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Javier E

Trump is already antagonizing the intelligence community, and that's a problem - The Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-897f-918837dae0ae_story.html

intelligence trump cia truth

shared by Javier E on 13 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • On Sunday, the president-elect again rejected the Russian role, adding that he was smart enough that he didn’t want or need a daily briefing.
  • If what is gained is not used or wanted or is labeled as suspect or corrupt — by what moral authority does a director put his people at risk?
  • Then there is the ethic of the intelligence profession, captured by the gospel of John’s dictum in the agency’s headquarters lobby — that the truth will set you free.
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  • What happens if the incoming administration directs that the “Russia did it” file be closed? Would standing intelligence requirements to learn more about this be eliminated? And if they were, what would the agency do with relevant data that would inevitably come through its collection network?
  • And what about the statute that requires the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to keep Congress “fully and currently informed” about all significant intelligence activities? Data on a foreign power manipulating the federal electoral process would certainly qualify. What will the White House position be when the agency is asked by Congress if it has learned anything more on the issue?
  • His future workforce will be looking for clues about his willingness to defend them against charges of incompetence and politicization simply for saying what their craft tells them to be true.
Javier E

Covering politics in a "post-truth" America | Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...litics-in-a-post-truth-america

post-truth politics journalism media fake news crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
  • Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.
  • I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century
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  • (An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)
  • Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year
  • the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
  • Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.
  • none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.
  • This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.
  • To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.
  • Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.
  • Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.
  • This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.
  • I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.
  • In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”
  • These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.
  • I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.
  • And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.
  • Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.
  • Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.
  • , we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.
  • politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth
  • Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.
  • As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.
  • And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.
  • When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.
  • when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!
  • By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.
  • in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.
  • 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.
  • So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.
ecfruchtman

Trump derides intel briefing on 'so-called' Russian hacking - 0 views

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

shared by ecfruchtman on 04 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 04 Jan 17
     
    It was his latest attack on a key body he will rely on as commander in chief and again put him at odds with the agencies' unanimous conclusion that Russia hacked Democratic Party groups and individuals to interfere in the US presidential election.
abbykleman

Russia hacking claims: US intelligence chiefs to brief Trump - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-38532700

shared by abbykleman on 06 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 06 Jan 17
     
    America's top intelligence officials are due to brief President-elect Donald Trump on Russian hacking claims related to the presidential election. They will make their strongest case yet that Russia interfered in the November election by hacking Democratic emails.
julia rhodes

Crimea Offers Showcase for Russia's Rebooted Military - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...russias-rebooted-military.html

russia military nytimes politics history crisis

shared by julia rhodes on 02 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Across Crimea in the past several weeks, a sleek new vanguard of the Russian military has been on display, with forces whose mobility, equipment and behaviors were sharply different from those of the Russian forces seen in action in the brief war in Georgia in 2008 or throughout the North Caucasus over nearly two decades of conflict with Muslim separatists.
  • Past Russian military actions have often showcased an army suffering from a poor state of discipline and supply, its ranks filled mostly with the conscripts who had not managed to buy deferments or otherwise evade military service. Public drunkenness was common, as were tactical indecisiveness and soldiers who often looked like they could not run a mile, much less swiftly.Not so in Crimea.
  • The Kremlin’s investment, analysts said, has revived Russia’s military, which has now shown that it can field a competent and even formidable force, and both guard the nation and project power to neighboring states.
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  • “As a result of these reforms,” Mr. Golts added, “Russia now has absolute superiority over any country in the post-Soviet space.”
  • Since the start of 2012, salaries for most military personnel have roughly tripled, to between $700 and $1,150 a month for privates and sergeants — a respectable amount in Russian terms. The Kremlin has also expanded housing and education benefits.
  • At his direction, a comprehensive, multiagency military strategy was developed for the first time, with ambitious goals that included bringing all units to permanent combat readiness and upgrading weapons systems.
  • It was a sharp contrast to the brief war with Georgia in 2008, when Russia overwhelmed its much smaller foe on a tiny patch of ground, but also revealed the sorry state of its own forces — problems that stretched back to the two military campaigns in Chechnya.
Emilio Ergueta

The Mamluks | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...mamluks

history islam egypt

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 01 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • James Waterson introduces the slave warriors of medieval Islam who overthrew their masters, defeated the Mongols and the Crusaders and established a dynasty that lasted 300 years.
  • They destroyed the Crusader kingdoms of Outremer, and saved Syria, Egypt and the holy places of Islam from the Mongols. They made Cairo the dominant city of the Islamic world in the later Middle Ages, and under these apparently unlettered soldier-statesmens’ rule, craftsmanship, architecture and scholarship flourished. Yet the dynasty remains virtually unknown to many in the West.
  • The Mamluks’ opportunity to overthrow their masters came at the end of the 1240s, a time when the Kurdish Ayyubid dynasty, set up by Saladin in the 1170s, had reached a modus vivendi with the Crusader states; skirmishing, rather than outright war, was the order of the day in Syria and the Holy Land.
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  • the Mamluks eventually forced Shaggar ad Durr to marry their commander Aybeg. Louis’ crusade therefore proved the catalyst for the Mamluks to finally dispense with their Ayyubid overlords. The Bahri Mamluk dynasty was set up in 1250, with Aybeg as its first, though not uncontested, sultan
  • The Mamluk dynasty was now secure, and it lasted until the 16th century. Power struggles prevented continuity at the centre, and even after the Circassian Burji Mamluks seized power from the Bahri Mamluks in the mid-14th century, factionalism and insecurity continued unabated. The Mamluks managed successfully to re-establish their Syrian powerbases following Timur’s brief but hugely destructive invasion in the early 1400s; but the dynasty had been left weakened by the Black Death which had made repeated onslaughts through the Middle East from the mid-14th century and it soon lost the valuable trade revenues of Syria after the Portuguese had opened up Europe’s Ocean trade and the route to India in the later 15th century. In the end it took two only two brief battles for the Ottoman Sultan Selim I to decimate the last Mamluk army to take the field just outside Cairo near the Pyramids in 1517.
  • Selim I continued to employ a Mamluk as viceroy, however, and recruitment of Circassians as ‘tax farmers’ continued until the new age arrived in Egypt with Napoleon’s army in 1798. Indeed faction building and Mamluk infighting were still characteristic of Egyptian politics in the early 19th century. 
  • Emilio Ergueta on 01 Jun 15
     
