Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged coding

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
mattrenz16

Opinion: The single most important quality a president must have - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump upended countless longstanding norms when he took office, prompting Americans, foreign allies and enemies alike to wonder, what does the office of the presidency really stand for?
  • One night after moving into a brand new White House in November 1800, then-President John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail and included a short prayer: "I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House, and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof."
  • Faith in elected leaders rose to 55% in 2002, but by 2015 -- just before Trump took office -- it had dropped again, this time to only 19% of Americans saying they trusted the federal government all or most of the time.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • First, our next president should set a new tone in the White House on day one, proclaiming that honesty, dignity and respect for others will be the new marching orders. In the aftermath of Watergate, when former President Richard Nixon was forced out in disgrace, I saw his successor -- Gerald Ford -- change the atmosphere within hours. Ford proclaimed "that truth is the glue" that holds us all together. He believed it and soon his followers did, too.
  • If he or she is open and honest, that is the path they will walk; but if he or she acts more like a mobster, bullying and lying to those in his midst, some of them will eventually copy this behavior. So, the question before us is simple: Will the wise and the honest prevail over the next four years? The answer really rests with you, the voters. You are the ultimate stewards of our democracy.
  • Washington Post cataloging his over 20,000 false or misleading statements.
  • These sentiments about honor and wisdom, shared for over two centuries by our best presidents, are now at the center of this year's presidential contest.
  • Within a decade, faith in the federal government as a whole dropped 41 points.
  • Faith in elected leaders rose to 55% in 2002, but by 2015 -- just before Trump took office -- it had dropped again, this time to only 19% of Americans saying they trusted the federal government all or most of the time.
  • Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt loved the prayer so much that in 1945 he had it engraved in the mantel above a stone fireplace in the State Dining Room.
  • And a recent Pew poll measuring international sentiments across 13 countries found that the international community was more trusting of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping than of Trump.
  • Indeed, I believe that the restoration of trust should be the single highest priority of our next president. Everything else will flow from there.
  • First, our next president should set a new tone in the White House on day one, proclaiming that honesty, dignity and respect for others will be the new marching orders.
  • Ford proclaimed "that truth is the glue" that holds us all together. He believed it and soon his followers did, too.
  • Second, our next president needs every department to review and refresh its ethics codes and then require every new political appointee to attend no-nonsense briefings on what is in bounds and what is out of bounds.
  • Third, our next president needs to review and overhaul those who now serve as inspectors general across the federal landscape.
  • In writing his magisterial biography of Harry Truman, historian David McCullough concluded that character is the single most important quality a president must have.
  • So, the question before us is simple: Will the wise and the honest prevail over the next four years? The answer really rests with you, the voters. You are the ultimate stewards of our democracy.
leilamulveny

Election Voting Issues: What We're Watching - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-voting-challenges-11603030074

voting election issues politics us

shared by leilamulveny on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Voters face challenges including changing deadlines for mail-in ballots and concerns about long lines, demonstrations and potential intimidation at polling places.
  • Disabled voters will have limited access after the Supreme Court reinstated a ban on curbside voting, blocking a lower-court order that allowed county officials to use the accommodation.
  • A Superior Court judge ordered polls to remain open an additional two hours, until 9 p.m., in Spalding County after technical difficulties prevented people from voting in the county. Voters who vote in the extended time frame will cast provisional ballots.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • reports of robocalls spreading misinformation in the city of Flint that told voters that “due to long lines, they should vote tomorrow.” Attorney General Dana Nessel said that was false and called it an effort to suppress the vote.
  • An extension for receiving ballots in the mail by Nov. 10, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day, faces legal uncertainty after a federal appeals court ruling last week that the extended deadline is likely unconstitutional. The court ordered the state to segregate late-arriving ballots for possible disqualification.
  • Civil-rights groups said they filed a lawsuit in federal court late Monday against the Alamance County sheriff and chief of police in Graham, N.C., alleging the police disrupted a Saturday march to an early-voting location and intimidated and discouraged march participants from voting. The Graham Police Department said the demonstration blocked traffic and was deemed unsafe and unlawful. The department said it arrested eight people.
  • A Republican-backed lawsuit asked a federal judge to throw out at least 1,200 ballots in Montgomery County, outside Philadelphia, alleging local officials handled mail-in ballots illegally. The suit alleged the county Board of Elections was illegally sorting through and identifying potential problems with mail-in ballots received before Nov. 3. A county spokesperson said: “We believe our process is sound and permissible under the Election Code.”
  • The Supreme Court earlier let stand a ruling by Pennsylvania’s highest court that extended the deadline for accepting mail-in ballots by three days. The ruling also allows ballots with illegible postmarks to be counted if received by the deadline. The state’s top election official, a Democrat, extended the deadline to compensate for more voters turning to mail ballots. Republican plaintiffs asked the high court to reconsider the matter. In anticipation of possible postelection legal challenges, local election officials have been directed to separate ballots received after the original Election Day deadline.
  • The judge noted that state law requires voting on Election Day to take place inside buildings. To ensure compliance, the clerk for Harris said on Twitter that the county would operate one drive-through center on Election Day, at the Toyota Center, a large indoor arena.
  • The Supreme Court declined to allow pandemic-related changes to voting rules in Wisconsin, letting stand a federal appeals court’s ruling that mail-in ballots must be received by Election Day.
tsainten

TikTok Deal Exposes a Security Gap, and a Missing China Strategy - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...k-trump-national-security.html

China politics policy culture

shared by tsainten on 21 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • The United States wants to have it all. It seeks to reap the benefits of a global internet yet limit its citizens to made-in America products, ensuring that the data that flows through American networks is “clean.”
  • the State Department has begun what it calls “the clean network initiative,” making sure that data is not tainted by adversaries, starting with China.
  • On Capitol Hill, the China problem many politicians still fume about is cheap Chinese goods, ignoring the fact that China’s labor is no longer inexpensive.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • And the same algorithm that picks your next dance video could, in the future, pick a political video. (There is already more than a whiff of political content on the app.)
  • Trump has achieved his objective: preventing Chinese engineers, perhaps under the influence of the state, from manipulating the code in ways that could censor, or manipulate, what American users see.
  • Attorney General William P. Barr has already called for greater scrutiny — and perhaps abolition — of any such app that does not allow the United States a legal “back door.”
  • defeats the original intent of the internet. And that was to create a global communications network, unrestrained by national borders.
Javier E

How South Korea Successfully Managed Coronavirus - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ow-to-manage-covid-11601044329

