miami, before studying at Howard University.
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At the China-Russia Border, the Xi-Putin Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying - WSJ - 0 views
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The meeting in Moscow this week between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to showcase what they have declared a partnership with “no limits” between their countries. Beneath the surface are economic, political, cultural and historical divisions that undercut the relationship.
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Russia seeks to disrupt the international order, including through military action. The International Criminal Court last week issued an arrest warrant against Mr. Putin for war crimes. China, which reached its economic stature through the status quo, seeks changes that further its interests, complicating the binational collaboration,
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In many ways, the Chinese and Russian economies are highly complementary. Russia exports natural resources China needs to power its industrial economy. China sells goods that Russian consumers want. On the energy front in particular, Chinese purchases of oil and gas since the invasion of Ukraine have helped Russia weather Western sanctions.
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Opinion | Do You Live in a 'Tight' State or a 'Loose' One? Turns Out It Matters Quite a... - 0 views
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Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.
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In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a Ph.D. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”
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Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”
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A Blow Against the Malice Theory of American Politics - The Dispatch - 1 views
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Why were partisans so oblivious to the escalating tensions that were tearing America apart? Why were they so confident that the solution to American polarization was domination and not accommodation?
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The answer was clear. For decades, winners and losers alike spun virtually every American election as the sign of things to come, the harbinger of a permanent victory (or permanent defeat). You don’t even have to be that old to see the recent pattern. The thrill of Democratic victory in 1992 turned into the agony of defeat in 1994, then the thrill of victory again in 1996
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Then Obama won in 2008. But for Republicans, that was an aberration—a fluke caused by the housing crash and an unpopular war. The real majority came to the polls in Tea Party 2010. But wait: Obama won again in 2012, and suddenly all the momentum was on the side of the “coalition of the ascendant.” Remember that phrase? It signaled permanent Republican doom—the alleged party of white people couldn’t possibly keep winning in a nation that was growing more diverse by the year, could it?
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Plagues of the Body and Plagues of the Mind - The Bulwark - 0 views
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Though Pamuk is playful where Tolstoy is strident, behind all the beautiful descriptions of Mingherian flowers and mountains of rose-colored marble, he is undeniably making an argument. If Tolstoy’s great theme in War and Peace is the powerlessness of humanity to remake the world through acts of will alone, Pamuk’s is the role of accident in shaping history and its writing. Tolstoy’s enemy was Napoleon, the embodiment of modernity’s hubris. Pamuk’s is the historiographic crimes of nationalism.
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Mingheria becomes independent not only through the great accident of the plague, but also through thousands of tiny accidents at crucial moments. The problem with nations, the book suggests, is that they take all these small instances in which things could just as well have been otherwise and cast them as a monumental inevitability. Once a nation-state comes into existence, the machinery of education and civic ritual and the instruments of propaganda and state violence are wielded to turn chance into fate. And that fate becomes inexorable.
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This is a bold thing to say in Turkey, a country that has gone to great lengths to promulgate a heroic and highly sanitized account of its founding. It is even bolder when one notes that Mingheria’s struggle for independence, and its troubled post-independence history, function very well as an allegory of Turkey itself. Major Kâmil is, like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, an Ottoman war hero and secularist who tries to found a country divided by ethnic and religious rivalries on a conception of linguistic and ethnic nationalism.
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See How Real AI-Generated Images Have Become - The New York Times - 0 views
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The rapid advent of artificial intelligence has set off alarms that the technology used to trick people is advancing far faster than the technology that can identify the tricks. Tech companies, researchers, photo agencies and news organizations are scrambling to catch up, trying to establish standards for content provenance and ownership.
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The advancements are already fueling disinformation and being used to stoke political divisions
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Last month, some people fell for images showing Pope Francis donning a puffy Balenciaga jacket and an earthquake devastating the Pacific Northwest, even though neither of those events had occurred. The images had been created using Midjourney, a popular image generator.
