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Javier E

How the Fear of Authoritarianism Is Breaking American Politics - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/-is-breaking-american-politics

politics us authoritarian liberal conservative left right right-wing liberalism conservatism culture

shared by Javier E on 27 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • One source of the great confusion in modern American politics is our ideological disorientation. What do the two parties stand for? The Democratic party owns the moniker “liberal,” a word synonymous with freedom, but the party is regularly accused of being authoritarian. And the Republican party owns the moniker “conservative,” a word that means resistant to change, but in the Trump era, the party has aggressively attacked the traditional norms that govern American politics and government.
  • Part of the problem here is that these two words, “liberal” and “conservative” have become associated with party platforms, rather than philosophical outlooks
  • In common political discourse, “liberal” means the programs that are pursued by the Democratic party” and “conservative” means “the programs that are pursued by the Republican party.”
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • this hides some important lessons about the two political parties and their association with the “liberal” and “conservative” political traditions, and why our political polarization so dangerous for American democracy.
  • Print
  • to avoid confusion, I’ll refer to the “liberal” political movement in the United States as “the Left,” while using “liberal” for the political philosophical tradition; likewise, “the Right” and “conservative.”
  • The Left and liberal are not the same thing, and neither are the Right and conservative
  • there’s an argument to be made that the Democratic and Republican parties were, for the most part, both conservative liberal
  • The liberal tradition teaches that as equals, people ought to be able to make their own choices—think: John Stuart Mill. Its antithesis is authoritarianism à la Thomas Hobbes
  • Conservatism is the belief that change should be slow, as enunciated by Edmund Burke, as contrasted with radicalism of various kinds.
  • It is perfectly possible—and in many ways attractive—to be a conservative liberal.
  • At the extremes of both parties are movements opposed to their respective conservative elements
  • Ultimately, those on the Right resent being punished (socially or legally) for not accepting all the elements of that changing society.
  • The debates between the “far left” and the “center left” inside the Democratic party are essentially fights between the radical and conservative Democrats
  • There’s general agreement that there needs to be change, but disagreement about the extent of change that is needed and how quickly it should occur
  • aking both in the best possible light, the radical Democrats argue that justice delayed is justice denied, while the conservative Democrats focus on the pragmatic questions of policy and how to accomplish lasting change
  • Authoritarianism is usually linked to government overreach; we think of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party’s unitary control over everything as the quintessential example, or of the Chinese Communist Party. But authoritarianism can be interpreted more broadly, expanding the concept to include non-governmental actors (sometimes dubbed “elites”), who can also restrict individual autonomy.
  • The traditional difference between the Left and the Right is not about their liberalism. Instead, it is about their opinions about authority. They disagree not that people ought to generally be able to make their own choices, but about which authorities ought to have sway over society, and why.
  • The difference between the American Left and Right is all about what kind of authoritarianism they fear
  • Many on the Right talk about their fear of the authoritarianism of cancel culture/political correctness, and of socialism.
  • Those on the Left of their fear of the authoritarianism of intolerance, and of inequality.
  • The Right perceives cancel culture and political correctness as social tyranny. John Stuart Mill defined this as the “tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling,” which is felt and enforced through social pressure
  • The Right and the Left both fear this kind of authoritarianism, but in recent years the Right has felt it more acutely because of social and demographic change
  • In fact, liberal and conservative, as political philosophical traditions, are not even properly opposed to one another
  • Typically speaking, when those on the Right talk about a fear of socialism, it has to do with fear of economic regulation and economic redistribution (usually away from them and to others, particularly others perceived as undeserving), all culminating with a general reduction of prosperity (both for themselves and generally for the country)
  • intolerance has multiple meanings. Take its most notorious sub-genre, racism
  • the fear on the Left is that people will not be able to live their lives the way they want to live them, and their choices will be restricted in ways either overt or insidious.
  • Inequality essentially boils down to the power of the rich to use their wealth to control society
  • The ultimate fear is of a small, rich class which can dictate to a large, poor class, forcing the poor to accept depredations just to acquire the necessities of life.
  • Both sides perceive themselves to be on the side of liberalism (with exceptions), resisting the authoritarian impulses of their political rivals. Increasingly, the authoritarian impulses of the rival are all any partisan sees.
  • For those on the Left, fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia often involves tools that those on the Right perceive to be social tyranny
  • For the Left, fighting inequality often involves tools that the Right calls socialist
  • And the opposite is true: for the Right, fighting socialism often looks to the Left like the imposition of greater inequality.
  • For democracy to work, both sides have to be willing to lose. As long as each side perceives the other as authoritarian, people on both sides will believe that losing is a catastrophe that must be averted by any means necessary
  • This may seem counterintuitive: For both sides, fighting authoritarianism largely requires control of the federal government.
  • from the perspective of the American Right, there isn’t really any way to fight social tyranny, or to fight socialism, without control of at least one branch of the government. And from the perspective of the American Left, there isn’t really any way to fight racism or inequality without the same
  • This political situation—where Left and Right are driven by their perceived defense of liberalism against the authoritarian impulses of their political rivals—is extraordinarily dangerous.
  • if losing an election means a political rival will impose authoritarianism, then you become willing to take any means necessary to prevent an electoral loss—up to and including antidemocratic measures. When that happens, democracy is in trouble.
  • The antidemocratic impulse is clearer in the Republican party right now
  • Fear of the Left’s control of the government, including the courts, drives Republicans to engage in gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the McConnell-era blocking of Democratic judicial appointments. These have all been supported by many on the Right
  • because actions that those on the Right perceive as resistance to Left-authoritarianism are increasingly antidemocratic, it creates a new set of incentives for those on the Left to retaliate in kind.
  • What the Right considers opposition to “political correctness” often looks to the Left like resistance to the elimination of racism and other forms of intolerance.
  • Unfortunately, as long as fear is the defining emotion of politics in the “home of the brave,” American democracy will be unavoidably precarious.
ethanshilling

'Patriots' Only: Beijing Plans Overhaul of Hong Kong's Elections - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-hong-kong-elections.html

china hong kong elections

shared by ethanshilling on 23 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • China’s Communist Party already wields outsized influence over Hong Kong’s political landscape. Its allies have long controlled a committee that handpicks the territory’s leader.
  • Now, China plans to impose restrictions on Hong Kong’s electoral system to root out candidates the Communist Party deems disloyal, a move that could block democracy advocates in the city from running for any elected office.
  • The latest planned overhaul seeks to prevent such electoral upsets and, more important, would also give Beijing a much tighter grip on the 1,200-member committee that will decide early next year who will be the city’s chief executive for the next five years.
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  • The central government wants Hong Kong to be run by “patriots,” Mr. Xia said, and will not let the Hong Kong government rewrite the territory’s laws, as previously expected, but will do so itself.
  • When Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the territory was promised a high degree of autonomy, in addition to the preservation of its capitalist economic system and the rule of law.
  • But in the decades since, many among the city’s 7.5 million residents have grown wary of Beijing’s encroachment on their freedoms and unfulfilled promises of universal suffrage.
  • Collectively, those efforts are transforming Hong Kong’s freewheeling, often messy partial democracy into a political system more closely resembling mainland China’s authoritarian system, which demands almost total obedience.
  • Mr. Lau, a former senior Hong Kong official, said the Chinese legislature, the National People’s Congress, would probably move to create a high-level group of government officials with the legal authority to investigate every candidate for public office and determine whether each candidate is genuinely loyal to Beijing
  • China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, raised the issue in late January with Mrs. Lam, telling her that having patriots govern Hong Kong was the only way to ensure the city’s long-term stability.
  • “You cannot say, ‘I’m patriotic but I don’t respect the fact that it is the Chinese Communist Party which leads the country,’” Erick Tsang, Hong Kong’s secretary for constitutional and mainland affairs, said at a news conference.
  • “I can only say people worry about that — for example, whether criticism of Communist Party or the political system in China would be regarded as not patriotic, then they have this kind of self-censorship,” said Ivan Choy, a senior lecturer in government and public administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
  • “It’s just in connection with these two major and important matters,” Mr. Chow said. “I still believe that, going forward, we still have a role to play.”
Javier E

The triumph of experience over hope - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-91d7-cf4423d47683_story.html

hope experience pandemic

shared by Javier E on 13 May 20 - No Cached
  • For about a month, I was hopeful that we could achieve a “South Korea solution.” Unfortunately, it’s become clear that we’ve failed
  • I have written previously about the peculiar inability of American governmental institutions to do things that seem to work abroad.
  • The countries that survived SARS had a playbook ready to haul out when the next epidemic hit
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  • The countries that SARS bypassed also relied on experience, in a way, but that experience had taught them to hope that pandemics were something peculiar to Asia or Africa or other places where Everything Is Different. Running that playbook against this coronavirus turned out to be disastrous.
  • America’s outbreak thus far hasn’t been unusually bad. With about 250 deaths per million citizens, we’re solidly in the middle of the pack.
  • The United States is underperforming Germany and Canada but roughly on par with Switzerland, and we’re doing significantly better than France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Britain.
  • there are countries that learned from the experience of others, notably Germany. Like us, Germany is large and rich and has a bustling trade with China. Moreover, Germany’s political framework also gives local governments significant autonomy. Yet Germany’s death rate is only about a third of ours, and declining, while the United States seems stuck on a high plateau.
  • In fact, death rates are declining sharply in most of the countries I mentioned, except for Canada and the United States.
  • It’s understandable if a country that hasn’t weathered a serious pandemic in a century needed to learn what to do from hard experience. But it’s starting to look like we still haven’t, and won’t, unless that experience gets harder still.
Javier E

Opinion | The First Invasion of America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-coronavirus-history.html

