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Javier E

How 2020 Forced Facebook and Twitter to Step In - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617493

facebook twitter knowledge truth social media tech misinformation culture history

shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • mainstream platforms learned their lesson, accepting that they should intervene aggressively in more and more cases when users post content that might cause social harm.
  • During the wildfires in the American West in September, Facebook and Twitter took down false claims about their cause, even though the platforms had not done the same when large parts of Australia were engulfed in flames at the start of the year
  • Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube cracked down on QAnon, a sprawling, incoherent, and constantly evolving conspiracy theory, even though its borders are hard to delineate.
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  • As platforms grow more comfortable with their power, they are recognizing that they have options beyond taking posts down or leaving them up. In addition to warning labels, Facebook implemented other “break glass” measures to stem misinformation as the election approached.
  • Nothing symbolizes this shift as neatly as Facebook’s decision in October (and Twitter’s shortly after) to start banning Holocaust denial. Almost exactly a year earlier, Zuckerberg had proudly tied himself to the First Amendment in a widely publicized “stand for free expression” at Georgetown University.
  • The evolution continues. Facebook announced earlier this month that it will join platforms such as YouTube and TikTok in removing, not merely labeling or down-ranking, false claims about COVID-19 vaccines.
  • the pandemic also showed that complete neutrality is impossible. Even though it’s not clear that removing content outright is the best way to correct misperceptions, Facebook and other platforms plainly want to signal that, at least in the current crisis, they don’t want to be seen as feeding people information that might kill them.
  • It tweaked its algorithm to boost authoritative sources in the news feed and turned off recommendations to join groups based around political or social issues. Facebook is reversing some of these steps now, but it cannot make people forget this toolbox exists in the future
  • Down-ranking, labeling, or deleting content on an internet platform does not address the social or political circumstances that caused it to be posted in the first place
  • Even before the pandemic, YouTube had begun adjusting its recommendation algorithm to reduce the spread of borderline and harmful content, and is introducing pop-up nudges to encourage user
  • Platforms don’t deserve praise for belatedly noticing dumpster fires that they helped create and affixing unobtrusive labels to them
  • Warning labels for misinformation might make some commentators feel a little better, but whether labels actually do much to contain the spread of false information is still unknown.
  • News reporting suggests that insiders at Facebook knew they could and should do more about misinformation, but higher-ups vetoed their ideas. YouTube barely acted to stem the flood of misinformation about election results on its platform.
  • When internet platforms announce new policies, assessing whether they can and will enforce them consistently has always been difficult. In essence, the companies are grading their own work. But too often what can be gleaned from the outside suggests that they’re failing.
  • And if 2020 finally made clear to platforms the need for greater content moderation, it also exposed the inevitable limits of content moderation.
  • Content moderation comes to every content platform eventually, and platforms are starting to realize this faster than ever.
  • even the most powerful platform will never be able to fully compensate for the failures of other governing institutions or be able to stop the leader of the free world from constructing an alternative reality when a whole media ecosystem is ready and willing to enable him. As Renée DiResta wrote in The Atlantic last month, “reducing the supply of misinformation doesn’t eliminate the demand.”
  • Even so, this year’s events showed that nothing is innate, inevitable, or immutable about platforms as they currently exist. The possibilities for what they might become—and what role they will play in society—are limited more by imagination than any fixed technological constraint, and the companies appear more willing to experiment than ever.
Javier E

March 2020: How the Fed Averted Economic Disaster - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-economic-disaster-11645199788

fed pandemic monetary policy emergency history crisis us economics

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Over the week of March 16, markets experienced an enormous shock to what investors refer to as liquidity, a catchall term for the cost of quickly converting an asset into cash.
  • Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible.
  • They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.
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  • They were offering nearly unlimited cheap debt to keep the wheels of finance turning, and when that didn’t help, the Fed began purchasing massive quantities of government debt outright.
  • Investors dumped whatever they could, including ostensibly “risk-free” U.S. Treasury securities. As a global dash for dollars unfolded, Treasurys were no longer serving as the market’s traditional shock absorbers, amplifying extreme turmoil on Wall Street.
  • By week’s end, the Dow had plunged more than 10,000 points since mid-February as investors struggled to get their arms around what a halt to global commerce would mean for businesses that would soon have no revenue.
  • “It was sheer, unadulterated panic, of a magnitude that was far worse than in 2008 and 2009. Far worse,”
  • The idea of shutting down markets was especially discouraging: “It was a profoundly un-American thing to contemplate, to just shut everything down, and almost fatalistic—that we’re not going to get out of this.”
  • nearly two years later, most agree that the Fed’s actions helped to save the economy from going into a pandemic-induced tailspin.
  • “My thought was—I remember this very clearly—‘O.K. We have a four-or-five-day chance to really get our act together and get ahead of this. We’re gonna try to get ahead of this,’” Mr. Powell recalled later. “And we were going to do that by just announcing a ton of stuff on Monday morning.”
  • It worked. The Fed’s pledges to backstop an array of lending, announced on Monday, March 23, would unleash a torrent of private borrowing based on the mere promise of central bank action—together with a massive assist by Congress, which authorized hundreds of billions of dollars that would cover any losses.
  • If the hardest-hit companies like Carnival, with its fleet of 104 ships docked indefinitely, could raise money in capital markets, who couldn’t?
  • on April 9, where he shed an earlier reluctance to express an opinion about government spending policies, which are set by elected officials and not the Fed. He spoke in unusually moral terms. “All of us are affected,” he said. “But the burdens are falling most heavily on those least able to carry them…. They didn’t cause this. Their business isn’t closed because of anything they did wrong. This is what the great fiscal power of the United States is for—to protect these people as best we can from the hardships they are facing.”
  • They were extraordinary words from a Fed chair who during earlier, hot-button policy debates said the central bank needed to “stay in its lane” and avoid providing specific advice.
  • To avoid a widening rift between the market haves (who had been given access to Fed backstops) and the market have-nots (who had been left out because their debt was deemed too risky), Mr. Powell had supported a decision to extend the Fed’s lending to include companies that were being downgraded to “junk” status in the days after it agreed to backstop their bonds.
  • Most controversially, Mr. Powell recommended that the Fed purchase investment vehicles known as exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that invest in junk debt. He and his colleagues feared that these “high-yield” bonds might buckle, creating a wave of bankruptcies that would cause long-term scarring in the economy.
  • Mr. Powell decided that it was better to err on the side of doing too much than not doing enough.
  • , Paul Singer, who runs the hedge-fund firm Elliott Management, warned that the Fed was sowing the seeds of a bigger crisis by absolving markets of any discipline. “Sadly, when people (including those who should know better) do something stupid and reckless and are not punished,” he wrote, “it is human nature that, far from thinking that they were lucky to have gotten away with something, they are encouraged to keep doing the stupid thing.”
  • The breathtaking speed with which the Fed moved and with which Wall Street rallied after the Fed’s announcements infuriated Dennis Kelleher, a former corporate lawyer and high-ranking Senate aide who runs Better Markets, an advocacy group lobbying for tighter financial regulations.
  • This is a ridiculous discussion no matter how heartfelt Powell is about ‘we can’t pick winners and losers’—to which my answer is, ‘So instead you just make them all winners?’”
  • “Literally, not only has no one in finance lost money, but they’ve all made more money than they could have dreamed,” said Mr. Kelleher. “It just can’t be the case that the only thing the Fed can do is open the fire hydrants wide for everybody
  • Mr. Powell later defended his decision to purchase ETFs that had invested in junk debt. “We wanted to find a surgical way to get in and support that market because it’s a huge market, and it’s a lot of people’s jobs… What were we supposed to do? Just let them die and lose all those jobs?” he said. “If that’s the biggest mistake we made, stipulating it as a mistake, I’m fine with that. It wasn’t time to be making finely crafted judgments,” Mr. Powell said. He hesitated for a moment before concluding. “Do I regret it? I don’t—not really.”
  • “We didn’t know there was a vaccine coming. The pandemic is just raging. And we don’t have a plan,” said Mr. Powell. “Nobody in the world has a plan. And in hindsight, the worry was, ‘What if we can’t really fully open the economy for a long time because the pandemic is just out there killing people?’”
  • Mr. Powell never saw this as a particularly likely outcome, “but it was around the edges of the conversation, and we were very eager to do everything we could to avoid that outcome,”
  • The Fed’s initial response in 2020 received mostly high marks—a notable contrast with the populist ire that greeted Wall Street bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis. North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry, the top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, gave Mr. Powell an “A-plus for 2020,” he said. “On a one-to-10 scale? It was an 11. He gets the highest, highest marks, and deserves them. The Fed as an institution deserves them.”
  • The pandemic was the most severe disruption of the U.S. economy since the Great Depression. Economists, financial-market professionals and historians are only beginning to wrestle with the implications of the aggressive response by fiscal and monetary policy makers.
  • Altogether, Congress approved nearly $5.9 trillion in spending in 2020 and 2021. Adjusted for inflation, that compares with approximately $1.8 trillion in 2008 and 2009.
  • By late 2021, it was clear that many private-sector forecasters and economists at the Fed had misjudged both the speed of the recovery and the ways in which the crisis had upset the economy’s equilibrium. Washington soon faced a different problem. Disoriented supply chains and strong demand—boosted by government stimulus—had produced inflation running above 7%.
  • because the pandemic shock was akin to a natural disaster, it allowed Mr. Powell and the Fed to sidestep concerns about moral hazard—that is, the possibility that their policies would encourage people to take greater risks knowing that they were protected against larger losses. If a future crisis is caused instead by greed or carelessness, the Fed would have to take such concerns more seriously.
  • The high inflation that followed in 2021 might have been worse if the U.S. had seen more widespread bankruptcies or permanent job losses in the early months of the pandemic.
  • an additional burst of stimulus spending in 2021, as vaccines hastened the reopening of the economy, raised the risk that monetary and fiscal policy together would flood the economy with money and further fuel inflation.
  • The surge in federal borrowing since 2020 creates other risks. It is manageable for now but could become very expensive if the Fed has to lift interest rates aggressively to cool the economy and reduce high inflation.
  • The Congressional Budget Office forecast in December 2020 that if rates rose by just 0.1 percentage point more than projected in each year of the decade, debt-service costs in 2030 would rise by $235 billion—more than the Pentagon had requested to spend in 2022 on the Navy.
  • its low-rate policies have coincided with—and critics say it has contributed to—a longer-running widening of wealth inequality.
  • In 2008, household wealth fell by $8 trillion. It rose by $13.5 trillion in 2020, and in the process, spotlighted the unequal distribution of wealth-building assets such as houses and stocks.
  • Without heavy spending from Washington, focused on the needs of the least well-off, these disparities might have attracted more negative scrutiny.
  • Finally, the Fed is a technocratic body that can move quickly because it operates under few political constraints. Turning to it as the first line of defense in this and future crises could compromise its institutional independence.
  • Step one, he said, was to get in the fight and try to win. Figuring out how to exit would be a better problem to have, because it would mean they had succeeded.
  • “We have a recovery that looks completely unlike other recoveries that we’ve had because we’ve put so much support behind the recovery,” Mr. Powell said last month. “Was it too much? I’m going to leave that to the historians.”
  • The final verdict on the 2020 crisis response may turn on whether Mr. Powell is able to bring inflation under control without a painful recession—either as sharp price increases from 2021 reverse on their own accord, as officials initially anticipated, or because the Fed cools down the economy by raising interest rates.
Javier E

