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Ethiopian troops push for regional capital, rebels promise 'hell' | Reuters - 0 views

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  • Ethiopia predicted swift victory but northern rebels promised them “hell” on Wednesday in a two-week war threatening the vast nation’s unity and further destabilising the Horn of Africa.
  • The war has killed hundreds, sent 30,000 refugees into Sudan, and called into question whether Africa’s youngest leader can hold together Ethiopia’s myriad fractious ethnic groups.
  • its forces are marching on Tigray’s capital Mekelle and will soon triumph over the local ruling Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which he accuses of revolt.
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  • The TPLF says Abiy, their ex-military comrade and one-time political partner, has removed Tigrayans from senior security and government posts since he took office in 2018 and now wants to dominate them completely.
  • Debretsion Gebremichael, elected Tigrayan president in polls that Ethiopia does not recognise,
  • The Tigrayan leaders accused federal forces of targeting civilians, churches and homes
  • Abiy’s government has repeatedly denied an ethnic undertone, saying it is pursuing criminals and guaranteeing national unity.
  • Tigrayans represent about 5% of the 115 million people in Africa’s second most populous country.They dominated national leadership before Abiy took the premiership and began opening up the economy and a repressive political system that had jailed tens of thousands of political prisoners.
  • The TPLF has also fired rockets into neighbouring Eritrea, escalating the war beyond national borders. It has a long-standing enmity with President Isaias Afwerki’s government, which has denied sending troops into Tigray against the rebels.
  • Ethiopia’s army is one of Africa’s strongest, but many officers were Tigrayan and much of its heavy weaponry was based in Tigray, on the front line of the standoff with Eritrea after a 1998-2000 war.
  • The Tigrayans are also a battle-hardened force with experience of fighting against Eritrea and spearheading the ouster of a Marxist dictatorship in 1991.
  • That was due to concerns over loyalty, not their ethnicity, the government said.
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Biden Immigration Plan May Fall Short Of Activists' Demands : NPR - 0 views

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  • Immigration activists are gearing up for a fight to push President-elect Joe Biden to do more to counter the measures taken by President Trump that made life more uncomfortable for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the county.
  • But some immigrant-rights groups like the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, Movimiento Cosecha and United We Dream want more. "We need advocates and people who wake up every day thinking about how they're going to fix the system so that people like myself and people like my family and others who are seeking refuge here have the ability to have a better life,"
  • Their requests include returning undocumented immigrants wrongfully deported under Trump, stopping detention of asylum seekers, expanding the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and using other executive powers like Temporary Protected Status to protect more undocumented immigrants.
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  • While Biden promised to reverse Trump's most restrictive immigration policies, he did not include immigration among his four top priorities: the coronavirus pandemic, economic recovery, racial equity and climate change.
  • Biden is largely expected to go back to the priorities that were in place at the end of the Obama administration.
  • the Biden administration must be careful not to unwind Trump's restrictions too quickly before getting their own processing system in place — or they will risk a new surge at the border.
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Tyson Foods Fires 7 Plant Managers Over Betting Ring On Workers Getting COVID-19 : Coro... - 0 views

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  • Tyson Foods has fired seven managers at an Iowa pork plant after investigating allegations they bet on how many workers there would get sick from the coronavirus.
  • "The behaviors exhibited by these individuals do not represent the Tyson core values, which is why we took immediate and appropriate action to get to the truth," Tyson Foods President and CEO Dean Banks said in a statement Wednesday. "Now that the investigation has concluded, we are taking action based on the findings."
  • More than 1,000 employees at the plant in Waterloo have been infected by the virus, and at least six have died.
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  • Many of the plant's 2,800 employees are immigrants and refugees.
  • Black Hawk County Sheriff Tony Thompson visited the plant along with health officials in April. He told The New York Times that working conditions there — workers crowded elbow to elbow, not wearing face coverings — "shook me to the core."
  • The complaint says Tyson offered $500 "thank you bonuses" to employees who showed up for every scheduled shift for three months — a policy that the plaintiffs argue incentivized sick workers to keep working.
  • Tyson had employees move between a different Iowa plant where an outbreak was occurring and the Waterloo plant, and did not adequately test or quarantine them before they entered the Waterloo facility.
  • The lawsuit also alleges that supervisors outwardly denied there were cases of the virus at the Waterloo plant but began avoiding the plant floor because they were afraid of contracting the virus.
  • It was around this time, according to a complaint from the family of one employee who died, that the manager of the Waterloo facility organized a "cash buy-in, winner-take-all betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many employees would test positive for COVID-19."
  • "We're saddened by the loss of any Tyson team member and sympathize with their families. Our top priority is the health and safety of our workers, and we've implemented a host of protective measures at our facilities that meet or exceed CDC and OSHA guidance for preventing COVID-19," Mickelson said, pointing to investments the company has made in testing, temperature scanners, workspace dividers and other safety measures.
  • Tyson eventually announced on April 22 it would suspend operations at the plant. It reopened two weeks later.
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Opinion | The 'Third Rail of American Politics' Is Still Electrifying - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • white attitudes toward immigrants could be broken up into “five main classes or ‘immigrant archetypes’ that come to whites’ minds when they respond to questions about immigrants in surveys.”
  • The authors, describing in broad outline the various images of immigrants held by whites, gave the five archetypes names: “the undocumented Latino man” (38 percent), the “poor, nonwhite immigrant” (18.5 percent), the “high status worker” (17 percent), the “documented Latina worker” (15 percent) and the “rainbow undocumented immigrant” (12 percent).
  • We find the “undocumented Latino man” archetype is predicted to increase the probability of wanting to decrease immigration flows by a whopping 38 points, plus or minus 7 points. This archetype is joined near the bottom by the “rainbow undocumented immigrant” — “from every region in the world” — which increases that probability by 29 points.
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  • The authors identify the survey respondents who are most resistant to immigration:
  • These respondents are the oldest of any class and possess many of the traits typical of conservative southern whites. Many live in small towns or rural areas in the U.S. south and identify as Republicans. Further, many of them are retirees with low levels of education. Interestingly, these respondents live in the least diverse communities relative to all other classes as judged by the presence of few immigrants and ethnic/racial minorities in their ZIP codes, which highlights the subjective nature of immigrant archetypes.
  • The authors conducted a survey in which they explicitly provided information rebutting negative stereotypes of immigrants’ impact on crime, tax burdens and employment. They found that respondents in many cases shifted their views of immigrants from more negative to more positive assessments.
  • But shifts in a liberal direction on policies were short-lived, at best: “In sum,” Abascal, Huang and Tran wrote, the effects of the stereotype-challenging information “on beliefs about immigration are more durable than the effects on immigration policy preferences, which themselves decay rapidly
  • The decision to remove barriers to trade in goods and capital flows have had profound effects on immigration. Trade has meant the closure of businesses in developed countries that rely on low-skill labor. When these firms closed, they took their support for low-skill immigration with them.
  • The Republican Party was once the party of big business and the party that supported immigration as a source of cheap labor. What happened to turn it into the anti- immigration party?
  • corporate America’s need for cheap labor had been falling before the advent of Trump, and that that decline opened to door for Republican politicians to campaign on anti-immigrant themes.
  • These findings recommend caution when deploying factual information to change attitudes toward immigration policy.”
  • The ability of capital to move intensified this trend: whereas once firms needed to bring labor to their capital, they can now take their capital to labor. Once these firms move, they have little incentive to fight for immigration at home.
  • Finally, increased productivity, as both a product of and response to globalization, has meant that firms can do more with fewer workers, again decreasing demands for immigration. Together, these changes have led to less business support for immigration, allowing politicians to move to the right on immigration and pass restrictions to appease anti-immigration forces.
  • On the other side of the aisle, Democrats, in the view of Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton, have failed to counter Republican opposition to immigration with an aggressive assertion of the historical narrative of the United Statesas a nation of immigrants, tapping into the fact that nearly all Americans are descendant from immigrants who arrived into a land they did not originally populate, and that despite epochs of xenophobia and restriction, in the end the US has been a great machine of immigrant integration that has benefited the United States and made us an exceptional nation.
  • the intertwined forces of climate change, state failure, violence, and criminal economics will greatly complicate efforts to create a counternarrative by producing surges of asylum seekers and refugees, which could be managed with effective immigration and border policies, but which under current circumstances instead serves to produce images of chaos along the southern border.
  • The question for the future of the broader consensus on immigration is whether Republicans can continue to be successful despite the anti-immigrant pandering that is largely out of step with the broad American consensus on immigration. If they are electorally successful — and there is reason to believe they will be, given forecasts for Democratic losses in 2022 — then this broad consensus might break down permanently and a large portion of the American public may follow their Republican leaders toward more fully adopting anti-immigrant ideology.
  • There are potentially tragic consequences if the Democratic Party proves unable to prevent anti-immigration forces from returning to take over the debate
  • The average undocumented immigrant has been in the U.S. for ten years The problems of the undocumented spill over onto the large population of U.S. citizens, who are the children, mates, relatives of the undocumented and whose lives are adversely affected by the increasingly repressive policy environment.
  • for all intents and purposes, most undocumented immigrants — and perhaps especially the Dreamers — are Americans deserving of full citizenship.
  • But these Americans are on the political chopping block, dependent on a weakened Democratic Party to protect them from a renewal of the savagery an intensely motivated Republican Party has on its agenda.
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Opinion | Chris Murphy gets it right on how to examine Afghanistan - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...phy-afghanistan-hearings-biden afghanistan review critique investigation question frame failure history politics us crisis policy biden gop Democratic party
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  • Democrats have mostly focused on the process and decisions adopted by the Biden administration leading up to wrenching scenes of stranded refugees, including countless people who aided the U.S.
  • This framing has been widely echoed by neutral journalists, but embedded in it is a very pronounced point of view. It treats it as an established, objective fact that there existed an alternate execution of the withdrawal that would have been quasi-immaculate in nature.
  • Congressional investigations are appropriate, because we need to know the full story and what governing weaknesses it reveals. Perhaps such investigations will reveal that an alternate approach would have been much cleaner.
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  • It also privileges the position of Republicans, who want the focus narrow for obvious political reasons, since a broader focus would implicate their party. And it privileges the position of those who advocated for this war all along.
  • “Right now many Democrats are buying into Republican arguments that the Biden administration is solely to blame for the chaos,” Murphy said. “That is not true. We’re seeing the regrettable but inevitable consequence of a 20-year war that was badly mismanaged and lasted far too long.”
  • “There is this fantasy that has been constructed by the media and members of both parties that we could leave Afghanistan, amid a collapse of the Afghan army and government, in a neat, clean way,”
  • That framing also implicitly takes a position — in the negative — on whether a very messy withdrawal was an inevitable outgrowth of the situation that was created by 20 years of misguided policy.
  • But no one should be asserting this as an objective fact at this point. And regardless, it in no way requires the focus to be only on those things.
  • it’s plainly in the public interest to determine the full scope of folly that went into the entire sorry episode.
  • Indeed, the claim that a broader focus is “partisan” is itself a deeply biased claim: It validates and protects the position of Republicans and the war’s initiators and longtime boosters. A broader focus would implicate Democratic supporters of the war, too.
