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Javier E

Opinion | With War Raging, Colleges Confront a Crisis of Their Own Making - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...alestine-college-campuses.html

education university challenge customer model amusement academic freedom fragility coddle safety

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Students, meanwhile, have blasted those administrators for saying too much or too little. They’ve complained about feeling stranded.
  • The tense situation largely reflects the intense differences of opinion with which many onlookers, including students, interpret and react to the rival claims and enduring bloodshed in the Middle East. But it tells another story, too: one about the evolution of higher education over the past quarter-century, the promises that schools increasingly make to their students and the expectations that arise from that.
  • Many students now turn to the colleges they attend for much more than intellectual stimulation. They look for emotional affirmation. They seek an acknowledgment of their wounds along with the engagement of their minds
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  • Also, college students aren’t full-fledged grown-ups. They do need guidance, and they benefit from it.
  • “The campus protests of the late 1960s sought in part to dismantle the in loco parentis role that colleges and universities had held in American life. But the past two decades have been shaped by a reversal of that, as institutions have sought to reconstruct this role in response to what students and parents paying enormous sums for their education have seemed to want.”
  • For us professors, the surrogate-parent paradigm means regular emails and other reminders from administrators that we should be taking our students’ temperatures, watching for glimmers of distress, intervening proactively and fashioning accommodations, especially if there has been some potentially discomfiting global, national or local news event
  • where does reasonable consideration end and unreasonable coddling begin? And what do validation and comfort have to do with learning?
  • Arguably, everything. If you’re not mentally healthy, you’ll be harder pressed to do the reading, writing and critical thinking at the core of college work
  • many schools have encouraged that mind-set, casting themselves as stewards of students’ welfare, guarantors of their safety, places of refuge, precincts of healing.
  • But are we responsibly preparing them for the world after college — and for the independence, toughness, resourcefulness and resilience it will almost surely demand of them — when we too easily dole out A’s, too readily grant extensions, too gingerly deliver critiques, and too quickly wonder and sound alarms about any disturbance in the atmosphere?
  • We keep witnessing episodes of students taking their colleges to task in ways that smack of entitlement and fragility and are out of bounds
  • Hamline’s president, Fayneese Miller, defended that sequence of events by saying that to not weigh academic freedom against a “debt to the traditions, beliefs and views of students” is a “privileged reaction.”
  • That’s a troubling assertion, as Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic: “If you don’t want your traditions, beliefs or views challenged, then don’t come to a university, at least not to study anything in the humanities or the social sciences.”
  • The school is a merchant, a kind of department store, or so a student could easily assume, based on the come-ons from affluent colleges competing with one another for applicants. They peddle tantalizing dining options, themed living arrangements, diverse amusements. They assign students the role of discerning customers. And the customer is always right.
  • But in an educational environment, that credo is all wrong, because learning means occasionally being provoked, frequently being unsettled and regularly being yanked outside of your comfort zone,
  • most students can handle that dislocation — if they’re properly prepped for it, if they’re made to understand its benefits. We shortchange them when we sell them short
Javier E

The Halloween Costume Controversy at Yale's Silliman College - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...414810

campus Yale halloween free speech victimization tolerance culture

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Watching footage of that meeting, a fundamental disagreement is revealed between professor and undergrads.
  • Christakis believes that he has an obligation to listen to the views of the students, to reflect upon them, and to either respond that he is persuaded or to articulate why he has a different view. Put another way, he believes that one respects students by engaging them in earnest dialogue.
  • But many of the students believe that his responsibility is to hear their demands for an apology and to issue it. They see anything short of a confession of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one respects students by validating their subjective feelings.
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  • Notice that the student position allows no room for civil disagreement.
  • In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argued that too many college students engage in “catastrophizing,” which is to say, turning common events into nightmarish trials or claiming that easily bearable events are too awful to bear. After citing examples, they concluded, “smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.”
  • As students saw it, their pain ought to have been the decisive factor in determining the acceptability of the Halloween email. They thought their request for an apology ought to have been sufficient to secure one. Who taught them that it is righteous to pillory faculty for failing to validate their feelings, as if disagreement is tantamount to disrespect? Their mindset is anti-diversity, anti-pluralism, and anti-tolerance, a seeming data-point in favor of April Kelly-Woessner’s provocative argument that “young people today are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation.”
  • This notion that one’s existence can be invalidated by a fellow 18-year-old donning an offensive costume is perhaps the most disempowering notion aired at Yale.
  • It ought to be disputed rather than indulged for the sake of these students, who need someone to teach them how empowered they are by virtue of their mere enrollment; that no one is capable of invalidating their existence, full stop; that their worth is inherent, not contingent; that everyone is offended by things around them; that they are capable of tremendous resilience; and that most possess it now despite the disempowering ideology foisted on them by well-intentioned, wrongheaded ideologues encouraging them to imagine that they are not privileged.
  • Here’s one of the ways that white men at Yale are most privileged of all: When a white male student at an elite college says that he feels disempowered, the first impulse of the campus left is to show him the extent of his power and privilege. When any other students say they feel disempowered, the campus left’s impulse is to validate their statements. This does a huge disservice to everyone except white male students.
  • That isn’t to dismiss all complaints by Yale students. If contested claims that black students were turned away from a party due to their skin color are true, for example, that is outrageous. If any discrete group of students is ever discriminated against, or disproportionately victimized by campus crime, or graded more harshly by professors, then of course students should protest and remedies should be implemented.
proudsa

Why Facilitating Dialogue Is More Challenging Than Ever | Murali Balaji - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...tating-dialogue_b_8933220.html

shared by proudsa on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • In the year since the Charlie Hebdo terror attack, free speech and political correctness, particularly in the West, have been presented as antithetical.
  • As a few of the panelists noted, the Constitution enshrined the right to offend as a bedrock of free speech, but in recent years, the right not to be offended has taken precedent.
  • However, the segregation and self-censorship among liberals, shaped partly by the desire not to offend, has been just as devastating, in part because it has undermined what many progressives have hailed as a pillar of liberalism: the ability to debate ideas and confront difficult issues.
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  • For years, this segregation was taking place among conservatives, whose rightward lurch was fueled by a 24-7 infotainment complex driven by conspiracies, xenophobia and paranoia.
  • It seems as if ideologically, religiously, and culturally, many Americans are beginning to retreat into comfort zones, either out of fear of the Other or fear of offending the Other.
  • As former professor, I tend to agree to an extent with Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's assessment that the intellectual coddling of students has discouraged critical thinking and being able to see other perspectives (which should actually be the goal of any humanities-based education).
  • Simply put, some of the prominent racial, social and economic justice movements over the past five years have floundered because they don't have cohesive goals, fail to incorporate pragmatism as part of long-term growth, and stifle the possibility for internal discussion.
  • Efforts to condemn police brutality have come under fire for lacking the vision, discipline and willingness to dialogue to effect meaningful change.
  • Even the marriage equality movement of the late 2000s, after a setback in California in 2008, worked in a way to get more people across generations and ideological lines to accept the idea -- and reality -- of same-sex marriage.
  • Whether in Germany, the United Kingdom, India or Israel, these debates are also being accompanied by polarization and ideological segregation. Of course, in countries such as Bangladesh, free speech rights have become a matter of life and death, particularly for secular bloggers who are coming under increasing attack.
  • . However, we don't need another Charlie Hebdo-type tragedy to remind us that these entrenched silos we have clustered ourselves into are undermining the very basis of our democracy: the free exchange of ideas, and the enrichment of our society through dialogue and collective action. More:
knudsenlu

Why is the gun industry so afraid of the long arm of the law? | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-industry-lawsuits-protection

gun industry law Politics US history crisis

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • A 2005 law protects the companies from lawsuits over gun crime – but if the case against them is as weak as they claim, why do they need such coddling?
  • n the wake of the mass killing at a school in Parkland, Florida, Americans are again embroiled in a debate about guns, and the consensus (at least outside of Congress) seems to be that it’s beyond time for sensible and effective gun laws.
  • Less clear is what those laws might be. Which ones would be the most effective in preventing the kind of killing sprees to which Americans have grown far too accustomed? And which ones would prevent the thousands of deaths that don’t grab headlines, but still make the United States’ gun-slaughtered body count an outlier among peacetime nations? Some are obvious: banning the bump stocks that make it possible to turn a legal gun into what amounts to an automatic machine gun; barring convicted violent criminals and those with domestic violence restraining orders against them from owning guns; requiring robust background checks for every single gun purchase; and strengthening licensing requirements so that, like driving a car, anyone who owns a gun has to actually know how to use one. Perhaps less obvious, but just as important: treating gun manufacturers like any other company
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  • The question is what liability gun manufacturers or sellers have in making, marketing a selling a product that kills thousands every year, and whether, for example, they are negligent in selling weapons, like the AR-15, that many argue have no place outside of a combat zone and are predictable weapons of mass death.
  • And yet they seem awfully nervous about having to defend themselves in court. Yes, lawsuits are expensive and time-consuming, but gun manufacturers aren’t exactly vulnerable little guys. The American legal system has mechanisms in place for tossing out baseless lawsuits, and surely some brought against gun makers and sellers will be summarily tossed.
  • We don’t know a whole lot about how the gun industry deals with the violence, death and destruction its products bring about because the whole industry operates under a Congress-approved veil of secrecy. We do know that victims have been unjustly stymied, denied even the chance to have their voices heard in court. No good happens in the shadows, and no industry does the right thing if it’s permitted to operate partly outside of the law. Getting rid of the PLCAA won’t end gun violence. But it would let victims be heard, and it would bring a little transparency to the shadowy, coddled gun industry.
Javier E