Putin Seems to Sideline Advisers on Ukraine, Taking a Political Risk - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...putin-ukraine-advisers.html

putin power base

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • There was low public support for war in Ukraine even before casualties began to mount. A long-running academic survey found in December that only 8 percent of Russians supported a military conflict against Ukraine, and only 9 percent thought that Russia should arm Ukrainian separatists.
  • Public anger over war can also increase elites’ perception that a leader is no longer an effective protector of their interests. And if the United States and Europe manage to impose effective sanctions on members of Mr. Putin’s elite coalition, that could make the war costly for them as individuals, as well as risky for Russia.
  • Elite dissatisfaction could affect his responsiveness to targeted sanctions, for instance, or the constraints he might face on resources for the conflict in Ukraine. It also could affect whether he has the political capital to stay the course if domestic opposition grows.
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  • “Two-thirds of authoritarian leaders are removed by their own allies,” Dr. Popova said. “If he tightens the screws too much, if he tries to really increase his power at the expense of the ruling authoritarian coalition, then he is threatening his own position.”
Javier E

Opinion | Inflation Isn't Going to Bring Back the 1970s - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ation-stagflation-economy.html

inflation fed history policy economics

shared by Javier E on 15 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • In both cases, heavy federal spending (on the war in Vietnam and Great Society programs in the 1960s, on the response to Covid in 2020 and 2021) added to demand. And shocks to global energy and food prices in the 1970s made the inflation problem significantly worse, just as they are doing now.
  • In contrast, efforts by the current Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, and his colleagues to bring down inflation enjoy considerable support from both the White House and Congress, at least so far. As a result, the Fed today has the independence it needs to make policy decisions based solely on the economic data and in the longer-run interests of the economy, not on short-term political considerations.
  • a key difference from the ’60s and ’70s is that the Fed’s views on both the sources of inflation and its own responsibility to control the pace of price increases have changed markedly. Burns, who presided over most of the 1970s inflation, had a cost-push theory of inflation. He believed that inflation was caused primarily by large companies and trade unions, which used their market power to push up prices and wages even in a slow economy. He thought the Fed had little ability to counteract these forces, and as an alternative to raising interest rates, he helped persuade Nixon to set wage and price controls in 1971, which proved a spectacular failure.
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  • today’s monetary policymakers understand that as we wait for supply constraints to ease, which they will eventually, the Fed can help reduce inflation by slowing growth in demand. Drawing on the lessons of the past, they also understand that by doing what is needed to get inflation under control, they can help the economy and the job market avoid much more serious instability in the future.
  • Markets and the public appear to understand how the Fed’s approach has changed from the earlier era I described
  • they suggest continued confidence that, over the longer term, the Fed will be able to bring inflation down close to its 2 percent target.
  • This confidence in turn makes the Fed’s job easier, by limiting the risk of an “inflationary psychology,” as Burns once put it, on the part of the public.
  • The degree to which the central bank will have to tighten monetary policy to control our currently high inflation, and the associated risk of an economic slowdown or recession, depends on several factors: how quickly the supply-side problems (high oil prices, supply-chain snarls) subside, how aggregate spending reacts to the tighter financial conditions engineered by the Fed and whether the Fed retains its credibility as an inflation fighter even if inflation takes a while to subside.
Javier E

To Keep Putin and His Oligarchs Afloat, It Takes a System - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...putin-russia-corruption.html

putin system corruption russia yeltsin democracy history culture

shared by Javier E on 15 May 22 - No Cached
  • We tend to think of corruption as a failure of morality, when a greedy person decides to benefit by steering public resources toward private gain.
  • But while that’s not exactly untrue, it misses the most important thing: namely, that corruption is a group activity. You need bribe-payers and bribe-takers, resource-diverters and resource-resellers, look-the-other-wayers and demand-a-share-of-the-takers.
  • When that kind of corrupt network behavior becomes widespread, it creates its own parallel system of rewards — and punishments.
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  • “What is different with systemic corruption is that it’s the expected behavior,”
  • “These expectations make it very difficult for all individuals, actually, to stand against corruption, because it’s very costly in all different ways to resist that kind of system.”
  • Those who refuse to participate in the parallel economy of favors and bribes get passed over for promotion, cut off from benefits, and frozen out of power.
  • The result is a system where power and wealth accrue to those willing to play the corruption game, and those who are not get left behind.
  • Corruption “serves as a regressive tax, it’s like Robin Hood in reverse,” Persson told me. “All the resources are moved to the top of the system, to the great cost of the majority of the population.”
  • But why did corruption in Russia get that bad? The answer, and maybe a counterintuitive one, is in democratization.
  • There was corruption in the Soviet Union. But after its dissolution in 1991, the sudden explosive growth of freedom of expression and freedom of association in Russia and the other former Soviet countries and satellites brought new opportunities, not just for political and economic development, but for crime and corruption.
  • “Freedoms of expression and association don’t only have to be used for good things, they can be used for illegal activities, too,” McMann said. “When people can more easily get together and talk, that enables them to actually plan corrupt activity.”
  • That wouldn’t have been so bad if democratization had also brought in checks on executive power, an independent judiciary to investigate and prosecute crimes. “In order to have capitalism have functioning markets, you also need to build institutions. You need banks that can provide credit, you need a strong legal system that will protect property.”
  • Estonia followed that path. After the Soviet Union fell, Estonia’s new, democratically elected parliament strengthened the judiciary and introduced new checks on executive power. There, corruption fell.
  • But in Russia, the government heeded Western advisers’ urging to get the state out of the economy as much as possible in order to let free markets flourish. Institutions and constraints fell by the wayside. In that vacuum, the parallel structures of corruption flourished, crowding honest politicians out of government and honest businesses out of the market.
  • By the late 1990s, official corruption had flourished at every level of the government. In 1999, as President Boris Yeltsin’s presidency began to weaken, elites pressured him to leave office on their terms. If Yeltsin would anoint their handpicked successor, they would ensure that he and his family did not face prosecution for misappropriation of government funds.
Javier E

Opinion | This Is What Happened When the Authorities Put Trump Under a Microscope - The... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ump-mueller-ukraine-jan-6.html

trump reports analysis

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The two highest-profile congressional investigations of Trump that followed — the 2019 report by the House Intelligence Committee on Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine as well as the recently released report by the select committee on the Jan. 6 attack — read like deliberate contrasts to the document produced by Robert Mueller and his team.
  • Their presentation is dramatic, not dense; their conclusions are blunt, not oblique; their arguments are political as much as legal. And yet, the Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports seem to follow the cues, explicit or implied, that the Mueller report left behind.
  • The Mueller report also notes in its final pages that “only a successor administration would be able to prosecute a former president,” which is what the Jan. 6 special committee, with its multiple criminal referrals, has urged the Biden administration’s Justice Department to do.
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  • ALL THREE REPORTS INCLUDE quintessentially Trumpian scenes, consistent in their depictions of the former president’s methods, and very much in keeping with numerous journalistic accounts of how he sought to manipulate people, rules and institutions.
  • The three investigations tell different stories, but the misdeeds all run together, more overlapping than sequential
  • Still, each investigation offers a slightly different theory of Trump. In the Mueller report, Trump and his aides come across as the gang that can’t cheat straight — too haphazard to effectively coordinate with a foreign government, too ignorant of campaign finance laws to purposely violate them, often comically naïve about the gravity of their plight.
  • The Ukraine report, by contrast, regards Trump as more strategic than chaotic, and it does not wallow in the netherworld between the president’s personal benefit and his public service. “The president placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security,”
  • All three reports show Trump deploying the mechanisms of government for political gain.
  • The Mueller report argues that viewing the president’s “acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance.” The Ukraine report shows that the conversation that Trump described as “a perfect call” was not the ask; it was the confirmation. When Trump said, “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” Zelensky and his aides had already been notified of what was coming. The Ukraine scandal was never about a single call, just as the Jan. 6 report was not about a single day.
  • The Jan. 6 report takes seriously the admonition to view the president’s actions collectively, not individually; the phrase “multipart plan” appears throughout the report, with Trump as the architect.
  • Even more so than the Ukraine report, the Jan. 6 report repeatedly emphasizes how Trump knew, well, everything
  • There is no room here for the plausible deniability that the Mueller report entertained, for the notion that Trump didn’t know better, or that, in the immortal words of Attorney General William P. Barr when he creatively interpreted the Mueller report to exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice, that the president was “frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency.”
  • This alleged sincerity underscored the president’s “noncorrupt motives,” as Barr put it. In the Jan. 6 report, any case for Trumpian sincerity is eviscerated in a six-page chart in the executive summary, which catalogs the many times the president was informed of the facts of the election yet continued to lie about them. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump told top Department of Justice officials in late December 2020, the report says.
  • Just announce an investigation into the Bidens. Just say the 2020 election was rigged. Trump’s most corrupt action is always the corruption of reality.
  • The studious restraint of the Mueller report came in for much criticism once the special counsel failed to deliver a dagger to the heart of the Trump presidency and once the document was so easily miscast by interested parties
  • for all its diffidence, there is power in the document’s understated prose, in its methodical collection of evidence, in its unwillingness to overstep its bounds while investigating a president who knew few bounds himself.
  • The Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports came at a time when Trump’s misconduct was better understood, when Mueller-like restraint was less in fashion and when those attempting to hold the chief executive accountable grasped every tool at hand. For all their passion and bluntness, they encountered their own constraints, limits that are probably inherent to the form
Javier E

Ukraine Is the West's War Now - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-is-the-wests-war-now-5d468bdb

