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criscimagnael

Shipwreck From 1891 is Found in Lake Superior - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...shipwreck-lake-superior.html

shared by criscimagnael on 14 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • On May 4, 1891, as gale-force winds and waves raged on Lake Superior, the crew of a schooner barge named Atlanta abandoned ship as it sank. The six men and one woman, a cook, clung to their lifeboat for nine hours, fighting at its oars to guide it to the Michigan shore.
  • Only two men survived.
  • This month, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society said that the wreckage of the Atlanta had been found after it had sat undetected in the cold oblivion of the lake’s depths for more than a century. The announcement revived the story of how the Atlanta’s crew members fought for their lives on the world’s largest freshwater lake.
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  • “We were the first human eyes to be looking at this since that dramatic moment. I about jumped out of my chair.”
  • In 2021, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, the nonprofit that operates the museum, had its best season for locating wrecks, Mr. Lynn said, helped by good weather and side-scan sonar, which sends and receives acoustic pulses that help map the seafloor and detect submerged objects. It discovered nine shipwrecks, including the Atlanta, the most in any season, after towing the sonar 2,500 miles, said Darryl Ertel, the society’s director of marine operations.
  • “It was a target we had found earlier but were not exactly sure what it was,” Mr. Lynn said. “You never quite know until you see a smoking gun. That name board was it. It announced with no uncertain terms, ‘This is what I am.’”
  • The Atlanta’s voyage was typical of the Industrial Revolution, when schooner barges hauled iron ore and coal across Lake Superior, said Fred Stonehouse, a local historian.
  • “This is really about solving historical mysteries,” Mr. Stonehouse said.
  • The Atlanta will remain undisturbed. A Michigan law makes it illegal to raise shipwrecks, but Mr. Lynn said it would also be like raiding a burial plot.
  • “These are like grave sites,” he said. Finding the Atlanta, he added, “was fortunate. There were survivors who can tell us what happened.”
Javier E

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.
Javier E

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

resilience human nature crisis boys

shared by Javier E on 11 May 20 - No Cached
  • I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature.
  • That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.
  • had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island
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  • I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently.
  • trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: “One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip ... Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”
  • on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. Not a tropical paradise with waving palm trees and sandy beaches, but a hulking mass of rock, jutting up more than a thousand feet out of the ocean
  • there he was, sitting out in front of a low-slung house off the dirt road: the man who rescued six lost boys 50 years ago, Captain Peter Warner.
  • The boys, once aboard, claimed they were students at a boarding school in Nuku‘alofa, the Tongan capital. Sick of school meals, they had decided to take a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm.
  • six boys who had been found three weeks earlier on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of ‘Ata for more than a year. According to the article, the captain had even got a television station to film a re-enactment of the boys’ adventure.
  • The real Lord of the Flies, Mano told us, began in June 1965. The protagonists were six boys – Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless
  • These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But “by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.”
  • The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out
  • Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirit
  • While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read. Media historians even credit him as being the unwitting originator of one of the most popular entertainment genres on television today: reality TV.
  • It’s time we told a different kind of story. The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.
  • “Life has taught me a great deal,” it began, “including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.”
Javier E

Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right - after 2,469 years | Science | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rchaeologists-thonis-heraclion

history egypt mediterranean

shared by Javier E on 17 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Robinson added: “Herodotus describes the boats as having long internal ribs. Nobody really knew what that meant… That structure’s never been seen archaeologically before. Then we discovered this form of construction on this particular boat and it absolutely is what Herodotus has been saying.”
ethanmoser

The Latest: 7 bodies of migrants found near Spain, off coast | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...ound-near-spain-off-coast.html

migrants crisis spain pope smuggling africa

shared by ethanmoser on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • The Latest: 7 bodies of migrants found near Spain, off coast
  • Spain's maritime rescue service says the bodies of seven African migrants have been found dead along the Strait of Gibraltar since Friday.
  • More than 181,000 people, most so-called "economic migrants" with little chance of being allowed to stay in Europe, attempted to cross the central Mediterranean last year from Libya, Africa's nearest stretch of coast to Italy. About 4,500 died or disappeared.
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  • Some European leaders are warning of a fresh migration crisis when sea waters warm again and more people choose to put their lives in the hands of smugglers.
  • Pope Francis is demanding that "every possible measure" be taken to protect young refugees as he marks the church's World Day of Migrants a day after the latest Mediterranean migrant shipwreck.
  • Italy's coast guard says only four people survived the sinking of a migrant ship off Libya's coast on Saturday. An estimated 100 people were aboard and only eight bodies have been recovered.
Maria Delzi