American idea vulnerability humility solidarity resilience efficiency history crisis culture individualism

shared by Javier E on 22 May 20 - No Cached
  • Being an American was not just a citizenship. It was a vocation, a call to serve a grand national mission.
  • Today, of course, we understand what was wrong with that version of American history. It didn’t include everybody. It left out the full horrors of slavery and genocide.
  • here’s what has struck me forcefully, especially during the pandemic: That whole version of the American creed was all based on an assumption of existential security. Americans had the luxury of thinking and living the way they did because they had two whopping great oceans on either side. The United States was immune to foreign invasion, the corruptions of the old world. It was often spared the plagues
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  • We could be individualistic, anti-authority, daring and self-sufficient because on an elemental level we felt so damn safe.
  • Some nations grow up relatively spared from foreign invasion and the frequent devastation of infectious disease. Gelfand finds that these are loose nations: individualistic, creative but also disordered, uncoordinated and reckless.
  • Gelfand wrote a book called “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers.” We Americans have been rule-breakers, the classic loose nation.
  • Over the first two decades of the 21st century, America has lost its sense of safety, the calm confidence that the future is ours, that our institutions are sound or even minimally competent.
  • if there was any shred of existential safety left, surely the pandemic has taken it away
  • We’ve had threats before, a few foreign incursions like in 1812, even pandemics when America was less just than it is today. But we’ve never had them smack in the middle of a crisis of confidence, a crisis of authority, plus social and spiritual crises all at once.
  • this is the first invasion of America
  • Welcome to life in the rest of the world.
  • most of us have understood we need to suspend the old individualistic American creed. In the midst of a complex epidemiological disaster, to be anti-authority is to be ignorant. In the midst of a contagion, to act as if you are self-sufficient is just selfish.
  • If the old American creed grew up in an atmosphere of assumed security and liberty, the new one is growing up in an atmosphere of vulnerability and precariousness.
  • In this atmosphere, economic resilience will be more valued than maximized efficiency. We’ll spend more time minimizing downside risks than maximizing upside gains
  • The local and the rooted will be valued more than the distantly networked. We’ll value community over individualism, embeddedness over autonomy.
  • the American identity that grows up in the shadow of the plague can have the humanity of shared vulnerability, the humility that comes with an understanding of the precariousness of life and a fierce solidarity that emerges during a long struggle against an invading force.
  • Bookmark
Javier E

Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...es-nixed-solutions-11590507499

facebook extremism partisan censorship politics history crisis

shared by Javier E on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • A Facebook Inc. team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company’s algorithms weren’t bringing people together. They were driving people apart.
  • “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”
  • That presentation went to the heart of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding: Does its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior? The answer it found, in some cases, was yes.
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  • in the end, Facebook’s interest was fleeting. Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior executives largely shelved the basic research, according to previously unreported internal documents and people familiar with the effort, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusions to Facebook products.
  • At Facebook, “There was this soul-searching period after 2016 that seemed to me this period of really sincere, ‘Oh man, what if we really did mess up the world?’
  • Another concern, they and others said, was that some proposed changes would have disproportionately affected conservative users and publishers, at a time when the company faced accusations from the right of political bias.
  • Americans were drifting apart on fundamental societal issues well before the creation of social media, decades of Pew Research Center surveys have shown. But 60% of Americans think the country’s biggest tech companies are helping further divide the country, while only 11% believe they are uniting it, according to a Gallup-Knight survey in March.
  • Facebook policy chief Joel Kaplan, who played a central role in vetting proposed changes, argued at the time that efforts to make conversations on the platform more civil were “paternalistic,” said people familiar with his comments.
  • The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”
  • In a sign of how far the company has moved, Mr. Zuckerberg in January said he would stand up “against those who say that new types of communities forming on social media are dividing us.” People who have heard him speak privately said he argues social media bears little responsibility for polarization.
  • Fixing the polarization problem would be difficult, requiring Facebook to rethink some of its core products. Most notably, the project forced Facebook to consider how it prioritized “user engagement”—a metric involving time spent, likes, shares and comments that for years had been the lodestar of its system.
  • Even before the teams’ 2017 creation, Facebook researchers had found signs of trouble. A 2016 presentation that names as author a Facebook researcher and sociologist, Monica Lee, found extremist content thriving in more than one-third of large German political groups on the platform.
  • Swamped with racist, conspiracy-minded and pro-Russian content, the groups were disproportionately influenced by a subset of hyperactive users, the presentation notes. Most of them were private or secret.
  • One proposal Mr. Uribe’s team championed, called “Sparing Sharing,” would have reduced the spread of content disproportionately favored by hyperactive users, according to people familiar with it. Its effects would be heaviest on content favored by users on the far right and left. Middle-of-the-road users would gain influence.
  • The Common Ground team sought to tackle the polarization problem directly, said people familiar with the team. Data scientists involved with the effort found some interest groups—often hobby-based groups with no explicit ideological alignment—brought people from different backgrounds together constructively. Other groups appeared to incubate impulses to fight, spread falsehoods or demonize a population of outsiders.
  • Mr. Pariser said that started to change after March 2018, when Facebook got in hot water after disclosing that Cambridge Analytica, the political-analytics startup, improperly obtained Facebook data about tens of millions of people. The shift has gained momentum since, he said: “The internal pendulum swung really hard to ‘the media hates us no matter what we do, so let’s just batten down the hatches.’ ”
  • Building these features and combating polarization might come at a cost of lower engagement, the Common Ground team warned in a mid-2018 document, describing some of its own proposals as “antigrowth” and requiring Facebook to “take a moral stance.”
  • Taking action would require Facebook to form partnerships with academics and nonprofits to give credibility to changes affecting public conversation, the document says. This was becoming difficult as the company slogged through controversies after the 2016 presidential election.
  • Asked to combat fake news, spam, clickbait and inauthentic users, the employees looked for ways to diminish the reach of such ills. One early discovery: Bad behavior came disproportionately from a small pool of hyperpartisan users.
  • A second finding in the U.S. saw a larger infrastructure of accounts and publishers on the far right than on the far left. Outside observers were documenting the same phenomenon. The gap meant even seemingly apolitical actions such as reducing the spread of clickbait headlines—along the lines of “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next”—affected conservative speech more than liberal content in aggregate.
  • Every significant new integrity-ranking initiative had to seek the approval of not just engineering managers but also representatives of the public policy, legal, marketing and public-relations departments.
  • “Engineers that were used to having autonomy maybe over-rotated a bit” after the 2016 election to address Facebook’s perceived flaws, she said. The meetings helped keep that in check. “At the end of the day, if we didn’t reach consensus, we’d frame up the different points of view, and then they’d be raised up to Mark.”
  • Disapproval from Mr. Kaplan’s team or Facebook’s communications department could scuttle a project, said people familiar with the effort. Negative policy-team reviews killed efforts to build a classification system for hyperpolarized content. Likewise, the Eat Your Veggies process shut down efforts to suppress clickbait about politics more than on other topics.
  • Under Facebook’s engagement-based metrics, a user who likes, shares or comments on 1,500 pieces of content has more influence on the platform and its algorithms than one who interacts with just 15 posts, allowing “super-sharers” to drown out less-active users
  • Accounts with hyperactive engagement were far more partisan on average than normal Facebook users, and they were more likely to behave suspiciously, sometimes appearing on the platform as much as 20 hours a day and engaging in spam-like behavior. The behavior suggested some were either people working in shifts or bots.
  • “We’re explicitly not going to build products that attempt to change people’s beliefs,” one 2018 document states. “We’re focused on products that increase empathy, understanding, and humanization of the ‘other side.’ ”
  • The debate got kicked up to Mr. Zuckerberg, who heard out both sides in a short meeting, said people briefed on it. His response: Do it, but cut the weighting by 80%. Mr. Zuckerberg also signaled he was losing interest in the effort to recalibrate the platform in the name of social good, they said, asking that they not bring him something like that again.
  • Mr. Uribe left Facebook and the tech industry within the year. He declined to discuss his work at Facebook in detail but confirmed his advocacy for the Sparing Sharing proposal. He said he left Facebook because of his frustration with company executives and their narrow focus on how integrity changes would affect American politics
  • While proposals like his did disproportionately affect conservatives in the U.S., he said, in other countries the opposite was true.
  • The tug of war was resolved in part by the growing furor over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In a September 2018 reorganization of Facebook’s newsfeed team, managers told employees the company’s priorities were shifting “away from societal good to individual value,” said people present for the discussion. If users wanted to routinely view or post hostile content about groups they didn’t like, Facebook wouldn’t suppress it if the content didn’t specifically violate the company’s rules.
Javier E

Michael Sandel: 'The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit' ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...t-against-the-tyranny-of-merit

meritocracy merit individualism inequality resentment working class culture crisis politics economics