    History of the Mamluk empire.
Javier E

Lincoln at Gettysburg > Publications > National Affairs - 0 views

www.nationalaffairs.com/...lincoln-at-gettysburg

lincoln speech Civil War crisis history politics culture US

shared by Javier E on 27 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • To understand the significance of the Gettysburg Address, we need to go beyond the noting and remembering that Lincoln modestly said would not happen. We want to understand what he accomplished and how he did it, and maybe especially how he did what he did in such brief compass
  • The Gettysburg Address contains three paragraphs, ten sentences, and 272 words (word counts vary slightly depending on which version of the text is used, and whether certain words like "four score," "can not," and "battle-field" are formatted as one or two words). Astonishingly, since many words are used more than once, the speech is comprised of only 130 distinct words.
  • To truly understand how a statement so brief could run so deep and last so long, we must carefully consider its substance and structure. To do so is to appreciate all the more Lincoln's extraordinary accomplishment.
Cecilia Ergueta

History Of The Caribbean Community - 0 views

www.caricom.org/...caricom_history.jsp

caribbean history integration political economic

shared by Cecilia Ergueta on 05 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Cecilia Ergueta on 05 Jul 14
     
    " A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CARIBBEAN COMMUNITY (CARICOM)"
Javier E

Americans Aren't Saving Enough for Retirement, but One Change Could Help - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...but-one-change-could-help.html

retirement conflict of interest wall street saving

shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • On average, a typical working family in the anteroom of retirement — headed by somebody 55 to 64 years old — has only about $104,000 in retirement savings
  • more than half of all American households will not have enough retirement income to maintain the living standards they were accustomed to before retirement,
  • 83 percent of baby boomers and Generation Xers in the bottom fourth of the income distribution will eventually run short of money.
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  • More than a quarter of those with incomes between the middle of the income distribution and the 75th percentile will probably run short.
  • The standard prescription is that Americans should put more money aside in investments. The recommendation, however, glosses over a critical driver of unpreparedness: Wall Street is bleeding savers dry.
  • “A greater part of the problem is the failure of investors to earn their fair share of market returns.”
  • His observation suggests a different policy prescription: shoring up Americans’ retirement requires, first of all, aligning the interests of investment advisers and their clients.
  • Actively managed mutual funds, in which many workers invest their retirement savings, are enormously costly.
  • Altogether, costs add up to 2.27 percent per year, Mr. Bogle estimates.
  • By contrast, a passive index fund, like Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index Fund, costs merely 0.06 percent a year in all.
  • Assuming an annual market return of 7 percent, he says, a 30-year-old worker who made $30,000 a year and received a 3 percent annual raise could retire at age 70 with $927,000 in the pot by saving 10 percent of her wages every year in a passive index fund. (Such a nest egg, at the standard withdrawal rate of 4 percent, would generate an inflation-adjusted $37,000 a year more or less indefinitely.) If she put it in a typical actively managed fund, she would end up with only $561,000.
  • In 1979, almost two in five private sector workers had a defined-benefit pension that would pay out a check until they died. Today only 14 percent do. Almost one in three, by contrast, must make do with a retirement savings account alone to supplement their Social Security check.
  • nobody was paying attention to the safeguards that might be needed when corporate retirement funds managed by sophisticated professionals were replaced by individual 401(k)s and Individual Retirement Accounts.
  • “Wall Street makes no money on low-cost index funds,” said David F. Swensen, who runs the investment portfolio for Yale. “That is the problem.”
  • Harvard and colleagues from M.I.T. and the University of Hamburg sent “mystery shoppers” to visit financial advisers. They found that advisers mostly recommended investment strategies that fit their own financial interests. They reinforced their clients’ misguided biases, encouraging them to chase returns and advising against low-cost options like low-fee index funds.
  • For all their flaws, 401(k) plans have a fiduciary responsibility to act in participants’ best interest. Managers of I.R.A.s, by contrast, are not legally bound to put their clients’ interests first. They must offer “suitable” products — a much squishier standard.
  • The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers argues that “conflicted advice” by advisers who get payments from the funds they recommend reduces the annual returns to investment by 1 percentage point, a more modest penalty than Mr. Bogle’s analysis
  • In 2010, the Labor Department proposed imposing fiduciary responsibility on I.R.A. advisers. The resistance from Wall Street was so fierce that the Obama administration was forced to back down. Last month, the administration tried again.
  • Unlike regulations in Canada and some Western European countries, which have essentially banned kickbacks from funds to investment advisers, the Obama administration’s proposed rule does not directly attack conflicts of interest.
redavistinnell