korea pandemic response

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • South Korea appears to have cracked the code for managing the coronavirus. Its solution is straightforward, flexible and relatively easy to replicate.
  • The country has averaged about 77 new daily cases since early April and recently suppressed a spike in infections. Adjusting for population, that would be the equivalent of about 480 cases a day in the U.S., where new daily cases have averaged about 38,000 over the same period.
  • South Korea halted virus transmission better than any other wealthy country during the pandemic’s early months. It was about twice as effective as the U.S. and U.K. at preventing infected individuals from spreading the disease to other
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • South Korea’s economy is expected to decline by just 0.8% this year, the best among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s forecasts for member nations.
  • When the supply of face masks ran short early on in the crisis, the government seized production.
  • The nation fast-tracked approval of domestic testing kits as soon as cases began hitting
  • It tapped into its relative wealth and hyperconnectivity, blasting text alerts to citizens if infections occurred in their area
  • The key to South Korea’s success came from blending technology and testing like no other country, centralized control and communication—and a constant fear of failure.
  • Some parts of its playbook wouldn’t work in most Western societies—and received backlash in South Korea as well
  • Nearly everyone in the country wears masks.
  • Every confirmed patient, even those with no or mild symptoms, gets isolated at hospitals or converted dormitories run by the government. Treatment is free.
  • As a result, South Korea never had to mandate a lockdown, so restaurants and business were able to stay open, cushioning the blow to the economy.
  • “No country has adapted to living with, and containing, the virus like South Korea,”
  • “You don’t need or want to eradicate the virus. But you modify your behavior and get on with life.”
  • It detected the country’s first case 10 days later using a test that screened for all known coronavirus strains—the same tactic practiced during the December simulation.
  • Health officials have unfettered access to individuals’ private mobile data, and early on used government websites to share the whereabouts of confirmed patients, plucked from smartphone GPS history
  • The government now offers anonymous testing and leaves out identifying information and specific names of places visited in contact-tracing disclosures.
  • After a major cluster linked to a megachurch in the city of Daegu emerged on Feb. 18, the government made a flurry of moves
  • Cases peaked in 11 days.
  • The day after cases reached a five-month high of 441 on Aug. 27, South Korea’s top public-health official gave a grim forecast: “We could see 800 to 2,000 infections next week
  • South Koreans took the advice and adjusted. Population mobility, as measured by local telecom operators, soon fell by one-quarter. Most schools closed and diners had to leave restaurants by 9 p.m. Aug. 27 turned out to be the peak.
  • At twice-a-day briefings, health officials express worry when they can only trace the origins of three-quarters of confirmed cases.
  • In total, South Korea, with a population of 52 million, has reported 23,455 cases and 395 deaths.
  • One reason South Korea was prepared: It learned painful lessons in 2015 from an outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome
  • “The only way to make the government prepared is to actually have an outbreak,”
  • After MERS, the government started twice-a-year training sessions simulating a rapid spread of viral disease
  • “Oddly enough, last December’s ‘war game’ was a novel coronavirus,”
  • After two weeks of aggressive social distancing, South Koreans could again head back to schools, gyms and sports stadiums.
  • One firm, Kogene Biotech Co., demonstrated a successful test and got the regulatory green light within four days. A second manufacturer would be added by Feb. 12. The tests all used the same methodology and could be sent to any of the country’s roughly 120 laboratories that promised turnaround times of between six to 24 hours.
  • Cases, which had been slowly rising, suddenly doubled in a day, to over 100. Experts predicted it would soon surge to levels seen nowhere else but China.
  • That triggered a Feb. 20 late-night message in a group chat with eight South Korean infectious-disease experts: “We need to quickly devise a way to conduct mass testing,”
  • an answer: drive-through clinics.
  • Dr. Kim sent a PowerPoint presentation to the group within hours, at 3:53 a.m., outlining how tests would take just 10 minutes and saved much-needed protective gear since outdoor workers didn’t have to change gowns after each patient
  • Two days later, cars rumbled through the country’s first drive-through clinic. Testing capacity multiplied 100 times, giving South Korea a critical early edge.
  • As South Korea’s coronavirus problems mounted, Mr. Moon intentionally kept his profile low. “His stance is that it’s more objective for an expert to hold the briefings, and that is the way to gain the trust of the people,”
  • Even with the swift response, a lack of hospital beds became a major issue. In just 11 days, South Korea’s case count had gone from 31 to 3,150. Thousands were waiting to be hospitalized. A handful died while waiting.
  • South Korea’s infectious-disease experts had a proposal. Confirmed patients should be divided into four categories, based on the risk profile and severity of symptoms, with only the most serious cases hospitalized. Those with mild or no symptoms should be isolated at makeshift treatment facilities.
  • Dr. Peck set up a meeting with senior officials from the Samsung conglomerate, asking that an empty facility near Daegu be lent to the South Korean government. By first having a company volunteer a venue, Dr. Peck recalled thinking, it would pressure South Korea’s health ministry to act.
  • About 80% of South Korea’s coronavirus patients have been hospitalized in the community treatment centers. Those who are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms are still sent there.
  • That changed in August. Unlike February’s outbreak, the new wave of infections fanned out across South Korea to all 15 of the country’s major cities and provinces. The country’s national testing capacity had by then expanded to 50,000 a day with test results notified within 24 hours, up from 20,000 in February
  • The U.S. conducted about 900,000 tests a day over the past week through Thursday, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project. But South Korea performs six times as many tests per confirmed Covid-19 case than the U.S. doe
  • South Korea’s three-tier system created in June for social distancing went off script. With health experts split on whether to adopt the maximum levels last month, a government advisory committee landed at a “level 2.5” social-distancing for the Seoul area that closed schools and banned church services and gatherings of more than 10 people.
  • On Tuesday, South Korea reported its lowest one-day infections in over a month, with just 61 cases.
Javier E

Rising Seas Threaten an American Institution: The 30-Year Mortgage - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ate-seas-30-year-mortgage.html

mortgage housing flood global warming

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Home buyers are increasingly using mortgages that make it easier for them to stop making their monthly payments and walk away from the loan if the home floods or becomes unsellable or unlivable.
  • More banks are getting buyers in coastal areas to make bigger down payments — often as much as 40 percent of the purchase price, up from the traditional 20 percent — a sign that lenders have awakened to climate dangers and want to put less of their own money at risk.
  • And in one of the clearest signs that banks are worried about global warming, they are increasingly getting these mortgages off their own books by selling them to government-backed buyers like Fannie Mae, where taxpayers would be on the hook financially if any of the loans fail.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • “Conventional mortgages have survived many financial crises, but they may not survive the climate crisis,” said Jesse Keenan, an associate professor at Tulane University. “This trend also reflects a systematic financial risk for banks and the U.S. taxpayers who ultimately foot the bill.”
  • The question that matters, according to researchers, isn’t whether the effects of climate change will start to ripple through the housing market. Rather, it’s how fast those effects will occur and what they will look like.
  • It’s not only along the nation’s rivers and coasts where climate-induced risk has started to push down home prices. In parts of the West, the growing danger of wildfires is already making it harder for homeowners to get insurance.
  • as the world warms, that long-term nature of conventional mortgages might not be as desirable as it once was, as rising seas and worsening storms threaten to make some land uninhabitable. A retreat from the 30-year mortgage could also put homeownership out of reach for more Americans.
  • Those homes are valued at $241 billion.
  • In 2016, Freddie Mac’s chief economist at the time, Sean Becketti, warned that losses from flooding both inland and along the coasts are “likely to be greater in total than those experienced in the housing crisis and the Great Recession.”
  • If climate change makes coastal homes uninsurable, Dr. Becketti wrote, their value could fall to nothing, and unlike the 2008 financial crisis, “homeowners will have no expectation that the values of their homes will ever recover.”
  • In 30 years from now, if global-warming emissions follow their current trajectory, almost half a million existing homes will be on land that floods at least once a year,
  • It could also be one of the most economically significant. During the 2008 financial crisis, a decline in home values helped cripple the financial system and pushed almost 9 million Americans out of work.
  • new research shows banks rapidly shifting mortgages with flood risk off their books and over to organizations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored entities whose debts are backed by taxpayers
  • the lenders selling off coastal mortgages the fastest are smaller local banks, which are more likely than large national banks to know which neighborhoods face the greatest climate risk.
  • In 2009, local banks sold off 43 percent of their mortgages in vulnerable zones, Dr. Keenan and Mr. Bradt found, about the same share as other areas. But by 2017, the share had jumped by one-third, to 57 percent, despite staying flat in less vulnerable neighborhoods.
  • Dr. Keenan found banks protecting themselves in other ways, such as lending less money to home buyers in vulnerable areas, relative to the value of the homes.
  • a growing share of mortgages had required down payments between 21 percent and 40 percent — what Dr. Keenan called nonconventional loans.
  • flood insurance isn’t likely to address the problem, Dr. Keenan said, because it doesn’t protect against the risk of a house losing value and ultimately becoming unsellable.
  • More homeowners are also taking out a type of mortgage that is less financially painful for a borrower to walk away from if a home becomes uninhabitable because of rising seas. These are known as interest-only mortgages — the monthly payment covers only the interest on the loan, and doesn’t reduce the principal owed.
  • It’s a loan you can never pay off with the regular monthly payments. However, it also means buyers aren’t sinking any more of their own money into the property beyond a down payment. That’s an advantage if you think the property may become unlivable.
  • he share of homes with fixed-rate, 30-year mortgages has declined sharply — to less than 80 percent, as of 2016 — in areas most exposed to storm surge
  • More than 10 percent of homeowners in those areas had interest-only loans in 2016, compared with just 2.3 percent in other ZIP Codes.
  • “What happens when the water starts lapping at these properties, and they get abandoned?” she said.
Javier E