Opinion | Therapy Culture Has Undermined Our Maturity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mental-health-culture-war.html

therapy culture maturity narcissism

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • to trace the decline of the American psyche, I suppose I would go to a set of cultural changes that started directly after World War II and built over the next few decades, when writers as diverse as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe noticed the emergence of what came to be known as the therapeutic culture.
  • In earlier cultural epochs, many people derived their self-worth from their relationship with God, or from their ability to be a winner in the commercial marketplace
  • in a therapeutic culture people’s sense of self-worth depends on their subjective feelings about themselves. Do I feel good about myself? Do I like me?
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  • many writers noticed that this ethos often turned people into fragile narcissists. It cut them off from moral traditions and the normal sources of meaning and identity. It pushed them in on themselves, made them self-absorbed, craving public affirmation so they could feel good about themselves
  • As Lasch wrote in his 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism,” such people are plagued by an insecurity that can be “overcome only by seeing his ‘grandiose self’ reflected in the attentions of others.”
  • “Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the ‘psychological man’ of the 20th century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it.”
  • Fast forward a few decades, and the sense of lostness and insecurity, which Lasch and many others had seen in nascent form, had transmogrified into a roaring epidemic of psychic pain. By, say, 2010, it began to be clear that we were in the middle of a mental health crisis, with rising depression and suicide rates, an epidemic of hopelessness and despair among the young.
  • Social media became a place where people went begging for attention, validation and affirmation — even if they often found rejection instead.
  • Before long, safetyism was on the march. This is the assumption that people are so fragile they need to be protected from social harm. Slate magazine proclaimed 2013 “the year of the trigger warning.” Concepts like “microaggression” and “safe spaces” couldn’t have lagged far behind.
  • the elephantiasis of trauma
  • Once, the word “trauma” referred to brutal physical wounding one might endure in war or through abuse. But usage of the word spread so that it was applied across a range of upsetting experiences.
  • A mega-best-selling book about trauma, “The Body Keeps the Score,” by Bessel van der Kolk, became the defining cultural artifact of the era. Parul Sehgal wrote a perceptive piece in The New Yorker called “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” noting how many characters in novels, memoirs and TV shows are trying to recover from psychological trauma — from Ted Lasso on down. In January 2022, Vox declared that “trauma” had become “the word of the decade,” noting that there were over 5,500 podcasts with the word in the title.
  • For many people, trauma became their source of identity. People began defining themselves by the way they had been hurt.
  • a culture war, and that’s what happened to the psychological crisis. In one camp, there were the coddlers.
  • They sought to alter behavior and reform institutions so that no one would feel emotionally unsafe
  • the coddling approach turned out to be counterproductive. It was based on a series of false ideas that ended up hurting the people it was trying to help.
  • the first bad idea in “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It was the notion that “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” inducing people to look at the wounds in their past and feel debilitated, not stronger.
  • The second false idea was, “I am a thing to whom things happen.” The traumatized person is cast as a passive victim unable to control his own life. He is defined by suffering and
  • The third bad idea is, “If I keep you safe, you will be strong.”
  • But overprotective parenting and overprotective school administration don’t produce more resilient children; they produce less resilient ones.
  • The counterreaction to the coddlers came from what you might call the anti-fragile coalition. This was led by Jordan Peterson and thousands of his lesser imitators
  • they merely represented the flip side of the fragile victim mind-set.
  • The right-wing victimologists feel beset by hidden forces trying to oppress them, by a culture that conspires to unman them, dark shadowy conspiracies all around
  • recent right-wing narratives, even J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” often follow the trauma formula: “Take the lamentations about atrophying manhood and falling sperm counts. Call it what you want, but the core idea is always shaped like trauma. Once, we were whole, but now we’re not; now we suffer from a sickness we struggle to grasp or name.”
  • The instability of the self has created an immature public culture — impulsive, dramatic, erratic and cruel. In institution after institution, from churches to schools to nonprofits, the least mature voices dominate and hurl accusations, while the most mature lie low, trying to get through the day.
  • They are considerate to and gracious toward others because they can see situations from multiple perspectives
  • The founders of the therapeutic ethos thought they were creating autonomous individualists who would feel good about themselves. But, as Lasch forecast: “The narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity.”
  • Maturity, now as ever, is understanding that you’re not the center of the universe. The world isn’t a giant story about me.
  • In a nontherapeutic ethos, people don’t build secure identities on their own. They weave their stable selves out of their commitments to and attachments with others. Their identities are forged as they fulfill their responsibilities as friends, family members, employees, neighbors and citizens. The process is social and other-absorbed; not therapeutic.
  • Maturity in this alternative ethos is achieved by getting out of your own selfish point of view and developing the ability to absorb, understand and inhabit the views of others.
  • Mature people are calm amid the storm because their perception lets them see the present challenges from a long-term vantage.
  • People on all sides genuinely come to believe they are powerless, unwilling to assume any responsibility for their plight — another classic symptom of immaturity.
  • They can withstand the setbacks because they have pointed their life toward some concrete moral goal.
  • “one of the greatest indicators of our own spiritual maturity is revealed in how we respond to the weaknesses, the inexperience and the potentially offensive actions of others.”
  • a sign of maturity is the ability to respond with understanding when other people have done something stupid and given you the opportunity to feel superior.
Javier E

Opinion | At the Waco Rally and Beyond, Trump's Movement Now Commands Him - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-trump-waco-rally-speech.html

trump movement maga populism culture crisis elitiism

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • virtually every speaker at Trump’s marathon rally. One after another, they looked at a seething, conspiracy-addled crowd and indulged, fed, and stoked every element of their furious worldview. I didn’t see a single true leader on Trump’s stage, not even Trump himself. I saw a collection of followers, each vying for the affection of the real power in Waco, the coddled populist mob.
  • To understand the social and political dynamic on the modern right, you have to understand how millions of Americans became inoculated against the truth
  • every time Trump faced pushback, he and his allies called critics “elitist” or “fake news” or “weak” or “cowards.” It was much easier to say the Trump skeptics had “Trump derangement syndrome,” or were “just establishment stooges,” than to engage with substantive critique
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  • Thus began the coddling of the populist mind
  • Disagreement on the right quickly came to be seen as synonymous with disrespect. If “we the people” (the term Trump partisans apply to what they call the “real America”) believe something, then the people deserve to have that view reflected right back to them by their politicians and pundits.
  • Repeatedly, Fox leaders and personalities who did not seem to believe the 2020 election was stolen referred to the need to “respect” their audience by telling them otherwise. For these Fox staffers, respecting the audience didn’t mean relaying the truth (a true act of respect). Instead, it meant feeding viewers’ insatiable hunger for confirmation of their conspiracy theories.
  • Politicians are always tempted to pander, but rarely do you see such a complete abdication of anything approaching true moral or political leadership as what transpired at the Waco rally
  • It’s common to critique the Trumpist movement as a Donald Trump cult, but that’s not quite right anymore. He’s still immensely influential, but do true cultists boo their leader when he deviates from the approved script? Yet that’s what happened in December 2021, when parts of a Dallas rally crowd booed Trump when he said he’d received a Covid vaccine booster. And does anyone think that Trump is a QAnon aficionado? Yet in 2022 he boosted explicit Q content on Truth Social, his social media platform of choice.
  • There may have been a time when Trump truly commanded his movement. That time is past. His movement now commands him. Fed by conspiracies, it is hungry for confrontation, and rallies like Waco demonstrate its dominance
Javier E

David Stockman: Mitt Romney and the Bain Drain - Newsweek and The Daily Beast - 1 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...romney-and-the-bain-drain.html