  • Why do few Democrats go here? Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who backs Biden’s decision, points to a party-wide problem: Democratic presidents often face blowback from their own party when they buck hawkish D.C. conventional wisdom.
  • “Whether it’s Barack Obama negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran or Biden drawing down in Afghanistan,” Duss told me, “it’s crazy that Democratic presidents face more aggressive criticism from their own party for trying to end wars or prevent them through diplomacy than they do when continuing decades-old wars or launching new ones.”
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The rise of American authoritarianism - Vox - 1 views

www.vox.com/...trump-authoritarianism election politics US authoritarianism psychology crisis policy economic
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  • Trump currently does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the towns of upstate New York, and he won a resounding victory in the Nevada caucuses
  • it wasn't just Trump but his supporters who seemed to have come out of nowhere, suddenly expressing, in large numbers, ideas far more extreme than anything that has risen to such popularity in recent memory
  • CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn't have freed the slaves.
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  • MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders.
  • He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism.
  • Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.
  • He realized that he and a fellow political scientist, the University of North Carolina's Jonathan Weiler, had essentially predicted Trump's rise back in 2009, when they discovered something that would turn out to be far more significant than they then realized.
  • That year, Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.
  • This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which "activated" authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.
  • What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator
  • According to Stenner's theory, there is a certain subset of people who hold latent authoritarian tendencies. These tendencies can be triggered or "activated" by the perception of physical threats or by destabilizing social change, leading those individuals to desire policies and leaders that we might more colloquially call authoritarian
  • What we found is a phenomenon that explains, with remarkable clarity, the rise of Donald Trump — but that is also much larger than him, shedding new light on some of the biggest political stories of the past decade. Trump, it turns out, is just the symptom. The rise of American authoritarianism is transforming the Republican Party and the dynamics of national politics, with profound consequences likely to extend well beyond this election.
  • a small but respected niche of academic research has been laboring over a question, part political science and part psychology, that had captivated political scientists since the rise of the Nazis.
  • How do people come to adopt, in such large numbers and so rapidly, extreme political views that seem to coincide with fear of minorities and with the desire for a strongman leader?
  • They believe that authoritarians aren't "activated" — they've always held their authoritarian preferences — but that they only come to express those preferences once they feel threatened by social change or some kind of threat from outsiders.
  • a button is pushed that says, "In case of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant."
  • Authoritarians prioritize social order and hierarchies, which bring a sense of control to a chaotic world. Challenges to that order — diversity, influx of outsiders, breakdown of the old order — are experienced as personally threatening because they risk upending the status quo order they equate with basic security.
  • . The country is becoming more diverse, which means that many white Americans are confronting race in a way they have never had to before.
  • If you were to read every word these theorists ever wrote on authoritarians, and then try to design a hypothetical candidate to match their predictions of what would appeal to authoritarian voters, the result would look a lot like Donald Trump.
  • But political scientists say this theory explains much more than just Donald Trump, placing him within larger trends in American politics: polarization, the rightward shift of the Republican Party, and the rise within that party of a dissident faction challenging GOP orthodoxies and upending American politics. More than that, authoritarianism reveals the connections between several seemingly disparate stories about American politics. And it suggest that a combination of demographic, economic, and political forces, by awakening this authoritarian class of voters that has coalesced around Trump, have created what is essentially a new political party within the GOP — a phenomenon that broke into public view with the 2016 election but will persist long after it has ended.
  • This study of authoritarianism began shortly after World War II, as political scientists and psychologists in the US and Europe tried to figure out how the Nazis had managed to win such wide public support for such an extreme and hateful ideology.
  • Feldman, a professor at SUNY Stonybrook, believed authoritarianism could be an important factor in American politics in ways that had nothing to do with fascism, but that it could only reliably be measured by unlinking it from specific political preferences.
  • Feldman developed what has since become widely accepted as the definitive measurement of authoritarianism: four simple questions that appear to ask about parenting but are in fact designed to reveal how highly the respondent values hierarchy, order, and conformity over other values. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?
  • Trump's rise. And, like them, I wanted to find out what the rise of authoritarian politics meant for American politics. Was Trump just the start of something bigger?
  • In the 1960s, the Republican Party had reinvented itself as the party of law, order, and traditional values — a position that naturally appealed to order- and tradition-focused authoritarians. Over the decades that followed, authoritarians increasingly gravitated toward the GOP, where their concentration gave them more and more influence over time.
  • Stenner argued that many authoritarians might be latent — that they might not necessarily support authoritarian leaders or policies until their authoritarianism had been "activated."
  • This activation could come from feeling threatened by social changes such as evolving social norms or increasing diversity, or any other change that they believe will profoundly alter the social order they want to protect. In response, previously more moderate individuals would come to support leaders and policies we might now call Trump-esque.
  • Ever since, political scientists who study authoritarianism have accumulated a wealth of data on who exhibits those tendencies and on how they align with everything from demographic profiles to policy preferences.
  • People do not support extreme policies and strongman leaders just out of an affirmative desire for authoritarianism, but rather as a response to experiencing certain kinds of threats.
  • when non-authoritarians feel sufficiently scared, they also start to behave, politically, like authoritarians.
  • a distinction between physical threats such as terrorism, which could lead non-authoritarians to behave like authoritarians, and more abstract social threats, such as eroding social norms or demographic changes, which do not have that effect. That distinction would turn out to be important, but it also meant that in times when many Americans perceived imminent physical threats, the population of authoritarians could seem to swell rapidly.
  • Together, those three insights added up to one terrifying theory: that if social change and physical threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a strongman leader and the extreme policies necessary, in their view, to meet the rising threats.
  • This theory would seem to predict the rise of an American political constituency that looks an awful lot like the support base that has emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, to propel Donald Trump from sideshow loser of the 2012 GOP primary to runaway frontrunner in 2016.
  • If this rise in American authoritarianism is so powerful as to drive Trump's ascent, then how else might it be shaping American politics? And what effect could it have even after the 2016 race has ended?
  • The second set asked standard election-season questions on preferred candidates and party affiliation. The third set tested voters' fears of a series of physical threats, ranging from ISIS and Russia to viruses and car accidents. The fourth set tested policy preferences, in an attempt to see how authoritarianism might lead voters to support particular policies.
  • If the research were right, then we'd expect people who scored highly on authoritarianism to express outsize fear of "outsider" threats such as ISIS or foreign governments versus other threats. We also expected that non-authoritarians who expressed high levels of fear would be more likely to support Trump. This would speak to physical fears as triggering a kind of authoritarian upsurge, which would in turn lead to Trump support.
  • We asked people to rate a series of social changes — both actual and hypothetical — on a scale of "very good" to "very bad" for the country. These included same-sex marriage, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and American Muslims building more mosques in US cities.
  • If the theory about social change provoking stress amongst authoritarians turned out to be correct, then authoritarians would be more likely to rate the changes as bad for the country.
  • Authoritarianism was the best single predictor of support for Trump, although having a high school education also came close.
  • people in this 44 percent only vote or otherwise act as authoritarians once triggered by some perceived threat, physical or social. But that latency is part of how, over the past few decades, authoritarians have quietly become a powerful political constituency without anyone realizing it.
  • More than 65 percent of people who scored highest on the authoritarianism questions were GOP voters. More than 55 percent of surveyed Republicans scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians.
  • People whose scores were most non-authoritarian — meaning they always chose the non-authoritarian parenting answer — were almost 75 percent Democrats.
  • this is not a story about how Republicans are from Mars and Democrats are from Venus. It's a story of polarization that increased over time.
  • Democrats, by contrast, have positioned themselves as the party of civil rights, equality, and social progress — in other words, as the party of social change, a position that not only fails to attract but actively repels change-averse authoritarians.
  • Over the next several decades, Hetherington explained to me, this led authoritarians to naturally "sort" themselves into the Republican Party.
  • It is not for nothing that our poll found that more than half of the Republican respondents score as authoritarian.
  • Our results found that 44 percent of white respondents nationwide scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians, with 19 percent as "very high." That's actually not unusual, and lines up with previous national surveys that found that the authoritarian disposition is far from rare1.
  • among Republicans, very high/high authoritarianism is very predictive of support for Trump." Trump has 42 percent support among Republicans but, according to our survey, a full 52 percent support among very high authoritarians.
  • Trump support was much lower among Republicans who scored low on authoritarianism: only 38 percent.
  • But that's still awfully high. So what could explain Trump's support among non-authoritarians? I suspected the answer might lie at least partly in Hetherington and Suhay's research on how fear affects non-authoritarian voters,
  • Authoritarians, we found in our survey, tend to most fear threats that come from abroad, such as ISIS or Russia or Iran. These are threats, the researchers point out, to which people can put a face; a scary terrorist or an Iranian ayatollah. Non-authoritarians were much less afraid of those threats. For instance, 73 percent of very high-scoring authoritarians believed that terrorist organizations like ISIS posed a "very high risk" to them, but only 45 percent of very low-scoring authoritarians did. Domestic threats like car accidents, by contrast, were much less frightening to authoritarians.
  • A subgroup of non-authoritarians were very afraid of threats like Iran or ISIS. And the more fear of these threats they expressed, the more likely they were to support Trump.
  • that non-authoritarians who are sufficiently frightened of physical threats such as terrorism could essentially be scared into acting like authoritarians.
  • That's important, because for years now, Republican politicians and Republican-leaning media such as Fox News have been telling viewers nonstop that the world is a terrifying place and that President Obama isn't doing enough to keep Americans safe.
  • Republican voters have been continually exposed to messages warning of physical dangers. As the perception of physical threat has risen, this fear appears to have led a number of non-authoritarians to vote like authoritarians — to support Trump.
  • But when establishment candidates such as Marco Rubio try to match Trump's rhetoric on ISIS or on American Muslims, they may end up deepening the fear that can only lead voters back to Trump.
  • pushing authoritarians to these extremes: the threat of social change.
  • This could come in the form of evolving social norms, such as the erosion of traditional gender roles or evolving standards in how to discuss sexual orientation. It could come in the form of rising diversity, whether that means demographic changes from immigration or merely changes in the colors of the faces on TV. Or it could be any changes, political or economic, that disrupt social hierarchies.
  • What these changes have in common is that, to authoritarians, they threaten to take away the status quo as they know it — familiar, orderly, secure — and replace it with something that feels scary because it is different and destabilizing, but also sometimes because it upends their own place in societ
  • Authoritarians were significantly more likely to rate almost all of the actual and hypothetical social issues we asked about as "bad" or "very bad" for the country.
  • an astonishing 44 percent of authoritarians believe same-sex marriage is harmful to the country. Twenty-eight percent rated same-sex marriage as "very bad" for America, and another 16 percent said that it’s "bad." Only about 35 percent of high-scoring authoritarians said same-sex marriage was "good" or "very good" for the country.
  • Non-authoritarians tended to rate same-sex marriage as "good" or "very good" for the country.
  • The fact that authoritarians and non-authoritarians split over something as seemingly personal and nonthreatening as same-sex marriage is crucial for understanding how authoritarianism can be triggered by even a social change as minor as expanding marriage rights.