Opinion | Tom Cotton Duped The Times With His Op-Ed - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tom-cotton-oped-nyt.html

media message frame demagogue propaganda lies manipulation

shared by Javier E on 11 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Many flabbergasted legal experts quickly responded on Twitter, including the lawyer and journalist David French, who tweeted correctly that “a no quarter order is a war crime, prohibited even in actual insurrection since Abraham Lincoln’s signed the Lieber Code in 1863. Such an order is banned by international law and would, if carried out, be murder under American law.”
  • Of course, Mr. Cotton tried to teargaslight Twitter with the assertion that it was not what he meant.“Definition of ‘no quarter’: If you say that someone was given no quarter, you mean that they were not treated kindly by someone who had power or control over them.”
  • for you digital civilians, it’s a classic Twitter feint to say you did not say what you did say. While it is always vexing to see, even more irritating was Mr. Cotton’s ability to remove the appalling digital troll costume he’d worn on Twitter and don a whitewashed version of it for The Times.Yes, I said whitewashed, which is why someone at the big and highly curated opinion platforms needs to figure out what to do about the many different opinions that appear all over the now impossibly fractured internet.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Readers may miss a critical frame of reference when there are so many frames to choose from. And some public figure may take advantage of that, slipping in and out of frames like the portraits at Hogwarts, without being tagged for revolting behavior in one when moving to the next.
  • Consider the master at this: President Trump. He has perfected a sick performative art form of playing the worst troll in Twitter’s history, even as he struts on the world stage with a flag backdrop and a White House podium playing a great leader.
  • It reminds me of the groundbreaking idea in Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”: “The medium is the message.”
  • That was 1964. So, let me update that for you to reflect the rage-baiting stylings of Mr. Trump and Mr. Cotton in 2020: The mediums are a mess. And that’s just the way they like it.
Javier E

How 'White Fragility' Talks Down to Black People - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...614146

racism white privilege review culture

shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • DiAngelo is an education professor and—most prominently today—a diversity consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome in order for meaningful progress on both interpersonal and societal racism to happen
  • DiAngelo has convinced university administrators, corporate human-resources offices, and no small part of the reading public that white Americans must embark on a self-critical project of looking inward to examine and work against racist biases that many have barely known they had.
  • I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • Despite the sincere intentions of its author, the book diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us. This is unintentional, of course, like the racism DiAngelo sees in all whites
  • Still, the book is pernicious because of the authority that its author has been granted over the way innocent readers think.
  • she is devoted to endlessly exploring, acknowledging, and seeking to undo whites’ “complicity with and investment in” racism. To DiAngelo, any failure to do this “work,” as adherents of this paradigm often put it, renders one racist.
  • Her assumption that all people have a racist bias is reasonable—science has demonstrated it. The problem is what DiAngelo thinks must follow as the result of it.
  • DiAngelo has spent a very long time conducting diversity seminars in which whites, exposed to her catechism, regularly tell her—many while crying, yelling, or storming toward the exit—that she’s insulting them and being reductionist. Yet none of this seems to have led her to look inward.
  • Rather, she sees herself as the bearer of an exalted wisdom that these objectors fail to perceive, blinded by their inner racism.
  • When writers who are this sure of their convictions turn out to make a compelling case, it is genuinely exciting. This is sadly not one of those times
  • For one, DiAngelo’s book is replete with claims that are either plain wrong or bizarrely disconnected from reality.
  • DiAngelo’s depiction of white psychology shape-shifts according to what her dogma requires.
  • iAngelo also writes as if certain shibboleths of the Black left—for instance, that all disparities between white and Black people are due to racism of some kind—represent the incontestable truth.
  • The problem is that White Fragility is the prayer book for what can only be described as a cult.
  • We must consider what is required to pass muster as a non-fragile white person.
  • Refer to a “bad neighborhood,” and you’re using code for Black; call it a “Black neighborhood,” and you’re a racist; by DiAngelo’s logic, you are not to describe such neighborhoods at all, even in your own head.
  • You must not ask Black people about their experiences and feelings, because it isn’t their responsibility to educate you. Instead, you must consult books and websites. Never mind that upon doing this you will be accused of holding actual Black people at a remove, reading the wrong sources, or drawing the wrong lessons from them.
  • You must never cry in Black people’s presence as you explore racism, not even in sympathy, because then all the attention goes to you instead of Black people.
  • n 2020—as opposed to 1920—I neither need nor want anyone to muse on how whiteness privileges them over me.
  • That is a pretty strong charge to make against people who, according to DiAngelo, don’t even conceive of their own whiteness
  • if you are white, make no mistake: You will never succeed in the “work” she demands of you. It is lifelong, and you will die a racist just as you will die a sinner.
  • Whites aren’t even allowed to say, “I don’t feel safe.” Only Black people can say that.
  • She does stress that she is not dealing with a good/bad dichotomy and that your inner racist does not make you a bad person. But with racism limned as such a gruesome spiritual pollution, harbored by individuals moreover entrapped in a society within which they exert racism merely by getting out of bed, the issue of gray zones seems beside the point.
  • By the end, DiAngelo has white Americans muzzled, straitjacketed, tied down, and chloroformed for good measure—but for what?
  • herein is the real problem with White Fragility. DiAngelo does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching is necessary to forging change in society.
  • DiAngelo insists that “wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to ‘solutions’” is a “foundation of white fragility.” In other words, for DiAngelo, the whole point is the suffering. And note the scare quotes around solutions, as if wanting such a thing were somehow ridiculous.
  • A corollary question is why Black people need to be treated the way DiAngelo assumes we do. The very assumption is deeply condescending to all proud Black people.
  • In my life, racism has affected me now and then at the margins, in very occasional social ways, but has had no effect on my access to societal resources; if anything, it has made them more available to me than they would have been otherwise. Nor should anyone dismiss me as a rara avis. Being middle class, upwardly mobile, and Black has been quite common during my existence since the mid-1960s, and to deny this is to assert that affirmative action for Black people did not work.
  • If you object to any of the “feedback” that DiAngelo offers you about your racism, you are engaging in a type of bullying “whose function is to obscure racism, protect white dominance, and regain white equilibrium.”
  • Nor do I need wider society to undergo teachings in how to be exquisitely sensitive about my feelings.
  • I cannot imagine that any Black readers could willingly submit themselves to DiAngelo’s ideas while considering themselves adults of ordinary self-regard and strength. Few books about race have more openly infantilized Black people than this supposedly authoritative tome.
  • DiAngelo preaches that Black History Month errs in that it “takes whites out of the equation”—which means that it doesn’t focus enough on racism. Claims like this get a rise out of a certain kind of room, but apparently DiAngelo wants Black History Month to consist of glum recitations of white perfidy.
  • The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.
  • DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think—or, better, stop thinking.
  • Or simply dehumanized us.
  • John McWhorter is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He teaches linguistics at Columbia University, hosts the podcast Lexicon Valley, and is the author, most recently, of Words on the Move.
Javier E

