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katyshannon

Our great-grandchildren will speak a wildly different English - Quartz - 0 views

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english US england spanglish singlish dialects accents spellings future

shared by katyshannon on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • The global role English plays today as a lingua franca—used as a means of communication by speakers of different languages—has parallels in the Latin of pre-modern Europe.
  • Having been spread by the success of the Roman Empire, Classical Latin was kept alive as a standard written medium throughout Europe long after the fall of Rome. But the Vulgar Latin used in speech continued to change, forming new dialects, which in time gave rise to the modern Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Italian.
  • Similar developments may be traced today in the use of English around the globe, especially in countries where it functions as a second language. New “interlanguages” are emerging, in which features of English are mingled with those of other native tongues and their pronunciations.
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  • Looking back to the early 20th century, it was the Standard English used in England, spoken with the accent known as “Received Pronunciation,” that carried prestige. But today the largest concentration of native speakers is in the US, and the influence of US English can be heard throughout the world: can I get a cookie, I’m good, did you eat, the movies, “skedule” rather than “shedule.” In the future, to speak English will be to speak US English.
  • The turn of the 20th century was a period of regulation and fixity—the rules of Standard English were established and codified in grammar books and in the New (Oxford) English Dictionary on historical principles, published as a series of volumes from 1884-1928. Today we are witnessing a process of de-standardization, and the emergence of competing norms of usage.
  • Clipped forms, acronyms, blends, and abbreviations have long been productive methods of word formation in English (think of bus, smog and scuba) but the huge increase in such coinages means that they will be far more prominent in the English of 2115.
Javier E

Stanford launches artificial intelligence institute to put humans and ethics at the cen... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ty-wants-put-humans-its-center

stanford ai ethics

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • “The correct answer to pretty much everything in AI is more of it,” said Schmidt, the former Google chairman. “This generation is much more socially conscious than we were, and more broadly concerned about the impact of everything they do, so you’ll see a combination of both optimism and realism.”
  • Researchers and journalists have shown how AI technologies, largely designed by white and Asian men, tend to reproduce and amplify social biases in dangerous ways. Computer vision technologies built into cameras have trouble recognizing the faces of people of color. Voice recognition struggles to pick up English accents that aren’t mainstream. Algorithms built to predict the likelihood of parole violations are rife with racial bias.
Javier E

Trump, hillbillies and race - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-96c0-37533479f3f5_story.html

white poor working class crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • We all now know that Trump’s rise has been fueled by the alienation and anger of the country’s white working class. That cohort has seen its incomes stagnate, cities crumble and dreams vanish. But Vance gets underneath the data and shows us what these impersonal forces mean to actual people. He describes the abandoned children, the poor work habits, the drug abuse, the violence, the rage. But he does it with sympathy and love.
  • For Vance, the problem is ultimately cultural, one of values, attitudes and mores. “We hillbillies must wake the hell up,” he writes, and “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what can we do to make things better.”
  • His own life story — coming from low expectations, dysfunctional relationships and persistent poverty to end up a graduate of Yale Law School and a Silicon Valley executive — demonstrates that grit can conquer all.
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  • But Vance got some help along the way. He tells us that his public schools were decent enough and, when he got motivated, his teachers helped him succeed. He notes that his trajectory changed when he was admitted to Ohio State University, which he was able to attend because of generous federal loans and grants.
  • the turning point in the book and his life takes place when he decides to enlist in the Marine Corps. He describes how the armed forces taught him discipline, hard work, high expectations and good values.
  • This is federal bureaucracy engaged in shaping mores and morals, the ultimate example of government as nanny. When so much of what government does is under siege, it is odd that Vance seems to minimize the role that government can play in providing opportunities for others like him.
  • The other, larger gap in Vance’s book is race. He speaks about the causes of the anxiety and pain of the white working class, but he describes the causes almost entirely in economic terms.
  • there is surely something else at work here — the sense that people who look and sound very different are rising up.
  • Vance touches on this sideways, when speaking about the almost pathological suspicion his hillbillies have for Barack Obama. Vance explains that it is because of the president’s accent — “clean, perfect, neutral” — his urban background, his success in the meritocracy, his reliability as a father. “And,” one wants to whisper to Vance, “because he’s black .”
  • The white working class has always derived some of its status because there was a minority underclass below it. In his seminal work, “American Slavery, American Freedom,” Edmund Morgan argues that even before the revolution, the introduction of slavery helped dampen class conflict within the white population.
  • The rage that is fueling the Trump phenomenon is not just about stagnant wages. It is about a way of life under siege, and it risks producing a “politics of cultural despair.” That phrase was coined by Fritz Stern to describe Germany a century ago.
  • The key to avoiding that fate is not a series of public policies — whether tariffs or tax credits — but enlightened politics, meaning leadership that does not prey on people’s fears and phobias.
abbykleman

Can Evolution Have a 'Higher Purpose'? - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ion-have-a-higher-purpose.html

shared by abbykleman on 12 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 12 Dec 16
     
    Hamilton continued, in his British accent, "I could enlarge on that in terms of the possible existence of extraterrestrial manipulators who interfere, and so on, but I think this would be getting too far from the general topic of discussion." Well, maybe, but this sounded at least as interesting as the general topic of discussion.
Javier E

We are the empire: Military interventions, "Star Wars" and how we're the real aliens - ... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...nd_how_were_the_aliens_partner