finance ROmney private equity LBO investment

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims.
  • Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.
  • Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaign’s narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs. The fact that Bain’s returns reputedly averaged more than 50 percent annually during this period is purportedly proof of the case
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  • Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.
  • That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism—where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.
  • So the vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise. I know this from 17 years of experience doing leveraged buyouts at one of the pioneering private-equity houses, Blackstone, and then my own firm. I know the pitfalls of private equity. The whole business was about maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible. Occasionally, we did invest in genuine growth companies, but without cheap debt and deep tax subsidies, most deals would not make economic sense.
  • In truth, LBOs are capitalism’s natural undertakers—vulture investors who feed on failing businesses. Due to bad policy, however, they have now become monsters of the financial midway that strip-mine cash from healthy businesses and recycle it mostly to the top 1 percent.
  • Accordingly, Bain’s returns on the overwhelming bulk of the deals—67 out of 77—were actually lower than what a passive S&P 500 indexer would have earned even without the risk of leverage or paying all the private-equity fees. Investor profits amounted to a prosaic 0.7X the original investment on these deals and, based on its average five-year holding period, the annual return would have computed to about 12 percent—well below the 17 percent average return on the S&P in this period.
  • having a trader’s facility for knowing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em has virtually nothing to do with rectifying the massive fiscal hemorrhage and debt-burdened private economy that are the real issues before the American electorate
  • Indeed, the next president’s overriding task is restoring national solvency—an undertaking that will involve immense societywide pain, sacrifice, and denial and that will therefore require “fairness” as a defining principle. And that’s why heralding Romney’s record at Bain is so completely perverse. The record is actually all about the utter unfairness of windfall riches obtained under our anti-free market regime of bubble finance.
  • When Romney opened the doors to Bain Capital in 1984, the S&P 500 stood at 160. By the time he answered the call to duty in Salt Lake City in early 1999, it had gone parabolic and reached 1270. This meant that had a modern Rip Van Winkle bought the S&P 500 index and held it through the 15 years in question, the annual return (with dividends) would have been a spectacular 17 percent. Bain did considerably better, of course, but the reason wasn’t business acumen.
  • The secret was leverage, luck, inside baseball, and the peculiar asymmetrical dynamics of the leveraged gambling carried on by private-equity shops. LBO funds are invested as equity at the bottom of a company’s capital structure, which means that the lenders who provide 80 to 90 percent of the capital have no recourse to the private-equity sponsor if deals go bust. Accordingly, LBO funds can lose 1X (one times) their money on failed deals, but make 10X or even 50X on the occasional “home run.” During a period of rising markets, expanding valuation multiples, and abundant credit, the opportunity to “average up” the home runs with the 1X losses is considerable; it can generate a spectacular portfolio outcome.
  • The Wall Street Journal examined 77 significant deals completed during that period based on fundraising documents from Bain, and the results are a perfect illustration of bull-market asymmetry. Overall, Bain generated an impressive $2.5 billion in investor gains on $1.1 billion in investments. But 10 of Bain’s deals accounted for 75 percent of the investor profits.
  • The credentials that Romney proffers as evidence of his business acumen, in fact, mainly show that he hung around the basket during the greatest bull market in recorded history.
  • By contrast, the 10 home runs generated profits of $1.8 billion on investments of only $250 million, yielding a spectacular return of 7X investment. Yet it is this handful of home runs that both make the Romney investment legend and also seal the indictment: they show that Bain Capital was a vehicle for leveraged speculation that was gifted immeasurably by the Greenspan bubble. It was a fortunate place where leverage got lucky, not a higher form of capitalist endeavor or training school for presidential aspirants.
  • The startling fact is that four of the 10 Bain Capital home runs ended up in bankruptcy, and for an obvious reason: Bain got its money out at the top of the Greenspan boom in the late 1990s and then these companies hit the wall during the 2000-02 downturn, weighed down by the massive load of debt Bain had bequeathed them. In fact, nearly $600 million, or one third of the profits earned by the home-run companies, had been extracted from the hide of these four eventual debt zombies.
  • The bankruptcy forced the closure of about 250—or 40 percent—of the company’s stores and the loss of about 5,000 jobs. Yet the moral of the Stage Stores saga is not simply that in this instance Bain Capital was a jobs destroyer, not a jobs creator. The larger point is that it is actually a tale of Wall Street speculators toying with Main Street properties in defiance of sound finance—an anti-Schumpeterian project that used state-subsidized debt to milk cash from stores that would not have otherwise survived on the free market.
  • Ironically, the businesses and jobs that Staples eliminated were the office-supply counterparts of the cracker-box stores selling shoes, shirts, and dresses that Bain kept on artificial life-support at Stage Stores Inc. At length, Wal-Mart eliminated these jobs and replaced them with back-of–the-store automation and front-end part-timers, as did Staples, which now has 40,000 part-time employees out of its approximate 90,000 total head count. The pointless exercise of counting jobs won and lost owing to these epochal shifts on the free market is obviously irrelevant to the job of being president, but the fact that Bain made $15 million from the winner and $175 million from the loser is evidence that it did not make a fortune all on its own. It had considerable help from the Easy Button at the Fed.
  • The lesson is that LBOs are just another legal (and risky) way for speculators to make money, but they are dangerous because when they fail, they leave needless economic disruption and job losses in their wake. That’s why LBOs would be rare in an honest free market—it’s only cheap debt, interest deductions, and ludicrously low capital-gains taxes that artifically fuel them.
  • The larger point is that Romney’s personal experience in the nation’s financial casinos is no mark against his character or competence. I’ve made money and lost it and know what it is like to be judged. But that experience doesn’t translate into answers on the great public issues before the nation, either. The Romney campaign’s feckless narrative that private equity generates real economic efficiency and societal wealth is dead wrong.
  • The Bain Capital investments here reviewed accounted for $1.4 billion or 60 percent of the fund’s profits over 15 years, by my calculations. Four of them ended in bankruptcy; one was an inside job and fast flip; one was essentially a massive M&A brokerage fee; and the seventh and largest gain—the Italian Job—amounted to a veritable freak of financial nature.
  • In short, this is a record about a dangerous form of leveraged gambling that has been enabled by the failed central banking and taxing policies of the state. That it should be offered as evidence that Mitt Romney is a deeply experienced capitalist entrepreneur and job creator is surely a testament to the financial deformations of our times.
Javier E

What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right' | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump

post-truth disinformation fascism rationality far right social media manipulation press alt-right psychology culture

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Gamergate
  • The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate – even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect
  • ure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasn’t why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Is this all sounding rather familiar now? Does it remind you of something?
  • The similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the “alt-right”, are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence
  • fter all, the culture war that began in games now has a senior representative in The White House. As a founder member and former executive chair of Brietbart News, Steve Bannon had a hand in creating media monster Milo Yiannopoulos, who built his fame and Twitter following by supporting and cheerleading Gamergate. This hashtag was the canary in the coalmine, and we ignored it.
  • Gamergate was an online movement that effectively began because a man wanted to punish his ex girlfriend. Its most notable achievement was harassing a large number of progressive figures - mostly women – to the point where they felt unsafe or considered leaving the industry
  • The same voices moved into other geek communities, especially comics, where Marvel and DC were criticised for progressive storylines and decisions. They moved into science fiction with the controversy over the Hugo awards. They moved into cinema with the revolting kickback against the all-female Ghostbusters reboot.
  • no one in the movement was willing to be associated with the abuse being carried out in its name. Prominent supporters on Twitter, in subreddits and on forums like 8Chan, developed a range of pernicious rhetorical devices and defences to distance themselves from threats to women and minorities in the industry: the targets were lying or exaggerating, they were too precious; a language of dismissal and belittlement was formed against them. Safe spaces, snowflakes, unicorns, cry bullies. Even when abuse was proven, the usual response was that people on their side were being abused too. These techniques, forged in Gamergate, have become the standard toolset of far-right voices online
  • In 2016, new wave conservative media outlets like Breitbart have gained trust with their audience by painting traditional news sources as snooty and aloof. In 2014, video game YouTube stars, seeking to appear in touch with online gaming communities, unscrupulously proclaimed that traditional old-media sources were corrupt. Everything we’re seeing now, had its precedent two years ago.
  • With 2014’s Gamergate, Breitbart seized the opportunity to harness the pre-existing ignorance and anger among disaffected young white dudes. With Trump’s movement in 2016, the outlet was effectively running his campaign: Steve Bannon took leave of his role at the company in August 2016 when he was hired as chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign
  • young men converted via 2014’s Gamergate, are being more widely courted now. By leveraging distrust and resentment towards women, minorities and progressives, many of Gamergate’s most prominent voices – characters like Mike Cernovich, Adam Baldwin, and Milo Yiannopoulos – drew power and influence from its chaos
  • These figures gave Gamergate a new sense of direction – generalising the rhetoric: this was now a wider war between “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) and everyday, normal, decent people. Games were simply the tip of the iceberg – progressive values, went the argument, were destroying everything
  • it quickly became clear that the GamerGate movement was a mess – an undefined mission to Make Video Games Great Again via undecided means.
  • Using 4chan (and then the more sympathetic offshoot 8Chan) to plan their subversions and attacks made Gamergate a terribly sloppy operation, leaving a trail of evidence that made it quite clear the whole thing was purposefully, plainly nasty. But the video game industry didn’t have the spine to react, and allowed the movement to coagulate – forming a mass of spiteful disappointment that Breitbart was only more than happy to coddle
  • Historically, that seems to be Breitbart’s trick - strongly represent a single issue in order to earn trust, and then gradually indoctrinate to suit wider purposes. With Gamergate, they purposefully went fishing for anti-feminists. 2016’s batch of fresh converts – the white extremists – came from enticing conspiracy theories about the global neoliberal elite secretly controlling the world.
  • The greatest strength of Gamergate, though, was that it actually appeared to represent many left-leaning ideals: stamping out corruption in the press, pushing for better ethical practices, battling for openness.
  • There are similarities here with many who support Trump because of his promises to put an end to broken neo-liberalism, to “drain the swamp” of establishment corruption. Many left-leaning supporters of Gamergate sought to intellectualise their alignment with the hashtag, adopting familiar and acceptable labels of dissent – identifying as libertarian, egalitarian, humanist.
  • At best they unknowingly facilitated abuse, defending their own freedom of expression while those who actually needed support were threatened and attacked.
  • Genuine discussions over criticism, identity and censorship were paralysed and waylaid by Twitter voices obsessed with rhetorical fallacies and pedantic debating practices. While the core of these movements make people’s lives hell, the outer shell – knowingly or otherwise – protect abusers by insisting that the real problem is that you don’t want to talk, or won’t provide the ever-shifting evidence they politely require.
  • In 2017, the tactics used to discredit progressive game critics and developers will be used to discredit Trump and Bannon’s critics. There will be gaslighting, there will be attempts to make victims look as though they are losing their grip on reality, to the point that they gradually even start to believe it. The “post-truth” reality is not simply an accident – it is a concerted assault on the rational psyche.
  • The strangest aspect of Gamergate is that it consistently didn’t make any sense: people chose to align with it, and yet refused responsibility. It was constantly demanded that we debate the issues, but explanations and facts were treated with scorn. Attempts to find common ground saw the specifics of the demands being shifted: we want you to listen to us; we want you to change your ways; we want you to close your publication down. This movement that ostensibly wanted to protect free speech from cry bully SJWs simultaneously did what it could to endanger sites it disagreed with, encouraging advertisers to abandon support for media outlets that published stories critical of the hashtag. The petulance of that movement is disturbingly echoed in Trump’s own Twitter feed.
  • Looking back, Gamergate really only made sense in one way: as an exemplar of what Umberto Eco called “eternal fascism”, a form of extremism he believed could flourish at any point in, in any place – a fascism that would extol traditional values, rally against diversity and cultural critics, believe in the value of action above thought and encourage a distrust of intellectuals or experts – a fascism built on frustration and machismo. The requirement of this formless fascism would – above all else – be to remain in an endless state of conflict, a fight against a foe who must always be portrayed as impossibly strong and laughably weak
  • 2016 has presented us with a world in which our reality is being wilfully manipulated. Fake news, divisive algorithms, misleading social media campaigns.
  • The majority of people who voted for Trump will never take responsibility for his racist, totalitarian policies, but they’ll provide useful cover and legitimacy for those who demand the very worst from the President Elect. Trump himself may have disavowed the “alt-right”, but his rhetoric has led to them feeling legitimised. As with Gamergate, the press risks being manipulated into a position where it has to tread a respectful middle ground that doesn’t really exist.
  • Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements. The situation was horrifying enough two years ago, it is many times more dangerous now.
Javier E