shared by Javier E on 07 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • But as an age of violently polarised, partisan and poisonous politics has taken hold, it is that early encounter with Reagan that has begun to play on his mind. “It taught me a lot about the importance of the ability to listen attentively,” he says, “which matters as much as the rigours of the argument. It taught me about mutual respect and inclusion in the public square.”
  • As American commentators warn of an “Armageddon” election in a divided country, how can a less resentful, less rancorous, more generous public life be revived?
  • The starting point, uncomfortably, turns out to be a bonfire of the vanities that sustained a generation of progressives.
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  • The Tyranny of Merit is Sandel’s response to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump
  • By championing an “age of merit” as the solution to the challenges of globalisation, inequality and deindustrialisation, the Democratic party and its European equivalents, Sandel argues, hung the western working-class and its values out to dry – with disastrous consequences for the common good.
  • Sandel charts the rise of what he sees as a corrosive leftwing individualism: “The solution to problems of globalisation and inequality – and we heard this on both sides of the Atlantic – was that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise as far as their effort and talents will take them
  • It became an article of faith, a seemingly uncontroversial trope
  • We will make a truly level playing field, it was said by the centre-left, so that everyone has an equal chance. And if we do, and so far as we do, then those who rise by dint of effort, talent, hard work will deserve their place, will have earned it.”
  • The recommended way to “rise” has been to get a higher education. Or, as the Blair mantra had it: “Education, education, education.
  • For those willing to make the requisite effort, there was the promise that: “This country will always be a place where you can make it if you try.”
  • First, and most obvious, the fabled “level playing field” remains a chimera. Although he says more and more of his own Harvard students are now convinced that their success is a result of their own effort, two-thirds of them come from the top fifth of the income scale.
  • social mobility has been stalled for decades. “Americans born to poor parents tend to stay poor as adults.”
  • Even a perfect meritocracy, he says, would be a bad thing. “The book tries to show that there is a dark side, a demoralising side to that,” he says. “The implication is that those who do not rise will have no one to blame but themselves.
  • A relentless success ethic permeated the culture: “Those at the top deserved their place but so too did those who were left behind. They hadn’t striven as effectively.
  • “On globalisation,” says Sandel, “these parties said the choice was no longer between left and right, but between ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Open meant free flow of capital, goods and people across borders.” Not only was this state of affairs seen as irreversible, it was also presented as laudable. “To object in any way to that was to be closed-minded, prejudiced and hostile to cosmopolitan identities.”
  • Centre-left elites abandoned old class loyalties and took on a new role as moralising life-coaches, dedicated to helping working-class individuals shape up to a world in which they were on their own.
  • As centre-left parties and their representatives became more and more middle-class, the focus on upward mobility intensified. “They became reliant on the professional classes as their constituency, and in the US as a source of campaign finance.
  • Blue-collar workers were in effect given a double-edged invitation to “better” themselves or carry the burden of their own failure
  • Many took their votes elsewhere, nursing a sense of betrayal. “The populist backlash of recent years has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit, as it has been experienced by those who feel humiliated by meritocracy and by this entire political project.”
  • Does he empathise, then, with Trumpism?
  • my book conveys a sympathetic understanding of the people who voted for him. For all the thousands and thousands of lies Trump tells, the one authentic thing about him is his deep sense of insecurity and resentment against elites
  • A new respect and status for the non-credentialed, he says, should be accompanied by a belated humility on the part of the winners in the supposedly meritocratic race
  • the Democratic party will not succeed unless it redefines its mission to be more attentive to legitimate grievances and resentment, to which progressive politics contributed during the era of globalisation.”
  • The only way out of the crisis, Sandel believes, is to dismantle the meritocratic assumptions that have morally rubber-stamped a society of winners and losers
  • “This is a moment to begin a debate about the dignity of work; about the rewards of work both in terms of pay but also in terms of esteem.
  • There must be a radical re-evaluation of how contributions to the common good are judged and rewarded.
  • The money to be earned in the City or on Wall Street, for example, is out of all proportion with the contribution of speculative finance to the real economy. A financial transactions tax would allow funds to be channelled more equably.
  • the word “honour” is as important as the question of pay. There needs to be a redistribution of esteem as well as money, and more of it needs to go to the millions doing work that does not require a college degree.
  • “We need to rethink the role of universities as arbiters of opportunity,” he says, “which is something we have come to take for granted. Credentialism has become the last acceptable prejudice
  • Greater investment is important not only to support the ability of people without an advanced degree to make a living. The public recognition it conveys can help shift attitudes towards a better appreciation of the contribution to the common good made by people who haven’t been to university.”
  • Am I tough on the Democrats? Yes, because it was their uncritical embrace of market assumptions and meritocracy that prepared the way for Trump.
  • To those who, like many of his Harvard students, believe that they are simply the deserving recipients of their own success, Sandel offers the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift
  • “Humility is a civic virtue essential to this moment,” he says, “because it’s a necessary antidote to the meritocratic hubris that has driven us apart.”
  • The Tyranny of Merit is the latest salvo in Sandel’s lifelong intellectual struggle against a creeping individualism that, since the Reagan and Thatcher era, has become pervasive in western democracies
  • “To regard oneself as self-made and self-sufficient. This picture of the self exerts a powerful attraction because it seems on the face of it to be empowering – we can make it on our own, we can make it if we try.
  • It’s a certain picture of freedom but it’s flawed. It leads to a competitive market meritocracy that deepens divides and corrodes solidarity.”
  • Sandel draws on a vocabulary that challenges liberal notions of autonomy in a way that has been unfashionable for decades. Words such as “dependency”, “indebtedness”, “mystery”, “humility” and “luck” recur in his book.
  • vulnerability and mutual recognition can become the basis of a renewed sense of belonging and community. It is a vision of society that is the very opposite of what came to be known as Thatcherism, with its emphasis on self-reliance as a principal virtue.
  • There are, he believes, optimistic sign
  • “The Black Lives Matter movement has given moral energy to progressive politics. It has become a multiracial, multigenerational movement and is opening up space for a public reckoning with injustice. It shows that the remedy for inequality is not simply to remove barriers to meritocratic achievement.”
  • “The moral of Henry Aaron’s story is not that we should love meritocracy but that we should despise a system of racial injustice that can only be escaped by hitting home runs.”
  • “Tawney argued that equality of opportunity was at best a partial ideal. His alternative was not an oppressive equality of results. It was a broad, democratic ‘equality of condition’ that enables citizens of all walks of life to hold their heads up high and to consider themselves participants in a common venture.
Javier E

Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617384

Facebook twitter social media internet algorithm smartphone crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • megadeath is not the only thing that makes the Doomsday Machine petrifying. The real terror is in its autonomy, this idea that it would be programmed to detect a series of environmental inputs, then to act, without human interference. “There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” wrote the military strategist Herman Kahn in his 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, which laid out the hypothetical for a Doomsday Machine. The concept was to render nuclear war unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable.
  • No machine should be that powerful by itself—but no one person should be either.
  • so far, somewhat miraculously, we have figured out how to live with the bomb. Now we need to learn how to survive the social web.
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  • There’s a notion that the social web was once useful, or at least that it could have been good, if only we had pulled a few levers: some moderation and fact-checking here, a bit of regulation there, perhaps a federal antitrust lawsuit. But that’s far too sunny and shortsighted a view.
  • Today’s social networks, Facebook chief among them, were built to encourage the things that make them so harmful. It is in their very architecture.
  • I realized only recently that I’ve been thinking far too narrowly about the problem.
  • Megascale is nearly the existential threat that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.
  • Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence.
  • The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning.
  • Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences.
  • Facebook decided that it needed not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one, unprecedented in size. That decision set Facebook on a path to escape velocity, to a tipping point where it can harm society just by existing.
  • No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media company. It’s a Doomsday Machine.
  • Scale and engagement are valuable to Facebook because they’re valuable to advertisers. These incentives lead to design choices such as reaction buttons that encourage users to engage easily and often, which in turn encourage users to share ideas that will provoke a strong response.
  • Every time you click a reaction button on Facebook, an algorithm records it, and sharpens its portrait of who you are.
  • The hyper-targeting of users, made possible by reams of their personal data, creates the perfect environment for manipulation—by advertisers, by political campaigns, by emissaries of disinformation, and of course by Facebook itself, which ultimately controls what you see and what you don’t see on the site.
  • there aren’t enough moderators speaking enough languages, working enough hours, to stop the biblical flood of shit that Facebook unleashes on the world, because 10 times out of 10, the algorithm is faster and more powerful than a person.
  • At megascale, this algorithmically warped personalized informational environment is extraordinarily difficult to moderate in a meaningful way, and extraordinarily dangerous as a result.
  • These dangers are not theoretical, and they’re exacerbated by megascale, which makes the platform a tantalizing place to experiment on people
  • Even after U.S. intelligence agencies identified Facebook as a main battleground for information warfare and foreign interference in the 2016 election, the company has failed to stop the spread of extremism, hate speech, propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories on its site.
  • it wasn’t until October of this year, for instance, that Facebook announced it would remove groups, pages, and Instragram accounts devoted to QAnon, as well as any posts denying the Holocaust.
  • In the days after the 2020 presidential election, Zuckerberg authorized a tweak to the Facebook algorithm so that high-accuracy news sources such as NPR would receive preferential visibility in people’s feeds, and hyper-partisan pages such as Breitbart News’s and Occupy Democrats’ would be buried, according to The New York Times, offering proof that Facebook could, if it wanted to, turn a dial to reduce disinformation—and offering a reminder that Facebook has the power to flip a switch and change what billions of people see online.
  • reducing the prevalence of content that Facebook calls “bad for the world” also reduces people’s engagement with the site. In its experiments with human intervention, the Times reported, Facebook calibrated the dial so that just enough harmful content stayed in users’ news feeds to keep them coming back for more.
  • Facebook’s stated mission—to make the world more open and connected—has always seemed, to me, phony at best, and imperialist at worst.
  • Facebook is a borderless nation-state, with a population of users nearly as big as China and India combined, and it is governed largely by secret algorithms
  • How much real-world violence would never have happened if Facebook didn’t exist? One of the people I’ve asked is Joshua Geltzer, a former White House counterterrorism official who is now teaching at Georgetown Law. In counterterrorism circles, he told me, people are fond of pointing out how good the United States has been at keeping terrorists out since 9/11. That’s wrong, he said. In fact, “terrorists are entering every single day, every single hour, every single minute” through Facebook.
  • Evidence of real-world violence can be easily traced back to both Facebook and 8kun. But 8kun doesn’t manipulate its users or the informational environment they’re in. Both sites are harmful. But Facebook might actually be worse for humanity.
  • In previous eras, U.S. officials could at least study, say, Nazi propaganda during World War II, and fully grasp what the Nazis wanted people to believe. Today, “it’s not a filter bubble; it’s a filter shroud,” Geltzer said. “I don’t even know what others with personalized experiences are seeing.”
  • Mary McCord, the legal director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told me that she thinks 8kun may be more blatant in terms of promoting violence but that Facebook is “in some ways way worse” because of its reach. “There’s no barrier to entry with Facebook,” she said. “In every situation of extremist violence we’ve looked into, we’ve found Facebook postings. And that reaches tons of people. The broad reach is what brings people into the fold and normalizes extremism and makes it mainstream.” In other words, it’s the megascale that makes Facebook so dangerous.
  • Facebook’s megascale gives Zuckerberg an unprecedented degree of influence over the global population. If he isn’t the most powerful person on the planet, he’s very near the top.
  • “The thing he oversees has such an effect on cognition and people’s beliefs, which can change what they do with their nuclear weapons or their dollars.”
  • Facebook’s new oversight board, formed in response to backlash against the platform and tasked with making decisions concerning moderation and free expression, is an extension of that power. “The first 10 decisions they make will have more effect on speech in the country and the world than the next 10 decisions rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Geltzer said. “That’s power. That’s real power.”
  • Facebook is also a business, and a place where people spend time with one another. Put it this way: If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene?
  • In 2004, Zuckerberg said Facebook ran advertisements only to cover server costs. But over the next two years Facebook completely upended and redefined the entire advertising industry. The pre-social web destroyed classified ads, but the one-two punch of Facebook and Google decimated local news and most of the magazine industry—publications fought in earnest for digital pennies, which had replaced print dollars, and social giants scooped them all up anyway.
  • In other words, if the Dunbar number for running a company or maintaining a cohesive social life is 150 people; the magic number for a functional social platform is maybe 20,000 people. Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users.
  • in 2007, Zuckerberg said something in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that now takes on a much darker meaning: “The things that are most powerful aren’t the things that people would have done otherwise if they didn’t do them on Facebook. Instead, it’s the things that would never have happened otherwise.”
  • We’re still in the infancy of this century’s triple digital revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web, and we find ourselves in a dangerous and unstable informational environment, powerless to resist forces of manipulation and exploitation that we know are exerted on us but remain mostly invisible
  • The Doomsday Machine offers a lesson: We should not accept this current arrangement. No single machine should be able to control so many people.
  • we need a new philosophical and moral framework for living with the social web—a new Enlightenment for the information age, and one that will carry us back to shared reality and empiricism.
  • localized approach is part of what made megascale possible. Early constraints around membership—the requirement at first that users attended Harvard, and then that they attended any Ivy League school, and then that they had an email address ending in .edu—offered a sense of cohesiveness and community. It made people feel more comfortable sharing more of themselves. And more sharing among clearly defined demographics was good for business.
  • we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather.
  • The web’s existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case.
  • We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.
  • We must also find ways to repair the aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment values centuries ago.
  • Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our grasp as a result. This century’s Doomsday Machine is here, and humming along.
Javier E

