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Javier E

Opinion | At Least 89 Coronavirus Vaccines Are Being Developed. It May Not Matter. - Th... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-vaccine.html

vaccine distribution access inequality pandemic

shared by Javier E on 30 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The potential for outbreaks to spread uncontrollably is particularly high in low-income countries where inadequate public health systems are unable to effectively track and respond to new diseases or to treat people who are infected
  • These countries are also limited in their ability to pay for vaccines, which is why the organization I run, Gavi, the Vaccine Allianc
  • substantially more financial help will be required if large numbers of vulnerable people are to be vaccinated. Otherwise, reservoirs of the virus will remain and continue to spread
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The danger is that richer nations will buy up the supply for their own use or prevent exports of vaccines developed within their borders as countries scramble to protect their citizens or stockpile for future outbreaks
  • Another concern is that manufacturers might restrict sales to the highest bidder.
  • the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is trying to expedite the development of vaccines
  • The coalition has kick-started the development of at least nine coronavirus vaccines but needs to raise $2 billion to help up to three of these candidates make it through the regulatory and quality requirements and to complete efficacy trials. The world would then need to ensure funds to guarantee manufacturing capacity for global production to make billions of doses available within the next 18 to 24 months.
  • it is encouraging that the health ministers of the Group of 20 wealthy nations called for accelerating the development, manufacturing and equitable distribution of vaccines against the coronavirus at its April 19 meeting and that last Friday, more than 15 heads of state, the president of the European Union, the director general of the World Health Organization and leaders of other international institutions committed to join together to do the same.
  • to keep the global population safe, it must be done. Innovative financing mechanisms exist that can translate long-term government commitments into immediate funding by issuing bonds on capital markets. The Ebola vaccine we have today was made possible by such an approach.
  • Estimates put the cost of Covid-19 to the global economy at up to $2 trillion this year.
  • If we can advance the mass distribution of an effective vaccine or vaccines by as little as two weeks, not only would we would save countless lives, but the effort would almost pay for itself by getting the world back to work.
Javier E

This is how a superpower commits suicide - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...trump-china

superpower suicide trump policy foreign policy economic

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • As an official from one of America’s key partners in the region put it to me earlier this year: “Is this how superpowers commit suicide?” It appears the answer is yes.
  • While America continues to maintain a significant military edge over its closest rivals, it’s gradually losing the main battle that is defining this century: trade and investment.
  • Meanwhile, China is busy shaping the world in its own image with verve and vigor. In a surreal twist of events, a communist regime has now emerged as the unlikely guardian of globalization and multilateral diplomacy.
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  • Since Trump’s ascent to power, America’s standing in the world has experienced a virtual collapse. According to the Pew Research Center, international confidence in American leadership has declined significantly in the past year. This has been most acutely felt in the Asia-Pacific region, the new center of gravity in global geopolitics.
  • Among America’s Asian allies, such as South Korea and Japan, confidence in the American president’s ability to make the right judgment has dropped by as much as 71 percent and 54 percent, respectively
  • In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, it dropped by 41 percent. This is nothing short of a disaster for American soft power.
  • In contrast, Chinese President Xi Jinping, speaking at APEC, described globalization as an “irreversible historical trend.” He promoted a “multilateral trading regime and practice” to allow “developing members to benefit more from international trade and investment.” The statements echoed Xi’s high-profile speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, where he effectively presented China as the vanguard of the global economic order.
  • Those were not just empty words. China has forged ahead, winning over the region and the world with an all-consuming sense of purpose. Xi has helped established the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Shanghai-based New Development Bank as alternatives to the U.S.-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as well as the Japan-dominated Asian Development Bank.  
Javier E