The right has its own version of political correctness. It's just as stifling. - The Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...rrectness-its-just-as-stifling

patriotic correctness PC conservative

shared by Javier E on 08 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”
  • But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.
  • Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.
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  • Complaining about political correctness is patriotically correct. The patriotically correct must use the non-word “illegals,” or “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien” to describe foreigners who broke our immigration laws. Dissenters support “open borders” or “shamnesty” for 30 million illegal alien invaders. The punishment is deportation because “we’re a nation of laws” and they didn’t “get in line,” even though no such line actually exists. Just remember that they are never anti-immigration, only anti-illegal immigration, even when they want to cut legal immigration.
  • Black Lives Matter is racist because it implies that black lives are more important than other lives, but Blue Lives Matter doesn’t imply that cops’ lives are more important than the rest of ours. Banning Islam or Muslim immigration is a necessary security measure, but homosexuals should not be allowed to get married because it infringes on religious liberty. Transgender people could access women’s restrooms for perverted purposes, but Donald Trump walking in on nude underage girls in dressing rooms before a beauty pageant is just “media bias.”
  • Terrorism is an “existential threat,” even though the chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is about 1 in 3.2 million a year. Saying the words “radical Islam” when describing terrorism is an important incantation necessary to defeat that threat. When Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya decides to employ refugees in his factories, it’s because of his ties to “globalist corporate figures.” Waving a Mexican flag on U.S. soil means you hate America, but waving a Confederate flag just means you’re proud of your heritage.
  • Those who disagree with the patriotically correct are animated by anti-Americanism, are post-American, or deserve any other of a long list of clunky and vague labels that signal virtue to other members of the patriotic in-group.
  • Poor white Americans are the victims of economic dislocation and globalization beyond their control, while poor blacks and Hispanics are poor because of their failed cultures. The patriotically correct are triggered when they hear strangers speaking in a language other than English. Does that remind you of the PC duty to publicly shame those who use unacceptable language to describe race, gender or whatever other identity is the victim du jour?
  • The patriotically correct rightly ridicule PC “safe spaces” but promptly retreat to Breitbart or talk radio, where they can have mutually reinforcing homogeneous temper tantrums while complaining about the lack of intellectual diversity on the left.
  • There is no such thing as too much national security, but it’s liberals who want to coddle Americans with a “nanny state.”
  • Blaming the liberal or mainstream media and “media bias” is the patriotically correct version of blaming the corporations or capitalism. The patriotically correct notion that they “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University” because the former have “common sense” and the “intellectual elites” don’t know anything, despite all the evidence to the contrary, can be sustained only in a total bubble.
  • Every group has implicit rules against certain opinions, actions and language as well as enforcement mechanisms — and the patriotically correct are no exception. But they are different because they are near-uniformly unaware of how they are hewing to a code of speech and conduct similar to the PC lefties they claim to oppose.
  • The modern form of political correctness on college campuses and the media is social tyranny with manners, while patriotic correctness is tyranny without the manners, and its adherents do not hesitate to use the law to advance their goals.
Javier E

The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern Economy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...511067

crisis spiritual meritocracy grace culture

shared by Javier E on 27 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • This go-it-alone mentality works against the ways that, historically, workers have improved their lot. It encourages workers to see unions and government as flawed institutions that coddle the undeserving, rather than as useful, if imperfect, means of raising the relative prospects of all workers.
  • It also makes it more likely that white workers will direct their frustration toward racial and ethnic minorities, economic scapegoats who are dismissed as freeloaders unworthy of help—in a recent survey, 64 percent of Trump voters (not all of whom, of course, are part of the white working class) agreed that “average Americans” had gotten less they they deserved, but this figure dropped to 12 percent when that phrase was replaced with “blacks.” (Among Clinton voters, the figure stayed steady at 57 percent for both phrases.
  • This is one reason that enacting good policies is, while important, not enough to address economic inequality. What’s needed as well is a broader revision of a culture that makes those who struggle feel like losers.
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  • One explanation for why so many come to that conclusion in the first place has to do with the widening of the gulf between America’s coasts and the region in between them
  • Cities that can entice well-educated professionals are booming, even as “flyover” communities have largely seen good-paying factory work automated or shipped overseas, replaced to a large extent with insecure jobs: Walmart greeters, independent-contractor truck drivers, and the like.
  • a college degree has become the true mark of individual success in America—the sort of white-picket-fence fantasy that drives people well into their elder years to head back to school
  • the white working class that emerged in the 19th century—stitched together from long-combative European ethnic groups—strived to set themselves apart from African Americans, Chinese, and other vilified “indispensable enemies,” and build, by contrast (at least in their view), a sense of workingman pride.
  • this last election was a reminder that white male resentment of “nasty” women and “uppity” racial and other minorities remains strong.
  • That said, many Americans with more stable, better-paid jobs have blind spots of their own. For all of their professed open-mindedness in other areas, millions of the well-educated and well-off who live in or near big cities tend to endorse the notion, explicitly or implicitly, that education determines a person’s value
  • white voters from hard-hit rural areas and hollowed-out industrial towns have turned away from a Democratic Party that has offered them little in the way of hope and inspiration and much in the way of disdain and blame.
  • such a fervent belief in the transformative power of education also implies that a lack of it amounts to personal failure—being a “stupid” person
  • As much as both liberals and conservatives have touted education as a means of attaining social mobility, economic trends suggest that this strategy has limits, especially in its ability to do anything about the country’s rapidly growing inequalities
  • Well into the 21st century, two-thirds of Americans age 25 and over do not have a bachelor’s degree. The labor market has become more polarized, as highly paid jobs for workers with middling levels of education and skill dwindle away.
  • even some workers I spoke to—all former union members—said they felt that people without a good education did not deserve to make a good living.
  • The rules of meritocracy that these blue-collar workers say they admire barely apply to the very top levels of the economy. Groups of elite workers—professionals, managers, financial workers, tenured professors—continue to wall themselves off from competition. They still organize collectively, through lobbying, credentialing, licensing, and other strategies. But fewer ordinary workers have the same ability to do so
  • What has emerged in the new economy, then, is a stunted meritocracy: meritocracy for you, but not for me
  • One of the few things he could really depend on was his church. He volunteered on their Sunday-school bus, leading the kids in singing songs. “It helps to be around young people,” he said. For many of the jobless workers I interviewed, religion and tradition provided a sense of community and a feeling that their lives had purpose.
  • However exaggerated by stereotypes, the urbane, urban values of the well-educated professional class, with its postmodern cultural relativism and its rejection of old dogmas, are not attractive alternatives to what the working class has long relied on as a source of solace.
  • In the absence of other sources of meaning, Americans are left with meritocracy, a game of status and success, along with the often ruthless competition it engenders. And the consequence of a perspective of self-reliance—Americans, compared to people in other countries, hold a particularly strong belief that people succeed through their own hard work—is a sense that those who fail are somehow inferior
  • The concept of grace comes from the Christian teaching that everyone, not just the deserving, is saved by God’s grace. Grace in the broader sense that I (an agnostic) am using, however, can be both secular and religious. In the simplest terms, it is about refusing to divide the world into camps of deserving and undeserving, as those on both the right and left are wont to do
  • It rejects an obsession with excusing nothing, with measuring and judging the worth of people based on everything from a spotty résumé to an offensive comment.
  • Unlike an egalitarian viewpoint focused on measuring and leveling inequalities, grace rejects categories of right and wrong, just and unjust, and offers neither retribution nor restitution, but forgiveness.
  • With a perspective of grace, it becomes clearer that America, the wealthiest of nations, possesses enough prosperity to provide adequately for all. It becomes easier to part with one’s hard-won treasure in order to pull others up, even if those being helped seem “undeserving”—a label that today serves as a justification for opposing the sharing of wealth on the grounds that it is a greedy plea from the resentful, idle, and envious.
  • ignorance shouldn’t be considered an irremediable sin. Yet many of the liberal, affluent, and college-educated too often reduce the beliefs of a significant segment of the population to a mash of evil and delusion
  • From gripes about the backwardness and boredom of small-town America to jokes about “rednecks” and “white trash” that are still acceptable to say in polite company, it’s no wonder that the white working class believes that others look down on them. That’s not to say their situation is worse than that of the black and Latino working classes—it’s to say that where exactly they fit in the hierarchy of oppression is a question that leads nowhere, given how much all these groups have struggled in recent decades.
  • While there are no simple explanations for the desperation and anger visible in many predominantly white working-class communities, perhaps the most astute and original diagnosis came from the rabbi and activist Michael Lerner, who, in assessing Donald Trump’s victory, looked from a broader vantage point than most. Underneath the populist ire, he wrote, was a suffering “rooted in the hidden injuries of class and in the spiritual crisis that the global competitive marketplace generates.”
  • That cuts right to it. The modern economy privileges the well-educated and highly-skilled, while giving them an excuse to denigrate the people at the bottom (both white and nonwhite) as lazy, untalented, uneducated, and unsophisticated.
  • many well-off Americans from across the political spectrum scorn the white working class in particular for holding onto religious superstitions and politically incorrect views, and pity them for working lousy jobs at dollar stores and fast-food restaurants that the better-off rarely set foot in
  • This system of categorizing Americans—the logical extension of life in what can be called an extreme meritocracy—can be pernicious: The culture holds up those who succeed as examples, however anecdotal, that everyone can make it in America. Meanwhile, those who fail attract disdain and indifference from the better-off, their low status all the more painful because it is regarded as deserved.
  • the shame of low status afflicts not just the unemployed, but also the underemployed. Their days are no longer filled with the dignified, if exhausting, work of making real things.
  • For less educated workers (of all races) who have struggled for months or years to get another job, failure is a source of deep shame and a reason for self-blame. Without the right markers of merit—a diploma, marketable skills, a good job—they are “scrubs” who don’t deserve romantic partners, “takers” living parasitically off the government, “losers” who won’t amount to anything
  • Even those who consider themselves lucky to have jobs can feel a sense of despair, seeing how poorly they stand relative to others, or how much their communities have unraveled, or how dim their children’s future seems to be: Research shows that people judge how well they’re doing through constant comparisons, and by these personal metrics they are hurting, whatever the national unemployment rate may be.
Javier E

