Japan, the need for strong emotional unity has also resulted in an inability to criticize others openly. As a consequence, the development of ambiguity can be viewed as a defining characteristic of the Japanese style of communication: Japanese conversation does not take the form of dialectic development. The style of conversation is almost always fixed from beginning to end depending on the human relationship. It is one-way, like a lecture, or an inconclusive argument going along parallel lines or making a circle round and round, and in the end still ending up mostly at the beginning. This style
2More
55More
shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 18
- No Cached
Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Culture (Roger J. Davies and Osamu I... - 0 views
DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/27e0f1978b39d4041a3510efda2c0c8b
Japan history culture language book notes values
![](/images/link.gif)
-
To express oneself distinctly carries the assumption that one’s partner knows nothing, so clear expression can be considered impolite.
-
own customs. Japanese people, too, have their own opinions, but they tend to wait their turn to speak out. If they completely disagree with a speaker, they will usually listen with an air of acceptance at first, then disagree in a rather vague and roundabout way. This is considered the polite way to do things in Japan. On
- ...52 more annotations...
-
In Japan, however, if you go against someone and create a bad atmosphere, your relations may break off completely. People tend to react emotionally, and most are afraid of being excluded from the group.
-
For the Japanese, silence indicates deep thinking or consideration, but too much silence often makes non-Japanese uncomfortable. Whereas the Japanese consider silence as rather good and people generally feel sympathetic toward it, non-Japanese sometimes feel that it is an indication of indifference or apathy.
-
The concept of amae greatly affects all aspects of Japanese life because it is related to other characteristics of the Japanese way of thinking, such as enryo (restraint), giri (social obligation), tsumi (sin), haji (shame) (Doi, 1973, pp. 33–48).
-
In other words, in the inner circle, amae is at work and there is no enryo, in the middle zone enryo is present, and in the outer circle, which is the world of strangers, there is neither amae nor enryo.
-
they feel giri (obligation) when others, toward whom they have enryo (restraint), show kindness to them. However, they do not express their appreciation as much to people they are close to and with whom they can amaeru
-
Japanese have difficulty saying no, in contrast to Westerners, who are able to do so more easily. The reason for this is that Japanese relationships, which are based on amae, are unstable (Doi; cited in Sahashi, 1980, p. 79); that is, people hesitate to refuse others for fear of breaking this bond. Doi insists that Westerners can refuse easily because amae is not at work in their relationships
-
Hirayama and Takashina (1994, pp. 22–23) state, for example, that the Japanese sense of beauty is based on a concept known as mono no aware, a kind of aesthetic value that comes from feelings, while in Western art, people try to construct something of beauty with a logic of what is beautiful. In contrast, Japanese art focuses not on what is logically considered beautiful, but on what people feel is beautiful. The Japanese aesthetic is very subjective, and there are no absolute criteria as to what this should be.
-
Aware is thus connected to feelings of regret for things losing their beauty, and paradoxically finding beauty in their opposite. Moreover, anything can ultimately be appreciated as beautiful in Japan, and what is beautiful depends upon people’s subjective point of view.
-
ma is an empty space full of meaning, which is fundamental to the Japanese arts and is present in many fields, including painting, architecture, music, and literature.
-
The Japanese have long treated silence as a kind of virtue similar to “truthfulness.” The words haragei and ishin denshin symbolize Japanese attitudes toward human interactions in this regard. The former means implicit mutual understanding; the latter suggests that people can communicate with each other through telepathy. In short, what is important and what is true in Japan will often exist in silence, not in verbal expression.
-
uchi-soto, or inner and outer duality. Lebra (1987, p. 345) provides an explanation: [The Japanese] believe that the truth lies only in the inner realm as symbolically located in the heart or belly. Components of the outer self, such as face, mouth, spoken words, are in contrast, associated with cognitive and moral falsity. Truthfulness, sincerity, straightforwardness, or reliability are allied to reticence. Thus a man of few words is trusted more than a man of many words.
-
Zen training is designed to teach that truth cannot be described verbally, but can exist only in silence. Traditional Japanese arts and the spirit of dō (the “way” or “path”) reflect this characteristic silence.
-
Otoko-masari means a woman who is superior to men physically, spiritually, and intellectually. However, despite this literal meaning of “a woman who exceeds men,” it often sounds negative in Japanese because it carries a connotation of lacking femininity, and such women are usually disliked.
-
Zen emphasizes that all human beings originally possess the Buddha-nature within themselves and need only the actual experience of it to achieve enlightenment (satori). This is a state that is seen as a liberation from man’s intellectual nature, from the burden of fixed ideas and feelings about reality: “Zen always aims at grasping the central fact of life, which can never be brought to the dissecting table of the intellect” (Suzuki, 1964,
-
For the Zen master, the best way to express one’s deepest experiences is by the use of paradoxes that transcend opposites (e.g., “Where there is nothing, there is all” or “To die the great death is to gain the great life”). These sayings illustrate two irreducible Zen dilemmas—the inexpressibility of truth in words, and that “opposites are relational and so fundamentally harmonious” (Watts, 1957, p. 175).
-
In all forms of activity, Zen emphasizes the importance of acting naturally, gracefully, and spontaneously in whatever task one is performing, an attitude that has greatly influenced all forms of cultural expression in Japan.
-
All practice takes place in an atmosphere of quietude, obedience, and respect, mirroring the absolute obedience and respect of the master-student relationship.
-
Common expressions in Japanese reflect these steps: kata ni hairu (follow the form), kata ni jukutatsu suru (perfect the form), and kata kara nukeru (go beyond the form).
-
moves must be repeated thousands of times and perfected before new techniques may be learned. The purpose of such discipline is “not only to learn new skills but also to build good character and a sense of harmony in the disciple” (Niki et al., 1993, p.
-
Japanese mothers, who “apparently do not make explicit demands on their children and do not enforce rules when children resist. Yet, diverse accounts suggest that Japanese children strongly internalize parental, group, and institutional values”
-
Sen no Rikyu transformed the tea ceremony in the sixteenth century with an aesthetic principle known as wabi, or the contrast of refinement, simplicity, and rusticity. He advocated the use of plain, everyday Japanese utensils rather than those imported from China in the tea ceremony. Proportions and sizes were carefully chosen to harmonize perfectly with the small tearooms. Not only the utensils but the styles of the buildings and tea gardens, the order and etiquette of the ceremony were designed to be in accord with an atmosphere in which the goal was to perfect one’s existence without self-indulgence. Thus, the ideas of simplicity, perfection, discipline, and harmony with nature, which are central to the Zen way of life, are also reflected in sadō.
-
Reischauer (1988, p. 200) concurs: The Japanese have always seemed to lean more toward intuition than reason, to subtlety and sensitivity in expression rather than to clarity of analysis, to pragmatism rather than to theory, and to organizational skills rather than to great intellectual concepts. They have never set much store by clarity of verbal analysis and originality of thought. They put great trust in nonverbal understanding and look on oral or written skills and on sharp and clever reasoning as essentially shallow and possibly misleading. They value in their literature not clear analysis, but artistic suggestiveness and emotional feeling. The French ideal of simplicity and absolute clarity in writing leaves them unsatisfied. They prefer complexity and indirection as coming closer to the truth.
-
a discussion on the subject, scholars, journalists, and graduate students from other countries who know the Japanese and Japanese culture well provided expressions that are close to gambaru in their mother tongues, such as a ushalten, beharren, and beharrung in German; tiens bon in French; a guante in Spanish; and chā yo in Chinese.
-
Both Chinese and Korean have the characters that make up gambaru, but they do not have expressions that possess the same nuances. This suggests that gambaru is an expression that is unique to Japan and expresses certain qualities of the Japanese character.
-
There are some expressions that are often used in America but seldom in Japan, such as “take it easy.” Americans say to a person who is busy working, “take it easy” or “don’t work too hard”; in contrast, the Japanese say “gambatte ” (or work hard) as a sign of encouragement. Americans, of course, also think that it necessary to be diligent, but as the proverb says, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” suggesting that working too hard is not good for you.
-
giri involves caring for others from whom one has received a debt of gratitude and a determination to realize their happiness, sometimes even by self-sacrificing. (Gillespie & Sugiura, 1996, p. 150)
-
Giri can perhaps best be understood as a constellation of related meanings, the most important of which are as follows: (1) moral principles or duty, (2) rules one has to obey in social relationships, and (3) behavior one is obliged to follow or that must be done against one’s will (Matsumura, 1988, p.
-
the cost of ochūgen and oseibo gifts is almost equivalent to the cost of justice in the USA, meaning that the cost of keeping harmony in human relations and that of mediating legal disputes is almost the same.