  • A whopping 56.5 percent of very high-scoring authoritarians said it was either "bad" or "very bad" for the country when Muslims built more mosques. Only 14 percent of that group said more mosques would be "good" or "very good."
  • The literature on authoritarianism suggests this is not just simple Islamophobia, but rather reflects a broader phenomenon wherein authoritarians feel threatened by people they identify as "outsiders" and by the possibility of changes to the status quo makeup of their communities.
  • This would help explain why authoritarians seem so prone to reject not just one specific kind of outsider or social change, such as Muslims or same-sex couples or Hispanic migrants, but rather to reject all of them.
  • Working-class communities have come under tremendous economic strain since the recession. And white people are also facing the loss of the privileged position that they previously were able to take for granted. Whites are now projected to become a minority group over the next few decades, owing to migration and other factors. The president is a black man, and nonwhite faces are growing more common in popular culture. Nonwhite groups are raising increasingly prominent political demands, and often those demands coincide with issues such as policing that also speak to authoritarian concerns.
  • the loss of working-class jobs in this country is a real and important issue, no matter how one feels about fading white privilege — but that is not the point.
  • mportant political phenomenon we identify as right-wing populism, or white working-class populism, seems to line up, with almost astonishing precision, with the research on how authoritarianism is both caused and expressed.
  • It all depends, he said, on whether a particular group of people has been made into an outgroup or not — whether they had been identified as a dangerous other.
  • Since September 2001, some media outlets and politicians have painted Muslims as the other and as dangerous to America. Authoritarians, by nature, are more susceptible to these messages, and thus more likely to come to oppose the presence of mosques in their communities.
  • , it helps explain how Trump's supporters have come to so quickly embrace such extreme policies targeting these outgroups: mass deportation of millions of people, a ban on foreign Muslims visiting the US. When you think about those policy preferences as driven by authoritarianism, in which social threats are perceived as especially dangerous and as demanding extreme responses, rather than the sudden emergence of specific bigotries, this starts to make a lot more sense.
  • authoritarians are their own distinct constituency: effectively a new political party within the GOP.
  • Authoritarians generally and Trump voters specifically, we found, were highly likely to support five policies: Using military force over diplomacy against countries that threaten the United States Changing the Constitution to bar citizenship for children of illegal immigrants Imposing extra airport checks on passengers who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent in order to curb terrorism Requiring all citizens to carry a national ID card at all times to show to a police officer on request, to curb terrorism Allowing the federal government to scan all phone calls for calls to any number linked to terrorism
  • What these policies share in common is an outsize fear of threats, physical and social, and, more than that, a desire to meet those threats with severe government action — with policies that are authoritarian not just in style but in actuality
  • The real divide is over how far to go in responding. And the party establishment is simply unwilling to call for such explicitly authoritarian policies.
  • There was no clear correlation between authoritarianism and support for tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 per year, for example. And the same was true of support for international trade agreements.
  • he way he reduces everything to black-and-white extremes of strong versus weak, greatest versus worst. His simple, direct promises that he can solve problems that other politicians are too weak to manage.
  • That's why it's a benefit rather than a liability for Trump when he says Mexicans are rapists or speaks gleefully of massacring Muslims with pig-blood-tainted bullets: He is sending a signal to his authoritarian supporters that he won't let "political correctness" hold him back from attacking the outgroups they fear.
  • Rather, it was that authoritarians, as a growing presence in the GOP, are a real constituency that exists independently of Trump — and will persist as a force in American politics regardless of the fate of his candidacy.
  • If Trump loses the election, that will not remove the threats and social changes that trigger the "action side" of authoritarianism. The authoritarians will still be there. They will still look for candidates who will give them the strong, punitive leadership they desire.
  • ust look at where the Tea Party has left the Republican establishment. The Tea Party delivered the House to the GOP in 2010, but ultimately left the party in an unresolved civil war. Tea Party candidates have challenged moderates and centrists, leaving the GOP caucus divided and chaotic.
  • Authoritarians may be a slight majority within the GOP, and thus able to force their will within the party, but they are too few and their views too unpopular to win a national election on their own.
  • the rise of authoritarianism as a force within American politics means we may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians.
  • It will become more difficult for Republican candidates to win the presidency because the candidates who can win the nomination by appealing to authoritarian primary voters will struggle to court mainstream voters in the general election. They will have less trouble with local and congressional elections, but that might just mean more legislative gridlock as the GOP caucus struggles to balance the demands of authoritarian and mainstream legislators. The authoritarian base will drag the party further to the right on social issues, and will simultaneously erode support for traditionally conservative economic policies.
  • Norms around gender, sexuality, and race will continue evolving. Movements like Black Lives Matter will continue chipping away at the country's legacy of institutionalized discrimination, pursuing the kind of social change and reordering of society that authoritarians find so threatening.
  • The chaos in the Middle East, which allows groups like ISIS to flourish and sends millions of refugees spilling into other countries, shows no sign of improving. Longer term, if current demographic trends continue, white Americans will cease to be a majority over the coming decades.
  • t will be a GOP that continues to perform well in congressional and local elections, but whose divisions leave the party caucus divided to the point of barely functioning, and perhaps eventually unable to win the White House.
  • For decades, the Republican Party has been winning over authoritarians by implicitly promising to stand firm against the tide of social change, and to be the party of force and power rather than the party of negotiation and compromise. But now it may be discovering that its strategy has worked too well — and threatens to tear the party apart.
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How US sanctions are fueling Afghanistan's humanitarian crisis - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...-humanitarian-crisis-sanctions afghanistan crisis politics sanctions
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  • More than five months after the fall of Kabul, the Afghan economy is on the brink of collapse, leaving millions of people at risk of extreme poverty or starvation. One major culprit: the US decision to halt aid to the country and freeze billions in Afghan government funds.
  • “virtually every man, woman and child in Afghanistan could face acute poverty”
  • The organization is requesting more than $5 billion in aid to help the Afghan people, both inside the country and in refugee camps in bordering nations like Uzbekistan and Pakistan.
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  • The US and the UN have made some concessions to allow humanitarian aid to operate outside the auspices of the Taliban; the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) granted some licenses to aid groups to operate in Afghanistan without running afoul of of financial restrictions on certain individuals and institutions in the country.
  • In the aftermath of the US withdrawal, many Afghans working as interpreters, aid workers, prosecutors, professors, and journalists suddenly lost their positions and their incomes, and many have been forced into hiding, further hampering their ability to provide even the most basic necessities — blankets, food, fuel, and medicine — for their families.
  • Many of Afghanistan’s current problems are intimately connected to the US withdrawal from the country last year, and the Taliban’s ensuing takeover of the central government. Since then, US sanctions and an abrupt end to international aid have wrecked Afghanistan’s economy and sent it spiraling into crisis.
  • Now, much of the country is facing poverty and starvation: In December, the World Food Program (WFP) found that 98 percent of Afghans aren’t getting enough to eat, and Guterres warned this month that “we are in a race against time to help the Afghan people.”
  • “Sanctions are intended to have a chilling effect, in that sanctions will always go beyond the face of the text,”
  • So far, however, no policy shift has been forthcoming. As of earlier this month, the US has pledged an additional $308 million in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, but the Afghan central bank reserves remain frozen.
  • And while Afghanistan’s current crisis isn’t wholly caused by external factors — even without sanctions by the US and its allies, the Taliban’s inability to manage the bureaucracy of government would have created issues, as would the pandemic and a severe drought that began in June last year — US actions do play a substantial role.
  • The chilling effect of sanctions is keeping businesses and banks from actually engaging with the economy. As House Democrats pointed out in their letter last month, relatively simple steps — like issuing letters to international businesses assuring them that they are not violating US sanctions — could help alleviate the crisis and shore up the Afghan private sector, but Treasury has yet to do so.
  • In the meantime, however, the Taliban will hold talks this coming week with Western nations, including Norway, Britain, the US, Italy, France, and Germany, about humanitarian aid. The talks should not be seen as a legitimization of Taliban rule, Norwegian Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt stressed to AFP on Friday, “but we must talk to the de facto authorities in the country. We cannot allow the political situation to lead to an even worse humanitarian disaster.”
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'It's Russian roulette': migrants describe nightmarish route across Florida Straits | A... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...h-route-across-florida-straits immigrants refugees US migration crisis
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  • Those who survive the perilous sea crossing between the Bahamas and the US describe a nightmarish odyssey of vomit, sweat and fear.“It’s suicide – Russian roulette,” one Brazilian migrant recalled in a 2017 interview after at least a dozen fellow countrymen vanished while attempting the same illegal voyage across the Florida Straits.
  • The Florida shipwreck is the latest humanitarian drama to expose the Covid-fuelled migration crisis gripping Latin America and the Caribbean, where the pandemic has killed more than 1.5 million people and wreaked economic havoc.
  • Last year more than 125,000, mostly Haitian migrants – among them elderly women and children - hiked through the Darién Gap, a snake-ridden jungle between Colombia and Panama, to reach the US after abandoning their homes in South America.
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  • “God got us out of there,” said Edner Michel, a 38-year-old Haitian who recently braved the Darién with his wife and newborn child after leaving Brazil because of the crunch. “The feeling I had was that 95% of people who went in there would die.”
  • Meghan López, the International Rescue Committee’s vice-president for Latin America, predicted the exodus would continue in 2022 as families sought to escape pre-existing crises such as poverty, hunger, violence and political turmoil that had often been exacerbated by Covid-19.
  • “These are crazy choices and yet they are not made by crazy people,” López said of their treacherous journeys. “They are made by desperate people making the very best decision that they can make in what are impossible conditions.”
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Why Russia has never accepted Ukrainian independence | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ccepted-ukrainian-independence politics history crisis
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  • Yeltsin did not just want what Mr Kravchuk had achieved in Ukraine for economic reasons. Independence would, he felt, be crucial to consolidating his power and pursuing liberal democracy. And Ukraine—never, until the 19th century, a well-defined territory, and home to various ethnic enclaves and deep cultural divides—becoming an independent unitary state within its Soviet borders set a precedent for Russia to define itself the same way, and refuse independence to restive territories such as Chechnya.
  • That was why the Russian republic was one of the first three polities in the world to recognise it as an independent state.
  • if a world in which Ukraine, Russia and indeed Belarus were completely independent from the Soviet Union was attractive, one in which they were not tied to each other in some other way was very troubling to a Russian like Yeltsin.
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  • It was not just that Ukraine was the second-most-populous and economically powerful of the remaining republics, its industries tightly integrated with Russia’s. Nor was it the question of what was to happen to the nuclear forces stationed there but still notionally under the command of Soviet authorities in Moscow. It went deeper.
  • The need to let the Baltic states go was clear—and when they left the Soviet Union in 1990, Solzhenitsyn, Yeltsin and most of Russia rallied against revanchist attempts to keep them in. Much the same was true of Central Asia and the Caucasus; they were colonies. Belarus and Ukraine were part of the metropolitan core. The bonds which tied “Little Russians” (ie Ukrainians), “Great Russians” and Belarusians together, Solzhenitsyn argued, must be defended by all means short of war.