Amy Chua Profiles Four Female Tycoons in China - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...r-female-tycoons-in-china.html

women China entrepreneur success

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 12 - Cached
  • Zhang sees a lack of innovation as a persistent problem for China. “Going forward, we need people who can invent. The reason China doesn’t have a Steve Jobs is because of the education system, which needs reform, along with health care and the political system. China does not train enough people to think.”
  • “In China nowadays, teachers are desperate,” Yang Lan told me over lunch. With her upswept hair and porcelain skin, Yang radiated celebrity power. “They’re worried that all the only children—‘little emperors’—are spoiled and self-centered and no longer appreciate their parents.” She told me how one school had invited 1,000 parents to sit on chairs on the playground, “then asked the kids to wash their parents’ feet in front of everyone—a sign of filial piety.”
  • China’s “little emperors” are coddled in a distinctly Chinese way. While doted on and catered to, they are also loaded up with the expectations of parents who have invested all their dreams—not to mention money—in their only child. These “spoiled” children often study and drill from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day.
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  • China’s political sphere remains male-dominated: women are starkly underrepresented in China’s Parliament and the Communist Party’s Central Committee. In fact, many young Chinese women, disillusioned about their prospects in an economy many see as navigable only by those with money or connections, say the best hope for a woman is “to marry a rich man.” On a popular TV dating show, a model rebuffed an endearing but poor suitor by saying, “I’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back seat of a bicycle.” In a survey of more than 50,000 single women, as reported in China Daily, 80 percent agreed that “only men who make more than 4,000 yuan [$634] a month deserve to have a relationship with a woman.”
  • at least in business, women and men in China operate largely on a level playing field. “Sixty years of communism,” said Yu, “did one really good thing: bring true equality between the sexes. I think people in China are brought up believing that women are just as capable as men.”
  • the Mao era was a deviation for China: anti-intellectual, anti-Confucian, collectivist rather than family-oriented. Thus, as China sheds its communist mantle, it is not only Westernizing but also Sinicizing, rediscovering its traditional values.
  • These values, however, are mutating. The traditional Chinese family, for example, was a pyramid, with a few revered elders at the pinnacle and many younger generations below. In a typical Chinese family today, the pyramid has been inverted, with a “little emperor” only child at the bottom, doted on and catered to by parents and grandparents. At the same time, while the intense competitive pressures of Confucian China have returned, the countervailing Confucian values—selflessness, compassion, honor, and rectitude—have not. As a result, many worry that the China emerging from communism will know no values other than wealth and materialism.
  • “When we were growing up,” says Yang, “we wanted to be nurses, doctors, astronauts, teachers. Today people are suspicious of anything noble or grand. Kids just want to be rich or powerful.” In 2009, schoolchildren in Guangzhou City were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. A viral Internet video—later blocked and deleted—showed an adorable 6-year-old giving her answer: “A corrupt official.”
  • the four women I interviewed are a new breed. Progressive, worldly, and open to the media, they are in many ways not representative of China, past or present. Perhaps they are merely the lucky winners of the 1990s free-for-all in China, a window that may already be closing. Or perhaps they are the forerunners of a China still to come, in which paths to success are far more open.
Javier E

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us? | Mother Jones - 0 views

www.motherjones.com/...l-intelligence-jobs-automation

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.
  • Slowly but steadily, labor's share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.
  • at this point our tale takes a darker turn. What do we do over the next few decades as robots become steadily more capable and steadily begin taking away all our jobs?
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  • The economics community just hasn't spent much time over the past couple of decades focusing on the effect that machine intelligence is likely to have on the labor marke
  • The Digital Revolution is different because computers can perform cognitive tasks too, and that means machines will eventually be able to run themselves. When that happens, they won't just put individuals out of work temporarily. Entire classes of workers will be out of work permanently. In other words, the Luddites weren't wrong. They were just 200 years too early
  • while it's easy to believe that some jobs can never be done by machines—do the elderly really want to be tended by robots?—that may not be true.
  • Robotic pets are growing so popular that Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies the way we interact with technology, is uneasy about it: "The idea of some kind of artificial companionship," she says, "is already becoming the new normal."
  • robots will take over more and more jobs. And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.
  • Economist Paul Krugman recently remarked that our long-standing belief in skills and education as the keys to financial success may well be outdated. In a blog post titled "Rise of the Robots," he reviewed some recent economic data and predicted that we're entering an era where the prime cause of income inequality will be something else entirely: capital vs. labor.
  • We're already seeing them, and not just because of the crash of 2008. They started showing up in the statistics more than a decade ago. For a while, though, they were masked by the dot-com and housing bubbles, so when the financial crisis hit, years' worth of decline was compressed into 24 months. The trend lines dropped off the cliff.
  • In the economics literature, the increase in the share of income going to capital owners is known as capital-biased technological change
  • The question we want to answer is simple: If CBTC is already happening—not a lot, but just a little bit—what trends would we expect to see? What are the signs of a computer-driven economy?
  • if automation were displacing labor, we'd expect to see a steady decline in the share of the population that's employed.
  • Second, we'd expect to see fewer job openings than in the past.
  • Third, as more people compete for fewer jobs, we'd expect to see middle-class incomes flatten in a race to the bottom.
  • Fourth, with consumption stagnant, we'd expect to see corporations stockpile more cash and, fearing weaker sales, invest less in new products and new factories
  • Fifth, as a result of all this, we'd expect to see labor's share of national income decline and capital's share rise.
  • There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.
  • The modern economy is complex, and most of these trends have multiple causes.
  • in another sense, we should be very alarmed. It's one thing to suggest that robots are going to cause mass unemployment starting in 2030 or so. We'd have some time to come to grips with that. But the evidence suggests that—slowly, haltingly—it's happening already, and we're simply not prepared for it.
  • the first jobs to go will be middle-skill jobs. Despite impressive advances, robots still don't have the dexterity to perform many common kinds of manual labor that are simple for humans—digging ditches, changing bedpans. Nor are they any good at jobs that require a lot of cognitive skill—teaching classes, writing magazine articles
  • in the middle you have jobs that are both fairly routine and require no manual dexterity. So that may be where the hollowing out starts: with desk jobs in places like accounting or customer support.
  • In fact, there's even a digital sports writer. It's true that a human being wrote this story—ask my mother if you're not sure—but in a decade or two I might be out of a job too
  • Doctors should probably be worried as well. Remember Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computer? It's now being fed millions of pages of medical information so that it can help physicians do a better job of diagnosing diseases. In another decade, there's a good chance that Watson will be able to do this without any human help at all.
  • Take driverless cars.
  • Most likely, owners of capital would strongly resist higher taxes, as they always have, while workers would be unhappy with their enforced idleness. Still, the ancient Romans managed to get used to it—with slave labor playing the role of robots—and we might have to, as well.
  • There will be no place to go but the unemployment lin
  • we'll need to let go of some familiar convictions. Left-leaning observers may continue to think that stagnating incomes can be improved with better education and equality of opportunity. Conservatives will continue to insist that people without jobs are lazy bums who shouldn't be coddled. They'll both be wrong.
  • Corporate executives should worry too. For a while, everything will seem great for them: Falling labor costs will produce heftier profits and bigger bonuses. But then it will all come crashing down. After all, robots might be able to produce goods and services, but they can't consume them
  • we'll probably have only a few options open to us. The simplest, because it's relatively familiar, is to tax capital at high rates and use the money to support displaced workers. In other words, as The Economist's Ryan Avent puts it, "redistribution, and a lot of it."
  • would we be happy in a society that offers real work to a dwindling few and bread and circuses for the rest?
  • The next step might be passenger vehicles on fixed routes, like airport shuttles. Then long-haul trucks. Then buses and taxis. There are 2.5 million workers who drive trucks, buses, and taxis for a living, and there's a good chance that, one by one, all of them will be displaced
  •  economist Noah Smith suggests that we might have to fundamentally change the way we think about how we share economic growth. Right now, he points out, everyone is born with an endowment of labor by virtue of having a body and a brain that can be traded for income. But what to do when that endowment is worth a fraction of what it is today? Smith's suggestion: "Why not also an endowment of capital? What if, when each citizen turns 18, the government bought him or her a diversified portfolio of equity?"
  • In simple terms, if owners of capital are capturing an increasing fraction of national income, then that capital needs to be shared more widely if we want to maintain a middle-class society.
  • it's time to start thinking about our automated future in earnest. The history of mass economic displacement isn't encouraging—fascists in the '20s, Nazis in the '30s—and recent high levels of unemployment in Greece and Italy have already produced rioting in the streets and larger followings for right-wing populist parties. And that's after only a few years of misery.
  • When the robot revolution finally starts to happen, it's going to happen fast, and it's going to turn our world upside down. It's easy to joke about our future robot overlords—R2-D2 or the Terminator?—but the challenge that machine intelligence presents really isn't science fiction anymore. Like Lake Michigan with an inch of water in it, it's happening around us right now even if it's hard to see
  • A robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us, but we have a long and dimly lit tunnel to navigate before we get there.
Javier E