-
A Japanese dictionary (cited in Matsumoto, 1988, p. 20) describes haragei as follows: (1) the verbal or physical action one employs to influence others by the potency of rich experience and boldness, and (2) the act of dealing with people or situations through ritual formalities and accumulated experience. In other words, haragei is a way of exchanging feelings and thoughts in an implicit way among the Japanese.
-
Honne and tatemae are another related set of concepts that are linked to haragei. “These terms are often used as contrasting yet complementary parts of a whole, honne being related to the private, true self, and tatemae typifying the public persona and behavior. Honne then has to do with real intentions and sincere feelings, while tatemae conveys the face the world sees” (Matsumoto, 1988, p. 18). People in Japan are implicitly taught from a young age how to use honne and tatemae properly, and these concepts are important in maintaining face and not hurting the feelings of others; therefore, what a speaker says is not always what he or she really means. intentions and sincere feelings, while tatemae conveys the face the world sees” (Matsumoto, 1988, p. 18). People in Japan are implicitly taught from a young age how to use honne and tatemae properly,
-
those who cannot use these concepts effectively are not considered to be good communicators, because they may hurt others or make a conversation unpleasant by revealing honne at the wrong moment.
-
In high-context cultures most of the information lies either in the setting or people who are part of the interaction. Very little information is actually contained in a verbal message. In low-context cultures, however, the verbal message contains most of the information and very little is embedded in the context or the participants. (Samovar & Porter, 1995,
-
Personal space in Japanese human relationships can be symbolized by two words that describe both physical and psychological distance between individuals: hedataru and najimu. Hedataru means “to separate one thing from another, to set them apart,” and it is also used in human relationships with such nuances as “to estrange, alienate, come between, or cause a rupture between friends.” A relationship between two persons without hedatari means they are close. On the other hand, najimu means “to become attached to, become familiar with, or used to.” For instance, if one says that students “najimu ” their teacher, it means that they become attached to and have close feelings for the teacher.
-
Relationships are established through hedataru and then deepened by najimu, and in this process, three stages are considered important: maintaining hedatari (the noun form of the verb hedataru), moving through hedatari, and deepening friendship by najimu.
-
Underlying these movements are the Japanese values of restraint and self-control. In Japan, relationships are not built by insisting strongly on one’s own point of view but require time, a reserved attitude, and patience.
-
In the seventh century, Prince Shotoku, who was a nephew of Emperor Suiko, occupied the regency and discovered a way of permitting Buddhism and the emperor system to coexist, along with another belief system adopted from China, Confucianism. He stated that “Shinto is the trunk, Buddhism is the branches, and Confucianism is the leaves” (Sakaiya, 1991, p. 140). By following this approach, the Japanese were able to accept these new religions and philosophies, and the cultural values and advanced techniques that came with them, in such a way that they were able to reconcile their theoretical contradictions.
-
Iitoko-dori, then, refers specifically to this process of accepting convenient parts of different, and sometimes contradictory, religious value systems, and this practice has long been widespread in Japan. In modern times, Sakaiya (ibid., p. 144) notes that the number of Japanese people who do not admit to following some form of iitoko-dori is only about 0.5 percent of the population.
-
However, the process of iitoko-dori, which has given rise to relative rather than absolute ethical value systems, has also resulted in serious negative consequences. For example, many Japanese students will not oppose bullies and stop them from hurting weaker students.
-
In other words, in Japan, even if people know that something is wrong, it is sometimes difficult for them to defend their principles, because rather than being absolute, these principles are relative and are easily modified, depending on the situation and the demands of the larger group to which people belong.
-
The characteristics most often associated with the traditional Japanese arts are keishikika (formalization), kanzen shugi (the beauty of complete perfection), seishin shūyō (mental discipline), and tōitsu (integration and rapport with the skill). The steps that are followed are as follows: The establishment and formalization of the pattern or form (kata): every action becomes rule-bound (keishikika) The constant repetition of the pattern or form (hampuku) Mastering the pattern or form, as well as the classification of ability en route to mastery, resulting in licensing and grades (kyū and dan) Perfecting the pattern or form (kanzen shugi): the beauty of perfection Going beyond the pattern or form, becoming one with it (tōitsu)
-
It is also interesting to note the differences in this concept of “good-child identity” between Japan and America. As far as expectations for children’s mental development are concerned, Japanese mothers tend to place emphasis on manners, while with American mothers the stress is on linguistic self-expression.
-
In other words, the ideal of the “good child” in Japan is that he or she should not be self-assertive in terms of rules for living together in society, while American “good children” should have their own opinions and be able to stand by themselves.
-
In other words, Japanese mothers tend to refer to people’s feelings, or even to those of inanimate objects, to modify their child’s behavior, and this establishes the basis for making judgments for the child: Children who are taught that the reason for poor behavior has something to do with other people’s feelings tend to place their basis for judgments, or for their behavior, on the possibility of hurting others.
-
As a result, there is a constant emphasis on other people’s feelings in Japan, and parents try to teach their children from a very early age to be sensitive to this information. In Japan, people are expected to consider others first and foremost, and this is a prerequisite for proper behavior in society. It
-
A senior or an elder is called a sempai; one who is younger or subordinate is a kōhai. This sempai-kōhai dichotomy exists in virtually all Japanese corporate, educational, and governmental organizations.
-
The Japanese language has one of the most complicated honorific (keigo) systems in the world. There are basically three types of keigo: teineigo (polite speech), sonkeigo (honorific speech), and kenjōgo (humble speech). Teineigo is used in both
-
Although keigo is used to address superiors or those whom one deeply respects, it is also widely employed in talking to people one does not know well, or who are simply older than oneself. Moreover, it is common for company employees to use keigo in addressing their bosses, whether or not they feel any respect for the other on a personal level. As
-
Recently, it has been said that the younger generation cannot use keigo properly. In fact, children do not use it in addressing their parents at home, nor do students in addressing their teachers in modern Japan. Furthermore, humble forms seem to be disappearing in colloquial language and can be found today only in formal speeches, greetings, and letters.
-
Dictionaries usually suggest kenkyo as the equivalent of modesty. One Japanese dictionary states that kenkyo means sunao to hikaeme. Hikaeme gives the impression of being reserved, and sunao has a variety of meanings, including “gentle, mild, meek, obedient, submissive, docile, compliant, yielding,” and so on. Many of these adjectives in English connote a weak character, but in Japanese sunao is always seen as a compliment. Teachers often describe good students as sunaona iiko. This means that they are quiet, listen to what the teacher says, and ask no questions in class.
-
The Japanese ideal of the perfect human being is illustrated in these folktales, and this is generally a person who has a very strong will.
-
Dentsu Institute reported that only 8 percent of Japanese people surveyed said that they would maintain their own opinion even if it meant falling out with others, which was the lowest percentage in all Asian countries (“Dour and dark outlook,” 2001, p. 19).
10More
shared by Alex Trudel on 04 Jun 15
- No Cached
Hope for the best, pre-empt the worst in Middle East - Al Jazeera English - 0 views
www.aljazeera.com/...ddle-east-150603111154290.html
middle east crisis politics US obama culture policy
![](/images/link.gif)
-
We are "winning", he said. The strategy is "working" against ISIL in Syria and Iraq, "politically and militarily". Therefore, the US is going to double its efforts; it will send more arms to the Iran-supported Haider al-Abbadi government and launch more air strikes.
- ...7 more annotations...
-
The regimes' repression - bloody and sectarian - has created the conditions that nurture, motivate and strengthen extremist groups like ISIL, and pave the way towards uniting the two into one bloody and protracted "civil war" in the whole of Mesopotamia.
-
ISIL is benefiting from the break-up of fragile states, the breakdown of their bankrupt regimes, and the implosion of their societies.
-
ISIL has also benefited from violence becoming the new norm in the Middle East. After millions of casualties, the toll is rising exponentially as countless more meet similar fate, alas.
-
Once it eclipsed al-Qaeda and established itself as the new caliphate with a fixed address at the cradle of the world's civilisation, ISIL became the new magnate for religious extremism.
-
In a region of instability, uncertainty and chaos, ISIL is unmistakably steadfast and clear. It espouses clarity of doctrine (terribly violent jihad), mission (fighting infidels, heretics, and apostates), and clarity of goal (establishment of the caliphate throughout the Muslim world)
-
For all these reasons, I don't share the Obama administration's optimism. In these dark times, optimism entails a large dose of myopia, naivete or cynicism.
