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Javier E

Russell Brand on revolution: "We no longer have the luxury of tradition" - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...russell-brand-on-revolution

revolution activism conservativism crisis politics spiritual

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
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  • The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.
  • This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.
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  • Biomechanically we are individuals, clearly. On the most obvious frequency of our known sensorial reality we are independent anatomical units. So we must take care of ourselves. But with our individual survival ensured there is little satisfaction to be gained by enthroning and enshrining ourselves as individuals.
  • For me the solution has to be primarily spiritual and secondarily political.
  • By spiritual I mean the acknowledgement that our connection to one another and the planet must be prioritised. Buckminster Fuller outlines what ought be our collective objectives succinctly: “to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone”. This maxim is the very essence of “easier said than done” as it implies the dismantling of our entire socio-economic machinery. By teatime.
  • The price of privilege is poverty. David Cameron said in his conference speech that profit is “not a dirty word”. Profit is the most profane word we have. In its pursuit we have forgotten that while individual interests are being met, we as a whole are being annihilated. The reality, when not fragmented through the corrupting lens of elitism, is we are all on one planet.
  • Suffering of this magnitude affects us all. We have become prisoners of comfort in the absence of meaning. A people without a unifying myth. Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, says our global problems are all due to the lack of relevant myths.
andrespardo

Will Florida be lost forever to the climate crisis? | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-crisis-sea-level-habitat-loss

enviro climate change global warming

shared by andrespardo on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Few places on the planet are more at risk from the climate crisis than south Florida, where more than 8 million residents are affected by the convergence of almost every modern environmental challenge – from rising seas to contaminated drinking water, more frequent and powerful hurricanes, coastal erosion, flooding and vanishing wildlife and habitat.
  • Below are some of the biggest threats posed by the climate crisis to south Florida today, along with solutions under consideration. Some of these solutions will have a lasting impact on the fight. Others, in many cases, are only delaying the inevitable. But in every situation, doing something is preferable to doing nothing at all.
  • Sea level rise The threat: By any estimation, Florida is drowning. In some scenarios, sea levels will rise up to 31in by 2060, a devastating prediction for a region that already deals regularly with tidal flooding and where an estimated 120,000 properties on or near the water are at risk. The pace of the rise is also hastening, scientists say – it took 31 years for the waters around Miami to rise by six inches, while the next six inches will take only 15 more.
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  • The cost: The participating counties and municipalities are contributing to a $4bn statewide spend, including Miami Beach’s $400m Forever Bond, a $1bn stormwater plan and $250m of improvements to Broward county’s sewage systems to protect against flooding and seawater seepage. In the Keys, many consider the estimated $60m a mile cost of raising roads too expensive.
  • The threat: Saltwater from sea level rise is seeping further inland through Florida’s porous limestone bedrock and contaminating underground freshwater supplies, notably in the Biscayne aquifer, the 4,000-sq mile shallow limestone basin that provides drinking water to millions in southern Florida. Years of over-pumping and toxic runoff from farming and the sugar industry in central Florida and the Everglades have worsened the situation. The Florida department of environmental protection warned in March that “existing sources of water will not adequately meet the reasonable beneficial needs for the next 20 years”. A rising water table, meanwhile, has exacerbated problems with south Florida’s ageing sewage systems. Since December, millions of gallons of toxic, raw sewage have spilled on to Fort Lauderdale’s streets from a series of pipe failures.
  • The cost: The Everglades restoration plan was originally priced at $7.8bn, rose to $10.5bn, and has since ballooned to $16.4bn. Donald Trump’s proposed 2021 federal budget includes $250m for Everglades restoration. The estimated $1.8bn cost of the reservoir will be split between federal and state budgets.
  • Possible solutions
  • The cost: With homeowners and businesses largely bearing their own costs, the specific amount spent on “hurricane-proofing” in Florida is impossible to know. A 2018 Pew research study documented $1.3bn in hazard mitigation grants from federal and state funding in 2017, along with a further $8bn in post-disaster grants. Florida is spending another $633m from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on resiliency planning.
  • Wildlife and habitat loss The threat: Florida’s native flora and fauna are being devastated by climate change, with the Florida Natural Areas Inventory warning that a quarter of the 1,200 species it tracks is set to lose more than half their existing habitat, and the state’s beloved manatees and Key deer are at risk of extinction. Warmer and more acidic seas reduce other species’ food stocks and exacerbate the deadly red-tide algal blooms that have killed incalculable numbers of fish, turtles, dolphins and other marine life. Bleaching and stony coral tissue disease linked to the climate crisis threaten to hasten the demise of the Great Florida Reef, the only living coral reef in the continental US. Encroaching saltwater has turned Big Pine Key, a crucial deer habitat, into a ghost forest.
  • As for the Key deer, of which fewer than 1,000 remain, volunteers leave clean drinking water to replace salt-contaminated watering holes as herds retreat to higher ground. A longer-term debate is under way on the merits and ethics of relocating the species to other areas of Florida or the US.
  • Coastal erosion The threat: Tourist brochures showcase miles of golden, sandy beaches in South Florida, but the reality is somewhat different. The Florida department of environmental protection deems the entire coastline from Miami to Cape Canaveral “critically eroded”, the result of sea level rise, historically high tides and especially storm surges from a succession of powerful hurricanes. In south-eastern Florida’s Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, authorities are waging a continuous war on sand loss, eager to maintain their picture-perfect image and protect two of their biggest sources of income, tourism dollars and lucrative property taxes from waterfront homes and businesses.
  • In the devastating hurricane season just one year before, major storms named Harvey, Maria and Irma combined to cause damage estimated at $265bn. Scientists have evidence the climate crisis is causing cyclones to be more powerful, and intensify more quickly, and Florida’s position at the end of the Atlantic Ocean’s “hurricane alley” makes it twice as vulnerable as any other state.
  • With the other option abandoning beaches to the elements, city and county commissions have little choice but costly replenishment projects with sand replacement and jetty construction. Federal law prohibits the importation of cheaper foreign sand, so the municipalities must source a more expensive alternative from US markets, often creating friction with residents who don’t want to part with their sand. Supplementary to sand replenishment, the Nature Conservancy is a partner in a number of nature-based coastal defense projects from West Palm Beach to Miami.
  • benefited from 61,000 cubic yards of new sand this year at a cost of $16m. Statewide, Florida spends an average $50m annually on beach erosion.
  • The threat: “Climate gentrification” is a buzzword around south Florida, a region barely 6ft above sea level where land has become increasingly valuable in elevated areas. Speculators and developers are eyeing historically black, working-class and poorer areas, pushing out long-term residents and replacing affordable housing with upscale developments and luxury accommodations that only the wealthy can afford.
  • No study has yet calculated the overall cost of affordable housing lost to the climate crisis. Private developers will bear the expense of mitigating the impact on the neighborhood – $31m in Magic City’s case over 15 years to the Little Haiti Revitalization Trust, largely for new “green” affordable housing. The University of Miami’s housing solutions lab has a $300,000 grant from JPMorgan to report on the impact of rising seas to South Florida’s affordable housing stocks and recommend modifications to prevent it from flooding and other climate events. A collaboration of not-for-profit groups is chasing $75m in corporate funding for affordable housing along the 70-mile south Florida rail trail from Miami to West Palm Beach, with the first stage, a $5m project under way to identify, build and renovate 300 units.
  • Florida has long been plagued by political leadership more in thrall to the interests of big industry than the environment. As governor from 2011 to 2019, Rick Scott, now a US senator, slashed $700m from Florida’s water management budget, rolled back environmental regulations and enforcement, gave a free ride to polluters, and flip-flopped over expanding offshore oil drilling. The politician who came to be known as “Red Tide Rick”, for his perceived inaction over 2018’s toxic algae bloom outbreaks, reportedly banned the words “climate change” and “global warming” from state documents.
  • Last month, state legislators approved the first dedicated climate bill. It appears a promising start for a new administration, but activists say more needs to be done. In January, the Sierra Club awarded DeSantis failing grades in an environmental report card, saying he failed to protect Florida’s springs and rivers and approved new roads that threatened protected wildlife.
  • The cost: Florida’s spending on the environment is increasing. The state budget passed last month included $650m for Everglades restoration and water management projects (an instalment of DeSantis’s $2.5bn four-year pledge) and $100m for Florida Forever. A $100m bridge project jointly funded by the state and federal governments will allow the free flow of water under the Tamiami Trail for the first time in decades.
  • Florida has woken up to the threat of climate change but it is not yet clear how effective the response will be. The challenges are innumerable, the costs immense and the political will to fix or minimize the issues remains questionable, despite recent progress. At stake is the very future of one of the largest and most diverse states in the nation, in terms of both its population and its environment. Action taken now will determine its survival.
brickol

The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-politics-us-health-disaster

COVID-19 us trump

shared by brickol on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.
  • In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.
  • One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.
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  • Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.
  • Some 357,896 tests later, the country has more or less won the coronavirus war. On Friday only 91 new cases were reported in a country of more than 50 million.
  • The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
  • Though the decision to allow private and state labs to provide testing has increased the flow of test kits, the US remains starkly behind South Korea, which has conducted more than five times as many tests per capita. That makes predicting where the next hotspot will pop up after New York and New Orleans almost impossible.
  • Today, 86,012 cases have been confirmed across the US, pushing the nation to the top of the world’s coronavirus league table – above even China.
  • Most worryingly, the curve of cases continues to rise precipitously, with no sign of the plateau that has spared South Korea.
  • Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the US government’s response to international disasters at USAid from 2013 to 2017, frames the past six weeks in strikingly similar terms. He told the Guardian: “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.”
  • If Trump’s travel ban did nothing else, it staved off to some degree the advent of the virus in the US, buying a little time. Which makes the lack of decisive action all the more curious.
  • It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.
  • In the absence of sufficient test kits, the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially kept a tight rein on testing, creating a bottleneck. “I believe the CDC was caught flat-footed,” was how the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, put it on 7 March. “They’re slowing down the state.”The CDC’s botched rollout of testing was the first indication that the Trump administration was faltering as the health emergency gathered pace. Behind the scenes, deep flaws in the way federal agencies had come to operate under Trump were being exposed.
  • In 2018 the pandemic unit in the national security council – which was tasked to prepare for health emergencies precisely like the current one – was disbanded. “Eliminating the office has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response,” Beth Cameron, senior director of the office at the time it was broken up, wrote in the Washington Post.
  • It was hardly a morale-boosting gesture when Trump proposed a 16% cut in CDC funding on 10 February – 11 days after the World Health Organization had declared a public health emergency over Covid-19.
  • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates the diagnostic tests and will control any new treatments for coronavirus, has also shown vulnerabilities. The agency recently indicated that it was looking into the possibility of prescribing the malaria drug chloroquine for coronavirus sufferers, even though there is no evidence it would work and some indication it could have serious side-effects.
  • As the former senior official put it: “We have the FDA bowing to political pressure and making decisions completely counter to modern science.”
  • Trump has designated himself a “wartime president”. But if the title bears any validity, his military tactics have been highly unconventional. He has exacerbated the problems encountered by federal agencies by playing musical chairs at the top of the coronavirus force.
  • The president began by creating on 29 January a special coronavirus taskforce, then gave Vice-President Mike Pence the job, who promptly appointed Deborah Birx “coronavirus response coordinator”, before the federal emergency agency Fema began taking charge of key areas, with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, creating a shadow team that increasingly appears to be calling the shots.“There’s no point of responsibility,” the former senior official told the Guardian. “It keeps shifting. Nobody owns the problem.”
  • So it has transpired. In the wake of the testing disaster has come the personal protective equipment (PPE) disaster, the hospital bed disaster, and now the ventilator disaster.Ventilators, literal life preservers, are in dire short supply across the country. When governors begged Trump to unleash the full might of the US government on this critical problem, he gave his answer on 16 March.In a phrase that will stand beside 20 January 2020 as one of the most revelatory moments of the history of coronavirus, he said: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment – try getting it yourselves.”
  • In the absence of a strong federal response, a patchwork of efforts has sprouted all across the country. State governors are doing their own thing. Cities, even individual hospitals, are coping as best they can.
Javier E