  • For centuries Ukraine had anchored Russia’s identity. As the centre of the storied medieval confederation known as Kyivan Rus, which stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, Kyiv was seen as the cradle of Russian and Belarusian culture and the font of their Orthodox faith.
  • Being united with Ukraine was fundamental to Russia’s feeling of itself as European.
  • Instead the shooting down of planes, along with the violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, the seizure of Crimea, the reassertion that the legacy of Kyivian Rus meant the nations must be shackled together and the reversion of Belarus to dictatorship—that all came later, a sequence of events which led, 30 Decembers later, to 70,000 or more Russian troops on the border of Ukraine and, in a ghastly sideshow, thousands of Middle Eastern refugees stuck in the Belovezh forest itself. The once seemingly settled question of post-Soviet relations between the three nations has once again become an overriding geopolitical concern.
  • The agreement reached, in draft form, at 4am on Sunday morning achieved those aims with a rather neat piece of casuistry. For Russia simply to have followed Ukraine into independence would have left moot the question of the Soviet Union’s residual powers. So instead they abolished the union itself.
  • The Soviet Union had been formed, in 1922, through a joint declaration by four Soviet republics—the Transcaucasian republic and the three represented at Viskuli. With the Transcaucasian republic long since dismembered, the presidents dissolved by fiat what their forebears had bound together. In its place they put a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—Mr Kravchuk would not allow any use of the word “union”—with few clearly defined powers which any post-Soviet state would be welcome to join. There was to be no special relationship between the Slavic three.
  • The importance of Ukraine was not an abstract matter to him. Like Solzhenitsyn, he was the child of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father. He grew up singing Ukrainian songs and reading Gogol, who reimagined his native country’s folk magic as rich poetry after moving to St Petersburg. The Soviet Union had meant that Mr Gorbachev and others like him, whatever their parentage, could partake in both identities.
  • disassembling a multi-ethnic empire of 250m people was still a subject of huge trepidation. As Solzhenitsyn had written in “Rebuilding Russia”, “The clock of communism has stopped chiming. But its concrete edifice has not yet crumbled. And we must take care not to be crushed beneath its rubble instead of gaining liberty.” The fact that in that rubble, if rubble there was to be, there would be the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, spread between four separate countries (the three Slavic ones and Kazakhstan), frightened statesmen around the world.
  • “the Kyivan myth of origins…became the cornerstone of Muscovy’s ideology as the polity evolved from a Mongol dependency to a sovereign state and then an empire.” Russian empire required Ukraine; and Russia had no history other than one of empire. The idea of Kyiv as just the capital of a neighbouring country was unimaginable to Russians.
  • When, as the economy worsened, Mr Gorbachev went to President George Bush for $10bn-15bn, Bush’s top concern was the nuclear threat. The same worry had led him to oppose Ukraine’s secession in a speech given just before the August coup. “Do you realise what you’ve done?” Mr Gorbachev demanded of Mr Shushkevich. “Once Bush finds out about this, what then?”
  • Yeltsin was overcome by a sense of lightness and freedom. “In signing this agreement,” he later recalled, “Russia was choosing a different path, a path of internal development rather than an imperial one…She was throwing off the traditional image of ‘potentate of half the world’, of armed conflict with Western civilisation, and the role of policeman in the resolution of ethnic conflicts. The last hour of the Soviet empire was chiming.” Maybe the convoluted interdependency of Russia and Ukraine did not matter as much as people thought; maybe democratic nationhood was enough. Maybe the problem had been a failure of imagination.
  • His foreign supporters stood by him too, and the following year a security agreement saw America, Britain and Russia guarantee respect for Ukraine’s integrity within its existing borders—which is to say, including Crimea—in exchange for its giving up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union. Ukraine was grateful; the West saw further evidence of a transition towards a liberal, democratic Russian state.
  • Yeltsin’s unburdened moment among the trees had been that of a man who did not want to, and did not have to, rule an empire. He consciously rejected not just the Soviet Union’s ideology and central planning, but also the tools of statecraft that had held it together—repression and lies. To him, the market economy was a condition for freedom, not a substitute for it. His successor, Vladimir Putin, also embraced capitalism. But he saw no need for it to bring freedom with it, and had no problem with a state run through repression and lies. He thus reversed Yeltsin’s democratic project and, though not at first territorially imperialist himself, took the country down the other side of Brzezinski’s fork. It is that which puts Russia and its Slavic neighbours in such a parlous position today.
  • But when pollsters asked people what they expected of their incoming president, reducing this corruption was not their highest priority. The standing of the state was. Russians wanted a strong state and one respected abroad. As Mr Putin’s successful manifesto put it,
  • “A strong state is not an anomaly to fight against. Society desires the restoration of the guiding, organising role of the state.” When, shortly after his election, Mr Putin restored the Soviet anthem, it was not as a symbol of reverting to central planning or rebuilding an empire. It was a signal that the strong state was back. State power did not mean the rule of law or a climate of fairness. It did not have, or need, an ideology. But it did have to take on some of the “geopolitical reality” that the meeting in Viskuli had stripped from the Soviet Union.
  • The strong state which provided an effective cover for kleptocracy in Mr Putin’s Russia was not an option for Mr Kuchma’s similarly oligarchic Ukraine. It had no real history as a state, let alone a strong one. Its national myth was one of Cossacks riding free. So in Ukraine the stealing was instead dressed up in terms of growing into that distinctive national identity. The essence of the argument was simple. As Mr Kuchma put it in a book published in 2003, “Ukraine is not Russia”.
  • And the West, spooked by the increased belligerence Russia had shown in Georgia, was taking a keen interest in Ukraine. The EU offered the country an association agreement which would allow Ukrainians to enjoy the benefits of a deep and comprehensive free-trade agreement and free travel across Europe.
  • Mr Kuchma could have used force against them; Mr Putin encouraged him to do so. But various considerations, including Western opprobrium, argued against it.
  • Perhaps most fundamental was his sense that, as a Ukrainian president, he could not thus divide the Ukrainian nation. He stayed his hand and allowed a second vote. Viktor Yushchenko, pro-Western and Ukrainian-speaking, beat Viktor Yanukovych, a corrupt thug from Donbas (the easternmost part of the country and, save Crimea, the most ethnically Russian) who had claimed victory the first time round. The “Orange revolution”, as the protest came to be known, was a serious setback for Mr Putin—all the more so when a similar uprising in Georgia, the Rose revolution, put another pro-Western state on his borders.
  • Mr Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 came at a time when the global financial crisis had choked the Russian economy.
  • The degree to which Ukraine was not Russia became clearer, though, in 2004, when a rigged presidential election saw hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protesting in the streets.
  • A year earlier a group of economists had told Mr Putin that a customs union with Ukraine would be a smart move. What was more, such a deal would preclude Ukraine’s association with the EU. Pursuing it was thus a way for Mr Putin to achieve three things at once: push back against the West; give Russia a victory that would prove its importance; and help the economy.
  • Mr Yanukovych did not want to be Russia’s vassal. Nor did he share western Europe’s values—especially when applied to matters of anti-corruption. But eventually he had to choose a side. At a secret meeting in Moscow in November 2013, as European leaders were preparing to sign their agreement with Ukraine, he was promised a $15bn credit line with $3bn paid up front. He ditched the European deal. And at 4am on November 30th his goons bludgeoned a few dozen students protesting against his betrayal in Kyiv’s Independence Square, known as Maidan.
  • This was far worse, for Mr Putin, than the Orange revolution. Ukraine had made geopolitical reality, to coin a phrase, of the independence it had claimed two decades before. Its demands for dignity resonated with Russia’s middle class and some of its elite, making it a genuinely dangerous example. So Mr Putin annexed Crimea and started a war in Donbas.
  • According to Russian state media, Mr Putin was not undermining a revolution against a corrupt regime quite like his own; he was protecting the Russian people and language from extermination at the hands of western Ukrainian fascists. The relevance to Russia of the issues that had led to what was being called in Ukraine “the revolution of dignity” was thus obscured
  • the annexation was supported by nearly 90% of the Russian population.
  • tract published in both Russian, Ukrainian and English in July 2021, Mr Putin described how the inheritors of “Ancient Rus” had been torn apart by hostile powers and treacherous elites, and how Ukraine had been turned from being “not Russia” into an anti-Russia, an entity fundamentally incompatible with Russia’s goals.
  • All baloney. Mr Putin did not attack Ukraine in order to honour or recreate an empire, whether Russian or Soviet. He attacked it to protect his own rule; the history is window-dressing. At the same time, following Brzezinski, for Russia to be something other than a democracy it has to at least be able to think of itself as an empire. And in Russia, empire requires Ukraine—now more deeply opposed to union with Russia than ever before.
  • “The Russian state, with its severe and inflexible interior, survived exclusively because of its tireless expansion beyond its borders. It has long lost the knowledge [of]—how to survive otherwise.”
  • The only way Russia can escape chaos, he argued, is to export it to a neighbouring country.
  • What he did not say was that Mr Putin’s export of chaos, and violence, to that end has severed the ties between the Slavic nations and their peoples in a way which the collapse of the Soviet empire did not.
  • Ukraine is not a province, or a colony; it is a beleaguered nation in a messy, perilous process of self-realisation. Belarus, for its part, is a grim illustration of how “severe and inflexible” things have to get in order to stop such aspirations welling up. Mr Lukashenko has met a nationalist resurgence with ever more brutal and well-orchestrated repression—a bloody irony given that he helped start it.
  • Like Ukraine, Belarus had no real history of statehood; all that Mr Lukashenko had given it since 1994 was a rough approximation of its Soviet past, fascism with Stalinist trappings. But the idea of something better had taken hold.
  • But change is afoot; it can be seen in the way that demography increasingly trumps regional allegiance. Even in the east nearly 60% of those born since 1991 see their future as in the EU—countrywide, the figure is 75%. All told 90% want Ukraine to stay independent, and nearly 80% are optimistic about its future.
  • That is why Alexei Navalny was first poisoned and is now jailed. As the leader of the opposition to Mr Putin he has championed the idea of Russia not as an empire but as a civic nation: a state for the people. It is why Russia has recently become much more repressive. It is why Mr Putin cannot tolerate a true peace on his borders.
  • Unlike Ukrainians and Belarusians, Russians cannot separate themselves from Russia, so they have to change it from within. They cannot do that in a forest retreat, or with a few phone calls. But only through such change will they become truly independent of the Soviet Union.
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Russia preparing to attack Ukraine by late January: Ukraine defense intelligence agency... - 0 views

www.militarytimes.com/...ense-intelligence-agency-chief crisis
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  • Russia has more than 92,000 troops amassed around Ukraine’s borders and is preparing for an attack by the end of January or beginning of February, the head of Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency told Military Times.
  • Such an attack would likely involve airstrikes, artillery and armor attacks followed by airborne assaults in the east, amphibious assaults in Odessa and Mariupul and a smaller incursion through neighboring Belarus
  • Russia’s large-scale Zapad 21 military exercise earlier this year proved, for instance, that they can drop upwards of 3,500 airborne and special operations troops at once, he said.
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  • The attack Russia is preparing, said Budanov, would be far more devastating than anything before seen in the conflict that began in 2014 that has seen some 14,000 Ukrainians killed.
