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Javier E

Britain entering first world war was 'biggest error in modern history' | World news | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-biggest-error-niall-ferguson

history UK WWI

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 14 - No Cached
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  • Britain could have lived with a German victory in the first world war, and should have stayed out of the conflict in 1914, according to the historian Niall Ferguson, who described the intervention as "the biggest error in modern history".
  • Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914,
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "Even if Germany had defeated France and Russia, it would have had a pretty massive challenge on its hands trying to run the new German-dominated Europe and would have remained significantly weaker than the British empire in naval and financial terms. Given the resources that Britain had available in 1914, a better strategy would have been to wait and deal with the German challenge later when Britain could respond on its own terms, taking advantage of its much greater naval and financial capability."
  • "Creating an army more or less from scratch and then sending it into combat against the Germans was a recipe for disastrous losses. And if one asks whether this was the best way for Britain to deal with the challenge posed by imperial Germany, my answer is no.
  • He continued: "The cost, let me emphasise, of the first world war to Britain was catastrophic, and it left the British empire at the end of it all in a much weakened state … It had accumulated a vast debt, the cost of which really limited Britain's military capability throughout the interwar period. Then there was the manpower loss – not just all those aristocratic officers, but the many, many, many skilled workers who died or were permanently incapacitated in the war.
  • He concedes that if Britain had stood back in 1914, it would have reneged on commitments to uphold Belgian neutrality. "But guess what? Realism in foreign policy has a long and distinguished tradition, not least in Britain – otherwise the French would never complain about 'perfidious Albion'. For Britain it would ultimately have been far better to have thought in terms of the national interest rather than in terms of a dated treaty."
katyshannon

Justice Department Sues Ferguson After City Amends Police Reform Deal : The Two-Way : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...city-amends-police-reform-deal

justice department ferguson city MO amends police reform DOJ npr sue deal lynch US crisis politics

shared by katyshannon on 11 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • The U.S. Department of Justice is suing the city of Ferguson, Mo., for unjust policing that violates the civil and constitutional rights of citizens, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced Wednesday.
  • The lawsuit came one day after the Ferguson City Council voted to change a proposed consent decree to reform the police and courts. The council said the package, which had been negotiated between the DOJ and city officials, cost too much.
  • In a news conference, Lynch said the DOJ was sensitive to the city's cost concerns throughout the months-long negotiation. She also said, "There is no price for constitutional policing."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "A few weeks ago, the Department of Justice and Ferguson's own negotiators came to an agreement that was both fair and cost-effective — and that would provide all the residents of Ferguson the constitutional and effective policing and court practices guaranteed to all Americans. As agreed, it was presented to the Ferguson City Council for approval or rejection. And last night, the city council rejected the consent decree approved by their own negotiators. Their decision leaves us no further choice."
  • She also said she was disappointed that Ferguson had not approved the deal, as the goal of the negotiation was to avoid litigation.
  • A year after the DOJ announced the findings of its investigation into the Ferguson Police Department, Lynch said the people of Ferguson should not have to wait any longer for "their city to adopt an agreement that would protect their rights and keep them safe." She said the violations by the police and courts in Ferguson "were not only egregious — they were routine."
  • The lawsuit alleges a "pattern or practice of law enforcement conduct that violates the First, Fourth and 14th Amendments of the Constitution and federal civil rights laws," Lynch said. "We intend to aggressively prosecute this case and I have no doubt that we will prevail."
sarahbalick

Justice Department threatens legal action against Ferguson - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...80084794

justice department action ferguson

shared by sarahbalick on 10 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Justice Department threatens legal action against Ferguson
  • The Justice Department said Wednesday it is exploring "legal actions" against the city of Ferguson, hours after the city council in the St. Louis suburb called for several revisions to a tentative agreement to revamp its police department and municipal court operations.
  • The Justice Department rebuked the move and could file a civil rights suit against the city to enforce the agreement. Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department civil rights division, said in statement that the department will take "necessary legal actions to ensure that Ferguson’s policing and court practices comply with the Constitution and relevant federal laws.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • "In order to make sure this is a successful decree, we got to make sure that this something we can implement, something we can afford," Knowles said.
  • "Their vote to do so creates an unnecessary delay in the essential work to bring constitutional policing to the city and marks an unfortunate outcome for concerned community members and Ferguson police officers."
  • The Ferguson City Council has attempted to unilaterally amend the negotiated agreement,"
  • "This is not going away. We have to pay," Patricia Cowan, 54, told council members. "We need to think about where we’re at, and we need to move forward."
  • "My fear is that with your vote that Ferguson will cease to exist," said Susan Ankenbrand, 73, who has lived in the city for 41 years. "I would rather lose our city by fighting in court than losing it to DOJ’s crushing demands."
  • The tentative agreement reached last month calls for Ferguson to pay the cost of a Justice Department monitor for at least three years and purchase software and hire staff to maintain data on arrests, traffic stops and use-of-force incidents. It calls for a revision in the police department's training with an emphasis "toward de-escalation and avoiding force — particularly deadly force — except where necessary."
  • "since time immemorial"
  • “We reject this argument out of hand as an affront to democracy," said Sherilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "All public institutions, including police departments, must operate in accordance with the U.S. Constitution."
Javier E