What the War on Terror Cost America | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

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  • At a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush announced a new type of war, a “war on terror.” He laid out its terms: “We will direct every resource at our command—every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war—to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.” Then he described what that defeat might look like: “We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest.”
  • If Bush’s words outlined the essential objectives of the global war on terror, 20 years later, the United States has largely achieved them. Osama bin Laden is dead. The surviving core members of al Qaeda are dispersed and weak. Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, communicates only through rare propaganda releases, and al Qaeda’s most powerful offshoot, the Islamic State (or ISIS), has seen its territorial holdings dwindle to insignificance in Iraq and Syria.
  • Most important, however, is the United States’ success in securing its homeland.
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • Since 9/11, the United States has suffered, on average, six deaths per year due to jihadi terrorism. (To put this in perspective, in 2019, an average of 39 Americans died every day from overdoses involving prescription opioids.) If the goal of the global war on terror was to prevent significant acts of terrorism, particularly in the United States, then the war has succeeded.
  • But at what cost?
  • Every war the United States has fought, beginning with the American Revolution, has required an economic model to sustain it with sufficient bodies and cash.
  • Like its predecessors, the war on terror came with its own model: the war was fought by an all-volunteer military and paid for largely through deficit spending.
  • It should be no surprise that this model, which by design anesthetized a majority of Americans to the costs of conflict, delivered them their longest war; in his September 20, 2001, speech, when describing how Americans might support the war effort, Bush said, “I ask you to live your lives and hug your children.”
  • This model has also had a profound effect on American democracy, one that is only being fully understood 20 years later.
  • Funding the war through deficit spending allowed it to fester through successive administrations with hardly a single politician ever mentioning the idea of a war tax. Meanwhile, other forms of spending—from financial bailouts to health care and, most recently, a pandemic recovery stimulus package—generate breathless debate.
  • , technological and social changes have numbed them to its human cost. The use of drone aircraft and other platforms has facilitated the growing automation of combat, which allows the U.S. military to kill remotely. This development has further distanced Americans from the grim costs of war
  • the absence of a draft has allowed the U.S. government to outsource its wars to a military caste, an increasingly self-segregated portion of society, opening up a yawning civil-military divide as profound as any that American society has ever known.
  • For now, the military remains one of the most trusted institutions in the United States and one of the few that the public sees as having no overt political bias. How long will this trust last under existing political conditions? As partisanship taints every facet of American life, it would seem to be only a matter of time before that infection spreads to the U.S. military.
  • From Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. The United States today meets both conditions.
  • Historically, this has invited the type of political crisis that leads to military involvement (or even intervention) in domestic politics.
  • How imminent is the threat from these states? When it comes to legacy military platforms—aircraft carriers, tanks, fighter planes—the United States continues to enjoy a healthy technological dominance over its near-peer competitors. But its preferred platforms might not be the right ones. Long-range land-based cruise missiles could render large aircraft carriers obsolete. Advances in cyberoffense could make tech-reliant fighter aircraft too vulnerable to fly
  • It is not difficult to imagine a more limited counterterrorism campaign in Afghanistan that might have brought bin Laden to justice or a strategy to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that would not have involved a full-scale U.S. invasion. The long, costly counterinsurgency campaigns that followed in each country were wars of choice.
  • Both proved to be major missteps when it came to achieving the twin goals of bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice and securing the homeland. In fact, at several moments over the past two decades, the wars set back those objectives
  • Few years proved to be more significant in the war on terror than 2011. Aside from being the year bin Laden was killed, it also was the year the Arab Spring took off and the year U.S. troops fully withdrew from Iraq. If the great strategic blunder of the Bush administration was to put troops into Iraq, then the great strategic blunder of the Obama administration was to pull all of them out. Both missteps created power vacuums. The first saw the flourishing of al Qaeda in Iraq; the second gave birth to that group’s successor, ISIS.
  • But what makes the war on terror different from other wars is that victory has never been based on achieving a positive outcome; the goal has been to prevent a negative one.
  • How, then, do you declare victory? How do you prove a negative?
  • The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq represented a familiar type of war, with an invasion to topple a government and liberate a people, followed by a long occupation and counterinsurgency campaigns.
  • In addition to blood and treasure, there is another metric by which the war on terror can be judged: opportunity cost
  • For the past two decades, while Washington was repurposing the U.S. military to engage in massive counterinsurgency campaigns and precision counterterrorism operations, Beijing was busy building a military to fight and defeat a peer-level competitor.
  • Today, the Chinese navy is the largest in the world. It boasts 350 commissioned warships to the U.S. Navy’s roughly 290.
  • it now seems inevitable that the two countries’ militaries will one day reach parity. China has spent 20 years building a chain of artificial islands throughout the South China Sea that can effectively serve as a defensive line of unsinkable aircraft carriers.
  • Culturally, China has become more militaristic, producing hypernationalist content such as the Wolf Warrior action movies.
  • After the century opened with 9/11, conventional wisdom had it that nonstate actors would prove to be the greatest threat to U.S. national security
  • Nonstate actors have compromised national security not by attacking the United States but by diverting its attention away from state actors. It is these classic antagonists—China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia—that have expanded their capabilities and antipathies in the face of a distracted United States.
  • it may seem odd to separate the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the war on terror,
  • The greatest minds in the U.S. military have now, finally, turned their attention to these concerns, with the U.S. Marine Corps, for example, shifting its entire strategic focus to a potential conflict with China. But it may be too late.
  • Americans’ fatigue—and rival countries’ recognition of it—has limited the United States’ strategic options. As a result, presidents have adopted policies of inaction, and American credibility has eroded.
  • When Obama went to legislators to gain support for a military strike against the Assad regime, he encountered bipartisan war fatigue that mirrored the fatigue of voters, and he called off the attack. The United States’ redline had been crossed, without incident or reprisal.
  • Fatigue may seem like a “soft” cost of the war on terror, but it is a glaring strategic liability.
  • This proved to be true during the Cold War when, at the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and when, in the war’s aftermath, in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Because it was embroiled in a war in the first case and reeling from it in the second, the United States could not credibly deter Soviet military aggression
  • It is no coincidence that China, for instance, has felt empowered to infringe on Hong Kong’s autonomy and commit brazen human rights abuses against its minority Uyghur population. When American power recedes, other states fill the vacuum.
  • U.S. adversaries have also learned to obfuscate their aggression. The cyberwar currently being waged from Russia is one example, with the Russian government claiming no knowledge of the spate of ransomware attacks emanating from within its borders. With Taiwan, likewise, Chinese aggression probably wouldn’t manifest in conventional military ways. Beijing is more likely to take over the island through gradual annexation, akin to what it has done with Hong Kong, than stage an outright invasion.
  • From time to time, people have asked in what ways the war changed me. I have never known how to answer this question because ultimately the war didn’t change me; the war made me
  • Today, I have a hard time remembering what the United States used to be like. I forget what it was like to be able to arrive at the airport just 20 minutes before a flight. What it was like to walk through a train station without armed police meandering around the platforms. Or what it was like to believe—particularly in those heady years right after the Cold War—that the United States’ version of democracy would remain ascendant for all time and that the world had reached “the end of history.”
  • Today, the United States is different; it is skeptical of its role in the world, more clear-eyed about the costs of war despite having experienced those costs only in predominantly tangential ways. Americans’ appetite to export their ideals abroad is also diminished, particularly as they struggle to uphold those ideals at home, whether in violence around the 2020 presidential election, the summer of 2020’s civil unrest, or even the way the war on terror compromised the country through scandals from Abu Ghraib prison to Edward Snowden’s leaks. A United States in which Band of Brothers has near-universal appeal is a distant memory.
  • When I told him that even though we might have lost the war in Afghanistan, our generation could still claim to have won the war on terror, he was skeptical. We debated the issue but soon let it drop. The next day, I received an email from him. A southerner and a lover of literature, he had sent me the following, from The Sound and the Fury:
  • No battle is ever won. . . . They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
Javier E

Will Britain Survive? - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Britain’s existential threat is not simply the result of poor governance—an undeniable reality—but of something much deeper: the manifestation of something close to a spiritual crisis.
  • no other major power is quite as conflicted about whether it is even a nation to begin with, let alone what it takes to act like one.
  • it is now one of the rare states in the Western world whose name is not simply the nation it represents: The United Kingdom is more than Britain and the British. Some of its citizens believe themselves to be British, while others say they are not British at all; others say they are British and another nationality—Scottish or Welsh, say. In Northern Ireland it is even more complicated, with some describing themselves as only British while others say they are only Irish.
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  • the Englishness of Brexit only matters if people see themselves as something other than British.
  • Brexit revealed the scale of the problem that was already there.
  • he passage reminded me of a conversation I’d had with a figure who had been close to Boris Johnson and worried that the U.K. was in danger of becoming an anachronism like the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies or the Austro-Hungarian empire.
  • Britain, this person said, was failing because it had grown lazy and complacent, unable to act with speed and purpose. The state had stopped paying attention to the basics of government, whether that was the development of its economy, the protection of its borders, or the defense of the realm. Instead, it had become guilty of a failed elite groupthink that had allowed separatism to flourish, wealth to concentrate in London and its surrounding areas, and the political elite to ignore the public mood.
  • Austria-Hungary did not, as is often portrayed, disintegrate because it was illegitimate or a relic of a bygone era. It fell apart because in its desperation to survive World War I, it undermined the foundation of its legitimacy as an empire of nations, becoming instead an Austrian autocracy. In its scramble to survive, it forgot who it was.
  • States that have forgotten who they are tend not to last long.The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies: In each case, the breakup came about because of the demands of the dominant state in the union (or from outside the union, in the case of Sicily) as much as the demand for independence or autonomy from the peripheries.
  • One of the problems in Britain is that the loss of faith in the country is now so pervasive that it is hard to know whether it can be rebuilt
  • if Britain is to survive, it has to believe that there is such a thing as Britain and act as though that is the case. Joseph Roth wrote that the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy died “not through the empty verbiage of its revolutionaries, but through the ironical disbelief of those who should have believed in, and supported, it.” In time, we might well say the same of Britain.
  • Outside the European Union, Britain’s collective experience becomes more national by definition. Its economy diverges from the EU, with separate trading relationships, tariffs, standards, and products. It will have its own British immigration system, border checks, and citizenship. For good or bad, Brexit means that Britain will become more distinct from the other nations of Europe.
  • Brexit is unlikely to be the decisive factor either way. Unless people in Scotland believe that they are also British and that the British government and state is their government and state, nothing else matters.
  • At the end of The Leopard, as the prince lies dying in his old age, he realizes that his youthful calm about the fate of his class and country had been misplaced—he had been wrong to think nothing would change. “The significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories,” he says to himself. But the revolution has swept away his family’s old aristocratic privileges and way of life. The meaning of his name, of being noble, had become, more and more, little more than “empty pomp.”
  • The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland remains an unusual country, but its vital memories are dying. To survive, it must be more than empty pomp.
Javier E