Can Our Democracy Survive Tribalism? - 0 views

nymag.com/...mocracy-survive-tribalism.html

democracy moderation openness tribal tribe Trump politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 27 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • we don’t really have to wonder what it’s like to live in a tribal society anymore, do we? Because we already do. Over the past couple of decades in America, the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous. I don’t just mean the rise of political polarization (although that’s how it often expresses itself), nor the rise of political violence (the domestic terrorism of the late 1960s and ’70s was far worse), nor even this country’s ancient black-white racial conflict (though its potency endures).
  • I mean a new and compounding combination of all these differences into two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other.
  • I mean two tribes whose mutual incomprehension and loathing can drown out their love of country, each of whom scans current events almost entirely to see if they advance not so much their country’s interests but their own. I mean two tribes where one contains most racial minorities and the other is disproportionately white; where one tribe lives on the coasts and in the cities and the other is scattered across a rural and exurban expanse; where one tribe holds on to traditional faith and the other is increasingly contemptuous of religion altogether; where one is viscerally nationalist and the other’s outlook is increasingly global; where each dominates a major political party; and, most dangerously, where both are growing in intensity as they move further apart.
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  • The project of American democracy — to live beyond such tribal identities, to construct a society based on the individual, to see ourselves as citizens of a people’s republic, to place religion off-limits, and even in recent years to embrace a multiracial and post-religious society — was always an extremely precarious endeavor. It rested, from the beginning, on an 18th-century hope that deep divides can be bridged by a culture of compromise, and that emotion can be defeated by reason.
  • Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life. For the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet, the tribe was the only form of human society. We lived for tens of thousands of years in compact, largely egalitarian groups of around 50 people or more, connected to each other by genetics and language, usually unwritten.
  • Tribal cohesion was essential to survival, and our first religions emerged for precisely this purpose.
  • Religion therefore fused with communal identity and purpose, it was integral to keeping the enterprise afloat, and the idea of people within a tribe believing in different gods was incomprehensible. Such heretics would be killed.
  • we became a deeply cooperative species — but primarily with our own kind. The notion of living alongside people who do not look like us and treating them as our fellows was meaningless for most of human history.
  • Successful modern democracies do not abolish this feeling; they co-opt it. Healthy tribalism endures in civil society in benign and overlapping ways.
  • in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts
  • most critically, there is the Über-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events, that forms the core unit of belonging that makes a national democracy possible.
  • Tribalism only destabilizes a democracy when it calcifies into something bigger and more intense than our smaller, multiple loyalties; when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole; and when it turns rival tribes into enemies. And the most significant fact about American tribalism today is that all three of these characteristics now apply to our political parties, corrupting and even threatening our system of government.
  • If I were to identify one profound flaw in the founding of America, it would be its avoidance of our tribal nature
  • The founders were suspicious of political parties altogether — but parties defined by race and religion and class and geography? I doubt they’d believe a republic could survive that, and they couldn’t and didn’t foresee it. In fact, as they conceived of a new society that would protect the individual rights of all humanity, they explicitly excluded a second tribe among them: African-American slaves
  • But it did happen here, on a fault line that closely resembles today’s tribal boundary.
  • in the first half of the 20th century, with immigration sharply curtailed after 1924, the world wars acted as great unifiers and integrators. Our political parties became less polarized by race, as the FDR Democrats managed to attract more black voters as well as ethnic and southern whites. By 1956, nearly 40 percent of black voters still backed the GOP.
  • The re-racialization of our parties began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, when the GOP lost almost all of the black vote. It accelerated under Nixon’s “southern strategy” in the wake of the civil-rights revolution. By Reagan’s reelection, the two parties began to cohere again into the Civil War pattern, and had simply swapped places.
  • The greatest threat to a politician today therefore is less a candidate from the opposing party than a more ideologically extreme primary opponent. The incentives for cross-tribal compromise have been eviscerated, and those for tribal extremism reinforced.
  • When it actually came to undoing the reform earlier this year, the GOP had precious little intellectual capital to fall back on, no alternative way to keep millions insured, no history of explaining to voters outside their own tribe what principles they were even trying to apply.
  • Add to this the great intellectual sorting of America, in which, for generations, mass college education sifted countless gifted young people from the heartland and deposited them in increasingly left-liberal universities and thereafter the major cities, from which they never returned, and then the shifting of our economy to favor the college-educated, which only deepened the urban-rural divide.
  • The myths that helped us unite as a nation began to fray. We once had a widely accepted narrative of our origins, shared icons that defined us, and a common pseudo-ethnicity — “whiteness” — into which new immigrants were encouraged to assimilate.
  • we should be clear-eyed about the consequence. We can no longer think of the Puritans without acknowledging the genocide that followed them; we cannot celebrate our Founding Fathers without seeing that slavery undergirded the society they constructed; we must tear down our Confederate statues and relitigate our oldest rifts. Even the national anthem now divides those who stand from those who kneel. We dismantled many of our myths, but have not yet formed new ones to replace them.
  • The result of all this is that a lopsided 69 percent of white Christians now vote Republican, while the Democrats get only 31. In the last decade, the gap in Christian identification between Democrats and Republicans has increased by 50 percent. In 2004, 44 percent of Latinos voted Republican for president; in 2016, 29 percent did. Forty-three percent of Asian-Americans voted Republican in 2004; in 2016, 29 percent did. Since 2004, the most populous urban counties have also swung decisively toward the Democrats, in both blue and red states, while rural counties have shifted sharply to the GOP
  • When three core components of a tribal identity — race, religion, and geography — define your political parties, you’re in serious trouble.
  • Some countries where tribal cleavages spawned by ethnic and linguistic differences have long existed understand this and have constructed systems of government designed to ameliorate the consequences
  • There is no neutral presidency here, and so when a rank tribalist wins the office and governs almost entirely in the interests of the hardest core of his base, half the country understandably feels as if it were under siege. Our two-party, winner-take-all system only works when both parties are trying to appeal to the same constituencies on a variety of issues.
  • Our undemocratic electoral structure exacerbates things. Donald Trump won 46 percent of the vote, attracting 3 million fewer voters than his opponent, but secured 56 percent of the Electoral College. Republicans won 44 percent of the vote in the Senate seats up for reelection last year, but 65 percent of the seats. To have one tribe dominate another is one thing; to have the tribe that gained fewer votes govern the rest — and be the head of state — is testing political stability.
  • Slowly our political culture becomes one in which the two parties see themselves not as participating in a process of moving the country forward, sometimes by tilting to the right and sometimes to the left, as circumstances permit, alternating in power, compromising when in opposition, moderating when in government — but one where the goal is always the obliteration of the other party by securing a permanent majority, in an unending process of construction and demolition.
  • And so by 2017, 41 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Democrats said they disagreed not just with their opponents’ political views but with their values and goals beyond politics as well.
  • 61 percent of Trump supporters say there’s nothing he could do to make them change their minds about him; 57 percent of his opponents say the same thing. Nothing he could do.
  • When criticized by a member of a rival tribe, a tribalist will not reflect on his own actions or assumptions but instantly point to the same flaw in his enemy.
  • By the 2000 election, we were introduced to the red-blue map, though by then we could already recognize the two tribes it identified as they fought to a national draw. Choosing a president under those circumstances caused a constitutional crisis, one the Supreme Court resolved at the expense of losing much of its nonpartisan, nontribal authority.
  • In America, the intellectual elites, far from being a key rational bloc resisting this, have succumbed. The intellectual right and the academic left have long since dispensed with the idea of a mutual exchange of ideas.
  • Conservatism thrived in America when it was dedicated to criticizing liberalism’s failures, engaging with it empirically, and offering practical alternatives to the same problems. It has since withered into an intellectual movement that does little but talk to itself and guard its ideological boundaries.
  • among tribal conservatives, the Iraq War remained a taboo topic when it wasn’t still regarded as a smashing success, tax cuts were still the solution to every economic woe, free trade was all benefit and no cost, and so on. Health care was perhaps the most obvious example of this intellectual closure. Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act was immediate and total. Even though the essential contours of the policy had been honed at the Heritage Foundation, even though a Republican governor had pioneered it in Massachusetts, and even though that governor became the Republican nominee in 2012, the anathematization of it defined the GOP for seven years.
  • the now near-ubiquitous trend of “whataboutism,” as any glance at a comments section or a cable slugfest will reveal. The Soviets perfected this in the Cold War, deflecting from their horrific Gulags by pointing, for example, to racial strife in the U.S. It tells you a lot about our time that a tactic once honed in a global power struggle between two nations now occurs within one.
  • George Orwell famously defined this mind-set as identifying yourself with a movement, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” It’s typified, he noted, by self-contradiction and indifference to reality
  • As for indifference to reality, today’s Republicans cannot accept that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet, and today’s Democrats must believe that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism. Even now, Democrats cannot say the words illegal immigrants or concede that affirmative action means discriminating against people because of their race. Republicans cannot own the fact that big tax cuts have not trickled down, or that President Bush authorized the brutal torture of prisoners, thereby unequivocally committing war crimes.
  • Orwell again: “There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case … still one cannot feel that it is wrong.” That is as good a summary of tribalism as you can get, that it substitutes a feeling — a really satisfying one — for an argument.
  • When a party leader in a liberal democracy proposes a shift in direction, there is usually an internal debate. It can go on for years. When a tribal leader does so, the tribe immediately jumps on command. And so the Republicans went from free trade to protectionism, and from internationalism to nationalism, almost overnight
  • And then there is the stance of white Evangelicals, a pillar of the red tribe. Among their persistent concerns has long been the decline of traditional marriage, the coarsening of public discourse, and the centrality of personal virtue to the conduct of public office.
  • In the 1990s, they assailed Bill Clinton as the font of decadence; then they lionized George W. Bush, who promised to return what they often called “dignity” to the Oval Office. And yet when a black Democrat with exemplary personal morality, impeccable public civility, a man devoted to his wife and children and a model for African-American fathers, entered the White House, they treated him as a threat to civilization
  • And when they encountered a foulmouthed pagan who bragged of grabbing women by the pussy, used the tabloids to humiliate his wife, married three times, boasted about the hotness of his own daughter, touted the size of his own dick in a presidential debate, and spoke of avoiding STDs as his personal Vietnam, they gave him more monolithic support than any candidate since Reagan, including born-again Bush and squeaky-clean Romney.
  • In 2011, a poll found that only 30 percent of white Evangelicals believed that private immorality was irrelevant for public life. This month, the same poll found that the number had skyrocketed to 72 percent.
  • Total immersion within one’s tribe also leads to increasingly extreme ideas. The word “hate,” for example, has now become a one-stop replacement for a whole spectrum of varying, milder emotions involved with bias toward others:
  • Or take the current promiscuous use of the term “white supremacist.” We used to know what that meant. It meant advocates and practitioners of slavery, believers in the right of white people to rule over all others, subscribers to a theory of a master race, Jim Crow supporters, George Wallace voters.
  • But it is now routinely used on the left to mean, simply, racism in a multicultural America, in which European-Americans are a fast-evaporating ethnic majority.
  • Liberals should be able to understand this by reading any conservative online journalism and encountering the term “the left.” It represents a large, amorphous blob of malevolent human beings, with no variation among them, no reasonable ideas, nothing identifiably human at all
  • It’s not easy to be optimistic with Trump as president. And given his malignant narcissism, despotic instincts, absence of empathy, and constant incitement of racial and xenophobic hatred, it’s extremely hard not to be tribal in return. There is no divide he doesn’t want to deepen, no conflict he doesn’t want to start or intensify. How on earth can we not “resist”?
  • In 2015, did any of us anticipate that neo-Nazis would be openly parading with torches on a college campus or that antifa activists would be proudly extolling violence as the only serious response to the Trump era?
  • In fact, the person best positioned to get us out of this tribal trap would be … well … bear with me … Trump. The model would be Bill Clinton, the first president to meet our newly configured divide. Clinton leveraged the loyalty of Democrats thrilled to regain the White House in order to triangulate toward centrist compromises with the GOP. You can argue about the merits of the results, but he was able to govern, to move legislation forward, to reform welfare, reduce crime, turn the deficit into a surplus, survive impeachment, and end his term a popular president.
  • The Democrats are now, surprisingly, confronting a choice many thought they would only face in a best-case-scenario midterm election, and their political calculus is suddenly much more complicated than pure resistance. Might the best interest of the country be served by working with Trump? And if they do win the House in 2018, should they seek to destroy Trump’s presidency, much like GOP leaders in Congress chose to do with Obama? Should they try to end it through impeachment, as the GOP attempted with Bill Clinton? Or could they try to moderate the tribal divide?
  • if the Democrats try to impeach a president who has no interest in the stability or integrity of our liberal democracy, and if his base sees it, as they will, as an Establishment attempt at nullifying their vote, are we really prepared to handle the civil unrest and constitutional crisis that would almost certainly follow?
  • Tribalism is not a static force. It feeds on itself. It appeals on a gut level and evokes emotions that are not easily controlled and usually spiral toward real conflict. And there is no sign that the deeper forces that have accelerated this — globalization, social atomization, secularization, media polarization, ever more multiculturalism — will weaken
  • But we should not delude ourselves that this is all a Trump problem.
  • As utopian as it sounds, I truly believe all of us have to at least try to change the culture from the ground up. There are two ideas that might be of help, it seems to me. The first is individuality.
  • I mean valuing the unique human being — distinct from any group identity, quirky, full of character and contradictions, skeptical, rebellious, immune to being labeled or bludgeoned into a broader tribal grouping. This cultural antidote to tribalism, left and right, is still here in America and ready to be rediscovered
  • I may be an extreme case, but we all are nonconformist to some degree. Nurturing your difference or dissent from your own group is difficult; appreciating the individuality of those in other tribes is even harder. It takes effort and imagination, openness to dissent, even an occasional embrace of blasphemy.
  • we also need mutual forgiveness. It doesn’t matter if you believe, as I do, that the right bears the bulk of the historical blame. No tribal conflict has ever been unwound without magnanimity. Yitzhak Rabin had it, but it was not enough. Nelson Mandela had it, and it was
  • But this requires, of course, first recognizing our own tribal thinking. So much of our debates are now an easy either/or rather than a complicated both/and. In our tribal certainties, we often distort what we actually believe in the quiet of our hearts, and fail to see what aspects of truth the other tribe may grasp.
  • Not all resistance to mass immigration or multiculturalism is mere racism or bigotry; and not every complaint about racism and sexism is baseless. Many older white Americans are not so much full of hate as full of fear.
  • The actual solutions to our problems are to be found in the current no-man’s-land that lies between the two tribes. Reentering it with empiricism and moderation to find different compromises for different issues is the only way out of our increasingly dangerous impasse.
  • All of this runs deeply against the grain. It’s counterintuitive. It’s emotionally unpleasant. It fights against our very DNA. Compared with bathing in the affirming balm of a tribe, it’s deeply unsatisfying. But no one ever claimed that living in a republic was going to be easy — if we really want to keep it.
Javier E