military repression US army empire culture

shared by Javier E on 17 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • in these years, we’ve morphed into the planet’s invading aliens.
  • Think about it. Over the last half-century, whenever and wherever the U.S. military “deploys,” often to underdeveloped towns and villages in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq, it arrives very much in the spirit of those sci-fi aliens. After all, it brings with it dazzlingly destructive futuristic weaponry and high-tech gadgetry of all sorts (known in the military as “force-multipliers”). It then proceeds to build mothership-style bases that are often like American small towns plopped down in a new environment. Nowadays in such lands, American drones patrol the skies (think: the “Terminator” films), blast walls accented with razor wire and klieg lights provide “force protection” on the ground, and the usual attack helicopters, combat jets and gunships hover overhead like so many alien craft. To designate targets to wipe out, U.S. forces even use lasers.
  • In the field, American military officers emerge from high-tech vehicles to bark out commands in a harsh “alien” tongue. (You know: English.
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  • the message couldn’t be more unmistakable if you happen to be living in such countries — the “aliens” are here, and they’re planning to take control, weapons loaded and ready to fire.
  • . In 2004, near Samarra in Iraq’s Salahuddin province, for instance, then-Major Guy Parmeter recalled asking a farmer if he’d “seen any foreign fighters” about. The farmer’s reply was as simple as it was telling: “Yes, you.
  • It’s not the fault of the individual American soldier that, in these years, he’s been outfitted like a “Star Wars” storm trooper. His equipment is designed to be rugged and redundant, meaning difficult to break, but it comes at a cost. In Iraq, U.S. troops were often encased in 80 to 100 pounds of equipment, including a rifle, body armor, helmet, ammunition, water, radio, batteries and night-vision goggles. And, light as they are, let’s not forget the ominous dark sunglasses meant to dim the glare of Iraq’s foreign sun.
  • Think for a moment about the optics of a typical twenty-first-century U.S. military intervention. As our troops deploy to places that for most Americans might as well be in a galaxy far, far away, with all their depersonalizing body armor and high-tech weaponry, they certainly have the look of imperial storm troopers.
  • As Iraq war veteran Roy Scranton recently wrote in The New York Times, “I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.” Ouch.
  • American troops in that country often moved about in huge MRAPs (mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles) described to me by an Army battalion commander as “ungainly” and “un-soldier like.” Along with M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, those MRAPs were the American equivalents of the Imperial Walkers in “Star Wars.”
  • Do you recall what the aliens were after in the first “Independence Day” movie? Resources. In that film, they were compared to locusts, traveling from planet to planet, stripping them of their valuables while killing their inhabitants. These days, that narrative should sound a lot less alien to us. After all, would Washington have committed itself quite so fully to the Greater Middle East if it hadn’t possessed all that oil so vital to our consumption-driven way of life?
  • Now, think how that soldier appeared to ordinary Iraqis — or Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans or almost any other non-Western people. Wouldn’t he or she seem both intimidating and foreign, indeed, hostile and “alien,” especially while pointing a rifle at you and jabbering away in a foreign tongue?
  • Now, think of the typical U.S. military response to the nimbleness and speed of such “rebels.” It usually involves deploying yet more and bigger technologies. The United States has even sent its version of Imperial Star Destroyers (we call them B-52s) to Syria and Iraq to take out “rebels” riding their version of “speeders” (i.e. Toyota trucks).
  • unlike the evil empire of “Star Wars” or the ruthless aliens of “Independence Day,” the U.S. military never claimed to be seeking total control (or destruction) of the lands it invaded, nor did it claim to desire the total annihilation of their populations (unless you count the “carpet bombing” fantasies of wannabe Sith Lord Ted Cruz). Instead, it promised to leave quickly once its liberating mission was accomplished, taking its troops, attack craft and motherships with it.After 15 years and counting on Planet Afghanistan and 13 on Planet Iraq, tell me again how those promises have played out.
  • Like it or not, as the world’s sole superpower, dependent on advanced technology to implement its global ambitions, the U.S. provides a remarkably good model for the imperial and imperious aliens of our screen life.
Javier E

China: A Modern Babel - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...hina-a-modern-babel-1487202893

china mandarin language culture

shared by Javier E on 19 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The oft-repeated claim that we must all learn Mandarin Chinese, the better to trade with our future masters, is one that readers of David Moser’s “A Billion Voices” will rapidly end up re-evaluating.
  • In fact, many Chinese don’t speak it: Even Chinese authorities quietly admit that only about 70% of the population speaks Mandarin, and merely one in 10 of those speak it fluently.
  • Mr. Moser presents a history of what is more properly called Putonghua, or “common speech,” along with a clear, concise and often amusing introduction to the limits of its spoken and written forms.
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  • what Chinese schoolchildren are encouraged to think of as the longstanding natural speech of the common people is in fact an artificial hybrid, only a few decades old, although it shares a name—Mandarin—with the language of administration from imperial times. It’s a designed-by-committee camel of a language that has largely lost track of its past.
  • The idea of a national Chinese language began with the realization by the accidentally successful revolutionaries of 1911 that retaining control over a country speaking multiple languages and myriad dialects would necessitate reform. Long-term unification and the introduction of mass education would require a common language.
  • Whatever the province they originated from, the administrators of the now-toppled Great Qing Empire had all learned to communicate with one another in a second common language—Guanhua, China’s equivalent, in practical terms, of medieval Latin
  • To understand this highly compressed idiom required a considerable knowledge of the Chinese classics. Early Jesuit missionaries had labeled it Mandarin,
  • The committee decided that the four-tone dialect of the capital would be the base for a new national language but added a fifth tone whose use had lapsed in the north but not in southern dialects. The result was a language that no one actually spoke.
  • After the Communist victory of 1949, the process began all over again with fresh conferences, leading finally to the decision to use Beijing sounds, northern dialects and modern literature in the vernacular (of which there was very little) as a source of grammar.
  • This new spoken form is what is now loosely labeled Mandarin, still as alien to most Chinese as all the other Chinese languages.
  • A Latin alphabet system called Pinyin was introduced to help children learn to pronounce Chinese characters, but today it is usually abandoned after the first few years of elementary school.
  • The view that Mandarin is too difficult for mere foreigners to learn is essential to Chinese amour propre. But it is belied by the number of foreign high-school students who now learn the language by using Pinyin as a key to pronunciation —and who bask in the admiration they receive as a result.
  • Since 1949, the Chinese government, obsessed with promoting the image of a nation completely united in its love of the Communist Party, has decided that the Chinese people speak not several different languages but the same one in a variety of dialects. To say otherwise is to suggest, dangerously, that China is not one nation
  • Yet on Oct. 1, 1949, Mao Zedong announced the founding of the People’s Republic in a Hunan accent so thick that members of his audience subsequently differed about what he had said. He never mastered the Beijing sounds on which Putonghua is based, nor did Sichuanese-speaking Deng Xiaoping or most of his successors.
  • When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, many online commentators rejoiced. “At last! A Chinese leader who can speak Putonghua!” One leader down, only 400 million more common people to go.
johnsonma23

Oscars So White? Or Oscars So Dumb? Discuss. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...or-oscars-so-dumb-discuss.html

white new york times

shared by johnsonma23 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Oscars So White? Or Oscars So Dumb? Discuss.
  • Are these the whitest Oscar nominations ever? Or just the most recent Academy Award whiteout? For the second year in a row, the nominations failed to recognize any minority actors.
  • The black directors of each movie along with their nonwhite actors were shut out
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  • Last year, Vin Diesel boldly predicted that “Furious 7” would win the Academy Award for best picture, “unless Oscars don’t want to be relevant, ever.”
  • s “the economy of prestige”
  • done a reasonably good job of recognizing black talent, belatedly making up for decades of neglect. “12 Years a Slave” won best picture.
  • whiteness of this year’s field of nominees exposes not only the myopia of the nominating body but also the deep structural biases of the industry that feeds it.
  • I love that so many people are enraged at this year’s whiteout — anyone who yells at the Academy is a friend of mine — but I wish that this anger was being expressed 365 days a year and not when the nominations are announced
  • I mean, half of me really doesn’t care. There’s obviously a serious problem with regard to race, sexuality and gender in Hollywood. B
  • . The Oscars aren’t full-time jobs. To hear some voters talking about this time of year, it sounds like tax season or exam tim
  • In the case of both “Creed” and “Compton,” I just don’t think the campaigns were there for these movies. Just as I don’t think they were there for “Selma” the previous year.
  • But I don’t want to let the Academy and its members off the hook. Or rather, I want to broaden the indictment beyond the specific complaints that they ignored Mr. Elba, “Creed,” “Straight Outta Compton” and Will Smith’s excellent Nigerian accent in “Concussion.”
  • I think it’s when you get to that one that race sneaks back into the picture. The Academy, in its function as the culture industry’s upholder of the ideology of Quality, has for a long time been open to African-American talent and even eager to promote and reward it.
Javier E