The Assault on Climate Science - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ssault-on-climate-science.html

assault climate science new york new york times

shared by redavistinnell on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The Assault on Climate Science
  • State College, Pa. — WITH world leaders gathered in Paris to address climate change, most of the planet seems to have awakened to the reality that the Earth is warming and that we’re responsible.
  • Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology
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  • “implicitly questioning the integrity of the researchers conducting those studies can be viewed as a form of intimidation that could deter scientists from freely carrying out research on important national challenges.”
  • The study found that the “rate of global warming during the last 15 years has been as fast as or faster than what was seen during the latter half of the 20th century.”
  • In fact, 2014 was the warmest year on record, and this year is likely to end up even warmer.
  • Fortunately, NOAA did not acquiesce to Mr. Smith’s outrageous demands. The agency pointed out that it had provided Mr. Smith’s committee with the scientific briefings, data and studies behind the Science article, as well as two thorough briefings by NOAA scientists
  • At the same time, as NOAA noted, the confidentiality of communications between scientists is “essential to frank discourse.” For that reason, the agency rejected his demand.
  • Now he is using his committee chairmanship to go after the government’s own climate scientists, whose latest study is an inconvenience to his views.
  • ut he added, ominously, that “this prioritization does not alleviate NOAA’s obligation to respond fully to the Committee’s subpoena.”
  • During his tenure as the committee’s chairman, he has attempted to slash funding for earth sciences research by the National Science Foundation.
  • He has threatened to replace the foundation’s vaunted scientific peer-review process with a system where congressmen like him help choose which scientific grants are funded.
  • And he recently started a congressional investigation into the finances of an environmental institute headed by a climate scientist who was a lead signatory of a letter suggesting that if fossil fuel companies knowingly misrepresented what they knew about climate change, they should be held accountable in the same way the tobacco industry was for hiding its knowledge about the health impacts of tobacco.
  • In 2005, Joe L. Barton, a Texas Republican who was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sought all of my personal emails and notes because I had published a study with colleagues showing how the planet’s temperature had shot up after 1900.
  • Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, also weighed in against what he saw as “a kind of intimidation which threatens the relationship between science and public policy” that “must not be tolerated.”
  • While there is no doubt climate change is real and caused by humans, there is absolutely a debate to be had about the details of climate policy, and there are prominent Republicans participating constructively in that discourse. Let’s hear more from these sensible voices. And let’s end the McCarthy-like assault on science led by the Lamar Smiths of the world. Our nation is better than that.
Javier E

Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oah-harari-silicon-valley.html

Harari culture futuristic

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • The futurist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari worries about a lot.
  • He worries that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and ushering in a dystopian hellscape in which voting is obsolete.
  • He worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will.
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  • He worries that because the technological revolution’s work requires so few laborers, Silicon Valley is creating a tiny ruling class and a teeming, furious “useless class.”
  • If this is his harrowing warning, then why do Silicon Valley C.E.O.s love him so
  • When Mr. Harari toured the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was incongruously joyful. Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, threw him a dinner party. The leaders of X, Alphabet’s secretive research division, invited Mr. Harari over. Bill Gates reviewed the book (“Fascinating” and “such a stimulating writer”) in The New York Times.
  • it’s insane he’s so popular, they’re all inviting him to campus — yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,
  • Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else
  • he brought up Aldous Huxley. Generations have been horrified by his novel “Brave New World,” which depicts a regime of emotion control and painless consumption. Readers who encounter the book today, Mr. Harari said, often think it sounds great. “Everything is so nice, and in that way it is an intellectually disturbing book because you’re really hard-pressed to explain what’s wrong with it,” he said. “And you do get today a vision coming out of some people in Silicon Valley which goes in that direction.”
  • The story of his current fame begins in 2011, when he published a book of notable ambition: to survey the whole of human existence. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” first released in Hebrew, did not break new ground in terms of historical research. Nor did its premise — that humans are animals and our dominance is an accident — seem a likely commercial hit. But the casual tone and smooth way Mr. Harari tied together existing knowledge across fields made it a deeply pleasing read, even as the tome ended on the notion that the process of human evolution might be over.
  • He followed up with “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” which outlined his vision of what comes after human evolution. In it, he describes Dataism, a new faith based around the power of algorithms. Mr. Harari’s future is one in which big data is worshiped, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and some humans develop Godlike abilities.
  • Now, he has written a book about the present and how it could lead to that future: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.” It is meant to be read as a series of warnings. His recent TED Talk was called “Why fascism is so tempting — and how your data could power it.”
  • At the Alphabet talk, Mr. Harari had been accompanied by his publisher. They said that the younger employees had expressed concern about whether their work was contributing to a less free society, while the executives generally thought their impact was positive
  • Some workers had tried to predict how well humans would adapt to large technological change based on how they have responded to small shifts, like a new version of Gmail. Mr. Harari told them to think more starkly: If there isn’t a major policy intervention, most humans probably will not adapt at all.
  • It made him sad, he told me, to see people build things that destroy their own societies, but he works every day to maintain an academic distance and remind himself that humans are just animals. “Part of it is really coming from seeing humans as apes, that this is how they behave,” he said, adding, “They’re chimpanzees. They’re sapiens. This is what they do.”
  • this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Mr. Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. “Basically,” Mr. Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.”
  • He said he had resigned himself to tech executives’ global reign, pointing out how much worse the politicians are. “I’ve met a number of these high-tech giants, and generally they’re good people,” he said. “They’re not Attila the Hun. In the lottery of human leaders, you could get far worse.”
  • Some of his tech fans, he thinks, come to him out of anxiety. “Some may be very frightened of the impact of what they are doing,” Mr. Harari said
  • as he spoke about meditation — Mr. Harari spends two hours each day and two months each year in silence — he became commanding. In a region where self-optimization is paramount and meditation is a competitive sport, Mr. Harari’s devotion confers hero status.
  • He told the audience that free will is an illusion, and that human rights are just a story we tell ourselves. Political parties, he said, might not make sense anymore. He went on to argue that the liberal world order has relied on fictions like “the customer is always right” and “follow your heart,” and that these ideas no longer work in the age of artificial intelligence, when hearts can be manipulated at scale.
  • Everyone in Silicon Valley is focused on building the future, Mr. Harari continued, while most of the world’s people are not even needed enough to be exploited. “Now you increasingly feel that there are all these elites that just don’t need me,” he said. “And it’s much worse to be irrelevant than to be exploited.”
  • The useless class he describes is uniquely vulnerable. “If a century ago you mounted a revolution against exploitation, you knew that when bad comes to worse, they can’t shoot all of us because they need us,” he said, citing army service and factory work.
  • Now it is becoming less clear why the ruling elite would not just kill the new useless class. “You’re totally expendable,” he told the audience.
  • This, Mr. Harari told me later, is why Silicon Valley is so excited about the concept of universal basic income, or stipends paid to people regardless of whether they work. The message is: “We don’t need you. But we are nice, so we’ll take care of you.”
  • On Sept. 14, he published an essay in The Guardian assailing another old trope — that “the voter knows best.”
  • “If humans are hackable animals, and if our choices and opinions don’t reflect our free will, what should the point of politics be?” he wrote. “How do you live when you realize … that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? These are the most interesting questions humanity now faces.”
  • Today, they have a team of eight based in Tel Aviv working on Mr. Harari’s projects. The director Ridley Scott and documentarian Asif Kapadia are adapting “Sapiens” into a TV show, and Mr. Harari is working on children’s books to reach a broader audience.
  • Being gay, Mr. Harari said, has helped his work — it set him apart to study culture more clearly because it made him question the dominant stories of his own conservative Jewish society. “If society got this thing wrong, who guarantees it didn’t get everything else wrong as well?” he said
  • “If I was a superhuman, my superpower would be detachment,” Mr. Harari added. “O.K., so maybe humankind is going to disappear — O.K., let’s just observe.”
  • They just finished “Dear White People,” and they loved the Australian series “Please Like Me.” That night, they had plans to either meet Facebook executives at company headquarters or watch the YouTube show “Cobra Kai.”
Javier E