Opinion | White Supremacy Was Her World. And Then She Left. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-supremacy-hate-movements.html

white supremacy whitelash recruitment culture history

shared by Javier E on 19 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Many white Americans are quick to distinguish between everyday prejudice and radical bigotry, but it’s a false distinction. White nationalists make explicit ideas that are already coded or veiled in the wider white imagination. Hate is what many people would see if they looked in a fun-house mirror: a distorted but still recognizable reflection.
  • It is important to acknowledge this ugly truth if we hope to understand events now unfolding across the country.
  • There are questions about whether white lip service will translate into sustained anti-racist action, and about what the same people who condemn unlawful killings of Black Americans might have to say about less violent manifestations of racism, ones that benefit them
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • There is also the inevitability of backlash: History shows that there are always people who turn to hate in the very moments that others find hope.
  • We know little about how to combat hate effectively; the federal government has cut funding for programs to counter right-wing extremism and blocked the dissemination of data on the subject
  • Ms. Olsen had never thought too hard about being white. Like many white Americans, she never had to. She grew up in a largely white school district in Eugene, Ore., and she did not interact meaningfully with people of other races until her late 20s, when she moved to Portland for her embalming career. She had paid such little mind to race as a concept that there was a flatness to her understanding of it, a one-dimensionality susceptible to simplified reasoning.
  • To Ms. Olsen, these people seemed smart. Just as important, she told me, “they seemed immensely interested in me and my life, and they wanted to be my friend.” To someone who “grew up without friends, that was very appealing. It made me feel like I must be doing something right.”
  • Then came the election of President Barack Obama. “Right-wing extremists are harnessing this historical election as a recruitment tool,” a Homeland Security report noted in 2009. The first year of Mr. Obama’s presidency, Stormfront registered nearly 100,000 new users.
  • The most basic definition of hate is personal animus, but there is a more useful, and frightening, description: Hate is a social bond — a shared currency — and it abhors a vacuum
  • “social camaraderie, a desire for simple answers to complex political problems, or even the opportunity to take action against formidable social forces can coexist with, even substitute for, hatred as the reason for participation in organized racist activities.”
  • So can a need for validation, visibility and purpose. For someone like Ms. Olsen, hate becomes a cure for loneliness.
  • People who are drawn to the hate movement have an acute desire to make sense of their place in the world. There’s a gap between who they are and who they think they should be, what they have and what they want. They want to seize or regain what they believe is a rightful status. They want empowerment, with minimal effort. Hate promises them that.
  • White Citizens’ Councils and other organs of resistance emerged in reaction to the civil rights movement. Hate fed on opposition to second- and third-wave feminism, the expansion of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and shifting racial demographics.
  • She wasn’t always sure that she believed what she said when she echoed her new friends’ views, but what mattered was that they wanted to keep talking to her; all she had to do was log in and start typing. If playing a part graduated to instinct, maybe they would like her even more.
  • Ms. Olsen was part of this wave, which also found fuel in the xenophobia of the post-Sept. 11 era and public disgust with the financial crisis.
  • Many people rationalize their racism — or even refuse to call it that — by insisting that it isn’t as bad as someone else’s. They could spit on immigrants instead of complaining in private about foreigners stealing American jobs. They could put Jewish people in camps instead of muttering about how they have too much power.
  • Bigotry has many branches, some bigger and stronger than others, but they all derive from the same trunk. No wonder, then, that when “somebody said he didn’t like Black people, or he told a racist joke, or he said illegal immigration is wrong,” Ms. Olsen recalled, she assumed he might be interested in becoming a neo-Nazi, too.
  • n her telling, Ms. Olsen decided to leave the hate movement because she realized that she could not tolerate violence. That may have been part of it, but when I spoke to her, it was clear that she also exited because the movement stopped giving her the meaning and camaraderie she wanted.
  • People don’t leave the hate movement because a veil lifts and they are suddenly able to see hate for what it is. The truth is more disappointing. They leave because it makes sense to them and for them, because the value hate once gave them has diminished or evaporated. Ms. Olsen seemed to know this, writing once on a blog, “The reality is, people rarely change their personality or ideals during adulthood, and if they do, it needs to be something they do on their own, for themselves.”
  • Some prominent white supremacists now point to the birth of Black Lives Matter as a pivotal moment in their radicalization
  • Perhaps more people than ever will emerge from 2020 on the side of justice. Still, there are those who will turn to hate, finding it — perversely — to be a kind of balm.
  • Research shows that a shared sense of racial identity is hardening among white Americans. The political scientist Ashley Jardina has found that some 20 percent of white Americans, roughly 40 million people, now have “strong levels of group consciousness,” meaning they “feel a sense of discontent over the status of their group.”
  • Having group consciousness does not automatically translate into prejudice, but the hate movement is poised to exploit white people’s grievances and fears.
  • What can we do to stop it? There aren’t easy answers.
  • while reporting on the hate movement, I found it difficult not to feel despondent. Magnifying my gloom were encounters with white liberals who made statements that I recognized as precisely the kind of bait white nationalists use to make their case to the mainstream.
  • The least Americans can ask of one another is to have frank conversations about whiteness, no matter how uncomfortable.
  • People concerned about the tide of hate can also work to empower minority populations, tackle inequality, foster dialogue about prejudice and root discriminatory ideas out of American life. They can vote bigots out of office. They can support the work of groups like Life After Hate, which helps people leave far-right groups.
  • First, though, combating hate requires understanding it. Not what it seems to be, but what it actually is. That includes who embraces it, and why.
  • So much of history is made up of small moves. Hope, too, dwells in increments. There is hope if white Americans can confront the true face of hate and their own complicity in bigotry. There is hope if we can see white nationalism as a crisis of individual and collective responsibility.
Javier E

America's Enduring Caste System - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...isabel-wilkerson-caste.html