BBC News - EU failing Syria refugees, says Amnesty International report - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-middle-east-25345923

shared by Maria Delzi on 13 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • European leaders should be ashamed by the paltry numbers of refugees from Syria they are prepared to resettle, human rights group Amnesty says.
  • 10 member states have offered to take in refugees and even then only 12,000, it complains. The UK and Italy have offered no places at all, it adds.
  • European Union aid has reached 1.3bn euros (£1.1bn; $1.7bn), officials say.
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  • UN estimates almost 2.3 million Syrians have fled to neighbouring countries since March 2011.
  • In September, Sweden became the first EU member state to offer Syrian refugees permanent residence. More than 14,000 Syrians have sought asylum there in the past two years.
  • ermany has resettled 1,000 refugees and plans to admit another 9,000.
  • the EU put forward plans to do more to stop migrants dying in the Mediterranean, after more than 350 people, many of them from Syria, lost their lives in a shipwreck off the Italian island of Lampedusa in October.
  • The UN has urged Western countries to take in up to 30,000 Syrians by the end of 2014.
  • EU leaders will consider the package on 19 December.
  • Ten countries have promised to allow in 12,000 people, it says, with 80% of the total pledges from Germany. France has offered 500 places and Spain 30, it says.
  • The harsh conditions faced by Syrian refugees have been highlighted this week with the first winter snowfalls in the Bekaa valley of northern Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Syrians are sheltering in tents.
  • A total of 838,000 Syrians have fled to Lebanon, living either in tented camps, unused buildings or with friends and family.
lenaurick

Migrant increase on Mediterranean route, UNHCR says - CNN.com - 0 views

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

refugee mediterranean politics history crisis policy

shared by lenaurick on 17 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • "One in three people arriving to Greece were children as compared to just one in 10 in September 2015
  • While more than 80,000 people crossed the Mediterranean safely -- more than 74,000 to Greece alone -- "near daily shipwrecks" had left at least 400 dead so far this yea
  • Some 36% of the migrants arriving in Greece so far this year have been children, and 21% were women, the U.N. says
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  • Most of the people arriving in Greece cited conflict as a reason for their journey, with more than 56% of January's arrivals coming from war-torn Syria
  • Fueled by xenophobia and propaganda campaigns based on fear, refugee families, homes and places of worship are being targeted with hate crimes varying from physical attacks, vandalism, arson, and even more sinister incidents such as one where a mosque had blood thrown on its walls and a pig's head left at its door
Javier E

Why Conservatives Must Abandon Trumpocracy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550685