ukraine war history west crisis policy us europe

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • A year later, the war in Ukraine has become, to a large extent, the West’s own. True, no American or NATO soldiers are fighting and dying on Ukrainian soil. But the U.S., its European allies and Canada have now sent some $120 billion in weapons and other aid to Ukraine, with new, more advanced military supplies on the way. If this monumental effort fails to thwart President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, the setback would not only undermine American credibility on the world stage but also raise difficult questions about the future of the Western alliance.
  • “In many ways, we’re all-in, and we’re all-in because the realization has dawned in Europe that showing weakness to President Putin, showing no response to his atrocities, only invites him to go further and further,” said Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, a Dutch politician and member of parliament. “We have also realized that it is not only the safety and security of Ukraine that is at stake but also our own.”
  • The Russian military’s mixture of unexpected ineptitude and shocking cruelty has pulled the U.S. and allies deeper and deeper into the conflict. With one self-imposed constraint falling after another, Western goals have gradually moved from preventing the obliteration of Ukraine to supporting its military victory over Russia.
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  • It’s a more ambitious commitment that carries much higher risks—but also strategic rewards—for the Western alliance.
  • “Nobody thought the Russians would start a medieval war in the 21st century,” said Sen. James Risch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “This conflict is going to change the face of Europe as much as World War II did.”
  • In Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere, the West’s geopolitical adversaries are calculating whether the U.S. and its allies have the stamina and cohesion to defend the rules-based international order that has benefited the West for decades.
  • In particular, the future of Taiwan and the South China Sea is closely linked to the West’s record in Ukraine.
  • “If Putin wins in Ukraine, the message to him and other authoritarian leaders will be that they can use force to get what they want. This will make the world more dangerous and us more vulnerable.”
  • The Munich conference capped several weeks in which the U.S. and its allies have dramatically expanded the scope of their military aid, an indication that Mr. Putin’s expectation that the West will eventually tire of helping Ukraine hasn’t materialized just yet
  • Both sides believe they can win on the battlefield, and little room exists for peace negotiations. Ukraine is preparing offensives to regain the roughly 18% of its territory still occupied by Moscow, including the Crimea peninsula and parts of the eastern Donbas region that Mr. Putin seized in 2014. Russia has declared four Ukrainian regions, none of which it fully controls, to be its own sovereign territory and seeks, at the very least, to conquer those lands. Mr. Putin, in a speech on Tuesday, indicated that his aspirations remain much broader, referring to Russia’s “historical territories that are now called Ukraine.”
  • A year into Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II, Ukraine’s own military industries have been shattered by Russian missile strikes, and its reserves of Soviet-vintage weapons are running out. By now, Kyiv can keep fighting only as long as Western assistance continues apace
  • “The next months will be very critical. If, say, another Ukrainian offensive fails, if it becomes the public narrative that it’s going to be a stalemate, support in the West might drop—perhaps not substantially, but some of the politicians will see the writing on the wall,
  • “In diplomacy, morality is part of the public narrative, but rarely part of the real decision-making process. But Ukraine’s case was one of the examples in history when you can argue that sympathy based on moral arguments was a game changer,”
  • “Some governments acted the way they did not merely based on their practical considerations but under enormous pressure of their public opinion. And that public opinion was based on moral compassion for the victim of the aggression.”
  • Mr. Putin has tried to counter the Ukrainian message by appealing to fear. On the first morning of the war, he alluded to nuclear weapons to deter the West from helping Ukraine.
  • “Putin is threatening Armageddon, and the Russians are doing it all the time, sometimes in oblique ways and sometimes in a more direct way,
  • “But when you actually poke at that and provide weapons gradually over time, there hasn’t been the catastrophic response that Putin promised.”
  • “boiling the frog.” As the U.S. began to introduce new weapons systems, it did so slowly and, initially, in limited numbers. None of these individual decisions were of sufficient scope to provoke a dramatic escalation by Moscow. But over the past 12 months, the cumulative effect of these new weapons has transformed the balance of power on the battlefield and enabled a string of strategic Ukrainian victories.
  • “If you look at the arc of Western involvement, no one would have predicted where we are now six months ago, and the same goes for six months before that. It’s a crisis response that has evolved into a policy—a policy that, probably, no one would have prescribed at the outset,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. who has urged caution on arming Ukraine
  • “The West is also the frog that is boiling itself. With each incremental increase in assistance, qualitative or quantitative, we become accustomed to that being normal, and the next one doesn’t seem so extreme,”
  • “There is a dynamic here where we become desensitized to what is going on. We are in a bit of a slow-moving spiral that shows no signs of letting up.”
  • In 2014, after Mr. Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and triggered a bloody war in the eastern Donbas region, covertly sending troops and heavy weapons across the border, the American and European response was limited to sanctions that only marginally affected Russia’s economy.
  • Back in 1991, President George H.W. Bush viewed Ukraine’s desire for freedom as a dangerous nuisance. That year, just months before the Soviet Union’s collapse, he delivered to the Ukrainian parliament his infamous “Chicken Kiev” speech, urging Ukrainians to abandon “suicidal nationalism” and permanently remain under the Kremlin’s rule.
  • Other analysts and policy makers argue that the true danger lies in excessive caution over accelerating Western military involvement. “We have been slow in delivering certain capabilities. We keep climbing the stairs, but it goes through a tortuous process, and in the meantime Ukrainians are dying,” said ret. Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “It has taken the Pentagon a long time to come to the realization that Ukraine can win, and will win, especially if we give them what they need. There has been all too much defeatist hand-wringing.”
  • At the time, President Barack Obama resisted calls to help Ukraine militarily as he sought Mr. Putin’s cooperation on his presidency’s main foreign-policy priority, the nuclear deal with Iran
  • Ukraine, Mr. Obama said in an interview with the Atlantic in 2016, “is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” All the evidence of the past 50 years, he added, suggested that Russian (and Chinese) decision-making wouldn’t be influenced by “talking tough or engaging in some military action.”
  • Mr. Biden, speaking in front of U.S., Polish and Ukrainian flags to a cheering crowd in Warsaw on Tuesday, had a different message. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia,” he pledged. “Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed.”
Javier E

Why Putin Is Outfoxing the West - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...uman-rights-abuses-11645471567

putin west wsj us russia history politics crisis policy risk

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • They are beginning to see that he is in quest of bigger game and that he means what he says about reassembling the Soviet Union and reviving Russian power. But they have not yet really fathomed the gulf between Mr. Putin’s world and their own—and until they do, he will continue to confound their expectations and disrupt their agendas.
  • Mr. Putin is, first and foremost, a gambler who is accustomed to taking large risks against long odds with a cool head
  • Like Napoleon Bonaparte, he can surprise and outmaneuver his opponents because he is willing to assume risks they would never consider, and so to attack in times and ways they can neither imagine nor plan for.
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  • Beyond that, Mr. Putin is a Soviet nostalgist. He is the product of a system in which power produced truth and truth reinforced power.
  • Mr. Putin is an immensely skilled ruler, the most formidable Russian figure since Stalin, but he has his problems, too. Russian power remains limited by material and demographic constraints
  • In the same way, accusing Mr. Putin, even accurately, of planning or committing atrocities may weaken him among human-rights activists in the West, but it may strengthen him at home and in Ukraine.
  • Letting the world know that Mr. Putin has a kill list for Ukraine is more likely, Mr. Putin may believe, to reduce resistance to his rule in Ukraine than to boost it.
  • Exposing Mr. Putin as, by our standards, a liar does not weaken him at home or, in his view, in Ukraine.
  • If Western leaders can overcome their posthistorical parochialism and develop coherent strategies for the actual world as opposed to the world of their dreams, effectively countering Vladimir Putin is an eminently achievable goal, though in no way a simple or a trivial one.
Javier E

All the Trump Indictments Everywhere All at Once - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...ump-indictments-everywhere-all

corruption gop maga electorate trump culture politics

shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Here’s Furman:There’s what economists think people should think about inflation—and what people actually think about inflation are different. . . .Inflation has big winners and losers. So surprise inflation helps debtors and hurts creditors. And there are probably tens of millions of people in our economy who have benefited from inflation. Maybe it’s a business that was able to raise prices more. Maybe a worker who was able to get a bigger raise. Maybe it’s someone whose mortgage is now worth 10 percent less.But there are not tens of millions of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation. In fact, I’m not sure there are tens of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation.And so it has these winners and losers. The losers are very aware of their losses. The winners are completely oblivious to their gains.So then as a policymaker, do you want to sort of make people happy? Or do you want to sort of do what you think is in their economic and financial interests? And that to me is not obvious.
  • Oh it’s obvious to me. The People are the problem.But they’re a persistent problem and until the AIs replace us, The People aren’t going away. So given this constraint, I’m not sure that an optimal solution is ever going to be politically possible in American democracy. The country is too fractured. Our political institutions too compromised.
  • so if you work from the assumption that we’re going to shoot wide of the mark in one direction or the other, I’d still rather be on the Trump-Biden side of having done too much, and dealing with our attendant problems than the Bush-Obama side of having done too little.
Javier E

Opinion | There's a Reason There Aren't Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actua... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eacher-shortage-education.html

teaching teachers trends history school analysis shortage

shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Here are just a few of the longstanding problems plaguing American education: a generalized decline in literacy; the faltering international performance of American students; an inability to recruit enough qualified college graduates into the teaching profession; a lack of trained and able substitutes to fill teacher shortages; unequal access to educational resources; inadequate funding for schools; stagnant compensation for teachers; heavier workloads; declining prestige; and deteriorating faculty morale.
  • Nine-year-old students earlier this year revealed “the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics,”
  • In the latest comparison of fourth grade reading ability, the United States ranked below 15 countries, including Russia, Ireland, Poland and Bulgaria.
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  • Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession. What made this work good for them is no longer accessible. That is why we are hearing so many refrains of “I’m not leaving the profession, my profession left me.”
  • We find there are at least 36,000 vacant positions along with at least 163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers, both of which are conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.
  • “The current problem of teacher shortages (I would further break this down into vacancy and under-qualification) is higher than normal.” The data, Nguyen continued, “indicate that shortages are worsening over time, particularly over the last few years
  • a growing gap between the pay of all college graduates and teacher salaries from 1979 to 2021, with a sharp increase in the differential since 2010
  • The number of qualified teachers is declining for the whole country and the vast majority of states.
  • Wages are essentially unchanged from 2000 to 2020 after adjusting for inflation. Teachers have about the same number of students. But, teacher accountability reforms have increased the demands on their positions.
  • The pandemic was very difficult for teachers. Their self-reported level of stress was about as twice as high during the pandemic compared to other working adults. Teachers had to worry both about their personal safety and deal with teaching/caring for students who are grieving lost family members.
  • the number of students graduating from college with bachelor’s degrees in education fell from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 104,008 in 2010-11 to 85,058 in 2019-20.
  • We do see that southern states (e.g., Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida) have very high vacancies and high vacancy rates.”
  • These gaps play a significant role in determining the quality of teachers,
  • By 2021, teachers made $1,348, 32.9 percent less than what other graduates made, at $2,009.
  • Sixty percent of teachers and 65 percent of principals reported believing that systemic racism exists. Only about 20 percent of teachers and principals reported that they believe systemic racism does not exist, and the remainder were not sure
  • “We find,” they write, “that teachers’ cognitive skills differ widely among nations — and that these differences matter greatly for students’ success in school. An increase of one standard deviation in teacher cognitive skills is associated with an increase of 10 to 15 percent of a standard deviation in student performance.”
  • teachers have lower cognitive skills, on average, in countries with greater nonteaching job opportunities for women in high-skill occupations and where teaching pays relatively less than other professions.
  • the scholars found that the cognitive skills of teachers in the United States fell in the middle ranks:Teachers in the United States perform worse than the average teacher sample-wide in numeracy, with a median score of 284 points out of a possible 500, compared to the sample-wide average of 292 points. In literacy, they perform slightly better than average, with a median score of 301 points compared to the sample-wide average of 295 points.
  • Increasing teacher numeracy skills by one standard deviation increases student performance by nearly 15 percent of a standard deviation on the PISA math test. Our estimate of the effect of increasing teacher literacy skills on students’ reading performance is slightly smaller, at 10 percent of a standard deviation.
  • How, then, to raise teacher skill level in the United States? Hanushek and his two colleagues have a simple answer: raise teacher pay to make it as attractive to college graduates as high-skill jobs in other fields.
  • policymakers will need to do more than raise teacher pay across the board to ensure positive results. They must ensure that higher salaries go to more effective teachers.
  • The teaching of disputed subjects in schools has compounded many of the difficulties in American education.
  • The researchers found that controversies over critical race theory, sex education and transgender issues — aggravated by divisive debates over responses to Covid and its aftermath — are inflicting a heavy toll on teachers and principals.
  • “On top of the herculean task of carrying out the essential functions of their jobs,” they write, “educators increasingly find themselves in the position of addressing contentious, politicized issues in their schools as the United States has experienced increasing political polarization.”
  • Teachers and principals, they add, “have been pulled in multiple directions as they try to balance and reconcile not only their own beliefs on such matters but also the beliefs of others around them, including their leaders, fellow staff, students, and students’ family members.”
  • These conflicting pressures take place in a climate where “emotions in response to these issues have run high within communities, resulting in the harassment of educators, bans against literature depicting diverse characters, and calls for increased parental involvement in deciding academic content.”
  • In 1979, the average teacher weekly salary (in 2021 dollars) was $1,052, 22.9 percent less than other college graduates’, at $1,364
  • Forty-eight percent of principals and 40 percent of teachers reported that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in school leadership or teaching, respectively, was a job-related stressor. By comparison, only 16 percent of working adults indicated that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in their jobs was a source of job-related stress
  • Nearly all Black or African American principals (92 percent) and teachers (87 percent) reported believing that systemic racism exists.
  • White educators working in predominantly white school systems reported substantially more pressure to deal with politically divisive issues than educators of color and those working in mostly minority schools: “Forty-one percent of white teachers and 52 percent of white teachers and principals selected the intrusion of political issues and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compared with 36 percent of teachers of color and principals of color.
  • and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compar
  • A 54 percent majority of teachers and principals said there “should not be legal limits on classroom conversations about racism, sexism, and other topics,” while 20 percent said there should be legislated constraint
  • Voters, in turn, are highly polarized on the teaching of issues impinging on race or ethnicity in public schools. The Education Next 2022 Survey asked, for example:Some people think their local public schools place too little emphasis on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States. Other people think their local public schools place too much emphasis on these topics. What is your view about your local public schools?
  • Among Democrats, 55 percent said too little emphasis was placed on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people, and 8 percent said too much.
  • Among Republicans, 51 said too much and 10 percent said too little.
  • Because of the lack of reliable national data, there is widespread disagreement among scholars of education over the scope and severity of the shortage of credentialed teachers, although there is more agreement that these problems are worse in low-income, high majority-minority school systems and in STEM and special education faculties.
  • Public schools increasingly are targets of conservative political groups focusing on what they term “Critical Race Theory,” as well as issues of sexuality and gender identity. These political conflicts have created a broad chilling effect that has limited opportunities for students to practice respectful dialogue on controversial topics and made it harder to address rampant misinformation.
  • The chilling effect also has led to marked declines in general support for teaching about race, racism, and racial and ethnic diversity.
  • These political conflicts, the authors wrote,have made the already hard work of public education more difficult, undermining school management, negatively impacting staff, and heightening student stress and anxiety. Several principals shared that they were reconsidering their own roles in public education in light of the rage at teachers and rage at administrators’ playing out in their communities.
  • State University of New York tracked trends on “four interrelated constructs: professional prestige, interest among students, preparation for entry, and job satisfaction” for 50 years, from the 1970s to the present and founda consistent and dynamic pattern across every measure: a rapid decline in the 1970s, a swift rise in the 1980s, relative stability for two decades, and a sustained drop beginning around 2010. The current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.
  • Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 50 percent since the 1990s, and 38 percent since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years
  • Perceptions of teacher prestige have fallen between 20 percent and 47 percent in the last decade to be at or near the lowest levels recorded over the last half century
  • Who among the next generation of college graduates will choose to teach?
  • the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50-year low
  • Teachers’ job satisfaction is also at the lowest level in five decades, with the percent of teachers who feel the stress of their job is worth it dropping from 81 percent to 42 percent in the last 15 years
  • The combination of these factors — declining prestige, lower pay than other professions that require a college education, increased workloads, and political and ideological pressures — is creating both intended and unintended consequences for teacher accountability reforms mandating tougher licensing rules, evaluations and skill testing.
  • Education policy over the past decade has focused considerable effort on improving human capital in schools through teacher accountability. These reforms, and the research upon which they drew, were based on strong assumptions about how accountability would affect who decided to become a teacher. Counter to most assumptions, our findings document how teacher accountability reduced the supply of new teacher candidates by, in part, decreasing perceived job security, satisfaction and autonomy.
  • The reforms, Kraft and colleagues continued, increasedthe likelihood that schools could not fill vacant teaching positions. Even more concerning, effects on unfilled vacancies were concentrated in hard-to-staff schools that often serve larger populations of low-income students and students of color
  • We find that evaluation reforms increased the quality of newly hired novice teachers by reducing the number of teachers that graduated from the least selective institutions
  • We find no evidence that evaluation reforms served to attract teachers who attended the most selective undergraduate institutions.
  • In other words, the economic incentives, salary structure and work-life pressures characteristic of public education employment have created a climate in which contemporary education reforms have perverse and unintended consequences that can worsen rather than alleviate the problems facing school systems.
  • If so, to improve the overall quality of the nation’s more than three million public schoolteachers, reformers may want to give priority to paychecks, working conditions, teacher autonomy and punishing workloads before attempting to impose higher standards, tougher evaluations and less job security.
Javier E