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Opinion | It's 2086. This Is What American History Could Look Like. - The New York Times - 0 views
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If it seems far-fetched that a notorious insurgent could be given such a place of honor, the past begs to differ. When the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, was imprisoned after the Civil War (rumored to be dressed at the time of his arrest in his own outlandish costume), he was more reviled and mocked than any Capitol rioter, and his crimes far more serious. His statue joined George Washington’s in the Capitol 65 years later.
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As curators at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, we are regularly confronted by hard physical evidence of just how slippery the past can be.
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It is chilling, but not impossible, to envision the signs screaming “Stop the steal!” picked up on the garbage-strewn National Mall on Jan. 7, 2021, treated one day as patriotic treasures, displayed alongside the writing desk Thomas Jefferson used to draft the Declaration of Independence or the inkwell Abraham Lincoln dipped into to compose the Emancipation Proclamation.
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Opinion | Joe Biden Puts Donald Trump In His Place - The New York Times - 0 views
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He also performed a service by keeping the preservation of American democracy central to his campaign. He has faced plenty of second-guessing for this choice. Democracy is a big, amorphous concept like climate change, the critics say. Regular people struggle to understand it as concretely as they do, say, crime or the economy.
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But as Mr. Biden explained, “Without democracy, no progress is possible.” It’s all connected, he said.
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“Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind, to be who you are, to be who you want to be,” he said. “Democracy is about being able to bring about peaceful change. Democracy — democracy is how we’ve opened the doors of opportunity wider and wider with each successive generation, notwithstanding our mistakes. But if democracy falls, we’ll lose that freedom.”
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In defense of science fiction - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion - 0 views
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I’m a big fan of science fiction (see my list of favorites from last week)! So when people start bashing the genre, I tend to leap to its defense
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this time, the people doing the bashing are some serious heavyweights themselves — Charles Stross, the celebrated award-winning sci-fi author, and Tyler Austin Harper, a professor who studies science fiction for a living
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The two critiques center around the same idea — that rich people have misused sci-fi, taking inspiration from dystopian stories and working to make those dystopias a reality.
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Opinion | How Covid Changed America in 2020 - The New York Times - 0 views
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It’s only now becoming clear how little we understood what the United States experienced during that unforgettable year and how deeply it shaped us
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I’ve come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust
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On a wide range of outcomes, including many that were less visible at the time, this country fared much worse during the Covid pandemic than comparable nations did. Distrust, division and disorganized leadership contributed to the scale of our negative health outcomes.
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Polyamory, the Ruling Class's Latest Fad - The Atlantic - 0 views
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More is a near-perfect time capsule of the banal pleasure-seeking of wealthy, elite culture in the 2020s, and a neat encapsulation of its flaws. This culture would have us believe that interminable self-improvement projects, navel-gazing, and sexual peccadilloes are the new face of progress.
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The climate warms, wars rage, and our country lurches toward a perilous election—all problems that require real action, real progress. And somehow “you do you” has become the American ruling class’s three-word bible.
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Charles Taylor has argued that, since at least the late 20th century, Western societies have been defined by “a generalized culture of ‘authenticity,’ or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own way, discover their own fulfillment, ‘do their own thing.’
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Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today | Samantha... - 0 views
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The Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green party, founded the prize not to honor Arendt but to “honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by representing their opinion in controversial political discussions”, withdrew its support, causing the city of Bremen to withdraw its support, leading to an initial cancellation
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The Foundation said Gessen’s comparison was “unacceptable”, but has since backtracked and has now said that they stand behind the award.
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The comparison is not a one-to-one argument, but rather a barometer for urging individuals – and countries – to think about their support for Israe
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The future belongs to Right-wing progressives - UnHerd - 0 views
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the only subset of Right-wing thought in the West today that doesn’t feel moribund is actively anti-conservative. The liveliest corner of the Anglophone Right is scornful of cultural conservatism and nostalgia, instead combining an optimistic view of technology with a qualified embrace of global migration and an uncompromising approach to public order.