The Brexit Fantasy Goes Down in Tears | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...xit-fantasy-goes-down-in-tears

brexit uk

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • O’Brien’s show received a call from a Leave voter named Bill, who said he owed the host an apology. “I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong,” the man began to say, in an accent that placed him firmly outside the British élite. “I’m an old-fashioned git, really, I suppose . . . For some reason, I thought we were better off, but, clearly, I was wrong.” As Bill made this admission, his voice broke and he started crying. O’Brien pointed out that 17.4 million Britons made the same choice, and told him not to blame himself. Bill was inconsolable. “I was wrong, I am so sorry,” he blubbered. “What have I done to my country?”
  • May had very little bargaining leverage. She and the Europeans both knew that, even as Britain went through the motions of leaving the E.U., it couldn’t afford to make a clean break. Which, of course, raises the question of what the point of the exercise was to begin with.The harsh fact is there was no point.
  • Contrary to the claims of the Brexiteers, Britain already had substantial flexibility within the E.U. Having long ago opted out of the common currency and other E.U. initiatives, it retained the freedom to set its own interest rates and fiscal policies, check visitors at the border, and reject some of the legislative directives from Brussels, but it enjoyed all the advantages of the single market. To the extent that any E.U. member country was having its cake and eating it, Britain was the one.
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  • Now it has spent two and a half years trying to sabotage its future. As Bill and others are discovering, this can be a painful truth to contemplate.
Javier E

Amazon Workers Are Listening In on Amazon Echo Users - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...587110

AI human amazon

shared by Javier E on 16 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Hundreds of human reviewers across the globe, from Romania to Venezuela, listen to audio clips recorded from Amazon Echo speakers, usually without owners’ knowledge
  • This global review team fine-tunes the Amazon Echo’s software by listening to clips of users asking Alexa questions or issuing commands, and then verifying whether Alexa responded appropriately.
  • Amazon says these recordings are anonymized, with any identifying information removed, and that each of these recorded exchanges came only after users engaged with the device by uttering the “wake word.”
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  • in the examples in Bloomberg’s report—a woman overheard singing in the shower, a child screaming for help—the users seem unaware of the device.
  • Alexa-enabled speakers can and do interpret speech, but Amazon relies on human guidance to make Alexa, well, more human—to help the software understand different accents, recognize celebrity names, and respond to more complex commands.
  • Advancements in AI, the researchers write, create temporary jobs such as tagging images or annotating clips, even as the technology is meant to supplant human labor
  • In all cases, Silicon Valley would have us believe that AI is smart enough to replace humans, when in reality it only works because of the role of hidden human labor in creating and maintaining these loops. AI is always a human-machine collaboration. It can accomplish incredible feats, but rarely alone.
Javier E

How Russia's Propaganda Campaign Exploited America's Prejudices - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...ts-exploit-american-prejudices

fb campaign election influence targeting advertising conservative

shared by Javier E on 12 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • most of the ads unearthed thus far appear to have been devoted to reinforcing the American electorate’s own prejudices;
  • For example, YouTube videos recently uncovered by the Daily Beast feature two black men with African accents deriding Black Lives Matter and calling Clinton an “evildoer” while praising WikiLeaks. One meme posted on a Russian troll-operated Facebook account read—with a dropped article worthy of Boris Badenov—“Why do I have a gun? Because it’s easier for my family to get me out of jail than out of cemetery.”
  • Facebook has said the Russian-bought ads were probably viewed 10 million times; Columbia University professor Jonathan Albright has suggested that the ads actually were viewed hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of times.
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  • , such examples of ham-handed propaganda likely didn’t raise eyebrows at the time because the function of social media is to affirm its users
  • On Facebook, as opposed to a medium like television, “you’re able to hone in on someone who will likely vote Republican or will likely vote Democrat and hold on to them a bit more,” Borrell told TPM. “You don’t see a lot of crossover. They’ll hold onto you as a voter—at least that’s what [social media] campaigns appear to do.”
  • Facebook, Twitter and Google have flattened the media ecosystem to such a degree that traditional news outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times effectively compete with whitewashed demagoguery masquerading as information on sites like InfoWars and Breitbart. The Google News ranking algorithm gives those sites equal footing, and until very recently treated digital troll hive 4Chan as a news source. 
  • “One of the reasons people are dismissing this stuff is they’ll look at one particular instance of this stuff and say, ‘That looks like it might be vaguely anti-Trump,'” Hendrix told TPM. “And you’ll dig under it and see that while it may initially appear anti-Trump it has a subtler purpose, to discourage people from being engaged or to suggest that all politics are so corrupt that there’s an equivalence between the candidates.”
  • The Trump campaign didn’t need conservatives who didn’t dig Trump as a candidate to like him—they just needed those holdouts to believe he was better than Clinton, and the image of a black person supporting him, or at least deriding her as a “racist bitch,” might do the trick.
  • Another Russian-linked group called Heart of Texas, with about 225,000 followers, successfully organized anti-immigrant rallies protesting “higher taxes to feed undocumented aliens” and warned of the scourge of “mosques,”
  • A Facebook account called “Blacktivist” posted ostensibly pro-black liberation rhetoric that was filled with dogwhistles designed to play on the worst right-wing fears: “Our race is under attack, but remember, we are strong in numbers,” one post uncovered by CNN proclaimed. “Black people should wake up as soon as possible,” said another.
  • People who fear disloyalty don’t just fear activists like BLM. Trump’s resoundingly anti-immigrant campaign, with its cornerstone of a border wall he may or may not ever build, and the nativist grievances that anchor his base dovetail with the Putin government’s desire to see less military and diplomatic cooperation across the West.
  • The @tpartynews account was quick to tie together everything the right fears about undocumented people: “Illegal Immigrants today.. Democrat on welfare tomorrow!” Russian-linked Facebook pages went a step further: “Due to the town of Twin falls, Idaho, becoming a center of refugee resettlement, which led to the huge upsurge of violence towards American citizens, it is crucial to draw society’s attention to this problem,” read a post on the SecuredBorders page,
  • “A lot of it does seem to really prey on identity politics,” Hendrix said.That identity politics was already surging in reaction to the presence of a black president: Conservative pundits have been quick to attribute any unrest that follows episodes of police brutality to Black Lives Matter, wielding #bluelivesmatter and #alllivesmatter hashtags on social media, and to tie all Black Lives Matter positions to Obama, whose justice department had taken first steps toward police reform. Russian-operated accounts gleefully exploited that festering sore spot
  • Undergirding both the anti-immigrant and anti-black sentiment the Russian propaganda campaign capitalized on is a fear of violence. It’s something the NRA exploited throughout the tenure of the United States’ first black president to great effect, and it was easy for Russian trolls to exploit too.
  • Looking at the ads—though scant few of them have been unearthed by reports as tech companies have declined to publicly release them—it’s clear that the issue of race is paramount. The ads that have surfaced play relentlessly on prejudices against black people, immigrants and Muslims, and Trump’s campaign was a symphony of insults maligning all three groups.
  • Advertising from the Trump campaign was notable for the brazenness of its racialized invective; the Russian propaganda campaign followed suit with a microtargeted series of ads explicitly playing up racism and bigotry, rather than trying to sanitize it with coded phrases and winks. The results were inexpert and scattershot—the improbably named “Williams and Kalvin” seem to be looking at cue cards occasionally in their videos—but Facebook, Twitter and their peers had honed the delivery mechanism so carefully that the r
  • “It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in computer science to use Facebook’s targeting tools,” Hendrix said. “These are tools that were built for anybody to be able to target messages and ads to any constituency. They’re designed for the lowest common denominator—to be as simple as possible and to work at scale.”
Javier E