Here's the best thing the media can do when reporting on 'antifa' - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-84c0-02cc069f2c37_story.html

antifa media reporting alt-right

shared by Javier E on 04 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • few have heard the activist author Cornel West give credit to anarchists and anti-fascists for saving the lives of peacefully protesting clergy members in Charlottesville: Given the weak police response in protecting them from the neo-Nazis, West said, “We would have been crushed like cockroaches” otherwise.
  • There certainly was no question that the alt-right had political ties — at the highest level. Stephen K. Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart News, who would would become Trump’s chief strategist, once described his news organization as the “platform for the alt-right.”
  • “They have no political allies,” national political reporter David Weigel of The Post observed of antifa, asking rhetorically, “Who is the Corey Stewart of antifa?
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  • As Paul Blest wrote in the Outline, “To pretend that the alt-right and Antifa are comparable is like equating the danger of playing Russian roulette with taking a walk.”
  • Meanwhile, one white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan leader, Chris Barker, said last month that his movement would destroy immigrants: “We killed 6 million Jews the last time. Eleven million is nothing.”
  • Right-wing extremists committed 74 percent of the 372 politically motivated murders recorded in the United States between 2007 and 2016. Left-wing extremists committed less than 2 percent.
  • He was comparing things that aren’t the least bit equal, neither in scale nor in intent.
  • “Trump was playing into a meme about violent leftists that was well developed on the right,”
  • For months, the likes of Hannity have been using “alt-left” to trash mainstream journalists. Then along came Charlottesville, and the ubiquitous image of the black-clad, shield-wielding leftists.
  • “What about the alt-left that came charging at, what you say, the alt-right?” Trump asked a few days after Charlottesville’s confrontation. “What about the fact they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs, do they have any problem? I think they do.”
Javier E

A Chronicle of Predation, Appetites and Power - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...-predation-appetites-and-power

power cynicism trump crisis morality nihilism

shared by Javier E on 18 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • there’s one small element of truth to the “Was that wrong?” argument. Everything we know about the Trumps suggests they are fundamentally amoral people. Their loyalty is to a triad of enrichment, power and family – the order in that hierarchy I don’t really know. The idea that there are limits to what you do in pursuit of those goals is, I believe, quite alien to them.
  • it’s not that somehow Don Jr was so profoundly clueless that he didn’t know this was a problem. He knew enough to lie about it for at least a year. It’s not that he doesn’t know it’s wrong or against the law. It is that in this family having that be a brake or obstacle to action is simply alien. Dad’s good, Hillary’s bad
  • The additional factor to the Trump’s is the coterie of lackies and toadies who trail around them. There are numerous people in the Trump universe who were either apolitical or relatively committed Democrats before 2016 and now they’re the most committed Trumpers. Other people who probably had not entirely embraced a total amorality are nonetheless dragged alone.
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  • here is a contagious amorality that emanates from the Trumps.
  • people who know no limits on their actions, not even cynical limits on actions that may simply be too dangerous to risk (what keeps many, though by no means all super powerful people in check) are very, very dangerous people and all the more so when they take control of a state with such vast powers.
Javier E

Who Is a 'Criminal'? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...who-is-a-criminal.html

criminal politics legal repression exile

shared by Javier E on 01 May 17 - No Cached
  • While President Barack Obama set deportation priorities by making a distinction between undocumented immigrants with serious criminal convictions and everyone else, Trump’s executive orders vastly expand the criminal category — so much so that it essentially criminalizes anyone in the country who is without status and makes the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States a top priority for deportation
  • Between January and March of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 21,362 immigrants, a 32.6 percent increase from the same period last year. Of those arrested, 5,441 of them had no history of violating a law.
  • To test the severity of that position, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., confessed to a crime — driving 60 miles an hour in a 55-mile-an-hour zone many years ago without being caught. He then asked if a person who had not disclosed such an incident in his citizenship application could have his citizenship revoked. The lawyer answered, yes.
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  • There was “indignation and incredulity” expressed by the members of the Court. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy told the lawyer, “Your argument is demeaning the priceless value of citizenship.” Roberts put it simply. If the administration has its way, he said, “the government will have the opportunity to denaturalize anyone they want.”
  • EXILE FROM ONE’S HOME is historically considered one of the worst punishments the state could employ; it was, after all, one of the traditional Greek and Roman punishments for murder, their alternative to the death penalty
  • To drag someone out of the life they have painstakingly created over many years, for something as petty as traffic violations or shoplifting, is a gross violation of the proportionality principle — that the punishment should fit the crime.
  • Human rights by their nature apply to both citizens and noncitizens alike. It is difficult to see why deportation for such violations is not also a human rights violation. How, then, have so many of us accepted these policies so at odds with our American values?
  • The word “criminal” has a literal meaning, of course, but it also has a resonant meaning — people who by their nature are insensitive to society’s norms, drawn to violate the law by self-interest or malice. We do not generally use the term to describe those who may have inadvertently broken a law
  • Someone who runs to catch a bus is not necessarily a runner; someone who commits a crime is not necessarily a criminal.
  • Politicians who describe people as “criminals” are imputing to them permanent character traits that are frightening to most people, while simultaneously positioning themselves as our protectors
  • Deliberately obscuring the crucial distinction between someone who violates a law and someone whose character leads them to repeatedly commit serious crimes is an effective strategy for masking gross injustice.
  • Our current administration is vigorously employing that strategy, and history suggests that it is rarely constrained to just one group. If we look away when the state brands someone a criminal, who among us then remains safe?
Javier E