conservatism gop trump politics boomers party

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • it will require much more than Republican congressional defeats in 2018 to halt Trumpocracy. Indeed, such defeats may well perversely strengthen President Trump. Congressional defeats will weaken alternative power centers within the Republican Party. If they lose the House or the Senate or many governorships—or some combination of those defeats—then Republicans may feel all the more compelled to defend their president. The party faithful may interpret any internal criticism of Trump as a treasonable surrender to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
  • The more isolated Trump becomes within the American political system as a whole, the more he will dominate whatever remains of the conservative portion of that system. He will devour his party from within.
  • If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.
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  • That means slowing the pace of immigration so that the existing population of the country does not feel it is being displaced and replaced. Economists will argue that a country with a slow-growing population needs more immigrants to sustain the growth of its labor force. But a population is a citizenry as well as a labor force, and when it grows slowly, it can less easily assimilate newcomers. Immigration is to natural population increase as wine is to food: a good complement, a bad substitute.
  • In the most immediate sense, that means accepting that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay, and to work to reform it so that it costs less and protects middle-class families more
  • The stability of American society depends on conservatives’ ability to find a way forward from the Trump dead end, toward a conservatism that cannot only win elections but also govern responsibly, a conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible, that upholds markets at home and U.S. leadership internationally.
  • Then struck the financial crisis, followed by the presidency of Barack Obama. The proportion of baby boomers who called themselves “angry with government” surged from 15 percent before 2008 to 26 percent the next year. By 2011, 42 percent of baby boomers were labeling themselves “conservative,” the same percentage as the next generation up.
  • Here’s what those right-leaning boomers did mean by “conservatism.” If read a list of scally liberal statements like, “It is the responsibility of government to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves,” boomers became increasingly likely to deliver a stern no over the 20 years between the 1990s and the 2010s. In fact, by 2010, they had become the age cohort most likely to answer no, more so than either their elders or juniors.
  • They were the cohort most likely to attribute individual economic troubles to those individuals’ own personal failings, rather than to ill fortune, racism, or any other systemic cause.
  • The boomers had faced more competition for everything, from jobs to housing, and now faced an ominous retirement environment. If they acted like shipwreck survivors in an already overcrowded lifeboat … well, the boat really was jammed awfully tight.
  • Americans
  • “Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts,” reported Teresa Ghilarducci of The New York Times. They would need their federal retirement benefits much more than they had anticipated back when they were younger and more liberal.
  • As when they had resisted the draft in the 1960s, so now when they refused changes to Medicare, the politics of the baby boom generation were the politics of generational self-defense.
  • “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.” Tea Partiers differentiated between those who worked (or who had worked) and those who sought something for nothing—in other words, between people as they imagined themselves and the people they imagined competing against them.
  • In a multiethnic society, economic redistribution inescapably implies ethnic redistribution.
  • Of the U.S. residents who lacked health insurance prior to the 2008 financial crisis, 27 percent were foreign born. As the Obama administration squeezed Medicare to fund the Affordable Care Act, it’s not surprising that many white boomers perceived Obamacare as a transfer of health care resources from “us” to “them”—by a president who identified with “them” and not with “us.”
  • The social scientist Robert Putnam observed with dismay in 2007 that “new evidence from the U.S. suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.” Projects of social and economic reform crash into the reality that human beings most willingly cooperate when they feel common identity. In a society undergoing rapid demographic change, loyalties narrow.
  • Republican politicians since the 1980s had spoken a language of “hope” and “opportunity.”
  • “Believe in America!” “A new American century!” What are they talking about? wondered voters battered and bruised by the previous American century.
  • the political language of the 1980s had lost its power. The most common age for white Americans in 2015 was 55. These older white voters were more eager to protect what they had than to hustle for more. They wanted less change, not more. They cared about security, not opportunity. Protection of the status quo was what candidate Trump offered.
  • One poll found that nearly half of all white working-class voters agreed with the statement, “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” As America has become more diverse, tribalism has intensified. The Left’s hopes for a social democratic politics founded on class without regard to race look only slightly less moribund than the think-tank conservatism of low taxes and open borders.
  • Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonalit
  • Trump appealed to what was mean and cruel and shameful. The power of that appeal should never be underestimated. But once its power fades, even those who have succumbed will feel regret.
  • Those who have expressed regret will need some kind of exit from Trumpocracy, some reintegration into a politics again founded on decency.
Javier E

The Search for Dark Matter Depends on Sunken Ships - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...600718

dark matter science lead radiation archaeology ships history

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The real danger, Gonzalez-Zalba suspects, comes from the booming microelectronics industry. Microchips, found in every single computer and smartphone, tend to need low-background lead components. Although the industry could use newly produced lead, he says, manufacturers often chose ancient lead because it’s an order of magnitude cheaper. “This is the application that worries me most, because it’s a commercial application,” Gonzalez-Zalba says. “It’s not an application for the benefit of humankind.”
Javier E

'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

shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • 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.”
criscimagnael