Restoring Henry by Michael O'Donnell | The Washington Monthly - 0 views

www.washingtonmonthly.com/...restoring_henry057190.php

kissinger foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 27 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The Idealist. The author’s revisionist thesis is that Kissinger was not in fact a realist, as he is so frequently portrayed
  • The ideals and deepest hopes of mankind? Kissinger and Nixon bombed Cambodia to pieces in a secret four-year campaign that annihilated some 100,000 civilians. “Anything that flies, on anything that moves,” were the parameters Kissinger gave to Alexander Haig. He countered African liberation movements by embracing the white supremacists of Rhodesia and South Africa, a policy known as the “Tar Baby option.” Kissinger facilitated the overthrow of the governments of Chile and Argentina by right-wing generals, and then worked tirelessly to deflect criticism of the new governments’ torture and murder. A declassified memorandum of his meeting with Augusto Pinochet in 1976 shows Kissinger in a particularly unflattering light: “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position.” In 1975 Kissinger and President Ford met with Indonesian strongman Suharto and authorized him to invade East Timor, which he promptly did the following day; another 100,000 lost their lives. “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,” Kissinger advised.
  • [A]rguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries—and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor—must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected U.S. relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major Western European powers?
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Tellingly, at several points in the narrative Ferguson strays from his thesis and defends Kissinger on more utilitarian grounds: the Cold War was real, its outcome was uncertain, and the United States needed every ugly advantage it could find on the geostrategic battlefield. The crimes of communist regimes vastly dwarfed Kissinger’s in scope and scale, Ferguson writes
  • Ferguson is now on the hook for his next volume to weigh the strategic implications of Kissinger’s most barbaric foreign policies once he assumed power
  • Ferguson’s problem is not a conflict of interest: it is his ideological affinity with his subject, and his determination because of that affinity to present his man favorably
  • This begins with Ferguson’s use of language, which repeatedly seeks to bring the reader onto Kissinger’s side
  • Ferguson spends much of the book attempting to rehabilitate Kissinger’s character. He makes an unpersuasive attempt to convince readers that Kissinger was not the relentless ladder climber we think we know.
  • The book also largely sidesteps the topic of Kissinger’s famous vanity, thin skin, and penchant for insincere flattery
  • Kissinger provided information and analysis to Nixon’s aide Richard Allen in breathless telephone calls, which he insisted be kept secret. Nixon’s campaign subsequently passed word to the South Vietnamese government that it could obtain better peace terms under a Nixon administration. South Vietnam pulled out of the talks just days before the U.S. election, the Democratic Party was humiliated, Nixon won the presidency—and then he immediately appointed Kissinger, a man he had met only once, his national security advisor.
  • Johnson referred to the maneuver—spiking a peace deal in order to win an election, thereby extending the Vietnam War—as treason
  • Yet Ferguson again is not convinced. He questions Allen’s reliability as a witness and contends that Nixon’s memoir does not prove that Kissinger was his insider. (Decide for yourself. Here is Nixon: “During the last days of the campaign, when Kissinger was providing us with information about the bombing halt, I became more aware of both his knowledge and his influence.”)
  • Ferguson also makes the legalistic argument that Kissinger’s intervention was not determinative, for Nixon had other informers, and North Vietnam “would surely” have found a pretext to abandon the peace talks had South Vietnam not walked out first. If we use Johnson’s terms, I suppose that reduces the charge to attempted treason.
  • Kissinger’s Shadow. Grandin, a historian at New York University, contends that Kissinger has left us with war as an instrument of policy, less as a last resort than as a kind of peacock’s strut. “Kissinger taught that there was no such thing as stasis in international affairs,” Grandin writes. “[G]reat states are always either gaining or losing influence, which means that the balance of power has to be constantly tested through gesture and deed.” (He quotes Kissinger as asking a fellow cabinet member, “Can’t we overthrow one of the sheikhs just to show that we can do it?”)
  • The abiding concern driving Kissinger’s foreign policy was therefore maintaining credibility: action to avoid the appearance of inability to act.
  • Secrecy is very much a part of Kissinger’s legacy. His systematic efforts to keep the war in Cambodia from becoming public—false records, wiretaps, blatant lies told to Congress—are much more disturbing than the fourth-rate jiggery-pokery of Watergate
  • Ferguson downplays this too, projecting his disagreement by writing disdainfully that “we are told” Kissinger loved secrecy
Javier E

Niall Ferguson: school history lessons 'lack all cohesion' | Education | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...n-school-history-lack-cohesion

history teaching education UK

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The Harvard academic Niall Ferguson has warned that too few pupils are spending too little time studying history – and what they do study lacks a sweeping narrative.
  • His plan aims to give pupils an overview of the years 1400 to 1914, and encourage them "to understand and offer answers to the most important question of that period: why did the west dominate the rest?"
  • directs the teacher to show their class a map of the world circa 1913 "showing the extent of the western empires".The class then divides into groups to defend the merits of six ingredients of western success, ranging from "competition" to – perhaps more controversially — "the work ethic".
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  • The academic criticises "an unholy alliance between well-meaning politicians and educationalists" for reshaping history teaching to focus more on skills such as analysing sources while neglecting facts.
  • Ferguson laments the fact that England is the only country in Europe where history is not compulsory after the age of 14
  • The historian approves of a passage in Ofsted's report, which highlights a lack of narrative in primary school history teaching."The only thing wrong with this observation is that Ofsted seems to think it applies only to primary school pupils, whereas it could equally well be applied to those in secondary school – and students at a good few universities, too."The "long arc of time" has been replaced by "odds and sods", Ferguson says.
jlessner

Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson Joins Exodus of City Officials - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-joins-exodus-in-ferguson.html

ferguson police chief US politics history culture

shared by jlessner on 12 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • FERGUSON, Mo. — The city’s embattled police chief, the focus of bitter complaints after a white officer fatally shot an unarmed black teenager here last August, agreed to resign Wednesday, completing a near complete shake-up of the city’s most senior administrators.
  • In the week since the Department of Justice released a scathing report detailing how Ferguson used law enforcement to pad its coffers, often violating constitutional rights and disproportionately targeting blacks in the process, the city manager and Municipal Court judge have also stepped down, and the city’s court has been placed under state supervision.
  • Together with the chief, Thomas Jackson, the three officials were cited as central figures in the abuses found by the Justice Department.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “To Ferguson residents, business owners and to the entire country, the City of Ferguson looks to become an example of how a community can move forward in the face of adversity,”
  • Chief Jackson, 58, will receive a year’s pay — about $96,000 — and a year of health insurance as severance, the mayor said.
Javier E

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Authors - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates

race racism obama politics crisis violence non-violent property

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The genre of Obama race speeches has always been bounded by the job he was hired to do. Specifically, Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people.
  • But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers. For a creedal country like America, this poses a problem—in nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country's nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, "You wear the mask."
  • As it happens, there is nothing about a congenitally racist country that necessarily prevents an individual leader hailing from the pariah class. The office does not care where the leader originates, so long as the leader ultimately speaks for the state.
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  • watching Obama both be black and speak for the state was torturous. One got the sense of a man fatigued by people demanding he say something both eminently profound and only partially true. This must be tiring.
  • Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street, but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who "bulk up" to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson, but a staple of American racism.
  • What clearly cannot be said is that American society's affection for nonviolence is notional. What cannot be said is that American society's admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. increases with distance, that the movement he led was bugged, smeared, harassed, and attacked by the same country that now celebrates him.
  • What clearly cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works. "Property damage and looting impede social progress," Jonathan Chait wrote Tuesday. He delivered this sentence with unearned authority. Taken together, property damage and looting have been the most effective tools of social progress for white people in America. They describe everything from enslavement to Jim Crow laws to lynching to red-lining.
  • What cannot be said is that America does not really believe in nonviolence—Barack Obama has said as much—so much as it believes in order. What cannot be said is that there are very convincing reasons for black people in Ferguson to be nonviolent. But those reasons emanate from an intelligent fear of the law, not a benevolent respect for the law.
  • The fact is that when the president came to the podium on Monday night there actually was very little he could say. His mildest admonitions of racism had only earned him trouble. If the American public cannot stomach the idea that arresting a Harvard professor for breaking into his own home is "stupid," then there is virtually nothing worthwhile that Barack Obama can say about Michael Brown.
  • And that is because the death of all of our Michael Browns at the hands of people who are supposed to protect them originates in a force more powerful than any president: American society itself. This is the world our collective American ancestors wanted. This is the world our collective grandparents made. And this is the country that we, the people, now preserve in our fantastic dream. What can never be said is that the Fergusons of America can be changed—but, right now, we lack the will to do it.
  • Perhaps one day we won't, and maybe that is reason to hope. Hope is what Barack Obama promised to bring, but he was promising something he could never bring.
  • Hope is not feel-goodism built on the belief in unicorns. Martin Luther King had hope, but it was rooted in years of study and struggle, not in looking the other way. Hope is not magical. Hope is earned.
  • It is my guiding thesis that people who claim a serious interest in America but consider racism to be a niche topic are divided against themselves. You can't understand American politics, without understanding the Civil War. You can't understand the suburbs, without understanding redlining. You can't understand the constitution, without understanding slavery. In effect if you are an American who avoids understanding the force of racism, you are avoiding an understanding of yourself and your country. 
  • The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s view, “in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.” As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany’s Mississippi.
  • It's easy to consider the reduction of this hemisphere's aboriginal people, the seizure of their land, their enslavement, the importation of African labor, the creation of a "black race," the profitable murder of black families, the perpetual warring against black people, the subsequent campaigns of terrorism which followed, as without analogue or global import. As though the land simply appeared beneath our feet, and by God's decree, delivered onto us its wealth. As though our state was not founded in plunder of land, labor and lives.
  • When Americans complained about Nazi anti-Semitism, party officials rejoined by citing southern racial practices, claiming a kinship. The Völkischer Beobachter, the oldest Nazi Party newspaper, routinely disparaged Africans and African-Americans. Like much of the German press, it frequently printed antiblack cartoons, reminded its readers that southern public accommodations were segregated, and delighted in reporting how blacks, like German Jews, could not sleep in Pullman cars and could not exercise the right to vote. Lynching was a favorite subject. Neues Volk celebrated southern lynching for protecting white women from unrestrained black desire. The Völkischer Beobachter published many graphic stories that were intended to support lynching as a tool to shield white sexual purity. “The SS journal Schwarze Korps exclaimed that if lynching occurred in Germany as it did in the American South, the whole world would complain loudly.” 
  • The desire to put a history of American racism, which is to say a portion of America's roots, in a corner is a kind of wish-fulfillment. It would be so much easier if "black studies" really were niche, if it really weren't that important, if racism really was a minor thread in the history of the West.
Javier E

Book review of The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Fac... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8b08-027a6ccb38eb_story.html

networks hierarchy history WORLD

shared by Javier E on 27 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Ferguson maintains that historians have paid too much attention to hierarchies (monarchies, empires, nation-states, governments, armies, corporations) and too little to the loose social networks that often end up disrupting them.
  • “traditional historical research relied heavily for its source material on the documents produced by hierarchical institutions such as states. Networks do keep records, but they are not so easy to find.”
  • The author argues that dismissing the role of social networks is a grave mistake because these loose organizational arrangements have been far more important in shaping history than most historians know or are prepared to accept
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • the power of networks has varied over time and that the relative importance of the tower and the square has ebbed and flowed. Nonetheless, Ferguson sees two specific periods as standing out as intensely “networked eras.” The first started in the late 15th century, after the introduction in Europe of the printing press, and lasted until the late 18th century. The second, “our own time,” began in the 1970s and is still going on.
  • from the late 1790s until the late 1960s, was terrible for networks. Ferguson writes that “hierarchical institutions re-established their control and successfully shut down or co-opted networks. The zenith of hierarchically organized power was in fact the mid-twentieth century — the era of totalitarian regimes and total war.”
  • “The Square and the Tower” will not disappoint readers who have come to expect from Ferguson ambition, erudition, originality and expansive historical panoramas. These often come mixed with telling anecdotes, illuminating minutiae, fun facts and even some facile one-liners that, while entertaining, don’t add much to the argument.
  • it is too much, and not all of it is illuminated by the “theoretical insights from myriad disciplines.” In fact, it is surprising how little Ferguson relies on the initial chapters on network theory to make his case.
  • In the remaining eight parts of the book, this network theory mostly disappears and the story is told in standard historical narrative.
  • its main unit of analysis, the social network, is too imprecise a concept to provide a solid foundation from which to launch the book’s epic theorizing. Most networks have some hierarchical features, and, as Ferguson notes, “a hierarchy is just a special kind of network
  • Nonetheless, the networks-and-hierarchies dichotomy does work as a narrative device that allows a gifted storyteller to take his readers on a fascinating tour of world history.
Grace Gannon

Ferguson: The signal it sends about America - 0 views

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

race America US Ferguson tension crime poverty politics

shared by Grace Gannon on 24 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 24 Oct 14
     
    This opinion article by Sally Kohn discusses the signals that the violent events in Ferguson could possibly be sending out about America. Sally Kohn suggests that "Ferguson protests reflect a larger picture of America's racial divide." Kohn also suggests that politicians seem to believe that crime and poverty are African American problems only.
Javier E

Conservatives Start to Take the DOJ Report on Ferguson Seriously - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...387835

justice system DOJ partisan bias epistemic politics report

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • I criticized the conservative movement for its reaction to the DOJ report on Ferguson, Missouri, arguing that for various ideological and political reasons, its organs were failing to recognize civil rights violations in urgent need of a remedy. Where was the outrage? Since then, there's been a small but notable improvement.
Javier E

Neil Ferguson: 'One year ago, I first realised how serious coronavirus was. T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-was-then-it-got-worse-covid

uk pandemic response 2020

shared by Javier E on 14 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • there were also major failures, and one of the most important of these lay in our inability to scale up testing for the disease. “It was tragic how slow we were at increasing testing for the virus. We should have started testing in hospitals and GPs [surgeries] much earlier than we did. We would then have had a much clearer picture of how quickly infections were coming into the country. As a result, we would have almost certainly locked down earlier – and perhaps would have adopted very different strategies, such as more draconian restrictions on international travel.”
  • “I got a fair bit of abuse and it was quite stressful at times, not just for me but for my colleagues. It was part of a campaign to undermine the science behind the country’s Covid policy, and it was carried out by those who have taken an ideological stance opposing the lockdown.
  • Such attacks are nothing new, Ferguson acknowledges. For several decades, climate scientists who have warned about the dangers of global heating have had to deal with similar vilification: targeted, highly personalised attacks mixed with the cherrypicking of evidence in order to try to discredit research.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “What is paradoxical is the fact that the UK has punched well above its weight in its epidemiology, in its vaccine development and in understanding the virus – yet we have the worst per capita mortality for Covid-19 in the developed world. The eventual public inquiry will have a very mixed bag of conclusions to make about our handling of Covid.”
  • A major problem for the UK – and for much of Europe – has been the assumption that controlling the virus is a matter of having a trade-off between the economy and imposing lockdowns. “That is a false dichotomy,” says Ferguson. “If you act early when you impose lockdowns and other restrictions, you don’t just minimise deaths, you minimise economic disruption because you can lift lockdown so much earlier.”
  • As to the differential impact of the disease on society, Ferguson is unequivocal. “The poor have been worst affected in multiple ways. They have the lowest job security and have the least ability to work from home. They tend to work in frontline professions where they are more exposed to the virus. They also tend to have poorer health and have more co-morbidities so that they get more severe reactions to Covid and suffer higher mortality rates.
izzerios