Jennifer Rubin, Charles Cooke, and the Future of Conservatism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...548738

conservatism white supremacy culture politics partisan polarization gop

shared by Javier E on 19 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • In the spring of 2016, National Review published its “Against Trump” issue. Twenty-one prominent conservatives signed individual statements of opposition to Trump’s candidacy. Of those 21, only six continue to speak publicly against his actions. Almost as many have become passionate defenders of the Trump presidency
  • As a survival strategy, this is viable enough in the short term. But let’s understand what is driving it.
  • The conservative intellectual world is whipsawed between distaste for President Trump and fear of its own audience. The conservative base has become ever more committed to Trump—and ever less tolerant of any deviation. Those conservative talkers most susceptible to market pressure—radio and TV hosts—have made the most-spectacular conversions and submissions: Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson.
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  • The same day that Cooke launched himself into Jennifer Rubin, another contributor to the National Review special issue, Erick W. Erickson, announced that he had lost his Fox News contract. Erickson had precisely followed Cooke’s advice, conscientiously seeking opportunities to praise Trump where he could. That halfway support did not suffice for his producers.
  • Researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center have quantified how dramatically far-right media sources such as Breitbart News have overtaken and displaced traditional conservative outlets such as National Review. By tallying links, citations, and other indicators of influence, they found:
  • The center-left and the far right are the principal poles of the media landscape. The center of gravity of the overall landscape is the center-left. Partisan media sources on the left are integrated into this landscape and are of lesser importance than the major media outlets of the center-left. The center of attention and influence for conservative media is on the far right. The center-right is of minor importance and is the least represented portion of the media spectrum.
  • Rubin stands on that embattled center-right. She is not quite alone. Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations stands there, as does the true-hearted remainder of the National Review 21: Mona Charen, Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz.
  • You’ll find others at the Niskanen Center (Jerry Taylor, Brink Lindsey), and holding the faith from the Evan McMullin–Mindy Finn independent presidential ticket. A few brave the adverse comments on social media: Tom Nichols from the academic world; Seth Mandel at the New York Post’s editorial page. Joe Scarborough keeps the faith on morning TV.
  • The urgency to defend Trump will accelerate should Republicans lose one or both chambers of Congress in November 2018. At that point, Trump’s veto and executive orders will become the chief political resource that conservatives have. They would not dare risk losing it.
  • Charles Cooke arraigned Jennifer Rubin for being dragged to new political positions by her resistance to Trump. She is not alone. Bill Kristol quipped on Twitter: “The GOP tax bill's bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
  • The most revealing thought in Cooke’s essay is his explanation for why he feels it is safe to go with the Trumpian flow: “Conservatism in this country long predated Trump; for now, it is tied up with Trump; soon, it will have survived Trump.”
  • Good question, and here’s the answer: What is happening is the revelation that politics is dynamic, that new facts call forth new responses.
  • This is something many conservatives tell themselves, but it’s not even slightly true. Trump is changing conservatism into something different. We can all observe that. Will it snap back afterward?
  • Just as many anti-Trump conservatives find themselves pulled in new directions by their revulsion against Trump’s corruption and abuse of power, so too is the conservative mainstream being altered by its determination to remain on terms with Trump and his supporters.
  • You can believe this only if you imagine that ideologies exist independently of the human beings who espouse them—and that they can continue unchanged and unchanging despite fluctuations in their adherents.
  • This is simply not true. Ideas are not artifacts, especially the kind of collective ideas we know as ideologies. Conservatives in 1964 opposed civil-rights laws. Conservatives in 1974 opposed tax cuts unless paid for by spending cuts. Conservatives in 1984 opposed same-sex marriage. Conservatives in 1994 opposed trade protectionism. Conservatives in 2004 opposed people who equated the FBI and Soviet Union’s KGB. All those statements of conservative ideology have gone by the boards, and one could easily write a similar list of amended views for liberals.
  • Conservatism is what conservatives think, say, and do. As conservatives change—as much through the harsh fact of death and birth as by the fluctuations of opinion—so does what it means to be a conservative.
  • The Trump presidency is a huge political fact. He may not be the leader of American conservatism, but he is its most spectacular and vulnerable asset. The project of defending him against his coming political travails—or at least of assailing those who doubt and oppose him—is already changing what it means to be a conservative.
  • The word conservative will of course continue in use. But its meaning is being rewritten each day by the actions of those who lay claim to the word. It is their commitment to Trump that etches Trumpism into them. And while Trump may indeed pass, that self-etching will not soon be effaced.
anonymous

Opinion | The G.O.P. Isn't Going to Split Apart Anytime Soon - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ublican-party-trump-split.html

politics

shared by anonymous on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • There is no rule that says American political parties can’t die, and there was a time when it was quite common.
  • The Republican Party does not have that structural disadvantage. Just the opposite: Its rural and exurban character gives it a powerful asset in an electoral system in which the geography of partisanship plays a huge part in the party makeup of Congress. Republicans can win total control of Washington without ever winning a majority of votes, an advantage that the Federalists, for example, would have killed for.
  • The long list of now-defunct American political parties includes the Greenback Party, the Know-Nothing Party, the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party, the Anti-Masonic Party and the National Republican Party. And then, of course, there are the Federalist and Whig parties, which came to power and then fell into decline during the first and second generations of American democracy.
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  • As much as you can see some of these dynamics within the present-day Republican Party, there’s also nothing comparable to the division and factionalism that tore the Whigs apart. A rump faction of the discontented notwithstanding, the official Republican Party is united behind Donald Trump and his anti-voting agenda.
  • The G.O.P. Isn’t Going to Split Apart Anytime SoonBut is the party in danger of fracturing over its wavering commitment to democracy?
  • And not just in the 19th century either. The first decades of the 20th century, for example, saw the rise and fall of the Socialist Party, with Eugene V. Debs at its head. The short-lived Progressive Party came to life as a platform for the revived presidential ambitions of Theodore Roosevelt, and the Populist Party swept through much of America in the last years of the 19th century as a vehicle for the interests of farmers and laborers.
  • There are ways in which I think this comparison works. Like the Federalists then, the Republican Party now is struggling to reorient itself to a new era of mass politics, its reinvention held back by its aging white base. Rather than broaden their appeal, many Republicans are fighting to suppress the vote out of fear of the electorate itself. And just as the Whigs struggled internally and failed to forge a cross-sectional compromise over slavery, the Republican Party does risk fracturing over its commitment to democracy itself.
  • The Federalists also faced important structural obstacles, chief among them the three-fifths compromise, which gave partial representation to enslaved Americans. And as the number of slaves increased in the South, so too did the region’s weight in the Electoral College. The party that won the South would likely win the presidency, and so it was with the Democratic-Republicans, who beginning with Thomas Jefferson would win six straight elections, knocking the Federalist Party out of national political competition by 1820, when James Monroe ran for re-election unopposed.
  • As the Whig coalition deteriorated in the 1840s under stress from election defeats, sectional conflict and the growth of third parties like the Know-Nothings, it turned to charismatic figures like Zachary Taylor. A veteran of the Mexican-American War, which many Whigs opposed, General Taylor would lead the party to victory in the 1848 presidential election. But as a cipher with no previous political experience, his win only papered over the fierce, factional disputes that would explode in the wake of his death in office in the summer of 1850.
  • Of course, when that Democratic Party finally went too far, it plunged the country into the worst, deadliest crisis of its history. Let us hope, then, that that particular resemblance is only superficial.
katherineharron