The new tech worldview | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...the-new-tech-worldview

tech guru theories pundit culture innovation western civilization ai

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Sam Altman is almost supine
  • the 37-year-old entrepreneur looks about as laid-back as someone with a galloping mind ever could. Yet the ceo of OpenAi, a startup reportedly valued at nearly $20bn whose mission is to make artificial intelligence a force for good, is not one for light conversation
  • Joe Lonsdale, 40, is nothing like Mr Altman. He’s sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley, dressed in linen with his hair slicked back. The tech investor and entrepreneur, who has helped create four unicorns plus Palantir, a data-analytics firm worth around $15bn that works with soldiers and spooks
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  • a “builder class”—a brains trust of youngish idealists, which includes Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, a payments firm valued at $74bn, and other (mostly white and male) techies, who are posing questions that go far beyond the usual interests of Silicon Valley’s titans. They include the future of man and machine, the constraints on economic growth, and the nature of government.
  • They share other similarities. Business provided them with their clout, but doesn’t seem to satisfy their ambition
  • The number of techno-billionaires in America (Mr Collison included) has more than doubled in a decade.
  • ome of them, like the Medicis in medieval Florence, are keen to use their money to bankroll the intellectual ferment
  • The other is Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, whose essays on everything from cities to politics are considered required reading on tech campuses.
  • Mr Altman puts it more optimistically: “The iPhone and cloud computing enabled a Cambrian explosion of new technology. Some things went right and some went wrong. But one thing that went weirdly right is a lot of people got rich and said ‘OK, now what?’”
  • A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is the essence of this new mindset, making it resolutely upbeat
  • The question is: are the rest of them further evidence of the tech industry’s hubristic decadence? Or do they reflect the start of a welcome capacity for renewal?
  • Two well-known entrepreneurs from that era provided the intellectual seed capital for some of today’s techno nerds.
  • Mr Thiel, a would-be libertarian philosopher and investor
  • This cohort of eggheads starts from common ground: frustration with what they see as sluggish progress in the world around them.
  • In the 2000s Mr Thiel supported the emergence of a small community of online bloggers, self-named the “rationalists”, who were focused on removing cognitive biases from thinking (Mr Thiel has since distanced himself). That intellectual heritage dates even further back, to “cypherpunks”, who noodled about cryptography, as well as “extropians”, who believed in improving the human condition through life extensions
  • the rationalist movement has hit the mainstream. The result is a fascination with big ideas that its advocates believe goes beyond simply rose-tinted tech utopianism
  • A burgeoning example of this is “progress studies”, a movement that Mr Collison and Tyler Cowen, an economist and seer of the tech set, advocated for in an article in the Atlantic in 2019
  • Progress, they think, is a combination of economic, technological and cultural advancement—and deserves its own field of study
  • There are other examples of this expansive worldview. In an essay in 2021 Mr Altman set out a vision that he called “Moore’s Law for Everything”, based on similar logic to the semiconductor revolution. In it, he predicted that smart machines, building ever smarter replacements, would in the coming decades outcompete humans for work. This would create phenomenal wealth for some, obliterate wages for others, and require a vast overhaul of taxation and redistribution
  • His two bets, on OpenAI and nuclear fusion, have become fashionable of late—the former’s chatbot, ChatGPT, is all the rage. He has invested $375m in Helion, a company that aims to build a fusion reactor.
  • Mr Lonsdale, who shares a libertarian streak with Mr Thiel, has focused attention on trying to fix the shortcomings of society and government. In an essay this year called “In Defence of Us”, he argues against “historical nihilism”, or an excessive focus on the failures of the West.
  • With a soft spot for Roman philosophy, he has created the Cicero Institute in Austin that aims to inject free-market principles such as competition and transparency into public policy.
  • He is also bringing the startup culture to academia, backing a new place of learning called the University of Austin, which emphasises free speech.
  • All three have business ties to their mentors. As a teen, Mr Altman was part of the first cohort of founders in Mr Graham’s Y Combinator, which went on to back successes such as Airbnb and Dropbox. In 2014 he replaced him as its president, and for a while counted Mr Thiel as a partner (Mr Altman keeps an original manuscript of Mr Thiel’s book “Zero to One” in his library). Mr Thiel was also an early backer of Stripe, founded by Mr Collison and his brother, John. Mr Graham saw promise in Patrick Collison while the latter was still at school. He was soon invited to join Y Combinator. Mr Graham remains a fan: “If you dropped Patrick on a desert island, he would figure out how to reproduce the Industrial Revolution,”
  • While at university, Mr Lonsdale edited the Stanford Review, a contrarian publication co-founded by Mr Thiel. He went on to work for his mentor and the two men eventually helped found Palantir. He still calls Mr Thiel “a genius”—though he claims these days to be less “cynical” than his guru.
  • “The tech industry has always told these grand stories about itself,” says Adrian Daub of Stanford University and author of the book, “What Tech Calls Thinking”. Mr Daub sees it as a way of convincing recruits and investors to bet on their risky projects. “It’s incredibly convenient for their business models.”
  • Yet the impact could ultimately be positive. Frustrations with a sluggish society have encouraged them to put their money and brains to work on problems from science funding and the redistribution of wealth to entirely new universities. Their exaltation of science may encourage a greater focus on hard tech
  • Silicon Valley has shown an uncanny ability to reinvent itself in the past.
Javier E

Polyamory, the Ruling Class's Latest Fad - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...677312

polyamory sex frustration libertarian therapeutic history culture

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • More is a near-perfect time capsule of the banal pleasure-seeking of wealthy, elite culture in the 2020s, and a neat encapsulation of its flaws. This culture would have us believe that interminable self-improvement projects, navel-gazing, and sexual peccadilloes are the new face of progress.
  • The climate warms, wars rage, and our country lurches toward a perilous election—all problems that require real action, real progress. And somehow “you do you” has become the American ruling class’s three-word bible.
  • Charles Taylor has argued that, since at least the late 20th century, Western societies have been defined by “a generalized culture of ‘authenticity,’ or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own way, discover their own fulfillment, ‘do their own thing.’
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  • Among the right, a new kind of reactionary self-help is ascendant. Its mainstream version is legible in the manosphere misogyny of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Tate, while more eldritch currents lurk just beneath the surface. The Nietzscheanism of internet personalities like Bronze Age Pervert—who combines ethnonationalist chauvinism in politics and personal life with a Greco-Roman obsession with physical fitness—is only one of many examples of the trend the social critic Maya Vinokour has called “lifestyle fascism.”
  • We might call this turbocharged version of authenticity culture “therapeutic libertarianism”: the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints—whether imposed by states, faith systems, or other people—should impede each of us from achieving personal growth
  • This attitude is therapeutic because it is invariably couched in self-help babble. And it is libertarian not only because it makes a cult out of personal freedom, but because it applies market logic to human beings. We are all our own start-ups. We must all adopt a pro-growth mindset for our personhood and deregulate our desires.
  • We must all assess and reassess our own “fulfillment,” a kind of psychological Gross Domestic Product, on a near-constant basis. And like the GDP, our fulfillment must always increase.
  • On the left, what gets termed “wokeness” is indissociable from self-help. How should we understand superficial, performative expressions of “anti-racism” or preening social-media politics if not as a way for self-described good-hearted liberals to make grand public displays of pruning their moral shrubbery?
  • Stewart’s response to the UTIs is not concern for his wife but irritation: “This guy is breaking all my toys,” he grumbles. When she gets upset that her husband keeps calling her a “cunt” and a “whore” during sex—something he professes not being able to help—Stewart does not change this habit. Instead they strike a preposterous bargain: “He will try his best not to scream cunt during sex, and I will do my best to ignore him if he does.”
  • What the author is trying to find in her open relationship is not sex, but self-understanding—what it means, how we get it, whether sex can provide it. And although the answers Molly arrives at are not cheaply won, they are cheap all the same.
  • Near the end of the memoir, the author’s mother provides the empty epiphany toward which the text careens. “Everything that happens in life,” her mom offers, “is an opportunity to learn about yourself. Marriage. Motherhood. Relationships. Even anger and illness. Nothing that happens is good or bad in and of itself. It’s all just an opportunity to learn and grow.” With this maternal revelation, Molly’s “skin starts to tingle.” She relates that the advice “feels almost holy.”
  • though Molly may tell herself and her readers that she is on a journey of learning and growth, the ugly truth is that More feels like a 290-page cry for help. Molly does not come off as a woman boldly finding herself, but rather as someone who is vulnerable to psychological manipulation and does not enjoy her open marriage.
  • if it seems like Molly Roden Winter does not want to be in an open marriage, it is because she often lets us know that she doesn’t want to be in an open marriage.
  • When a couples therapist asks the pair why they’re in counseling halfway through the book—prompted by a breakdown Molly experiences that stems from their marital arrangement—she explains: “We’re here because I don’t want to be in an open marriage anymore, but Stewart does.”
  • There are precious few sex scenes where Molly seems to be enjoying herself. When Molly is in the middle of a squirmy threesome she’s been dreading, she literally dissociates from her body, pretending that she is a director staging a scene in which her physical person is merely an actor. Molly describes how she performs her role with “a clinician’s detachment” and leaves the apartment rapidly so as not “to be pulled back into this scene.” After one of her dates repeatedly removes his condom without her consent—an act known as “stealthing,” which is considered a sex crime in a number of countries and the state of California—she contracts a series of urinary tract infections
  • his concept doesn’t quite capture the extent to which this relentless quest for self-optimizing authenticity has infused our social and even political sensibilities.
  • Winter is trapped in her therapeutic worldview, one imposed on her by an American culture that has made narcissism into not simply a virtue, but a quasi-religion that turns external obstacles into opportunities for internal self-improvement.
  • These obstacles include, in her case, profound gender inequality relating to Molly’s life as a parent to two sons, and a troubling family history. Molly’s mother joined a cult—and indoctrinated the author into it as a child—at the urging of a male partner in her own open marriage. The book makes tacit comparisons between Molly’s mother’s initiation into a cult at the behest of an extramarital partner, and Molly’s own initiation into an open marriage at the behest of her husband.
  • throughout More, the dominant emotion Molly reports is not lust but rage—primarily at the deeply unequal child-care burdens that are placed upon her. “I think about all the years I’ve spent my night alone with the kids—the dinners, the bedtimes, the dishes, the loneliness of doing it all by myself—because Stew had to work,” she laments at one point. That Stewart is now spending late nights not working (if he ever was) but rather schtupping his endless reserve of mistresses pushes Molly further to the brink: “I feel my jealousy mingle with the resentment I’ve kept at bay for years,”
  • Molly doubles down on her quest for self-actualization through the relentless pursuit of bitter novelty: new sexual experiences that she rarely seems to enjoy, new partners who rarely treat her kindly.
  • The only solution Molly can imagine is to persist in an open marriage, rather than push for an equal one. Inward sexual revolution plainly feels more possible than a revolution in who does the dishes.
Javier E