Ta-Nehisi Coates's 'Letter to My Son' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...397619

race racism American dream American idea youth slavery white supremacy history culture

shared by Javier E on 08 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me.
  • When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.
  • you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy
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  • To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body
  • There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies
  • It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth
  • ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
  • And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.
  • The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.
  • I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood
  • The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.
  • But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.
  • still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party
  • I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies
  • I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.
  • Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed
  • When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.
  • Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?
  • the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.
  • erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped
  • this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?
  • now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.
  • “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
  • The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.
  • I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons
  • here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.
  • Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.
  • I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.
  • American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.
  • I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.
  • Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.
  • It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.
  • “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.
  • There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.
  • I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.
  • I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
  • You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have
  • I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.
  • “I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.
  • the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.
  • You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life
  • I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.
  • I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
  • I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
oliviaodon

A Very German Love Story: When Old Left and Far Right Share a Bedroom - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ethen-caroline-sommerfeld.html

politics europe

shared by oliviaodon on 05 May 18 - No Cached
  • VIENNA — When she says identity, he hears exclusion.When he says diversity, she hears Islamization.He accuses her of forgetting history. She accuses him of obsessing with history. He calls her a racist. She calls him a national masochist.Helmut Lethen, 79, and Caroline Sommerfeld, 42, are both writers. They represent two generations and two intellectual camps in an ever more divided Germany. They are political enemies.And they are married.
  • It is a very German love story (though the couple reside in Austria, where the husband teaches), one neatly pegged to the 50th anniversary of the counterculture movement that remains a touchstone of global postwar history — and to the ascent of the counter-counterculture movement of today.
  • May 1968 was as important in Europe as it was in the United States, fueled similarly by a youth bulge, sexual liberation, disgust with the Vietnam War and general discontent with the era’s political establishment.And it spawned much the same trajectory for its baby boomers, from budding student revolutionaries to button-down liberal elites.Germany was no exception. And neither was Mr. Lethen.
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  • Ms. Sommerfeld, a philosopher in her own right, was swept up in another countercultural movement: In the summer of 2015, as hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived in Germany, she discovered the “New Right,” the intellectual spearhead of a nationalist movement that considers Islam and globalization existential threats.Her husband had celebrated the arrival of the refugees: “I think it is the first time in our cultural history that we have welcomed the foreign in this way,” he said.Ms. Sommerfeld, though, felt “anxious” and “repelled.”Today, she hopes her own fringe movement is tapping into a shifting zeitgeist that will reverberate in Germany and beyond, just as her husband’s did in its day.“We are the megaphone of a silent majority,” she claims.Mr. Lethen dismisses the analogy.“We were moved by a yearning for the world, we looked to the future,” he said. “They are moved by the yearning to go back to the womb of Teutonic tradition. It is a nostalgia for a past that never was.”
  • One recent evening Mr. Lethen called his wife and her far-right friends “spongers.”Their attack on liberal democracy was only possible because of liberal democracy, he reasoned. Fantasizing about an authoritarian regime like that in Hungary was akin to “sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.”Ms. Sommerfeld countered that the liberal mainstream consensus was itself authoritarian and did not even realize it. “You preach openness,” she said, “but you aren’t open to opinions you don’t like.”
  • Even the methods of the New Right borrow heavily from 1968: provoking with language; staging sit-ins; infiltrating book fairs with far-right publishing houses; breaking taboos like throwing a burqa over the statue of the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna; forging international links to similar movements.And feeding in large part off the outrage and reaction of the other side.“Revolutionizing perceptions,” Ms. Sommerfeld calls it.The first time they really fought was in 2016 after a far-right politician insulted the German soccer player Jérôme Boateng, who is black.
  • “People consider Boateng a good footballer, but they don’t want to have him as a neighbor,” Alexander Gauland of the Alternative for Germany party had said. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story
  • Ms. Sommerfeld remarked she would not want him as a neighbor either. Her husband exploded and called her a racist. Advertisement Continue reading the main story It was a key moment in their relationship. “That is the biggest conflict,” he said.Once, Mr. Lethen was so exasperated that he wrote down five conditions as a basis for discussion between them. Three of them had to do with acknowledging the Holocaust and the crimes of Germans during World War II.She rejected them all. Not, she says, because she denies the Holocaust, but because she rejects the notion that it should define modern German identity.
  • She wants to move on from “this extreme collective pathological obsession with the Holocaust which informs the entire moral discourse of the ’68 generation,” she said.(If he was really so concerned about anti-Semitism, she added, he might want to look at refugees from Syria who were taught in school that the Holocaust never happened.)“I want to say: ‘Dear lefties, this obsession with those 12 years is all yours. You can stew in it but it’s something we don’t want to deal with every minute of the day,’” she said.
Javier E

The age of perpetual crisis: how the 2010s disrupted everything but resolved nothing | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...verything-but-resolved-nothing

2010s decade review history politics culture crisis uk

shared by Javier E on 28 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • How will we remember the last 10 years? Above all, as a time of crises. During the 2010s, there have been crises of democracy and the economy; of the climate and poverty; of international relations and national identity; of privacy and technology
  • The world of the 2000s, she concluded, “has been swept away”. In place of centrist politicians and steady economic growth, the 2010s have brought shocks, revolts and extremists. Hung parliaments; rightwing populists in power; physical attacks on politicians; Russian influence on western elections; elderly leftists galvanising young Britons and Americans; rich, rightwing leaders in both countries captivating working-class voters – scenarios close to unimaginable a decade ago have become familiar, almost expected.
  • In the 2010s, it has often felt as if everything is up for grabs – from the future of capitalism to the future of the planet – and yet nothing has been decided. Between the decade’s sense of stasis and sense of possibility, an enormous tension has built up
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  • Perhaps the most frightening of this year’s many apocalyptic books is The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. Its chapter titles read: Heat Death. Hunger. Drowning. Dying Oceans. Unbreathable Air. Wildfire. Plagues. Economic Collapse. Climate Conflict. It’s intended to be a forecast of the planet’s near future that will shock readers out of their complacency. But during the 2010s almost all the disasters that the book names have already started to happen.
  • As one of the New Optimists’ favourite sources, the website Our World in Data, had to admit this year: “In some aspects the data suggests the world is getting worse.”
  • the awareness that much of modern life – air travel, car travel, eating meat, shopping, using plastics – has malign consequences has grown from a minority preoccupation in the 1970s into an everyday topic.
  • Sometimes in the 2010s, it has felt as if the whole world we have made, from the tiniest exhaust particle to the most sprawling conurbation, is toxic.
  • Nowadays, the fear is almost universal. The creation of social media networks over the last decade and a half, starting with Twitter in 2006, and the conversion of traditional media into non-stop news services, have made awful events seem relentless and impossible to ignore. We have become perpetually anxious.
  • “It is what it is.” Usually, it means: “I’m learning to live with something negative” – a personal setback, a wider injustice, difficult circumstances. It’s a mantra for an age of diminishing expectations, when many people no longer assume – unlike their postwar predecessors – that they will become richer than their parents, and live in an ever more sophisticated or just society, on an ever more hospitable planet
  • When people say “It is what it is”, they are rarely challenged. Instead, they are usually heard in respectful silence. In a difficult world, fatalism and stoicism are useful qualities.
  • Another coping mechanism is escape. Possibly the most revealing leisure activity of the 2010s is shutting yourself away with a TV series: typically a drama set in another country or another era, with an addictive, slowly resolved plot, many characters, elaborate settings, and enough episodes to allow for watching in binges. In an age of squeezed incomes, TV dramas are worlds you can explore on the cheap.
  • During the decade, it became cooler than usual in Britain to eat comforting things: bread, cakes, pies, even grilled cheese sandwiches. The Great British Bake Off, first broadcast in 2010, made cooking with lots of carbs and sugar respectable again
  • Clothes have become more cocooning: enormous puffer jackets, scarves the size of small blankets, fleeces and woolly hats. In the 2000s, clothes and silhouettes were leaner and more formal – tight suits, skinny trousers – as if people expected to seize exciting new opportunities, or at least to work in offices. In the 2010s, social mobility has stalled, and many of the jobs being created – and often taken by middle-class graduates – involve zero-hours contracts and outdoor work
  • In a working world that requires quick switches between inactivity and activity, that values powers of endurance, caffeine is a vital drug. In many British town and city centres during the 2010s, otherwise emptied out by online commerce, cafes proliferated, replacing shops and pubs as the busiest indoor spaces.
  • Another way to cope with the 2010s has been to work obsessively on yourself. From the 1950s to the 1990s, being young in the west was often associated with lounging around, or rebelling, or living for the moment. But in the 2010s being young often means relentlessly working and studying, polishing your public persona, and keeping fit
  • Yoga, marathons, triathlons – it’s not hard to see their renewed popularity over the last decade as an effort by people, conscious or otherwise, to hone themselves for a tougher world.
  • this self-optimisation can be measured, and compared with the efforts of others, as never before. This process has created a new hierarchy, particularly within the American middle class, but increasingly in its European counterpart, too, which privileges the leanest people, the most punishing exercise classes, the most body-conscious brands of workout clothes.
  • finally, the harsher world of the 2010s has also prompted many people to undergo a more private, less visible toughenin
  • They have got used to walking past the decade’s casualties in the street, and not giving them much thought. In the 2010s, as in Victorian times, if you want an untroubled mind, it doesn’t pay to look at the world around you too hard.
  • the difficulties since 2010 of so many previously dominant value systems – capitalism, centrism, traditional conservatism, white male supremacy – have opened up space for new political movements, at a rate not seen since the 1960s.
  • the 2010s have reacquainted voters with the idea that politics can be about big promises and fundamental choices.
  • the 2010s have also brought a renewed realisation that culture is political – after decades when most creative people and cultural critics avoided that conclusion. Literary and art prizes now regularly go to people whose work is overtly political, such as Margaret Atwood
  • Although prizes are inherently elitist, they are now also increasingly expected to promote greater equality in society as a whole. It is a contradiction characteristic of the decade’s politics, where a greater awareness of the injustices suffered by many social groups, and sometimes a greater willingness to redress them, co-exists with an intensifying individualism – with a growing preference for letting people self-identify and respecting each person’s particular life experience
  • In 2012, Mark Fisher said that Britain was suffering from “depression economics and boomtime politics”: the disengagement prompted by the relatively comfortable 1990s and 2000s was lingering on, despite the reopening of so many economic issues by the financial crisis. Seven years later, apathy remains a habit for many Britons
  • digital technology, far from enabling more creativity, had actually made it both harder and less essential for artists. Instead of coming up with new ideas, they could now roam the internet’s infinite archives, and build careers out of clever hybrids and pastiches of previous forms.
  • Pop culture from the 1990s, in particular, such as the cosy TV series Friends, has become hugely popular again. In our often backward-looking society, “Time itself seem[s] to become sluggish,” wrote Reynolds, “like a river that starts to meander”
katyshannon