Washington is first state to sue Trump over immigration order - Chicago Tribune - 0 views

www.chicagotribune.com/...travel-ban-20170130-story.html

shared by izzerios on 31 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Washington state's attorney general declared Monday that he was suing President Donald Trump over his temporary ban on immigration
  • Trump's executive order also suspended the United States' entire refugee program and set off nationwide protests over the weekend
  • Ferguson was one of 16 state attorneys general who released a statement Sunday calling Trump's immigration action "un-American and unlawful."
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • suspending immigration for citizens of the seven countries for 90 days is aimed at protecting the nation against extremists
  • complaint seeks to have key provisions of the executive order declared unconstitutional, Ferguson said.
  • "We are a country based on the rule of law and in a courtroom it is not the loudest voice that prevails, it's the Constitution," Ferguson said. "At the end of the day, either you're abiding by the Constitution or you are not. And in our view, the president is not adhering to the Constitution when it comes to this executive action."
  • complaint claims that Trump's actions are separating Washington families, harming thousands of state residents, damaging the state economy, hurting Washington-based companies
  • "This is un-American, it is wrong, and it will not stand," Inslee said. "The clear intent of this executive order is to discriminate against one faith amongst all God's children."
  • Ferguson said he has been in contact with other attorneys general but at this point Washington state was acting on its own regarding the legal action.
Grace Gannon

Viewpoint: Ferguson and a new civil rights fight - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-30284312

Ferguson civil rights race US Missouri

shared by Grace Gannon on 13 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 13 Jan 15
     
    This article discusses how Ferguson will go down in civil rights history: The civil rights movement in the 1960s fought unjust laws. Can a modern movement brought on by the events in Ferguson, Missouri, take on a more ambiguous target? Journalist Ellis Cose examines the modern struggles of those protesting for racial equity.
Grace Gannon

Ferguson on edge as doubts raised over Darren Wilson indictment - 0 views

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

Ferguson Missouri Michael Brown case jury ruling

shared by Grace Gannon on 24 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 24 Oct 14
     
    The citizens of Ferguson, Missouri, and those of cities around the country, await the ruling of the Michael Brown case, as new evidence has emerged suggesting that Michael Brown attempted to grab the policeman Darren Wilson's gun during the struggle in the moments leading to his death.
gaglianoj

Police prepare for grand jury decision in Ferguson - 0 views

bigstory.ap.org/...-preparing-grand-jury-decision

ferguson

shared by gaglianoj on 25 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The preparations are aimed at avoiding a renewed outbreak of violence during the potentially large demonstrations that could follow an announcement of whether Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson will face a criminal trial for the Aug. 9 death of Michael Brown.
  • Many protesters want Wilson indicted for murder. Grand jury proceedings are secret, but legal analysts say recently leaked information about Wilson's testimony to investigators may be an attempt to prepare the public for the possibility that he might not be charged.
  • "I know there's a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of fear, anticipation" about that announcement, said Missouri State Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson, who was put in charge of security in Ferguson in the days after Brown was killed and is now part of a coordinated command with local police. But "I have a lot of hope."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "The moment I learn that there is, in fact, a non-indictment, then there's going to be an organized protest," said Eric Vickers, a black St. Louis attorney and civil rights activist.
Javier E

Niall Ferguson: Ukraine Invasion Struggles Could Be the End for Putin - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...les-could-be-the-end-for-putin