caste us class inequality white privilege racial hierarchy system

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • We in this country are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even.
  • Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures in the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.
  • And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.
  • ...42 more annotations...
  • Many people may rightly say: “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked Indigenous people, never owned slaves.” And yes
  • Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be.
  • Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton: its caste system, which is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home.
  • Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order.
  • Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.
  • Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children
  • We may mention “race,” referring to people as Black or white or Latino or Asian or Indigenous, when what lies beneath each label is centuries of history and assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.
  • What people look like, or rather, the race they have been assigned or are perceived to belong to, is the visible cue to their caste. It is the historic flashcard to the public of how they are to be treated, where they are expected to live
  • in recent decades, we have learned from the human genome that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,” said J. Craig Venter, the genomics expert who ran Celera Genomics when the initial sequencing was completed in 2000. “We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.
  • Which means that an entire racial caste system, the catalyst of hatreds and civil war, was built on what the anthropologist Ashley Montagu called “an arbitrary and superficial selection of traits,” derived from a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of genes that make up a human being
  • “The idea of race,” Montagu wrote, “was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior social caste.”
  • Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.
  • Caste is rigid and deep; race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States
  • While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception — whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste.
  • Thus we are all born into a silent war game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing. The side to which we are assigned in the American system of categorizing people is proclaimed by the team uniform that each caste wears, signaling our presumed worth and potential.
  • he said to himself, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all his life.
  • One afternoon, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city then known as Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high school students whose families had been untouchables. The principal made the introduction.“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”
  • Social scientists often define racism as the combination of racial bias and systemic power, seeing racism, like sexism, as primarily the action of people or systems with personal or group power over another person or group with less power
  • over time, racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not. It has come to mean overt and declared hatred of a person or group because of the race ascribed to them, a perspective few would ever own up to
  • Who is racist in a society where someone can refuse to rent to people of color, arrest brown immigrants en masse or display a Confederate flag but not be “certified” as a racist unless he or she confesses to it or is caught using derogatory signage or slurs?
  • With no universally agreed-upon definition, we might see racism as a continuum rather than an absolute. We might release ourselves of the purity test of whether someone is or is not racist and exchange that mind-set for one that sees people as existing on a scale based on the toxins they have absorbed from the polluted and inescapable air of social instruction we receive from childhood.
  • Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.
  • Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.
  • Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism
  • Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two
  • Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.
  • Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage or privilege or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you
  • What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place.
  • For this reason, many people — including those we might see as good and kind people — could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense
  • Actual racists, actual haters, would by definition be casteist, as their hatred demands that those they perceive as beneath them know and keep their place in the hierarchy.
  • Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an X-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenges is flawed without it.
  • Race and caste are not the cause of and do not account for every poor outcome or unpleasant encounter. But caste becomes a factor, to whatever infinitesimal degree, in interactions and decisions across gender, ethnicity, race, immigrant status, sexual orientation, age or religion that have consequences in our everyday lives
  • The younger country, the United States, would become the most powerful democracy on Earth. The older country, India, would become the largest.
  • as if operating from the same instruction manual translated to fit their distinctive cultures, both countries adopted similar methods of maintaining rigid lines of demarcation and protocols.
  • The American system was founded as a primarily two-tiered hierarchy with its contours defined by the uppermost group, those identified as white, and by the subordinated group, those identified as Black, with immigrants from outside Europe forming blurred middle castes that sought to adjust themselves within a bipolar structure, and Native Americans largely exiled outside it.
  • The Indian caste system, by contrast, is an elaborate fretwork of thousands of subcastes, or jatis, correlated to region and village, which fall under the four main varnas — the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, the Vaishya, the Shudra and the excluded fifth, the Dalits. It is further complicated by non-Hindus — including Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Christians — who are outside the original caste system but have incorporated themselves into the workings of the country, at times in the face of resistance and attack, and may or may not have informal rankings among themselves and in relation to the varnas.
  • African-Americans, throughout most of their time in this land, were relegated to the dirtiest, most demeaning and least desirable jobs by definition. After enslavement and well into the 20th century, they were primarily restricted to the role of sharecroppers and servants — domestics, lawn boys, chauffeurs and janitors. The most that those who managed to get an education could hope for was to teach, minister to, attend to the health needs of or bury other subordinate-caste people.
  • the caste lines in America may have at one time appeared even starker than those in India. In 1890, “85 percent of Black men and 96 percent of Black women were employed in just two occupational categories,” wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg, “agriculture and domestic or personal service.”
  • So, too, with groups trained to believe in their inherent sovereignty. “The essence of this overestimation of one’s own position and the hate for all who differ from it is narcissism,” wrote Erich Fromm, a leading psychoanalyst and social theorist of the 20th century. “He is nothing,” Fromm wrote, “but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything.”
  • “Narcissus could not conceive that he was in love with his own reflection,” wrote the Harvard clinical psychologist Elsa Ronningstam in her 2005 book, “Identifying and Understanding the Narcissistic Personality.” “He was caught in an illusion.”
  • The political theorist Takamichi Sakurai, in his 2018 examination of Western and Eastern perspectives on the topic, and channeling Fromm, wrote bluntly: “Group narcissism leads people to fascism.” He went on, “An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives to rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism and so on.”
  • “The survival of a group,” Fromm wrote, “depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great as or greater than that of their own lives.”Thus, when under threat, they are willing to sacrifice themselves and their ideals for the survival of the group from which they draw their self-esteem.
Javier E

'Out of Control': When Schools Opened in a Virus Hot Spot - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...chools-reopening-outbreak.html

schools pandemic response Culture politics us

shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • “We’ve forced every school district to figure out how to respond to a pandemic on its own, and it’s insane,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.“There should be clear guidance — whether it’s Department of Education, or C.D.C., or ideally a combination — so that you don’t have every school district in America with different thresholds, different approaches, different measures.”
  • Over the summer, Canyons said it would adhere to the state health department’s standard for closing schools. But when Corner Canyon reached 15 cases the school board decided to ignore the guidance, shifting the school to a hybrid schedule instead of going fully remote.The board ultimately adopted its own standard, which stipulated that it would shift high schools to remote learning when positive cases represented 2 percent of the students attending in-person classes — mostly, one board member suggested, because at that point the number of students quarantined from possible exposure would become unmanageable.
  • In a Canyons board meeting on Sept. 15, when Corner Canyon was at 42 cases, one board member, Steve Wrigley, said he had looked in vain for national standards. “There really is not many guidelines out there right now — everybody is sort of flying by their seat,” Mr. Wrigley said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Another board member, Clareen Arnold, cited a C.D.C. statement about the importance of in-person school to children’s mental health and development, inserted at the behest of the White House, as an argument for keeping Corner Canyon open.
  • In a community that parents and teachers described as deeply divided over whether the virus represents a real threat, the board’s decision left parents on both sides angry. Some were upset that the board had ignored the health department’s guidance, while others thought that schools should not close until 10 percent of the students had tested positive.
  • Mr. Walker said he had heard from some Corner Canyon parents that there was an agreement among mothers at the school — he called it a “mom code” — not to get their children tested for the virus even if they became ill, to avoid adding to the school’s case count and contributing to it being shut down. (He said he told these parents he did not agree with this approach.)
  • She had become a high school teacher because she loved the social rituals of high school — “the dances and the football games and the assemblies and the extracurricular things” — and it made her sad, she said, that her students were missing out on some of those traditions.There are these things I want these kids to be able to experience in life,” she said. “But then, is it worth it — for life, you know?”
  • In September, as the Canyons board put off closing Corner Canyon High School, district officials and board members said that a vast majority of cases in the district’s schools were the result of exposures outside of school and that there was minimal spread within schools themselves.But a spokesman for the Salt Lake County Health Department, Nicholas Rupp, said it was very difficult to definitively determine in most cases where someone was infected.
  • In any event, once Corner Canyon shut its doors, cases among students and staff fell sharply. After a month of being closed, the school is set to reopen on Monday. As of last Wednesday, according to the district’s dashboard, it had between one and five cases.
leilamulveny

How Joe Biden's Tax Plan Could Affect You - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...n-could-affect-you-11603307433

joe biden tax plan politics economics

shared by leilamulveny on 22 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Counting both tax increases and tax cuts, the Biden plan would raise between $2 trillion and $3 trillion over a decade, according to recent estimates by the Tax Policy Center and the American Enterprise Institute.
  • It would send revenue as a share of the economy to near the levels it reached in the late 1990s.
  • the top 1% of households would see their after-tax income drop by 16% in 2022. That’s an average tax increase of $265,640.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Also, the Biden plan—or some version of it—is likely to advance in Congress only if Democrats keep a majority in the House and take control of the Senate
  • they only want to repeal parts of the law and that they would focus those changes on corporations and households making more than $400,000.
  • For corporations, he would raise the tax rate to 28% from 21%, impose a new minimum tax and raise taxes on foreign income. For individuals, he would raise the top rate to 39.6% from 37%, create new limits on deductions and impose the 12.4% Social Security payroll tax on wages above $400,000. High-income owners of pass-through businesses that don’t pay the corporate tax would lose a break they got in 2017.
  • The middle 20% of households would get a tax cut worth 1% of after-tax income, or an average of $620.
  • But there are two main ways in which middle-income families could pay more. One is through Mr. Biden’s proposed reinstatement of the individual mandate to buy health insurance. The campaign, citing Trump administration language, describes that as a fee, not a tax. The payments are required by the tax code, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the penalty for failing to purchase health insurance is a tax.
  • So anyone owning stocks could be affected and eventually, companies may raise wages less than they otherwise would.
  • He would temporarily expand the child tax credit to $3,000 from $2,000 and add another $600 for children under age 6
Javier E