19More
President Biden Will Revisit Trump Rules on Campus Sexual Assault - The New York Times - 0 views
-
The Biden administration will examine regulations by Betsy DeVos that gave the force of law to rules that granted more due-process rights to students accused of sexual assault.
-
President Biden on Monday directed the Education Department to conduct an expansive review of all policies on sex and gender discrimination and violence in schools, effectively beginning his promised effort to dismantle Trump-era rules on sexual misconduct that afforded greater protections to students accused of assault.
-
WASHINGTON — President Biden on Monday directed the Education Department to conduct an expansive review of all policies on sex and gender discrimination and violence in schools, effectively beginning his promised effort to dismantle Trump-era rules on sexual misconduct that afforded greater protections to students accused of assault.
- ...16 more annotations...
-
one ordering the new education secretary to review those policies, and the other establishing a gender-focused White House policy council — Mr. Biden, an author of the Violence Against Women Act, waded into an area that has been important to him but has been politically charged for more than a decade.
-
“We’re looking for a process that does not turn us into courts, that allows us to treat both sides fairly and equally, and does not attempt to micromanage campus proceedings,” said Terry W. Hartle
-
Victims’ rights groups hailed the Obama-era rules for reversing longstanding practices on college campuses of sweeping sexual assault claims under the rug, and for extending wide-ranging protections from obstacles that had long stymied reporting of sexual assault. The guidance instituted a broad definition for what qualified as sexual harassment, discouraged cross-examination and required schools to use the lowest evidentiary standard in adjudicating claims.
-
The Trump administration’s rules have been in effect since August, and lawsuits that sought to overturn them — including one to delay them as colleges grappled with the coronavirus pandemic — have failed
-
The guidance, however, was also criticized by school administrators and due-process activists, who said it amounted to an illegal edict that incentivized schools to often err on the side of complainants. Hundreds of federal and state lawsuits have been filed by students accused of sexual misconduct since 2011, when the Obama administration issued its guidance, and dozens of students have won court cases against their colleges for violating their rights under those rules.
-
Civil liberties groups that endorsed those rules said they were concerned about how the Biden administration’s efforts would shake out for survivors and accused students alike.The Trump administration took into account more than 120,000 comments and several changes that victims’ rights groups pressed for, such as a dating violence definition, “rape shield” protections and mandating “supportive measures” for victims, even if they did not file a formal complaint.
-
“We have the tools that we have,” Ms. Klein said, “which are federal laws and the bully pulpit and clarity about our policy and values.”
-
Ms. DeVos strongly criticized Mr. Biden’s objections to the rule last spring, when he was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, telling The Washington Examiner that she was “disgusted” by his position.
-
The Biden administration’s decision to review Title IX policies also comes as states around the country introduce their own legislation to bar transgender female athletes from competing on sports teams that do not match their biological sex at birth.
-
“There are students who are raped on college campuses, and there are students who are wrongly accused, and we should not be choosing between which of those groups we wish to give justice,” Mr. Cohn said. “The one-sided rhetoric doesn’t lead us to have confidence at this point that the rights of the accused will seriously be taken into account.”
-
The Obama administration issued guidance to schools, colleges and universities that critics in and out of academia said leaned too heavily toward accusers and offered scant protections or due process for students and faculty accused of sexual harassment, assault or other misconduct. The Trump administration swept those aside and delivered the first-ever regulations on sexual misconduct, which many saw as swinging too far the other way, offering the accused too much power through guaranteed courtlike tribunals and cross-examination of accusers.
-
“The policy of this administration is that every individual, every student, is entitled to a free — a fair education free of sexual violence, and that people — all involved — have access to a fair process,” said Ms. Klein, a former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton when she was the first lady.
-
When the Trump administration’s rules were proposed, Mr. Biden said they would “return us to the days when schools swept rape and assault under the rug, and survivors were shamed into silence.”Ms. DeVos strongly criticized Mr. Biden’s objections to the rule last spring, when he was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, telling The Washington Examiner that she was “disgusted” by his position.
-
As vice president, Mr. Biden was integral to President Barack Obama’s efforts to overhaul Title IX, in part by issuing guidance that led to aggressive investigations of schools that had mishandled sexual assault complaints and threatened them with funding cuts. Rules proposed in 2018 by Betsy DeVos, the education secretary under President Donald J. Trump, wiped those out and cemented procedures that bolstered the due process rights of accused students.
-
“We’re really seeing it used as a way for schools to confuse and manipulate survivors, which is really what we’ve seen for decades,” Ms. Carson said of the DeVos rules. “Now it’s this really scary process on the books, and it gives the schools a way to say, ‘Do you really want to go through this?’”
-
“We have the tools that we have,” Ms. Klein said, “which are federal laws and the bully pulpit and clarity about our policy and values.”
8More
France and Germany 'seeking full clarity' from US and Denmark on spying report - CNN - 0 views
-
France and Germany are "seeking full clarity" on a report claiming that one of Denmark's intelligence agencies helped the United States spy on several senior European officials, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday.
-
"If the information is true," Macron said during a statement to the press following a virtual Franco-German summit , these practices are "unacceptable between allies, and even less acceptable between European allies and partners."
-
Revelations that the US National Security Agency (NSA) tapped Merkel's cellphone emerged in 2013 after former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden shared documents with The Guardian showing that a US official had handed the agency 200 phone numbers, including those of world leaders, for the agency to monitor.
- ...5 more annotations...
-
The report did not name any of the 35 world leaders that were allegedly on in the list. However, few months after the initial reports, the German government publicly said it had information that suggested the US might have monitored Merkel's cell phone.
-
Denmark's independent public service broadcaster, DR, published a report on Sunday saying that the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (FE) had launched an internal investigation in 2014 over whether the NSA used its partnership with FE, and Danish internet cables in and out of Denmark, to spy on senior European officials, according to Reuters.
-
Merkel on Monday said she agreed with French President Emmanuel Macron's assertion that wiretapping between allies was unacceptable. "Nothing has changed in our stance to the clarification given by the predecessor at the time," Merkel said, referencing the initial claims raised in 2013.
-
The DR report also found that the NSA spied on Germany's then-foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is now the country's president, and the former German opposition leader Peer Steinbrück, Reuters reported.
-
DR reported that the intelligence was gathered through an analysis of software known as Xkeyscore, developed by the NSA. Reuters reported that the agency "intercepted both calls, texts and chat messages to and from telephones of officials in the neighbouring countries," citing the DR report.
51More
shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 21
- No Cached
Reach Out and Elect Someone-Postman.pdf - 0 views
diigo.com/0kw206
Postman media politics amusing text language censorship television print tyranny power freedom
![](/images/link.gif)
-
Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America. In I 966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. "Politics," he said, "is just like show business."
-
I~ politic~ were like a sporting event, there would be several virtues to attach to its name: clarity, honesty, excellence.
-
The television commercial has been the chief instrument in(. • creating the modem methods of presenting political ideas.
- ...48 more annotations...
-
An \ American who has reached the age of forty will have seen well h ver one million television commercials in his or her lifeti~e, nd has close to another million to go before the first Social ecurity check arrives.
-
the practice of capitalism has its contradictions. I Cartels and monopolies, for example, undermine the theo,ry
-
evision commercials make hash of it. To take the simplest example: To be rationally considered, any claim-commercial ! or otherwise-~ust be made in language. More precisely, it i' must take the fomi of a proposition, for that is· the universe of II discourse from which such words as "true" apd "false" come. If that universe of discourse is discarded, then 'the application of/ empirical tests, logical analysis or any of the othtr instrum¢nts \ of reason are impotent.
-
Today, on television commercials, propositions are as. scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply_not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama-a mythology, if you will-of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamb_urgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune.
-
t has accomplished this in two ways. The first_ is by requiring its form'AQ) to be used in political ca~p~igns.
-
What the advertiser needs to know is not what l is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product .. research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
-
pear so to anyone hearing or reading it. But the commercial disdains exposition, for that takes tinie and invites argument. It is a very bad commercial indeed that engages the viewer in wondering about the validity of th~ point_ being made.
-
More9ver, commercials have the advantage of vivid visual symbols through which we may easily learn the lessons being taught. Among those lessons are that shor:t and simple messages are preferable to long and complex ones; that drama is to be preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions is better than being confronted with 1 questions about ·problems.
-
ninous form of pubhc commumcauon m our society, it was I inevitable that Americans would ac~ommo~~te themselves ,~o tl:le philosophy of television commercials. By accommodate, I mean that we accept them as a normal and plausible form of discourse. By "philosophy," I mean that the television commerl cial has embedded in it certain assumptions about the nature of communication that run counter to those of other media, espe( dally the printed word.
