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Javier E

Zoom school's unexpected upside - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ing-school-personal-connection

teaching pandemic priority

shared by Javier E on 14 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Virtually inviting students into my home via video meant I had to obliterate the boundaries I once held dear. My students saw me at my most comfortable: no makeup — opting instead for an extra hour of sleep
  • I once greeted each student walking into my classroom by issuing a basic “Hey, what’s up?” But as many of my students and their family members became ill, long daily check-ins became a must. These conversations allowed students to compare symptoms with one another; other times, the talks gave them space to mourn the loss of a loved one or offer empathy and support
  • Afterward, we sometimes got to the material I’d planned to cover, sometimes not. But unlike before, I didn’t berate myself for not hitting all my curriculum targets for the day. Some lessons could wait; these could not.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Knowing what these kids were dealing with — caring for sick family members, babysitting younger siblings, using their own money to keep food on the table — I worked to become more flexible. I used to invest a lot of importance in arbitrary deadlines and make-or-break exams to establish high academic standards. These days, I’ve let go of many of my old notions about penalties for late or missing work; I no longer give students one way, and one way only, to show mastery of a skill.
  • I used to judge my students for not completing an assignment to my satisfaction, even after multiple opportunities to do so. I’d lament to my husband about their questionable priorities. This was harder now that I’d learned so much about their lives:
  • I have never paid closer attention to my students’ mental and physical health, or devoted so much time to hearing their struggles and giving them resources to help manage their anxiety.
  • seeing my students’ faces up close — not behind the cover of a textbook or staring down at their phones — I saw the dark circles under their eyes, chapped lips, unkempt hair. Students were inhaling and exhaling trauma. Together, we allowed one another into our lives and made that breathing a little easier.
  • Perhaps the biggest transformation was this: I accepted the fact that I was not the single most important person in my students’ lives, and my assignments weren’t their most important tasks. I am no longer the authoritarian at the front of the classroom, asserting rules that benefit me and me alone. This might once have struck me as lenient — undisciplined, even — but the fluidity has produced a higher level of respect and a better quality of work than I’ve seen in quite some time.
  • I have always seen them as humans first — but perhaps for the first time, I allowed them to see me in the same way. I once feared that seeming human, more myself, would undermine my authority and make me a worse teacher; now I’ve realized that our most valuable interactions come from sharing our vulnerability.
Javier E

Opinion | The G.O.P. Is Getting Even Worse - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-gop.html

gop trump crisis Culture politics radicalization pessimism apocalypse illiberal catastrophe

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swathes of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it
  • When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.The level of Republican pessimism is off the chart
  • A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”
  • This level of catastrophism, nearly despair, has fed into an amped-up warrior mentality.
  • With their deep pessimism, the hyperpopulist wing of the G.O.P. seems to be crashing through the floor of philosophic liberalism into an abyss of authoritarian impulsiveness.
  • With this view, the Jan. 6 insurrection was not a shocking descent into lawlessness but practice for the war ahead. A week after the siege, nearly a quarter of Republicans polled said violence can be acceptable to achieve political goals.
  • “The decent know that they must become ruthless. They must become the stuff of nightmares,” Jack Kerwick writes in the Trumpian magazine American Greatness. “The good man must spare not a moment to train, in both body and mind, to become the monster that he may need to become in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the vulnerable.”
  • Philosophic liberals — whether on the right side of the political spectrum or the left — understand people have selfish interests, but believe in democracy and open conversation because they have confidence in the capacities of people to define their own lives, to care for people unlike themselves, to keep society progressing.
  • Liberal democracy is based on a level of optimism, faith and a sense of security. It’s based on confidence in the humanistic project: that through conversation and encounter, we can deeply know each other across differences; that most people are seeking the good with different opinions about how to get there; that society is not a zero-sum war, but a conversation and a negotiation.
  • The G.O.P. response to the Biden agenda has been anemic because the base doesn’t care about mere legislation, just their own cultural standing.
  • There are new and transformed magazines and movements like American Purpose, Persuasion, Counterweight, Arc Digital, Tablet and Liberties that point out the excesses of the social justice movement and distinguish between those who think speech is a mutual exploration to seek truth and those who think speech is a structure of domination to perpetuate systems of privilege.
  • Republicans and conservatives who believe in the liberal project need to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side.
  • apocalyptic pessimism has a tendency to deteriorate into nihilism, and people eventually turn to the strong man to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.
Javier E