Polarization in Poland: A Warning From Europe - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...568324

poland polarization authoritarian liberal democracy conspiracy theory propaganda

shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Nearly two decades later, I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year’s Eve party. They, in turn, would not only refuse to enter my house, they would be embarrassed to admit they had ever been there. In fact, about half the people who were at that party would no longer speak to the other half. The estrangements are political, not personal. Poland is now one of the most polarized societies in Europe, and we have found ourselves on opposite sides of a profound divide, one that runs through not only what used to be the Polish right but also the old Hungarian right, the Italian right, and, with some differences, the British right and the American right, too.
  • Some of my New Year’s Eve guests continued, as my husband and I did, to support the pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market center-right—remaining in political parties that aligned, more or less, with European Christian Democrats, with the liberal parties of Germany and the Netherlands, and with the Republican Party of John McCain. Some now consider themselves center-left. But others wound up in a different place, supporting a nativist party called Law and Justice—a party that has moved dramatically away from the positions it held when it first briefly ran the government, from 2005 to 2007, and when it occupied the presidency (not the same thing in Poland), from 2005 to 2010.
  • My husband was the Polish defense minister for a year and a half, in a coalition government led by Law and Justice during its first, brief experience of power; later, he broke with that party and was for seven years the foreign minister in another coalition government, this one led by the center-right party Civic Platform; in 2015 he didn’t run for office. As a journalist and his American-born wife, I have always attracted some press interest. But after Law and Justice won that year, I was featured on the covers of two pro-regime magazines, wSieci and Do Rzeczy—former friends of ours work at both—as the clandestine Jewish coordinator of the international press and the secret director of its negative coverage of Poland. Similar stories have appeared on Telewizja Polska’s evening news.
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • In a famous journal he kept from 1935 to 1944, the Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian chronicled an even more extreme shift in his own country. Like me, Sebastian was Jewish; like me, most of his friends were on the political right. In his journal, he described how, one by one, they were drawn to fascist ideology, like a flock of moths to an inescapable flame. He recounted the arrogance and confidence they acquired as they moved away from identifying themselves as Europeans—admirers of Proust, travelers to Paris—and instead began to call themselves blood-and-soil Romanians. He listened as they veered into conspiratorial thinking or became casually cruel. People he had known for years insulted him to his face and then acted as if nothing had happened. “Is friendship possible,” he wondered in 1937, “with people who have in common a whole series of alien ideas and feelings—so alien that I have only to walk in the door and they suddenly fall silent in shame and embarrassment?”
  • This is not 1937. Nevertheless, a parallel transformation is taking place in my own time, in the Europe that I inhabit and in Poland, a country whose citizenship I have acquired
  • the Dreyfus affair is most interesting because it was sparked by a single cause célèbre. Just one court case—one disputed trial—plunged an entire country into an angry debate, creating unresolvable divisions between people who had previously not known that they disagreed with one another. But this shows that vastly different understandings of what is meant by “France” were already there, waiting to be discovered
  • More important, though the people I am writing about here, the nativist ideologues, are perhaps not all as successful as they would like to be (about which more in a minute), they are not poor and rural, they are not in any sense victims of the political transition, and they are not an impoverished underclass. On the contrary, they are educated, they speak foreign languages, and they travel abroad—just like Sebastian’s friends in the 1930s.
  • What has caused this transformation
  • My answer is a complicated one, because I think the explanation is universal. Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.
  • And it is taking place without the excuse of an economic crisis of the kind Europe suffered in the 1930s. Poland’s economy has been the most consistently successful in Europe over the past quarter century. Even after the global financial collapse in 2008, the country saw no recession. What’s more, the refugee wave that has hit other European countries has not been felt here at all. There are no migrant camps, and there is no Islamist terrorism, or terrorism of any kind.
  • in modern Britain, America, Germany, France, and until recently Poland, we have assumed that competition is the most just and efficient way to distribute power. The best-run businesses should make the most money. The most appealing and competent politicians should rule. The contests between them should take place on an even playing field, to ensure a fair outcome.
  • All of these debates, whether in 1890s France or 1990s Poland, have at their core a series of important questions: Who gets to define a nation? And who, therefore, gets to rule a nation? For a long time, we have imagined that these questions were settled—but why should they ever be?
  • the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world—think of China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—was first developed by Lenin, in Russia, starting in 1917. In the political-science textbooks of the future, the Soviet Union’s founder will surely be remembered not for his Marxist beliefs, but as the inventor of this enduring form of political organization.
  • Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite—the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.
  • In monarchies such as prerevolutionary France and Russia, the right to rule was granted to the aristocracy, which defined itself by rigid codes of breeding and etiquette. In modern Western democracies, the right to rule is granted, at least in theory, by different forms of competition: campaigning and voting, meritocratic tests that determine access to higher education and the civil service, free markets
  • Two decades ago, different understandings of “Poland” must already have been present too, just waiting to be exacerbated by chance, circumstance, and personal ambition
  • Lenin’s one-party state was based on different values. It overthrew the aristocratic order. But it did not put a competitive model in place. The Bolshevik one-party state was not merely undemocratic; it was also anticompetitive and antimeritocratic. Places in universities, civil-service jobs, and roles in government and industry did not go to the most industrious or the most capable. Instead, they went to the most loyal.
  • As Hannah Arendt wrote back in the 1940s, the worst kind of one-party state “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
  • Lenin’s one-party system also reflected his disdain for the idea of a neutral state, of apolitical civil servants and an objective media. He wrote that freedom of the press “is a deception.” He mocked freedom of assembly as a “hollow phrase.” As for parliamentary democracy itself, that was no more than “a machine for the suppression of the working class.”
  • These parties tolerate the existence of political opponents. But they use every means possible, legal and illegal, to reduce their opponents’ ability to function and to curtail competition in politics and economics. They dislike foreign investment and criticize privatization, unless it is designed to benefit their supporters. They undermine meritocracy. Like Donald Trump, they mock the notions of neutrality and professionalism, whether in journalists or civil servants. They discourage businesses from advertising in “opposition”—by which they mean illegitimate—media.