ukraine situation crisis analysis consequences strategy russia

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • What makes history so hard to predict — the reason there is no neat “cycle” of history enabling us to prophesy the future — is that most disasters come out of left field.
  • Unlike hurricanes and auto accidents, to which we can at least attach probabilities, the biggest disasters (pandemics and wars) follow power-law or random distributions. They belong in the realm of uncertainty, or what Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book “The Black Swan,” calls  “Extremistan.”
  • What’s more, as I argued in my book “Doom,” disasters don’t come in any predictable sequence.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • Ukraine is also receiving vital private-sector assistance, notably the delivery of Starlink internet terminals, which are helping maintain communications
  • All I can do is to apply history, as there is no model from political science or economics that can really help us here.
  • 1. Do the Russians manage to take Kyiv in a matter of two, three, four weeks or never?
  • At least one military analyst I respect said late last week that the Russian invasion force has around two weeks left before serious logistical and supply problems force Putin seriously to the negotiating table.
  • On the other hand, Western media seem over-eager to cover news of Russian reverses, and insufficiently attentive to the harsh fact that the invaders continue to advance on more than one front.
  • A better analogy than the Winter War with Finland may be the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that began in December 1979.
  • Economic warfare between 1914 and 1918 was not a substitute for sending British armies to fight on the European continent, just as it had not been in the Napoleonic Wars against France.
  • What I cannot tell is whether or not these weapons and other equipment will suffice to sustain Ukrainian resistance over the coming weeks.
  • But the Ukrainians have no real answers to higher-altitude bombardment and missile attacks.
  • 2. Do the sanctions precipitate such a severe economic contraction in Russia that Putin cannot achieve victory?
  • I have heard it said that the breadth and depth of the sanctions imposed on Russia make them unprecedented. I disagree
  • recalls but does not quite match the sanctions that Britain and its allies imposed on Germany at the outbreak of World War
  • It seems there are seven distinct historical processes at work and it’s not clear which is going fastest.
  • Then, as now, it was possible for an increasingly authoritarian government to impose economic controls and divert resources away from civilian consumption to the war effort, while blaming the resulting deprivation on the enemy
  • We should remember that those measures did not defeat Germany, however, because — like Russia today — it had the resources to be self-sufficient
  • no one should forget that self-sufficiency is possible for Russia, albeit at the price of severe austerity, whether it is a choice or a consequence of war.
  • China is able to help Russia in ways that could mitigate the economic shock, just as for years it has helped Iran to circumvent U.S. sanctions by buying its oil.
  • Unlike Soviet citizens, who were accustomed to a state monopoly on communications, today’s Russians have come to rely as much as we do on Big Tech. Being cut off from the metaverse may prove a more psychologically painful deprivation than shortages of imported foods.
  • even a 35% quarterly decline in gross domestic product does not condemn a country to military defeat if its planes can still fly and its tanks still fire rounds.
  • 3. Does the combination of military and economic crisis precipitate a palace coup against Putin?
  • 4. Does the risk of downfall lead Putin to desperate measures (carrying out his nuclear threat)? 
  • The people with the power to arrest Putin are the people he counts on to execute his arrest orders: Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council and, like Putin, a long-serving KGB officer; Sergei Naryshkin, the head of foreign intelligence; and Alexander Bortnikov, who heads the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB.
  • 6. Does the West’s attention deficit disorder kick in before any of this?
  • If Putin’s goal was to deter members of NATO from offering direct military assistance to Ukraine, it seemed to have some effect.
  • Russian casualties are being caused by Ukrainians using arms supplied by multiple NATO countries, including the U.S. and Turkey, but they are mostly crossing into Ukraine from Poland. Might Putin therefore strike a target in eastern Poland — Lublin, say, or Przemysl?
  • he is surely more likely to do so if believes the U.S. would not immediately retaliate in kind against a Russian target. A key lesson of this entire crisis has been that indications of weakness on the U.S. side, which I discussed here last week, have emboldened Putin.
  • 5. Do the Chinese keep Putin afloat but on the condition that he agrees to a compromise peace that they offer to broker?
  • My guess is that the Chinese make no serious diplomatic move until they are convinced Putin’s invasion is thoroughly bogged down in Ukraine’s spring mud.
  • I would not bet the fate of Ukraine on Russian internal politics.
  • Remarkably, one U.S. legislator told me last week that he “couldn’t recall an issue more obsessively followed and more unifying among” his constituents.
  • The only real significance of Western public outrage at Putin’s actions is the political pressure it exerts on Biden and other leaders to take a tougher line with Russia.
  • 7. What is the collateral damage?
  • History shows that wars (much more than pandemics) are the most common cause of jumps in inflation.
  • The best-known recent illustration is the way wars in 1973 (Yom Kippur) and 1979 (Iran-Iraq) contributed to the great inflation of the Seventies
  • these price spikes are not confined to oil and gas but involve a host of other commodities. The prospect of this year’s Ukrainian grain harvest being disrupted means a significant surge in food prices, with all kinds of consequences, especially in developing countries.
  • A tsunami of war has struck Ukraine. Whether the Russian tide flows or ebbs in the coming weeks will do much to determine the course of world history for the rest of our lives.
  • Nor can we ignore the risks that may be lurking within the international financial system.
  • This is the first big crisis of Cold War II, which is in many ways like a mirror image of Cold War I, with China the senior partner, Russia the junior, and a hot war in Eastern Europe rather than East Asia (it was Korea’s turn in 1950).
  • I do not know how the crisis will turn out, but I do know it will have profound consequences for the course of the superpower contest.
  • If the invasion of Ukraine ends in disaster for the heroic defenders of Kyiv and their comrades, another disaster may well follow — and it could occur as far away as Taiwan. Conversely, if there is justice in the world and the disaster befalls the architect of this war, that too will give birth to some fresh and unforeseeable event.
  • Add these seven imponderables together and you see how profoundly important the next few weeks will be.
  • The failure of the administration to signal that it would retaliate is of a piece with last year’s reports that Biden’s national security team was considering ruling out first use of nuclear weapons in its new national military strategy. Nuclear missiles cease to be a deterrent if one side is unwilling to use them.
  • Today, however, the boot is on the other foot. Not only is Putin intimidating NATO; he may have achieved something more, namely a tacit admission by the Biden administration that it would not necessarily retaliate with nuclear weapons if Russia used them.
Javier E

Opinion | With Covid, Is It Really Possible to Say We Went Too Far? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-lockdown-failure.html