Amy Chua Is a Wimp - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18brooks.html

education learning values children chinese US

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • this Chua doesn’t appreciate), she is not really rebelling against American-style parenting; she is the logical extension of the prevailing elite practices. She does everything over-pressuring upper-middle-class parents are doing. She’s just hard core.
  • I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t.
  • Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.
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  • Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement. Most people work in groups. We do this because groups are much more efficient at solving problems than individuals (swimmers are often motivated to have their best times as part of relay teams, not in individual events). Moreover, the performance of a group does not correlate well with the average I.Q. of the group or even with the I.Q.’s of the smartest members.
  • Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon have found that groups have a high collective intelligence when members of a group are good at reading each others’ emotions
  • Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together.
  • This skill set is not taught formally, but it is imparted through arduous experiences. These are exactly the kinds of difficult experiences Chua shelters her children from
  • Chua would do better to see the classroom as a cognitive break from the truly arduous tests of childhood. Where do they learn how to manage people? Where do they learn to construct and manipulate metaphors? Where do they learn to perceive details of a scene the way a hunter reads a landscape? Where do they learn how to detect their own shortcomings? Where do they learn how to put themselves in others’ minds and anticipate others’ reactions?
  • These and a million other skills are imparted by the informal maturity process and are not developed if formal learning monopolizes a child’s time.
Javier E

America Is Becoming More Liberal - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...419112

politics US obama liberalism leftist shift trend

shared by Javier E on 25 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The story of the Democratic Party’s journey leftward has two chapters. The first is about the presidency of George W. Bush. Before Bush, unapologetic liberalism was not the Democratic Party’s dominant creed. The party had a strong centrist wing
  • Centrist Democrats believed that Reagan, for all his faults, had gotten some big things right. The Soviet Union had been evil. Taxes had been too high. Excessive regulation had squelched economic growth. The courts had been too permissive of crime. Until Democrats acknowledged these things, the centrists believed, they would neither win the presidency nor deserve to.
  • In the late 1980s and the 1990s, an influential community of Democratic-aligned politicians, strategists, journalists, and wonks believed that critiquing liberalism from the right was morally and politically necessary.
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  • Bush also destroyed centrist Democrats intellectually, by making it impossible for them to credibly critique liberalism from the right.
  • . In the late ’80s and the ’90s, centrist Democrats had also argued that Reagan’s decision to boost defense spending and aid the Afghan mujahideen had helped topple the Soviet empire. But in 2003, when Bush invaded Iraq, he sparked the greatest foreign-policy catastrophe since Vietnam.
  • If the lesson of the Reagan era had been that Democrats should give a Republican president his due, the lesson of the Bush era was that doing so brought disaster.
  • In the Senate, Bush’s 2001 tax cut passed with 12 Democratic votes; the Iraq War was authorized with 29. As the calamitous consequences of these votes became clear, the revolt against them destroyed the Democratic Party’s centrist wing
  • With the Dean campaign came an intellectual revolution inside the Democratic Party. His insurgency helped propel Daily Kos, a group blog dedicated to stiffening the liberal spine. It energized the progressive activist group MoveOn. It also coincided with Paul Krugman’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal columnist and Jon Stewart’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal television personality.
  • All of this has shaped the Clinton campaign’s response to Sanders. At the first Democratic debate, she noted that, unlike him, she favors “rein[ing] in the excesses of capitalism” rather than abandoning it altogether. But the only specific policy difference she highlighted was gun control, on which she attacked him from the left.
  • Whereas the party’s most respected thinkers had once urged Democrats to critique liberal orthodoxy, they now criticized Democrats for not defending that orthodoxy fiercely enough. The presidency of George W. Bush had made Democrats unapologetically liberal, and the presidency of Barack Obama was the most tangible result.
  • that’s only half the story. Because if George W. Bush’s failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left, Barack Obama’s have pushed it even further. If Bush was responsible for the liberal infrastructure that helped elect Obama, Obama has now inadvertently contributed to the creation of two movements—Occupy and Black Lives Matter—dedicated to the proposition that even the liberalism he espouses is not left-wing enough.
  • Todd Gitlin quotes Jeremy Varon, a close observer of Occupy who teaches at the New School for Social Research, as saying, “This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration. We thought his voice was ours. Now we know we have to speak for ourselves.
  • Occupy. The movement may have burned out, but it injected economic inequality into the American political debate
  • The same anger that sparked Occupy—directed not merely at Wall Street but at the Democratic Party elites who coddled it—fueled Bill de Blasio’s election and Elizabeth Warren’s rise to national prominence. And without Occupy, it’s impossible to understand why a curmudgeonly Democratic Socialist from Vermont is seriously challenging Hillary Clinton
  • the Democracy Alliance, the party’s most influential donor club, which includes mega-funders such as George Soros and Tom Steyer, has itself shifted leftward during the Obama years. In 2014, it gave Warren a rapturous welcome when she spoke at the group’s annual winter meeting. Last spring it announced that it was making economic inequality its top priority.
  • By the time Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, in part because of her support for the Iraq War, the mood inside the party had fundamentally changed.
  • Moreover, the Occupy-Warren-Sanders axis has influenced Clinton’s own economic agenda, which is significantly further left than the one she ran on in 2008. She has called for tougher regulation of the financial industry, mused about raising Social Security taxes on the wealthy (something she opposed in 2008), and criticized the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement she once gushed about).
  • “Black Lives Matter developed in the wake of the failure of the Obama administration,” argues the Cornell sociologist Travis Gosa, a co-editor of The Hip Hop & Obama Reader. “Black Lives Matter is the voice of a Millennial generation that’s been sold a ba
  • Had Black Lives Matter existed when Bill Clinton was seeking the presidency, he probably would have run against the group
  • Today, by contrast, the Democratic Establishment has responded to Black Lives Matter much as it responded to Occupy: with applause
  • what’s most remarkable isn’t Hillary Clinton’s move to the left, or the Democratic Party’s. It’s the American public’s willingness to go along.
  • Much of this shift is being driven by a changing mood among whites. Between January and April alone, according to a YouGov poll, the percentage of whites who called deaths like those of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray “isolated incident[s]” dropped 20 points. There’s even been movement within the GOP. From 2014 to 2015, the percentage of Republicans saying America needs to make changes to give blacks an equal chance rose 15 points—more than the percentage increase among Democrats or Independents.
  • Most interesting—because he is the Republican candidate with the keenest sense of how to appeal to the general electorate—has been the approach of Senator Marco Rubio. In August, a Fox News anchor asked him about Black Lives Matter. Instead of condemning the movement, Rubio told the story of an African American friend of his whom police had stopped eight or nine times over the previous 18 months even though he had never broken the law. “This is a problem our nation has to confront,” Rubio declared. Then he talked about young African Americans who get arrested for nonviolent offenses and pushed into plea deals by overworked public defenders. The government, he said, must “look for ways to divert people” from going to jail “so that you don’t get people stigmatized early in life.”
  • Conservative Republicans didn’t talk this way in the ’90s. They didn’t talk this way even in the early Obama years. The fact that Rubio does so now is more evidence that today, unlike in the mid-’60s, the debate about race and justice isn’t moving to the right. It’s moving further left
  • What’s different this time? One difference is that in the 1960s and ’70s, crime exploded, fueling a politics of fear and vengeance. Over the past two decades, by contrast, crime has plummeted. And despite some hyperbolic headlines, there’s no clear evidence that it’s rising significantly again.
  • When the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law examined polls, it found that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans now support barring discrimination against transgender people.
  • Most Americans, in other words, having decided that discriminating against lesbians and gay men was wrong, have simply extended that view to transgender people via what Flores describes as a “mechanism of attitude generalization.”
  • In polling, Americans typically say they favor smaller government in general while supporting many specific government programs. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Americans said they favored “a smaller government providing fewer services” over “a bigger government providing more services” by 37 percentage points. When Obama took power in 2009, the margin was a mere eight points. And despite the president’s many economic interventions, the most recent time Pew asked that question, in September 2014, the margin was exactly the same.
  • This intervention has sparked an angry response on the Republican right, but not among Americans as a whole.
  • On health care, the story is similar: no public backlash. When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, most polls showed Americans opposing it by about eight to 10 points. Today, the margin is almost identical
  • Little has changed on taxes, either, even though Obama allowed some of the tax cuts passed under George W. Bush to expire. The percentage of Americans who say they pay more than their fair share in taxes is about the same as it was in the spring of 2010 (
  • in an era when government has grown more intrusive, African American activists have grown more confrontational, and long-standing assumptions about sexual orientation and gender identity have been toppled, most Americans are not yelling “stop,” as they began doing in the mid-1960s. The biggest reason: We’re not dealing with the same group of Americans.
  • On issue after issue, it is the young who are most pleased with the liberal policy shifts of the Obama era, and most eager for more
  • It is largely because of them that the percentage of Americans who want government to “promote traditional values” is now lower than at any other time since Gallup began asking the question in 1993, and that the percentage calling themselves “socially liberal” now equals the percentage calling themselves “socially conservative” for the first time since Gallup began asking that question in 1999.
  • Millennials are also sustaining support for bigger government. The young may not have a high opinion of the institutions that represent them, but they nonetheless want those institutions to do more
  • They were also 25 points more likely than those 65 and older to approve of Occupy Wall Street and 36 points more favorable toward socialism, which they actually preferred to capitalism, 49 percent to 46 percent. As the Pew report put it, “Millennials, at least so far, hold ‘baked in’ support for a more activist government.
  • The press often depicts American politics as a battle pitting ever more liberal Democrats against ever more conservative Republicans. Among the young, however, that’s inaccurate. Young Democrats may be more liberal than their elders, but so are young Republicans. According to Pew, a clear majority of young Republicans say immigrants strengthen America, half say corporate profits are too high, and almost half say stricter environmental laws are worth the cost—answers that sharply distinguish them from older members of the GOP.
  • Asked how they categorize themselves ideologically, more than two-thirds of Republican Millennials call themselves either “liberal” or “mixed,” while fewer than one-third call themselves “conservative.” Among the oldest Republicans, that breakdown is almost exactly reversed.
  • Millennials are not liberal primarily because they are young. They are liberal because their formative political experiences were the Iraq War and the Great Recession, and because they make up the most secular, most racially diverse, least nationalistic generation in American history. And none of that is likely to change.
  • America is not governed by public-opinion polls, after all. Congressional redistricting, felon disenfranchisement, and the obliteration of campaign-finance laws all help insulate politicians from the views of ordinary people, and generally empower the right. But despite these structural disadvantages, Obama has enacted a more consequential progressive agenda than either of his two Democratic predecessors did
  • If Clinton does win, it’s likely that on domestic policy, she will govern to Obama’s left. (On foreign policy, where there is no powerful left-wing activist movement like Occupy or Black Lives Matter, the political dynamics are very different.) Clinton’s campaign proposals already signal a leftward shift. And people close to her campaign suggest that among her top agenda items would be paid family leave, debt-free college tuition, and universal preschool
  • Clinton will face this reality from her first day in office. And she will face it knowing that because she cannot inspire liberals rhetorically as Obama can, they will be less likely to forgive her heresies on policy. Like Lyndon B. Johnson after John F. Kennedy, she will have to deliver in substance what she cannot deliver in style.
  • it’s likely that any Republican capable of winning the presidency in 2016 would govern to the left of George W. Bush. In the first place, winning at all would require a different coalition. When Bush won the presidency in 2000, very few Millennials could vote. In 2016, by contrast, they will constitute roughly one-third of those who turn out
  • In 2000, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians constituted 20 percent of voters. In 2016, they will constitute more than 30 percent.
  • even if the 2016 Republican nominee wins 60 percent of the white vote (more than any GOP nominee in the past four decades except Reagan, in 1984, has won), he or she will still need almost 30 percent of the minority vote. Mitt Romney got 17 percent.
  • This need to win the votes of Millennials and minorities, who lean left not just on cultural issues but on economic ones, will shape how any conceivable Republican president campaigns in the general election, and governs once in office.
  • If America’s demographics have changed since the Bush presidency, so has the climate among conservative intellectuals. There is now an influential community of “reformocons”—in some ways comparable to the New Democratic thinkers of the 1980s—who believe Republicans have focused too much on cutting taxes for the wealthy and not enough on addressing the economic anxieties of the middle and working classes.
  • The candidate closest to the reformocons is Rubio, who cites several of them by name in his recent book. He says that partially privatizing Social Security, which Bush ran on in 2000 and 2004, is an idea whose “time has passed.” And unlike Bush, and both subsequent Republican presidential nominees, Rubio is not proposing a major cut in the top income-tax rate. Instead, the centerpiece of his economic plan is an expanded child tax credit, which would be available even to Americans who are so poor that they don’t pay income taxes
  • it’s likely that were he elected, Rubio wouldn’t push through as large, or as regressive, a tax cut as Bush did in 2001 and 2003. Partly, that’s because a younger and more ethnically diverse electorate is less tolerant of such policies. Partly, it’s because Rubio’s administration would likely contain a reformocon faction more interested in cutting taxes for the middle class than for the rich. And partly, it’s because the legacy of the Bush tax cuts themselves would make them harder to replicate
  • A key figure in passing the Bush tax cuts was Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2001 warned that unless Washington lowered tax rates, surpluses might grow too large, thus producing a dangerous “accumulation of private assets by the federal government.” Greenspan’s argument gave the Bush administration crucial intellectual cover. But the idea now looks laughable. And it’s hard to imagine the current Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, endorsing large upper-income tax cuts in 2017.
  • the kind of centrist, Chamber of Commerce–friendly Democrats who helped Bush pass his tax plan in 2001—including Max Baucus, John Breaux, Mary Landrieu, Zell Miller, Max Cleland, Tim Johnson, Blanche Lambert Lincoln—barely exist anymore. The Democrats’ shift left over the past decade and a half means that a President Rubio would encounter more militant opposition than Bush did in 2001
  • the next Republican president won’t be able to return the nation to the pre-Obama era.
  • That’s what happened when Dwight Eisenhower followed Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Ike moderated the growth in government expansion that had begun in the 1930s, but he didn’t return American politics to the 1920s, when the GOP opposed any federal welfare state at all. He in essence ratified the New Deal
  • It’s also what happened when Bill Clinton followed Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. By passing punitive anticrime laws, repealing restrictions on banks, signing NAFTA, cutting government spending to balance the budget, reforming welfare, and declaring that the “era of big government is over,” Clinton acknowledged that even a Democratic president could not revive the full-throated liberalism of the 1960s and ’70s. He ratified Reaganism.
  • Barack Obama sought the presidency hoping to be the Democrats’ Reagan: a president who changed America’s ideological trajectory. And he has changed it. He has pushed the political agenda as dramatically to the left as Reagan pushed it to the right, and, as under Reagan, the public has acquiesced more than it has rebelled.
Javier E