  • Budanov said U.S. and Ukraine intelligence assessments about the timing of a Russian attack are very similar.
  • Those efforts include ongoing anti-COVID-19 vaccination protests that Budanov said have been organized by Russia, which is also trying to stoke unrest related to the economy and energy supplies.
  • The ongoing border conflict between Poland and Belarus, which is trying to send refugees into Europe through Poland’s border, is part of that effort, he said.
  • Any such attack, however, would first follow a series of psychological operations currently underway designed to destabilize Ukraine and undermine its ability to fight
  • The Russian embassy did not respond to a request for comment Saturday. The Pentagon on Saturday declined to comment on Budanov’s assessments about the timing and nature of any potential Russian attack, instead pointing to comments made Wednesday and Thursday by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
  • The U.S. continues to see “troubling behavior from Russia,” Austin told reporters Wednesday.
  • Budanov said that ideally, the U.S. would help deter any Russian incursion, through additional military aid and increased diplomatic and economic pressure, including more sanctions against Russia and the seizure and blocking of Russian banking accounts.
  • Also, in addition to U.S. aid already promised and delivered, including Mark VI patrol boats, Javelin anti-armor systems and AN/TPQ-53 light counter-fire radar systems, Ukraine seeks additional air, missile and drone defense systems and electronic jamming devices,
  • Patriot missile batteries and counter rocket, artillery and mortar systems are on Ukraine’s wish list.
  • The AN/TPQ-53 systems were used to great effect, Ukraine military officials have previously told Military Times.
  • Still, he said, Ukraine needs more help from America.
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Why Is Ethiopia at War in the Tigray Region? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tigray-conflict-explained.html
shared by criscimagnael on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • A year of conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.
  • The tide of the civil war has fluctuated wildly. The government teetered in early November when fighters from Tigray surged south toward the capital, Addis Ababa, forcing Mr. Abiy to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.
  • But weeks later Mr. Abiy pulled off a stunning military reversal, halting the rebel march less than 100 miles from the capital, then forcing them to retreat hundreds of miles to their mountainous stronghold in Tigray.
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  • Mr. Abiy succeeded partly by mobilizing ordinary citizens to take up arms to block the Tigrayan advance. “Nothing will stop us. The enemy will be destroyed,”
  • Drones have also hit refugee camps in Tigray and killed dozens of civilians. Despite recent releases of political prisoners by Mr. Abiy, which prompted a phone call with President Joe Biden, the prospect of a cease-fire seems distant.
  • The conflict threatens to tear apart Ethiopia, a once-firm American ally, and further destabilize the volatile Horn of Africa region.
  • But after he took office in 2018, he set about draining the group of its power and influence in Ethiopia, infuriating the Tigrayan leadership, which retreated to its stronghold of Tigray. Tensions grew.
  • In September 2020, the Tigrayans defied Mr. Abiy by going ahead with regional parliamentary elections that had he had postponed across Ethiopia.
  • Two months later, T.P.L.F. forces attacked a federal military base in Tigray in what they called a pre-emptive strike against federal forces preparing to attack them from a neighboring region.
  • The Ethiopian military suffered a major defeat in June when it was forced to withdraw from Tigray, and several thousand of its soldiers were taken captive.
  • Through it all, civilians have suffered most. Since the war started, witnesses have reported numerous human rights violations, many confirmed by a U.N.-led investigation, of massacres, ethnic cleansing and widespread sexual violence.
  • The T.P.L.F. was born in the mid-1970s as a small militia of ethnic Tigrayans, a group that was long marginalized by the central government, to fight Ethiopia’s Marxist military dictatorship.
  • Tigrayans make up just 6 or 7 percent of Ethiopia’s population, compared with the two largest ethnic groups, the Oromo and the Amhara, which make up over 60 percent.
  • But at home, the Tigrayan-dominated government systematically repressed political opponents and curtailed free speech. Torture was commonplace in government detention centers.
  • Mr. Abiy, a onetime T.P.L.F. ally, moved quickly to purge the old guard. He removed Tigrayan officials from the security services, charged some with corruption or human rights abuses and in 2019 created a new political party. The Tigrayans refused to join.
  • At the same time, he strengthened his ties to President Isaias Afwerki, the authoritarian leader of Eritrea, who nursed a bitter, longstanding grudge against the Tigrayans.
  • But by mid-2020 that peace pact had become an alliance for war on Tigray.
  • Children are dying of malnutrition, soldiers are looting food aid, and relief workers have been prevented from reaching the hardest-hit areas, according to the United Nations and other aid groups. Since July, a government-imposed blockade of Tigray has kept desperately needed aid from reaching the area. In late November, the World Food Program announced that 9.4 million people across northern Ethiopia required food aid.
  • In western Tigray, ethnic Amhara militias have driven tens of thousands of people from their homes as part of what the United States has called an ethnic cleansing campaign.
  • Ethiopia’s ties to the United States, once a close ally, have come under great strain. Mr. Biden has cut off trade privileges for Ethiopia and threatened its leaders with sanctions.
  • He freed political prisoners, abolished controls on the news media and helped mediate conflicts abroad. His peace deal with Eritrea and its authoritarian leader, Mr. Isaias, caused the Ethiopian leader’s international profile to soar and led to his Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.
  • But even before the war erupted in Tigray, Mr. Abiy had resorted to old tactics of repression — shutting down the internet in some areas, arresting journalists and detaining protesters and critics.
  • In a stark speech in November, Mr. Abiy called on soldiers to sacrifice their “blood and bone” to bury his enemies in “a deep pit” and “uphold Ethiopia’s dignity and flag.”
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Novak Djokovic and Global Pandemic Morality - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-djokovic-australian-open.html
shared by criscimagnael on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • What began as a power struggle between a defiantly unvaccinated tennis star and a prime minister seeking a distraction from his own pre-election missteps has turned into something far weightier: a public stand for pandemic rules and the collective good.
  • Australians didn’t much like how their government had summarily canceled Mr. Djokovic’s visa at the airport. After all their lockdown obedience and vaccine drives, they were also unhappy about the celebrity athlete’s effort to glide into the country while skirting a Covid vaccination mandate.
  • Mr. Djokovic admitted that he had not isolated himself last month while he apparently suspected, and later confirmed, a Covid infection.
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  • With that, Australia’s leaders decided they had seen enough. On Friday, the country’s immigration minister canceled Mr. Djokovic’s visa for a second time, putting his bid to win a record 21st Grand Slam title in grave doubt.
  • In the final tally, a country far from the epicenters of Covid suffering, where sport is a revered forum for right and wrong, has become an enforcer of the collectivist values that the entire world has been struggling to maintain during the pandemic.
  • Mr. Djokovic sought to play by his own rules. First, he admitted submitting an entry form at the airport that falsely said he had not traveled internationally in the 14 days before he arrived in Melbourne. He had in fact been flying during that time between his native Serbia and Spain. (The misstatement was a “human error,” he said, made by his agent.)
  • And then there was everything he did during the time he believed he might have been exposed to Covid and eventually, in his telling, tested positive — the Covid diagnosis that enabled his vaccine exemption in the first place.
  • Five days in December, more or less, sank his chances of winning an unmatched 10th Australian Open, as the world saw what his many critics have described as his selfish and reckless disregard for the health of others.
  • The next day, before he had received the result, he said, he took a rapid antigen test that came back negative. He then attended a junior tennis ceremony in Belgrade, where photographs show him posing without a mask near children.
  • Later that day, Dec. 17, Mr. Djokovic said he learned about his positive P.C.R. test result. But he did not then go into 14 days of isolation, as the Serbian government requires.
  • The following day, Dec. 18, he did a media interview and a photo shoot at his tennis center in Belgrade. He later said he knew he was Covid-positive
  • his behavior after receiving a positive test seems to be what set the world on edge over his moral compass.
  • Refusing to get vaccinated was one thing. But withholding the fact that he was infectious?
  • Many Australians saw in Mr. Djokovic’s actions both dishonesty and a disregard for others. Some questioned whether he had really tested positive in the first place, given the convenient timing for his vaccination exemption.
  • The community spirit that has defined the country’s virus response — with people grinding through lockdowns and longing for family as borders slammed shut, only to then rush out for vaccines — is in an uncertain place at the moment.
  • Prime Minister Scott Morrison sought to exploit that urge when he pounced on Mr. Djokovic’s first visa cancellation, tweeting barely an hour after it happened on Jan. 6 that “rules are rules.”
  • He made the point again on Friday evening after the second visa cancellation was announced, four days after a judge had restored it on procedural grounds.
  • Australians have made many sacrifices during this pandemic, and they rightly expect the result of those sacrifices to be protected,”
  • With tens of thousands of new Covid cases every day in Australia, and sky-high vaccination rates among the vulnerable, one athlete does not pose much of a threat.
  • But the “Djokovic affair” is no longer — and maybe never was — just about science.
  • Dr. Collignon said that three years into the pandemic, it raised the question of moral judgment. “When do we stop punishing people for making bad decisions?” he asked.
  • In Australia, the answer is “not yet.”
  • the decent man is the one who doesn’t infect anyone, as Albert Camus wrote in his 1947 novel “The Plague,” and if the prime minister hadn’t jumped on the cause, someone else probably would have.
  • Sport is life to many Australians. Participation rates are high, and even watching others compete has been described, for generations, as an activity that builds character.
  • A “character test” sits at the center of a provision that gives the immigration minister the right to deny or cancel a visa for a wide range of reasons, though in this case, he relied on another section that lets the minister reject a visa if it’s “in the public interest.”
  • More than two dozen refugees are still in the same hotel where Mr. Djokovic stayed while waiting for the hearing on his first visa cancellation. Some, like Mehdi Ali, a musician who fled Iran when he was 15, have been held by Australia for many years.
  • But for Mr. Djokovic, Australia’s tough stance on border security seems to have delivered a result that many people can support, even if it means a less interesting Australian Open.
  • At Melbourne Park on Friday, where Mr. Djokovic had been scheduled to practice after being named the No. 1 seed, fans seemed resigned to the loss of a player who was fun to watch and hard to admire.
  • No disrespect for him or his tennis ability and that, but there’s something about him that just doesn’t quite sit with the Australian public.”
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The sinister spy who made our world a safer place - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...-world-a-safer-place-53sjhdczb nuclear bomb spies secrets cold war
shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Like Oppenheimer, Fuchs is an ambiguous and polarising character. A congressional hearing concluded he had “influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy in the history of nations”
  • But by helping the USSR to build the bomb, Fuchs also helped to forge the nuclear balance of power, the precarious equilibrium of mutually assured destruction under which we all still live.
  • Oppenheimer changed the world with science; and Fuchs changed it with espionage. It is impossible to understand the significance of one without the other.
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  • In March 1940 two more exiled German scientists working at Birmingham University, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, outlined the first practical exposition of how to build a nuclear weapon, a device “capable of unleashing an explosion at a temperature comparable to that of the interior of the sun”. Peierls recruited Fuchs to join him in the top-secret project to develop a bomb, codenamed “Tube Alloys”.
  • Fuchs arrived as a refugee in Britain in 1933 and, like many scientists escaping Nazism, he was warmly welcomed by the academic community. At Edinburgh University he studied under the great physicist Max Born, another German exile.