Jordan Peterson's Gospel of Masculinity | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...etersons-gospel-of-masculinity

Peterson rules masculine postmodernism free speech gender

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • his accent and vocabulary combine to make him seem like a man out of time and out of place, especially in America.
  • His central message is a thoroughgoing critique of modern liberal culture, which he views as suicidal in its eagerness to upend age-old verities.
  • a possibly spurious quote that nevertheless captures his style and his substance: “Sort yourself out, bucko.”
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  • His fame grew in 2016, during the debate over a Canadian bill known as C-16. The bill sought to expand human-rights law by adding “gender identity and gender expression” to the list of grounds upon which discrimination is prohibited. In a series of videotaped lectures, Peterson argued that such a law could be a serious infringement of free speech
  • His main focus was the issue of pronouns: many transgender or gender-nonbinary people use pronouns different from the ones they were assigned at birth—including, sometimes, “they,” in the singular, or nontraditional ones, like “ze.” The Ontario Human Rights Commission had found that, in a workplace or a school, “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity” would probably be considered discrimination.
  • Peterson resented the idea that the government might force him to use what he called neologisms of politically correct “authoritarians.”
  • To many people disturbed by reports of intolerant radicals on campus, Peterson was a rallying figure: a fearsomely self-assured debater, unintimidated by liberal condemnation.
  • He remains a psychology professor by trade, and he still spends much of his time doing something like therapy. Anyone in need of his counsel can find plenty of it in “12 Rules for Life.”
  • One of his many fans is PewDiePie, a Swedish video gamer who is known as the most widely viewed YouTube personality in the world—his channel has more than sixty million subscribers
  • In a video review of “12 Rules for Life,” PewDiePie confessed that the book had surprised him. “It’s a self-help book!” he said. “I don’t think I ever would have read a self-help book.” (He nonetheless declared that Peterson’s book, at least the parts he read, was “very interesting.”)
  • Political polemic plays a relatively small role; Peterson’s goal is less to help his readers change the world than to help them find a stable place within it. One of his most compelling maxims is strikingly modest: “You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.”
  • Of course, he is famous today precisely because he has determined that, in a range of circumstances, there are good reasons to buck the popular tide.
  • He is, by turns, a defender of conformity and a critic of it, and he thinks that if readers pay close attention, they, too, can learn when to be which.
  • “I stopped attending church, and joined the modern world.” He turned first to socialism and then to political science, seeking an explanation for “the general social and political insanity and evil of the world,” and each time finding himself unsatisfied.
  • The question was, he decided, a psychological one, so he sought psychological answers, and eventually earned a Ph.D. from McGill University, having written a thesis examining the heritability of alcoholism.
  • In “Maps of Meaning,” Peterson drew from Jung, and from evolutionary psychology: he wanted to show that modern culture is “natural,” having evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to reflect and meet our human needs.
  • Then, rather audaciously, he sought to explain exactly how our minds work, illustrating his theory with elaborate geometric diagrams
  • In “Maps of Meaning,” he traced this sense of urgency to a feeling of fraudulence that overcame him in college. When he started to speak, he would hear a voice telling him, “You don’t believe that. That isn’t true.” To ward off mental breakdown, he resolved not to say anything unless he was sure he believed it; this practice calmed the inner voice, and in time it shaped his rhetorical style, which is forceful but careful.
  • “You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you,” he writes. Peterson seems to have found that this approach works on much of the general population, too.
  • He is particularly concerned about boys and men, and he flatters them with regular doses of tough love. “Boys are suffering in the modern world,” he writes, and he suggests that the problem is that they’re not boyish enough. Near the end of the chapter, he tries to coin a new catchphrase: “Toughen up, you weasel.”
  • his tone is more pragmatic in this book, and some of his critics might be surprised to find much of the advice he offers unobjectionable, if old-fashioned: he wants young men to be better fathers, better husbands, better community members.
  • Where the pickup artists promised to make guys better sexual salesmen (sexual consummation was called “full close,” as in closing a deal), Peterson, more ambitious, promises to help them get married and stay married. “You have to scour your psyche,” he tells them. “You have to clean the damned thing up.
  • When he claims to have identified “the culminating ethic of the canon of the West,” one might brace for provocation. But what follows, instead, is prescription so canonical that it seems self-evident: “Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good.” In urging men to overachieve, he is also urging them to fit in, and become productive members of Western society.
  • Every so often, Peterson pauses to remind his readers how lucky they are. “The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West,” he writes, “is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.”
  • Peterson seems to view Trump, by contrast, as a symptom of modern problems, rather than a cause of them. He suggests that Trump’s rise was unfortunate but inevitable—“part of the same process,” he writes, as the rise of “far-right” politicians in Europe. “If men are pushed too hard to feminize,” he warns, “they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.”
  • Peterson sometimes asks audiences to view him as an alternative to political excesses on both sides. During an interview on BBC Radio 5, he said, “I’ve had thousands of letters from people who were tempted by the blandishments of the radical right, who’ve moved towards the reasonable center as a consequence of watching my videos.”
  • But he typically sees liberals, or leftists, or “postmodernists,” as aggressors—which leads him, rather ironically, to frame some of those on the “radical right” as victims. Many of his political stances are built on this type of inversion.
  • Postmodernists, he says, are obsessed with the idea of oppression, and, by waging war on oppressors real and imagined, they become oppressors themselves. Liberals, he says, are always talking about the importance of compassion—and yet “there’s nothing more horrible for children, and developing people, than an excess of compassion.”
  • The danger, it seems, is that those who want to improve Western society may end up destroying it.
  • But Peterson remains a figurehead for the movement to block or curtail transgender rights. When he lampoons “made-up pronouns,” he sometimes seems to be lampooning the people who use them, encouraging his fans to view transgender or gender-nonbinary people as confused, or deluded
  • Once, after a lecture, he was approached on campus by a critic who wanted to know why he would not use nonbinary pronouns. “I don’t believe that using your pronouns will do you any good, in the long run,” he replied.
  • In a debate about gender on Canadian television, in 2016, he tried to find some middle ground. “If our society comes to some sort of consensus over the next while about how we’ll solve the pronoun problem,” he said, “and that becomes part of popular parlance, and it seems to solve the problem properly, without sacrificing the distinction between singular and plural, and without requiring me to memorize an impossible list of an indefinite number of pronouns, then I would be willing to reconsider my position.
  • Despite his fondness for moral absolutes, Peterson is something of a relativist; he is inclined to defer to a Western society that is changing in unpredictable ways
  • Peterson excels at explaining why we should be careful about social change, but not at helping us assess which changes we should favor; just about any modern human arrangement could be portrayed as a radical deviation from what came before.
  • In the case of gender identity, Peterson’s judgment is that “our society” has not yet agreed to adopt nontraditional pronouns, which isn’t quite an argument that we shouldn’t.
  • Peterson—like his hero, Jung—has a complicated relationship to religious belief. He reveres the Bible for its stories, reasoning that any stories that we have been telling ourselves for so long must be, in some important sense, true.
  • In a recent podcast interview, he mentioned that people sometimes ask him if he believes in God. “I don’t respond well to that question,” he said. “The answer to that question is forty hours long, and I can’t condense it into a sentence.”
  • At times, Peterson emphasizes his interest in empirical knowledge and scientific research—although these tend to be the least convincing parts of “12 Rules for Life.”
  • Peterson’s story about the lobster is essentially a modern myth. He wants forlorn readers to imagine themselves as heroic lobsters; he wants an image of claws to appear in their mind whenever they feel themselves start to slump; he wants to help them.
  • Peterson wants to help everyone, in fact. In his least measured moments, he permits himself to dream of a world transformed. “Who knows,” he writes, “what existence might be like if we all decided to strive for the best?
  • His many years of study fostered in him a conviction that good and evil exist, and that we can discern them without recourse to any particular religious authority. This is a reassuring belief, especially in confusing times: “Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not.
  • there are therapists and life coaches all over the world dispensing some version of this formula, nudging their clients to pursue lives that better conform to their own moral intuitions. The problem is that, when it comes to the question of how to order our societies—when it comes, in other words, to politics—our intuitions have proved neither reliable nor coherent.
  • The “highly functional infrastructure” he praises is the product of an unceasing argument over what is good, for all of us; over when to conform, and when to dissent
  • We can, most of us, sort ourselves out, or learn how to do it. That doesn’t mean we will ever agree on how to sort out everyone else.
Javier E