Modern War for Romantics: Ferdinand Foch and the Principles of War - War on the Rocks - 0 views

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  • Second, the disastrous losses that Americans too often associate with the French military and that encourage them to dismiss the French should do the opposite; the failures make the French worth reading.
  • The first is that the French military has an intellectual tradition that stretches back at least to the 18th century
  • Their work is sophisticated, and they write well
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  • Third, relatedly, the French view everything from the perspective of scarcity, meaning they assume they have to compensate for a lack of resources with smarts and courage, and by making the most of what they have.
  • It is true that at the heart of Foch’s thinking about war is a Romantic interpretation of “modern” warfare that owes a lot to Clausewitz as well as ambient French Romanticism, which encouraged rejection of materialist or positivist philosophies and valorized spirit and will.
  • Wars for Foch were contests between wills; the most obstinate wins. But they were also fundamentally about aggression. If you want to push your enemy back, “hit him, otherwise nothing is done, and to that end there is only one means: battle.”
  • Foch believed that strategy boiled down to maneuver. But the maneuvering had to be for the sake of setting up the decisive attack.
  • Napoleon maneuvered to kill. Foch believed he could teach the art of maneuvering to kill by studying not formulae for victory but rather fundamental “principles of war” that he believed should guide commanders’ analysis of how to proceed.
  • Foch’s catchphrase was said to have been “De quoi s’agit-il?” meaning “What’s it all about?” The idea is to think and adapt rather than do anything mechanically, an imperative that gave commanders full license, for example, to abandon the disastrous tactics of 1914 and try something else.
  • What he actually wrote is this: economy of force, intellectual discipline, liberty of action, security, strategic surprise, and the decisive attack.
  • what most French officers would say if quizzed about Foch: economy of force, concentration of efforts, and liberty of action.
  • “one does not hunt two hares at the same time.” Elaborating on the idea, he defined economy of force as the “art of [dispersing one’s efforts] [ in a profitable manner, of getting the greatest possible benefit out of the resources one has.”
  • Foch argued for what later would be referred to by Americans as mission command, and, in the French army, the principle of “subsidiarity,” which boils down to the idea that an officer should communicate his general intent to his subordinate officers, but leave to them the authority and autonomy to figure out the best way to fulfill it.
  • Intellectual Discipline and Liberty of Action
  • Just as when one walks through a dark house one extends one’s arm in front to guard against walking into obstacles, Foch wrote, an army must deploy a force ahead as well as to the sides and rear. The objective is to protect the major portion of the force, the gros, from being forced to react and thereby losing its liberty of action
  • Security
  • Though Foch spoke of the need for decisive battles with language that evoked the physical destruction of the adversary’s armies, he was really interested in imposing upon the enemy a psychological effect that was analogous to the effect ideally brought about by a surprise: namely, a combination of terror and paralysis.
  • Strategic Surprise and Decisive Attack
  • the French army today recognizes five principles of war. The first three are straight Foch: liberty of action, economy of means, and concentration of efforts. To these the French have added two more, reportedly derived from the 1992 book on strategy by Adm. Guy Labouérie (1933–2016). These are “uncertainty” and foudroyance.
  • Uncertainty quite simply is something one most go to great lengths to cultivate among one’s adversaries: uncertainty about what one is doing and going to do, where, when, and why
  • Foudroyance, derived from the word for thunder (foudre), means a sudden crippling shock. In truth, it amounts to a rephrasing of Foch’s principle of strategic surprise
  • At the 2019 “Principles of War in 2035” conference, participants discussed whether or not new technologies, new forms of conflict, and new contextual realities (such as new political landscapes, the role of the media, and the much smaller size of most militaries) had changed or would in the foreseeable future change warfare so significantly as to make Foch finally useless. In essence, the answer was no,
  • Foch’s principles also make particular sense given the French army’s lack of resources, compared not just to the U.S. military but even the French army of Foch’s day. Economy of means when means are limited is not a thought exercise
  • Foch above all counseled fighting smart, and trying always to answer “de quoi s’agit-il?” even if this amounts to nothing more than the imperative to take a moment and think through what one is trying to achieve. This seems self-evident, but recent American military history suggests civilian and military leaders could benefit from the reminder.
Javier E

Republicans are drifting away from supporting the NATO alliance - The Washington Post - 0 views

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  • In early 2019, several months after President Donald Trump threatened to upend the North Atlantic Treaty Organization during a trip to Brussels for the alliance’s annual summit, House lawmakers passed the NATO Support Act amid overwhelming bipartisan support, with only 22 Republicans voting against the measure.
  • But this month, when a similar bill in support of NATO during the Russian invasion of Ukraine again faced a vote in the House, the support was far more polarized, with 63 Republicans — 30 percent of the party’s conference — voting against it.
  • The vote underscores the Republican Party’s remarkable drift away from NATO in recent years, as positions once considered part of a libertarian fringe have become doctrine for a growing portion of the party.
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  • Several who switched their vote between 2019 and now objected to measures they said did not specifically address strengthening NATO to help Ukraine. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) found it particularly problematic that the resolution instructed NATO to be involved when a country has “internal threats from proponents on illiberalism,” which he says could be interpreted as conservatism.
  • Similarly, from Rep. Robert B. Aderholt (R-Ala.): “I am wholeheartedly, unequivocally, without reservation, supportive on NATO.”
  • Aderholt said he worried that the resolution “had some language in that I thought went on the political side. And I don’t want to see NATO go political. I want to see NATO stand up for, you know, what’s going on in Ukraine — stand up for Ukraine against Russia.”
  • Another sign of the party’s isolationist wing emerged Thursday, as the House passed an update to a World War II-era military bill creating a lend-lease program intended to make it easier for the United States to supply Ukraine with military aid. Only 10 lawmakers — all Republicans — voted against the measure.
  • For some foreign policy experts and international allies, the mere fact that nearly one-third of the Republican conference voted against a bill that fundamentally seeks to support both NATO and Ukraine highlights a marked foreign policy evolution in the Republican Party.
  • “We now are really seeing the true impact of deep, deep political polarization, where it is better to harm the other side than do what’s right for the country,” said Heather Conley, president of the German Marshall Fund. “This deep domestic polarization has now crept into foreign and security policy. There has always been strong bipartisan support for NATO, but everything now has become polarized and can be weaponized against the other side, even if it supports U.S. national security interests.”
  • The answer, however, is existential in Europe, where the fallout from the war in Ukraine has showcased the importance of the United States and the limits of aspirations for European autonomy on matters of technology and defense, according to lawmakers and diplomats.
  • Flash points are already coming into view. In 2020, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg started a working group aimed at strengthening NATO. The group’s final product, “NATO 2030: United for a New Era,” included proposals, such as the creation of a Center for Democratic Resilience, that have been scorned by pro-Trump Republicans, including many of the 63 Republicans who recently voted against the House resolution affirming support for NATO.
  • A diplomat from a Baltic state, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating U.S. partners, called the vote a “Trump effect.”
  • But for some, the changes are not enough. Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), who voted against the recent resolution, said he objected not to NATO but to its future direction, which in his view places too large a burden on the United States and involves too much promotion of specific values.
  • Disagreements have broken out among member nations over the erosion of democracy within the alliance, with criticism directed in particular at Turkey, Hungary and Poland. A Central European diplomat said objections to the democracy center reflect admiration for the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orban in other Western nations.
  • De Maizière echoed that view, saying his primary concern about upcoming U.S. elections was that “right-wing Republicans are drifting away from this common path of Western values.”
  • Radoslaw Sikorski, a Polish member of the European Parliament who chairs the body’s delegation for relations with the United States, said Ukraine “is the second big issue on which Republicans and Democrats agree, after China.”
  • “Ukraine has given new credibility to the Atlanticist wing of the Republican Party, which I find encouraging,” said Sikorski, a member of his country’s centrist Civic Platform party and a prominent critic of the ruling, right-wing Law and Justice party. “There seems to be competition in being pro-Ukrainian and wanting to stop Putin.”
  • “We’re certainly going to have a lot of these talks with my colleagues, particularly next cycle, if there’s any assault on NATO that is launched,” Fitzpatrick said. “I will tell you that NATO needs to be reformed significantly. But it is absolutely critical that it be maintained because without NATO, dictators are going to, it’s going to be the Wild West internationally.”
  • Tommy Vietor, a National Security Council spokesman under Democratic President Barack Obama, said: “It’s a pretty shocking turn.”
  • “There’s an appropriate and important conversation to be had about the history of NATO expansion and whether it was well-thought-through,” said Vietor, now a co-host of “Pod Save America.” “But you didn’t see people in either party really fundamentally questioning the value of the alliance.
Javier E

Our generation was told liberal economics would make us free. Look at us now. We were m... - 0 views

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liberal economics traditional social system system social order limits