covid response backlash revisionist history crisis culture policy

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • In 2020, many Americans told themselves that all it would take to halt the pandemic was replacing the president and hitting the “science button.”
  • In 2023, it looks like we’re telling ourselves the opposite: that if we were given the chance to run the pandemic again, it would have been better just to hit “abort” and give up.
  • you can see it in Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s book “The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind,” excerpted last month in New York magazine under the headline “Covid Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure.”
  • ...68 more annotations...
  • we can’t simply replace one simplistic narrative, about the super power of mitigation policy, for another, focused only on the burdens it imposed and not at all on the costs of doing much less — or nothing at all.
  • Let’s start with the title. What is the big failure, as you see it?
  • McLean: I think it gets at things that had happened in America even before the pandemic hit. And among those things were, I think, a failure to recognize the limits of capitalism, a failure of government to set the right rules for it, particularly when it comes to our health care system; a focus on profits that may have led to an increase in the bottom line but created fragility in ways people didn’t understand; and then our growing polarization that made us incapable of talking to each other
  • How big is the failure? When I look at The Economist’s excess mortality data, I see the U.S. had the 53rd-worst outcome in the world — worse than all of Western Europe, but better than all of Eastern Europe.
  • McLean: I think one way to quantify it is to take all those numbers and then put them in the context of our spending on health care. Given the amount we spend on health care relative to other countries, the scale of the failure becomes more apparent.
  • o me, the most glaring example is the schools. They were closed without people thinking through the potential consequences of closing down public schools, especially for disadvantaged kids.
  • to compound it, in my view, public health never made the distinction that needed to be made between the vulnerabilities of somebody 70 years old and the vulnerabilities of somebody 10 years old.
  • In the beginning of the book you write, in what almost feels like a thesis statement for the book: “A central tenet of this book is that we could not have done better, and pretending differently is a dangerous fiction, one that prevents us from taking a much needed look in the mirror.”
  • This claim, that the U.S. could not have done any better, runs against your other claim, that what we observed was an American failure. It is also a pretty extreme claim, I think, and I wanted to press you on it in part because it is, in my view, undermined by quite a lot of the work you do in the book itself.
  • Would the U.S. not have done better if it had recognized earlier that the disease spread through the air rather than in droplets? Would it not have done better if it hadn’t bungled the rollout of a Covid test in the early months?
  • McLean: Everything that you mentioned — the point of the book is that those were set by the time the pandemic hit.
  • in retrospect, what we were doing was to try to delay as much spread as we could until people got vaccinated. All the things that we did in 2020 were functionally serving or trying to serve that purpose. Now, given that, how can you say that none of that work saved lives?
  • McLean: I think that the test failure was baked into the way that the C.D.C. had come to operate
  • But the big question I really want to ask is this one: According to the C.D.C., we’ve had almost 1.2 million deaths from Covid. Excess mortality is nearly 1.4 million. Is it really your contention that there was nothing we might’ve done that brought that total down to 1.1 million, for instance, or even 900,000?
  • McLean: It’s very — you’re right. If you went through each and every thing and had a crystal ball and you could say, this could have been done, this could have been moved up by a month, we could have gotten PPE …
  • When I came to that sentence, I thought of it in terms of human behavior: What will humans put up with? What will humans stand for? How do Americans act? And you’ve written about Sweden being sort of average, and you’ve written about China and the Chinese example. They lock people up for two years and suddenly the society just revolts. They will not take it anymore. They can’t stand it. And as a result, a million and a half people die in a month and a half.
  • Well, I would tell that story very differently. For me, the problem is that when China opened up, they had fully vaccinated just under two-thirds of their population over 80. So to me, it’s not a failure of lockdowns. It’s a failure of vaccinations. If the Chinese had only achieved the same elderly vaccination rate as we achieved — which by global standards was pretty poor — that death toll when they opened up would have been dramatically lower.
  • What do you mean by “lockdown,” though? You use the word throughout the book and suggest that China was the playbook for all countries. But you also acknowledge that what China did is not anything like what America did.
  • Disparities in health care access — is it a dangerous fiction to think we might address that? You guys are big champions of Operation Warp Speed — would it not have been better if those vaccines had been rolled out to the public in nine months, rather than 12
  • . But this isn’t “lockdown” like there were lockdowns in China or even Peru. It’s how we tried to make it safer to go out and interact during a pandemic that ultimately killed a million Americans.
  • McLean: I think that you’re absolutely right to focus on the definition of what a lockdown is and how we implemented them here in this country. And I think part of the problem is that we implemented them in a way that allowed people who were well off and could work from home via Zoom to be able to maintain very much of their lives while other people couldn’t
  • And I think it depends on who you were, whether you would define this as a lockdown or not. If you were a small business who saw your small business closed because of this, you’re going to define it as a lockdown.
  • n the book you’re pretty definitive. You write, “maybe the social and economic disasters that lockdowns created would have been worth it if they had saved lives, but they hadn’t.” How can you say that so flatly?
  • I think there are still open questions about what worked and how much. But the way that I think about all of this is that the most important intervention that anybody did anywhere in the world was vaccination. And the thing that determined outcomes most was whether your first exposure came before or after vaccination.
  • Here, the shelter-in-place guidelines lasted, on average, five to seven weeks. Thirty nine of the 40 states that had issued them lifted them by the end of June, three months in. By the summer, according to Google mobility data, retail and grocery activity was down about 10 percent. By the fall, grocery activity was only down about 5 percent across the country
  • Nocera: Well, on some level, I feel like you’re trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, you’re saying that lockdowns saved lives. On the other hand, you said they weren’t real lockdowns because everybody was out and about.
  • I don’t think that’s having it both ways. I’m trying to think about these issues on a spectrum rather than in binaries. I think we did interrupt our lives — everybody knows that. And I think they did have an effect on spread, and that limiting spread had an effect by delaying infections until after vaccination.
  • Nocera: Most of the studies that say lockdowns didn’t work are really less about Covid deaths than about excess mortality deaths. I wound up being persuaded that the people who could not get to the hospital, because they were all working, because all the doctors were working on Covid and the surgical rooms were shut down, the people who caught some disease that was not Covid and died as a result — I wound up being persuaded about that.
  • We’re in a pandemic. People are going to die. And then the question becomes, can we protect the most vulnerable? And the answer is, we didn’t protect the most vulnerable. Nursing homes were a complete disaster.
  • There was a lot of worry early on about delayed health care, and about cancer in particular — missed screenings, missed treatments. But in 2019, we had an estimated 599,600 Americans die of cancer. In 2020, it was 602,000. In 2021, it was 608,000. In 2022, it was 609,000.
  • Nocera: See, it went up!But by a couple of thousand people, in years in which hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying of Covid.
  • Nocera: I think you can’t dispute the excess mortality numbers.I’m not. But in nearly every country in the world the excess mortality curves track so precisely with Covid waves that it doesn’t make sense to talk about a massive public health problem beyond Covid. And when you add all of these numbers up, they are nowhere near the size of the footfall of Covid. How can you look back on this and say the costs were too high?
  • Nocera: I think the costs were too high because you had school costs, you had economic costs, you had social costs, and you had death.
  • McLean: I think you’re raising a really good point. We’re making an argument for a policy that might not have been doable given the preconditions that had been set. I’m arguing that there were these things that had been put in place in our country for decades leading up to the pandemic that made it really difficult for us to plant in an effective way, from the outsourcing of our PPE to the distrust in our health care system that had been created by people’s lack of access to health care with the disparities in our hospital system.
  • How would you have liked to see things handled differently?Nocera: Well, the great example of doing it right is San Fran
  • I find the San Francisco experience impressive, too. But it was also a city that engaged in quite protracted and aggressive pandemic restrictions, well beyond just protecting the elderly and vulnerable.