Why 'they' seem more violent than 'we' are - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html

guns debate nativism immigration mass murder

shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • While we are used to approaching America’s gun culture as a singular phenomenon, it is worth considering how it relates to those other headlines about immigration.
  • — from President Trump’s assertion that Mexican immigrants are rapists to the language of the original travel ban, which targeted Muslim-majority countries and was titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.”
  • a powerful narrative persists that immigrants are preternaturally violent and that our safety is best guaranteed by closing our doors to anyone with brown skin.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • while one hand draws up plans for border walls, the other doles out AR-15s to white, male, homegrown terrorists: Between 54 and 63 percent of the mass shootings since 1982 were committed by white men. A hypothetical outside threat is seen as far more deadly than a very real internal one. How do we account for these seemingly contradictory impulses?
  • In recent years, for instance, politicians and pundits have gone to great lengths to distinguish “our” violence from “theirs,” referring to Muslims.
  • Where does a political motive diverge from a delusion? Only in the case of Muslim killers are we confident that we can draw a bright line.
  • We’ve embraced the false dichotomy: If browser history and social media accounts link a shooter to some form of radical Islam, then he is a terrorist (as in the case of Syed Rizwan Farouk, one of the San Bernardino, Calif., attackers), even though the animating factor may have been mental illness.
  • If we look beyond America, we might notice features common among perpetrators across religious and ethnic lines. As Olivier Roy argues in his recent book, “Jihad and Death,” they tend to be young men from middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds, often with a history of petty crime
  • “People suffering from psychological troubles can undoubtedly find in the jihadi imaginary a way to situate their madness within a realm of meaning shared by others,” Roy writes; “in other words, to cease being considered mad when their insanity reaches its murderous height, because they will be given the prestigious label of terrorist instead of being called a psychopath.”
  • white American perpetrators are deemed “troubled” or “disturbed” (as Trump described Cruz on Thursday), while their Muslim counterparts are purportedly motivated by nothing but religious fanaticism.
  • Perhaps most important — and chilling — what links mass shootings is the sense of sheer randomness they invoke
  • they rarely stop to target foes or spare friends. The mere act of being present makes one a legitimate target. It is this feature of contemporary terrorism — whether in Paris or Parkland — that unites disparate acts of violence and constitutes their prime psychological menace: It could be anyone, anywhere.
  • That truth transcends borders, but Americans continue to embrace the expensive fiction that outsiders are the real threat, with 45 percent of Americans saying immigrants worsen U.S. crime.
  • Even as the Islamic State entreats would-be fighters to take advantage of America’s lax gun laws (“their” domestic attacks depend on “our” policies), our leaders offer “thoughts and prayers” to shooting victims.
  • Scholars in a range of disciplines — from comparative literature to social theory to psychoanalysis — have long noted the tendency to project our faults on people who seem alien to us.
  • With regard to safety and security, demonizing refugees, Muslims, Mexicans and so on does the important work of seeming to take action while leaving the existing order (and the incredible profits of gun manufacturers) intact.
manhefnawi

Death of ex-Queen Isabella II of Spain | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...ath-ex-queen-isabella-ii-spain