E.P.A. Broke Law With Social Media Push for Water Rule, Auditor Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-water-rule-auditor-finds.html

water social media push law rule lobbying auditor new york times epa clean obama politics US

shared by katyshannon on 15 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded. From Our Advertisers .story-link { position: relative; display: block; text-decoration: none; padding: 6px 0; min-height: 65px; min-width: 300px; } .story-link:hover { background-color: #eeeeec; } .story-kicker, .story-heading, .summary { margin: 0; padding: 0; } .thumb { position: absolute; left: 0; top: 6px; } .thumb-hover, .story-link:hover .thumb-main { display: none } .thumb-main, .story-link:hover .thumb-hover { display: block } .story-body { padding-left: 75px; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: #000; } .story-body .story-kicker { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 11px; line-height: 11px; font-weight: 400; color: #5caaf3; } .story-heading { font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 700; padding: 5px 0 0; } Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation Changing Charity Younger donors are finding new ways to give. <noscript class=&quot;MOAT-nytdfp348531439194?moatClientLevel1=31074278&amp;amp;moatClientLevel2=343740158&amp;amp;moatClientLevel3=58584518&amp;amp;moatClientLevel4=94015704638&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer1=28390358&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer2=30706478&amp;amp;zMoatPR=n
  • The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.
  • An E.P.A. official on Tuesday disputed the finding. “We use social media tools just like all organizations to stay connected and inform people across the country about our activities,” Liz Purchia, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement. “At no point did the E.P.A. encourage the public to contact Congress or any state legislature.”
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  • But the legal opinion emerged just as Republican leaders moved to block the so-called Waters of the United States clean-water rule through an amendment to the enormous spending bill expected to pass in Congress this week. While the G.A.O.’s findings are unlikely to lead to civil or criminal penalties, they do offer Republicans a cudgel for this week’s showdown.
  • The E.P.A. rolled out a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even on more innovative tools such as Thunderclap, to counter opposition to its water rule, which effectively restricts how land near certain surface waters can be used. The agency said the rule would prevent pollution in drinking water sources. Farmers, business groups and Republicans have called the rule a flagrant case of government overreach.
  • The publicity campaign was part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to counter critics of its policies through social media tools, communicating directly with Americans and bypassing traditional news organizations.
  • At the White House, top aides to President Obama have formed the Office of Digital Strategy, which promotes his agenda on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and other social sites. Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser to the president, is charged in part with expanding Mr. Obama’s presence in that online world.
  • White House officials declined to say if they think Mr. Reynolds or other agency officials did anything wrong.
  • Federal agencies are allowed to promote their own policies, but are not allowed to engage in propaganda, defined as covert activity intended to influence the American public. They also are not allowed to use federal resources to conduct so-called grass-roots lobbying — urging the American public to contact Congress to take a certain kind of action on pending legislation.
  • As it promoted the Waters of the United States rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, the E.P.A. violated both of those prohibitions, a 26-page legal opinion signed by Susan A. Poling, the general counsel to the G.A.O., concluded in an investigation requested by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
aniyahbarnett

Lizzo criticized body positivity. What is body neutrality? - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...7317015002

body Culture

shared by aniyahbarnett on 23 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • body neutrality.
  • "celebrating medium and small girls and people who occasionally get rolls."
  • "we're still getting talked about, memed, shamed," but "no one cares anymore."&nbsp;
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  • Imagine just not thinking about your body. You're not hating it. You're not loving it. You're just a floating head. I'm a floating head wandering through the world."
  • "The body positive movement&nbsp;urges people to love their bodies&nbsp;no matter what they look like, whereas body neutrality focuses on what your body can do for you rather than what it actually looks like
  • She noted&nbsp;body neutrality's&nbsp;focus on how a body functions as opposed to how it looks comes with some&nbsp;able-bodied privilege.
  • "the idea that we can still care for our bodies even if we don't regard them positively."
  • "I don't have to be happy with my body, I don't have to love my body, but I can still acknowledge that&nbsp;this is the one body that I have... and so I&nbsp;need to be caring for tha
  • "But I can hold a space for you to learn to sort of accept your body as it is or find gratitude in what your body can do for you."
  • The body positivity movement&nbsp;has roots in the fat acceptance movement from the '60s
  • "commercialized" and "commandeered by smaller-bodied influencers,
  • "People can benefit from body neutrality and body positivity at different times in their lives or for different reasons
  • "definitely a step in the right direction for people who are experiencing body image concerns, and even for the general public."
  • There are also options beyond positivity and body neutrality, including "body acceptance" and "body liberation."
lilyrashkind

Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin describes attempts to phone gunman during school massacre -... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ayor-interview-school-shooting

US politics

shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • In an interview with The Washington Post, McLaughlin (R) said he rushed to Hillcrest Funeral Home about 15 minutes after “the first call” reporting that 18-year-old Salvador Ramos had crashed his pickup truck nearby. He found himself standing near an official he identified only as “the negotiator,” while frightened parents gathered outside the school and police waited well over an hour to storm the classroom.
  • He said he doesn’t believe the negotiator was aware there were children calling 911 and asking police to save them while the gunman was in the classroom. The mayor said he was not aware of those calls, nor did he hear shots fired from inside the school, across the street.
  • In the recent Texas primary for governor, he opted not to endorse the Republican incumbent, Gov. Greg Abbott, labeling him a “fraud” over his approach to the border and immigration. And he has appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” multiple times to lambaste the Border Patrol’s release of migrants into the streets of Uvalde and lament that he cannot get a call back from the state’s two Republican senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.
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  • McLaughlin said he has not been in touch with Pete Arredondo, the embattled head of the Uvalde school district’s police department, who served as the incident commander during the shooting and has been criticized for not sending officers in sooner.Arredondo has not spoken publicly about the incident, telling CNN on Wednesday that he would do so after more time has passed and the victims of the massacre are buried.
  • Last week, Abbott said he was “misled” by law enforcement authorities about the series of events that took place.
  • “Why should any of us be afraid of expanding background checks? There’s nothing wrong with that, I don’t have anything to hide,” said McLaughlin, who has also long pushed to build a psychiatric hospital in Uvalde.
  • During the interview on Wednesday, however, McLaughlin took a much more conciliatory tone, urging compromise between Republicans and Democrats to find a set of laws that “work for everyone.”
  • “The briefing that the governor and the lieutenant governor and everybody else in that room [had] ... was given by the DPS, not local law enforcement,” McLaughlin said.“They’ve had three press conferences,” he added. “In all three press conferences, something has changed.”
  • In his letter to Patrick, who presides over the Senate, and House Speaker Dade Phelan (R), Abbott asked that both chambers form committees to explore five issues: school safety; mental health; social media; police training; and firearm safety.“As leaders, we must come together at this time to provide solutions to protect all Texans,” Abbott said in his letter.
  • Abbott also announced new instructions for the Texas School Safety Center, a research center focused on campus safety and security that is statutorily responsible for auditing schools for safety processes and establishing best practices.
  • According to a letter Abbott sent to education officials, the governor said the San Marcos-based safety center should start conducting “random intruder detection audits,” designed to find weaknesses in campus security systems.
  • McLaughlin said he could not imagine the school returning to normal operations.“I hope we tear it down to the ground,” he said. “I would never expect a teacher, a student, anyone to go walk back in that building.”
Javier E

The Wall Street Journal's Trump problem | Media | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-street-journals-trump-problem