  • nepotism, state capture. But if you so choose, you can also describe it in positive terms: It represents the end of the hateful notions of meritocracy and competition, principles that, by definition, never benefited the less successful. A rigged and uncompetitive system sounds bad if you want to live in a society run by the talented. But if that isn’t your primary interest, then what’s wrong with it?
  • If you are someone who believes that you deserve to rule, then your motivation to attack the elite, pack the courts, and warp the press to achieve your ambitions is strong. Resentment, envy, and above all the belief that the “system” is unfair—these are important sentiments among the intellectuals of the Polish right.
  • Whatever mistakes the party might make, whatever laws it might break, at least the “truth” about Smolensk would finally be told.
  • the polarizing political movements of 21st-century Europe demand much less of their adherents. They don’t require belief in a full-blown ideology, and thus they don’t require violence or terror police. They don’t force people to believe that black is white, war is peace, and state farms have achieved 1,000 percent of their planned production. Most of them don’t deploy propaganda that conflicts with everyday reality.
  • yet all of them depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once told me should be called the Medium-Size Lie, or perhaps a clutch of Medium-Size Lies. To put it differently, all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality. Sometimes that alternative reality has developed organically; more often, it’s been carefully formulated, with the help of modern marketing techniques, audience segmentation, and social-media campaigns.
  • In Hungary, the lie is unoriginal: It is the belief, shared by the Russian government and the American alt-right, in the superhuman powers of George Soros, the Hungarian Jewish billionaire who is supposedly plotting to bring down the nation through the deliberate importation of migrants, even though no such migrants exist in Hungary.
  • In Poland, at least the lie is sui generis. It is the Smolensk conspiracy theory: the belief that a nefarious plot brought down the president’s plane in April 2010.
  • The truth, as it began to emerge, was not comforting to the Law and Justice Party or to its leader, the dead president’s twin brother. The plane had taken off late; the president was likely in a hurry to land, because he wanted to use the trip to launch his reelection campaign. There was thick fog in Smolensk, which did not have a real airport, just a landing strip in the forest; the pilots considered diverting the plane, which would have meant a drive of several hours to the ceremony. After the president had a brief phone call with his brother, his advisers apparently pressed the pilots to land. Some of them, against protocol, walked in and out of the cockpit during the flight. Also against protocol, the chief of the air force came and sat beside the pilots. “Zmieścisz się śmiało”—“You’ll make it, be bold,” he said. Seconds later, the plane collided with the tops of some birch trees, rolled over, and hit the ground.
  • When, some weeks after the election, European institutions and human-rights groups began responding to the actions of the Law and Justice government, they focused on the undermining of the courts and public media. They didn’t focus on the institutionalization of the Smolensk conspiracy theory, which was, frankly, just too weird for outsiders to understand. And yet the decision to put a fantasy at the heart of government policy really was the source of the authoritarian actions that followed.
  • Although the Macierewicz commission has never produced a credible alternate explanation for the crash, the Smolensk lie laid the moral groundwork for other lies. Those who could accept this elaborate theory, with no evidence whatsoever, could accept anything.
  • picking apart personal and political motives is extremely difficult. That’s what I learned from the story of Jacek Kurski, the director of Polish state television and the chief ideologist of the Polish illiberal state. He started out in the same place, at the same time, as his brother, Jarosław Kurski, who edits the largest and most influential liberal Polish newspaper. They are two sides of the same coin.
  • The Smolensk conspiracy theory, like the Hungarian migration conspiracy theory, served another purpose: For a younger generation that no longer remembered Communism, and a society where former Communists had largely disappeared from politics, it offered a new reason to distrust the politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals who had emerged from the struggles of the 1990s and now led the country.
  • More to the point, it offered a means of defining a new and better elite. There was no need for competition, or for exams, or for a résumé bristling with achievements. Anyone who professes belief in the Smolensk lie is by definition a true patriot—and, incidentally, might well qualify for a government job.
  • Hungary’s belated reckoning with its Communist past—putting up museums, holding memorial services, naming perpetrators—did not, as I thought it would, help cement respect for the rule of law, for restraints on the state, for pluralism
  • 16 years after the Terror Háza’s opening, Hungary’s ruling party respects no restraints of any kind. It has gone much further than Law and Justice in politicizing the state media and destroying the private media, achieving the latter by issuing threats and blocking access to advertising. It has created a new business elite that is loyal to Orbán.
  • Schmidt embodies what the Bulgarian writer Ivan Krastev recently described as the desire of many eastern and central Europeans to “shake off the colonial dependency implicit in the very project of Westernization,” to rid themselves of the humiliation of having been imitators, followers of the West rather than founders.
  • Listening to her, I became convinced that there was never a moment when Schmidt’s views “changed.” She never turned against liberal democracy, because she never believed in it, or at least she never thought it was all that important. For her, the antidote to Communism is not democracy but an anti-Dreyfusard vision of national sovereignty
  • It’s clear that the Medium-Size Lie is working for Orbán—just as it has for Donald Trump—if only because it focuses the world’s attention on his rhetoric rather than his actions.
  • I described my 1999 New Year’s Eve party to a Greek political scientist. Quietly, he laughed at me. Or rather, he laughed with me; he didn’t mean to be rude. But this thing I was calling polarization was nothing new. “The post-1989 liberal moment—this was the exception,” Stathis Kalyvas told me. Polarization is normal. More to the point, I would add, skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal.
  • Americans, with our powerful founding story, our unusual reverence for our Constitution, our relative geographic isolation, and our two centuries of economic success, have long been convinced that liberal democracy, once achieved, cannot be altered. American history is told as a tale of progress, always forward and upward, with the Civil War as a kind of blip in the middle, an obstacle that was overcome.
  • In Greece, history feels not linear but circular. There is liberal democracy and then there is oligarchy. Then there is liberal democracy again. Then there is foreign subversion, then there is an attempted Communist coup, then there is civil war, and then there is dictatorship. And so on, since the time of the Athenian republic.
  • In truth, the argument about who gets to rule is never over, particularly in an era when people have rejected aristocracy, and no longer believe that leadership is inherited at birth or that the ruling class is endorsed by God
  • Democracy and free markets can produce unsatisfying outcomes, after all, especially when badly regulated, or when nobody trusts the regulators, or when people are entering the contest from very different starting points. Sooner or later, the losers of the competition were always going to challenge the value of the competition itself.
  • More to the point, the principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don’t necessarily answer deeper questions about national identity, or satisfy the human desire to belong to a moral community.
  • The authoritarian state, or even the semi-authoritarian state—the one-party state, the illiberal state—offers that promise: that the nation will be ruled by the best people, the deserving people, the members of the party, the believers in the Medium-Size Lie.
Javier E