Ferdinand VII Isabella II Alfonso XII

shared by manhefnawi on 16 May 18 - No Cached
  • Queen of Spain from the age of three, Isabella II abdicated after thirty-six years of more or less ceaseless turmoil, and spent almost half her life in exile in France
  • Her accession as a baby in 1833 in succession to her father, the autocratic Ferdinand VII, precipitated seven years of civil war with the Carlists
  • Isabella’s first regent was her mother, who weakened her position
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • There were mutinies in the army and an attempt to kidnap the young queen from the royal palace in Madrid, possibly inspired by her mother
  • she was married to her Bourbon cousin, Prince Francisco de Asis
  • There two years later she abdicated in favour of her teenage son, Don Alfonso
  • Prince Amadeo of Savoy was the nominal ruler, popularly nicknamed King Macaroni because he spoke Spanish with an Italian accent
  • There was yet another Carlist civil war in the 1870s and Alfonso died in 1885
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: Will There Always Be an England? - 0 views

nymag.com/...here-always-be-an-england.html

immigration diversity identity anxiety working class

shared by Javier E on 08 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • For the under-40s, economic insecurity, college debt, and inability to own a home drive the angst. For the over-40s, it’s a sense that the England they identified with, that gave their lives meaning and pride — the England that was nearly destroyed in the “finest hour” of 1940 — this “sceptered isle,” is disappearing.
  • That’s the reason for Brexit. Period.
  • The more you investigate what Brexit actually, practically means, it turns out to be an attempt to keep everything the same but somehow change it completely.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • It’s a policy that makes no sense, is being negotiated by a prime minister who voted to remain in the E.U., is being debated by a Parliament overwhelmingly pro-staying, in deference to a referendum that was a blizzard of disinformation and ignorance
  • they voted against it because they are scared. Last week’s PRRI/Atlantic study of the key voters who brought us Trump brings this out with stunning and, for me, decisive clarity:
  • Sixty-eight percent of white working-class voters said the American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence. And nearly half agreed with the statement, ‘things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.’
  • Only a small portion—just 27 percent—of white working-class voters said they favor a policy of identifying and deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally. [But] among the people who did share this belief, Trump was wildly popular: 87 percent of them supported the president in the 2016 election
  • Nearly two-thirds of the white working class say American culture has gotten worse since the 1950s. Sixty-eight percent say the U.S. is in danger of losing its identity, and 62 percent say America’s growing number of immigrants threaten the country’s culture.
  • What few on the left seem to see is that cultural anxiety, given the ethnic and cultural transformation of the last few decades, is an entirely predictable and entirely understandable response
  • If people felt that someone in charge actually saw their point of view, sympathized with it, and attempted even minor changes to accommodate it, we would have a different politics. But all they had was Trump. And all they still have is Trump.
  • the little, overcrowded, once remarkably homogeneous island that is Britain. This country’s core identity is thousands of years old. Yes, it has long accepted immigrants, but until the 1950s, net immigration was a rounding error. Since then, it has exploded. In the last 20 years, it has reached American levels
  • For those whose self-understanding is wrapped up in bluebells and tea, in English accents divided solely by class and region, in a nearly all-white and all-English country for centuries, these times are culturally terrifying.
  • It wasn’t their economic insecurity that gave us Brexit. It was that no one in charge even sensed their unease. Elites — and I count myself among the guilty — gave them nothing by way of reassurance or even a sense that they were understood instead of reviled. So all they had was Brexit
  • Their pride and self-identity are bound up in it now, just as a critical slice of America’s is bound up in Trump. Which is why, despite the mounting evidence that the Brexit gambit is a disaster, they will never let it go.
  • Home is indeed where one starts from. Change it too rapidly and it will disintegrate. We have been fools on mass immigration, we have been fools for preventing an honest debate about the benefits and drawbacks of diversity, and we have been contemptible in our contempt for so many of our fellow citizens. Both countries are now paying a terrible, terrible price.
Javier E

Review: 'Transaction Man' and 'The Economists' Hour' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...594718