  • Fuchs was extremely clever and very odd: chain-smoking, obsessively punctual, myopic, gangling and solitary, the “perfect specimen of an abstracted professor”, in the words of one colleague. He kept his political beliefs entirely concealed.
  • The son of a Lutheran pastor, Fuchs came of age in the economic chaos and violent political conflict of Weimar Germany. Like many young Germans, he embraced communism, the creed from which he never wavered. He was studying physics at Kiel University when his father was arrested for speaking out against Hitler. His mother killed herself by drinking hydrochloric acid. Returning from an anti-Nazi rally, he was beaten up and thrown into a river by fascist brownshirts. The German Communist Party told him to flee.
  • When Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to collaborate on building the bomb (while excluding the Soviet Union), “Tube Alloys” was absorbed into the far more ambitious Manhattan Project. Fuchs was one of 17 British-based scientists to join Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.
  • “I never saw myself as a spy,” Fuchs later insisted. “I just couldn’t understand why the West was not prepared to share the atom bomb with Moscow. I was of the opinion that something with that immense destructive potential should be made available to the big powers equally.”
  • In June 1945 Gold was waiting on a bench in Santa Fe when Fuchs drove up in his dilapidated car and handed over what his latest biographer calls “a virtual blueprint for the Trinity device”, the codename for the first test of a nuclear bomb a month later. When the Soviet Union carried out its own test in Kazakhstan in 1949, the CIA was astonished, believing Moscow’s atomic weapons programme was years behind the West. America’s nuclear superiority evaporated; the atomic arms race was on.
  • Fuchs was a naive narcissist and a traitor to the country that gave him shelter. He was entirely obedient to his KGB masters, who justified his actions with hindsight. But without him, there might have been only one superpower. Some in the Truman administration argued that the bomb should be used on the Soviet Union before it developed its own. Fuchs and the other atomic spies enabled Moscow to keep nuclear pace with the West, maintaining a fragile peace.
  • As the father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer made the world markedly less secure. Fuchs, paradoxically, made it safer.
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The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ngton-police-stolen-bikes.html burlington crime culture crisis US
shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • In the effort to try to solve the crime of bike theft themselves, the group’s members have come close to a world of violence and despair that lurks barely below the surface of this beautiful place and, at times, bursts into the open
  • In some years, Burlington has gone without a single gunfire incident, according to the police. But in 2022 there have been 25 such incidents, including four murders — the most in at least 30 years, the police say.
  • The Progressives on the Council tend to be left leaning on many issues and often at odds with the city’s Democratic mayor. And in June 2020, the Progressive members of the Council successfully sponsored a measure that sought to reduce the size of the city’s police force by about 30 percent. The move, which the mayor opposed, came just weeks after the murder of George Floyd, and amid concerns about how the Burlington police had used force against Black people.
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  • The city’s population remains about 85 percent white — in a state that is among the whitest in the nation. But Burlington is a college town, drawing people from around the country. It’s also a refugee resettlement hub, where people from war-torn countries in Asia and Africa come to live.
  • The measure capped the number of officers at 74, down from a maximum of about 100. Most of the reduction was expected to happen over time through attrition.
  • Still, the Burlington Police say many kinds of crimes have increased in 2022. Larceny of all types is up 107 percent this year in Burlington compared with the five-year average from 2017 to 2021, and downtown businesses have begun to react.
  • “And 85 percent of the time that is probably true,” she said, “but there is the other 15 percent that has to be dealt with.”
  • “Street level crime, like bike thefts, they are not being dealt with before it escalates into something bigger,’’ said Joseph Corrow, a patrol officer and president of the local police union.
  • The police say making arrests for bike thefts could be challenging. They cite a memo from the local prosecutor which stipulates that, according to Vermont law, in order to effectively prosecute someone the police must prove the person “actually knew” the property was stolen.
  • Tammy Boudah, a street outreach worker in Burlington, said she supported the broad examination of race and class by the city government. But the notion of replacing the police with more social workers, she said, “is predicated on the idea that everyone just wants to get along.”
  • Mr. Weinberger readily admits, however, that the police cuts do not explain everything that’s going wrong in Burlington, particularly the increase in violence.Over the course of two weeks in September, a man in a wheelchair was hit in the face and robbed while withdrawing money from an A.T.M., another man suffered multiple skull fractures and nearly lost an eye after being beaten outside a Walgreens and a third man, a college student, was robbed at gunpoint and forced to strip naked.
  • “We are not used to this level of violence in Vermont,” Mr. Weinberger said at a news conference announcing a double murder in early October.
  • “I no longer feel safe going into City Hall Park at any time of the day,” said Ms. Toof, who has worked in street outreach for seven years.Those concerns are exacerbated because the outreach workers say they can no longer depend on the police to accompany them on certain calls because of staffing constraints.
  • Michael Hutchins, who moved to Florida last October to get away from the drug scene in Burlington, said some meth users he knew in Burlington stole bikes for transportation. “To get from Point A to Point B,” he said.
  • Others stole for the sheer thrill of taking something. Up for days without sleeping, some rode the bikes around with no real purpose. Mr. Davis said he had watched one bike change hands six times in the park
  • Last year, when the police dismantled a large encampment in an empty lot, they found the “severed limbs of hundreds of bikes” strewn about, Chief Murad said.
  • “Bikes were a quick easy grab that fulfilled the need to take something for an adrenaline rush,” Mr. Hutchins, 40, said in a phone interview from Florida.
  • Stealing and hoarding were common among the people Mr. Hutchins knew in Burlington struggling with addiction.
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The Greek shipwreck was a horrific tragedy. Yet it didn't get the attention of the Tita... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...attention-of-the-titanic-story psychic numbing suffering overwhelming psychology rich poor migration migrants story crisis culture
shared by Javier E on 22 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • Last Wednesday, one of the worst tragedies that has ever occurred on the Mediterranean Sea took place: a fishing boat carrying around 750 people, mainly Pakistani and Afghan migrants, capsized on its way to Italy. There were 100 children below deck in that ship. One hundred children. The exact number of fatalities are unclear: so far we know that 78 people have been confirmed dead and as many as 500 are missing
  • hundreds of dead and missing migrants have failed to garner anywhere near the amount of attention from the US media as five rich adventurers.
  • I’m not saying there hasn’t been any coverage of the Greek shipwreck. Of course there has. But it pales in comparison to the attention that’s been given to the Titan’s disappearance
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  • The rescue efforts also couldn’t be more different: a frantic rush to save five wealthy people versus a shoulder shrug at the idea of 100 children dead at the bottom of the sea.
  • The Greek coastguard and government officials, in response to criticism of their handling of the disaster, have said that people on board refused any help. Activists, on the other hand, have said the people on board were pleading for help more than 15 hours before it sank. In any case, is it really the job of a coast guard to look at a ship full of desperate people, full of innocent children, and decide they don’t want help
  • Nobody looked at the Titan and thought: ahh well, they signed a waiver saying they accepted death was a possibility, there’s no point saving them.
  • If you find yourself more captivated by the story of five rich people in a submersible rather than the 750 people who sank on a fishing trawler, it’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s because it’s human nature to be feel overwhelmed by suffering at scale; it’s called psychic numbing. As the saying goes, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
  • They deserve the same sort of resources and attention and empathy that five rich adventurers, who put themselves in harm’s way for the fun of it, rather than because they were desperate for a better life, have had.
  • I hope it makes it uncomfortably clear that, in the eyes of the media and policymakers, one missing billionaire is seemingly more important than hundreds of missing migrants.
  • I hope it makes more people interrogate the ways in which migrants are blamed for their deaths, blamed for seeking out better lives – and how completely different that is from the empathy afforded to millionaires seeking out underwater thrills.
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'There was all sorts of toxic behaviour': Timnit Gebru on her sacking by Google, AI's d... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...s-dangers-and-big-techs-biases AI critic danger social
shared by Javier E on 22 May 23 - No Cached
  • t feels like a gold rush,” says Timnit Gebru. “In fact, it is a gold rush. And a lot of the people who are making money are not the people actually in the midst of it. But it’s humans who decide whether all this should be done or not. We should remember that we have the agency to do that.”
  • something that the frenzied conversation about AI misses out: the fact that many of its systems may well be built on a huge mess of biases, inequalities and imbalances of power.
  • As the co-leader of Google’s small ethical AI team, Gebru was one of the authors of an academic paper that warned about the kind of AI that is increasingly built into our lives, taking internet searches and user recommendations to apparently new levels of sophistication and threatening to master such human talents as writing, composing music and analysing images
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  • The clear danger, the paper said, is that such supposed “intelligence” is based on huge data sets that “overrepresent hegemonic viewpoints and encode biases potentially damaging to marginalised populations”. Put more bluntly, AI threatens to deepen the dominance of a way of thinking that is white, male, comparatively affluent and focused on the US and Europe.
  • What all this told her, she says, is that big tech is consumed by a drive to develop AI and “you don’t want someone like me who’s going to get in your way. I think it made it really clear that unless there is external pressure to do something different, companies are not just going to self-regulate. We need regulation and we need something better than just a profit motive.”
  • one particularly howling irony: the fact that an industry brimming with people who espouse liberal, self-consciously progressive opinions so often seems to push the world in the opposite direction.
  • Gebru began to specialise in cutting-edge AI, pioneering a system that showed how data about particular neighbourhoods’ patterns of car ownership highlighted differences bound up with ethnicity, crime figures, voting behaviour and income levels. In retrospect, this kind of work might look like the bedrock of techniques that could blur into automated surveillance and law enforcement, but Gebru admits that “none of those bells went off in my head … that connection of issues of technology with diversity and oppression came later”.
  • The next year, Gebru made a point of counting other black attenders at the same event. She found that, among 8,500 delegates, there were only six people of colour. In response, she put up a Facebook post that now seems prescient: “I’m not worried about machines taking over the world; I’m worried about groupthink, insularity and arrogance in the AI community.”
  • When Gebru arrived, Google employees were loudly opposing the company’s role in Project Maven, which used AI to analyse surveillance footage captured by military drones (Google ended its involvement in 2018). Two months later, staff took part in a huge walkout over claims of systemic racism, sexual harassment and gender inequality. Gebru says she was aware of “a lot of tolerance of harassment and all sorts of toxic behaviour”.
  • She and her colleagues prided themselves on how diverse their small operation was, as well as the things they brought to the company’s attention, which included issues to do with Google’s ownership of YouTube
  • A colleague from Morocco raised the alarm about a popular YouTube channel in that country called Chouf TV, “which was basically operated by the government’s intelligence arm and they were using it to harass journalists and dissidents. YouTube had done nothing about it.” (Google says that it “would need to review the content to understand whether it violates our policies. But, in general, our harassment policies strictly prohibit content that threatens individuals,
  • in 2020, Gebru, Mitchell and two colleagues wrote the paper that would lead to Gebru’s departure. It was titled On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots. Its key contention was about AI centred on so-called large language models: the kind of systems – such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s newly launched PaLM 2 – that, crudely speaking, feast on vast amounts of data to perform sophisticated tasks and generate content.