US and China deploy aircraft carriers in South China Sea as Philippines prepares for jo... - 0 views

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

taiwan

shared by katherineharron on 12 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Military activity in the South China Sea spiked over the weekend as a Chinese aircraft carrier entered the region and a US Navy expeditionary strike group wrapped up exercises.
  • the US and Philippines were preparing for joint drills as the US secretary of defense proposed ways to deepen military cooperation between Washington and Manila after China massed vessels in disputed waters.
  • China's state-run Global Times on Sunday said the country's first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, steamed into the South China Sea on Saturday after completing a week of naval exercises around Taiwan.
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  • There was no official announcement of the Liaoning's position
  • The Liaoning's reported arrival in the South China Sea came after a US Navy expeditionary strike group, fronted by the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island, conducted exercises in the South China Sea a day earlier.
  • The ships also carried hundreds of Marine ground forces from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit as well as their supporting helicopters and F-35 fighter jets.Read More
  • "This expeditionary strike force fully demonstrates that we maintain a combat-credible force, capable of responding to any contingency, deter aggression, and provide regional security and stability in support of a free and open Indo-Pacific,"
  • Exercises by the Chinese carrier "can establish wider maritime defensive positions, safeguard China's coastal regions, and keep US military activities in check," the report said, citing Wei.
  • US analyst described the Liaoning's presence in the South China Sea as normal for the spring when weather conditions are conducive to training.
  • On Monday, more than 1,700 US and Philippines troops were beginning two weeks of military exercises, Reuters reported, citing Philippine military chief Lt. Gen. Cirilito Sobejana.
  • The proposals included ways of "enhancing situational awareness of threats in the South China Sea" and come after "the recent massing of People's Republic of China maritime militia vessels at Whitsun Reef," in the Philippines' exclusive economic zone in the Spratly Islands, the statement said.
  • Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. on Saturday tweeted he will work to have any attack on Philippine civilian craft trigger mutual defense aid, CNN Philippines reported.
  • Beijing accuses Washington and other foreign navies of stoking tensions in the region by sending in warships like the current expeditionary group led by the carrier Roosevelt.
  • Tensions extend to the northeastern edges of the South China Sea, where the island of Taiwan sits
  • Beijing claims the democratic, self-governed island of almost 24 million people as its territory
  • the two sides have been governed separately for more than seven decades.
  • Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed that Beijing will never allow Taiwan to become formally independent
  • Before moving into the South China Sea at the weekend, the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning had been putting on a show of military muscle around Taiwan for a week, according to Chinese state media. At one point the People's Liberation Army flanked Taiwan, with the Liaoning and its escorts operating in the Pacific Ocean to the east and PLA warplanes making forays into Taiwan's self-declared air defense identification zone to the west.
  • Analysts said the exercises were a warning to Taipei and Washington that Beijing would not brook any moves for Taiwanese independence
  • "What is a real concern to us is increasingly aggressive actions by the government in Beijing directed at Taiwan," Blinken said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
  • "We have a serious commitment to Taiwan being able to defend itself. We have a serious commitment to peace and security in the Western Pacific. And in that context, it would be a serious mistake for anyone to try to change that status quo by force," Blinken said.
Javier E

An Outdated Idea Is Still Shaping Climate Policy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618652

climate coalition free rider politics

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • the ideas underpinning this week’s ceremony are simply outdated
  • Reading news of the China talks, I thought of a recent paper by the political scientists Michaël Aklin and Matto Mildenberger. They argue that, since the 1990s, policy makers and academics have conceived of climate change in a mostly useless way. Officials have taken their cues from economists and imagined climate change as a free-rider problem, in which the goal is to prevent nations from taking advantage of one another.
  • In fact, Aklin and Mildenberger say, climate change is a distributive-conflict problem
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  • The challenge of global climate action isn’t that other people will benefit from your emissions cuts; it’s that many interests actively oppose decarbonization. The key to passing climate policy is stitching together a coalition that will support and sustain decarbonization.
  • is is familiar enough: Coal mines suffer; electric utilities prosper. Because political leaders want, above all, to maintain the support of key constituencies, climate policy flows from a societal negotiation between potential winners and potential losers, a fight between climate reformers and climate obstructionists
  • In essence, climate policy restructures the economy, creating new economic winners and losers
  • Surveying the past few decades, they find that countries almost never care about free riding. “Governments implement climate policies regardless of what other countries do,” they write, “and they do so whether a climate treaty dealing with free-riding has been in place or not.”
  • When Donald Trump took the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, other nations did not react by withdrawing as well. Instead, revulsion at Trump himself—and his climate views by proxy—strengthened political support in those countries for continuing climate action.
  • both Aklin and Mildenberger’s coalitional idea and the free-rider conception of climate action seem to operate within the Biden administration
  • The president’s domestic-policy staff, epitomized by his adviser Brian Deese, is pursuing coalition-building climate policies, primarily characterized by public spending. The policies spread the economic gains of decarbonization around and increase the Biden coalition’s support for further action.
  • An older guard, epitomized by Kerry, hopes to secure other countries’ involvement as well, in order to prevent free riding.
  • Whose theory is better? Neither seems necessarily awful to me. Kerry’s approach actually fits within Deese’s: Securing foreign climate commitments makes the task easier at home.
  • now. The Biden administration has sold climate action as concretely in America’s interests: Its infrastructure package seeks to develop green industries not out of a sense of global do-goodism but because America’s economic competitiveness is at stake. And Xi Jinping’s government has, since last year, pursued aggressive climate policy as a way to build its international prestige. China uses climate policy to sell the orderliness and sanity of its system over the cacophonous and chaotic American approach.
  • So the weekend’s announcement seemed anticlimactic, to be honest. Of course the Biden administration and the Xi government now say they want further emissions reductions in the 2020s: Both governments are already acting domestically as if climate action is in their concrete interests.
  • . The question for me is whether—during this transition period—the politics of free riding help or hinder Biden’s attempt to forge a stronger pro-decarbonization coalition. If Biden commits to slashing greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, will that make the public pay more attention to—and feel more skittish about—the rest of his climate-policy playbook?
saberal

Sen. Rubio & Rep. Malliotakis: Biden's human rights choice - turn blind eye to UN corru... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...o-rubio-rep-nicole-malliotakis

US politics

shared by saberal on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • President Joe Biden has made his intentions to return to the failed foreign policies of the past very clear. This includes the Biden administration’s intent for the United States to "re-engage immediately and robustly" with the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) without receiving any commitments for much needed institutional reforms. 
  • More than 60 years later, the basic rights of the Cuban people remain nonexistent. Shamefully, Cuba is a current member of the UNHCR, where they are given a platform to speak on human rights. This is an absolute slap in the face to the Cuban people.  
  • In a matter of years, Maduro transformed Venezuela from one of the wealthiest countries in South America into an economic catastrophe, where Venezuelans cannot access basic essentials. The illegitimate regime has killed and tortured dissidents, independent reporters, university students and civilians. This is the same regime that was found to have committed crimes against humanity by the U.N. Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela. 
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  • America’s presence on the council, alongside these nations, only legitimizes the hypocritical abuses that have plagued this body for years. For the sake of those suffering under repressive regimes, President Biden must make the right choice and stand for human rights. 
  • The bottom line is this: returning to the UNHRC would require a dramatic overhaul of this corrupt body to implement its founding mission. Oppressed peoples around the world are watching in the hopes that America will stand with them and against their oppressors.  
aidenborst