Alex Stamos, Facebook Data Security Chief, To Leave Amid Outcry - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-alex-stamos.html

fb cybersecurity privacy security crisis

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • One central tension at Facebook has been that of the legal and policy teams versus the security team. The security team generally pushed for more disclosure about how nation states had misused the site, but the legal and policy teams have prioritized business imperatives, said the people briefed on the matter.
  • “The people whose job is to protect the user always are fighting an uphill battle against the people whose job is to make money for the company,” said Sandy Parakilas, who worked at Facebook enforcing privacy and other rules until 2012 and now advises a nonprofit organization called the Center for Humane Technology, which is looking at the effect of technology on people.
  • Mr. Stamos said in statement on Monday, “These are really challenging issues, and I’ve had some disagreements with all of my colleagues, including other executives.” On Twitter, he said he was “still fully engaged with my work at Facebook” and acknowledged that his role has changed, without addressing his future plans.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Mr. Stamos joined Facebook from Yahoo in June 2015. He and other Facebook executives, such as Ms. Sandberg, disagreed early on over how proactive the social network should be in policing its own platform, said the people briefed on the matter.
  • Mr. Stamos first put together a group of engineers to scour Facebook for Russian activity in June 2016, the month the Democratic National Committee announced it had been attacked by Russian hackers, the current and former employees said.
  • By November 2016, the team had uncovered evidence that Russian operatives had aggressively pushed DNC leaks and propaganda on Facebook. That same month, Mr. Zuckerberg publicly dismissed the notion that fake news influenced the 2016 election, calling it a “pretty crazy idea
  • In the ensuing months, Facebook’s security team found more Russian disinformation and propaganda on its site, according to the current and former employees. By the spring of 2017, deciding how much Russian interference to disclose publicly became a major source of contention within the company.
  • A detailed memorandum Mr. Stamos wrote in early 2017 describing Russian interference was scrubbed for mentions of Russia and winnowed into a blog post last April that outlined, in hypothetical terms, how Facebook could be manipulated by a foreign adversary, they said. Russia was only referenced in a vague footnote. That footnote acknowledged that Facebook’s findings did not contradict a declassified January 2017 report in which the director of national intelligence concluded Russia had sought to undermine United States election, and Hillary Clinton in particular.
  • Mr. Stamos pushed to disclose as much as possible, while others including Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications and policy, recommended not naming Russia without more ironclad evidence, said the current and former employees.
  • By last September, after Mr. Stamos’s investigation had revealed further Russian interference, Facebook was forced to reverse course. That month, the company disclosed that beginning in June 2015, Russians had paid Facebook $100,000 to run roughly 3,000 divisive ads to show the American electorate.
  • The public reaction caused some at Facebook to recoil at revealing more, said the current and former employees. Since the 2016 election, Facebook has paid unusual attention to the reputations of Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg, conducting polls to track how they are viewed by the public, said Tavis McGinn, who was recruited to the company last April and headed the executive reputation efforts through September 2017.
  • Mr. McGinn, who now heads Honest Data, which has done polling about Facebook’s reputation in different countries, said Facebook is “caught in a Catch-22.”
  • “Facebook cares so much about its image that the executives don’t want to come out and tell the whole truth when things go wrong,” he said. “But if they don’t, it damages their image.”
  • Mr. McGinn said he left Facebook after becoming disillusioned with the company’s conduct.
  • By December 2017, Mr. Stamos, who reports to Facebook’s general counsel, proposed that he report directly to higher-ups. Facebook executives rejected that proposal and instead reassigned Mr. Stamos’s team, splitting the security team between its product team, overseen by Guy Rosen, and infrastructure team, overseen by Pedro Canahuati, according to current and former employees.
  • “I told them, ‘Your business is based on trust, and you’re losing trust,’” said Mr. McNamee, a founder of the Center for Humane Technology. “They were treating it as a P.R. problem, when it’s a business problem. I couldn’t believe these guys I once knew so well had gotten so far off track.”
jayhandwerk