wsj journalism influence trump media

shared by Javier E on 10 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • The talented staff that remain still produce memorable journalism. But when it comes to covering Trump – according to interviews with 18 current and former Journal staffers, some of whom have provided the Guardian with previously unpublished emails from Baker – many say this is no thanks to management.
  • “The Journal has done a lot of good work in covering the Trump administration, but not nearly as much as it should have,” another recent departee said. “I lay almost all of that at Gerry’s doorstep. Political editors and reporters find themselves either directly stymied by Gerry’s interference or shave the edges off their stories in advance to try to please him (and, by extension, Murdoch).”
  • “This is the most access he has had to a sitting president ever – that is something he’s tried to do and has done in other countries particularly with British prime ministers,” Ellison said. “He’s choosing his own personal access over having any journalistic clout.
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  • Murdoch and Trump have known each other for years on the New York scene, but what started out as a reportedly slightly chilly relationship has warmed considerably in recent years. As recently as April, the two were said to be talking “almost every day” (the White House has denied this). Murdoch’s Fox News played a crucial cheerleading role in Trump’s election and before that, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were known to go on double-dates with Murdoch and his ex-wife Wendi Deng, the two women remaining close even after Murdoch split with Deng. Throughout the campaign, Ivanka was a trustee of the $300m fortune allocated to Murdoch’s daughters with Deng, stepping down only after the financial connection became public.
  • the full transcript revealed a number of lines embarrassing for Trump that the paper had ignored, from Trump’s inquiry about Scottish independence – “What would they do with the British Open if they ever got out? They’d no longer have the British Open” – to his claim that the head of the Boy Scouts had called him to say he had delivered “the greatest speech that was ever made to them” the day before. (The Boy Scouts denied that.)
  • By the time of the February town hall meeting in the WSJ newsroom, tensions were running high between Baker and his staff.
  • And they came to a head again this summer when Politico published a leaked transcript of an Oval Office interview Baker had carried out with Trump, after the Journal had printed a news piece and a partial transcript.
  • In early January 2017, Baker upped the ante, publicly expressing reluctance to accuse Trump of “lying” amid a bout of national media soul-searching over how to cover the incoming president’s false statements, and lashing out at critics in a column mocking a “fit of Trump-induced pearl-clutching among the journalistic elite”. “If we are to use the term ‘lie’ in our reporting, then we have to be confident about the subject’s state of knowledge and his moral intent,” Baker explained of his approach.
  • The full transcript also showed that the Journal’s White House reporters were sidelined during the interview by Baker, who dominated the questioning, speaking familiarly with Ivanka Trump about their children and a party they had both attended in the Hamptons in New York.
  • Last month, another series of emails were leaked, to the Journal’s top competitor, the New York Times. In them, Baker again chastised his staff for the language they used to describe Trump, in this case in coverage of the president’s erratic rally in Phoenix, Arizona, at the height of controversy over his remarks equating neo-Nazis with protesters opposing them. “Sorry. This is commentary dressed up as news reporting,” Baker wrote in a late-night email to staff about the draft story. “Could we please just stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism?
  • On Wednesday night last week, a staffer contacted the Guardian about the latest obfuscating clause included in a Journal story on the debt ceiling that day. In it, Trump was described as having “condemned white supremacists in Charlottesville”, obscuring the fact that his last word on the subject was rather the opposite. “I almost threw up,” the staffer told the Guardian of reading the story.
  • By adhering to the conservative worldview – newly supercharged by Trump – that all media skews liberal, Baker just may have helped the Journal straddle the divide between readers who want their information from a trustworthy outlet and those typically skeptical of journalism as an institution.
  • But many staffers aren’t satisfied to be the best media voice in the Trump echo chamber, given the Journal’s history as one of the top papers in the country, with 16 newsroom Pulitzer prizes under pre-Murdoch editor Paul Steiger between 1991 and 2007 (only one more has been added in the Murdoch era).
  • One staffer added: “Words have consequences and Gerry’s terrible handling of things like why we don’t call lies ‘lies’ had a chilling effect.”
  • “It really came to a head after the election,” a recent Journal departee told the Guardian. “The election was on Tuesday and it wasn’t until Monday or Tuesday of the next week that the Journal wrote a single story about the legitimate anxiety that Trump’s win had provoked within large sections of the population.”
  • the Journal is not competing with the Post and the Times for scoops and talent the way they have in earlier eras.
  • In November, Poynter reported that 48 Journal employees had accepted buyouts – a trend seen across the media industry. In the months that followed, more staffers opted for the door. The departures include two top White House reporters, well-respected political and policy reporters, veteran foreign correspondents, and virtually the entire national security team, some of whom were poached by the Washington Post.
  • Baker’s influence is often not direct, current and former employees say. Instead, his preferences are internalized by reporters who avoid pitching stories they expect he won’t like or who tone down language in their copy before turning it in.
  • “The main way he influenced the coverage in a political way was not by saying you can’t write about X subject,” one former staffer said. “It was more that there were certain stories that could get into the paper very easily and other stories you knew would be a fight.”
  • Others said reporters, in the DC bureau especially, have had to fight to get their harder-hitting Trump stories published, if they get published at all. “Almost everyone in the newsroom has a story about their story or a story of a colleague’s getting killed,” said a reporter. “That happens in all newspapers, but the killings run in one direction.
  • Murdoch appeared to recognise there was an opportunity for a major publication outside of the coastal media bubble, just as he saw the opportunity for a right-leaning cable channel when he launched Fox News in the 1990s.
  • But the difficulty for the Journal is its owner’s close relationship with the president. This year Murdoch, long adept at cultivating relationships with powerful conservatives, has become closer than ever to the White House, according to some accounts, speaking almost every day.
  • Carr noted that Baker, as early as 2010, when he was deputy managing editor, was already seen as pushing the WSJ into “adopting a more conservative tone, and editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the [Obama] administration”.
  • And Martin Peers, who was head of the Journal’s media and marketing bureau from 2011 until 2014, recalls being pressured to go soft when covering Murdoch’s company and tough on rivals. “It was really striking how any time we were writing something about News Corp they would go over it very carefully,” he told the Guardian. “With the New York Times they’d say we weren’t being hard enough on them.”
  • And as repeated leaks from the newsroom have made clear, top editors have continued to pull reporters back from writing which was too critical of Trump – and there’s hardly an infraction too minor. Recently, a reporter in the Washington bureau was chided by an editor for a tweet regarding Trump’s effects on the stock market, which was deemed to be too sharp on Trump, according to a colleague.
  • “The whole culture of the Journal for decades has been to be fair and accurate but also convey analysis and perspective and meaning,” another ex-Journal person said. “Gerry’s saying ‘just report the facts’, but there’s a difference between journalism and stenography.”
Javier E

At risk: 10 ways the changing climate is creating a health emergency | Global developme... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-is-wrecking-peoples-lives-acc

health effects climate change

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • 1. Floods and disease
  • As life becomes less tolerable for humans, animals and plants, things will get easier for disease-causing organisms. More than half of all known diseases have been made worse by the climate crisis
  • A warming world makes outbreaks of water-borne diseases such as cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio more likely.
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  • World Health Organization data published in September showed there were twice as many cholera cases in 2022 than in 2021. Outbreaks were recorded in countries where cholera had been under control for years, including Yemen and Lebanon.
  • 2. Mosquitoes on the march
  • Rising temperatures and frequent floods also unlock new places where disease-carrying insects thrive. The mosquitoes that carry the viruses that cause dengue fever and mala
  • Nor is the disease confined to developing countries. There are fears that it is spreading in southern Europe, partly owing to the warm weather. More than 8 billion people could be at risk of malaria and dengue fever by 2080, scientists have warned.
  • 3. Human-animal contact
  • Many existing diseases will get more dangerous, but new illnesses could also emerge as people are increasingly forced into areas where there is wildlife. Diseases can jump from animals to humans. These diseases, such as Ebola, avian flu and Sars, are called “zoonoses” and they make up the majority of new illnesses.
  • Scientists have found that the climate crisis is helping to circulate diseases between species that previously did not encounter each other. As the planet heats up, many animal species are forced to move into new areas to find suitable conditions.
  • It has been estimated that zoonoses are responsible for as many as 2.5bn cases of human illness and 2.7m human deaths worldwide each year, and that animals have played a major part in nearly every major disease outbreak since 1970.
  • 4. Severe weather events
  • Although governments are getting better at preparing for severe weather events, nine out of 10 deaths linked to weather disasters since 1970 happened in small island nations and developing countries in Africa, Asia and South America.
  • 5. The air that we breathe
  • Outside air pollution has been linked to numerous cancers and diseases and is estimated to be responsible for more than 4m premature deaths globally each year.
  • Changing weather patterns are expected to make this already bad situation worse as more dust, rain and wildfire smoke are added to the mix. Children are especially likely to get sick from air pollution because their brains, lungs and other organs are still developing.
  • 6. The psychological cost
  • Environmental deterioration has a knock-on effect on the economic and social systems that keep society productive and happy, setting in motion a downward spiral of psychological hardship.
  • If crops are destroyed during extreme weather events, children may get less nutritious food, the consumption of which is linked to psychological conditions such as anxiety and depression.
  • When people can’t get the help they need, they may self-medicate with alcohol or drugs, which in turn makes them more likely to engage in risky behaviour (such as unprotected sex) that could result in infections such as HIV, or illnesses that can result from spending time in crowded places, such as tuberculosis.
  • In 2021, scientists studying evidence of a potential link between heat exposure and mental health found a 2.2% increase in mental health-related mortality per 1C rise in temperature.
  • 7. Salty water and perilous pregnancies
  • Drinking water is becoming saltier. One reason for this is that sea levels are rising, so there is more sea water flowing into rivers and other sources of fresh water during floods and tropical storms.
  • Taking in too much salt can lead to high blood pressure (hypertension). Over time, this condition damages the body’s veins, arteries and major organs (including the brain, heart, kidneys and eyes) since they’re working so much harder overall.
  • Hypertension is doubly dangerous for pregnant women and their babies
  • 8. Food insecurity
  • More frequent and severe droughts and floods make it harder to grow the grains, fruit and vegetables that people need to eat to stay healthy. Small island states in the Caribbean, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean bear the brunt of the effects of the crisis, in part because most people live close to sea level.
  • As a result, people who live in one of the 39 small island nations are the most likely to die from one of the four main NCDs: cancer, diabetes, heart disease and lung disease.
  • 9. The stress of extreme heat
  • The scorching temperatures this year broke records in Europe, China and North America. Heat is one of the most dangerous effects of the climate crisis and the top cause of weather-related deaths in the U
  • When it gets too hot, the body’s temperature rises faster than it can cool itself down, less blood flows to other organs, and the kidneys have to work harder. This puts strain on the heart and can lead to organ failure. Heatstroke is the most serious heat-related illness.
  • In particular, people whose jobs require long hours of physical labour in the sun face an increased risk of kidney disease as temperatures rise, research suggests. Repeated instances of heat stress can lead to permanent damage and chronic kidney disease.
  • In June, the Guardian revealed how young migrant workers were returning to Nepal with chronic kidney disease after working in extreme heat conditions in the Gulf and Malaysia. “One factor highlighted again and again is heat. Prolonged exposure to h
  • 10. Millions on the move
  • It’s hard to predict exactly how many people will be on the move because of the climate crisis, but extreme weather events are likely to make conditions worse for the more than 100 million displaced people around the world.
  • If nothing changes, the number of people who need humanitarian aid to recover from floods, storms and droughts could double by 2050,
  • That means more than 200 million people will need aid annually. The displacement of millions of people also means cramped and often unsanitary living. For example, more than 900,000 Rohingya refugees live in makeshift shelters in Bangladesh, often built on unstable ground that’s prone to landslides.
Javier E

Naomi Klein on wellness culture: 'We really are alive on the knife's edge' | Well actua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...iew-wellness-culture-far-right

wellness culture fitness polycrisis response solidarity fascism hierarchy body beauty