-
Such beli~fs would naturally have implications for our orientation to political discourse; that is to say, we may begin to accept as normal certain assumptions about the political domain that either derive from or are amplified by the tekvision commercial.
-
For example, a person who has seen one million television commercials might well believe that all political problems have fast solutions through simple measures-or ought to. Or that complex language is not to be trusted, and that all problems lend themselves to theatrical expression. Or that argument is in bad taste, and leads only to an intolerable uncertainty.
-
But what virtues attach to politics if Ronald Reagan is right? show business is not entirely ·without an idea of excellence, but its main business is to please the crowd, and its principal instrument is artifice. If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.
-
Such a: person may also come to believe that it is not necessary to draw any line between politics and other forms of social life. Just as a television commercial will use an athlete, an act<;>r, a musician, a novelist, a scientist or a countess to s~eak for the virtues (?f a product in no way within their domain of expertise, television also frees politicians from the limited field of their own expertise.
-
The commercial asks us to believe that all problems am solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry.
-
Although it may go ,too far to say that the politician-ascelebrity has, by itself, made political partie~ irrelevant, there is certainly a conspicuous correlation between the rise of the former and the decline of the latter.
-
The point is that television does not reveal whol the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by "better"
-
such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in ) executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, ._and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with "image."
-
This is the lesson of all great television commercials: TheD provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.
-
But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare 41d deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience.
-
In the shift from party politics to television ·politics, the same goal is sought. We are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor or Sena~or, but whose image is best in touching and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent.
-
The historian Carl Schorske has, in my opinion, circled closer to the truth by noting that the modem mind has grown indifferent to history because history has become useless to it; in other words, it is not obstinacy or ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the diminution of history.
-
It follows from this that hjggr¥_can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.
-
"The past is a world," Thomas Carlyle said, "and not a void of [ grey haze." But he wrote this at a time when the book was the principal medium of serious public discourse.
-
Terence Moran, I be~ lieve, lands on the target in saying that with media whose structure is biased toward furnishing images and fragments, we are deprived of access to an historical perspective. In the absence of continuity and context, he says, "bits of information cannot be integrated into an intelligent and consistent whole."·
-
A book is all history. Everything about it takes one back in time-from the way it is produced to its linear mode of exposition to the fact that the past tense is its most comfortable form of address. As no other medium before or since, the book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past. In a conversation of books, history, as Carlyle understood it, is not only a world but a living world. It is
-
We do opt refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, .it requires a contextual basis-a theory, a vision, a metaphorsomething within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.
-
But televisio. n is a ~peed-of-light me~um, a present-centered \ medium, lts grammar, so to say, penruts no access to the past. Everything presented in moving pictures is experienced as happening "now," which is why we must be told in language that a ideotape we are seeing was made months before.
-
The politics of image and instantaneous news provides no such context, is, in fact, hampered by attempts to provide any. A mirror records only what you are wearing today. It is silent about yesterday. With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.
-
"History," Henry Ford said, "is_bunk." Henry Ford was a typographic optimist. "History," the Electric Plug replies, "doesn't exist."
-
profound cultural proolem until the maturing of the Age of ·l Print. Whatever dangers th~re may be in a word that is written, such a word is a hundred times more dangerous when stamped by a press.
-
We ought also to look to Huxley, not Orwell, to understand the threat that television and other forms of imagery pose to the foundation of liberal democracy-namely, to freedom of information.
-
To paraphrase J David Riesman only slightly, in a world of printing, information is the gunpowder of the mind; hence come the censors in their austere robes to dampen the explosion.
-
Thus, Orwell envisioned that ( 1) government c:ontrol over (2) printed matter posed a serious threat for Western: democracies. He was wrong on both counts. (He was, of course, right on both counts insofar as Russia, China and other pre-electronic cultures are concerned.)
-
The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might_ be superseded by another sort of problen:i altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.
-
I merely note the fact with apprehension, as did George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, when he wrote:
-
Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch .... 6
-
What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our a.ccess to information but in fact. widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian., It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form ~ that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.
-
Tyrants of all varieties' have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusement.s as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses·would ignore that which does not amuse.
-
iri the Age of Television, our information environment is completely different from what it was in 1783; that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut;
-
That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on censorship. Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment-and cares.
-
hat, in fact, we have ~o way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.
-
How delighted would be all the kings, czars and fuhrers of the past (and commissars of. the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when ~II political discourse takes the form of a jest.
88More
The Inside Story of Michigan's Fake Voter Fraud Scandal - POLITICO - 0 views
-
In the end, it wasn’t a senator or a judge or a general who stood up to the leader of the free world. There was no dramatic, made-for-Hollywood collision of cosmic egos. Rather, the death knell of Trump’s presidency was sounded by a baby-faced lawyer, looking over his glasses on a grainy Zoom feed on a gloomy Monday afternoon, reading from a statement that reflected a courage and moral clarity that has gone AWOL from his party, pleading with the tens of thousands of people watching online to understand that some lines can never be uncrossed.
-
“We must not attempt to exercise power we simply don’t have,” declared Van Langevelde, a member of Michigan’s board of state canvassers, the ministerial body with sole authority to make official Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. “As John Adams once said, 'We are a government of laws, not men.' This board needs to adhere to that principle here today. This board must do its part to uphold the rule of law and comply with our legal duty to certify this election.”
-
As a Republican, his mandate for Monday’s hearing—handed down from the state party chair, the national party chair and the president himself—was straightforward. They wanted Michigan’s board of canvassers to delay certification of Biden’s victory. Never mind that Trump lost by more than 154,000 votes, or that results were already certified in all 83 counties. The plan was to drag things out, to further muddy the election waters and delegitimize the process, to force the courts to take unprecedented actions that would forever taint Michigan’s process of certifying elections.
- ...85 more annotations...
-
Not because it was going to help Trump win but because it was going to help Trump cope with a loss. The president was not accepting defeat. That meant no Republican with career ambitions could accept it, either.
-
At a low point in his party’s existence, with much of the GOP’s leadership class pre-writing their own political epitaphs by empowering Trump to lay waste to the country’s foundational democratic norms, an obscure lawyer from west Michigan stood on principle. It proved to be the nail in Trump’s coffin
-
Shortly after Michigan’s vote to certify, the General Services Administration finally commenced the official transition of power and Trump tweeted out a statement affirming the move “in the best interest of our Country.”
-
Still, the drama in Lansing raised deeper questions about the health of our political system and the sturdiness of American democracy
-
Why were Republicans who privately admitted Trump’s legitimate defeat publicly alleging massive fraud? Why did it fall to a little-known figure like Van Langevelde to buffer the country from an unprecedented layer of turmoil?
-
In conversations with more than two dozen Michigan insiders—elected officials, party elders, consultants, activists—it became apparent how the state’s conditions were ripe for this sort of slow-motion disaster
-
Michigan is home to Detroit, an overwhelmingly majority Black city, that has always been a favorite punching bag of white Republicans. The state had viral episodes of conflict and human error that were easily manipulated and deliberately misconstrued. It drew special attention from the highest levels of the party, and for the president, it had the potential to settle an important score with his adversary, Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer
-
Perhaps most important, Trump’s allies in Michigan proved to be more career-obsessed, and therefore more servile to his whims, than GOP officials in any other state he has cultivated during his presidency, willing to indulge his conspiratorial fantasies in ways other Republicans weren’t.
-
“Anybody can sue anybody for any reason. But winning is a whole different matter. And Trump didn’t have a realistic pathway here,” Brian Calley, the former GOP lieutenant governor, told me prior to the certification vote
-
“We have to see this for what it is. It’s a PR strategy to erode public confidence in a very well-run election to achieve political ends,” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said in an interview last week. “This was not any type of valid legal strategy that had any chance at ultimately succeeding.”
-
Strangely liberated by his deficit of 154,000 votes, the president’s efforts here were aimed not at overturning the results, but rather at testing voters’ faith in the ballot box and Republicans’ loyalty to him.
-
where he can ultimately succeed—is in convincing unprecedented numbers of Americans that their votes didn’t count. Last month, Gallup reported that the public’s confidence in our elections being accurate dropped 11 points since the 2018 midterms, which included a 34-point decrease among Republicans.
-
That was before a daily deluge of dishonest allegations and out-of-context insinuations; before the conservative media’s wall-to-wall coverage of exotic conspiracy theories; before the GOP’s most influential figures winked and nodded at the president of the United States alleging the greatest fraud in U.S. history.