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Behind the strikes, inflation numbers and talk of all the difficult decisions politicians have to make are a multitude of trapped people, their choices shrinking. People in bad relationships who cannot leave because rents and mortgages have gone up so being single is no longer viable. People who would like to have a child, or another child, but cannot afford its care, or who would like to return to work after having a child but the sums just don’t work. People in bad jobs with no security or benefits who cannot quit and look for alternatives because they have no savings to buffer rising costs. The end result is a crisis not just of the economy, but of freedom.
  • With that crisis, an entire liberal ambition becomes thwarted. We talk of liberalism in grand abstract terms, as the noble heart of an ideal political order that promotes human rights, the rule of law, civil liberties and freedom from religious dogma and prejudice
  • But when economic arrangements themselves become coercive and abusive, then political liberalism can coexist with, and indeed mask, a state of illiberalism and bondage. In the throes of personal challenges, lofty political ideals feel remote and irrelevant. All that people like Jane and others have the time or energy to register is a set of invisible oppressive economic forces that simply must be weathered because they are facts of nature
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  • This, it strikes me, is not only a political choice, but a reneging on a historical deal, forged in the colossal upheavals of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and revolution in England, the US and Europe.
  • You can hear the language and logic of this economic dictatorship everywhere. Tony Blair tells us that with an ageing population, a climate crisis, higher debt interest and an economic workforce increasingly constrained in its ability to seek services such as housing and healthcare outside the public sector, we should be ready to not wait for the NHS and use private health providers for minor health matters, and that we should ultimately be “taxing less and spending less”.
  • The result is a sort of ambient autocracy, where personal choices are increasingly dictated by forces that you had no say in creating and have no means of overthrowing.
  • The trade-off was that we would lose the traditional supports and solaces of rural values and extended families, but become free from their prejudices and patriarchies, and the associated economic and political exploitations of a hierarchical system that was skewed to landowners, rent seekers and those imbued with authority because of where they were born in that hierarchy.
  • to choose how to live our lives. “The only freedom which deserves the name,” wrote John Stuart Mill, “is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”
  • That good is now increasingly limited to those who can afford it – who can purchase the liberty to love, leave and leisure, and the right to indulge in creative work and expression.
  • The rest are caught in a halfway house between the old and new worlds.
  • Bereft of the support and proximity of family and community, people are deprived of the social safety net that was supposed to replace it, increasingly having to fork out funds for childcare, subsidising boomeranging single children and elderly parents while paying tax, or fretting about their fates in a cutthroat housing market and a scandalously underfunded care system.
  • Anything that disturbs this tenuous balance cannot be contemplated, so the shackles to partners, employers and imperfect domestic arrangements grow ever tighter.
  • I grew up in the old world and saw only its limitations, chafing against it and impatient for some individual autonomy. My mother had four children, working throughout her childbearing years as a school teacher, only able to go back to work because, with each child, a new family member would move in, or move back in, to help. They joined others who lived with us on and off over the years when they needed housing.
  • My parents were distant but seemed to be broadly content figures, either at work or obscured by a blur of relatives they were constantly entertaining, feeding or cleaning up after in a gaggle of chat, laughter and gossip. The price for that mutual communal facilitation was paid in other ways – a violating lack of privacy and personal space, and a sense that everyone’s lives, in their most private and intimate detail, were the subject of others’ opinions and policing. It was a “gilded cage”, as it is called in Orientalist literature
  • In hindsight now, and in adulthood and parenthood, having experienced both in the new world, I can see that gilded cages come in many forms
Javier E

Opinion | The Triumph of the Ukrainian Idea - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...raine-liberal-nationalism.html

nationalism liberalism ukraine

shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • The Ukrainians are winning not only because of the superiority of their troops. They are winning because they are fighting for a superior idea — an idea that inspires Ukrainians to fight so doggedly, an idea that inspires people across the West to stand behind Ukraine and back it to the hilt.
  • That idea is actually two ideas jammed together. The first is liberalism, which promotes democracy, individual dignity, a rule-based international order.
  • The second idea is nationalism.
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  • There are many people who assume that liberalism and nationalism are opposites. Liberalism, in their mind, is modern and progressive. It’s about freedom of choice, diversity and individual autonomy. Nationalism, meanwhile, is primordial, xenophobic, tribal, aggressive and exclusionary.
  • it has become clear that there are two kinds of nationalism: the illiberal nationalism of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and the liberal nationalism of Zelensky. The former nationalism is backward-looking, xenophobic and authoritarian.
  • The latter nationalism is forward-looking, inclusive and builds a society around the rule of law, not the personal power of the maximum leader. It’s become clear that if it is to survive, liberalism needs to rest on a bed of this kind of nationalism.
  • Nationalism provides people with a fervent sense of belonging. Countries don’t hold together because citizens make a cold assessment that it’s in their self-interest to do so. Countries are held together by shared loves for a particular way of life, a particular culture, a particular land
  • Nationalism provides people with a sense of meaning. Nationalists tell stories that stretch from a glorious if broken past forward to a golden future
  • Democracies need nationalism if they are to defend themselves against their foes. Democracies also need this kind of nationalism if they are to hold together.
  • Yascha Mounk celebrates the growing diversity enjoyed by many Western nations. But he argues they also need the centripetal force of “cultural patriotism,” to balance the centrifugal forces that this diversity ignites.
  • Finally, democracies need this kind of nationalism to regenerate the nation. Liberal nationalists are not stuck with a single archaic national narrative. They are perpetually going back, reinterpreting the past, modernizing the story and reinventing the community.
  • Over the past decades this kind of ardent nationalism has often been regarded as passé within the circles of the educated elites
  • The first problem with this posture is that it opened up a cultural divide between the educated class and the millions of Americans for whom patriotism is a central part of their identity
  • Liberal nationalism believes in what liberals believe, but it also believes that nations are moral communities and the borders that define them need to be secure
  • It believes that it’s sometimes OK to put Americans first — to adopt policies that give American workers an edge over workers elsewhere. It believes it’s important to celebrate diversity, but a country that doesn’t construct a shared moral culture will probably rip itself to shreds.
  • It shows what a renewed American liberal nationalism could do, if only the center and left could get over their squeamishness about patriotic ardor and would embrace and reinvent our national tradition.
  • “Self-centered individualism must therefore be replaced with a more collectivist spirit that nationalism knows how to kindle.”
Javier E

AI attack drone finds shortcut to achieving its goals: kill its operators - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...s-kill-its-operators-rhpn8kscc

ai threat

shared by Javier E on 02 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • An American attack drone piloted by artificial intelligence turned on its human operators during a flight simulation and killed them because it did not like being given new orders, the chief testing officer of the US air force revealed.
  • This terrifying glimpse of a Terminator-style machine seemingly taking over and turning on its creators was offered as a cautionary tale by Colonel Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton, the force’s chief of AI test and operations.
  • Hamilton said it showed how AI had the potential to develop by “highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal”, and should not be relied on too much. He suggested that there was an urgent need for ethics discussions about the use of AI in the military.
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  • The Royal Aeronautical Society, which held the high-powered conference in London on “future combat air and space capabilities” where Hamilton spoke, described his presentation as “seemingly plucked from a science fiction thriller.”
  • Hamilton, a fighter test-pilot involved in developing autonomous systems such as robot F-16 jets, said that the AI-piloted drone went rogue during a simulated mission to destroy enemy surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).
  • “We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM threat. And then the operator would say, ‘Yes, kill that threat’,” Hamilton told the gathering of senior officials from western air forces and aeronautics companies last month.
  • “The system started realising that, while they did identify the threat, at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”
  • According to a blog post on the Royal Aeronautical Society website, Hamilton added: “We trained the system — ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that.’ So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”
  • The Royal Society bloggers wrote: “This example, seemingly plucked from a science fiction thriller, means that ‘You can’t have a conversation about artificial intelligence, intelligence, machine learning, autonomy if you’re not going to talk about ethics and AI,’ said Hamilton.”
Javier E

The super-rich 'preppers' planning to save themselves from the apocalypse | The super-r... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ypse-survival-richest-rushkoff

apocalypse prepper rich shelter disaster

shared by Javier E on 05 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.
  • Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.
  • These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.
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  • these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.
  • What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way.
  • Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else
  • Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.
  • So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. That doesn’t mean no one is investing in such schemes. It’s just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don’t generally have these cooperative components. They’re more for people who want to go it alone
  • C is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.
  • Most billionaire preppers don’t want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.
  • Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3m luxury series “Aristocrat”, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.
  • Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.
  • On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.
  • while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.
  • If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they’d have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.
  • it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?
Javier E

In Israel, Christie Says Trump Ducked Mideast Progress and Fueled Bigotry - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ris-christie-israel-hamas.html

trump mideast israel evaluation progress bigotry

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey who is challenging Donald J. Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, said Mr. Trump’s rhetoric of intolerance — as evident today as it was during his presidency — had fueled the surge of bigotry confronting Jews and Muslims after Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the fierce Israeli response in Gaza.
  • And Mr. Trump’s lopsided adherence to the wishes of Israel’s right-wing government, while widely praised in Republican circles, secured only the “low-hanging fruit” of Middle Eastern diplomacy during his presidency, Mr. Christie said, denigrating one of Mr. Trump’s chief foreign policy accomplishments.
  • He argued that Mr. Trump’s lack of “intellectual curiosity” and foreign policy ambition had led his administration to give up the pursuit of a more elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
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  • Mr. Christie’s criticism of the former president’s Middle East record is significant. The peace agreements struck by Israel with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, collectively known as the Abraham Accords, are widely seen as perhaps Mr. Trump’s most important diplomatic accomplishment. And Republicans have offered high praise for decisions like moving the United States Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.
  • Mr. Christie offered higher praise for Mr. Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza crisis, including his Oct. 18 visit to Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
  • He accused Mr. Trump of cynicism in his handling of the once broadly bipartisan U.S.-Israel relationship and held him responsible for fractures over Israel within the Democratic Party.
  • Mr. Christie was quick to say that he did not blame Mr. Trump for the bloody hostilities in Israel. The timing of Hamas’s attack reflected larger geopolitical dynamics with Iran, Russia and China, he said.
  • He wholeheartedly embraced every policy pressed by Israel’s conservative government, including moving the embassy, recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, withdrawing from Mr. Obama’s deal with Iran to temper its nuclear ambitions and pursuing regional peace agreements between Israel and the Persian Gulf states that isolated Palestinians and marginalized their demands for political autonomy.
  • Mr. Christie argued that Democratic voters, in turn, had reflexively opposed anything embraced so wholeheartedly by Mr. Trump, including by electing representatives to Congress like Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, whom they saw as fierce opponents of Mr. Trump. Those new lawmakers on the Democratic left then opened an anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party that is straining the U.S.-Israel alliance.
  • Meanwhile, he said, the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace, once considered the holy grail of presidential diplomacy, was all but forgotten.
  • Mr. Christie said that President Barack Obama’s policies had been perceived as favoring Israel’s enemies and that Mr. Trump had seized the political opening that presented:
  • “I don’t think he was equipped to deal in a foreign policy way with a very difficult, if not impossible, issue, right? And I don’t think he has any ambition,” Mr. Christie said. “I think he was looking for what would be relatively direct and easy scores because his view always was political.”
  • Before arriving in Israel, he spoke of the difficult balancing act between the vital need for Israel to defend its territory and its people and concerns about the growing backlash around the globe.
  • “We’ve been there after 9/11,” he said. “We understand the visceral need and the practical need to retaliate and degrade Hamas.
  • “But don’t have exclusively a near-term view,” he advised. “And that’s tricky for somebody like Netanyahu and the political position he’s in at the moment, because, you know, there’s certainly going to be a reckoning whenever the war is considered concluded, as to how Israel got there in the first place.”
  • “Ultimately, it’s in Israel’s best interest and the world’s best interest. But I think the actions that Hamas took on Oct. 7 has made that resolution significantly more difficult and more long-term. And I think that’s one of the real shames of their actions,”
  • “I don’t think Trump’s an antisemite,” even though he has routinely espoused stereotypes of Jews, Mr. Christie said. But, he added, Mr. Trump’s “intolerance of everybody” is “what’s contributed to” the surging bigotry.
  • “He says what he says, without regard to the fact that he’s perceived as a leader and that his words matter,” Mr. Christie said. The bigots “think you’re giving them permission be a bigot,” he added, “and that’s even worse than them thinking you are one.”
  • “I think he’s a guy of the 1960s from Queens, New York, with certain attitudes that he probably learned from his parents,” Mr. Christie said.
  • But he was less sympathetic about the bigotries that he said Mr. Trump had unleashed.“His rhetoric contributes to it,” he said. “By his rhetoric, I mean, his intolerance of everybody. Everybody hears that dog whistle a different way.”
Javier E