Blinken says Russia has an 'obligation' to stop ransomware attacks - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

US politics history crisis policy Culture Pandemic ransomware Russia Putin

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN Español Wednesday that Russia has an obligation to stop cyberattacks like those on the JBS meatpacking plant and the Colonial Pipeline and not "harbor criminal enterprises that engage in these attacks."
  • On Wednesday, Blinken called on Russian leaders to control the criminal enterprises working within their borders.
  • "We are seeing, unfortunately, a new front in in cyber threats, and that is criminal organizations using what's called ransomware to hold hostage companies, to hold hostage critical infrastructure for financial gain," Blinken said. He noted that the criminal groups were often connected simply by virtue of being based in the same place.
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  • Blinken also said that Biden will soon announce a plan to make 80 million doses of Covid vaccine available in the region and around the world, after being asked about the large advantage that Russia and China have built in the region through their vaccine diplomacy.
  • He added that while the US and other countries need to fortify their defenses, the international community needs "countries around the world to make commitments and then make good on those commitments, not to harbor criminal enterprises that engage in these attacks and on the contrary to seek them out and to stop them."
  • "I think it's the obligation of any country to do whatever it can to find these enterprises, and to bring them to justice, including in the case of the attack on the Colonial Pipeline. The enterprise that was responsible [for] that attack, its leaders were in Russia, are in Russia, so I think there's an obligation on Russia's part to make sure that that doesn't continue," Blinken said.
  • The President has finalized his plan to distribute the millions of coronavirus vaccines worldwide after months of deliberation, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans.
  • "We will begin to make available around the world, including in the hemisphere, 80 million vaccines that we now have access to that, we will, as I said, begin to make available," Blinken told CNNE.
  • "But here's what's important: We'll distribute those vaccines working in coordination with COVAX, doing some of the work directly ourselves, we'll do it on the basis of equity. We'll do it on the basis of science, of need, and we will do it without political strings attached, which has not been the case, or some other countries that have been engaged in providing vaccines."
mimiterranova

How a Biden presidency could change US relations with the rest of the world - Atlantic ... - 0 views

www.atlanticcouncil.org/...ons-with-the-rest-of-the-world

biden presidency relations world

shared by mimiterranova on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • In mere weeks, Joe Biden will stride into the Oval Office and peer out at a world still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and at growing threats from resurgent US adversaries such as China and Russia. Leaders around the world will have to adapt to a new US administration and its potentially dramatic changes in policy and rhetoric.
  • We asked Atlantic Council experts to preview what Biden’s election means not just for regional heavyweights, but also for smaller nations who could play an outsized role in US foreign policy over the next four years.
  • GERMANY: A brighter tone and realistic expectations could rehabilitate relationship
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  • HUNGARY: Biden needs to invest in the relationship
  • NORTH KOREA: A step-by-step approach to denuclearization
  • POLAND: Drop the politics, and get back to basic values
  • TAIWAN: US needs to boost its commitment to protect vulnerable Taiwan
  • GREECE: Historic goodwill to be tested by deep regional challenges
  • THE PHILIPPINES: Closer eye on human rights, but potential for more partnership
  • GEORGIA: Biden will continue strong US support for Tbilisi
  • BELARUS: Stronger statements and deeper allied coordination
  • Focus on commercial relationships, conflict risks, and democratic transitions
  • IRAN: No easy path toward a reset
  • QATAR: Has Doha lost its leverage?
  • IRAQ: Baghdad needs practical support now
  • LIBYA: A clearer definition of US strategy
  • SYRIA: Serious US engagement returns
  • mimiterranova on 03 Jun 21
     
    Highlighter
aidenborst

Ranked choice voting: Why the process could take weeks to deliver New York City primary... - 0 views

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

US politics history crisis Culture policy election Midterm New-York

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Democrats running for New York City mayor will square off in a crucial debate Wednesday night, but they won't just be trying to convince voters that they're the best candidate for the job -- being someone's second, third, fourth or even fifth favorite could be almost as good.
  • Unlike past elections, Big Apple voters will pick their party nominees for mayor on June 22 using ranked-choice voting, and it could take weeks to determine the winners.
  • This will be the first time voters will be able to rank their top five choices in order of preference for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough president and city council instead of selecting just one candidate for each spot.
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  • As of Tuesday, 152,817 absentee ballots had been sent out by elections officials. Citywide, more than 12,000 had already been returned.
  • To calculate the winner, the first-choice votes of each ballot are counted. If no one receives a majority of the vote (which is unlikely in such a large field), the candidate with the least support is eliminated from contention, and votes for that candidate are redistributed to whomever the voter marked as their second choice. That process continues until a winner is determined.
  • The stakes are high. Thirteen candidates are running for the Democratic nomination for mayor, with the winner heavily favored in November's general election. (Two Republicans are vying for their party's nomination.)
  • Almost three-quarters of New York City voters picked ranked-choice voting for primaries and special elections in a 2019 referendum.
  • While the system is new to New York, it's been used in other places for years, according to FairVote, an organization that advocates for election reforms. New York City is the largest jurisdiction in the country to adopt ranked-choice voting, but it's been used for congressional and presidential elections in Maine since 2018. Alaska will begin using it next year.
  • "In order to do this process in the best way, we need to balance the public's right to know who won the election and the individual voter's right to cast absentee and affidavit ballots that will be counted and counted in an anonymous manner," Frederic Umane, the election board's president, said at a meeting last week.
  • Under the old system, if no primary candidate won 40% of the vote, the top two advanced to a runoff.November's general election will not use ranked-choice voting.
  • In April, the city launched a $15 million voter education plan, including advertising and community outreach.
  • In a statement announcing the initiative, Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to a "full court press to ensure every New Yorker has the information they need to make their voice heard."
  • "Studies have shown that a disproportionate number of Black Democrats, particularly older voters, vote for only one candidate, so a Black candidate that finishes ahead with first place votes can ultimately lose if White voters fully avail themselves of the RCV option," Hazel wrote. "In essence, those votes by White voters would count more than the older Black single candidate voters since the Black voters' second choices would not come into play."
  • Despite those concerns, Dukes wrote that she was committed to helping educate voters about the process to "ensure voters know what to expect when they go to the polls this June."
  • "We're hoping that it will be a positive experience in the end," Quigg said. "That people can see 'maybe my first choice candidate didn't win, but hey look my second or third choice candidate won and so that effort that I put into figuring that out made a difference.'"
  • "I think a lot of a lot of voters have sort of 2020 fatigue, if you will and are frankly, still a little traumatized from that election cycle. So, you know, a lot of people just haven't really been tuning in yet," she said. "I think a lot of New Yorkers want to participate, but they just need to know about it and they need to know that it's actually not that complicated."
lmunch

Opinion: There is a key word missing from the climate movement - CNN - 0 views

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

Climate US Culture crisis

shared by lmunch on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • And those memories have me thinking about climate change. As a father, Christian pastor and full-time climate organizer, climate change is rarely far from my mind. But now that President Joe Biden has made it the centerpiece of his legacy-defining American Jobs Plan -- with its investment in clean energy, its overhaul of our outdated energy grid, its commitment to clean transportation, and its promise of millions of family-sustaining jobs -- it's bound to be top of mind for many Americans for some time to come.
  • After all, the phrase "climate change" elicits a laundry list of emotions for most of us: anger, dread, guilt and grief, among them. A growing body of research is revealing the toll climate grief is taking on our collective mental health, and insomnia and other mental health concerns related to climate-induced anxiety have been documented across 25 countries. Absent from most of our climate-related emotional inventory is delight, contentedness or joy.We need to change that.
  • What else can I feel but shame as the land God has commanded me to hold in trust for my children and grandchildren is desecrated? What else is there to feel but guilt at my own ignorance and complicity, and rage at the behemoth vested interests who have worked so hard to thwart my efforts at every turn?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • For sustained, long-term action -- the kind needed to face down the threat of climate change -- we need more than anger. Every one of us needs a sense of agency. We need a community of belonging. We need hope that our actions can make a difference. We need joy.
  • I began to notice a curious alchemy as I continued to plunge my hands into the earth and look my neighbors in the eye on the bus and cook new plant-based meals with friends. Guilt was slowly transforming into gratitude, despair into joy.
  • When I think of the world my son is set to inherit, my stomach clenches. But even in those moments, I can find joy again when I think of the world we could all create, with enough political will and commitment to the common good. When I think about that world, and the millions of everyday people cultivating communities of belonging in order to dream it into being, my heart sings.
anonymous