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Why wellness became a seedbed for the far-right is one of several subjects that Naomi Klein explores in her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
  • She observed that people working in the field of bodily care seemed particularly drawn to anti-vax, anti-mask, “plandemic” beliefs. The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s report on the Disinformation Dozen – a list of 12 people responsible for circulating the bulk of anti-vax content online – was populated by a chiropractor, three osteopaths, and essential oil sellers, as well Christine Northrup, the former OB-GYN turned Oprah-endorsed celebrity doctor who claimed the virus was part of a deep state depopulation plot, and Kelly Brogan, the “holistic psychiatrist” and new age panic preacher.
  • some of this crossover made economic sense: for people working with bodies, social distancing often meant the loss of their livelihoods, and these “grievances set the stage for many wellness workers to see sinister plots in everything having to do with the virus”.
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  • I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming.
  • The parts of listening to Bannon that were most destabilizing were when I heard him saying things that sounded like the left, and when I heard him saying things that I agreed with in part – not in whole, but where I saw that kernel of truth and I realized how effective it was going to be in the mix and match with what I see as a fascist project that he’s engaged in.
  • I expect Steve Bannon to be monstrous on immigration, on gender. I expect that from him. It’s when he’s talking about corporate control of the media and saying things that are true about big tech that I start to get queasy and ask, wait a minute, why is he saying more about this than a lot of people on the liberal side of the spectrum? Have we ceded this territory?
  • This point seems central. The mirror world isn’t devoid of truth. Instead, it’s destabilizing because elements of truth are there, but warped.
  • Absolutely. And the destabilizing piece is not simply that they’re saying something true. It’s when you realize people [on the left] have stopped saying that true thing. That’s when you realize that it has power.
  • If we were building multiracial, intergenerational social movements that were really rooted in confronting corporate power, then they could say whatever they want and it wouldn’t really bother me. But we’re talking about it less, and the more [conspiracists] talk about it, the more reticent we become. So it’s a dialectic that makes me queasy.
  • Ehrenreich has a completely different theory, which I think is much more plausible, which is this is the 1980s: people are in the wreckage of the failures of these huge social movements in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There had been this glimpse of collective power that a lot of people really thought was going to change the world, and suddenly they’re living through Thatcherism and Reaganism. And there is this turn towards the self, towards the body as the site of control.
  • Kneeling before the temple of the body also has fascist roots. Historically, certain ideals of human fitness were a way to communicate the value of citizens.Whenever you are working within a system of a hierarchy of humans and bodies, then you’re in fascism territory. I think that it made perfect sense that Nazis were body obsessives who fetishized the natural and the hyperfit form and genes.
  • There is a connection between certain kinds of new age ideas and health fads and the fascist project
  • After the second world war, a lot of people in the world of wellness ran in the opposite direction. But there are some ways in which they are natural affinities and they’re finding each other again
  • there is a way the quest for wellness and hyper fitness becomes obsessive.
  • But the spread of misinformation across wellness culture was likely attributable to more complex factors, including the limits of conventional medicine and the areas of health that are understudied or dismissed.
  • Ehrenreich is trying to understand why this exploded in the 1980s. The whole aerobics craze, the whole jogging craze. You know, how does somebody like Jerry Rubin, a member of the Yippies, turn into a health evangelist in the 1980s?
  • in lots of ways this is what Naomi Wolf was trying to understand in the Beauty Myth. Why was there so much more of a focus in the 1980s on personal appearance? She makes the case that beauty became a third shift for women: there was the work shift, there was the home shift, and on top of that, women were now also expected to look like professional beauties.
  • Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about this really beautifully in her book about wellness culture, where she talks about the silence of the gyms. This is a collective space, right? Why aren’t people chitchatting? But often gyms are very silent and she speculates that maybe it’s because people are talking to someone, it’s just not the other people in the gym, it’s somebody in their head. They’re trying to tame their body into being another kind of body, a perfected body.
  • Then you have all of these entrepreneurial wellness figures who come in and say, individuals must take charge of their own bodies as their primary sites of influence, control and competitive edge.
  • the flip side of the idea that your competitive edge is your body is that the people who don’t have bodies as fit or strong as yours somehow did something wrong or are less deserving of access, less deserving even of life.
  • And that is unfortunately all too compatible with far-right notions of natural hierarchies, genetic superiority and disposable people.
  • We should be compassionate with ourselves in terms of why we look away. There are lots of ways of distracting oneself from unbearable realities. Conspiracy theories are a kind of distraction. So is hyper fitness, this turn towards the self.
  • The compassion comes in where we acknowledge that there’s a reason why it is so hard to look at the reality of what has been unveiled by these overlapping crises – you could call it a polycrisis: of the pandemic, climate change, massive racial and economic inequality, realizing that your country was founded on a lie, that the national narratives that you grew up on left out huge parts in the story.
  • All of this is hard to bear.
  • Because we live in a hyper-individualist culture, we try to bear it on our own and we should not be surprised that we’re cracking under the weight of that, because we can’t bear it alone.
  • the weight of our historical moment. We really are alive on the knife’s edge of whether or not this earth is going to be habitable for our species. That is not something that we can handle just on our own.
  • So we need to reach towards each other. That’s really tricky work. It’s a lot easier to come together and agree on things that are not working and things that are bad than it is to come together and develop a horizon of how things could be better.
  • Things could be beautiful, things could be livable. There could be a world where everyone belongs. But I don’t think we can bear the reality of our moment unless we can imagine something else.
katyshannon

Drug C.E.O. Martin Shkreli Arrested on Fraud Charges - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...shkreli-fraud-charges.html

martin arrested fraud charges new york times US

shared by katyshannon on 18 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • It has been a busy week for Martin Shkreli, the flamboyant businessman at the center of the drug industry’s price-gouging scandals. From Our Advertisers quot;frameC
  • He said he would sharply increase the cost of a drug used to treat a potentially deadly parasitic infection. He called himself “the world’s most eligible bachelor” on Twitter and railed against critics in a live-streaming YouTube video. After reportedly paying $2 million for a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, he goaded a member of the hip-hop group to “show me some respect.”
  • Then, at 6 a.m. Thursday, F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Shkreli, 32, at his Murray Hill apartment. He was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on securities fraud and wire fraud charges.
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  • In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Shkreli said he was confident that he would be cleared of all charges.
  • Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies and people with AIDS and, overnight, raising the price to $750 a pill from $13.50. His only mistake, he later conceded, was not raising the price more.
  • Those price increases combined with Mr. Shkreli’s jeering response to his critics has made him a lightning rod for public outrage and fodder for the presidential campaign. His company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, and others, like Valeant Pharmaceuticals, have come under fire from lawmakers and consumers for profiting from steep price increases for old drugs.
  • But the criminal charges brought against him actually relate to something else entirely — his time as a hedge fund manager and when he ran his first biopharmaceutical company, Retrophin.
  • Still, for many of his critics, Mr. Shkreli’s arrest was a comeuppance for the brash executive who has seemed to enjoy — relish, even — his public notoriety. On Thursday, a satirical New Yorker column by the humorist Andy Borowitz said Mr. Shkreli’s lawyers had informed their client their hourly legal fees had increased by 5,000 percent.
Javier E

Opinion | Christine Emba: Men are lost. Here's a map out of the wilderness. - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ine-emba-masculinity-new-model