-
Trump failed to win Michigan. But he succeeded in convincing America that a loss, no matter how conclusive, may never again be conclusive enough.
-
The irony of Michigan’s electoral meltdown is that Election Day, in the eyes of veteran clerks and poll workers across the state, was the smoothest it had ever been
-
“You’re talking about election officials implementing new laws, running an election with a 60 percent mail vote, in the middle of a pandemic,”
-
“In terms of voters getting the ballots processed and counted in a reasonable time period, I thought they did a marvelous job. But it was a huge challenge.”
-
There’s always this rallying cry from Republicans—‘We win everywhere else, but lose Wayne County’—that creates paranoia. I still remember hearing, back on my first campaign in 2002, that Wayne County always releases its votes last so that Detroit can see how many votes Democrats need to win the state. That’s what a lot of Republicans here believe.”
-
The Republicans—House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey—were not interested. Spooked by Trump’s continued assault on mail voting, and aware that their own members in the Legislature were distrustful of the new “no-excuse-absentee” rules, Chatfield and Shirkey weren’t inclined to do the process any favors.
-
The common expectation was that the president would lose comfortably, by at least 4 or 5 points, a margin that would render any controversy about absentee voting meaningless.
-
Michigan Republicans were gripped by equal parts euphoria and panic. It was clear Trump was running far more competitively than they’d anticipated; he was on track to win Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, three states that tally their ballots quickly, meaning the spotlight would abruptly shift to the critical, slow-counting battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
-
it wasn’t until midnight that the urgency of the situation crashed over Republicans. Trump had built a lead of nearly 300,000 votes on the strength of same-day ballots that were disproportionately favorable to him. Now, with the eyes of the nation—and of the president—fixed on their state, Michigan Republicans scrambled to protect that lead.
-
Whitmer and Benson warned the GOP leaders that a protracted counting process, especially in the scenario of a competitive election, would invite chaos. Other states Trump carried in 2016, such as Ohio and Florida, allowed for pre-canvassing of absentee and other mail-in ballots so that voters would know which candidate carried the state on election night. Why couldn’t Michigan do the same?
-
Thomas had been “thrilled” with the professionalism he’d witnessed during Monday’s pre-processing session and Tuesday’s vote tabulating. Now, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, things were going sideways. Groups of Republican poll challengers were clustering around individual counting tables in violation of the rules.
-
“Reading these affidavits afterward from these Republican poll challengers, I was just amazed at how misunderstood the election process was to them,” Thomas chuckled. “The things they said were going on—it’s like ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what was going on. That’s what’s supposed to happen.’
-
His cushion over Biden had been whittled down to 70,000 votes. There remained hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots to be counted in the large, Democratic strongholds of Detroit, Lansing and Flint. The math was simply not workable for the president. Just before 9:30 a.m., Biden overtook Trump in the tally of Michigan’s votes—and suddenly, a switch flipped on the right.
-
After 24 hours of letting the democratic process work, Republicans around the country—watching Trump’s second term slipping through their fingers—began crying foul and screaming conspiracy. No state cornered the hysteria market quite like Michigan.
-
“The people outside that room were doing exactly what the law says you would eject people for doing—they were disrupting the election,” Thomas said. “Everyone else in the room—the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the ACLU, the nonpartisans—they all still had a full complement of challengers in the room. And the Republicans, by the way, had far more challengers in the room than they were entitled to.”
-
Truly egregious was Cox’s dishonesty. At the time of her tweet, several hundred of her party’s poll challengers, attorneys and representatives were already inside the TCF Center monitoring the count
-
By law, Republicans were allowed to have 134 challengers in the room, one for each tabulation table. In reality, the GOP had far more than that, according to sworn testimony from nonpartisan poll watchers inside the TCF Center. Because of the overflow, election officials ultimately decided to lock down the complex
-
In the days following Trump’s shameful address to the nation, two realities became inescapable to Michigan’s GOP elite. First, there was zero evidence to substantiate widespread voter fraud. Second, they could not afford to admit it publicly.
-
What made this behavior all the more confounding, Thomas said, is that the election was conducted more transparently than any he’d ever participated in. Each of the 134 tables had monitors placed at the end, “showing every keystroke that was made,” so that challengers could see exactly what was happening
-
But he came to realize that none of this mattered. Having dealt with Republican poll challengers for decades, Thomas said, it was clear the people who infiltrated TCF on Wednesday were not adequately trained or there for the right reasons.
-
“Unlike the people who were there Monday and Tuesday, these people Wednesday were totally unprepared. They had no idea how the system worked. They had no idea what they were there for,” Thomas said. “Many of them—not all of them, but many of them—they were on a mission. They clearly came in believing there was mass cheating going on in Detroit and they were on a mission to catch it.”
-
When Trump addressed the nation from the White House on Thursday night, insisting the election had been “stolen” from him, he returned time and again to alleged misconduct in Michigan’s biggest city. Detroit, he smirked, “I wouldn’t say has the best reputation for election integrity.” He said the city “had hours of unexplained delay” in counting ballots, and when the late batches arrived, “nobody knew where they came from.” He alleged that Republicans had been “denied access to observe any counting in Detroit” and that the windows had been covered because “they didn’t want anybody seeing the counting.”
-
All of this was a lie. Republicans here—from Ronna Romney McDaniel to Laura Cox to federal and local lawmakers—knew it was a lie. But they didn’t lift a finger in protest as the president disparaged Michigan and subverted America’s democratic norms. Why?
-
The true insanity was saved for Detroit. By early afternoon on Wednesday, hundreds and hundreds of Republicans had descended on the TCF Center, responding to an all-hands-on-deck missive that went out from the state party and was disseminated by local officials. Cox, the party chair, tweeted out a video of her comrades standing outside the locked-up downtown building. “Republican poll challengers blocked from entering the TCF Center in Detroit! This is egregious!” she wrote.
-
Tapped by the president-elect to take over the Republican National Committee—on the not-so-subtle condition that she remove “Romney” from her professional name—McDaniel morphed into an archetype of the Trump-era GOP sycophant. There was no lie too outlandish to parrot, no behavior too unbecoming to justify, no abuse of power too flagrant to enable
-
Longtime friends worried that McDaniel wasn’t merely humiliating herself publicly; she seemed to be changing in private. She was no longer coolly detached from the passions of politics. If anything, she was turning into a true MAGA believer.
-
There was some relief, then, when in recent weeks McDaniel told multiple confidants that she doubted there was any scalable voter fraud in Michigan. Nevertheless, McDaniel told friends and fellow Republicans that she needed to stay the course with Trump and his legal team. This wasn’t about indulging him, she said, but rather about demonstrating a willingness to fight—even when the fight couldn’t be won.
-
McDaniel’s thinking is actually quite linear. The RNC will vote in January on the position of chair. She is anxious to keep her job.
-
No matter how obvious the outcome—to McDaniel, to the 168 members of the RNC, maybe even to Trump himself—any indication of surrender would be unforgivable.
-
This is why McDaniel has sanctioned her employees, beginning with top spokesperson Liz Harrington, to spread countless demonstrable falsehoods in the weeks since Election Day. It’s why the RNC, on McDaniel’s watch, tweeted out a video clip of disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell claiming Trump “won in a landslide” (when he lost by more than 6 million votes nationally) and alleging a global conspiracy to rig the election against him.
-
With Trump entering the anguished twilight of his presidency, all that appears to matter for someone like McDaniel—or Cox, the state party chair, who faces an upcoming election of her own—is unconditional fidelity to the president.
-
Both Chatfield and Shirkey are talented and ambitious, self-grooming for future runs at higher office. Both could see the obvious problems of meeting with the president at such a precarious moment—and both could also see how spurning Trump could torpedo their careers in the GOP.
-
“Frankly, continuing to humor him merely excuses his role in this. The election wasn’t stolen, he blew it. Up until the final two weeks, he seemingly did everything possible to lose. Given how close it was, there is no one to blame but Trump.”
-
“But if they want a future within the party, it is required of them to demonstrate continued fealty. Principled conservatives who respect the rule of law and speak out suddenly find themselves outcasts in a party that is no longer about conservativism but Trumpism. Just ask once-conservative heroes like Jeff Flake, Justin Amash and Mark Sanford.”
-
Monica Palmer, one of the GOP canvassers, caused an uproar when she offered to certify the rest of Wayne County—precincts like Livonia—without certifying Detroit. (Livonia, which is 95 percent white, had more poll-book irregularities than Detroit, which is 80 percent Black.)