Dianne Feinstein Doesn't Need a Do-Over - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...583501

youth politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Feinstein did something the kids weren’t expecting: she took them seriously, and she patiently explained some truths about American political life that they didn’t understand. And then she did the one thing an old woman isn’t supposed to do: She said that she wasn’t good at her job in spite of being old, but because of it.
  • AOC has so much star power, charisma, beauty, and political chutzpah that even older people are moved by her. To the young, she approaches the status of Barack Obama himself; soon she will probably exceed it. She is perfectly attuned to them, and they respond to her in the deeply emotional way that signals something important is happening
  • Fools dismiss her; when a natural shows up, things happen that are beyond the control of the powerful systems that normally dominate Washington.
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  • When the young people of the Sunrise Movement arrived at Feinstein’s office, what they had going for them is the kind of perfect and complete understanding of the Green New Deal that only those still freshly acquainted with the worlds of magic and make-believe can achieve
  • By the time Feinstein told them, “You know what’s interesting about this group is I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’m doing. You come in here and say, ‘It has to be my way or the highway.’ I don’t respond to that,” they looked like someone had cancelled Christmas.
  • It’s the most wildly transgressive thing you’ve ever seen. Children are our future! They must be coddled and exalted, their ideas about politics and the environment received as though they are the unpublished thoughts of Bertrand Russel
  • Seeing their rudeness treated in the measured and unyielding way that adults used to speak to misbehaving children is weirdly thrilling. She never lifted her voice, but compared with the way politicians usually respond children, she came across like W.C. Fields.
  • it was the sanctimonious comments of one of the teenagers in the group that provided the astonishing highlight of the film. “Senator,” the young woman said in a patronizing voice, “We are asking you to be brave.
  • By the end of the encounter, she had adroitly right-sized the young people. When one of them reflexively asked the great question of their generation—“Can I get an internship here?”—the teen finally received the constituent-friendly answer she craved: “You want an internship here?”
Javier E

Opinion | Moderates Have the Better Story - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rates-progressives-warren.html

politics moderate progressive policy

shared by Javier E on 02 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • American progressives have a story to tell, and they are not afraid to tell it. In this story global capitalism is a war zone. Free trade is a racket. Big business and big pharma are rapacious villains that crush the common man
  • In this context you need a government prepared for war. You need a government fired by economic nationalism, willing to play trade hardball against our foes. You need a centralized industrial policy to shift investment where it’s needed. You need a government that will protect you, control you and give you thing
  • As in any war, you want government that is centralized and paternalistic.
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  • In the moderate story, global capitalism is a challenge but also an opportunity field. Over the past generation more people have been lifted out of poverty than ever before. For the first time we have a mass global middle class. This opens up new opportunities, liberates masses of talent and leads to more creativity than ever before.
  • In the moderate story, government has a bigger role than before, but it is not a fighting, combative role. It is a booster rocket role. It is to give people the skills needed to compete and flourish in this open, pluralistic world. It is to give people a secure base, so they can go off and live daring adventures. It is to mitigate the downsides of change, and so people can realize the unprecedented opportunities.
  • Progressives want to create a government caste that is powerful and a population that is safe but dependent
  • Moderates, by contrast, are trying to create a citizenry that possesses the vigorous virtues — daring, empowered, always learning, always brave.
  • learn from the Nordic countries
  • they can afford to have strong welfare policies only because they have dynamic free-market economies.
  • Nordic countries are more open to free trade than the U.S. They have fewer regulations on business creation, fewer licensing regulations.
  • Nordic countries show that social solidarity and economic freedom are not opposite, but go hand in hand
  • The Nordic countries tried wealth taxes of the sort Elizabeth Warren is proposing, and all except Norway abandoned them because they were unworkable
  • Nordic health plans require patient co-payments and high deductibles, in stark contrast to Bernie Sanders’s plan
  • Second, never coddle. Progressives are always trying to give away free stuff
  • Moderates want to help but not infantilize
  • a country that is not full of passive recipients but audacious pioneers
  • Third, drive decision-making downward. People become energetic, responsible adults by making decisions for themselve
  • Fourth, bring on the world. International competition is more rigorous than national competition
  • Fifth, ignite from below. Warren wants to centralize economic decision
  • Moderates emphasize tools that regular people can choose to build their own lives and maximize their own opportunities: wage subsidies, subsidies to help people move to opportunities, charter schools.
Javier E