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in much the same way as the Western Left seized on Venezuela under Chávez as a totemic worked example of this vision, so too the radical Right today has its template for the future: El Salvador under Nayib Bukele
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These moves have drastically reduced the murder rate in a previously notoriously dangerous country
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Exclusive: Trump Media saved in 2022 by Russian-American under criminal investigation |... - 0 views
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The concern surrounding the loans to Trump Media is that ES Family Trust may have been used to complete a transaction that Paxum itself could not.
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Paxum Bank does not offer loans in the US as it lacks a US banking license and is not regulated by the FDIC. Postolnikov appears to have used the trust to loan money to help save Trump Media – and the Truth Social platform – because his bank itself could not furnish the loan.
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Postolnikov, the nephew of Aleksandr Smirnov, an ally of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has not been charged with a crime. In response to an email to Postolnikov seeking comment, a lawyer in Dominica representing Paxum Bank warned of legal action for reporting the contents of the leaked documents.
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Opinion | The Mystery of White Rural Rage - The New York Times - 0 views
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Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of “creative destruction,” but the process can be devastating, economically and socially, for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but also whole communities.
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It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America.
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This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman
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How 'Surf City USA' became California's MAGA stronghold - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Huntington Beach, one of Orange County’s largest cities, has long been associated with conservative beliefs, but its evolution in recent years shows how the bitter polarization of national politics has crept into even the most mundane municipal matters.
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“It’s the tipping on its head of the old notion that all politics is local. Now, all politics are national, and I think the overall effect of that is really destructive,” said Jim Newton, a public policy lecturer at UCLA and editor of Blueprint magazine. “It takes a sharply divided country at the national level and drags that down into local disputes.”
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Spurred by those early oil booms, the city embraced development and corporate interests, said Chris Jepsen, the president of the Orange County Historical Society, earning it “a reputation for being pro-business and ardently pro-property rights.”
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How the "hell camp" of Ohrdruf changed Eisenhower's view of the Second World War - and ... - 0 views
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The key difference between the liberation of Auschwitz and Ohrdruf lies not in the reactions of the first liberators on the scenes but in what came after. The accounts of Red Army soldiers and American GIs are actually remarkably similar: they both speak of survivors as “walking skeletons;” they both describe the squalor the camp’s inmates lived in; they both mention the smell of death that lingered in the air and permeated far beyond the confines of the camp—which led to similar observations when locals living near the camps claimed to know nothing of what happened there to be deemed as nothing less than lies or willful ignorance
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This impression was reinforced when the mayor of Gotha, the nearest town to Ohrdruf, wrote in his suicide note following his forced visit of the camp: “We did not know, but we knew.”
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The difference was that Eisenhower was determined that the world should never forget what he saw. His Red Army counterparts were also quick to document what they found, but their leader Joseph Stalin was uninterested in the Holocaust as a reality. In the hierarchy of Nazi victims that Stalin created, no other group could surpass the suffering of the Soviet Union.
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It feels like the social order is crumbling in Germany | The Spectator - 0 views
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. The concept of irrational German angst has become a bit of a cliche over the years, but this time the threats to social cohesion feel very real
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a wave of aggression against politicians and activists. Last year alone there were 3,691 offences against officials and party representatives, 80 of which were violent
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This series of assaults on politicians and activists fuel wider fears around the state of Germany’s post-war order
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Opinion | Belgium Shows What Europe Has Become - The New York Times - 0 views
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In Brussels, the seat of the European Union, rising crime, pollution and decaying infrastructure symbolize a continent in decline. With unusual clarity, Belgium shows what Europe has become in the 21st century: a continent subject to history rather than driving it.
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For a long time, Belgian politicians and citizens hoped that European integration would release them from their own tribal squabbles. Who needed intricate federal coalitions if the behemoth in Brussels would soon take over? Except for the army and the national museums, all other levers of policy could comfortably be transferred,
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The upward absorption has not come to pass. The European Union remains a halfway house between national government and continental superstate. There is no E.U. army or capacious fiscal apparatus. Consequently, Belgium has been put in an awkward position. Unable to collapse itself into Europe, it is stuck with a ramshackle federal state
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