masculine role model male crisis culture policy history

shared by Javier E on 16 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • “And the first question this kid asked me is just … ‘What the heck does good masculinity look like?’”He grimaced.“And I’ll be honest with you: I did not have an answer for that.”
  • by 1958, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that “the male role has plainly lost its rugged clarity of outline.” Writing in Esquire magazine, he added, “The ways by which American men affirm their masculinity are uncertain and obscure. There are multiplying signs, indeed, that something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.”
  • today’s problems are real and well documented. Deindustrialization, automation, free trade and peacetime have shifted the labor market dramatically, and not in men’s favor — the need for physical labor has declined, while soft skills and academic credentials are increasingly rewarded
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  • Men now receive about 74 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 awarded to women, and men account for more than 70 percent of the decline in college enrollment overall
  • In 2020, nearly half of women reported in a TD Ameritrade survey that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husbands or partners — a huge jump from fewer than 4 percent of women in 1960.
  • women are “increasingly selective,” leading to a rise in lonely, single young men — more of whom now live with their parents than a romantic partner.
  • Men also account for almost 3 of every 4 “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide, alcohol abuse or an overdose.
  • In my opinion, Peterson served up fairly banal advice: “Stand up straight,” “delay gratification.” His evolutionary-biology-informed takes ranged from amusingly weird to mildly insulting.
  • Women are still dealing with historical discrimination and centuries of male domination that haven’t been fully accounted for or rectified. Are we really worrying that men feel a little emasculated because their female classmates are doing well?
  • But millions of men lack access to that kind of power and success — and, downstream, cut loose from a stable identity as patriarchs deserving of respect, they feel demoralized and adrift. The data show it, but so does the general mood: Men find themselves lonely, depressed, anxious and directionless.
  • It seems like there’s been a breakdown, right? But there’s a very real way in which, at this moment, a lot of guys don’t know — they have no sense of what it means to be them, particularly. They have no idea what it means to be a man.”
  • Past models of masculinity feel unreachable or socially unacceptable; new ones have yet to crystallize. What are men for in the modern world? What do they look like? Where do they fit
  • Only one group seems to have no such doubts about offering men a plan.
  • an entire academic discipline emerged to theorize about gender and excavate women’s history — there hasn’t been a corresponding conversation about what role men should play in a changing world. At the same time, the increasing visibility of the LGBTQ+ movement has made the gender dynamic seem less stable, less defined.
  • went to that 2018 Peterson appearance as a skeptic. But his appeal — along with that of his fellow “manfluencers” — has become clearer since
  • Technically, men are slightly in the minority in the United States. But apart from that, Bray had a point — and what he said explained a lot about why the left and the mainstream are losing men.
  • What’s notable, first, is their empathy. For all Peterson’s barking and, lately, unhinged tweeting, he’s clearly on young men’s side.
  • This is especially compelling in a moment when many young men feel their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they don’t feel part of. For young men in particular, the assumption of a world built to serve their sex doesn’t align with their lived experience, where girls out-achieve them from pre-K to post-graduate studies and “men are trash” is an acceptable joke.
  • Then there’s the point-by-point advice. If young men are looking for direction, these influencers give them a clear script to follow — hours of video, thousands of book pages, a torrent of social media posts — in a moment when uncertainty abounds
  • if instruction is lacking elsewhere, even basic tips (“Clean your room!” Peterson famously advises) feel like a revelation. Plus, the community that comes with joining a fandom can feel like a buffer against an increasingly atomized world.
  • As one therapist told me: “I have used Jordan Peterson to turn a boy into a man. I used him to turn this guy without a strong father figure into someone who, yes, makes his bed and stands up straight and now is successful.” The books, she said, “do provide a structure that was clearly missing.”
  • It’s also important that the approach of these male models is both particular and aspirational. The BAPs and Hawleys find ways to celebrate aspects of the male experience — from physical strength to competitiveness to sex as a motivator — that other parts of modern society have either derided as “toxic” or attempted to explain aren’t specific to men at al
  • the 20-something guy in front of me swung around. “Jordan Peterson,” he told me without a hint of irony in his voice, “taught me how to live.”
  • the fact that they’re willing to define it outright feels bravely countercultural.
  • A baby-faced, 19-year-old University of Florida freshman with short, white-blond hair, Bray was wearing a hoodie despite the heat. (He grew up in Sarasota, so he was used to it.) He had agreed to talk to me about how he saw uncertainties about masculinity playing out on his campus.
  • First, he laid out his liberal, Gen Z bona fides — he’s in a fraternity, but many of his close friends are LGBTQ+. He feels that old versions of masculinity might be dissolving for the better.
  • But then he got candid. He doesn’t really identify with the manosphere, he told me, but can understand why others might. “I feel like there’s a lot of room to be proudly feminine, but there’s not, in my opinion, the same room to be proudly masculine.”
  • Men were constantly told to be “better” and less “toxic,” he said, but what that “better” might look like seemed hard to pin down. “You pretty much have to figure it out yourself. But yet society still has the expectation that, you know, you have to be a certain way.
  • Then he turned wistful. “I don’t feel like men in general have the same types of role models that women do, even in their own personal lives. … Just because you’re in the majority doesn’t mean you don’t need support.”
  • At their best, these influencers highlight positive traits that were traditionally associated with maleness — protectiveness, leadership, emotional stability — and encourage them, making “masculinity” out to be a real and necessary thing, and its acquisition something honorable and desirable
  • Even today, some progressives react touchily to any efforts to help men as a group.
  • In the conversations I had with men for this essay, I kept hearing that many would still find some kind of normative standard of masculinity meaningful and useful, if only to give them a starting point from which to expand.
  • The strategist described his party as having almost an allergy to admitting that some men might, in fact, be struggling in a unique way and could benefit from their own tailored attention and aid
  • when you strip out the specificity, people feel less seen,” he said. “There’s less of a resonance. If the question is what scripts we have for men, how are we appealing to men, then being willing and able to talk about men is a pretty key component of that.”
  • To the extent that any vision of “nontoxic” masculinity is proposed, it ends up sounding more like stereotypical femininity than anything else: Guys should learn to be more sensitive, quiet and socially apt, seemingly overnight
  • I’m convinced that men are in a crisis. And I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular — that is, neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity. Still, I find myself reluctant to fully articulate one. There’s a reason a lot of the writing on the crisis in masculinity ends at the diagnosis stage.
  • Take Richard Reeves’s book “Of Boys and Men,” omnipresent in the discourse since its 2022 release.
  • even he acknowledges he has felt pressure to shy away from some of the harder questions his subject matter raises.
  • Reeves told me that in his writing, he tried to stay descriptive, only going so far as saying there are some differences between the sexes that need to be taken into account to create the most viable solutions. He frames the biological differences between the sexes not as a binary but as overlapping distributions of traits — aggression, risk appetite, sex drive — with clusters of one sex or the other at the extremes.
  • But when it came to writing any kind of script for how men should be, the self-possessed expert scholar faltered.
  • “That’s a question I basically dodged in the book,” Reeves told me. “Because, candidly, it’s outside of my comfort zone. It’s more personal. It’s harder to empirically justify. There are no charts I can brandish.” After all, as he said, he’s a think-tank guy, a wonk.
  • “But I think I’m now trying to articulate more prescriptively, less descriptively, some of these discussions about masculinity and trying to send some messages around it” — here, his speech became emphatic — “because, honestly, nobody else is f---ing doing it except the right.”
  • “As soon as you start articulating virtues, advantages, good things about being male … then you’ve just dialed up the risk factor of the conversation,” he said. “But I’m also acutely aware that the risk of not doing it is much greater. Because without it, there’s a vacuum. And along comes Andrew Tate to make Jordan Peterson look like a cuddly old uncle.”
  • many progressives have ignored the opportunity to sell men on a better vision of what they can be
  • As a result, there’s a temptation to minimize men’s problems or erase references to masculinity altogether.
  • “I mean, there are certain attributes around masculinity that we should embrace. Men think about sex more than women. Use that as motivation to be successful and meet women. Men are more impulsive. Men will run out into a field and get shot up to think they’re saving their buddies.”
  • He was careful to point out that he doesn’t believe that women wouldn’t do as much but that the distributions are different.
  • “Where I think this conversation has come off the tracks is where being a man is essentially trying to ignore all masculinity and act more like a woman. And even some women who say that — they don’t want to have sex with those guys. They may believe they’re right, and think it’s a good narrative, but they don’t want to partner with them.”I, a heterosexual woman, cringed in recognition.
  • so men should think, ‘I want to take advantage of my maleness. I want to be aggressive, I want to set goals, go hard at it. I want to be physically really strong. I want to take care of myself.’”
  • “My view is that, for masculinity, a decent place to start is garnering the skills and strength that you can advocate for and protect others with. If you’re really strong and smart, you will garner enough power, influence, kindness to begin protecting others. That is it. Full stop. Real men protect other people.
  • Reeves, in our earlier conversation, had put it somewhat more subtl
  • His recipe for masculine success echoed Galloway’s: proactiveness, agency, risk-taking and courage, but with a pro-social cast
  • many young men I spoke with would describe as aspirational, once they finally felt safe enough to admit they did in fact carry an ideal of manhood with its own particular features.
  • Physical strength came up frequently, as did a desire for personal mastery. They cited adventurousness, leadership, problem-solving, dignity and sexual drive. None of these are negative traits, but many men I spoke with felt that these archetypes were unfairly stigmatized: Men were too assertive, too boisterous, too horny.
  • in fact, most of these features are scaffolded by biology — all are associated with testosterone, the male sex hormone. It’s not an excuse for “boys will be boys”-style bad behavior, but, realistically, these traits would be better acknowledged and harnessed for pro-social aims than stifled or downplayed
  • despite a push by some advocates to make everything from bathrooms to birthing gender-neutral, most people don’t actually want a completely androgynous society. And if a new model for masculinity is going to find popular appeal, it will depend on putting the distinctiveness of men to good use in whatever form it comes.
  • “Femininity or masculinity are a social construct that we get to define,” Galloway concluded. “They are, loosely speaking, behaviors we associate with people born as men or born as women, or attributes more common among people born as men or as women. But the key is that we still get to fill that vessel and define what those attributes are, and then try and reinforce them with our behavior and our views and our media.”
  • What would creating a positive vision of masculinity look like? Recognizing distinctiveness but not pathologizing it. Finding new ways to valorize it and tell a story that is appealing to young men and socially beneficial, rather than ceding ground to those who would warp a perceived difference into something ugly and destructive.
  • more than 20 years ago, anthropologist David D. Gilmore published “Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity,” a cross-cultural study of manliness around the world. He found that almost all societies had a concept of “real,” “true” or “adult” manhood that was seen as a valuable and indispensable ideal. But masculinity had to be earned — and proved
  • Men achieved it by providing for their families and broader society, by protecting their tribe and others, and by successfully procreating
  • all three of these goals seem less celebrated and further from reach. Young men who disappear into online forums, video games or pornography see none of the social or personal rewards of meeting these goals, and their loneliness and despair suggest how painful it has been to lose track of this ideal.
  • The other feature of Gilmore’s findings was that boys generally had to be ushered into manhood and masculinity by other men. And that seems to be a key link missing today.
  • “When I talk to my friends, I can literally count on one hand the number of friends I have who have a good relationship with their dad and actually have learned things from him,
  • Many of the young men I talked to for this essay told me they had troubled relationships with their fathers, or no father figure in their lives at all. The data bear this out: Since 1960, the percentage of boys living apart from their biological fathers has nearly doubled, from 17 percent to 32 percent.
  • “If you’re growing up in a single-parent household, and you go to a typical public school and typical medical system, there’s a decent chance that you will not encounter a male figure of authority until middle school or later. Not your doctor, not your teachers. No one else around you. What does that feel like?”
  • In 2018, Harvard economist Raj Chetty published a groundbreaking study on race and economic opportunity. Among the findings was that persistent income inequality between Black and White people was disproportionately driven by poor outcomes among Black boys.
  • those boys who grew up in neighborhoods where there were more fathers present — even if not their own — had significantly higher chances of upward mobility.
  • “Ultimately,” Reynolds mused, “it’s about relationships and finding older men who, you know — they’re not flashy, they’re not ‘important,’ necessarily, but they actually are living virtuous lives as men. And then being able to then learn from them.”
  • fostering positive representations of manhood requires relationships and mentorship on an individual level in a way that can’t be mandated.
  • nearly every thinker on the masculinity problem advocates getting more men into classrooms, from kindergarten up — not just for their effects as teachers but also because they’re more likely to serve as coaches, especially of boys’ sports.
  • the change will need to come from the bottom up — from everyday men who notice the crisis of identity hitting their younger counterparts and can put themselves forward to help. “Ninety percent of this, if not 95, is on us, is on older men, is on society,”
  • We can find ways to work with the distinctive traits and powerful stories that already exist — risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating. We can recognize how real and important they are. And we can attempt to make them pro-social — to help not just men but also women, and to support the common good.
  • For the left, there’s room to elaborate on visions of these qualities that are expansive, not reductive, that allow for many varieties of masculinity and don’t deny female value and agency.
  • In my ideal, the mainstream could embrace a model that acknowledges male particularity and difference but doesn’t denigrate women to do so. It’s a vision of gender that’s not androgynous but still equal, and relies on character, not just biology
  • it acknowledges that certain themes — protector, provider, even procreator — still resonate with many men and should be worked with, not against.
  • it will be slow. A new masculinity will be a norm shift, and that takes time.
  • empathy will be required, as grating as that might feel.
Javier E

'We can't go back to normal': how will coronavirus change the world? | World news | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ge-from-the-coronavirus-crisis