  • McLean: But are we going to go for stay-at-home orders plus protecting vulnerable communities like San Francisco did? Or simply letting everybody live their lives, but with a real focus on the communities and places like nursing homes that were going to be affected? My argument is that we probably would’ve been better off really focusing on protecting those communities which were likely to be the most severely affected.
  • I agree that the public certainly didn’t appreciate the age skew, and our policy didn’t reflect it either. But I also wonder what it would mean to better protect the vulnerable than we did. We had testing shortages at first. Then we had resistance to rapid testing. We had staff shortages in nursing homes.
  • Nocera: This gets exactly to one of our core points. We had spent 30 years allowing nursing homes to be owned by private equity firms that cut the staff, that sold the land underneath and added all this debt on
  • I hear you saying both that we could have done a much better job of protecting these people and that the systems we inherited at the outset of the pandemic would’ve made those measures very difficult, if not impossible, to implement.
  • But actually, I want to stop you there, because I actually think that that data tells the opposite story.
  • And then I’m trying to say at the same time, but couldn’t we have done something to have protected people despite all of that?
  • I want to talk about the number of lives at stake. In the book, you write about the work of British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson. In the winter of 2020, he says that in the absence of mitigation measures and vaccination, 80 percent of the country is going to get infected and 2.2 million Americans are going to die. He says that 80 percent of the U.K. would get infected, and 510,000 Brits would die — again, in the abs
  • In the end, by the time we got to 80 percent of the country infected, we had more than a million Americans die. We had more than 200,000 Brits die. And in each case most of the infections happened after vaccination, which suggests that if those infections had all happened in a world without vaccines, we almost certainly would have surpassed two million deaths in the U.S. and almost certainly would’ve hit 500,000 deaths in the U.K.
  • In the book, you write about this estimate, and you endorse Jay Bhattacharya’s criticism of Ferguson’s model. You write, “Bhattacharya got his first taste of the blowback reserved for scientists who strayed from the establishment position early. He co-wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal questioning the validity of the scary 2 to 4 percent fatality rate that the early models like Neil Ferguson’s were estimating and that were causing governments to panic. He believed, correctly as it turns out, that the true fatality rate was much lower.”
  • Nocera: I know where you’re going with this, because I read your story about the nine pandemic narratives we’re getting wrong. In there, you said that Bhattacharya estimated the fatality rate at 0.01 percent. But if you actually read The Wall Street Journal article, what he’s really saying is I think it’s much lower. I’ve looked at two or three different possibilities, and we really need some major testing to figure out what it actually is, because I think 2 percent to 4 percent is really high.
  • He says, “if our surmise of 6 million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%. That is ⅒th the flu mortality rate of 0.1%.” An I.F.R. of 0.01 percent, spread fully through the American population, yields a total American death toll of 33,000 people. We have had 1.2 million deaths. And you are adjudicating this dispute, in 2023, and saying that Neil was wrong and Jay was right.
  • hird, in the Imperial College report — the one projecting two million American deaths — Ferguson gives an I.F.R. estimate of 0.9 percent.
  • Bhattacharya’s? Yes, there is some uncertainty around the estimate he offers. But the estimate he does offer — 0.01 percent — is one hundred times lower than the I.F.R. you yourselves cite as the proper benchmark.
  • Nocera: In The Wall Street Journal he does not say it’s 0.01. He says, we need to test to find out what it is, but it is definitely lower than 2 to 4 percent.
  • Well, first of all, the 2 percent to 4 percent fatality rate is not from Neil Ferguson. It’s from the W.H.O.
  • But I think that fundamentally, at the outset of the pandemic, the most important question orienting all of our thinking was, how bad could this get? And it turns out that almost all of the people who were saying back then that we shouldn’t do much to intervene were extremely wrong about how bad it would be
  • The argument then was, more or less, “We don’t need to do anything too drastic, because it’s not going to be that big a deal.” Now, in 2023, it’s the opposite argument: “We shouldn’t have bothered with restrictions, because they didn’t have an impact; we would have had this same death toll anyway.” But the death toll turned out to be enormous.
  • Now, if we had supplied all these skeptics with the actual numbers at the outset of the pandemic, what kind of audience would they have had? If instead of making the argument against universal mitigation efforts on the basis of a death toll of 40,000 they had made the argument on the basis of a death toll of more than a million, do you think the country would’ve said, they’re right, we’re doing too much, let’s back off?
  • McLean: I think that if you had gone to the American people and said, this many people are going to die, that would’ve been one thing. But if you had gone to the American people and said, this many people are going to die and a large percentage of them are going to be over 80, you might’ve gotten a different answer.
  • I’m not arguing we shouldn’t have been trying to get a clearer sense of the true fatality rate, or that we shouldn’t have been clearer about the age skew. But Bhattacharya was also offering an estimate of fatality rate that turned out to be off by a factor of a hundred from the I.F.R. that you yourselves cite as correct. And then you say that Bhattacharya was right and Ferguson was wrong.
  • And you, too, Joe, you wrote an article in April expressing sympathy for Covid skeptics and you said ——Nocera: This April?No, 2020.Nocera: Oh, oh. That’s the one where I praised Alex Berenson.You also cited some Amherst modeling which said that we were going to have 67,000 to 120,000 American deaths. We already had, at that point, 60,000. So you were suggesting, in making an argument against pandemic restrictions, that the country as a whole was going to experience between 7,000 and 60,000 additional deaths from that point.
  • when I think about the combination of the economic effects of mitigation policies and just of the pandemic itself and the big fiscal response, I look back and I think the U.S. managed this storm relatively well. How about each of you?
  • in this case, Congress did get it together and did come to the rescue. And I agree that made a ton of difference in the short term, but the long-term effects of the fiscal rescue package were to help create inflation. And once again, inflation hits those at the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution much harder than it does those at the top. So I would argue that some of what we did in the pandemic is papering over these long-term issues.
  • I think as with a lot of the stuff we’ve talked about today, I agree with you about the underlying problems. But if we take for granted for a moment that the pandemic was going to hit us, when it did, under the economic conditions it did, and then think about the more narrow context of whether, given all that, we handled the pandemic well. We returned quickly to prepandemic G.D.P. trends, boosted the wealth of the bottom half of the country, cut child poverty in half, pushed unemployment to historical lows.
  • What sense do you make of the other countries of the world and their various mitigation policies? Putting aside China, there’s New Zealand, Australia, South Korea — these are all places that were much more aggressive than the U.S. and indeed more than Europe. And had much, much better outcomes.
  • Nocera: To be perfectly honest, we didn’t really look, we didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at that.
  • McLean: But one reason that we didn’t is I don’t think it tells us anything. When you look at who Covid killed, then you have to look at what the pre-existing conditions in a country were, what percentage of its people are elderly. How sick are people with pre-existing conditions?
  • I just don’t think there’s a comparison. There’s just too many factors that influence it to be able to say that, to be able to compare America to any other country, you’d have to adjust for all these factors.
  • But you do spend a bit of time in the book talking about Sweden. And though it isn’t precisely like-for-like, one way you can control for some of those factors is grouping countries with their neighbors and other countries with similar profiles. And Sweden’s fatality rate in 2020 was 10 times that of Norway, Finland and Iceland. Five times that of Denmark. In the vaccination era, those gaps have narrowed, but by most metrics Sweden has still done worse, overall, than all of those countries.
  • On the matter of omniscience. Let’s say that we can send you back in time. Let’s put you both in charge of American pandemic response, or at least American communication about the pandemic, in early 2020. What would you want to tell the country? How would you have advised us to respond?
  • McLean: What I would want is honesty and communication. I think we’re in a world that is awash in information and the previous methods of communication — giving a blanket statement to people that may or may not be true, when you know there’s nuance underneath it — simply doesn’t work anymore
  • o I would’ve been much more clear — we think masks might help, we don’t know, but it’s not that big of an ask, let’s do it. We think the early data coming out of Italy shows that these are the people who are really, really at risk from Covid, but it’s not entirely clear yet. Maybe there is spread in schools, but we don’t know. Let’s look at this and keep an open mind and look at the data as it comes in.
Javier E