Trump tariffs create uncertainty for Pentagon | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...reate-uncertainty-for-pentagon

Politics US trump economics policy

shared by jayhandwerk on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Military officials are still grappling with President TrumpDonald John TrumpAccuser says Trump should be afraid of the truth Woman behind pro-Trump Facebook page denies being influenced by Russians Shulkin says he has White House approval to root out 'subversion' at VA MORE’s new tariffs on steel and aluminum, uncertain as to how they might affect the Defense Department.
  • But he added that the Pentagon was concerned “about negative impact on our key allies” from the tariffs.
  • Lawmakers and industry executives are also warning Trump’s tariffs could result in higher costs for weapons systems and infrastructure projects.
malonema1

Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

www.today.com/...-chuck-todd-says-1221829187930

trump politics US

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • Trump does deserve credit for North Korean talks, Chuck Todd says
  • Meet the Press Moderator joins Sunday TODAY’s Chuck Todd and says President Donald Trump deserves credit for helping create conditions to start talks of denuclearization with North Korea, but says some questions still loom. {"1222279235816":{"mpxId":"1222279235816","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Neutral","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/oregon-trucker-recounts-walking-36-miles-after-losing-his-way-1222279235816","description":"Jacob Cartwright, a truck driver in Oregon, accidentally plugged the wrong address into his GPS and wound up lost more than 100 miles out of his way. 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g-dragon

A Brief History of Buddhism in Japan - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/n-japan-a-brief-history-450148

buddhism history japan

shared by g-dragon on 05 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • It took several centuries for Buddhism to travel from India to Japan. Once Buddhism was established in Japan, however, it flourished. Buddhism had an incalculable impact on Japanese civilization. At the same time, schools of Buddhism imported from mainland Asia became distinctively Japanese.
  • The Koreans brought with them Buddhist sutras, an image of the Buddha, and a letter from the Korean prince praising the dharma. This was the official introduction of Buddhism to Japan.
  • The Japanese aristocracy promptly split into pro- and anti-Buddhist factions. Buddhism gained little real acceptance until the reign of the Empress Suiko and her regent, Prince Shotoku (592 to 628 CE).
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  • In the centuries that followed, Buddhism in Japan developed robustly. During the 7th through 9th centuries, Buddhism in China enjoyed a "golden age" and Chinese monks brought the newest developments in practice and scholarship to Japan.
  • Six schools of Buddhism emerged in Japan in the 7th and 8th centuries and all but two of which have disappeared. These schools flourished mostly during the Nara Period of Japanese history (709 to 795 CE). Today, they are sometimes lumped together into one category known as Nara Buddhism.
  • After the Nara period, five other schools of Buddhism emerged in Japan that remain prominent today. These are Tendai, Shingon, Jodo, Zen, and Nichiren.
  • Tendai is best known for two distinctive features. One, it considers the Lotus Sutra to be the supreme sutra and the perfect expression of the Buddha's teachings. Second, it synthesizes the teachings of other schools, resolving contradictions and finding a middle way between extremes.
  • Shingon is the only non-Tibetan school of Vajrayana. Many of the teachings and rituals of Shingon are esoteric, passed orally from teacher to student, and not made public. Shingon remains one of the largest schools of Buddhism in Japan.
  • Very simply, Pure Land emphasizes faith the Buddha Amitabha (Amida Butsu in Japanese) through which one may be reborn in the Pure Land and be nearer to Nirvana. Pure Land is sometimes called Amidism.
  • After some years of study at Mount Hiei and other monasteries, Nichiren believed that the Lotus Sutra contained the complete teachings of the Buddha.
  • Nichiren also believed fervently that all of Japan must be guided by the Lotus Sutra or lose the protection and favor of the Buddha. He condemned other schools of Buddhism, particularly Pure Land.
  • The Buddhist establishment became annoyed with Nichiren and sent him into a series of exiles that lasted most of the rest of his life. Even so, he gained followers, and by the time of his death, Nichiren Buddhism was firmly established in Japan.
  • After Nichiren, no new major schools of Buddhism developed in Japan. However, the existing schools grew, evolved, split, fused, and otherwise developed in many ways.
  •  Japanese Buddhist culture flourished in the 14th century and Buddhist influence was reflected in art, poetry, architecture, gardening, and the tea ceremony.
  • In time, this favoritism led to a partisan rivalry, which sometimes became violent.
  • The influence of Buddhism declined, however. Buddhism faced competition from Shinto -- the Japanese indigenous religion -- as well as Confucianism. To keep the three rivals separated, the government decreed that Buddhism would have first place in matters of religion, Confucianism would have first place in matters of morality, and Shinto would have first place in matters of state.
  • The Meiji Restoration in 1868 restored the power of the Emperor. In the state religion, Shinto, the emperor was worshiped as a living god.
  • The Emperor was not a god in Buddhism, however. This may be why the Meiji government ordered Buddhism banished
  • Temples were burned or destroyed, and priests and monks were forced to return to lay life.
  • Buddhism was too deeply ingrained in Japan's culture and history to disappear, however. Eventually, the banishment was lifted. But the Meiji government was not done with Buddhism yet.
  • In 1872, the Meiji government decreed that Buddhist monks and priests (but not nuns) should be free to marry if they chose to do so. Soon "temple families" became commonplace and the administration of temples and monasteries became family businesses, handed down from fathers to sons.
  • Today, the government of Japan recognizes more than 150 schools of Buddhism, but the major schools are still Nara (mostly Kegon), Shingon, Tendai, Jodo, Zen, and Nichiren.
  • In more recent years, several news stories have reported that Buddhism is dying in Japan, especially in rural areas.
  • For generations, the many small "family owned" temples had a monopoly on the funeral business and funerals became their chief source of income. Sons took over temples from their fathers out of duty more than vocation. When combined, these two factors made much of Japanese Buddhism into "funeral Buddhism." Many temples offer little else but funeral and memorial services.
  • Japanese living in urban centers are losing interest in Buddhism.
g-dragon