history culture politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Every day brings news of developments that, as recently as February, would have felt impossible – the work of years, not mere days.
  • disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds
  • he pessimistic view is that a crisis makes bad things worse.
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  • “In a rational world, we would be ramping up production of basic essential supplies – test kits, masks, respirators – not only for our own use, but for poorer countries, too. Because it’s all one battle. But it’s not necessarily a rational world. So there could be a lot of demonisation and calls for isolation. Which will mean more deaths and more suffering worldwide.”
  • prior to 9/11, the US government had been in the process of developing serious regulations designed to give web users real choice about how their personal information was and wasn’t used. “In the course of a few days,” Zuboff says, “the concern shifted from ‘How do we regulate these companies that are violating privacy norms and rights’ to ‘How do we nurture and protect these companies so they can collect data for us?’”
  • “People have a hard time remembering privacy rights when they’re trying to deal with something like a pandemic,” says Vasuki Shastry, a Chatham House fellow who studies the interplay of technology and democracy. “Once a system gets scaled up, it can be very difficult to scale it back down. And then maybe it takes on other uses.”
  • The US Department of Justice has, since the outbreak began, filed a request with Congress for a new rule that would allow judges to suspend courtroom proceedings in emergencies, creating the possibility of people being jailed without ever being able to formally object.
  • In a 2008 report on the legal aspects of pandemic response, prompted by the increase in pandemic flu outbreaks, a team of historians and medical ethicists assembled by the American Civil Liberties Union bemoaned a common tendency – resurgent, in their view, since 9/11 – for government to address public health problems using mindsets more appropriate to tracking down criminals.
  • here’s another school of thought that looks at crisis and sees glimmers of possibility
  • “Ideas that used to be seen as leftwing seem more reasonable to more people. There’s room for change that there wasn’t beforehand. It’s an opening.”
  • Covid-19 has revealed the political status quo to be broken. Long before anyone had heard of the new coronavirus, people died of diseases we knew how to prevent and treat. People lived precarious lives in societies awash with wealth. Experts told us about catastrophic threats on the horizon, including pandemics, and we did next to nothing to prepare for them
  • At the same time, the drastic measures governments have taken in recent weeks testify to just how much power the state does have – the extent of what government can accomplish (and quickly!) when it realises it must act boldly or risk being seen as fundamentally illegitimate. As Pankaj Mishra recently wrote: “It has taken a disaster for the state to assume its original responsibility to protect citizens.”
  • For years, in mainstream politics the conventional line – on everything from healthcare to basic living expenses such as housing – has been that even if the world has its problems, expansive government intervention is not a feasible solution
  • Instead, we have been told that what works best are “marketplace” solutions, which give large roles to corporations motivated not by outdated notions like “the public good” but by a desire to make a profit
  • From this perspective, the task today is not to fight the virus in order to return to business as usual, because business as usual was already a disaster. The goal, instead, is to fight the virus – and in doing so transform business as usual into something more humane and secure.
  • disasters opened up human reserves of improvisation, solidarity and resolve, pockets of purpose and joy, even in the midst of loss and pain
  • In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein laid out a dark account of crisis politics. In Klein’s view, there is always Disaster 1 – the earthquake, the storm, the military conflict, the economic slump – and Disaster 2 – the bad things that people with power subsequently get up to, such as ramming through extreme economic reforms or gobbling up post-crisis opportunities for self-enrichment, while the rest of us are too dazed to notice
  • Both address crisis not in terms of what inevitably – or “naturally” – happens as they unfold, but in terms of choices that people make along the way. And both were well-timed to contribute to the political conversations taking shape in the rubble of the financial crash
  • We may not quite all be “in it together” – as always, the poor are hit worse – but there is more truth to the idea than there ever was in the wake of 2008.
  • In this, the optimists believe, there is hope that we might begin to see the world differently.
  • Maybe we can view our problems as shared, and society as more than just a mass of individuals competing against each other for wealth and standing. Maybe, in short, we can understand that the logic of the market should not dominate as many spheres of human existence as we currently allow it to.
  • in the years since publishing The Shock Doctrine, Klein has made climate change her central focus, framing it as the paradigmatic emergency that must be wrenched from the clutches of fossil-fuel profiteers and their enablers in government.
  • the two problems have suggestive similarities. Both will require unusual levels of global cooperation. Both demand changes in behaviour today in the name of reducing suffering tomorrow. Both problems were long predicted with great certainty by scientists, and have been neglected by governments unable to see beyond the next fiscal quarter’s growth statistics
  • both will require governments to take drastic action and banish the logic of the marketplace from certain realms of human activity, while simultaneously embracing public investment.
  • “What is possible politically is fundamentally different when lots of people get into emergency mode – when they fundamentally accept that there’s danger, and that if we want to be safe we need to do everything we can. And it’s been interesting to see that theory validated by the response to the coronavirus
  • Now the challenge is to keep emergency mode activated about climate, where the dangers are orders of magnitude greater. We can’t think we’re going to go ‘back to normal’, because things weren’t normal.”
  • Most people do not feel they or their loved ones could die from the climate crisis this month, and so emergency mode is harder to activate and sustain
  • Alongside these hopeful signs, a far less heartening story is unfolding, which fits Klein’s “shock doctrine” framework. Disaster 1: Covid-19. Disaster 2: the dismantling of even the meagre existing rules designed to protect the environment
  • advocacy groups funded by the plastics industry have launched a public relations blitz on behalf of single-use plastic bags, spreading the unproven claim that the virus is less likely to stick to plastic than to the cloth fabric of reusable bags.
  • On 26 March, following lobbying from the energy industry, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced that, in recognition of the pandemic’s effects on the workforce, it will not punish violations of pollution regulations so long as companies can link those violations to the pandemic. China’s environmental ministry has started waiving inspections that assess the environmental impact of industrial facilitie
  • “It’s good that we’re entering emergency mode about the pandemic,” she said. “But unless we also do it for climate … ” She didn’t finish the sentence.
  • We need to learn to be scared together, to agree on what we’re terrified about.” Only then, she said, would governments be forced to act.
  • The historian Philip Mirowski, author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, warns against complacency. “The left thought it was so obvious to everyone that the crisis revealed the utter bankruptcy of a certain way of looking at the economy,” he told me. “And it wasn’t obvious to everyone, and the left lost.”
  • How do we prevent the world from going back to a version of the way it was before Covid-19, with the virus vanquished but all of the old ongoing disasters still unfolding?
  • “The political outcome of the epidemic,” said Mike Davis, “will, like all political outcomes, be decided by struggle, by battles over interpretation, by pointing out what causes problems and what solves them. And we need to get that analysis out in the world any way we can.”
  • the past few weeks have exposed the fact that the biggest things can always change, at any minute. This simple truth, both destabilising and liberating, is easy to forget. We’re not watching a movie: we’re writing one, together, until the end
Javier E

Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the climate crisis they are fuelling... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...crisis-consumption-environment

population panic climate change crisis

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Next week the BirthStrike movement – founded by women who, by announcing their decision not to have children, seek to focus our minds on the horror of environmental collapse – will dissolve itself, because its cause has been hijacked so virulently and persistently by population obsessives. The founders explain that they had “underestimated the power of ‘overpopulation’ as a growing form of climate breakdown denial”.
  • It is true that, in some parts of the world, population growth is a major driver of particular kinds of ecological damage, such as the expansion of small-scale agriculture into rainforests, the bushmeat trade and local pressure on water and land for housing. But its global impact is much smaller than many people claim.
  • The formula for calculating people’s environmental footprint is simple, but widely misunderstood: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology (I = PAT).
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  • The global rate of consumption growth, before the pandemic, was 3% a year. Population growth is 1%. Some people assume this means that the rise in population bears one-third of the responsibility for increased consumption
  • But population growth is overwhelmingly concentrated among the world’s poorest people, who have scarcely any A or T to multiply their P. The extra resource use and greenhouse gas emissions caused by a rising human population are a tiny fraction of the impact of consumption growth.
  • Yet it is widely used as a blanket explanation of environmental breakdown.
  • Panic about population growth enables the people most responsible for the impacts of rising consumption (the affluent) to blame those who are least responsible.
  • At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, the primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, who is a patron of the charity Population Matters, told the assembled pollutocrats, some of whom have ecological footprints thousands of times greater than the global average: “All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.”
  • If we had the global population of 500 years ago (around 500 million), and if it were composed of average UK plane passengers, our environmental impact would probably be greater than that of the 7.8 billion alive today.
  • he proposed no mechanism by which her dream might come true. This could be the attraction. The very impotence of her call is reassuring to those who don’t want change. If the answer to environmental crisis is to wish other people away, we might as well give up and carry on consuming.
  • Since the clergymen Joseph Townsend and Thomas Malthus wrote their tracts in the 18th century, poverty and hunger have been blamed not on starvation wages, war, misrule and wealth extraction by the rich, but on the reproduction rates of the poor.
  • Winston Churchill blamed the Bengal famine of 1943, that he helped to cause through the mass export of India’s rice, on the Indians “breeding like rabbits”. In 2013 Sir David Attenborough, also a patron of Population Matters, wrongly blamed famines in Ethiopia on “too many people for too little land”, and suggested that sending food aid was counter-productive.
  • Malthusianism slides easily into racism.
  • Most of the world’s population growth is happening in the poorest countries, where most people are black or brown. The colonial powers justified their atrocities by fomenting a moral panic about “barbaric”, “degenerate” people “outbreeding” the “superior races”
  • These claims have been revived today by the far right, who promote conspiracy theories about “white replacement” and “white genocide”. When affluent white people wrongly transfer the blame for their environmental impacts on to the birthrate of much poorer brown and black people, their finger-pointing reinforces these narratives. It is inherently racist.
  • The far right now uses the population argument to contest immigration into the US and the UK
  • how do we distinguish proportionate concerns about these harms from deflection and racism? Well, we know that the strongest determinant of falling birth rates is female emancipation and education. The major obstacle to female empowerment is extreme poverty. Its effect is felt disproportionately by women.
  • So a good way of deciding whether someone’s population concerns are genuine is to look at their record of campaigning against structural poverty.
  • Have they contested the impossible debts poor nations are required to pay? Have they argued against corporate tax avoidance, or extractive industries that drain wealth from poorer countries, leaving almost nothing behind
  • Or have they simply sat and watched as people remain locked in poverty, then complained about their fertility?
  • Before long, this reproductive panic will disappear. Nations will soon be fighting over immigrants: not to exclude them, but to attract them, as the demographic transition leaves their ageing populations with a shrinking tax base and a dearth of key workers.
Javier E

Extinction Rebellion's future is far less radical than its past | Rupert Read | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-radical-unite-positive-action

radical extinction rebellion climate change activism illegal response politics

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Five years ago last week, Extinction Rebellion was launched in Parliament Square. Back then, a principal term of criticism lobbied at XR was that it was “alarmist”. Five years on, it’s plainly visible that it was not.
  • In the past few months the process of climatic decline has dramatically accelerated, and we are exceeding many of the supposed worst-case scenarios laid out in climate models. We are plainly hurtling towards 1.5C of global over-heat, long before most seemingly well-informed people thought we would.
  • it was never able to recover its reputation from the Canning Town incident in October 2019, when rebels inexplicably stopped underground trains running – to much public criticism
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  • Since then, it has struggled to assert itself as a credible vehicle for truly mass mobilisation.
  • Many significant organisations and movements have emerged in its wake. The most attention-grabbing have been from the recent, even more radical flank of the UK’s climate movement – first Insulate Britain and then Just Stop Oil – who have blocked the M25, stopped test matches and much more.
  • many in the broader climate movement now feel that action that disrupts the general public has become counterproductive – as XR came to learn
  • Citizens already feel the alarm has been raised. Right now, they don’t need further reminders: they need a journey into positive, effective action that they feel includes them.
  • I moved on from XR in 2020, judging it likely that it had achieved most of what it was capable of achieving (a huge raising of climate consciousness – not to mention a parliamentary declaration of climate and environment emergency, a net zero law, and a parliament-backed citizens’ assembly on climate).
  • what is now plainly obvious is that the most important achievement of XR may turn out to be the space it opened up for a new, moderate flank in the climate movement to emerge.
  • XR successfully dragged the whole eco-agenda into the light of day
  • this has made it both necessary and possible for a wave of novel organisations and initiatives to fill the vacuum; groups such as Wild Card, Community Climate Action, Lawyers for Net Zero, Purpose Disruptors and Zero Hour.
  • many of the successes of historical movements that inspired XR (the Suffragettes, for instance) followed a similar pattern: an agenda-shift prompted by radical-flank initiatives paving the way for actual political success by more moderate agents of change.
  • in order to make any real impact on the desperate situation we are slipping into, movements must now unite people in campaigns that they can actually get on board with. That means acting with others where they live, or work or pray – and within the law.
  • XR itself knows this is the way forward, and seems to have learned from past mistakes. As of 2023, it will no longer disrupt the public
  • XR’s new strategy, optimistically titled “Here comes everyone”, plans to build on the clearest success of the movement so far. In April, it mobilised about 60,000 people – considerably more than at any previous moment in its history – in a peaceful march on the climate crisis
  • If there is to be any chance of achieving a transformative adaptation to the self-imposed threat of ecological collapse, it’s going to require not just a minority, but most of us, to step up.
  • In decades to come, the only question our children will have any real interest in is: now that it’s becoming clearer what can effectively achieve change, how will you act? And once you knew, what did you do?
sgardner35