There's Probably Nothing We Can Do About This Awful Deepfake Porn Problem - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...res-probably-nothing-we-can-do

internet censorship screening tech constraints wish

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • we can’t (as in, are unable to in real-world terms) censor far-right content online because of the basic reality of modern communications technology. The internet makes the transmission of information, no matter how ugly or shocking or secret, functionally impossible to stop. Digital infrastructure is spread out across the globe, including in regimes that do not play ball with American legal or corporate mandates, and there’s plenty of server racks out there in the world buzzing along that are inaccessible to even the most dedicated hall monitors
  • , it happens that I am one of those free speech absolutists, yes, but that is very explicitly not what the piece argues - it’s precisely an argument that whether we should censor is entirely moot, because we can’t. The technological impediments to cutting off the flow of information (at least that which is not tightly controlled at the supply-side) are now existential.
  • This is a reality people have to accept, even if - especially if - they think that reality is corrosive and ugly. I suspect it’s a similar story with all of this horrible AI “deepfake” celebrity porn.
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  • The trouble is that, as I’ve seen again and again, in this era of entitlement people think saying “we can’t do this” necessarily means “I don’t want to.”
Javier E

I'm Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...680221

fantasy misinformation delusion cognitive bias deliberate ignorance fantasising

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 24 - No Cached
  • The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.
  • Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images—all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight—offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.
  • Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts.
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  • this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.
  • The result of this fearmongering is what you might expect. Angry, embittered citizens have been harassing government officials in North Carolina, as well as FEMA employees.
  • According to an analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an extremism-research group, “Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government,” including “calls to send militias to face down FEMA.” The study also found that 30 percent of the X posts analyzed by ISD “contained overt antisemitic hate, including abuse directed at public officials such as the Mayor of Asheville, North Carolina; the FEMA Director of Public Affairs; and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.” The posts received a collective 17.1 million views as of October 7
  • It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit.
  • Kremer wasn’t alone. The journalist Parker Molloy compiled screenshots of people “acknowledging that this image is AI but still insisting that it’s real on some deeper level”—proof, Molloy noted, that we’re “living in the post-reality.”
  • Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are “nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit,” as one X user put it
  • The technology writer Jason Koebler argued that we’ve entered the “‘Fuck It’ Era” of AI slop and political messaging, with AI-generated images being used to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.
  • This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity.
  • This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world
  • So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
  • This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information.
  • What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built.
  • Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not. Such was the case last week, when Republican politicians shared an AI-generated viral image of a little girl holding a puppy while supposedly fleeing Helene. Though the image was clearly fake and quickly debunked, some politicians remained defiant. “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” Amy Kremer, who represents Georgia on the Republican National Committee, wrote after sharing the fake image. “I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”
  • It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview.
  • What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political
  • Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality
  • If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is.
  • This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.
  • The world feels dark; for many people, it’s tempting to meet that with a retreat into the delusion that they’ve got everything figured out, that the powers that be have conspired against them directly. But in turning away, they exacerbate a crisis that has characterized the Trump era,
  • Americans are divided not just by political beliefs but by whether they believe in a shared reality—or desire one at all.
Javier E

Opinion | MAGA Turns Against the Constitution - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...maga-constitution-trump.html

constitution power liberty nationalism authoritarian right-wing tyranny class culture politics US history crisis GOP

shared by Javier E on 15 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • the problem of public ignorance and fake crises transcends politics. Profound pessimism about the state of the nation is empowering the radical, revolutionary politics that fuels extremists on the right and left.
  • now, for parts of MAGA, the Constitution itself is part of the crisis. If it doesn’t permit Trump to take control, then it must be swept aside.
  • Elements of this argument are now bubbling up across the reactionary, populist right
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  • Still others believe that the advent of civil rights laws created, in essence, a second Constitution entirely, one that privileges group identity over individual liberty.
  • Protestant Christian nationalists tend to have a higher regard for the American founding, but they believe it’s been corrupted. They claim that the 1787 Constitution is essentially dead, replaced by progressive power politics that have destroyed constitutional government.
  • Catholic post-liberals believe that liberal democracy itself is problematic. According to their critique, the Constitution’s emphasis on individual liberty “atomizes” American life and degrades the traditional institutions of church and family that sustain human flourishing.
  • The original Constitution and Bill of Rights, while a tremendous advance from the Articles of Confederation, suffered from a singular, near-fatal flaw. They protected Americans from federal tyranny, but they also left states free to oppress American citizens in the most horrific ways
  • if your ultimate aim is the destruction of your political enemies, then the Constitution does indeed stand in your way.
  • Right-wing constitutional critics do get one thing right: The 1787 Constitution is mostly gone, and America’s constitutional structure is substantially different from the way it was at the founding. But that’s a good thing
  • its guardrails against tyranny remain vital and relevant today.
  • Individual states ratified their own constitutions that often purported to protect individual liberty, at least for some citizens, but states were also often violently repressive and fundamentally authoritarian.
  • The criminal justice system could be its own special form of hell. Indigent criminal defendants lacked lawyers, prison conditions were often brutal at a level that would shock the modern conscience, and local law enforcement officers had no real constitutional constraints on their ability to search American citizens and seize their property.
  • Through much of American history, various American states protected slavery, enforced Jim Crow, suppressed voting rights, blocked free speech, and established state churches.
  • As a result, if you were traditionally part of the local ruling class — a white Protestant in the South, like me — you experienced much of American history as a kind of golden era of power and control.
  • The Civil War Amendments changed everything. The combination of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments ended slavery once and for all, extended the reach of the Bill of Rights to protect against government actions at every level, and expanded voting rights.
  • But all of this took time. The end of Reconstruction and the South’s “massive resistance” to desegregation delayed the quest for justice.
  • decades of litigation, activism and political reform have yielded a reality in which contemporary Americans enjoy greater protection for the most fundamental civil liberties than any generation that came before.
  • And those who believe that the civil rights movement impaired individual liberty have to reckon with the truth that Americans enjoy greater freedom from both discrimination and censorship than they did before the movement began.
  • So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty
  • One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.
  • Consider the state of the law a century ago. Until the expansion of the Bill of Rights (called “incorporation”) to apply to the states, if you controlled your state and wanted to destroy your enemies, you could oppress them to a remarkable degree. You could deprive them of free speech, you could deprive them of due process, you could force them to pray and read state-approved versions of the Bible.
  • The argument that the Constitution is failing is just as mistaken as the argument that the economy is failing, but it’s politically and culturally more dangerous
  • Powerful people often experience their power as a kind of freedom. A king can feel perfectly free to do what he wants, for example, but that’s not the same thing as liberty.
  • Looked at properly, liberty is the doctrine that defies power. It’s liberty that enables us to exercise our rights.
  • Think of the difference between power and liberty like this — power gives the powerful freedom of action. Liberty, by contrast, protects your freedom of action from the powerful.
  • At their core, right-wing attacks on the modern Constitution are an attack on liberty for the sake of power.
  • An entire class of Americans looks back at decades past and has no memory (or pretends to have no memory) of marginalization and oppression. They could do what they wanted, when they wanted and to whom they wanted.
  • Now they don’t have that same control
  • Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists and atheists all approach the public square with the same liberties. Drag queens have the same free speech rights as pastors, and many Americans are livid as a result.
  • when a movement starts to believe that America is in a state of economic crisis, criminal chaos and constitutional collapse, then you can start to see the seeds for revolutionary violence and profound political instability. They believe we live in desperate times, and they turn to desperate measures.
  • “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” So much American angst and anger right now is rooted in falsehoods. But the truth can indeed set us free from the rage that tempts American hearts toward tyranny.
Javier E