  • Gebru and her co-authors had an even graver concern: that trawling the online world risks reproducing its worst aspects, from hate speech to points of view that exclude marginalised people and places. “In accepting large amounts of web text as ‘representative’ of ‘all’ of humanity, we risk perpetuating dominant viewpoints, increasing power imbalances and further reifying inequality,” they wrote.
  • When the paper was submitted for internal review, Gebru was quickly contacted by one of Google’s vice-presidents. At first, she says, non-specific objections were expressed, such as that she and her colleagues had been too “negative” about AI. Then, Google asked Gebru either to withdraw the paper, or remove her and her colleagues’ names from it.
  • After her departure, Gebru founded Dair, the Distributed AI Research Institute, to which she now devotes her working time. “We have people in the US and the EU, and in Africa,” she says. “We have social scientists, computer scientists, engineers, refugee advocates, labour organisers, activists … it’s a mix of people.”
  • Running alongside this is a quest to push beyond the tendency of the tech industry and the media to focus attention on worries about AI taking over the planet and wiping out humanity while questions about what the technology does, and who it benefits and damages, remain unheard.
  • “That conversation ascribes agency to a tool rather than the humans building the tool,” she says. “That means you can aggregate responsibility: ‘It’s not me that’s the problem. It’s the tool. It’s super-powerful. We don’t know what it’s going to do.’ Well, no – it’s you that’s the problem. You’re building something with certain characteristics for your profit. That’s extremely distracting, and it takes the attention away from real harms and things that we need to do. Right now.”
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Goliath, Who Aspires to be David - Freddie deBoer - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...goliaths-will-to-be-david israel alone palestine zionism anti-Semitism democracy
shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • This meme conflates the modern state of Israel with the Jewish people, which is of course the central rhetorical move of contemporary Zionism
  • All of this is bound up with a flagrantly false concept of Zionism that people who know better allow to spread because it’s politically convenient. When I argue about these topics, I constantly encounter people who think that the history of the Jews simply is the history of Zionism - that since 70 AD, when the Romans destroyed the second temple, all of worldwide Jewry has been involved in an effort to rebuild a Jewish state in Palestine. This is totally, historically, factually false.
  • It simply is not the case that Zionism has been an assumed part of Jewish identity historically, anti-Zionist Jews have been common, and the modern Zionist project is less than 150 years old.
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  • But, OK - let’s accept the conflation of the Israeli state with the Jewish people for now. The immediate question is, on what planet does Israel stand alone?
  • There is such a powerful urge among Israel’s defenders to make the country out to be an underdog, but there is absolutely no rational basis for doing so. Israel enjoys one of the most powerful and advanced militaries on earth. Despite the conflict, Israeli citizens are actually remarkably safe from violence compared to most of the countries on the globe
  • All of that would be jeopardized if Israel did in fact stand alone. But it doesn’t! Indeed, it’s hard to name nation states that enjoy more diplomatic protection than Israel.
  • The subhead of this piece for the Free Press (which is proving itself to be, let’s say, not particularly free when it comes to this issue) reads “after the worldwide celebration of our people’s slaughter, my hope for peace is dead.” What? Worldwide celebration? Because a few dozen dopey college kids held a few small rallies? As of four days ago, at least forty-four countries expressed support for Israel in this conflict. How many will officially express support for the people dying by the droves in Gaza? Even the establishment governments of the greater Middle East (almost universally corrupt, theocratic, or both) don’t offer any real support to Palestinians. How much more support do you need, exactly, before you stop pretending like everyone is out to get you?
  • When you say no one stands with Israel, what the fuck are you talking about? I cannot fathom how anyone, even the most dedicated Zionist and supporter of the Netanyahu government, could believe that Israel is the vulnerable party in this exchange.
  • If we define the left as broadly and loosely as possible, we can say that one thing the left has certainly accomplished this past half-century is to associate moral superiority with the underdog. This is by turns both deeply misguided and an expression of an essential truth
  • this folk morality, maybe righteous, maybe misguided, most likely both, has become the default ethical firmament of modern politics. Sometimes Israel’s defenders argue that being the more powerful force does not make you wrong; that’s true, but their hearts never appear to be in it. They seem to feel the tug of powerlessness, the desire to wear the sad but comfortable cloak of a refugee people, a natural and sympathetic impulse for a people still defined by the diaspora.
  • Every time the Israel-Palestine conflict heats up again, certain elements within the pro-Israel coalition use creepy rhetoric to insist that everyone must be fully committed to Israel, that siding against Israel should not be within the sphere of legitimate debate. This takes place against a backdrop where principled supporters of the Palestinians argue that there’s a chilling effect created by pro-Israel hardliners which squelches legitimate debate, and where anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists claim that Jews pull the strings behind the scenes. All this loose talk about what we must do and must say does nothing to rebut the former and just plays into the propaganda of the latter. I wish people would stop doing it.
  • I need make no grand loyalty statements because my views on this conflict have been plain for many years: the moral imperative is that we create total legal and political equality for all people in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, as basic democratic principles demand, and that all people in that land enjoy safety and prosperity
  • The fact remains, though - and it is a fact, an objective fact, an empirical fact, no matter how mad it makes people - that Hamas has always been empowered by Israel’s violence and oppression. I’m sorry if this is hard to accept, but Palestine is a Chinese finger trap; the more Israel pulls away, the more tightly the conflict will grip the country.
  • Permanent statelessness and dispossession for the Palestinians will ensure violence for generations. Only freedom for Palestinians can bring peace, and that’s the most hardheaded, ruthlessly pragmatic point anyone can make about this horrid crisis.
  • And if Israel’s defenders feel put upon, othered, alone, it’s because Israel and Israel alone has the power to make Palestinians free. I’m sorry, but it’s not a moral principle that says that Israel must bear responsibility for achieving peace and freedom. It’s a purely pragmatic statement of the reality of Israel’s overwhelming power in the region. Choosing sides has nothing do with it.
  • Or, I suppose, you could go through with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, as a disturbing number of people are calling for. I doubt the world would stop you; that’s the upside of being Goliath. But that would destroy whatever hope there is left for Israel as a democratic state, a symbol of human rights. And I think that if you love Israel, the idea of Israel, you should fight like hell to stop that from happening. Because afterwards you’ll never be the same again.
  • The only way out is through de-escalation and the only permanent de-escalation is through formal legal recognition of Palestinians in the territories as full citizens in a democratic system. This might come from the establishment of a Palestinian state, or it might come with the absorption of the territories into a secular state of Israel-Palestine that extends perfectly equal legal and political rights to all people within it, as liberal values require
  • Serwer is a guy who constantly demands that he and his allies be allowed to do politics on easy mode, but he’s just part of a broader communal rejection of basic self-definition and comprehensible terms for this political tendency.
  • If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes! Yes they are! They’re going to shake society at its very foundations. Well, OK then -what do I call your movement? You reject every name that organically develops! I’ll use the name you pick, but you have to actually pick one.
  • The basic stance of the social justice set, for a long time now, has been that they are 100% exempt from ordinary politics. BlackLivesMatter proponents have spent a year and a half acting as though their demand for justice is so transcendently, obviously correct that they don’t have to care about politics.
  • Well, sooner or later, guys, you have to actually give a shit about what people who aren’t a part of your movement think. Sorry. That’s life. The universe is indifferent to your demand for justice, and will remain so until you bother to try to change minds.
  • Do politics. Think and speak strategically. Be disciplined. Work harder. And for fuck’s sake, give me a simple term to use to address you. Please? Because right now it sure looks like you don’t want to be named because you don’t want to be criticized.
  • Edit: I might not have underlined this point enough - I sincerely am asking for a better term and would happily use one if offered. If woke, political correctness, identity politics, etc, are inflammatory terms, I'd be happy to substitute something that's not. But surely something is happening in our politics, and we have to be able to talk about it. So I'm asking for a name.
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This is what a 'multipolar' world looks like. It's chaos | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...lar-world-looks-like-its-chaos multipolar rules-based world order hamas israel enlightenment culture politics history crisis
shared by Javier E on 15 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • The Hamas terror attack has triggered war in Gaza, a geopolitical crisis and now – from Sydney to New York City – outbursts of street-level anti-Semitism in the West. Unless it de-escalates quickly, it looks like a strategic turning point both for Palestinian nationalism and Israel
  • though I am no expert on the region, I can throw some concreteness into the current battle of abstractions.
  • But the international community has a right to demand proportionality, restraint, respect for international law, and condemn breaches of it. President Biden last night was right to emphasise the need for lawfulness.
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  • Let’s start with the obvious: Israel has a right to defend itself, rescue the hostages, arrest and prosecute Hamas and engage in lawful armed combat with its enemy.
  • People claiming the Hamas attack is the ‘violence of the oppressed’ are deluded. Hamas rules Gaza like a mafia state: its operatives walk around neighbourhoods in twos, dressed in dark suits, prying into people’s business. They run the place on a mixture of terror, public service provision and the kudos of their fighters.
  • They are feared but there is widespread disrespect for them, especially among secular and nationalist sections of the population.
  • Paradoxically, the western ‘anti-imperialists’ trying to apologise for the terror attack, and the Israeli right calling for retribution against civilians, both need to identify Hamas with the Palestinian population of Gaza in order to justify violence. But there is no basis for doing so.
  • The fact that a violent action takes place in the context of a wider oppression does not make it either (a) just (b) lawful under international law or c) effective in pursuit of social justice.
  • In this case, Hamas’s act of terror looks set to achieve the opposite.
  • What does Hamas want?
  • Hamas has offered a truce and asked for negotiations, stating that it has ‘achieved its objective’. If so, it’s logical to conclude that the immediate objective was to demonstrate proof-of-concept of an unstoppable pogromist terror. Do as we ask or we do this again, might be a fair summary.
  • The wider aim, according to numerous experts, is to force Hamas and Iran back into the power-broking process in the Middle East region, paralysing Saudi-Israeli rapprochement.
  • The firm view of the Islamic Republic is that the governments that are gambling on normalizing relations with the Zionist regime will suffer losses. Defeat awaits them…Today, the situation of the Zionist regime is not a situation that encourages closeness to it. They [other governments] should not make this mistake. The usurper [Zionist] regime is coming to an end.
  • Hamas could only achieve the aim of ending Saudi-Israeli rapprochement with an attack designed to trigger massive retribution, risking a regional all-out war.
  • there’s a line in Khamenei’s 3 October speech that, in retrospect looks explanatory: Thus, [the Zionists] are filled with grudge. They are filled with anger! Of course, the Quran exclaims: “Say, “die of your rage!” (3:119). That’s right. Be angry, and die of your rage. And this will happen. They are dying. With God’s help, this matter of ‘die of your rage’ is happening now as regards the Zionist regime.
  • ‘Die of your rage’ might actually be a good summary of what Hamas intends Israel to now do.
  • Enraged by the barbarity of the attacks, Israel unleashes unprecedented collective punishment against Gaza, triggering both Hezbollah and West Bank militants to join in the fight; this in turn prompts a wave of anti-Semitic demonstrations in western cities, and draws the USA into a regional quagmire, testing the limits of American support for Israel
  • Meanwhile combat losses, and retribution over the complete failure of Netanyahu’s strategy of ‘managing’ the conflict, raise political divisions in Israeli society to the point where its democracy fails.