What To Make Of Ferguson? Ctd « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...what-to-make-of-ferguson-ctd

race racism police brutality polarization

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • How can you say Wilson had “no need” to shoot Brown that many times? The reason law enforcement went to high-capacity handguns and dumped the six shooters is because of the ability of people to withstand multiple gunshot wounds and continue fighting (or shooting.) The catalyst for this approach was the 1986 Miami shooting in which to FBI officers were killed AFTER they had shot two bank robbers multiple times. The robbers eventually died of their wounds, but in the meantime, they kept firing and killed the agents. Officer Wilson adhered to his training: shoot until the suspect is on the ground.
  • Mike Brown is to the Left what Benghazi is to the Right. Preconceptions are everything. Facts don’t matter. Logic doesn’t matter. There’s a narrative of racist-white-cop-kills-harmless-black-kid, and no matter what uncomfortable fact intrudes, like that so many “witnesses” admitted they didn’t actually see what they told the media they saw, the narrative must go on. Because racism.
  • Maybe lethal force wasn’t necessary, but science has proven that Brown turned and moved back toward Wilson (at least 20 feet) and was not shot from behind. There was undeniably an altercation at/inside the police cruiser. Does the fact that one man is alive and one is dead skew the way those facts are interpreted? Absolutely. But there exist certain physical certainties that strongly suggest this was not cold-blooded murder.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • I agree entirely that this should have gone to trial and realize that, statistically, nearly everything reviewed by a grand jury does. I agree that the fact Wilson will never even face charges is a mark of shame on the legal system. But I don’t get the sense that the people who are furious about this, whatever their race, are clamoring for a trial they’ll never see; it seems to me they’re clamoring for a conviction they feel they’ve been cheated out of.
  • Balko’s article makes clear that this is not an environment where the police are protecting and serving but instead harassing and self-serving. I am in no way justifying assailing a police officer (or anyone for that matter), verbally or physically, but you are not a young Black man living in what is still ostensibly the South and facing harassment for just being. I challenge you to invite Black males to tell you their stories of police harassment. How many times they have been detained, cuffed, kicked and threatened with death because they fit a profile, looked suspicious or were just somewhere some cop didn’t think they belonged? Yes, this is in America.
  • there is an interminable, sometimes slight, sometimes massive burden that comes with Blackness that you seem wholly oblivious to. That 12 year old that was shot in Cleveland was sitting on a swing playing with a fake gun. Two things happened due purely to his Blackness: police were called and he was murdered. Full stop. The Black man shot in the stairwell of his building in NYC for just existing while Black because a cop got scared. And that’s just since Monday.
  • Clive Bundy assails and threatens federal officers and gets invited on Fox News. Eric Frein plans and carries out an attack on state trooper barracks, killing one and seriously wounding another – again brought in alive. Ted Nugent scares the shit out of me with his racism, misogyny, anti-government and gun-humping ways, but yet he’s a hero to many White people and no one seems to have shot him yet either. White people have feared, reviled and vilified Blackness since they first laid eyes upon us. The codification and justification of our enslavement, disenfranchisement and murder is beyond primordial; it is part and parcel of what has made America and the Western world. Ferguson is just another eruption in this racist legacy and reality.
  • on of your readers claimed that, at most, Brown was guilty of petit theft, which is a misdemeanor. This is incorrect. Brown not only stole from the convenience store, he assaulted the business owner who tried to stop him from stealing. This assault escalated Brown’s theft to a strong-arm robbery, which is a second-degree felony in the State of Missouri. And it was Brown’s commission of this felony that began the chain of events that led to his death. He had nobody but himself to blame for that – not Officer Wilson, not the prosecutor, and not racism.
Javier E

Opinion | The Best-Case Outcome for the Coronavirus, and the Worst - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-outcomes.html

pandemic model outcome crisis

shared by Javier E on 21 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • About four out of five people known to have had the virus had only mild symptoms, and even among those older than 90 in Italy, 78 percent survived.
  • Two-thirds of those who died in Italy had pre-existing medical conditions and were also elderly
  • “I’m not pessimistic. I think this can work.” She thinks it will take eight weeks of social distancing to have a chance to slow the virus, and success will depend on people changing behaviors and on hospitals not being overrun. “If warm weather helps, if we can get these drugs, if we can get companies to produce more ventilators, we have a window to tamp this down,”
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Dr. Neil M. Ferguson, a British epidemiologist who is regarded as one of the best disease modelers in the world, produced a sophisticated model with a worst case of 2.2 million deaths in the United States.
  • I asked Ferguson for his best case. “About 1.1 million deaths,” he said.
  • one can argue that the U.S. is not only on the same path as Italy but is also less prepared, for America has fewer doctors and hospital beds per capita than Italy does — and a shorter life expectancy even in the best of times.
  • up to 366,000 I.C.U. beds might be needed in the United States for coronavirus patients at one time, more than 10 times the number available. A Harvard study reached a similar conclusion.
  • This is an interval of quiet when the United States should be urgently ramping up investment in vaccines and therapies, addressing the severe shortages of medical supplies and equipment, and giving retired physicians and military medics legal authority to practice in a crisis
  • During World War II, the Ford Motor Company turned out one B-24 bomber every 63 minutes; today, we should be rushing out ventilators and face masks, but there’s nothing like the same sense of urgency.
  • After initial missteps in Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first discovered, China adopted protocols for protective gear that are more rigorous than those in the United States, involving N95 masks and face shields, double gowns, gloves and shoe covers, plus special areas to remove protective clothing — and all this worked. Not one of the 42,000 health workers sent to Wuhan is known to have become infected with the coronavirus. The United States isn’t protecting health workers with the same determination; it seems to be betraying them.
  • In Italy, 8.3 percent of coronavirus cases involve health workers. A doctor in the Seattle area who is forced to reuse N95 masks told me that she and her colleagues fear that the lack of supplies will be deadly.
  • “We are all making dying contingency plans at this point just in case,” she said. “Wills, backup people to take care of kids, recording bedtime stories.”
  • The United States is in a weaker position than some other countries to confront the virus because it is the only advanced country that doesn’t have universal health coverage, and the only one that does not guarantee paid sick leave
  • with infectious diseases, the burden will be shared by all Americans
  • This crisis should be a wake-up call to address long-term vulnerabilities. That means providing universal health coverage and paid sick leave — and if you think that the coronavirus legislation Trump signed on Wednesday achieves that, think again. It guarantees sick leave to only about one-fifth of private-sector workers. It’s a symbol of the inadequacy of America’s preparedness.
  • We may dodge a bullet this time, but experts have been warning for decades that a killer pandemic will come;
  • if we, too, can be scared enough to invest in public health and fix our health care system, then something good can come from this crisis — and in the long run, that may save lives.
  • Ferguson questions whether South Korea and other countries can sustain their success for 18 months until a vaccine is ready, even as new cases are constantly being imported
  • America and South Korea reported their first Covid-19 cases on the same day, but South Korea took the epidemic seriously, promptly created an effective test, used it widely and has seen cases go down more than 90 percent from the peak.
  • In contrast, the United States badly bungled testing, and President Trump repeatedly dismissed the coronavirus, saying it was “totally under control” and “will disappear,” and insisting he wasn’t “concerned at all.” The United States has still done only a bit more than 10 percent as many tests per capita as Canada, Austria and Denmark.
  • Peter Hotez, an eminent vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told me that he and his colleagues have a candidate vaccine for the coronavirus but still haven’t been able to line up sufficient funding for clinical trials.
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