How the Wreck of the Costa Concordia Changed an Italian Island - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lio-costa-concordia-italy.html

shared by criscimagnael on 15 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Few of the 500-odd residents of the fishermen’s village will ever forget the freezing night of Jan. 13, 2012, when the Costa Concordia shipwrecked, killing 32 people and upending life on the island for years.
  • In no time, Giglio residents hosted thousands of journalists, law enforcement officers and rescue experts who descended on the port
  • “Get back on board!” a Coast Guard officer shouted at Mr. Schettino when he understood that the captain was in a lifeboat watching people scramble to escape, audio recordings of their exchange later revealed. “Go up on the bow of the ship on a rope ladder, and tell me what you can do, how many people are there and what they need. Now!”
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  • What stands out now for many is how the wreck forever changed the lives of some of those whose paths crossed as a result. Friendships were made, business relations took shape and new families were even formed.
  • “It was such a shock for us,” said Bruna Danei, 42, who until 2018 worked as a secretary for the consortium that salvaged the wreck. “The work on the Costa Concordia was a life-changing experience for me in many ways.”
  • The local council voted to make Jan. 13 a day of remembrance on Giglio, but after this year it will stop the public commemorations and “make it a more intimate moment, without the media,” Mr. Ortelli said during the mass.
  • “Other victims’ families feel differently, but I am a Catholic and I have forgiven,” Mr. Rebello explained.
  • On Thursday, 10 years to the day of the tragedy, the victims’ families, some passengers and Italian authorities attended a remembrance Mass and threw a crown of flowers onto the waters where the Costa Concordia had rested. At 9:45 p.m., the time when the ship ran aground, a candlelit procession illuminated the port’s quay while church bells rang and ship sirens blared.
  • The officer has since pursued a successful career in politics, while Mr. Schettino is serving a 16-year sentence in a Roman prison for homicide and for abandoning the ship before the evacuation was completed.
  • The impact with the half-submerged rock near the island produced a gash in the hull more than 70 meters long, or about 76 yards, leading to blackouts on board and water pouring into the lower decks.
  • “I can’t forget the eyes of children, scared to death, and of their parents,” said Mr. Pellegrini, who had boarded the ship to speak with officials and organize the evacuation. “The metallic sound of the enormous ship tipping over and the gurgling of the sea up the endless corridors of the cruiser.”
  • “The tragedy will always stay with us as a community. It was an apocalypse for us.”
  • While the global attention shifted away from Giglio, residents have stayed in touch with the outside world through the people who temporarily lived there.
  • “So many nationalities — the world was at our door all of a sudden,” he said, remembering that night. “And we naturally opened it.”
lilyrashkind

10 Things You May Not Know About the Jamestown Colony - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...estown-colony-settlement-facts

history

shared by lilyrashkind on 16 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • In May of 1607, a hearty group of Englishmen arrived on the muddy shores of modern-day Virginia under orders from King James I to establish an English colony. But despite their efforts,
  • In December of 1606, the Virginia Company, under charter from King James I, sent an expedition to establish an English settlement in North America. When their ships, the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery, arrived near the banks of the James River on May 14, 1607, 104 men and boys set foot on what would soon become Jamestown. The initial group contained well-to-do adventurers, a handful of artisans and craftsmen, and laborers eager to forge a new home. Notably absent were members of the opposite sex. It would be another nine long months before any women arrived at the fledgling colony. 
  • While the terrain might have appeared ideal from the deck of a ship—unoccupied and ripe with natural resources—the Virginia Company established its settlement on a swath of swampy land with no source of fresh water. Soon after, the men began to perish. Only 38 of the 104 original settlers were still alive by January 1608. 
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  • Before more colonists arrived from England, the population of Jamestown dwindled. The Virginia Company had predicted that disease would manifest, and lives would be lost. Concerned about prying eyes and an ambush on a weakened colony, they had stressed "above all things" that the colonists hide the sick and bury the dead in unmarked graves. The men followed orders, burying their deceased out of sight behind the fort wall. When the death toll spiked between May and September of 1607, they also made use of double burials with two men laid to rest in the same shaft.
  • Surrounded by Powhatan’s warriors and trapped inside the fort, the settlers eventually ran out of food and were forced to eat whatever they could find: horses, dogs, rats, snakes, leather shoes and, according to forensic evidence, even each other.
  • The Virginia Company offered attractive incentives for would-be wives: free transportation, a plot of land, a dowry of clothing and furnishings. They also allowed the women to choose their husbands after entertaining the eager suitors. The tactic had some success, and, the women, in theory, became America’s first mail-order brides.
  • King James I had a strong, and well-known, distaste for tobacco. “A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose,” he once declared. It’s ironic that this very crop gave Jamestown its economic viability. The settlement had struggled to find a marketable commodity that it could trade and ship back to England for profit. The colonists dabbled in forestry, silk making and glassmaking, with little financial return.
  • . Thereafter, each new English colony sought its own legislature. Although there were challenges and power struggles, the concept of elections, creation of laws and power through and by the people, began in America's first English settlement.
  • Before their arrival, European explorers assumed America's climate would match that of other lands situated at the same latitude. They soon discovered that the New World was both hotter and colder than they expected. To make matters worse, the already harsh and unpredictable environment was exacerbated by climate change, namely a “Little Ice Age” that lasted from 1550 to 1800.
  • No one knows where or how Rolfe obtained the seeds. Until then, Spain had controlled tobacco on the European markets and selling seeds to non-Spaniards was a crime punishable by death. Rolfe may have smuggled the seeds from Bermuda, where some of the fleet was shipwrecked for 10 months before arriving in Jamestown, or somewhere in the Caribbean. Either way, the risk paid off.
  • Historians believe that Rolfe either falsified his report to conceal what the English had done or that the White Lion swapped flags with a Dutch ship while out at sea, causing Rolfe to incorrectly record the ship’s country of origin.
  • Active archaeological excavation, research and analysis have been ongoing since 1994 at the original site of Jamestown. Archaeologists have found parts of the palisade of the original 1607 fort, discovered the site of the second church and unearthed the remains of a handful of the settlement’s early inhabitants.
Javier E