How the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally may have spread coronavirus across the Upper Midwest -... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...sturgis-rally-spread

motorcycle rally pandemic response crisis infection

shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • "Holding a half-million-person rally in the midst of a pandemic is emblematic of a nation as a whole that maybe isn’t taking [the novel coronavirus] as seriously as we should.”
  • It’s not just that Sturgis went on after the pandemic sidelined most everything else. It also drew people from across the country, all of them converging on one region, packing the small city’s Main Street and the bars and restaurants along it.
  • And in contrast with participants in the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, many Sturgis attendees spent time clustered indoors at bars, restaurants and tattoo parlors, where experts say the virus is most likely to spread, especially among those without masks.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • In interviews with The Post, several rally attendees said they didn’t deny the threat of the coronavirus but also didn’t believe they needed to stay home indefinitely. Some noted that they take risks each time they get on their bikes. A number said they wore masks or made other minor concessions but were determined to go on with their lives.
  • “This motorcycle rally was and is such a big thing that people come from miles and miles away and they come from right next door. And it’s not reported anywhere who they are, where they live,” said Benjamin Aaker, president of the South Dakota State Medical Association.
  • But other countries offer examples of more robust and coordinated contact-tracing efforts, Michaud said. Japan uses what’s called retrospective contact tracing — working backward to determine where a person was infected and who else may have gotten the virus there, he said. It’s particularly effective in dealing with the coronavirus, which is often transmitted by a small number of people infecting many others in clusters.
  • It was “fairly obvious” that a gathering the size of the motorcycle rally represented a risk, Michaud said — and more rigorous contact tracing could have revealed the actual impact. It might also have prevented some of the secondary and tertiary spread.
  • State health officials, who linked 125 cases to Sturgis, have not tied the surge to the rally, however. They note it overlapped with school openings and end-of-summer restlessness.
  • “Anytime you’re bringing individuals together, you’re going to have times where you’re having covid-19 transmission,” state epidemiologist Joshua Clayton said last month. “That’s a risk whether you’re in South Dakota, or in other states.
  • Noem, the governor, attributed the rise in cases to increases in testing, echoing President Trump’s explanation of growing U.S. infections. “That’s normal, that’s natural, that’s expected,” she told the Associated Press. She did not explain how extra testing could have accounted for the rise in hospitalizations in the state, which hit record highs in October.
  • Balcom, whose case was mild, cried in the car, relieved he was coming home. She never said “I told you so,” or got angry with him. She was upset, though, when she found out Cervantes’s case wasn’t included in covid-19 tallies linked to Sturgis.“If we had an accurate representation of what’s going on, then people might say, ‘Maybe it’s not a good idea to go to the concert or go to the gathering,'" she said. “Everyone is just muddling through this because no one knows what the hell is going on.”
  • Cervantes now looks at things differently. Watching football, he worried how many of the thousands of fans admitted to a recent Kansas City Chiefs game might become infected, even as he noticed they sat apart. He once put on a mask to humor Balcom; now he says he has to resist the urge to yell at strangers to wear them.
  • After weeks of missed work, his stint in the hospital and a return visit to the ER over a blood clot concern, he’s come to deeply regret his decision.
  • “I was naive,” he said. “I was dumb, you know? I shouldn’t have went. I did; I can’t change that, so I just got to move forward. But sitting here just the past few days, that’s all I keep thinking about. I’m like, Jesus, look at the hell I’m going through, the hell I put everybody through. It ain’t worth it. It wasn’t. It really wasn’t.”
clairemann

Opinion | Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court Could Take Us Backward - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coney-barrett-health-care.html

shared by clairemann on 19 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • pretending that she has never had an interesting thought in her life.
  • She didn’t want to weigh in. A president postponing an election? Hmm. She’d have to think about that.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      While the people want to know her thoughts on this, she is closely following her Judicial code of conduct as well as the "Ginsburg" rule, so I can't fault her for not wanting to rule on an hypothetical set of facts on the Senate floor.
  • “I have read things about the Earth being round. I would not say I have firm views on it.”
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      This article feels a little too skewed for me...
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • A) is very bright; and B) would solidify a conservative Supreme Court majority whose judicial philosophy has been on the wrong side of many of the great issues of my lifetime.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      I am glad they acknowledge this, however her jurisprudence is firmly cemented in history, and while it may be controversial now, originalism was the favored method for many years.
  • that this path toward social progress would ideally have been blazed by legislators, not judges.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      This is so important!
  • Forward-thinking justices struck down such laws — and that wasn’t about “activist judges” but about decency, humanity and the 14th Amendment.
  • Three backward-thinking justices, including Antonin Scalia, Barrett’s mentor, would have allowed Taliban-style prosecutions of gay people for intimacy in the bedroom. (Barrett refused in the hearing Wednesday to say whether the case was rightly decided.)
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      Weather the case was rightly decided or not has nothing to do with if she agrees with the outcome. Just because someone thinks there was no grounds for the argument doesn't mean the disagree with the principal. Thats the role of a judge.
  • Perhaps the divide instead is between forward-thinking judges and backward-thinking judges.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      Well, as Barrett said, even Originalists of progressive Judges can disagree, because it has nothing to do with "wanting to go back in time" it is about the interpretation of a document.
  • That’s one reason next month’s election is such a milestone, for one political party in America is trying to join the rest of the civilized world and provide universal health care, and the other is doing its best to take away what we have.
  • My take is that Democrats are exaggerating that risk; the Republican argument in the case, to be heard next month, is such a legal stretch that it’s unlikely to succeed fully, even if Barrett is on the court.
  • Yet she’s working with a gang of Republican senators to steal a seat on the Supreme Court.
    • clairemann
      clairemann on 19 Oct 20
       
      its not stealing, NYT grow up! She will get a vote just like every other Justice...
  • Will voters reward the party that is working to provide more health care, or the party that has painstakingly robbed one million children of insurance? Will voters help tug the United States forward, or will they support the backward thinkers who have been on the side of discrimination, racism, bigotry and voter suppression?
  • which side of history will you stand on?
carolinehayter

2020 Census Redistricting Data Expected By Sept. 30 : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...uld-throw-elections-into-chaos

Politics US trump policy

shared by carolinehayter on 12 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • The 2020 census data needed for the redrawing of voting districts around the country are extremely delayed and now expected by Sept. 30.
  • in a statement, the bureau said the timing shift allows it to "deliver complete and accurate redistricting data in a more timely fashion overall for the states,"
  • Dogged by the coronavirus pandemic and the Trump administration's interference with the census schedule, the latest expected release date — six months past the March 31 legal deadline — could throw upcoming elections into chaos in states facing tight redistricting deadlines for Congress, as well as state and local offices.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Since counting ended in October, the bureau has been trying to sort through irregularities in records from college dormitories and other group living quarters, plus a higher than usual number of responses gathered without preassigned "Census ID" codes that help with matching addresses.
  • "The Census Bureau should take all the time it needs to report its data and make sure every person is counted as mandated by the Constitution," Schatz said in a statement. "Our bill would extend these statutory deadlines and ensure that we get a fair, accurate count."
  • carolinehayter on 12 Feb 21
     
    Biden Team Unveils New Asylum System To Replace Trump's 'Remain In Mexico'
hannahcarter11