FBI Director Wray Interview: Capitol Attack, Atlanta Shootings : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...tor-wray-says-of-capitol-siege

shared by anonymous on 19 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Christopher Wray is only the eighth director to lead the FBI — and the only one whose appointment was announced on Twitter.For the past 3 1/2 years, he has been grinding through fierce criticism by former President Donald Trump. He's also guided the bureau through some wounds the FBI inflicted upon itself, including employees' text messages about political candidates in 2016, the guilty plea by an FBI lawyer for altering a document, and a watchdog report that uncovered surveillance applications filled with big mistakes.
  • Now the laconic Wray, 54, is opening up, ever so slightly, to address what he calls a metastasizing threat of violent domestic extremists and the sprawling investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.He spoke with NPR on Thursday afternoon about the state of the bureau and how the FBI is confronting white supremacist and militia-based terrorism. He also addressed the ongoing investigation into the recent shootings in the Atlanta area.
  • The FBI is supporting state and local law enforcement, specifically APD, the Atlanta Police Department, and the [Cherokee County] Sheriff's Office. So we're actively involved but in a support role. And while the motive remains still under investigation at the moment, it does not appear that the motive was racially motivated.
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  • I elevated racially motivated violent extremism to our top threat priority level about a year and a half ago or so.
  • We have doubled the number of domestic violent extremist investigations we've had since where they were when I started as director, and we were up to about 2,000. And that was before the Jan. 6 siege.
  • And so at the same time, the international terrorism threat — especially international terrorist organizations that inspire homegrown violent extremists here in the U.S. — hasn't gone away by any stretch of the imagination.
  • I was appalled that something like that could happen in this country and determined to make sure that it doesn't happen ever again. ...
  • If we have the evidence to charge somebody and they committed a crime on that day, I expect them to be charged. ...
  • We've arrested people all over the country. I think we have ... open investigations specifically related to the Jan. 6 siege in all but one of our 56 field offices, which gives you a sense of the national sprawl of the investigation.
  • we had been reporting and warning for a good chunk of 2020, together with the Department of Homeland Security and in a number of instances about the domestic violent extremist threat, about the possibility that the domestic violence extremist threat would carry into the election and beyond the election.
  • Now, what we did not have, as far as I can tell ... is any indication that hundreds and hundreds of people were going to breach the U.S. Capitol. And so we'll be looking hard to figure out, is there more we can be doing? How can we do more, even better?
  • Our approach, the FBI's approach — we have one approach, which is if you take the law in your own hands and commit violence, it doesn't matter what your motivation is, what your ideology is, we're going to pursue you to the fullest extent of the law. And that ... was our approach over the summer. That's been our approach with jihadists-inspired violent extremists, and that's been our approach to the siege on the Capitol.
  • So in the last two years, the number of people across this country, qualified people, applying to be special agents, has tripled the years before, and it's the highest it's been in about a decade. So it was around 12,000 a year my first few years as director and went up to [36,000], 37,000.
  • If you were a victim ... who would you most want trying to seek justice on your behalf? And if you were a bad guy, who would you least want on your tail? And I think the FBI is the answer to both questions, 99 out of 100 times all over the country, and that to me is ultimately what really matters in terms of our brand.
anonymous

Yemen: Saudi Arabia Proposes A Peace Deal, But Houthis Say It's Not Enough : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...but-houthis-say-its-not-enough

shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia has proposed a peace deal to end the nearly six-year war in Yemen, if the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels agree.The Saudi proposal calls for a nationwide ceasefire and reopening the airport in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa.
  • "The initiative aims to end the human suffering of the brotherly Yemeni people, and affirms the Kingdom's support for efforts to reach a comprehensive political resolution," the Saudi Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
  • The war has been a quagmire for the Saudis and they are apparently looking for a way out.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • "We expected that Saudi Arabia would announce an end to the blockade of ports and airports and an initiative to allow in 14 ships that are held by the coalition," the Houthis' chief negotiator, Mohammed Abdulsalam,
  • The United States and the U.N. have been trying to end what they call the world's worst humanitarian disaster. President Biden has pledged to use diplomacy to end the war and to allow more refugees to come to the U.S.
  • In a briefing, U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq said he welcomed the Saudi proposals, and that U.N. envoy Martin Griffiths has been working toward these goals. Asked about the Houthis' rejection of the Saudi offer, Haq said Griffiths would be in touch with all parties to discuss moving forward with Saudi Arabia's proposal.Peter Salisbury, senior Yemen analyst at the International Crisis Group, says the Saudi proposal is essentially a new take on an idea that was put forth a year ago.
  • Salisbury says he believes the Saudi proposal is likely aimed at pressuring the Houthis. For now, he predicts more talks, more air strikes, and more fighting on the ground
  • The conflict has become a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Years of fighting have left 80% of Yemen's population reliant on aid and millions are on the brink of starvation.
  • The war in Yemen began in 2014, when Houthi militants supported by Iran overthrew the unpopular Saudi-backed government in Yemen's capital. A coalition of Gulf states — led by Saudi Arabia and with support from the U.S., France and the U.K. — responded with airstrikes, beginning in 2015.While the Biden administration has been critical of the way the Saudis have waged the war, it has also raised alarms about recent Houthi attacks against Saudi Arabia.
  • The State Department said that in a call with Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken "reiterated our commitment to supporting the defense of Saudi Arabia and strongly condemned recent attacks against Saudi territory from Iranian-aligned groups in the region."
  • The two officials reportedly expressed support for diplomatic efforts to end the conflict in Yemen, "starting with the need for all parties to commit to a ceasefire and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid."State Department deputy spokesperson Jalina Porter said the proposal is "one step in the right direction," calling on all of the parties to negotiate under the auspices of the U.N.
carolinehayter

GOP group tells online donors: Give every month or 'we will have to tell Trump you're a... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...rechecked-boxes-trump-defector