economics science policy inequality history

shared by Javier E on 08 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • little more than a generation ago, a stealthy revolution swept America. It was a dual changing of the guard: Two tribes, two attitudes, two approaches to a good society were simultaneously displaced by upstart rivals
  • In the world of business, the manufacturing bosses gave way to Wall Street dealmakers, bent on breaking up their empires. “Organization Man,” as the journalist William H. Whyte had christened the corporate archetype in his 1956 book, was ousted by “Transaction Man,” to cite Nicholas Lemann’s latest work of social history.
  • In the world of public policy, lawyers who counted on large institutions to deliver prosperity and social harmony lost influence. In their place rose quantitative thinkers who put their faith in markets.
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • It was The Economists’ Hour, as the title of the New York Times editorial writer Binyamin Appelbaum’s debut book has it.
  • Lemann and Appelbaum contribute to the second wave of post-2008 commentary. The first postmortems focused narrowly on the global financial crisis, dissecting the distorted incentives, regulatory frailty, and groupthink that caused bankers to blow up the world economy
  • The new round of analysis broadens the lens, searching out larger political and intellectual wrong turns, an expansion that reflects the morphing of the 2008 crash into a general populist surge.
  • Berle went further. He laid out in detail how shareholders, being so dispersed and numerous, could not hope to restrain bosses—indeed, how nobody could do so. Enormous powers to shape society belonged to company chieftains who answered to no one. Hence Berle’s prescription: The government should regulate them.
  • “the Treaty of Detroit,” GM’s bosses granted workers regular cost-of-living pay increases, a measure of job security, health insurance, and a pension—benefits that were almost unheard-of. General Motors had “set itself up as a comprehensive welfare state for its workers,” in Lemann’s succinct formulation.
  • Berle celebrated the Treaty of Detroit by propounding a pro-corporate liberalism. The corporation had become the “conscience-carrier of twentieth-century American society,” he marveled
  • Anticipating the “end of history” triumphalism of a later era, the sociologist Daniel Bell feted the corporatist order in a book titled The End of Ideology.
  • the chief threat to Berle’s vision came not from America’s suspicion of concentrated power. It came from economics
  • Starting in the 1970s, however, economists began to wield extraordinary influence. They persuaded Richard Nixon to abolish the military draft. They brought economics into the courtroom. They took over many of the top posts at regulatory agencies
  • The rise of economics, Appelbaum writes, “transformed the business of government, the conduct of business, and, as a result, the patterns of everyday life.
  • In sum, Jensen’s prescriptions inverted Berle’s. The market could be made to solve the problem of the firm. Government could pull back from regulation
  • Jensen agreed with Berle’s starting point: Corporate managers were unaccountable because shareholders could not restrain them. But rather than seeing a remedy in checks exerted by regulators and organized labor, Jensen proposed to overhaul the firm so that ownership and control were reunited
  • After decades in which economists’ influence expanded rapidly, the striking thing about the Trump administration and its foreign analogues is that they have largely dispensed with economic advisers
  • Shortly after the publication of his research, the invention of junk bonds made hostile takeovers the rage. During the ’80s, more than a quarter of the companies on the Fortune 500 list were targeted. Jensen became the scholar who explained why this unprecedented boardroom bloodbath was good news for America.
  • to a considerable extent, the news was good. Shielded from market discipline, the old corporate heads had deployed capital carelessly
  • From 1977 to 1988, Jensen calculated, American corporations had increased in value by $500 billion as a result of the new market for corporate control. Reengineered and reinvigorated, American business staved off what might have been an existential threat from Japanese competition.
  • Michael C. Jensen, an entertainingly impassioned financial economist who reframed attitudes toward the corporation in the mid-’70s.
  • Even before the 2008 crash, Jensen disavowed the transactional culture he had helped to legitimize. Holy shit, Jensen remembers saying to himself. Anything can be corrupted.
  • Contrary to common presumption, the economics establishment in the 1990s and 2000s did not believe that markets were perfectly efficient. Rather, influential economists took the pragmatic view that markets would discipline financiers more effectively than regulators could
  • He is happy to state at the outset that market-oriented reforms have lifted billions out of poverty, and to recognize that the deregulation that helped undo Berle-ism was not some kind of right-wing plot. In the late ’70s, it was initiated by Democrats such as President Jimmy Carter and Senator Ted Kennedy.
  • Inequality has grown to unacceptable extremes in highly developed economies. From 1980 to 2010, life expectancy for poor Americans scandalously declined, even as the rich lived longer.
  • Meanwhile, the primacy of economics has not generated faster economic growth. From 1990 until the eve of the financial crisis, U.S. real GDP per person grew by a little under 2 percent a year, less than the 2.5 percent a year in the oil-shocked 1970s.
  • economists have repeatedly made excessive claims for their discipline
  • In the ’60s, Kennedy’s and Johnson’s advisers thought they had the business cycle tamed. They believed they could prevent recessions by “fine-tuning” tax and spending policies
  • When this expectation was exposed as hubris, Milton Friedman urged central banks to focus exclusively on the supply of money circulating in the economy. This too was soon discredited. From the ’90s onward, economists oversold the benefits of targeting inflation, forgetting that other perils—the human cost of unemployment, the destabilization wrought by financial bubbles—might well be worse than rising prices
  • Greenspan and Summers ducked the political challenge of buffering new kinds of financial trading with regulatory safeguards
  • Yet a large cost eluded Jensen’s calculations. The social contract of the Berle era was gone: the unstated assumption of lifetime employment, the promise of retirement benefits, the sense of community and stability and shared purpose that gave millions of lives their meaning. Berle had viewed the corporation as a social and political institution as much as an economic one, and the dismembering of corporations on purely economic grounds was bound to generate fallout that had not been accounted for
  • today’s fierce international competition and disruptive innovation oblige businesses to cut costs or go under. The dilemma is that, even as they compel efficiency, globalization and technological change exacerbate inequality and uncertainty and therefore the need for a compassionate social contract
  • LinkedIn is not a solution to worker insecurity writ large, still less to inequality. On the contrary, a world in which people compete to gather connections may be even less equal than our current one. A few high-octane networkers will attract large followings, while a long tail of pedestrians will have only a handful of buddies
  • Rather than buy in to a single grand vision, societies should prefer a robust contest among interest groups—what Lemann calls pluralism. Borrowing from the forgotten early-20th-century political scientist Arthur Bentley, Lemann defines groups broadly. States and cities are “locality groups,” income categories are “wealth groups,” supporters of a particular politician constitute “personality groups.” People inevitably affiliate themselves with such groups; groups naturally compete to influence the government; and the resulting push and pull, not squabbles among intellectuals about organizing concepts, constitutes the proper stuff of politics
  • Lemann is aware of the risks in this conclusion. He cites the obvious objection: “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.” In a contest of competing interest groups, the ones with the most money are likely to win
  • For those who regard inequality as a challenge, an interest-group free-for-all is a perilous prescription.
  • Appelbaum presents a series of persuasive recommendations, confirming that Lemann is wrong to despair of reasoned, technocratic argument. If policy makers want ordinary Americans to appreciate the benefits of open trade, they must ensure that displaced workers have access to training and health care. Because some interest groups are weaker than others, government should correct the double standard by which the power of labor unions is regarded with antipathy but the power of business monopolies is tolerated
  • Progressives should look for ways to be pro-competition but anti-inequality
  • —it isn’t so clear that the economists have departed
  • throughout Appelbaum’s narrative, many of the knights who slay the dragons of bad economic ideology are economists themselves. The story of the past generation is more about debates among economists than about economists pitted against laypeople. Perhaps, with a bit of humility and retooling, the economists will have their day again. If they do not come up with the next set of good ideas, it is not obvious who will
Javier E

Opinion | America Has a Ruling Class - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...america-politics-elites.html

elitism class privilege US

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In his 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” the sociologist Max Weber argued that commitment to moral principles must be combined with an “ethic of responsibility” that aims to deliver results through negotiation, compromise, institutional know-how. Our cult of the outsider makes this balance impossible.
  • First, we should stop confusing consumer preferences with power.
  • Popular culture relies on the outdated clichés of starched linens and vaguely British accents to indicate privilege.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • This anachronism encourages public figures to signal their outsider status with aesthetic posturing. On the left, that often means the vaguely bohemian manner cultivated by Ms. Haines
  • On the right, it tends to involve exaggerated machismo and embrace of working-class signifiers.
  • But none of this has anything to do with power. We should judge public figures by the arguments they make and the results they deliver, not whether they eat caviar, kale or capocollo
  • Next, we need to learn from historical figures who embraced Weber’s “ethic of responsibility.”
  • The problem is that reading history only “from the bottom up” deprives us of models for navigating dilemmas of vision and responsibility, intention and outcome. We honor and study consequential historical figures because they were flawed human beings who made incredibly hard decisions. Canceling their stories and monuments prevents us from understanding why they succeeded — and failed.
  • Finally, we need to be honest: America has a de facto ruling class. Since World War II, membership in that class has opened to those with meritocratic credentials. But that should not conceal the truth that it remains heavily influenced by birth
hannahcarter11

Marjorie Taylor Greene may be politically safe, but her conservative Georgia constituen... - 0 views