Democrats to Unveil Up to $3,600 Child Tax Credit as Part of Stimulus Bill - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...child-tax-credit-stimulus.html

democrats stimulus tax biden

shared by hannahcarter11 on 08 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Top House Democrats are preparing to unveil legislation that would send up to $3,600 per child to millions of Americans, as lawmakers aim to change the tax code to target child poverty rates as part of President Biden’s sweeping $1.9 trillion stimulus package.
  • The proposal would expand the child tax credit to provide $3,600 per child younger than 6 and $3,000 per child up to 17 over the course of a year, phasing out the payments for Americans who make more than $75,000 and couples who make more than $150,000.
  • The credits would be split into monthly payments from the Internal Revenue Service beginning in July, based on a person’s or family’s income in 2020. Although the proposed credit is only for a year, some Democrats said they would fight to make it permanent, a sweeping move that could reshape efforts to fight child poverty in America.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The one-year credit appears likely to garner enough support to be included in the stimulus package, but it will also have to clear a series of tough parliamentary hurdles because of the procedural maneuvers Democrats are using to muscle the stimulus package through, potentially without Republican support.
  • With House Democratic leadership aiming to have the stimulus legislation approved on the chamber floor by the end of the month, Congress moved last week to fast-track Mr. Biden’s stimulus plan even as details of the legislation are still being worked out.
  • But the child tax credit could provide an opportunity for some bipartisan support, since Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, introduced a similar measure that would send payments of up to $1,250 per month to families with children.
  • Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, warned on Sunday that the United States labor market was stalling and in a “deep hole” that could take years to emerge from if lawmakers did not quickly pass the stimulus package.
  • Ms. Yellen said that passing the stimulus package could allow the economy to reach full employment by next year. Failing to do so, she said, could leave the jobless rate elevated for years to come.
  • Researchers at Columbia University found that Mr. Biden’s overall stimulus proposal could cut child poverty in half in 2021 because of the expansion of the child credit, as well as other changes to tax credits and expansions of unemployment and food assistance benefits.
katherineharron

US coronavirus: America is at a crossroads in this pandemic as Covid-19 deaths near 500... - 0 views

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

covid

shared by katherineharron on 22 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • On the brink of a devastating milestone -- 500,000 US Covid-19 deaths -- the US is at a crossroads in the course of this pandemic.
  • And while vaccinations slowly increase, some Americans say they won't get a Covid-19 vaccine -- hurting the chances of herd immunity and hindering a return to normal life.
  • More than 43.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of their two-dose vaccines, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. close dialogCovid-19Your local resource.Set your location and log in to find local resources and information on Covid-19 in your area.Please enter aboveSet Locationclose dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css from creative 50769 */.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-input {border-color: white !important;border-width: 1px !important;background-color: white !important;box-shadow: 0px 2px 8px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.12) !important;}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext { color: #e53841 !important; font-size: 11px !important; position: absolute !important; bottom: -1.8em !important;} @media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext {font-size: 10px !important; }}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-el::-webkit-input-placeholder { color: #e53841 !important;}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1191325 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 270px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {background-color: white;background-size: contain;border-style: solid;border-color: rgb(213, 213, 213);border-width: 1px 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {background-image: url(//assets.bounceexchange.com/assets/uploads/clients/340/creatives/79b9f84d1816b04c777d4e02a8d21b2d.jpg);background-position: 95% 15%;background-size: 140px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;padding: 8px 5px 5px 8px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 25px 15px 20px 15px;vertical-align: middle;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 24px;height: 24px;stroke-width: 3px;stroke: #d3d2d2;stroke-linecap: round;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 22px;height: 22px;top: 3px;right: 3px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-group-1191325-YCHCmvQ {width: 60%;text-align: left;padding: 0 0 0 25px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-group-1191325-YCHCmvQ {width: 100%;padding: 0;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-G5NQCjO {width: 100%;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-G5NQCjO> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 700;color: #e53841;line-height: 1em;letter-spacing: .3px;font-size: 34px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-G5NQCjO> *:first-child {font-size: 30px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-ACplpBG {width: 100%;padding: 3px 0 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-ACplpBG {width: 280px;padding: 4px 0 0;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-ACplpBG> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 700;color: #39373a;line-height: 1em;letter-spacing: .3px;font-size: 34px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-ACplpBG> *:first-child {font-size: 30px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-yrLQsfT {padding: 18px 0 22px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-yrLQsfT {width: 100%;padding: 12px 0;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-yrLQsfT> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 16.5px;color: #818287;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-yrLQsfT> *:first-child {font-size: 14px;line-height: 1.25;letter-spacing: -.45px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el {padding: 10px 14px;border-width: 1px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 500;font-size: 19px;color: #818287;border-color: #f4f4f4;border-radius: 8px 0 0 8px;box-shadow: 0px 2px 8px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.12);background-color: #f4f4f4;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-has-text.bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el {padding: 10px 14px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el::-webkit-input-placeholder {color: #818287;font-weight: 500;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el:-moz-placeholder {color: #818287;font-weight: 500;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el::-moz-placeholder {color: #818287;font-weight: 500;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el:-ms-input-placeholder {color: #818287;font-weight: 500;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el:focus {border-color: white;background-color: white;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el {padding: 9px;font-size: 15px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-has-text.bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el {padding: 9px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD {width: 255px;padding: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD {width: 170px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-wKqQsjS {width: 150px;padding: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-wKqQsjS {width: 140px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-wKqQsjS> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 17px;letter-spacing: .3px;border-color: #e53841;background-color: #e53841;padding: 15px;border-radius: 0 8px 8px 0;box-shadow: 0px 2px 8px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.22);}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-wKqQsjS
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • About 18.8 million have been fully vaccinated. That's about 5.7% of the US population -- far less than the estimated 70% to 85% of Americans who would need to be immune to reach herd immunity.
  • To speed up vaccinations, some experts have suggested delaying second vaccine doses to get more first doses into people's arms.
  • Both vaccines on the US market -- developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna -- require two doses, the second of which are intended to be administered 21 days and 28 days after the first, respectively.
  • Nationwide, the rates of new Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are declining.The number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has fallen for the 40th day in a row, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
  • Fauci hopes that doesn't happen, he said, adding it's "possible" people may be wearing masks in 2022.
  • And daily new cases have dropped 23% over the same time period, according to Johns Hopkins. (But testing is also down by 17%, according to the COVID Tracking Project.)
  • Daily deaths have declined 24% this past week compared to the previous week
  • Experts with the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said over the weekend that while the B.1.1.7 strain likely accounts for less than 20% of current infections in the US, that number will likely soar to 80% by late April.
  • "Managing the epidemic in the next four months depends critically on scaling up vaccination, trying to increase the fraction of adults willing to be vaccinated above three-quarters, and strongly encouraging continued mask use and avoiding situations where transmission is likely, such as indoor dining, going to bars, or indoor gatherings with individuals outside the household," the team wrote.
  • "With new, more contagious variants of the virus circulating throughout the U.S., now is not the time to let your guard down and scale back on the measures that we know will work to prevent further illness and deaths -- wearing masks, practicing physical distancing, and washing hands," a joint statement said.
  • About 1,700 cases of variant strains first spotted in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have been reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • "I do think we're looking at some new normals. I think the handshake, for example, is probably going away," she said."I do think masks in the cough/cold/flu season in the winter months would make a lot of sense. That clearly, really insulated the Southeast Asian countries from some of the worst of this, understanding the importance of wearing masks."
  • "It's estimated that about 70% of Americans must be vaccinated before we get to herd immunity through vaccination," CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said. "That's the point where enough people have the immune protection that the virus won't spread anymore."
  • "The evidence was pretty compelling by last March or April that uniform wearing of masks would reduce transmission of this disease," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told Axios on HBO on Sunday.
  • "A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device, and yet it got categorized in all sorts of other ways that were not factual, not scientific and frankly, dangerous," he added. "And I think you can make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result."
nrashkind