Tensions Simmer as a Small Town Seeks Answers in a Boy's Killing - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...llips-in-potsdam-new-york.html

shared by sgardner35 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Garrett Phillips, a popular and outgoing 12-year-old, was strangled in his home in fall 2011. The murder set off a mad, all-consuming pursuit for a killer in a region where such crimes are extraordinarily rare.
  • It took more than 30 months for prosecutors to charge him with second-degree murder, in May 2014 — and months more to secure a second indictment after the first was thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct. Despite the long pursuit, the case that a jury will hear this summer is far from perfect: There is a distinct lack of hard evidence, according to police testimony — no fingerprints, no witnesses, no hair or tissue samples, seemingly no conclusive forensic evidence at all connecting Mr. Hillary to the crime.In the long lead-up to the prosecution of Mr. Hillary, his supporters have highlighted not only the absence of physical evidence but the lack of any plausible motive or history that would suggest he was capable of murdering a child. They have also said that another man, a local sheriff’s deputy who once dated Garrett’s mother, was removed from suspicion too quickly.
  • “I can’t think of any other person who would want to hurt Garrett,” Ms. Cyrus said in a statement to the police after her son died.Like the Raquette River, which splits Potsdam in two, the case has divided opinion and tested residents’ patience in St. Lawrence County, a rural and job-challenged region where 94 percent of the population is white. But the emotional impact on Potsdam is raw and evident: Garrett’s former teachers and family friends cry at his memory, while the village’s elders echo one another, saying such terrible crimes simply do not happen in places like this.“It was like a meteor hitting,” said Ron Tischler, the mayor of Potsdam, home to around 9,600 residents that is about 25 miles south of Ontario.
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  • Mr. Hillary has also accused the county prosecutor, Mary Rain, of forsaking justice in the name of keeping a campaign promise: Ms. Rain was elected in 2013, in part on the strength of campaigning with Ms. Cyrus and promising to focus the energies of her small office on Garrett’s murder.
  • The suspicions and repercussions surrounding the boy’s death have rippled through time and distance. A key defense witness, for instance, suddenly discovered “Justice for Garrett” signs posted near his new workplace and home — each hundreds of miles from Potsdam. Mr. Hillary, now free on bail, found himself rearrested in September for allegedly violating an order of protection by using a drive-through A.T.M. at the bank where Ms. Cyrus worked.
  • Garrett Phillips was an ebullient child despite an early-life tragedy: When he was a toddler, his father, Robert — an amiable grounds worker at the State University of New York at Potsdam — suffered a brain aneurysm and never recovered. He died before Garrett was 3.Though Garrett never knew his father, the boy emulated him as he grew. Like his father, he hunted and fished; played any sport involving a ball; and balanced his rowdy and respectful sides, rambunctious sometimes in public but polite to family and strangers.
  • On the afternoon of Oct. 24, 2011, Garrett was playing basketball at the middle school with some friends as rain fell intermittently. A little before 5 p.m., Tandy Cyrus called his cellphone and told him to go home to do schoolwork.
  • Garrett got on his caster board — something of a cross between a skateboard and a snowboard — and headed home, his progress captured by a series of surveillance cameras and later described in a police timeline.
  • Combing the apartment for evidence, investigators found a possible clue: The screen of the bedroom window, about 20 feet off the ground, was “bent outward,” according to the incident report. A tile seemed to be broken on the roof of a lower section of the building, about 10 feet below, and there was a gash in the grass
  • His appeal, as both a coach and a person, is evident: His energy is intense, but his smile is unencumbered. He said he had always loved the North Country region’s rural mountains and summertime greenery — when it was warm it reminded him of Jamaica — though he was aware of the cultural boundaries beyond campus.“You’re a black person,” he said in an interview. “You were viewed as such.”A year after being hired by Clarkson, Mr. Hillary found that his relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Stacia Lee, the mother of his three children, was struggling. At a bar called Ton’s, he became acquainted with a bartender, Tandy Cyrus.
  • “I go, ‘Listen. Help me understand. Are you and Tandy together?’” Deputy Jones said.Ms. Cyrus, 37, declined to be interviewed for this article, but Mr. Hillary said he had been harassed because of his relationship with her. “It’s not a community with a lot of interracial relationships,” he said, adding that he had “to be mindful” when he was out. “I would go to the local restaurant,” he said, and Deputy Jones’s “friends would come up to me and like, ‘You know you’re not supposed to be dating John’s girl.’”A few months after they met, Mr. Hillary and Ms. Cyrus moved in together, forming a household of five, including his teenage daughter, Shanna-Kay, and Ms. Cyrus’s two sons.
  • Lieutenant Murray saw Mr. Duff as deeply credible.“I just can’t bring myself to fathom why a collegiate person playing on a Division III soccer team with his entire future ahead of him would lie and perjure himself on a sworn statement for no reason,” he said.On the evening after the murder, Lieutenant Murray went to watch Clarkson’s men’s soccer squad and videotaped Mr. Hillary coaching the penultimate game of a rough season. (The 2011 Clarkson squad had more losses than goals.)According to a search-warrant application, as Mr. Hillary strode along the sideline, he seemed stiff and sedate and had a “significant limp in his right leg,” something the detective inferred would have been caused by jumping from a second-story window. Last year, though, The Watertown Daily Times posted a clip from Lieutenant Murray’s video: In it, Mr. Hillary appears to walk unhindered along the sidelines.
  • As the men were being questioned, detectives searched for damning evidence. They seized Mr. Hillary’s phone and examined the contents of his pockets and his socks. Nude photographs, fingerprints and palm prints were taken. Mr. Hillary’s car was searched. (The timing of the seizures, and of the subsequent search warrants, has been a focus of Mr. Hillary’s civil suit.) The police also obtained his DNA from a coffee cup and the butt of a cigarette.
cartergramiak

Opinion | Three Weeks Inside a Pro-Trump QAnon Chat Room - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-washington-capitol-hill.html

US trump Politics policy

shared by cartergramiak on 27 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • “We have to trust that there’s going to be military tribunals and we’ll get to watch all kinds of executions.”
  • As President Biden’s inauguration ticked closer, some of Donald Trump’s supporters were feeling gleeful. Mr. Trump was on the cusp of declaring martial law, they believed. Military tribunals would follow, then televised executions, then Democrats and other deep state operatives would finally be brought to justice.
  • These were honestly held beliefs.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Participants tend to revere Mr. Trump and believe he’ll end the crisis outlined by Q: that the world is run by a cabal of pedophiles who operate a sex-trafficking ring, among other crimes. While the chat room group is relatively small, with only about 900 subscribers, it offers a glimpse into a worrying sect of Trump supporters. Some conspiracists like them have turned to violent language in the wake of Mr. Trump’s electoral loss.
  • Listening to the conspiracists — unfiltered and in their own voices — makes that digital conversation disturbingly real.
  • “I just read somewhere that Biden just lowered the age of consent to age 8. Has anybody heard anything about that?”
  • Sometimes the chat is lighthearted, like when supporters swap details about grocery runs or wish one other happy birthday. But the conversation can also turn dark, like when they speak longingly about “brutal” televised executions or simply ask, “Can the people declare war inside the country if they wanted to?”
  • As the rally began, participants uploaded dispatches from the ground. The mood was positive, even emotional. In the chat, they shared their real-time reactions as Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol.
  • They believed Mr. Trump would use his Washington rally to announce mass arrests and release long-awaited evidence supporting Q’s theories. None of that happened.
  • Mr. Trump needed to allow the vote to be certified to spot his enemies. He could use the Insurrection Act at any moment, putting America under martial law and using the military to seize control of the government.
  • They had been through this cycle so many times before, with promises of lawsuits that could overturn the election or a Supreme Court intervention that Mr. Trump had planned for months. None of it came to pass. Still, they had hope.
  • “We know not to watch CNN. We know not to watch these people. But when we have people that we trust on the right, and we’re pushing that information out — because we don’t have many media sources, so the ones that come out, they need to be pretty damn good. And for them to take advantage of people’s hope? We cannot have that.”
  • Rather than re-evaluate their approach in the wake of Q’s failures, many doubled down. The problem wasn’t that the whole worldview was false, just that they had been led astray by inaccurate reports and misinterpretations. Their response was to improve their process. They would develop a list of sources, vet credentials, link to original material, and view unconfirmed information skeptically. They were, in a sense, inventing journalism.
  • Theories spread that Q was actually part of a deep state plot to keep Mr. Trump’s supporters complacent
  • After the inauguration, Ron Watkins, one of the main pushers of QAnon’s theories, whom some suspect is actually Q, seemed to signal the end of the movement. In a message to followers, he focused on the strength of the community, writing, “As we enter into the next administration please remember all the friends and happy memories we made together over the past few years.”
blythewallick

Trump reversed course on hosting G-7 at his club after learning that impeachment-weary ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-829d-87b12c2f85dd_story.html

US politics history trump gop

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • President Trump was forced to abandon his&nbsp;decision to host next year’s Group of Seven summit at his private golf club after it became clear the move had alienated Republicans and swiftly become part of the impeachment inquiry that threatens his presidency.
  • Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney tried to defend the decision during a news conference but caused a new controversy when he was asked about Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president that sparked the impeachment inquiry. Mulvaney told reporters that Trump had held up nearly $400 million in aid to push the foreign government to investigate Democrats, comments that undercut Trump’s central defense in the inquiry. When a journalist followed up, saying that Mulvaney seemed to be describing a quid pro quo, Mulvaney said “we do that all the time with foreign policy.”
  • Trump blamed his G-7 reversal on critics, saying on Twitter that his decision to scrap plans for a summit at the Doral club was&nbsp;“based on both Media &amp; Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility.”AD
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  • Trump’s decision to host next year’s G-7 meeting at his private golf club only increased the anxiety among GOP lawmakers, some of whom have grown weary of having to develop new talking points almost daily.
  • Before he took office, Trump made the unprecedented decision to keep ownership of his businesses — but he promised that he would never use his new power to help them. The Trump Organization’s lawyers promised to avoid even the appearance of “any advantage derived from the Office of the Presidency.”
  • But in practice, Trump has continued to boost his businesses — by talking them up and by visiting them repeatedly, with aides and fellow Republicans in tow.
  • Christie said Trump should not be antagonizing Republicans at a time when he will need their votes to protect him in the impeachment process.
  • “It’s true that he really just thinks his properties are the best,” said a longtime adviser to the president. “He does not understand in his mind why he would have something at someone else’s property.”
  • “Could we have put on an excellent G-7 at Doral? Absolutely,” he said.&nbsp;“Will we end up putting on an excellent G-7 someplace else? Yes, we will.”
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