GOP politics US trump policy Culture

shared by carolinehayter on 08 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The campaign arm of House Republicans is using an aggressive tactic to push online donors toward committing to monthly contributions, telling them that opting out of having the same amount automatically charged to their credit card or withdrawn from their bank each month is an act of disloyalty toward former President Donald Trump.
  • "We need to know we haven't lost you to the Radical Left. If you UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you're a DEFECTOR & sided with the Dems."
  • "If you want Trump to run for President this is your LAST chance to FLIP the House," donors are told above another pre-checked box. "Change your Trump Victory Fund Status to ACTIVE now! Remain inactive = Republicans lose."
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform, allows some groups to use such boxes.
  • But Republicans -- including Trump's 2020 campaign -- have gone to new lengths to tap into Trump's popularity and strong-arm supporters into regular, automatic contributions.
  • The NRCC's language was first reported by the Bulwark, a news site run by anti-Trump conservatives, which highlighted similar pre-checked boxes the NRCC has used in recent weeks, including one that told donors to "check this box if you want Trump to run again" -- when, in reality, what donors were being asked to do was leave checked a box that signed them up to make monthly donations
  • "As a TOP grassroots supporter, we were surprised to see you ABANDONED him. This is your LAST CHANCE to update your status to ACTIVE!" the pre-checked box said.
  • Using the same tactics that the New York Times reported Trump's campaign used -- provoking complaints and a surge of refunds -- the larger, ominous warnings are placed above more easily missed, smaller fonts that make clear what donors are actually committing to do.
  • The NRCC's pre-checked boxes also appear to ignore the cease-and-desist letter Trump's lawyers recently sent to Republican committees instructing them not to use his likeness to raise money.
  • The NRCC's counterpart, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, also uses pre-checked boxes to sign online donors up for automatic monthly contributions.But the language donors see from the DCCC is straightforward about what they're being asked to do.
  • On the DCCC's ActBlue page, donors are asked immediately under their selection of an amount to donate to "Make it monthly!" The "Yes, count me in!" box is pre-checked, and has a "No, donate once" alternative next to it. Those who do opt for monthly donations then see a window thanking them for their monthly contributions, with an option to click a link to "Make this a one-time contribution instead."
  • "Unlike the NRCC, we use clear language and confirm with our grassroots supporters that they would like to set up a recurring monthly donation," DCCC spokeswoman Helen Kalla said.
Javier E

Opinion | How the Storming of the Capitol Became a 'Normal Tourist Visit' - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jan-6-capitol-attack.html

Democratic party Politics crisis history trump insurrection Capitol

shared by Javier E on 19 May 21 - No Cached
  • Selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be “tribal,” and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups
  • The human mind, Clark and her colleagues wrote,was forged by the crucible of coalitional conflict. For many thousands of years, human tribes have competed against each other. Coalitions that were more cooperative and cohesive not only survived but also appropriated land and resources from other coalitions and therefore reproduced more prolifically, thus passing their genes (and their loyalty traits) to later generations. Because coalitional coordination and commitment were crucial to group success, tribes punished and ostracized defectors and rewarded loyal members with status and resources (as they continue to do today).
  • We conclude that tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition, and that no group — not even one’s own — is immune.
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  • In large-scale contemporary studies, the authors continue,liberals and conservatives showed similar levels of partisan bias, and a number of pro-tribe cognitive tendencies often ascribed to conservatives (e.g., intolerance toward dissimilar others) have been found in similar degrees in liberals.
  • “Who is open to authoritarian governance within western democracies?,” agreed in an email that both liberals and conservatives “engage in biased reasoning on the basis of partisanship,” but, he argued, there is still a fundamental difference between left and right:
  • The surprising finding was the percentage that blamed the left, broadly construed: 16 percent for the Democratic Party, 4 percent for Joe Biden and 11 percent for “antifa,” for a total of 31 percent.
  • A UMass April 21-23 national survey asked voters to identify the person or group “you hold most responsible for the violence that occurred at the Capitol building.” 45 percent identified Trump, 6 percent the Republican Party and 11 percent white nationalists.
  • What we are seeing in the Republican Party is that mass partisan opinion is making it politically devastating for Republican elites to try to uphold democracy. I think that an underappreciated factor in this is that the Republican Party is the home of cultural conservatives, and cultural conservatives are disproportionately open to authoritarian governance.
  • “What type of Western citizens would be most inclined to support democracy-degrading actions?”
  • For what is likely a variety of reasons, a worldview encompassing traditional sexual morality, religiosity, traditional gender roles, and resistance to multicultural diversity is associated with low or flexible commitment to democracy and amenability to authoritarian alternatives.
  • Democrats, Wronski continued, appear to have takena pass on the identity-driven zero-sum debate regarding the 2020 election since there is no compromise on this issue — you either believe the truth or you believe the big lie. Once you enter the world of pitting people against each other who believe in different realities of win/lose outcomes, it’s going to be nearly impossible to create bipartisan consensus on sweeping legislative initiatives (like HR1 and infrastructure bills).
  • those who call themselves “not very strong Republicans” or who consider themselves political independents that lean closer to the Republican Party demonstrate less favorable opinions of their party, reduced perceptions that the Democratic Party poses a threat, and even become more favorable toward the Democratic Party, as a result of exposure to information about conflict within their party.
  • The challenge facing Democrats goes beyond winning office. They confront an adversary willing to lie about past election outcomes, setting the stage for Republican legislatures to overturn future election returns; an opponent willing to nurture an insurrection if the wrong people win; a political party moving steadily from democracy to authoritarianism; a party that despite its liabilities is more likely than not to regain control of the House and possibly even the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.
katherineharron

What is impeachment? Here's what you need to know - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

trump

shared by katherineharron on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The overall impeachment process laid out in the Constitution is relatively simple: President commits "high Crime or Misdemeanor," House votes to impeach, Senate conducts a trial.
  • The one President Donald Trump faces now, after inciting a riotous mob to attack the Capitol, is unprecedented in all sorts of ways, which means the process will feel entirely new and different from the one we saw in late 2019 around the Ukraine investigation.
  • Specifically, this House impeachment vote is likely to be done Wednesday,
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • this second impeachment of Trump, in which a US President is accused for the first time of inciting violence against another branch of government.
  • In that first effort, the details of Trump's pressure on Ukraine leaked out over the course of weeks and built into Democratic support to launch and conduct an investigation and, ultimately, to impeach him.With Trump's time in office set to expire at noon on January 20, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also gave Trump and Vice President Mike Pence the option of avoiding impeachment if either Trump resigned or Pence mobilized the Cabinet to use the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.When those two offramps were ignored, Democrats in the House moved quickly toward impeachment and the first post-presidential impeachment trial in US history.
  • The Article argues that Trump incited his supporters by repeatedly denying the election results in the lead-up to the counting of the electoral votes, that he pressured Georgia's secretary of state to "find" additional votes for him, and in doing so he "gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government," "threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government."
  • Getting from Trump's misdeed to impeachment proceedings in the House took 86 days in 2019. It's going to take just a week in 2021.
  • This time, while there's an argument he committed treason, Democrats in the House have alleged Trump "engaged in high Crimes and Misdemeanors by inciting violence against the Government of the United States."
  • It took 48 days to get from Trump's December 19, 2019 impeachment to his February 5, 2020 acquittal. That process was slowed by a break over the holidays. The trial actually began January 16.
  • This time it could be slowed by the fact that Trump won't be in office any more by the time the trial starts and new President Joe Biden will be asking the Senate to vote on his Cabinet nominees and act on legislation to address the Covid pandemic as well as relief for Americans hurt by the troubled economy.
  • This time, incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is hoping to pursue a half-day schedule to conduct the trial part of the day and business the rest of the day.
  • When both of the new Democratic senators from Georgia are seated, it will take 17 Republicans voting with Democrats to reach a two-thirds majority and convict Trump.
  • The most unconventional aspect of this second impeachment effort is that Trump will be a former President by the time it concludes. There is precedent for former officials facing impeachment both in US history and in England, from whence the Founders imported the idea of impeachment. Read here about what's technically called a "late impeachment" from the scholars Frank Bowman and Brian Kalt.
  • Beyond the stain of being a President who a majority of Congress feels it's worth impeaching for a second time, conviction could mean he can't run for office again in 2024. Barring him from further office would require a second vote by senators, although it probably would not require two-thirds agreement. It could also cost him his more-than $200,000 per year pension if the Senate wants to take that way.
  • Trump is widely thought to be considering the never-before-attempted self-pardon, to inoculate himself from future legal jeopardy related to his time in office and running for office. What's not clear is whether a late impeachment would have any bearing on his power to pardon himself. As the impeachment scholars Kalt and Bowman point out, the text of the Constitution doesn't mention pardons in terms of impeachment. It certainly seems like a successful impeachment would come up if and when a potential self pardon is challenged in court.
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