The House Is On Fire - Accepting the Truth of the Trump Revolution - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...-truth-of-the-trump-revolution

trump racism white supremacy revanchism crisis

shared by Javier E on 16 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Of course, he’s a racist. But that doesn’t tell us enough. Lots of people dislike blacks or Jews, don’t want to live near them, etc. But many, likely most with racist attitudes, do not embrace a politics driven by racial grievance. Trump’s politics are about racial grievance. It’s not latent or peripheral but rather central. That’s different and it’s worse.
  • We can infer what stands behind a person’s public statements if we’ve seen them enough, under different pressures and in different contexts. Trump’s repeated expressions of sympathy for racist activists, refusals to denounce racist activists, coddling and appointments of racist activists can only really mean one thing: that he instinctively sympathizes with them and indeed is one. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me 80 million times, I need to seriously consider what the fuck is wrong with me.
  • The simpler explanation that accounts for all the available facts is not always right. But as Occam noted, it is always to be preferred. What we need is a Copernican revolution in our understanding of Trumpism, or at least some of us need it. The breakthrough for Copernicus was in positing the unimaginable, indeed the terrifying possibility that the Earth is not the center of the universe but rather a peripheral, secondary celestial body. Once you accept that, a lot falls into place.
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  • With Trump, he has a revanchist racist politics because he is a revanchist racist. Once you accept that, a lot falls into place.
  • What we have in this Times article is the more direct evidence, a confirmation of what we should already know. His advisors know this is what he thinks. They apparently hear it frequently. They were shocked to here him say in public “opinions that the president had long expressed in private.”
  • What we’ve seen over the last five days is sickening and awful. The house is on fire. But it was on fire a week ago. It’s been on fire since November. The truth is indeed unimaginable and terrifying. But we need to accept the full truth of it if we are going to be able to save our country.
Javier E

France Knows What Awaits America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617729

france Dreyfus irrationality lies right-wing

shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A Jewish military officer wrongfully convicted of treason. A years-long psychodrama that permanently polarized an entire society—communities, friends, even families. A politics of anger and emotion designed to insult the very notion of truth. A divide that only grew with time. A reconciliation that never was. A frenzied right wing that turned to violence when it failed at the ballot box.
  • This was the Dreyfus affair, the signature scandal of fin de siècle France, aspects of which Americans might recognize as we arrive at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency: After decades of cascading political crises, debilitating financial scandals, and rising anti-Semitism, the Dreyfus affair saw the emergence of political surreality, an alternate universe of hateful irrationality and militarized lies that captured the minds of nearly half the population.
  • That period in France, known as the Third Republic, never resulted in any reconciliation. It turned out to be impossible to compromise with those who not only rejected the truth but also found the truth offensive, a kind of existential threat
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  • In fact, “unity” turned out to be the wrong goal to pursue. What mattered was defending the republic’s values, a defense never made forcefully enough.
  • As a historian of modern France, I’ve followed with great interest the innumerable comparisons drawn between Trumpism and Nazism that began even before Trump took office: the endless debate over whether Trump can be called a “fascist” (I would say yes), whether American society today resembles Weimar Germany before it fell to the Nazis (I would say no), and if we can really say that the Republican Party is just a confederation of “collaborators” (of course we can).
  • In the end, the opportunism and the cynicism of political elites earned them the distrust of both ordinary voters and the bureaucrats left to run things when they themselves would not. What emerged was a “politics of resentment,”
  • In seeking to understand Trump, and Trumpism, we have preferred to tell ourselves stories about violent rupture and hostile takeovers—of Hitler’s rise, of Nazism’s threat, of the perils of collaboration—but not so much about the valorization of falsehood and a republic that ignores, and even embraces, its own terminal impotence. That is the story of France’s Third Republic and its defining psychodrama.
  • What is most important to remember about the Third Republic is that, as long-lasting as it might have been, it was a parliamentary system constantly stalled in political gridlock
  • much like in America today, there was a self-absorbed intellectual establishment obsessed with decline and the mysterious disease of “decadence,” which was spoken of in the same pompous outrage that our own pundits use to decry what happens on Ivy League campuses or in major newsrooms.
  • All historical analogies are flawed, and they might not mean much at all. Even if they underscore the gravity of the moment, they often obscure its causes and might, in fact, prevent us from seeing them.
  • The spectacular crash of the Union Générale bank in 1882 triggered an economic downturn that would take years to overcome; this, and the corruption of the Panama scandal just four years later, might be seen as19th-century versions of 2008, economic crises whose root causes were similarly ignored by the elite and, among the masses, blamed on the Jews.
  • there were multiple Trumpian moments and characters in the Third Republic as well, most notably Georges Boulanger, the swashbuckling, garish hard-line nationalist general who seemed to emerge from nowhere and launched a populist movement of mass appeal, an anti-republican crusade that nearly toppled the republic in 1889. Boulangism did not last politically, but it represented a new fault line in French society: a powerful right-wing bloc that united some in the working class along with conservative Catholics and the remnants of the old nobility. It only radicalized from there a few years later, and the Dreyfus affair was the moment when what was left of the social fabric definitively unraveled.
  • What is especially useful to remember about the Dreyfus affair now is the point of no return it represented, the repugnant embrace of lies by one half of society, educated people who were not ignorant but who had simply ceased to care. For them, the truth was irrelevant; what mattered was preserving their vision of the nation, regardless of the facts.
  • From start to finish, the Dreyfus affair was a seemingly endless social drama. Much like the Trump presidency, it was an all-consuming, emotional experience that left no aspect of public or even private life untouched. It would be hard to overstate the polarization it triggered in France, which found its population split over the fate of an obscure officer hardly anyone had heard of before the episode began.
  • In some ways, the Dreyfus affair was the culmination of an age-old clash begun by the French Revolution: On one side were the defenders of the republic and its “universal” values, on the other the anti-republican faction that preferred the grandeur of the monarchy, the sanctity of the Church, and the prestige of the military.
  • Then, as now, these people had undertaken a deliberate embrace of irrationality, an almost primal flaunting of decency and civilized norms, merely because that was possible, and because there were never any real consequences.
  • this might not solve the deeper problem, which is that so many in Trump’s mob—like so many of his supporters in general—remain comfortably ensconced in the mansion of lies their champion has built. As we have seen for years on end, any attempt to expose those lies with facts or evidence of any kind is a fool’s errand. These people deliberately inhabit an alternate universe because it makes them feel powerful, because it frustrates their enemies, and, in the end, because they can.
  • he line among certain Democrats has been that there can be “no healing without accountability.” But this is naïve. There can be no accountability for those who engage in surreality, the dark province in which the world is apparently run by a cabal of prominent pedophiles and where Trump somehow retained the White House in a landslide. As long as the president’s supporters insult the notion of objective truth, coddled by conspiracy theories and social-media networks that simulate a sense of community, there will be no common ground to seek, no “America” to reclaim
  • if the past rarely offers lessons, sometimes it offers warnings.
Javier E

Opinion | Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Republican Perversion of 'Freedom' - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...r-greene-republican-party.html

gop freedom atrocity perversion culture language

shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Many House Republicans have been freaking out, no exaggeration, over the installation of metal detectors along their paths to the House floor
  • Apparently, if you can’t pack heat in proximity to Nancy Pelosi, you’re living in a totalitarian state.
  • Lesko, an Arizona Republican, tweeted that the new security screening was proof that lawmakers “now live in Pelosi’s communist America.”
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  • two themes that keep growing brighter — or maybe I should say darker — in Republican politics now.
  • One is the reflexive attempt to divert attention from the florid craziness in their own ranks and own base by screaming “communist,” “socialist” or “radical left.”
  • The other is to claim that they’re protecting freedom when they’re sanctioning nonsense.
  • How did Marco Rubio, emblematic of all the Republican senators who are determined to stay cozy with Trump’s supporters, respond to Trump’s richly earned second impeachment?
  • By saying that the “radical left” was out of control. Mind you, the radical right, bloated by Trump’s fictions and most Republican senators’ silence, orchestrated the deadly events of Jan. 6, but confronting that head-on is of no political use to Rubio. So, instead: socialism! Cancel culture! The radical left!
  • Many Republicans immediately accepted Greene’s speech on the House floor on Thursday — during which she disavowed QAnon and the idea that school massacres and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were hoaxes — as a redemptive apology. It was nothing of the kind.
  • She played the victim, deriding “big media companies” and “cancel culture,” and insisting that she “never once said any of the things that I am being accused of today during my campaign” or since being elected.
  • “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true,” she said. Allowed to? No, ready to. Eager to. Itching with paranoia and hate, which she then spread.
  • Removing Representative Greene from her House committee assignments — which the House did on Thursday night by a 230-to-199 vote, with 11 Republicans joining 219 Democrats in favor of her ouster — wasn’t the death of free speech. Greene remains free, as an individual, to spout the bunk she once spouted
  • But Congress has the right — and, I’d argue, the responsibility — to make crystal clear that such bunk is vile, dangerous and antithetical to anything and everything that democratic government should be about, and to hold Greene to account for her actions. What happened to Republicans’ belief in personal responsibility?
  • Requiring that people wear face masks in crowded settings in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic doesn’t repress individualism. It protects many individuals, so that they’re free to continue breathing and living
  • Sensible firearms restrictions aren’t an insult to freedom. They’re a bulwark against bloodshed and chaos, protecting the freedom of high school students and others to go about their days without the constant, gnawing fear of being shot.
  • That brings us back to those metal detectors in the U.S. Capitol
  • context is everything. The new detectors popped up after a violent invasion of the Capitol. Proudly gun-loving Republican members of Congress have bragged about carrying their firearms everywhere and have coddled voters on the far right who espouse violence against Democrats.
  • Representative Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, had previously delivered a floor speech in which he said that the detectors weren’t merely unnecessary. They were “atrocities.” Once upon a time, that word had meaning. But then, once upon a time, “freedom” did, too.
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