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

Marjorie Taylor Greene Conservative

shared by hannahcarter11 on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • Marjorie Taylor Greene has turned herself into one of the most visible Republicans in the country -- stoking an endless stream of controversies that has caused headaches for a defeated party trying to find its footing while she rakes in campaign cash without fear of consequences.
  • Greene's political security in the district -- where 75% of voters supported former President Donald Trump last November -- doesn't mean that all of her constituents are relishing her role as the GOP's flamethrower or that they approve of the recent anti-Semitic comments that she has used to rally her supporters.
  • Some questioned the motives behind Greene's attention-seeking maneuvers and said they were open to supporting a different Republican for her seat -- though no formidable challenger has emerged yet.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • She's already been stripped of her committee assignments by a vote in the House, rendering her an essentially ineffective legislator, but she's largely gone undisciplined by party leadership in Washington, DC, as congressional Republicans bow to Trump.
  • Unbowed by reprimands from her GOP colleagues, she made a fresh comparison between Democrats and Nazis, claimed that the cartels "love" President Joe Biden during a discourse on immigration, and then did a racist impression in what she described as her "really bad Mexican accent."
  • nside the Oakwood Cafe that morning, 78-year-old Phil Neff, who supported Trump, paid for his breakfast amid the morning bustle. Afterward, he told CNN he believes that Greene "has more interest in herself than serving the community," but added with a note of resignation: "That's what the people chose."
  • "I don't think anybody should be comparing anything for the Nazis and the Holocaust. It's different worlds," White said during an interview in Rome, Georgia, hours before Greene's rally. "She has been ineffective, and she'll continue to be ineffective as long as she is as controversial as she is. She doesn't garner support of other Republicans."
  • But Greene also has plenty of defenders within the Republican base -- despite her past embrace of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, racist and Islamophobic rhetoric, and past Facebook comments and videos unearthed by CNN's KFile in which she indicated support for executing prominent Democrats.
  • In the few short months she's been in Congress, Greene has created major headaches for her party, not just by lobbing her inflammatory criticisms at Democrats, but also by undermining Republican leaders in the GOP conference.
  • But just as Republican voters often excused Trump's outlandish statements as proof of his authenticity, some voters in this conservative Georgia district praise Greene for her candor.
  • "I don't necessarily agree with that statement," Deal said in an interview in Rome with CNN's Martin Savidge when asked about Greene's comparisons between mask requirements and the Holocaust. "But I do agree with her right to say it."
  • "It does feel like people are getting some of the rights taken away that they're used to," Shults said.Sandra Campbell, another Georgia voter, said she believes Greene and Trump are representative of the "real America."
woodlu

The great slowdown - America's demography is looking European | United States | The Eco... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...demography-is-looking-european

shared by woodlu on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Lots of immigration and relatively high fertility rates increased its population faster—and kept it more youthful—than its rich-country peers.
  • Over many generations they proved much readier than Europeans
  • dynamism helped to produce a flexible labour force and lively economy.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • California’s population has stalled and may, for the first time, be declining
  • New York endured more shrinkage than any state: it lost 126,000, or 0.65%, of its people.
  • Some states, mostly in the South, are growing fast, but not enough to lift the national rate.
  • In the year to July it grew by 0.35% (or 1.2m) to 329m.
  • Institution calculates expansion in the decade to July 2020 at just 6.6%. If his sums are right, that is the lowest decadal gain since 1790
  • Evidence has also piled up to show Americans becoming much less mobile
  • Just 9.3% of the population moved,
  • high cost of housing that makes it difficult for younger Americans to move.
  • absence of new, fast-growing cities and more similarity between various labour markets—mean that “this nation of pioneers has parked its wagons”.
  • technology, such as air-conditioning, previously did much to open up territory for settlement. More recent technology, notably the internet, may instead have made it less necessary to move to find work.
  • just-concluding decade will see the smallest expansion of the foreign-born population in any decade since the 1970s.
  • Less immigration, for example, has several effects.
  • Lower immigration hits domestic mobility, because recent immigrants are among the readiest to move for work.
  • The average American woman is now expected to have 1.7 children in her lifetime, the lowest level in decades
  • Mr Mangum sees a long-term reversion to the mean as America becomes less of an exception among rich countries
  • The policies of Donald Trump sharply cut inflows of migrants.
  • suggest deaths from covid-19, which may exceed 500,000 by April, will cut average life expectancy by more than one year.
  • The pandemic and the economic slump are also causing a baby bust.
  • estimate there will be 300,000 fewer births than otherwise expected in 2021
  • Eventual reopening of borders should see immigration tick up again. Even so, slower population growth will “continue in the coming years”
  • America “is looking more and more like Europe, with lower fertility, more measured levels of migration”.
  • Several Midwestern and north-eastern states, for example, will lose political clout as congressional and electoral-college seats go in reapportionment in 2021
  • matters for state finances if there are fewer taxpayers to pay for public services.
  • The US Census set out scenarios for the forecast population in 2060.
  • Were the country to return to being an exceptional place, open to high levels of immigration, its population could reach 447m. As a more normal rich country, less welcoming to immigrants, it could shrink to 320m. ■RecommendedGraphic detailAmerica’s demography is looking EuropeanInternationalThe scandal-hit market for passports and long-term visas is boomingThe AmericasJobs are coming back in Canada, thanks to subsidies
cartergramiak

Opinion | We Spoke to 430 Former Immigrants in Mexico. This Is What They Shared. - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tation-immigration-reform.html

US trump Politics policy

shared by cartergramiak on 27 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A week into his term, President Joe Biden is already making good on his campaign promise to reverse President Donald Trump's immigration policies, confront the nativism that infuses our treatment of immigrants, and pursue comprehensive reform that would provide a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
  • The vast majority were brought to the United States as young children, by parents fleeing poverty and violence. In their journeys to become Americans, they tried hard to fit into a society that could be unwelcoming. They often forgot how to speak Spanish.
  • More than half graduated from high school; a quarter obtained a college degree.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Many of those who return face a different kind of stigmatization in Mexico. They are often singled out for the way they dress; teased for their halting, accented Spanish; and stereotyped as arrogant, as failures, as criminals.
  • Some find the resilience to start over and pursue new dreams in Mexico.
johnsonel7

Muslim ferry discrimination: Families kept off New York ferry for 'security issues,' CA... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...minated-against-complaint-says

discrimination

shared by johnsonel7 on 18 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in New York, the complaint states that the three families initially had no issues taking a ferry from Bay Ridge in Brooklyn to Wall Street on Sept. 21. Their fortunes changed, however, while trying to board another ferry to Brooklyn Pier 6.
  • staffer for the commuter-ferry service reportedly said “security” had told her not to let them aboard. According to the complaint, two of the women in the group were wearing hijabs, in addition to other religious clothing, and had “pronounced accents.”
  • “All New Yorkers, regardless of creed, deserve equal and fair service free of discrimination, especially when using public transportation like the NYC Ferry,” Mohamed wrote. “These families were humiliated and traumatized in public view and treated as suspect because they happen to be Muslim. That is unacceptable. We hope the City will live up to its commitment of nondiscrimination and swiftly correct this injustice.”
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