Republicans blast FBI Russia probe as Rosenstein defends Mueller - Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...-defends-mueller-idUSKBN23A1EB

shared by nrashkind on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Republican allies of President Donald Trump attacked the FBI’s probe of his 2016 presidential campaign on Wednesday, but failed to get a key witness to agree that former U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation was unfounded.
  • “I still believe it was the right decision under the circumstances,” Rosenstein told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
  • The committee is examining the surveillance of Trump campaign officials during the FBI investigation code-named “Crossfire Hurricane
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “All the charges that were filed were legitimate,” he said when asked about cases filed against a half-dozen campaign officials and Trump associates.
  • Trump and his Republican allies say the president’s campaign was treated unfairly by officials involved, including former FBI Director James Comey.
  • “Congress should not conduct politically motivated investigations designed to attack or help any presidential candidate,” she said.
  • The Justice Department inspector general found numerous errors in the Crossfire Hurricane probe, including mistakes in seeking surveillance approval, but no political bias.
  • Rosenstein said he was unaware of problems with warrants allowing surveillance, saying he would not have given his approval had he known at the time.
katherineharron

Gun-toting members of the Boogaloo movement are showing up at protests - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • The "alert" was from a man who had a run-in with the Minneapolis police while on the frontline of the police-brutality protests set off by the death of George Floyd.
  • "He caught mace to the face," said Teeter, and "put out a national notice to our network."
  • They grabbed their guns -- mostly assault rifles -- hopped into their vehicles, and made the 18-hour trek to Minneapolis.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The Boogaloos are an emerging incarnation of extremism that seems to defy easy categorization. They are yet another confounding factor in the ongoing effort among local, state and federal officials to puzzle out the political sympathies of the agitators showing up to the mostly peaceful George Floyd rallies who have destroyed property, looted businesses, or -- in the case of the Boogaloos who descended on Minneapolis -- walked around the streets with assault rifles.
  • Some pockets of the group have espoused white supremacy while others reject it. But they have at least two things in common: an affinity for toting around guns in public and a "boogaloo" rallying cry, which is commonly viewed as code for another US civil war.
  • It "is now growing on mainstream platforms, and in this moment of protest it is starting to move offline," she said. "It resembles the militia movement that came before it, which has been well documented as a force for promoting violence."
  • "If people are going to initiate deadly force against us, we need to be willing and able to initiate deadly force in return," Teeter, 22, said.
  • "These are straight up criminals. These are not protestors," said one high-ranking LAPD official. In Los Angeles, he said, roving bands of thieves drove around in cars and communicated by cellphone, identifying businesses to loot.
  • "I'm a member of the LGBT community," said Teeter, who describes himself as a non-voting "left anarchist...People think I'm part of a Nazi group; I'm not."
  • "We are very careful to make sure that people realize that we are on their side. We are here to defend them ... Once people realize that we are on their side and we are here to protect them, everybody has been -- almost everybody -- has been very happy to have us here."
  • His social media posts appear consistent with his idiosyncratic political persuasions: photos of himself in a flak jacket or participating in the reopen protests, and memes lamenting police brutality, celebrating black men with guns, ridiculing both President Trump and Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden, and glorifying the Boogaloo movement and the notion of "coming civil conflict."
  • "We've seen less of that -- driving across the country -- because the protests have erupted in more places," she said. "And so these guys that were on the fence about whether or not to go, they can just stay where they are and just do the local protest."
Javier E

Bad Apples in Buffalo - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...612781

police brutality crisis

shared by Javier E on 06 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Police officers themselves know this. According to a 2000 survey published by the National Institute of Justice, 67 percent of police officers believe that “an officer who reports another officer’s misconduct is likely to be given the cold shoulder by his or her fellow officers.” Fifty-two percent believe that “it is not unusual for a police officer to turn a blind eye to improper conduct by other officers.” Just 39 percent agreed with the statement that “police officers always report serious criminal violations involving abuse of authority by fellow officers.” A more recent 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center found that a majority of police officers believed most officers in their department would not report a colleague whom they caught drunk driving. And this is the view of the police themselves.
  • Yet there is also some reason for hope. The NIJ survey also reveals that more than 80 percent of the officers surveyed “reported that they do not accept the ‘code of silence’” as an “essential part of the mutual trust necessary to good policing.” But “even though officers do not believe in protecting wrongdoers,” the report notes, “they often do not turn them in.”
anonymous

The West is relevant to our long history of anti-blackness, not just the South - The Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-anti-blackness-not-just-south

history US politics

shared by anonymous on 29 May 20 - No Cached
  • Two hundred years ago, Northern and Southern politicians came together to sign the Missouri Compromise. The bill, which admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state, Maine as a “free” state, and drew a line to the Pacific at 36 degrees 30 minutes (the Southern boundary of Missouri) that was intended to divide slavery from “freedom” forever after, is generally and properly considered a milestone on the pathway toward the Civil War and the conflict over slavery.
  • or many in Missouri, the statehood question was not simply a debate over slavery, but a purposeful effort to keep all black people, whether enslaved or free, out of Missouri and the West.
  • Understanding the Missouri Compromise in this way points the way to a reinterpretation of the Civil War as something other than a simple conflict between North and South or even slavery and freedom. Rather, the Civil War was a conflict between two interconnected but also antagonistic versions of white American expansion: one premised upon slavery, the other upon freedom not just from slavery but from black people entirely.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • On February 13, 1819, Rep. James Tallmadge of New York added a rider to the Missouri Statehood bill that came to consume Congress for almost a year and would ultimately shape the legal history of slavery and constitutional history of the state for the next 45 years. Missouri, Tallmadge suggested, should be admitted to the union only if it outlawed slavery.
  • In 1820 the threat to the union was allayed, or at least delayed, with the Missouri Compromise, one of the most notorious compromises in the history of the United States: Slavery would be allowed in Missouri. In exchange for Missouri’s admission as a slave state, Maine was admitted as a free state.
  • n addition to sanctioning slavery, the Missouri Constitution of 1820 directed the legislature of the new state “to prevent free negroes and mulattoes from coming to and settling in this State, under any pretext whatsoever.”
  • The provision reflected the particular sort of white supremacy that was characteristic of much of the growing population of the state of Missouri and the city of St. Louis. It was consonant with the politics of the American Colonization Society, which had emerged on the East Coast in 1817, and which sought the ethnic cleansing of the North through the removal of free black people to Africa.
  • Many of these white men were migrants from Virginia, where representation in the state legislature had, like representation in the U.S. Congress, been apportioned on the basis of population rather than suffrage — the three-fifths compromise, most notorious of them all, which provided an enduring political subsidy to slaveholders, who were able to increase their political representation in proportion (3/5) to the number of human beings they owned.
  • In Missouri things would be different and only “free white male inhabitants” would be counted: The state, under its 1820 Constitution, would be ruled by and for white men rather than slaveholders.
  • In order for Missouri to be admitted to the union, the state constitution had to be sent back to Washington and approved by the United States Congress. At stake was the question of negro exclusion. Article IV, Section 2 of the United States Constitution provides that “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” Termed the principle of “interstate comity,” in practice this clause means (and was in 1820 taken to mean) that individual states are not allowed to discriminate against the citizens of other states.
  • The Missouri Constitution of 1820’s deliberate exclusion of the free black citizens of other states declared that when it came to free people of color, the state of Missouri was a territory apart.
  • Under the constitution of 1820, free black people in Missouri were denizens, not citizens. Much like Indians, they fell under the law of the state without the ability to invoke its provided protections. Under an 1835 law, free black children were legally required to be apprenticed to white families. An 1843 revision to the state code restricted the immigration of all free blacks unless they could demonstrate they were citizens of another state — a near impossibility for most, because states did not issue proof-of-citizenship documents.
  • Rethinking the history of the coming of the Civil War from the West, from the standpoint of imperial expansion, demands we reconsider the racist legacy of the victory of the United States of America over the Confederate States. It helps explain just how deeply ingrained anti-blackness is in American life then, and now.
« First ‹ Previous 321 - 340 of 409 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page