Opinion | The Reactionary Futurism of Marc Andreessen - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ssen-reactionary-futurism.html

futurism accelerations trust silicon valley polarization AI market fundamentalism energy effective hero entrepreneur growth technology technocracy reactionary reaction aggression

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • “I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting,” Andreessen writes.
  • Modern American society, at least in the big cities, is turning on law enforcement and tolerating crime, so you need combat skills to protect your loved ones. We are also fat and depressed, and learning to fight might help on both counts. In conclusion, “if it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us.”
  • what caught my eye was the veneration of the virile aggression of the Greeks, the call to rediscover the ways of the ancients. A list of things that were good enough for the Greeks but not good enough for us would run long: Slavery, pederasty and bloodletting come to mind
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  • This is what connects figures as disparate as Jordan Peterson and J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel and Donald Trump. These are the ideas that unite both the mainstream and the weirder figures of the so-called postliberal right, from Patrick Deneen to the writer Bronze Age Pervert.
  • I think the Republican Party’s collapse into incoherence reflects the fact that much of the modern right is reactionary, not conservative
  • As Paul Valéry, the French poet, once said, “Ancient Greece is the most beautiful invention of the modern age.” To treat Andreessen’s essay as an argument misses the point. It’s a vibe. And the vibe is reactionary.
  • It’s a coalition obsessed with where we went wrong: the weakness, the political correctness, the liberalism, the trigger warnings, the smug elites. It’s a coalition that believes we were once hard and have become soft; worse, we have come to lionize softness and punish hardness.
  • The story of the reactionary follows a template across time and place. It “begins with a happy, well-ordered state where people who know their place live in harmony and submit to tradition and their God,” Mark Lilla writes in his 2016 book, “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction.”
  • He continues:Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals — writers, journalists, professors — challenge this harmony, and the will to maintain order weakens at the top. (The betrayal of elites is the linchpin of every reactionary story.) A false consciousness soon descends on the society as a whole as it willingly, even joyfully, heads for destruction. Only those who have preserved memories of the old ways see what is happening. Whether the society reverses direction or rushes to its doom depends entirely on their resistance.
  • The Silicon Valley cohort Andreessen belongs to has added a bit to this formula. In their story, the old way that is being lost is the appetite for risk and inequality and dominance that drives technology forward and betters human life. What the muscled ancients knew and what today’s flabby whingers have forgotten is that man must cultivate the strength and will to master nature, and other men, for the technological frontier to give way
  • Now Andreessen has distilled the whole ideology to a procession of stark bullet points in his latest missive, the buzzy, bizarre “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”
  • it’s the pairing of the reactionary’s sodden take on modern society with the futurist’s starry imagining of the bright tomorrow. So call it what it is: reactionary futurism
  • Andreessen’s argument is simple: Technology is good. Very good. Those who stand in its way are bad.
  • “The Enemy.” The list is long, ranging from “anti-greatness” to “statism” to “corruption” to “the ivory tower” to “cartels” to “bureaucracy” to “socialism” to “abstract theories” to anyone “disconnected from the real world … playing God with everyone else’s lives”
  • So who is it, exactly, who extinguishes the dancing star within the human soul?
  • Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades — against technology and against life — under varying names like “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “E.S.G.,” “sustainable development goals,” “social responsibility,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “precautionary principle,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” “risk management,” “degrowth,” “the limits of growth.”
  • The enemy, in other words, is anything or anyone who might seek to yoke technology to social goals or structures