Tiantai Buddhism in China - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/antai-buddhism-in-china-450017

china buddhism Tiantai

shared by g-dragon on 05 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The Buddhist school of Tiantai originated in late 6th century China. It became enormously influential until it was nearly wiped out by the Emperor's repression of Buddhism in 845.
  • it thrived in Japan as Tendai Buddhism. It also was transmitted to Korea as Cheontae and to Vietnam as Thien Thai tong.
  • Tiantai was the first school of Buddhism to consider the Lotus Sutra to be the most cumulative and accessible expression of the Buddha's teaching.
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  •   It is also known for its doctrine of the Three Truths; its classification of Buddhist doctrines into Five Periods and Eight Teachings; and its particular form of meditation.
  • Tiantai Buddhism in Japan as Tendai, which for a time was the dominant school of Buddhism in Japan.
  • In 845 the Tang Dynasty Emperor Wuzong ordered all "foreign" religions in China, which included Buddhism, to be eliminated.
  • However, Tiantai did not become extinct in China. In time, with the help of Korean disciples, Guoqing was rebuilt and copies of essential texts were returned to the mountain.
  • Tiantai had regained some of its footing by the year 1000, when a doctrinal dispute split the school in half and generated a few centuries' worth of treatises and commentaries.
  • The Three Truths proposes a "middle" acting as an interface of sorts between the absolute and the conventional.
  • This "middle" is the omniscient mind of Buddha, which takes in all phenomenal reality, both pure and impure.
  • These were (1) the period in the Buddha's life in which a sutra was preached; (2) the audience that first heard the sutra; (3) the teaching method the Buddha used to make his point.
  • Zhiyi identified five distinct periods of the Buddha's life, and sorted texts accordingly into the Five Periods.
  • He identified three kinds of audiences and five kinds of methods, and these became the Eight Teachings.
  • Although the Five Periods are not historically accurate, and scholars of other schools might differ with the Eight Teachings, Zhiyi's classification system was internally logical and gave Tiantai a solid foundation.
  • In different ways, much of Zhiyi's teaching lives on in Pure Land and Nichiren Buddhism, as well as Zen.
malonema1

GOP senator: Trump did not make 's---hole' comment | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...-did-not-make-shithole-comment

Trump US culture

shared by malonema1 on 14 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • I’m telling you he did not use that word, George. And I’m telling you it’s a gross misrepresentation. How many times do you want me to say that?” Perdue said after host George Stephanopoulos pressed him for an answer.Perdue was one of several lawmakers participating in a meeting with Trump last week when the president reportedly referred to immigrants from African nations, El Salvador and Haiti as coming from "shithole countries."
  • Trump allies see 's***hole' controversy as overblownTrump allies see 's***hole' controversy as overblownPlay VideoPlayMute0:00/0:43Loaded: 0%0:00Progress: 0%Stream TypeLIVE-0:43 SharePlayback Rate1xChaptersChaptersDescriptionsdescriptions off, selectedCaptions
  • "Following comments by the President, I said my piece directly to him yesterday. The President and all those attending the meeting know what I said and how I feel. I've always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals," Graham said. 
ecfruchtman

After Bannon: the new faces of the hard right | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ve-bannon-new-faces-hard-right

shared by ecfruchtman on 13 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Stephen Miller, White House senior adviser for policy
  • Miller has been pushing to stop any deal with advocates of immigration reform and shares Bannon’s advocacy of “economic nationalism”.
  • Matt Boyle, Washington editor, Breitbart News
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  • In a reference to the NFL, he has described himself as Tom Brady to Bannon’s Bill Belichick.
  • Raheem Kassam, London editor, Breitbart News
  • Kassam has also taken the opportunity to throw bombs on the other side of the Atlantic, defending Trump’s “shithole” comment by telling Sky News that London had become “a shithole” under Sadiq Khan.
  • Tucker Carlson, Fox News host
  • Carlson, the well groomed son of a former US ambassador, represents economic nationalism with a preppy face. He has long gleefully engaged in the culture wars that animated Bannon, targeting campus leftists and establishment Republicans with glee.
  • Benny Johnson, reporter-at-large, Daily Caller
  • Johnson, who has served stints at BuzzFeed and the Independent Journal Review, has long crafted a reputation for driving conservatives to click on his stories and pushing them to go viral with headlines such as: “Sarah Sanders Just Burned CNN So Bad The Briefing Room Let Out An Audible Gasp.”
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