Opinion | The Single Best Guide to Decarbonization I've Heard - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ein-podcast-jesse-jenkins.html

carbon climate change response politics industry power ezra klein

shared by Javier E on 17 Aug 24 - No Cached
  • and public health impacts, water quality impacts, all the other impacts of our fossil energy system
  • Now, the challenge of that, of course, is that making fossil energy more expensive is not a very politically attractive proposition. I mean, look how challenging inflation and the run up in energy prices has been for politicians around the world over the last year.
  • And an alternative strategy to that is to provide an economic role for those industries in the future and to remove their reticence to embrace decarbonization by allowing them to transition, to find a way that they can transition to play a role — a diminished role, I think — but a role in the new net-zero econom
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  • the alternative to that, which is admittedly less economically efficient, but much more likely to succeed in the real world, is to recognize that cleaner energy sources deliver some public good. They deliver a benefit of cleaner air, less air pollution and deaths and mortalities and asthma attacks and less climate damages. And to subsidize their production, so that we get more from the clean sources.
  • I do think that we are going to see basically the full range of all of those clean firm power generation technologies get trialed out over the next few years and have a chance to scale
  • what is going to be key to stopping, preventing the worst impacts of climate change is reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions globally as rapidly as possible.
  • where I see the future for nuclear in the West, and I think where the bulk of the industry and the investment now is focused is on smaller and more modular reactors that instead of trying to power a million people per reactor are trying to power 50,000 or 100,000 people, like a 1/10 or a 1/20 the size of a large scale reactor.
  • the challenge for electricity is really twofold, we have to cut emissions from the power sector, right? Which already is now the number two, used to be the number one, emitting sector of the economy. Since we have made some progress, electricity is now number two and transportation is edged into the number one position for biggest greenhouse gas polluting sector.
  • it is an important reality of complex energy systems that we need a complete team of resources, and we need a range of options because we’re a big, diverse country with different resource spaces, different geographic constraints and different values, frankly. So that some parts of the country really do want to build nuclear power or really do want to continue to use natural gas. Other parts don’t want to touch them.
  • I’m really struck by this International Energy Association estimate that almost half of global emissions reductions by 2050 will come from technologies that exist only as prototypes or demonstration projects today
  • And that means that the bets on each individual one are so much smaller that you can build one for a billion dollars instead of $15 billion or $20 billion. And I think that makes it much more likely that we can get our muscle memory back and get the economies of scale and learning by doing and trained work force developed around building them in series. That’s going to be key to building low-cost reactors.
  • I think we have to add that to the message. It’s not saying that one outweighs the other or these trade-offs are easy, but it is an important element that we can’t forget. That the more transmission we build, the more wind and solar we build, the lower the air pollution and public health impacts on vulnerable communities are as well, and we can save tens of thousands of lives in the process.
  • And so there’s sort of an opportunity cost right now where until we’ve shut down the last coal plants and the last natural gas plants, every single megawatt-hour of new clean electricity, new energy efficiency that we can add to the grid that goes to replace a nuclear power plant is a wasted opportunity to accelerate our emissions reductions and get rid of those dirty fossil fuels.
  • here is a segment of the climate movement that just hates this part of the bill, hates this part of the theory, does not want to see a substantial part of our decarbonization pathway built around things that allow us to continue producing fossil fuels in a putatively cleaner way. And I think there’s also some skepticism that it really will work technically in the long run. What is that critique? And why aren’t you persuaded by it?
  • And so they don’t cost a whole lot to demonstrate. We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars to demonstrate, rather than billions of dollars. And so I’m confident that we’re going to see a lot of success there.
  • But what we need are technologies that are not constrained by the weather and are not constrained by a duration limit, that can go as long as we need them, whenever we need them. And that’s what we call the third category, which are firm resources or clean firm resources, because we want to replace the dirty ones with the clean ones. And so today, we rely on natural gas and coal and our existing nuclear fleet for that firm role. But if we want to build a clean energy system and we need all that new clean electricity, we’re going to need to build about an equivalent amount as we have coal and gas plants today of clean firm options, whether that’s new nuclear power plants, advanced geothermal or similar options like that.
  • it is a massive transformation of our energy system, right? We’re going to have to rewire the country and change the way we make and use energy from the way we produce it, to the way we transport it, to the way we consume it at a very large scale. And so, yeah, that is the statistic.
  • l, let me get at that point about revitalization, about trying to spread a lot of this money geographically, widely. When I’ve talked to the Biden administration about this bill, something they’re always very keen to tell me is that it isn’t just money, it is standards. This bill is full of standards.
  • Well, there’s two — I think, two elements of that critique. One is that fossil energy companies are themselves primarily responsible for our lack of progress on climate change. That because of their vested economic interests, they have actively disrupted efforts to confront climate change over the long haul. And so climate campaigners, in this view, are trying to delegitimize fossil fuel companies and industries as social actors, the same way that tobacco companies were villainized and basically delegitimized as legitimate corporate citizens. And so that’s an effort, that’s a political strategy, that’s meant to try to weaken the ability of oil and gas companies to impede progress.
  • And that is real value because every time we burn natural gas or coal, we’re consuming something that costs money. And if we can avoid that, then the wind and solar farms are effectively delivering value in the value of the avoided fuel, and of course, the social value of the avoided emissions.
  • let’s also not forget that the money talks, right? That finances is a necessary condition, if not sufficient. But what this bill does is aligns all of the financial incentives, or at least most of them, behind making the right clean energy choices. And without that, there’s no way we’re going to make progress at the pace we need
  • And geothermal, unlike a big nuclear plant, they’re really modular. You only need to build them in 5 or 10 megawatt increments
  • The first rule of holes is stop digging, right? Then you can figure out how to climb out
  • We’re going to see the first nuclear power plants built at the end of the decade. There are a variety of technologies that are getting licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commissio
  • re you confident that we have or are near to having the carbon-capture technologies to reliably capture, and store, or use carbon for very, very long periods of geologic time?
  • You shouldn’t expect everyone to just be altruistic. We have to make it make good financial sense for everyone to make the clean choice. And so there’s two ways to do that. You can make fossil energy more expensive to price in the true cost of consuming fossil fuels for society, which includes all of the climate damages that are going to occur down the line because of accelerating climate change, but also air pollution
  • We still have to go all the way from there to net-zero in 2050. And that, of course, is assuming that we can build transmission in wind and solar at the pace that makes economic sense. So if we can’t do that, we’re going to fall even further short. So this is a big step down the road to net zero, but it is not the last step we need to take. And we need to sustain and accelerate this transition.
  • the policy environment is now finally aligned to do that with the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure law providing both demonstration funding for the first kind of n-of-a-kind, first handful of projects in all of those categories, as well as the first market-ready deployment subsidies, so that we can scale up, and drive down the cost, and improve the maturity and performance of all those technologies over the next 10 years as well, just as we did for wind and solar.
  • And so the role of wind and solar is effectively to displace the fuel consumption of other potentially more dependable resources in the grid, maybe not necessarily to shut down the power plant as a whole, but to use it less and less.
  • The last time Congress took up and failed to pass climate policy in 2009 and 2010, solar PV cost 10 times as much as it does today, and wind, onshore wind farms, cost three times as much as they do today. So we’ve seen a 90 percent decline in the cost of both solar PV and lithium ion batteries, which are the major cost component in electric vehicles and our main source of growing grid scale energy storage to help deal with the variability of wind and solar on the grid. And so those costs have come down by a factor of 10, and we’ve seen about a 70 percent decline in the cost of wind over the last decade. And that changes the whole game, right?
  • we tried them out, and we deployed them at scale, and we got better and better at it over time. And so we don’t need carbon capture at scale this decade. The things that are going to do all of the emissions reduction work, really, the bulk of it, are technologies that we bet on a decade ago and are ready to scale now. What we need to do over this next decade is to repeat that same kind of success that we had for wind and solar and batteries with the full portfolio of options that we think we might need at scale in the 2030s and 2040
  • Every year matters. Every tenth of a degree of warming matters in terms of the impacts and damages and suffering that can be avoided in the future. And so we need to get to net-zero emissions globally as rapidly as we can.
  • until we reach the point where the total emissions of climate-warming gases from human activities is exactly equaled out or more so by the removal of those same greenhouse gases from the atmosphere each year due to human activities, we’re basically contributing to the growing concentration of climate-warming gases in the atmosphere. And that’s what drives climate change, those cumulative emissions and the total atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases
  • let’s take the big picture of that. It gets called decarbonization, but as I understand it, basically every theory of how to hit net zero by 2050 looks like this — you make electricity clean, you make much more clean electricity, you make almost everything run on electricity, and then you mop up the kind of small industries or productive questions that we have not figured out how to make electric. Is that basically right?
  • nothing in this bill really changes our capacity to plan. There’s no central coordinator, or the federal government doesn’t have vast new powers to decide where things go. So I worry a little bit that we’re solving the money problem, but there’s a lot of other reasons we end up building things slowly and over budget than just money.
  • And so when I think about the challenge of decarbonization, I think about how you unlock feedback loops and how you change the political economy of decarbonization by disrupting current interests that might oppose clean energy transitions and building and strengthening interests that would support them
  • the other analogy I often use is that of a balanced diet. You can’t eat only bananas, and you don’t want to only eat burgers, you want to eat a diverse mix of different parts of your diet. And so whether it’s trying to have all the right star players playing the right position on the court or trying to balance out your diet, what we need to build is an effective energy system that consists of team of different roles. And we break it down in our research as basically three key roles.
  • There’s a second, and more substantial or tangible reason to oppose carbon capture, which is that if it perpetuates some amount of fossil fuel use — it’s going to be dramatically less than today — but some amount of fossil fuel use, then it also perpetuates some of the impacts of the extractive economy and the transport and processing of fossil fuels that have primarily been borne by low income and Black and Brown communities
  • I worry about those things too. Those were big emphasis points in the Net-Zero America Study. Once you start to really unpack the scale and pace of change that we’re talking about, you inevitably start to be concerned with some of those other kind of rate limiting factors that constrained how quickly we can make this transition.
  • you write and your colleagues write in the Net-Zero Report that, quote, “expanding the supply of clean electricity is a linchpin in all net-zero paths.”
  • achieving the required additions by 2030 of utility scale solar and wind capacity means installing 38 to 67 gigawatts a year on average. The U.S. single year record added capacity is 25 gigawatts, which we did in 2020. So we need to on average be somewhere between — be around doubling our best-ever year in solar and wind capacity installation year after year after year after year.
  • that’s a big role, but it’s not the only role that we have. And because their output is variable, as well as demand for electricity which goes up and down.
  • there’s basically two main reasons why electricity is such a key linchpin. The first is that it’s a carbon-free energy carrier. And by that I mean it’s a way to move energy around in our economy and convert it and make use of it that doesn’t emit any CO2 directly when we do use electricity.
  • And so, yeah, you do have to onboard new workers through apprenticeship programs and pay them prevailing wages if you want to build wind and solar projects.
  • The first is the one that wind and solar fill and other weather-dependent variable renewable resources. And we call those fuel-saving resources. If you think about what a wind farm is, it’s a bunch of steel, and copper, and capital that you invested upfront that then has no fuel costs.
  • so aligning the incentives isn’t sufficient, but it does mean we now have a lot more very clear reasons for a lot more constituents to try to get to work solving the next set of challenges. And so that’s a huge step forward.
  • We need a second key role, which we call fast-burst or balancing resources. And that’s where batteries, battery energy storage, as well as smart charging of electric vehicles or other ways to flexibly move around when we consume electricity
  • so if we can grow the share of carbon-free generation, we can decarbonize both the front end of the supply of our energy carriers. And then when we consume that carbon-free electricity on the other end, it doesn’t emit CO2 either. And there’s just a lot more ways to produce carbon-free electricity than there are to produce liquid fuels or gaseous fuels
  • we could avoid on the order of 35,000 premature deaths over the first decade of implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act due to the improvements in our clean energy economy, through the reduction of coal combustion and vehicle-related emissions.
  • I just don’t think we’re going to sustain the clean energy transition and diversify the set of communities that have a clear political stake in continuing that transition if we don’t drive some of these kinds of broad benefits that the bill is trying to do
  • And then when I talk to critics of the bill, one thing I hear is that a real problem is that this bill is full of standards. That if you just look at the decarbonization task — the land use we were talking about, the speed we need to do it. It is inhumanly hard already. But all over this bill is the tying of decarbonization money to other kinds of priorities,
  • If you think about what it would take to get 10 times as much political will to act, that’s a huge effort, right? There’s a lot of organizing. There’s a lot of transforming politics to get 10 times as much political will
  • then the challenge is we need to produce that electricity from a carbon-free source, and that’s the second reason why electricity is so key because we do actually have a lot of different ways to produce carbon-free electricity
  • one of the clear, tangible, near-term benefits of transitioning away from fossil fuel combustion, whether those are coal-fired power plants or buses or gasoline vehicles is that we’re going to substantially reduce fine particulate pollution and other ozone forming pollution that also creates smog and impacts urban air quality and air quality across the country
  • we need solutions that work in all of those contexts. And so keeping our options open, rather than trying to constrain them is definitely the lowest risk way to proceed these days. Because if you bet on a set of limited set of technologies, and you bet wrong, you’ve bet the planet, and you’ve failed. The stakes are that high.
  • we are going to need to enter a new era of nation building, right? A new era of investment in physical infrastructure that can build a better country. There are huge benefits associated with this, but are going to mean, we are going to see large-scale construction, and infrastructure, and impacts on lives
  • the Inflation Reduction Act is insufficient. It’s a huge step forward. But our estimation from the Repeat Project is that it cuts about two-thirds of the annual emissions gap that we need to close in 2030. It still leaves about a half a billion tons of emissions on the table that we need to tackle with additional policies. And that’s just 2030.
  • All of those decisions, we basically are putting the thumb on the scale heavily for the cleaner option over the dirtier option.
  • it took 140 years to build today’s power grid. Now, we have to build that much new clean electricity again and then build it again, so we have to build it twice over in just 30 years to hit our goals.
  • We, in the broad human sense, right? So Germany and Spain and China and the United States and a whole bunch of different countries decided to subsidize the deployment of those technologies when they were expensive, create early markets that drove innovation and cost declines and made them into tremendously affordable options for the future
  • “Making Climate Policy Work” by Danny Cullenward and David Victor, which explores the political economy and really real world history and experience of using market-based instruments, like carbon taxes or emissions cap and trade programs to try to tackle climate change. I think the book does a really good job of summarizing both a range of scholarship and the kind of real-world experience that we’ve gotten in the few places that have succeeded in implementing carbon pricing
  • what the Inflation Reduction Act does at its core is focus on making clean energy cheaper. And it does that in two main ways. The first way is with subsidies, right? So there’s a big package of tax credits that does the bulk of the work. But there’s also rebates for low-income households to do energy efficiency and electrification.
  • We built about 10 gigawatts of utility solar in 2020. The E.I.A. thinks we’ll build about 20 gigawatts this year. So things change, we can grow.
  • . Beyond wind and solar, what do you see as playing the central or most promising roles here?
  • if I sort of sum up the whole bill in one nutshell or one tweet, it’s that we’re going to tax billionaire corporations and tax cheats, and use that money to make energy cheaper and cleaner for all Americans, and also to build more of those technologies here in the United States, which we can talk about later
  • There’s loan programs that can help offer lower cost financing for projects. There’s grants that go out to states, and rural utilities, and others to help install things. And all of that is designed to make the cleaner option the good business decision, the good household financial decision.
  • the excellent article in “Nature Climate Change” from 2018, called “Sequencing to Ratchet Up Climate Policy Stringency,” which is the lea
  • So why electricity? Why has electrifying everything become almost synonymous with decarbonization in climate world?
  • So that it just makes good economic sense. And that clean energy is cheap energy for everybody. That’s with subsidies upfront, but it’s also going to kick off the same kind of innovation and incremental learning by doing in economies of scale that unlock those tremendous cost reductions for solar, and wind, and lithium ion batteries over the last decade
  • so we have to guide that process in a way that doesn’t recreate some of the harms of the last era of nation building, where we drove interstates right through the middle of Black and brown communities, and they had no say in the process. So that’s the challenge at a high level is like how do you build a national social license and sense of mission or purpose, and how do you guide the deployment of that infrastructure at scale, which doesn’t concentrate harms and spreads benefits amongst the people who really should be benefiting.
  • By no means is that impossible, but it is a profound construction challenge
  • author is —
  • And so we’re going to kick off the same kind of processes as well with this bill, building on the demonstration and hubs funding and things like that in the infrastructure law for the next generation of technologies that can take us even further down the path to net zero beyond 2030.
  • electricity is a way to power our lives — heat homes, power factories, move cars around — that at least when we use the electricity on that end, doesn’t lead to any CO2, or frankly, any other air pollutants and other combustion-related pollutants that cause public health impacts.
  • We made it 10 times easier to take action. So for a given amount of political will, we can do 10 times more decarbonization in the power sector and in transportation, which are two most heavily emitting sectors than we could do a decade ag
  • The reason that these aren’t expensive alternative energy technologies, as we called them in the 2009 era, and are now mainstream affordable options is because we used public policy.
  • he author is Michael Pahle and a variety of others who said — both economists, political scientists and policy analysts, who again, are trying to face down this reality that current policy ambition is inadequate. We’ve got to go further and faster. And so they’re trying to think about how do you order these policie
Javier E