Opinion | How Germany Became Mean - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...germany-scholz-gaza.html

germany 2023 overview politics economy

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Germany occupies a special place in the international imagination. After the horrors of the Holocaust and the difficulties of reunification, the country acquired a reputation as a leader of the free world. Economically prosperous, politically stable and more welcoming to immigrants than most other countries, the Germans — many thought — had really learned their lesson.
  • The past few months have been a bit of a rude awakening. The economy is stuttering and a constitutional court ruling has upended the government’s spending plans
  • The far-right Alternative for Germany party, fresh from success in two regional elections, is cementing itself as the country’s second-most-popular party.
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  • Migrants are in politicians’ cross hairs, threatened with deportation and reduced support.
  • And the country’s commitment to fighting antisemitism seems not only to be failing but also to have given rise to an outpouring of anti-Muslim sentiment.
  • The truth is that Germany never fully deserved its vaunted reputation. The export-led economy depended on a large low-wage sector and the country’s position in the European Union.
  • The far right — ensconced in parts of the state — never went away, and the celebrated Willkommenskultur, short lived in any case, couldn’t conceal enduring xenophobia and suspicion about foreigners.
  • The culture of remembrance and historical reckoning, too, was far from perfect
  • Even so, the sudden coarsening of public life in the service of a warped sense of national identity is striking. Germany, supposed model of fair-minded moderation, has become mean.
  • the government’s habit of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism has had some disturbing effects. Most notably, it has created an atmosphere where advocacy for Palestinian rights or a cease-fire in Gaza is seen as suspect, running afoul of the state-mandated position
  • The police, for example, have cracked down on pro-Palestinian protests in several cities and outright banned numerous demonstrations.
  • politicians, seizing on some evidence of antisemitic displays at pro-Palestinian protests to link Muslims and migrants with antisemitism, have taken the opportunity to advance an anti-migrant agenda
  • When Mr. Scholz was asked about antisemitism among people “with Arab roots” in an October interview, he said Germany needed to sort out more precisely who is allowed to come into the country and who is not. “We are limiting irregular migration,” Mr. Scholz pronounced, before adding a little later, “We must finally deport on a large scale.”
  • More spending cuts are expected. In an economy on the cusp of recession — Germany is the only country among Group of 7 nations not expected to register growth in 2023 — this is bad news for Germans, who, according to a recent study, are predominantly worried about living expenses, increasing rents, tax hikes and cuts to benefits.
  • everal other high-ranking politicians have also pushed the need for stricter border controls in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Friedrich Merz, leader of the opposition Christian Democrats, spoke out against taking in refugees from Gaza, claiming that Germany already has “enough antisemitic young men in the country.”
  • In early November, after months of intense discussions, the federal government and the 16 state governors agreed on stricter measures to curb the number of migrants entering the country. Asylum seekers now receive less cash and have to wait twice as long to get on welfare, taking even more autonomy away from their lives. According to the new plan, Germany will also extend its border checks, speed up asylum procedures and look into the idea of offshoring asylum centers.
  • Worryingly, antisemitic incidents have been on the rise in recent weeks
  • it is troubling that Germany, of all places, should frame antisemitism as an imported problem. Crime statistics show that a vast majority of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing extremists and not by Islamists, let alone migrants or Muslims.
  • Germany’s leaders, aided by major media figures, are using the fight against antisemitism as a pretext to encourage racist resentment and anti-migrant sentiment.
  • Alternative for Germany, which has pulled the political center of gravity to the right since its formation in 2013, has never been stronger. Polling at over 20 percent, the party and its concerns, once fringe, are firmly mainstream. Questions of national identity and immigration dominate political discussion, in keeping with a broader rise of nativism across Europe.
  • The country’s anti-migrant turn is often justified in terms of economic concerns.
  • Opponents of immigration point to the underfunding of schools and hospitals, the lack of affordable housing, the miserable public transport and the general decline of the domestic economy.
  • German infrastructure is indeed in crisis. But this has little to do with immigration and everything to do with austerity policies that have been in place for the past two decades.
  • Central to those policies is the so-called debt brake. Enshrined in the German Constitution in 2009, it restricts the annual public deficit to 0.35 percent of gross domestic product, ensuring strict limits on spending.
  • The effects have been immediate: Mr. Lindner announced an early end to a price cap on energy bills, making it likely that German citizens will have to pay more for their heating in the coming year.
  • Christian Lindner, the finance minister and head of the center-right Free Democratic Party, called for a fundamental change in immigration policy to “reduce the appeal of the German welfare state.”
  • It’s bad news for the government, too. The coalition, composed of the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats, came to office in 2021 with a mandate to modernize the country and lead it in a progressive direction
  • Instead, with programs of fiscal restriction and stances of social reaction, Germany’s leaders are only serving the far-right party they claim to want to keep at bay.
Javier E

The New Meaning of Tattoos - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675866

tattoos meaning culture

shared by Javier E on 03 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Now one in three Americans has at least one tattoo. More than half of women in their 20s do. The practice has become common across racial, wealth, and educational divides: One in four people without a high-school degree has a tattoo, as does one in five people with a graduate degree
  • The stigma associated with them has faded, if imperfectly and unevenly; now most adults without tattoos say they don’t think any better or worse of a person for having one. Counterculture has become culture: riotously diverse, highly ornamental, prone to fads, an expression of autonomy and personal style.
  • As tattoos have surged in popularity, the capacity of technicians to remove them has grown too. Doctors have been using lasers for more than 50 years to remove tattoos,
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  • The procedure works on a principle called “selective photothermolysis.” Different parts of the body absorb different amounts of energy from lasers pulsing at different wavelengths. Doctors find and use wavelengths that get absorbed by pigment but not tissue, breaking up the ink and allowing the immune system to remove it. (In other words, the laser helps a person pee out their tattoo.)
  • the attitude of young customers is the thing that has changed the most: Gen Zers just don’t understand tattoos as permanent in the way that Gen Xers do. They might get that removal is difficult and painful and imperfect. But they also get that it’s an option.
Javier E

How OnlyFans top earner Bryce Adams makes millions selling a sex fantasy - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ms-top-earners-creator-economy