  • For years, I’ve been arguing for politics to take technology more seriously, to see new inventions as no less necessary than social insurance and tax policy in bringing about a worthier world. Too often, we debate only how to divvy up what we already have. We have lost the habit of imagining what we could have; we are too timid in deploying the coordinated genius and muscle of society
  • I’ve been digging into the history of where and when we lost faith in technology and, more broadly, growth. At the core of that story is an inability to manage, admit or even see when technologies or policies go awry
  • The turn toward a less-is-more politics came in the 1970s, when the consequences of reckless growth became unignorable
  • Did we, in some cases, overcorrect? Absolutely. But the only reason we can even debate whether we overcorrected is because we corrected: The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and a slew of other bills and regulations did exactly what they promised.
  • It is telling that Andreessen groups sustainability and degrowth into the same bucket of antagonists
  • Degrowth is largely, though not wholly, skeptical of technological solutions to our problems
  • But the politics of sustainability — as evidenced in legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act — have settled into another place entirely: a commitment to solving our hardest environmental problems by driving technology forward, by investing and deploying clean energy infrastructure at a scale unlike anything the government has done since the 1950s.
  • Andreessen focuses at some length on the nuclear future he believes we’ve been denied —
  • but curiously ignores the stunning advances in solar and wind and battery power that public policy has delivered.
  • He yearns for a kind of person, not just a kind of technology. “We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength,” he writes, italics included. “We believe in merit and achievement. We believe in bravery, in courage.”
  • There are ways in which these virtues have become undervalued, in which the left, in particular, has a dysfunctional relationship with individual achievement and entrepreneurial élan.
  • Andreessen’s ideas trace an odd, meme-based philosophy that has flourished in some corners of the internet known as effective accelerationism
  • “Effective accelerationism aims to follow the ‘will of the universe’: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe,”
  • “E/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism.” OK!
  • Take Andreessen’s naming of trust and safety teams as among his enemies.
  • That, in a way, is my core disagreement with Andreessen. Reactionary futurism is accelerationist in affect but deccelerationist in practice
  • How has that worked out? A new analysis by Similarweb found that traffic to twitter.com fell in the United States by 19 percent from September 2022 to September 2023 and traffic on mobile devices fell by almost 18 percent. Indications are that advertising revenue on the platform is collapsing.
  • Andreessen spends much of his manifesto venerating the version of markets that you hear in the first few weeks of Econ 101, before the professor begins complicating the picture with all those annoying market failures
  • Throughout his essay, Andreessen is at pains to attack those who might slow the development of artificial intelligence in the name of safety, but nothing would do more to freeze progress in A.I. than a disaster caused by its reckless deployment
  • It is hard to read Andreessen’s manifesto, with its chopped-up paragraphs and its blunt jabs of thought delivered for maximum engagement and polarization, and not feel that Andreessen now reflects the medium in which he has made his home: X. He doesn’t just write in the way the medium rewards. He increasingly seems to think in its house style, too.
  • One reason I left Twitter long ago is that I noticed that it was a kind of machine for destroying trust. It binds you to the like-minded but cuts you from those with whom you have even modest disagreements
  • There is a reason that Twitter’s rise was conducive to politics of revolution and reaction rather than of liberalism and conservatism. If you are there too often, seeing the side of humanity it serves up, it is easy to come to think that everything must be burned down.
  • Musk purchased Twitter (in an acquisition that Andreessen Horowitz helped finance) and gutted its trust and safety teams. The result has been a profusion of chaos, disinformation and division on his platform
  • Treating so much of society with such withering contempt will not speed up a better future. It will turn people against the politics and policies of growth, just as it did before. Trust is the most essential technology of all.
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