Alexandre Lefebvre on Liberalism as a Way of Life - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...exandre-lefebvre-on-liberalism

liberalism history culture morality politics generosity etymology

shared by Javier E on 16 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • Our liberalism runs a lot deeper than perhaps we are prepared to admit.
  • I think that's especially true for people who identify as liberals. So people who are card-carrying liberals typically think about it as a political or institutional kind of thing, having to do with such things as rights, division of power, constitutions, and the like
  • what I'm trying to suggest is that, for a lot of us, our liberal values may run very deep in the sense that they may be at the heart of who we are, informing how we navigate all kinds of different walks of life—friendship, romance, parenting, how we are in the workplace, extending to the kinds of words we use and don't use, the kind of stuff we laugh at. All that stuff might be a liberal package.
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  • my book is a full-throated defense of liberalism. But it starts at a prior question, which is where do we find ourselves today? And especially for people who aren't religious, where is it that we're getting our big values, our big moral ideals from? And my gambit is that liberalism is the thing
  • t the biggest growing group of religious affiliation today is non-affiliation
  • in the United States, it's a rather low number (still a gigantic population) of around 30%. You move to godless New Zealand and it's clocking almost at 60% now. Here in Australia, it's around 50%
  • That's my audience. I'm trying to speak to people who don't have a prior religion that they can point to as the source for who they are
  • if we're not religious then I think that the one that we've probably absorbed and adopted is this liberal framework, precisely because (and we can talk about this) liberalism is the official hegemonic morality of our time. It's sort of what we are bombarded with 24/7. We just kind of grew up in those waters and that's who we are now. And so what I'm trying to do is to get liberals to recognize how deep it runs
  • I don't know if there's a God-sized hole in our heart, but I do know there's a Christianity-sized hole in our culture.
  • There's all kinds of casting about for meaning. And I'm an academic, I'm a philosopher, and in my neck of the woods everyone and their mother is writing a book about wisdom from whatever tradition they are doing. So you have books coming out every day on how to live well according to the Scottish Enlightenment, Chinese philosophy, whatever. Everyone's trying to go somewhere else to try to find meaning and pull it into our world
  • Maybe we already have a robust philosophy and we've already absorbed it and we just need to double down on the thing that we already have.
  • You asked me about its top-line values. In my book, I nominate three that I think are really at the center of this thing. One is a commitment to personal freedom—to my freedom, to your freedom.
  • Another is a commitment to fairness.
  • And the third is a commitment to reciprocity in the sense that I matter no more than you and you matter no more than me
  • And you take those three things together—freedom, fairness, and reciprocity—and you put them in a constellation,  and I think you have something like liberalism. So those are typically seen as political values. But again, what I'm trying to say is that they've descended into the background culture.
  • great book written ten years ago by an author named Melissa Mohr and it has this fantastic title. It's called Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing. And in those two words, “holy” and “shit,” what she does is effectively summarize the history of swear words over a 3,000-year tradition in the West, and her point is that at different moments and times, under different moral and religious paradigms, you have different kinds of swear words.
  • And very quickly, by finding out what a society thinks is bad and taboo and can't be said, you very quickly reverse engineer what its main moral commitments are. 
  • we love the swear words that are safe to say and we can say the “holy” and “shit” kind of words all we like on this podcast and no one's gonna bat an eye
  • But there's a different kind of word today that if we were to say that would get your podcast in hot water and me fired within a week, which are of course slurs, right? Those are the truly unsayable words that we have today. And the reason why swear slurs are the big no-no word today is because they impugn the self-respect and the dignity of all people. We've so absorbed certain liberal commitments that our liberalism runs right deep down to our bones in the kinds of words that we reflexively do and don't use. 
  • Talk us a little bit through what those three values mean and why it is that they're specifically liberal.
  • Lefebvre: So a book that has really inspired me in this is Helena Rosenblatt's work, The Lost History of Liberalism. It's just terrific because it goes into the history of the word “liberal” and tries to see what it means right from the start.
  • It's 200 years old, which is like a newborn by the standards of intellectual history. But on the other hand, it is really old because the roots of the word go right back to Roman times. And the word liber means a couple of things; on the one hand, freedom and the quality of being free and being a freeborn person, but also the quality or the characteristic of being generous and a generous person. And it's those two qualities that are at the heart of what liberalism means in this tradition.
  • Now, we tend to quickly associate liberalism with liberty and (critics would say) with individualism, egoism, selfishness, all that kind of stuff. But it's pointing to the freedom half of that equation, and we tend to forget the generosity half
  • When liberalism is born in the 19th century, though, those two ideas of being free and generous are really robustly connected. And the big question that I think animates almost all 19th century liberals, whatever their fascinating disagreements, whether we're talking the Frenchies like Tocqueville, Constant or Madame De Stael, or we're talking about the British tradition, all of them are asking, basically, looking at the modern world, how is it that human beings could remain on the one hand free, and on the other hand, generous, given all of these new pressures and temptations that the modern world is throwing at us.
  • They were worried about capitalism and how it not just threatens inequality, but it threatens to turn us into nasty little consumerists who care only about our material satisfactions and pleasures; they were worried about nationalism and the closing of the mind in that sense; and they were especially freaked out by democracy.
  • Today we think that liberalism and democracy are like peaches and cream. But the reconciliation between liberalism and democracy took 200 years to achieve, and hard-fought negotiation and compromise on the part of each of those bits. Because, initially, liberalism was established in order to counteract all of the perceived dangers of democracy.
  • Mounk: And just to briefly double-down on that point
  • If you think of democracy as something like translating the preferences of the people into public policy, and you think of liberalism as something, among other things, as constraints on what the state can do to individual citizens, those two things can come to be in tension when majorities of people persistently want laws and legislation and rules that constrain what individuals can do. 
  • at the same time, conversely, it's very hard, I think, in the long run to maintain either element without the other. So once you start having a political system that is deeply illiberal, it's very easy for the government to stay in power because it controls the media, because it has control over the judiciary and so on. And conversely, if you have a sort of technocratic elite that guarantees certain kinds of freedoms—as was the case under military domination in Turkey until relatively recently, as is the case in Singapore in certain ways—in order to sustain themselves, they're also going to limit the freedom of people, at the very least to criticize the government and probably to do other things as well
  • So the relationship between liberalism and democracy is very complicated because I think that they do effectively stand in tension. But once you give up on one of them, the other becomes really vulnerable. 
  • Where we find ourselves today is that we've inherited a liberal tradition that in so many respects privileges freedom over all equalities.
  • they don't entertain the notion that someone's liberalism can run all the way down into them. And that's what my beef or my complaint with political liberalism is—it obscures what I think is the major morality of our time because a whole bunch of people aren't liberal plus something, they're just liberal all the way down. And I'm not saying the state should force that one. What I'm saying is that we need to recognize empirical reality for what it is.
  • he digs and digs and he finds this one concept, which he names fairness. And he says that —and this is the fundamental proposition of Rawls—that society should be a fair system of cooperation from one generation to the next
  • in the book, what I tried to do is flesh out a little bit more what it demands of ourselves, especially once these ideas have ceased to be just kind of political stuff, but have gone into a much broader cultural frame.
  • what I want to try to do is to insist again on the essential connection between the notion of freedom and of generosity. And the thinker that does this for me most powerfully is John Rawls,
  • I do definitely think I'm not a perfectionist liberal, by which I mean that I do not think that the liberal state should promote a certain way of life. All political liberals make one assumption, which is that everyone living in a liberal democratic society is, let's say, liberal plus something else. So they believe in liberalism, they uphold the Constitution, all that stuff, equal rights. but they are also something else: they're Christian, Muslim, Jewish. But there's always a composite identity between liberalism and some other form of identity
  • what I'm trying to do in my book is insist on a certain vision of generous and free living and how it can be revived for us today, especially for those of us who basically can profess no other values because we've been born in this liberal world.
  • So what would it mean for us as a society and what would it mean for me, for you, for all of our listeners to be more genuine, more authentic, more real liberals rather than ones that simply pay lip service to these moral ideals?
  • Lefebvre: One main thing is whether a lot of your day-to-day behaviors support fairness in some really simple way. We live, of course, in compromised societies and with deep inequalities, but there are certain things that we do here and now that are definitely illiberal.
  • I'll confess my great sin: I send my daughter to a private school here in Australia. Now, if I think about that for a moment, I don't think I can square that with my liberal commitments. I'm taking her talents, I'm taking some revenue out of the public system, and then putting it into this other thing which will lavish generational advantage on it, generating all this meritocracy business that we know and hate and love and participate in
  • I think all of us do game the systems in that way. We file for taxes, we try to claim any deduction we can, we treat others ungenerously, we always try to assert our privileges and prerogatives above those of others. They just insinuate themselves into our everyday behavior. So what I'm trying to say is that we have to call ourselves out for not living up to it.
  • the book isn't scolding. I'm not trying to say that you're a bad liberal
  • What I'm trying to do in the book is I'm trying to furnish readers with reasons as to why they might want to adhere to their liberal values. And so I outline all the kinds of pleasures and joys and what I call felicities (or perks) of living a liberal way of life. I think there are a great many. I think it's joyful, it's cheerful, it's redemptive in some important way. It leads to all kinds of wonderful ideas like being more impartial, more autonomous, more free. So that's the pitch that I'm trying to make.
Javier E