  • In a context where both Russia and China have complex hybrid destabilisation operations going on in western democracies, and where the Brics+ project is pursuing the active decomposition of the rules-based order, this objective does not look as mad as at first sight.
  • the ‘multipolar world’ turns out not to be one of peaceful coexistence, but characterised by extreme conflicts and genocide.
  • In pursuit of systemic competition Beijing and Moscow are scraping at every open wound in the body geopolitic
  • it’s what you get when you purposefully dismantle an international order based on treaties and explicit rules. And where elites in Russia, the USA, Brasil and parts of Europe are openly experimenting with ethno-nationalist politics.
  • Chaos, then, is a feature of multipolarity, not a bug.
  • Israel has signalled its military objective is to destroy Hamas. From my experience in Gaza I would say: that is possible.
  • But be in no doubt. It will need a sustained urban combat operation, a long-term military occupation, massive loss of civilian life, an existential refugee crisis in Sinai, and the diversion of US-supplied ammunition and resources from Ukraine.
  • Attempting it with a largely conscript/reservist army, full of recently mobilised and enraged soldiers? Again it’s worth remembering Khamenei’s exhortation to Israelis to ‘die of your rage’.
  • The very impossibility of all these outcomes shows why we need an internationally mediated peace, alongside a functional two-state solution, which allows the people of Gaza to live in peace, exercise democracy and travel across borders.
  • not only will liberal sympathy for Israel evaporate, but the Muslim minorities in some Western countries will be radicalised.
  • Typically, from my experience, combat in Gaza takes the following form. There is a street with children playing at one end; in the middle it is eerily deserted; at the other end is the IDF and above is an IDF drone. But there is no front line. The mujahedeen are in tunnels, popping up to take sniper shots or lay IEDs at night, and only committing ATGMs once a vehicle comes into view. The only front line is, for most of the time, between the IDF and Palestinian civilians.
  • Both sides risk miscalculating. Hamas does not care what happens to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of whom hate Hamas.
  • But there is a danger of miscalculation for Israel too. Netanyahu’s far-right government completely missed the threat, actively stoked tensions in the West Bank and Al Aqsa, and could easily now double down on a self-destructive course.
  • Ultimately, you cannot hold two million people in an open air prison without a gaoler to keep order. If Hamas can’t do it, the IDF will have to be a permanent occupation force, or it will have to install the PA, or the UN will have to send a stabilisation force.
  • Danger of miscalculation
  • The Brics+ ideology
  • The Gaza crisis is the latest example of how the Russian/Chinese ‘multipolar world’ project works in practice. It doesn’t matter whether there is a chain of command that goes Moscow→Tehran→Hamas. There is a chain of understanding – seize every opportunity to militarise all conflict; exploit every unexpected breakthrough; make all violence symbolic; weaponise the information space and push conflict into the heartlands of ‘imperialism’.
  • the Brics+ ideology. Its central tenets are that a multipolar world is better than the charter system; that universalism and international law are over; that the West no longer has the right to use the structures of international governance to normalise concepts like democracy or human rights; and that everything that disorganises the rules-based order is progressive, even when carried out by reactionary political forces.
  • Arab nationalism no longer looks like the dominant ideology on the demonstrations we’ve seen in Sydney, London and NYC. Alongside it there’s a mixture of Islamism plus the ‘decolonisation’ agenda of postmodernist academia.
  • For the past two years, during the Ukraine war, this incipient red-brown ideology has been mostly contained:
  • with this conflict there is now a danger that the masses turn up, and are corralled into this emergent fusion of far-left/far-right politics.
  • I’ve spent the period post-2016 trying to equip the democratic left to defeat this ideology. It’s not about being ‘anti-woke’, or apologising for colonialism: it means teaching people that a cocktail of anti-humanism, anti-universalism and anti-rationality is a route to excusing the totalitarian states in Russia and China, and – now – the genocidal actions of their proxies.
  • A case study of this is the statement issued by 31 Harvard student groups saying they ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence’ – just hours after the Hamas attack began.
  • the global left is rapidly splitting into irreconcilable camps – as Edward Thompson recognised it would, under the influence of post-structuralism in the 1970s.
  • The logical implication is that Palestinians have no agency whatsoever. That Hamas murders civilians because Israel has ‘structured’ Palestinian reality to make that inevitable. For people presumably wedded to ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, it is a shockingly colonialist premise.
  • The logic is that Israel is responsible for everything Hamas does because its violence has ‘structured every aspect of Palestinian existence’ since the Nakba.
  • There are many civilisations, and none is superior or inferior to another. They are equal since each civilisation represents a unique expression of its own culture, traditions, and the aspirations of its people.
  • In a way, what Putin preaches is an ‘intersectionality of the peoples’: identity politics raised from the level of the individual to the level of the ethnic group.
  • And it turns out anti-Enlightenment leftism makes it pretty easy to converge with that view. The common assumptions are disdain for universalism, scorn for international law and human rights, repudiation of the Enlightenment (and thus liberalism, social democracy, humanistic Marxism and anarchism) and worship of any totalitarian government that delivers economic development.
  • This is the modern incarnation of Stalinism, and – to the surprise of nobody who has studied actual Stalinism – it has no problem seeing fascists like Hamas as the ‘agent of progress’.
  • we need to understand how closely this hyper-deterministic and anti-universal world view maps onto the ideology presented, for example, by Putin at Valdai last week. For Putin there is no single human civilisation, only civilisations, which must be rooted in ethnicity establish their co-existence through the survival of the fittest:
  • One camp, he said, is a theology. The other a tradition of active reason. The first repudiates liberalism and universalism. The second recognises its debt to liberalism and wants to make universalism consistent
  • The first claims international law is a sham; the second knows that, though the institutions of the rules-based order are flawed, they are better than chaos.
  • that you can stand with the Israeli people under attack while simultaneously standing up for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.
  • Those flaunting their joy at the murder of Israeli civilians need to understand the licence this creates in the minds of rightwing ethno-nationalists in our own society. What Hamas did to the kids of Kfar Azar, the far right wants to do to you.
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At risk: 10 ways the changing climate is creating a health emergency | Global developme... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-is-wrecking-peoples-lives-acc health effects climate change
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  • 1. Floods and disease
  • As life becomes less tolerable for humans, animals and plants, things will get easier for disease-causing organisms. More than half of all known diseases have been made worse by the climate crisis
  • A warming world makes outbreaks of water-borne diseases such as cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio more likely.
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  • World Health Organization data published in September showed there were twice as many cholera cases in 2022 than in 2021. Outbreaks were recorded in countries where cholera had been under control for years, including Yemen and Lebanon.
  • 2. Mosquitoes on the march
  • Rising temperatures and frequent floods also unlock new places where disease-carrying insects thrive. The mosquitoes that carry the viruses that cause dengue fever and mala
  • Nor is the disease confined to developing countries. There are fears that it is spreading in southern Europe, partly owing to the warm weather. More than 8 billion people could be at risk of malaria and dengue fever by 2080, scientists have warned.
  • 3. Human-animal contact
  • Many existing diseases will get more dangerous, but new illnesses could also emerge as people are increasingly forced into areas where there is wildlife. Diseases can jump from animals to humans. These diseases, such as Ebola, avian flu and Sars, are called “zoonoses” and they make up the majority of new illnesses.
  • Scientists have found that the climate crisis is helping to circulate diseases between species that previously did not encounter each other. As the planet heats up, many animal species are forced to move into new areas to find suitable conditions.
  • It has been estimated that zoonoses are responsible for as many as 2.5bn cases of human illness and 2.7m human deaths worldwide each year, and that animals have played a major part in nearly every major disease outbreak since 1970.
  • 4. Severe weather events
  • Although governments are getting better at preparing for severe weather events, nine out of 10 deaths linked to weather disasters since 1970 happened in small island nations and developing countries in Africa, Asia and South America.
  • 5. The air that we breathe
  • Outside air pollution has been linked to numerous cancers and diseases and is estimated to be responsible for more than 4m premature deaths globally each year.
  • Changing weather patterns are expected to make this already bad situation worse as more dust, rain and wildfire smoke are added to the mix. Children are especially likely to get sick from air pollution because their brains, lungs and other organs are still developing.
  • 6. The psychological cost
  • Environmental deterioration has a knock-on effect on the economic and social systems that keep society productive and happy, setting in motion a downward spiral of psychological hardship.
  • If crops are destroyed during extreme weather events, children may get less nutritious food, the consumption of which is linked to psychological conditions such as anxiety and depression.
  • When people can’t get the help they need, they may self-medicate with alcohol or drugs, which in turn makes them more likely to engage in risky behaviour (such as unprotected sex) that could result in infections such as HIV, or illnesses that can result from spending time in crowded places, such as tuberculosis.
  • In 2021, scientists studying evidence of a potential link between heat exposure and mental health found a 2.2% increase in mental health-related mortality per 1C rise in temperature.
  • 7. Salty water and perilous pregnancies
  • Drinking water is becoming saltier. One reason for this is that sea levels are rising, so there is more sea water flowing into rivers and other sources of fresh water during floods and tropical storms.
  • Taking in too much salt can lead to high blood pressure (hypertension). Over time, this condition damages the body’s veins, arteries and major organs (including the brain, heart, kidneys and eyes) since they’re working so much harder overall.
  • Hypertension is doubly dangerous for pregnant women and their babies
  • 8. Food insecurity
  • More frequent and severe droughts and floods make it harder to grow the grains, fruit and vegetables that people need to eat to stay healthy. Small island states in the Caribbean, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean bear the brunt of the effects of the crisis, in part because most people live close to sea level.
  • As a result, people who live in one of the 39 small island nations are the most likely to die from one of the four main NCDs: cancer, diabetes, heart disease and lung disease.
  • 9. The stress of extreme heat
  • The scorching temperatures this year broke records in Europe, China and North America. Heat is one of the most dangerous effects of the climate crisis and the top cause of weather-related deaths in the U
  • When it gets too hot, the body’s temperature rises faster than it can cool itself down, less blood flows to other organs, and the kidneys have to work harder. This puts strain on the heart and can lead to organ failure. Heatstroke is the most serious heat-related illness.
  • In particular, people whose jobs require long hours of physical labour in the sun face an increased risk of kidney disease as temperatures rise, research suggests. Repeated instances of heat stress can lead to permanent damage and chronic kidney disease.
  • In June, the Guardian revealed how young migrant workers were returning to Nepal with chronic kidney disease after working in extreme heat conditions in the Gulf and Malaysia. “One factor highlighted again and again is heat. Prolonged exposure to h
  • 10. Millions on the move
  • It’s hard to predict exactly how many people will be on the move because of the climate crisis, but extreme weather events are likely to make conditions worse for the more than 100 million displaced people around the world.
  • If nothing changes, the number of people who need humanitarian aid to recover from floods, storms and droughts could double by 2050,
  • That means more than 200 million people will need aid annually. The displacement of millions of people also means cramped and often unsanitary living. For example, more than 900,000 Rohingya refugees live in makeshift shelters in Bangladesh, often built on unstable ground that’s prone to landslides.
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