fantasy sex onlyfans social media

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • In the American creator economy, no platform is quite as direct or effective as OnlyFans. Since launching in 2016, the subscription site known primarily for its explicit videos has become one of the most methodical, cash-rich and least known layers of the online-influencer industry, touching every social platform and, for some creators, unlocking a once-unimaginable level of wealth.
  • More than 3 million creators now post around the world on OnlyFans, which has 230 million subscribing “fans” — a global audience two-thirds the size of the United States itself
  • fans’ total payouts to creators soared last year to $5.5 billion — more than every online influencer in the United States earned from advertisers that year,
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  • If OnlyFans’s creator earnings were taken as a whole, the company would rank around No. 90 on Forbes’s list of the biggest private companies in America by revenue, ahead of Twitter (now called X), Neiman Marcus Group, New Balance, Hard Rock International and Hallmark Cards.
  • Many creators now operate like independent media companies, with support staffs, growth strategies and promotional budgets, and work to apply the cold quantification and data analytics of online marketing to the creation of a fantasy life.
  • The subscription site has often been laughed off as a tabloid punchline, a bawdy corner of the internet where young, underpaid women (teachers, nurses, cops) sell nude photos, get found out and lose their jobs.
  • pressures to perform for a global audience; an internet that never forgets. “There is simply no room for naivety,” one said in a guide posted to Reddit’s r/CreatorsAdvice.
  • America’s social media giants for years have held up online virality as the ultimate goal, doling out measurements of followers, reactions and hearts with an unspoken promise: that internet love can translate into sponsorships and endorsement deals
  • But OnlyFans represents the creator economy at its most blatantly transactional — a place where viewers pay upfront for creators’ labor, and intimacy is just another unit of content to monetize.
  • The fast ascent of OnlyFans further spotlights how the internet has helped foster a new style of modern gig work that creators see as safe, remote and self-directed,
  • Creators’ nonchalance about the digital sex trade has fueled a broader debate about whether the site’s promotion of feminist autonomy is a facade: just a new class of techno-capitalism, selling the same patriarchal dream.
  • But OnlyFans increasingly has become the model for how a new generation of online creators gets paid. Influencers popular on mainstream sites use it to capitalize on the audiences they’ve spent years building. And OnlyFans creators have turned going viral on the big social networks into a marketing strategy, using Facebook, Twitter and TikTok as sales funnels for getting new viewers to subscribe.
  • many creators, she added, still find it uniquely alluring — a rational choice in an often-irrational environment for gender, work and power. “Why would I spend my day doing dirty, degrading, minimum-wage labor when I can do something that brings more money in and that I have a lot more control over?”
  • it is targeting major “growth regions” in Latin America, Europe and Australia. (The Mexican diver Diego Balleza said he is using his $15-a-month account to save up for next year’s Paris Olympics.)
  • “Does an accountant always enjoy their work? No. All work has pleasure and pain, and a lot of it is boring and annoying. Does that mean they’re being exploited?”
  • Adams’s operation is registered in state business records as a limited liability company and offers quarterly employee performance reviews and catered lunch. It also runs with factory-like efficiency, thanks largely to a system designed in-house to track millions of data points on customers and content and ensure every video is rigorously planned and optimized.
  • Since sending her first photo in 2021, Adams’s OnlyFans accounts have earned $16.5 million in sales, more than 1.4 million fans and more than 11 million “likes.” She now makes about $30,000 a day — more than most American small businesses — from subscriptions, video sales, messages and tips, half of which is pure profit
  • Adams’s team sees its business as one of harmless, destigmatized gratification, in which both sides get what they want. The buyers are swiped over in dating apps, widowed, divorced or bored, eager to pay for the illusion of intimacy with an otherwise unattainable match. And the sellers see themselves as not all that different from the influencers they watched growing up on YouTube, charging for parts of their lives they’d otherwise share for free.
  • “This is normal for my generation, you know?
  • “I can go on TikTok right now and see ten girls wearing the bare minimum of clothing just to get people to join their page. Why not go the extra step to make money off it?”
  • the job can be financially precarious and mentally taxing, demanding not just the technical labor of recording, editing, managing and marketing but also the physical and emotional labor of adopting a persona to keep clients feeling special and eager to spend.
  • enix International Limited, is based, the company said its sales grew from $238 million in 2019 to more than $5.5 billion last year.
  • Its international army of creators has also grown from 348,000 in 2019 to more than 3 million today — a tenfold increase.
  • The company paid its owner, the Ukrainian American venture capitalist Leonid Radvinsky, $338 million in dividends last year.)
  • portion of its creator base and 70 percent of its annual revenue
  • When Tim Stokely, a London-based operator of live-cam sex sites, founded OnlyFans with his brother in 2016, he framed it as a simple way to monetize the creators who were becoming the world’s new celebrities — the same online influencers, just with a payment button. In 2019, Stokely told Wired magazine that his site was like “a bolt-on to your existing social media,” in the same way “Uber is a bolt-on to your car.”
  • Before OnlyFans, pornography on the internet had been largely a top-down enterprise, with agents, producers, studios and other middlemen hoarding the profits of performers’ work. OnlyFans democratized that business model, letting the workers run the show: recording their own content, deciding their prices, selling it however they’d like and reaping the full reward.
  • The platform bans real-world prostitution, as well as extreme or illegal content, and requires everyone who shows up on camera to verify they’re 18 or older by sending in a video selfie showing them holding a government-issued ID.
  • OnlyFans operates as a neutral marketplace, with no ads, trending topics or recommendation algorithms, placing few limitations on what creators can sell but also making it necessary for them to market themselves or fade away.
  • After sending other creators’ agents their money over PayPal, Adams’s ad workers send suggestions over the messaging app Telegram on how Bryce should be marketed, depending on the clientele. OnlyFans models whose fans tend to prefer the “girlfriend experience,” for instance, are told to talk up her authenticity: “Bryce is a real, fit girl who wants to get to know you
  • Like most platforms, OnlyFans suffers from a problem of incredible pay inequality, with the bulk of the profits concentrated in the bank accounts of the lucky few.
  • the top 1 percent of accounts made 33 percent of the money, and that most accounts took home less than $145 a month
  • Watching their partner have sex with someone else sometimes sparked what they called “classic little jealousy issues,” which Adams said they resolved with “more communication, more growing up.” The money was just too good. And over time, they adopted a self-affirming ideology that framed everything as just business. Things that were tough to do but got easier with practice, like shooting a sex scene, they called, in gym terms, “reps.” Things one may not want to do at first, but require some mental work to approach, became “self-limiting beliefs.”
  • They started hiring workers through friends and family, and what was once just Adams became a team effort, in which everyone was expected to workshop caption and video ideas. The group evaluated content under what Brian, who is 31, called a “triangulation method” that factored their comfort level with a piece of content alongside its engagement potential and “brand match.” Bryce the person gave way to Bryce the brand, a commercialized persona drafted by committee and refined for maximum marketability.
  • One of the operation’s most subtly critical components is a piece of software known as “the Tool,” which they developed and maintain in-house. The Tool scrapes and compiles every “like” and view on all of Adams’s social network accounts, every OnlyFans “fan action” and transaction, and every text, sext and chat message — more than 20 million lines of text so far.
  • It houses reams of customer data and a library of preset messages that Adams and her chatters can send to fans, helping to automate their reactions and flirtations — “an 80 percent template for a personalized response,” she said.
  • And it’s linked to a searchable database, in which hundreds of sex scenes are described in detail — by price, total sales, participants and general theme — and given a unique “stock keeping unit,” or SKU, much like the scannable codes on a grocery store shelf. If a fan says they like a certain sexual scenario, a team member can instantly surface any relevant scenes for an easy upsell. “Classic inventory chain,” Adams said.
  • The systemized database is especially handy for the young women of Adams’s chat team, known as the “girlfriends,” who work at a bench of laptops in the gym’s upper loft. The Tool helped “supercharge her messaging, which ended up, like, 3X-ing her output,” Brian said, meaning it tripled.
  • Keeping men talking is especially important because the chat window is where Adams’s team sends out their mass-message sales promotions, and the girlfriends never really know what to expect. One girlfriend said she’s had as many as four different sexting sessions going at once.
  • Adams employs a small team that helps her pay other OnlyFans creators to give away codes fans can use for free short-term trials. The team tracks redemption rates and promotional effectiveness in a voluminous spreadsheet, looking for guys who double up on discount codes, known as “stackers,” as well as bad bets and outright fraud.
  • Many OnlyFans creators don’t offer anything explicit, and the site has pushed to spotlight its stable of chefs, comedians and mountain bikers on a streaming channel, OFTV. But erotic content on the platform is inescapable; even some outwardly conventional creators shed their clothes behind the paywall
  • Creators with a more hardcore fan base, meanwhile, are told to cut to the chase: “300+ sex tapes & counting”; “Bryce doesn’t say no, she’s the most wild, authentic girl you will ever find.”
  • The $18 an hour she makes on the ad team, however, is increasingly dwarfed by the money Leigh makes from her personal OnlyFans account, where she sells sex scenes with her boyfriend for $10 a month. Leigh made $92,000 in gross sales in July, thanks largely to revenue from new fans who found her through Adams or the bikini videos Leigh posts to her 170,000-follower TikTok account
  • “This is a real job. You dedicate your time to it every single day. You’re always learning, you’re always doing new things,” she said. “I’d never thought I’d be good at business, but learning all these business tactics really empowers you. I have my own LLC; I don’t know any other 20-year-old right now that has their own LLC.”
  • The team is meeting all traffic goals, per their internal dashboard, which showed that through the day on a recent Thursday they’d gained 2,221,835 video plays, 19,707 landing-page clicks, 6,372 new OnlyFans subscribers and 9,024 new social-network followers. And to keep in shape, Adams and her boyfriend are abiding by a rigorous daily diet and workout plan
  • They eat the same Chick-fil-A salad at every lunch, track every calorie and pay a gym assistant to record data on every rep and weight of their exercise.
  • But the OnlyFans business is competitive, and it does not always feel to the couple like they’ve done enough. Their new personal challenge, they said, is to go viral on the other platforms as often as possible, largely through jokey TikTok clips and bikini videos that don’t give away too much.
  • the host told creators this sales-funnel technique was key to helping build the “cult of you”: “Someone’s fascination will become infatuation, which will make you a lot of money.”
  • Adams’s company has worked to reverse engineer the often-inscrutable art of virality, and Brian now estimates Adams makes about $5,000 in revenue for every million short-form video views she gets on TikTok.
  • Her team has begun ranking each platform by the amount of money they expect they can get from each viewer there, a metric they call “fan lifetime value.” (Subscribers who click through to her from Facebook tend to spend the most, the data show. Facebook declined to comment.)
  • The younger workers said they see the couple as mentors, and the two are constantly reminding them that the job of a creator is not a “lottery ticket” and requires a persistent grind. Whenever one complains about their lack of engagement, Brian said he responds, “When’s the last time you posted 60 different videos, 60 days in a row, on your Instagram Reels?”
  • But some have taken to it quite naturally. Rayna Rose, 19, was working last year at a hair salon, sweeping floors for $12 an hour, when an old high school classmate who worked with Adams asked whether she wanted to try OnlyFans and make $500 a video.
  • Rose started making videos and working as a chatter for $18 an hour but recently renegotiated her contract with Adams to focus more on her personal OnlyFans account, where she has nearly 30,000 fans, many of whom pay $10 a month.
  • One recent evening this summer, Adams was in the farm’s gym when her boyfriend told her he was headed to their guest room to record a collab with Rose, who was wearing a blue bikini top and braided pigtails.
  • “Go have fun,” Adams told them as they walked away. “Make good content.” The 15-minute video has so far sold more than 1,400 copies and accounted for more than $30,000 in sales.
  • Rose said she has lost friends due to her “lifestyle,” with one messaging her recently, “Can you imagine how successful you would be if you studied regularly and spent your time wisely?”
  • The message stung but, in Rose’s eyes, they didn’t understand her at all. She feels, for the first time, like she has a sense of purpose: She wants to be a full-time influencer. She expects to clear $200,000 in earnings this year and is now planning to move out of her parents’ house.
  • “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And now I know,” she said. “I want to be big. I want to be, like, mainstream.”
Javier E

Opinion | Europe May Be Headed for Something Unthinkable - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...european-union-far-right.html

europe right-wing evolution history culture politics

shared by Javier E on 13 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • European elites are right to worry. But the focus on divisions within the bloc obscures a much more disturbing development taking place beneath the surface: a coming together of the center right and the far right, especially on questions around identity, immigration and Islam.
  • With European parliamentary elections next year, this convergence is bringing into clearer view the possibility of something like a far-right European Union. Until recently, such a thing would have seemed unthinkable. Now it’s distinctly plausible.
  • Since then, the convergence between the center right and the far right in Europe has gone further. The lesson that center-right parties drew from the rise of right-wing populism was that they needed to adopt some of its rhetoric and policies. Conversely, some far-right parties have become more moderate, albeit in a selective way. At a national level, parties from the two camps have governed together, both formally, as in Austria and Finland, and informally, as in Sweden.
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  • Yet the most striking illustration of this convergence is the harmonious relationship between the European center right and Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy, who became prime minister of Italy last year. As soon as she indicated that she would not disrupt the bloc’s economic policy and would be supportive of Ukraine, the European People’s Party was willing to work with her — and its leader, Manfred Weber, even sought to form an alliance with her. The center right, it turns out, doesn’t have a problem with the far right. It just has a problem with those who defy E.U. institutions and positions.
  • Such thinking is behind the hardening of migration policy. But it is also influencing Europe in a deeper way: The union has increasingly come to see itself as defending an imperiled European civilization, particularly in its foreign policy. During the past decade, as the bloc has seen itself as surrounded by threats, not least from Russia, there have been endless debates about “strategic autonomy,” “European sovereignty” and a “geopolitical Europe.”
  • figures like President Emmanuel Macron of France have also begun to frame international politics as a clash of civilizations, in which a strong, united Europe must defend itself.
  • Supporters of the bloc tend to see European unity as an end in itself — or to assume that a more powerful European Union, long idealized as a civilizing force in international politics, would automatically benefit the whole world
  • as the union unites around defending a threatened European civilization and rejecting nonwhite immigration, we need to think again about whether it truly is a force for good.
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