-
Tweeting out siren emojis, Jenna Ellis, the attorney for Trump’s campaign, announced: “BREAKING: This evening, the county board of canvassers in Wayne County, MI refused to certify the election results. If the state board follows suit, the Republican state legislator will select the electors. Huge win for @realDonaldTrump.”
-
the notion that legislators would under any circumstance be free to send their own partisans to the Electoral College had no basis in fact. Under Michigan statute, the only electors eligible to represent Michigan are those who will vote for the winner of the popular vote. There is no discretion for anyone—the governor, leaders of the legislature, canvassers at the county or state level—to do anything but follow the law.
-
“The unfortunate reality within the party today is that Trump retains a hold that is forcing party leaders to continue down the path of executing his fantasy of overturning the outcome—at their own expense,”
-
precautions were taken. In a savvy move, Chatfield and Shirkey prepared a letter addressing concerns over funding to deal with Covid-19 in Michigan. They also brought along their general counsels. These two maneuvers—one to soothe the outcry over Michigan lawmakers meeting with a president whose legal team was calling for them to overturn the state’s election results; the other to insulate them from improper discussions about doing exactly that—were sufficient to sidestep any major crisis.
-
Trump, perhaps sensing the nervous reticence of his guests, did not make the ask they feared. As the meeting went on, it became apparent to some people in the room that more than anything, Trump had called his Michigan allies to Washington to get an honest assessment of what had happened there. He wanted to know if there was any pathway to victory. They told him there was not.
-
“I don’t get it,” the president said, venting confusion and frustration. “All these other Republicans, all over the country, they all win their races. And I’m the only guy that loses?”
-
With all 83 counties boasting certified results, the only thing that stood between Joe Biden and his rightful claim to Michigan’s 16 electoral votes was certification from the state board of canvassers. In a rational political climate, this would not have been the subject of suspense. But the swirling innuendo and disinformation had long ago swept away any semblance of normalcy.
-
Already, one of the board’s two Republicans, Norm Shinkle, a career party fixture, had hinted he would not vote to certify the state’s result. Because the two Democrats would obviously vote in favor of certification, a manic gush of attention turned to the other Republican member, Aaron Van Langevelde.
-
By Sunday morning, speculation was rampant that Van Langevelde would resign from the board on Monday. This made perfect sense to Republicans and Democrats alike: Based on their fact-finding mission into the mysterious fourth board member, Van Langevelde was a bookish type, a rule follower, an obsessive student of world history (particularly the Roman Empire) who believes to his core in a conservative application of the law
-
He would be inclined, Lansing insiders figured, to vote in favor of certifying the results. But he would be disinclined to throw away his future in the Republican Party. A resignation from the board was his only way out.
-
Working off this expectation, a late lobbying blitz turned on Shinkle. In the 36 hours preceding Monday’s vote, he was inundated with calls and emails and text messages from high-ranking Republican luminaries around the state. Some, such as former congressman and House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers, urged him to certify the results in accordance with Michigan law. Others, including McDaniel and Cox and other state party figures, pleaded with Shinkle to stand his ground and insist on a two-week delay.
-
The response they got was universal: He would promise to “do my best,” then he would offer a litany of unsubstantiated allegations of fraud. (Not everyone bothered contacting Shinkle: That his wife served as a plaintiff’s witness in Trump’s ill-fated lawsuit against Detroit struck many people not just as a conflict of interest, but as a clear indication he would never vote to certify.)
-
Some Republicans didn’t want to believe it. But for others, reality began to set in. They had grown so accustomed to Republicans falling in line, bending a knee to Trumpism, that the notion of someone acting on his own personal ethic had become foreign.
-
But the more they learned about Van Langevelde, the more he sounded like just that type of independent thinker. Some viewed his relative youth as an asset, believing he wouldn’t risk throwing away his future in the party. What they had failed to appreciate was that young conservatives were oftentimes the most disillusioned with the party’s drift from any intellectual or philosophical mooring.
-
Like a good attorney, Van Langevelde meticulously questioned a number of expert guest speakers to ascertain if they had dissenting views of the board’s authority under state law. Time and again, they affirmed his position. The body did not have power to audit or investigate or recount; that could be done only by distinct bodies after certification was complete. The job of the board of state canvassers was narrowly to examine the certified results from all 83 counties and then, based on the relevant vote totals, certify a winner of Michigan’s 16 electoral votes. The one time he was challenged—by Spies, the political superlawyer representing John James’ U.S. Senate campaign—Van Langevelde calmly brushed his recommendations aside, telling Spies, “I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with you on that.”
-
Within minutes of Van Langevelde’s vote for certification—and of Shinkle’s abstention, which guaranteed his colleague would bear the brunt of the party’s fury alone—the fires of retaliation raged. In GOP circles, there were immediate calls for Van Langevelde to lose his seat on the board; to lose his job in the House of Representatives; to be censured on the floor of the Legislature and exiled from the party forever. Actionable threats against him and his family began to be reported. The Michigan State Police worked with local law enforcement to arrange a security detail.
-
ll for doing his job. All for upholding the rule of law. All for following his conscience and defying the wishes of Donald Trump.
-
“It took a lot of courage for him to do what he thought was right and appropriate, given the amount of pressure he was under,” said Brian Calley, the GOP former lieutenant governor, who told me days earlier that he had never heard the name Aaron Van Langevelde. “He carried himself as well as anybody I’ve seen in that type of setting, including people with decades and decades of experience. He showed an awful lot of poise.”
-
The name Van Langevelde is already so infamous in Michigan Republican lore that those associated with him are at risk of being branded turncoats, too.
-
because of the sweeping transformation of the party—not just ideologically or stylistically, but mechanically, with MAGA loyalists now installed in state and local leadership posts across the country—the question of loyalty will continue to define the Republican identity for years to come.
-
That contours of that identity—what it means to be a Trump Republican—have gained clarity over time. The default embrace of nationalism. The indifference to ideas as a vision for governing. The disregard for institutional norms. The aversion to etiquette and the bottomless appetite for cultural conflict. Now there is another cornerstone of that identity: The subversion of our basic democratic process.
-
More than any policy enacted or court vacancy filled, Trump’s legacy will be his unprecedented assault on the legitimacy of the ballot box
-
Future iterations of the GOP will make casual insinuations of voter fraud central to the party’s brand. The next generation of Republicans will have learned how to sow doubts about election integrity in one breath and in the next breath bemoan the nation’s lack of faith in our elections, creating a self-perpetuating justification to cast suspicion on a process that by raw numbers does not appear conducive to keeping them in power.
-
“This is not some whacked-out fringe,” James said in one taping. “When half the votes in our state believe we just had the most secure election in U.S. history, and the other half believe they were cheated, we have a problem.”
-
James is right. We do have a problem. Our elections continue to be underfunded. Our election bureaus are chronically understaffed. Our election workers are badly undertrained. Our elections are prone to a significant amount of human error—and any municipal or county clerk will tell you that concerns over not catching those errors keep them up at night.
-
But errors are not fraud. And when James says he’s troubled that half of Michigan’s voters feel they were cheated, he would do well to remember that he was the one telling them they got cheated in the first place.
-
there is no denying the advent of a pattern. Republicans in Michigan and across America have spent the past three weeks promoting baseless allegations of corruption at the ballot box, the rabid responses to which they use as justification to continue to question the fundamental integrity of our elections. It’s a vicious new playbook—one designed to stroke egos and rationalize defeats, but with unintended consequences that could spell the unraveling of America’s democratic experiment.
-
“By capriciously throwing around these false claims, you can’t get to the heart of a really important issue. In fact, you lose any credibility to get to the heart of that issue,”
-
“And by the way, if you’re going to do an audit, you’d better do it statewide. This is not just a Detroit thing. There are sloppy Republican precincts all over the state.
-
There is no immediate way to make Americans appreciate this distinction, no instant cure for the flagging confidence in our elections.
-
there are obvious incremental steps to take in the name of transparency and efficiency. First among them, acknowledged Chatfield, the Michigan House speaker, is getting rid of the rules that led to the TCF Center circus in the first place.
-
one of the items where we should look at other states and see how they’ve done it well, is regarding the early processing of absentee ballots. We mishandled that this year. We should have allowed for early processing. We didn’t, and it became a spectacle.
-
For those Republicans left to pick up the pieces in the coming legislative session, there may be little incentive for bipartisan cooperation on a subject that now divides the two party bases as starkly as gun rights or tax rates. The backlash against absentee voting from Republican constituents was already fierce; in the wake of Trump’s defeat and the TCF Center conspiracies, Republicans might find it beneficial to avoid raising the issue at all.