Opinion | What's Wrong With Donald Trump? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-trump-ezra-klein-podcast.html

trump inhibition strength

shared by Javier E on 29 Oct 24 - No Cached
  • We’ve never had good language for talking about the way he thinks and the way in which it is different from how other people think and talk and act. And so we circle it. We imply it. I don’t think this is bias so much as it’s confusion. In order to talk about something, you need the words for it. But for me, something clicked watching him up there, swaying to that music.
  • You may have heard of the big five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. We all fall somewhere on the spectrum of each of them.
  • And to be low on conscientiousness is to be disinhibited. To be very low on conscientiousness is to be very high on disinhibition. And that is Donald Trump.
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, is known to have bought the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” seeking insight on the man he served. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s third chief of staff, recommended aides read “A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness.” He thought it would help them understand the way Trump’s strange psychology, maybe even his mental illness, helped make him a powerful and unique leader.
  • The history of pathologizing political leaders we do not like is not an admirable one. So I am not a psychiatrist, and I am saying something simpler and, I think, more neutral here: Trump moves through the world without the behavioral inhibition most of us labor under.
  • every person’s strengths are also their weaknesses. Disinhibition is the engine of Trump’s success. It is a strength. It is what makes him magnetic and compelling on a stage. It is what allows him to say things others would not say, to make arguments they would not make, to try strategies they would not try.
  • The politicians we sense to be inauthentic — it’s often that the software is slower and buggier. You can see the seams
  • One of Trump’s verbal tics is to say, “Many people are saying.” But it’s the opposite. He’s saying what many people want somebody to be saying. He’s saying what people are saying in private but often are not saying in public.
  • You certainly don’t get his politics without his personality. How many people must want to do what Trump has done? How many millionaires and billionaires and celebrities must have thought to themselves, “I’d be a good president. I’m smarter and more charismatic and better on a stage and wiser than these idiots up there”?
  • What Donald Trump has done is remarkable. It is historic. It is unique in the entire history of American politics. To run as an outsider to a political party and capture that political party totally. Break its fundamental consensus. Slander its previous standard-bearers. To then become president, having never held elective office or served in the military, while saying things and doing things that, until you, everybody believed you could not do or say in politics. To achieve something unique, you must yourself be unique. Donald Trump is unique.
  • Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response through this internal piece of software. Some of them are really good at it. Pete Buttigieg, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — the software is so fast and efficient as to be almost seamless.
  • Let me state what everybody knows: There are many things politicians believe that they do not say. The norms of politics — the norms of simple politeness — suppress much that people feel. There are vast swaths of political opinion you’re not really supposed to talk about. A lot of people believe that immigrants are bad and dangerous and that we shouldn’t have so many of them in this country. That free trade is ripping this country off and it’s the fault of these corrupt idiots in Washington lining their own pockets. That China isn’t our ally or our partner — it’s our enemy. And that the great threat to America comes from within, that other Americans are disloyal, that they are the enemy and the power of the state should be turned against them.
  • It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him feel, to so many, like not a politician — the fact that he was already the U.S. president notwithstanding. It is why the people who want to be like him — the mini-Trumps, the Ron DeSantises and Blake Masterses and Ted Cruzes — can’t pull it of
  • During his presidency, Trump repeatedly proposed firing Patriot missiles at suspected drug labs in Mexico. He mused about launching nuclear weapons at other countries, and in one very strange case, at a hurricane
  • It is his great strength. It is also his terrible flaw.
  • Trump’s disinhibition is yoked to a malignancy at his core. I do believe he’s a narcissist. If Putin praises him, he will praise Putin. If John McCain mocks him, he will mock John McCain. Trump does not see beyond himself and what he thinks and what he wants and how he’s feeling
  • He does not listen to other people. He does not take correction or direction. Wisdom is the ability to learn from experience, to learn from others. Donald Trump doesn’t really learn
  • He once told a biographer: “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.”I believe him totally when he says that
  • If Donald Trump is so bad, why were things so good? Why were they at least OK?
  • There is an answer to this question: It’s that as president, Trump was surrounded by inhibitors. In 2020 the political scientist Daniel Drezner published a book titled “The Toddler in Chief.” The core of the book was over 1,000 instances Drezner collected in which Trump is described by those around him in terms befitting an impetuous child.
  • In 2017 his deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh described working with President Trump as “trying to figure out what a child wants.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, said — quote — “I’m sick of being a wet nurse for a 71-year-old.” James Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of defense, and John Kelly, later his chief of staff, often described themselves like babysitters; they made a pact to never be overseas at the same tim
  • Miles Taylor, the chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security. In a 2020 interview with ABC, he described the lengths he and others took to shield America — to shield their own staff — from the commander in chief’s whims and rages:
  • Miles Taylor: The president at the time would get into these phone rants with us, the secretary, myself, about Jerry Brown, and how frustrated he was with Jerry Brown and later Gavin Newsom, because they didn’t support him. And he didn’t have a base of supporters in California. So as wildfires were burning down houses in the state, the president basically said to us, “I don’t care. These people haven’t done enough to deserve it. Cut off the money.”
  • Our answer was: We’re not going to do it. Don’t worry. We’ll go back to the president. But then, George, months after, again in January 2019, the president said he wanted to do it. And again, I think subsequently, he tweeted about doing it. Fortunately, it never happened. FEMA didn’t follow through on it because I think because they determined from their lawyers that a tweet wasn’t an official order.
  • The Trump administration was rife with this sort of thing. In 2019 a senior national security official told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that.”
  • there is something undeniably electric to watch someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There is something aspirational about it
  • He mused about the efficacy of untested or dangerous treatments for Covid
  • In 2020, during the protests following George Floyd’s murder, Trump raged at his staff, demanding they turn the full force of the military against the protesters.
  • Esper: He says: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” And he is suggesting that that’s what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters.
  • After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, he refused to admit that loss, perhaps refused to even believe that loss. I’m personally persuaded by the reporting that he’d come to believe very weird theories both of fraud and that he could be reinstated as president.
  • Trump did not care. He was unrestrained by those inhibitions. He tried, in every possible way he could, to overturn the election
  • What is remarkable to me about that answer — which, to be sure, Trump gave just last week at a Univision town hall — is that it doesn’t serve Trump’s own interests. He needs to reassure people about this. That’s the problem with lacking the restraint that most of us hav
  • When JD Vance showed up at the vice-presidential debate as a kinder, gentler, more accommodating version of himself, all that anger and contempt sanded off, he did that for a reason. He inhibited himself to achieve his goals. But Trump has no ability to do the same. That is why he lost the debate with Harris so decisively
  • If you want to see Trump lose the 2024 election, that answer is perfect. If you want to see him win it — which he does, which his staff does — that answer is insane. The man cannot help himself.
  • The best argument you can make about Trump’s first term is that there was a constructive tension between his disinhibition and the constraints of the staff and the bureaucracy and the institutions that surrounded him
  • Yes, some of his ideas were bad, dangerous and unconstitutional. But those mostly didn’t happen: They were stopped by his aides, by the so-called deep state, by the courts, by civil society.
  • And the way he pushed, the way he didn’t constrain himself to what other presidents would have done or said, maybe that led to changes that — at least if you agree with him — were positive. Changes that wouldn’t have happened under another president: tariffs on China, a sharp drop in border crossings, NATO allies spending more on defense.
  • But now the people around Trump have spent four years plotting to dismantle everything that stopped Trump the first time. That’s what Project 2025, and the nearly 20,000 résumés it reportedly vetted, is really all about. That’s what Trump’s inner circle is spending its time and energy doin
  • I’ve heard this from a number of people preparing for a second Trump term. Personnel was a problem in the first. Vetting for loyalty is the answe
  • When, Ross asked, did Vance decide he actually liked Donald Trump?
  • Vance is one of many now who’ve made it their mission to see that Trump’s future orders are carried out, no matter their content
  • Vance has been arguing this for some time. Here he is in 2021, again arguing that the true threat to democracy isn’t Trump trying to overturn elections or Trump doing dangerous things in office but Trump’s will being frustrated by the bureaucracy around him:
  • The thing to see here is that Trump’s supporters want to have it both ways: They point to what didn’t happen in his first term as proof that the same or worse would not happen in his second term. But they themselves are trying to remove everything that stopped Trump’s worst impulses from becoming geopolitical or constitutional crises.
  • we know that aging can make disinhibition worse. The August 2020 edition of the journal Psychology and Aging was entirely devoted to research on how the ability to control our behavior appears, in many studies, to decline as we get older
  • It is hard not to think of that research when I read that Trump’s rallies have stretched to an average of 82 minutes, up from about 45 minutes in 2016. Trump’s ability to ramble on a stage is often used as evidence of his continued vigor. I think it’s the opposite. I think his inability to stop rambling on a stage is evidence that what little capacity he once had to control himself is weakening
  • What has changed even more than Trump are the people and institutions around him. The leader of the House Republicans is Mike Johnson, not Paul Ryan. Mitch McConnell is stepping down from Senate leadership. And while I do not consider McConnell a profile in courage, his successor will be more in need of Trump’s patronage. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, for all their flaws, are out, while Don Jr. and Lara Trump are in. JD Vance wormed his way onto the ticket by promising to do what Mike Pence would not. Elon Musk is doing everything in his power to buy influence, centrality even, in another Trump administration. The Supreme Court has given Trump immunity from prosecution for official presidential actions. Republicans have spent four years plotting to take control of the administrative state — to stock it with loyalists who would never, ever do anything to impede Trump — and turn the entire machinery of the government to Trump’s whims.
  • Donald Trump is not cognitively fit to be president. The presidency is a position that requires an occupant able to act strategically and carefully.
  • for years, his supporters have said: Don’t watch the man. Don’t listen to what he says. Look at the results. But those results reflected the power and ability of others to check Trump, to inhibit him when he could not inhibit himself. It is not just the man who is now unfit; it is the people and institutions that surround him.
  • Here is one difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The people who work most closely with Joe Biden, his top staff, have always said he is up to the job of the presidency. Fit cognitively. Fit morally. The people who worked most closely with Donald Trump, many of his cabinet secretaries, many of them now say he is not.
  • But to admit the obvious is to be excommunicated, to go from one of Trump’s amazing hires — he only brings on the best people — to one of his deranged enemies, a loser, someone he fired. And so he is now surrounded by yes men and enablers, by opportunists and scam artists, by ideologues and foot soldiers.
  • What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him.
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