-
There is little cause for optimism. If the majority of GOP politicians couldn’t be bothered to do the easy work of debunking crackpot conspiracy theories, how likely are they to do the hard work of hardening our democracy?
-
“A lot of our leaders in this country ought to be ashamed of themselves,” said Thomas, the nonpartisan elections guru who kept Michigan’s governing class guessing his political affiliation for the past several decades. “They have propagated this narrative of massive fraud, and it’s simply not true. They’ve leapt from some human error to massive fraud. It’s like a leap to Never Neverland. And people are believing them.
-
“The people of this country really need to wake up and start thinking for themselves and looking for facts—not conspiracy theories being peddled by people who are supposed to be responsible leaders, but facts,” Thomas said. “If they’re not going to be responsible leaders, people need to seek out the truth for themselves. If people don’t do that—if they no longer trust how we elect the president of the United States—we’re going to be in real trouble.”
5More
Greece's Tangled Land Ownership Is a Hurdle in Recovery - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
Not long ago Leonidas Hamodrakas, a lawyer in Athens, decided to pay closer attention to his family’s land holdings
-
No clarity on boundaries or zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered ownership of the same property.
-
As Greece tries to claw its way out of an economic crisis of historic proportions, one that has left 60 percent of young people without jobs, many experts cite the lack of a proper land registry as one of the biggest impediments to progress.
- ...2 more annotations...
-
Since then, Greece has tried, and tried again. But still, less than 7 percent of the country has been properly mapped, officials say.
-
Boundaries can be the “three olive trees near the well” or the spot “where you can hear a donkey on the path.”
2More
U.K. Economy Can't Shrug Off Brexit Forever - WSJ - 0 views
-
The U.K. economy hasn’t been knocked off course by Brexit yet. That will curb the Bank of England’s appetite for action for now.
-
That is likely to push inflation up further and faster than the BOE had been expecting. It is also likely to lead to real wages being squeezed again in 2017—a painful prospect for U.K. consumers. The lack of clarity over the shape and form of Brexit is likely to weigh on investment too.
7More
Dow Closes Above 19000 for First Time - WSJ - 0 views
-
. It was Nov. 4 when the blue-chip index last closed below 18000. Since then, a rally following the U.S. presidential election has benefited, in particular, the shares of industrial companies and banks, bolstering the Dow.
-
In January, worries about slowing economic growth in China and its possible spillover effects sent the blue-chip index to its worst-ever five-day start to a year.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
The strength in the recent rally belies the lack of clarity about the policy implications of a Trump administration, some analysts say.
-
The dollar—which had rallied for 10 consecutive sessions through Monday as investors bet on U.S. growth—inched higher again Tuesday.
-
Some of that selling pressure eased Tuesday. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note fell to 2.319% from 2.335% Monday. That compares with a close of 1.867% on Election Day.
3More
Trump's attack on John Lewis is the essence of narcissism - The Washington Post - 0 views
-
Trump seems to have no feel for, no interest in, the American story he is about to enter. He will lead a nation that accommodated a cruel exception to its founding creed; that bled and nearly died to recover its ideals; and that was only fully redeemed by the courage and moral clarity of the very people it had oppressed. People like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. People like John Lewis.
-
The only organizing principle is the degree of deference to Trump himself. It is the essence of narcissism.
-
A broader conception of the American story — a respect for the heroes and ghosts of our history — is absent in Trump’s public voice. He seems to be in the thrall of an eternal now. To some, the whole idea of a historical imagination will sound nebulous. Abraham Lincoln called it the “mystic chords of memory.” He hung his hopes for unity on the existence of a shared national experience that transcended regional differences. Today our divisions are more along lines of class and culture, but we also need to hear our story as one people.
12More
shared by Javier E on 02 Jan 17
- No Cached
Leave Your Laptops at the Door to My Classroom - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...-the-door-to-my-classroom.html
learning laptop tech classroom focus listening notetaking
![](/images/link.gif)
-
Laptops at best reduce education to the clackety-clack of transcribing lectures on shiny screens and, at worst, provide students with a constant escape from whatever is hard, challenging or uncomfortable about learning.
-
Lawyers can acquire hallmark precision only through repeated exercises of concentration. It does happen on occasion that a client loses millions of dollars over a misplaced comma or period.Once, a senior associate for whom I was working berated me for such a mistake and said, “Getting these things right is the easy part, and if you can’t get that right, what does it say about your ability to analyze the law properly?” I learned my lesson
- ...9 more annotations...
-
We must listen with care, which requires patience, focus, eye contact and managing moments of ennui productively — perhaps by double-checking one’s notes instead of a friend’s latest Instagram. Multitasking and the mediation of screens kill empathy.
-
The student who speaks in class learns to convey his or her points effectively because everyone else is listening.
-
education requires constant interaction in which professor and students are fully present for an exchange.
-
To restore the focus-training function of the classroom, I stopped allowing laptops in class early in my teaching career. Since then research has confirmed the wisdom of my choice.
-
Focus is crucial, and we do best when monotasking: Even disruptions of a few seconds can derail one’s train of thought
-
Students process information better when they take notes — they don’t just transcribe, as they do with laptops, but they think and record those thoughts. Laptops or tablets can undermine exam performance by 18 percent.
-
For all these reasons, starting with smaller classes, I banned laptops, and it improved the students’ engagement. With constant eye contact, I could see and feel when they understood me, and when they did not.
-
You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. My students need to learn how to be lawyers and professionals. To succeed they must internalize an ethos of caution, care and respect. To instill these values and skills in my students, I have no choice but to limit laptop use in the classroom.
1More
Of Courts And Confusion: Here's The Reaction To Trump's Immigration Freeze - 0 views
-
By the time the sun rose on Sunday in the U.S., the chaotic weekend set in motion by Trump's executive order on immigration was beginning to give way to greater clarity - in some respects, at least. That order - which temporarily bars citizens from seven largely Muslim countries, as well as all refugees, from entering the U.S.
18More
Donald Trump's Christian Soldiers - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Of all the reasons it once seemed unthinkable that Donald J. Trump might be the Republican nominee, one of the strongest was the G.O.P.’s reputation as the party of religious conservatives.
-
Trump was a different kind of figure: Not merely lukewarm or unorthodox, but a proud flouter of the entire Judeo-Christian code — a boastful adulterer and a habitual liar, a materialist and a sensualist, a greedy camel without even the slightest interest in squeezing through the needle’s eye
-
And yet: Despite his transparent irreligiosity, Trump has won easily across the South, one of the most religious portions of the country. Among both self-identified evangelicals and Catholics, he’s consistently polled as well as the evangelical Ted Cruz and the Roman Catholic Marco Rubio.
- ...15 more annotations...
-
This week two influential conservative Catholic scholars, Robert George and George Weigel, put out an open letter to their co-believers, urging them to reject Trump as “manifestly unfit to be president of the United States.”
-
Trump is not the first choice of most active churchgoers. Indeed, active religiosity is (relatively speaking) one of the bulwarks against Trumpism, and his coalition is strongest among the most secular Republicans
-
As with the wider conservative coalition, Trump is heightening conservative religion’s internal contradictions and fracturing it along pre-existing fault lines
-
Trump is losing the most active believers, but he’s winning in what I’ve previously termed the “Christian penumbra” — the areas of American society (parts of the South very much included) where active religiosity has weakened, but a Christian-ish residue remains.
-
The inhabitants of this penumbra still identify with Christianity, but they lack the communities, habits and support structures that make the religious path (somewhat) easier to walk. As a result, this Christian-ish landscape seems to produce more social dysfunction, more professional disappointment and more personal disarray than either a thoroughgoing secularism or a fully practiced faith
-
his occasional nods to religious faith — like, say, his promise to make store clerks say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” — are well tailored for voters for whom Christian identity is still a talisman even when an active faith is all but gone.
-
among Americans who do still have an active faith, Trump has exploited the widening gap between what many conservative Christians assumed about the relationship between their country and their faith, and what the last 10 years or more of social and political change have revealed about the nation’s drift
-
Evangelicals have for decades believed that the country was more conservative than not, more Christian than not. The bipartisanship on religious liberty and the civic faith of the country was conducive to that. Now they’ve woken up to a reality in the Obama years that this was a polite fiction.
-
If this is really a post-Christian society, they seem to be thinking, then Christians need to make sure the meanest, toughest heathen on the block is on their side. So it makes sense to join an alliance of convenience with a strongman, placing themselves under his benevolent protection, because their own leaders have delivered them only to defeat.
-
the lure of the strongman is particularly powerful for those believers whose theology was somewhat Trumpian already — nationalistic, prosperity-worshiping, by turns apocalyptic and success-obsessed.
-
With the steady post-1960s weakening of traditional Christian confessions, the preachers of this kind of gospel — this distinctively American heresy, really — have assumed a new prominence in the religious landscape. Trump, with his canny instinct for where to drive the wedge, has courted exactly these figures
-
he’s wooed televangelists and prosperity preachers, and pitched himself to believers already primed to believe that a meretricious huckster with unusual hair might be a vessel of the divine will.
-
Which he is not, save perhaps in this sense: In the light of Trumpism, many hard truths about American Christianity — its divisions, its failures, its follies, its heresies — stand ruthlessly exposed.
14More
shared by Javier E on 10 Jun 12
-
Cached
Essay-Grading Software, as Teacher's Aide - Digital Domain - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...chers-aide-digital-domain.html
writing teaching essay evaluation computer automation software program
![](/images/link.gif)
![](/images/uploaded-cache.png)
-
AS a professor and a parent, I have long dreamed of finding a software program that helps every student learn to write well. It would serve as a kind of tireless instructor, flagging grammatical, punctuation or word-use problems, but also showing the way to greater concision and clarity.
-
The standardized tests administered by the states at the end of the school year typically have an essay-writing component, requiring the hiring of humans to grade them one by one.
-
the Hewlett Foundation sponsored a study of automated essay-scoring engines now offered by commercial vendors. The researchers found that these produced scores effectively identical to those of human graders.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
humans are not necessarily ideal graders: they provide an average of only three minutes of attention per essa
-
We are talking here about providing a very rough kind of measurement, the assignment of a single summary score on, say, a seventh grader’s essay
-
“A few years back, almost all states evaluated writing at multiple grade levels, requiring students to actually write,” says Mark D. Shermis, dean of the college of education at the University of Akron in Ohio. “But a few, citing cost considerations, have either switched back to multiple-choice format to evaluate or have dropped writing evaluation altogether.”
-
As statistical models for automated essay scoring are refined, Professor Shermis says, the current $2 or $3 cost of grading each one with humans could be virtually eliminated, at least theoretically.
-
As essay-scoring software becomes more sophisticated, it could be put to classroom use for any type of writing assignment throughout the school year, not just in an end-of-year assessment. Instead of the teacher filling the essay with the markings that flag problems, the software could do so. The software could also effortlessly supply full explanations and practice exercises that address the problems — and grade those, too.
-
the cost of commercial essay-grading software is now $10 to $20 a student per year. But as the technology improves and the costs drop, he expects that it will be incorporated into the word processing software that all students use
-
“Providing students with instant feedback about grammar, punctuation, word choice and sentence structure will lead to more writing assignments,” Mr. Vander Ark says, “and allow teachers to focus on higher-order skills.”
-
When sophisticated essay-evaluation software is built into word processing software, Mr. Vander Ark predicts “an order-of-magnitude increase in the amount of writing across the curriculum.”
-
the essay-scoring software that he and his teammates developed uses relatively small data sets and ordinary PCs — so the additional infrastructure cost for schools could be nil.
-
the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation sponsored a competition to see how well algorithms submitted by professional data scientists and amateur statistics wizards could predict the scores assigned by human graders. The winners were announced last month — and the predictive algorithms were eerily accurate.
-
wanted to create a neutral and fair platform to assess the various claims of the vendors. It turns out the claims are not hype.”
6More
Scott Anderson's 'Lawrence in Arabia' Revisits Legends - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
This was a time when the seed was planted for the Arab world “to define itself less by what it aspires to become than what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms.”
-
Clarity was hard to find, and so, after such wanton loss of life, were victors. But heroes were needed, and here was a shoo-in.
-
Mr. Anderson’s thoughtful, big-picture version only enriches the story it tells. “Lawrence in Arabia” emphasizes the Gordian difficulties facing any strategist
- ...3 more annotations...
-
He illustrates how difficult it was to have any foresight at all, let along to see clearly, and he reserves his greatest interest for players whose imaginations were most fertile. Lawrence was the best and most eloquent of these manipulators, but he was by no means alone.
-
Mr. Anderson is especially illuminating about Lawrence’s purely political gifts: his way of anticipating the fallout from strategic or military maneuvers, his “peculiar skill at polite belligerence,” his no-nonsense powers of description.
-
Yes, it was history à la Hollywood, with moments of clear exaggeration. But its effort to depict Lawrence, his military raids, the tribal leaders with whom he dealt, the inept British military effort and the sly French diplomatic one are all shown by this book to be unusually faithful to the facts. It’s high praise for both the visually grand film and this grandly ambitious book to say that they do have a lot in common.
1More
shared by Javier E on 14 May 14
- No Cached
Vatican Dialogue: 'Man is a Technical Giant and an Ethical Child' - NYTimes.com - 0 views
dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...cal-giant-and-an-ethical-child
vatican dialogue technical ethics sustainable development
![](/images/link.gif)
-
there was a constructive search for clarity. After Sachs spoke of the importance of fostering a “global ethics,” Stefano Zamagni, an economics professor at the University of Bologna, cautioned that it was important to qualify such statements. “When we talk about ethics we mean different things,” he said, rattling off a list of ethical frames ranging from utilitarian to neo-contractualist.
9More
Criticism of United States' Mideast Policy Increasingly Comes From Allies - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
As the United States grapples with some of the most intractable problems in the Middle East, it has run into a buzz saw of criticism, not from traditional enemies but from two of its strongest allies.
-
And during a stop in Rome, Mr. Kerry sought to reassure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel that the Obama administration would not drop its guard in the newly invigorated nuclear talks with Iran.
-
But the criticism by Saudi officials has been the most vehement, as they have waged a campaign against the United States’ policy in the Middle East in private comments to diplomats and reporters, as well as in public remarks by a former intelligence official.
- ...6 more annotations...
-
Beyond criticism, the Saudis have been working against American policy in Egypt by providing billions of dollars in assistance to the authorities in Cairo, which has more than made up for aid the United States has withheld after the Egyptian military deposed Mr. Morsi. Mr. Kerry and other American officials have insisted that the United States was right to work with Mr. Morsi after he took office as the duly elected president.
-
Some Middle East experts said that the unease over American policy went beyond the details of the United States’ position on Syria or a potential nuclear deal with Iran
-
There is a lot of confusion and lack of clarity amongst U.S. allies in the Middle East regarding Washington’s true intentions and ultimate objectives,”
-
“There is also widespread unease throughout the Middle East, shared by many U.S. allies, that the United States’ primary objectives when it comes to Iran, Egypt or Syria are to avoid serious confrontation.”
-
in London on Tuesday, he acknowledged that the Saudis were “disappointed” that the administration had pulled back from its threats of a cruise missile attack against Syrian forces and seized instead on a Russian initiative to end Syria’s chemical weapons program.
8More
shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 13
- No Cached
Finding the Higgs Leads to More Puzzles - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ggs-leads-to-more-puzzles.html
physics higgs boson science supersymmetry multiverse
![](/images/link.gif)
-
Taken at face value, the result implies that eventually (in 10^100 years or so) an unlucky quantum fluctuation will produce a bubble of a different vacuum, which will then expand at the speed of light, destroying everything.”
-
The idea is that the Higgs field could someday twitch and drop to a lower energy state, like water freezing into ice, thereby obliterating the workings of reality as we know it. Naturally, we would have no warning. Just blink and it’s over.
-
. You might think that finding the Higgs boson, after 50 years and $10 billion or so, would bring clarity to physics and to the cosmos. But just the opposite is true: they may have found the Higgs boson, but they don’t understand it.
- ...5 more annotations...
-
they don’t understand why it weighs what it does — it is about 125 times as massive as the protons that were collided to make it, not gazillions of times as heavy, as standard quantum mechanical calculations would suggest.
-
For years the preferred solution to this conundrum has been a theory called supersymmetry, which, among other things, predicted the existence of a whole new spectrum of particles, superpartners of the ones we already know, that would cancel out the quantum calculations and keep the Higgs light. One of these particles might also be the dark matter that makes up a quarter of the universe by weight.
-
experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have already eliminated the simplest versions of supersymmetry.
-
The most talked-about alternative to supersymmetry is the idea of the multiverse, an almost infinite ensemble of universes in which the value of the Higgs — as well as many other crucial parameters — is random. We just happen to live in the one in which the conditions and parameters are fit for us. This is a notion that flows naturally from string theory and modern theories of the Big Bang, but accepting multiple universes means giving up the Einsteinian dream of a single explanation for the cosmos, a painful concession.
-
“Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought.”