Opinion | The hidden scam behind Tucker Carlson and the right's 'replacement' game - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...lson-replacement-rhetoric-scam

replacement scam racism gop immigration

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • a key fact about this narrative: It gets an important truth exactly backward.
  • The aging Whites this story targets will be relying on social insurance programs whose durability will heavily depend on immigrant taxpayers to sustain it, meaning they have a great deal to lose from decreased immigration.
  • With or without immigration, the White share of the population will decline in the coming decades, census projections show. But if immigration is reduced or eliminated, America will grow older, with many fewer working-age adults available to support an exploding number of retirees.And that would not only slow overall economic growth, multiple projections have found, but also would increase pressure for cuts in the Social Security and Medicare benefits that provide a lifeline to the older Whites most drawn to the right’s anti-immigrant arguments.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The “replacement” demagoguery seeks to exploit fears rooted in reaction to a truism: Immigrants have increased as a share of the U.S. population since national origins quotas were ended in the 1960s.
  • But as Brownstein notes, the further “browning” of America will be caused not primarily by new immigration, but rather the higher reproduction rates of immigrants already here and their descendants, relative to slower reproduction among Whites.
  • That means restricting immigration, even severely, cannot halt the transition to a majority-minority country by 2060. But it would mean a smaller workforce relative to the aging population.
  • To fully appreciate what a despicable scam this is, however, we need to look at the darker implications of the “replacement” narrative.
  • The argument isn’t just that liberals want more immigration to win future elections. It’s also that elites are deliberately importing more immigrants to threaten aging Whites’ long term survival.
  • Prominent Republicans who have echoed Carlson’s line in a deceptively softer form also trade on this idea. They have said liberals want more immigration to “permanently transform” our “political landscape” and to “remake the demographics of America” to “stay in power forever.”
  • What’s unmistakable, again and again, is the dark invocation of permanent erasure and elimination
  • There’s an audience for this: A recent survey by GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson found that nearly half of Republican respondents believe politics is about “ensuring the country’s survival as we know it.” As Anderson told Ezra Klein, there is a “real sense in the Republican coalition today that they are under siege.”
  • As Ed Kilgore writes, this intimation of an “overclass-underclass alliance” that feasts parasitically on the authentic “producerist” majority of “hard-working Americans” is a decades-old right wing populist trope that trades in “paranoia” of “uncommon power.”
Javier E

Fight the Future - The Triad - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...fight-the-future

tech social network social media disinformation extremism ch= psychology brain science bias friction

shared by Javier E on 22 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In large part because our major tech platforms reduced the coefficient of friction (μ for my mechanics nerd posse) to basically zero. QAnons crept out of the dark corners of the web—obscure boards like 4chan and 8kun—and got into the mainstream platforms YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
  • Why did QAnon spread like wildfire in America?
  • These platforms not only made it easy for conspiracy nuts to share their crazy, but they used algorithms that actually boosted the spread of crazy, acting as a force multiplier.
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  • So it sounds like a simple fix: Impose more friction at the major platform level and you’ll clean up the public square.
  • But it’s not actually that simple because friction runs counter to the very idea of the internet.
  • The fundamental precept of the internet is that it reduces marginal costs to zero. And this fact is why the design paradigm of the internet is to continually reduce friction experienced by users to zero, too. Because if the second unit of everything is free, then the internet has a vested interest in pushing that unit in front of your eyeballs as smoothly as possible.
  • the internet is “broken,” but rather it’s been functioning exactly as it was designed to:
  • Perhaps more than any other job in the world, you do not want the President of the United States to live in a frictionless state of posting. The Presidency is not meant to be a frictionless position, and the United States government is not a frictionless entity, much to the chagrin of many who have tried to change it. Prior to this administration, decisions were closely scrutinized for, at the very least, legality, along with the impact on diplomacy, general norms, and basic grammar. This kind of legal scrutiny and due diligence is also a kind of friction--one that we now see has a lot of benefits. 
  • The deep lesson here isn’t about Donald Trump. It’s about the collision between the digital world and the real world.
  • In the real world, marginal costs are not zero. And so friction is a desirable element in helping to get to the optimal state. You want people to pause before making decisions.
  • described friction this summer as: “anything that inhibits user action within a digital interface, particularly anything that requires an additional click or screen.” For much of my time in the technology sector, friction was almost always seen as the enemy, a force to be vanquished. A “frictionless” experience was generally held up as the ideal state, the optimal product state.
  • Trump was riding the ultimate frictionless optimized engagement Twitter experience: he rode it all the way to the presidency, and then he crashed the presidency into the ground.
  • From a metrics and user point of view, the abstract notion of the President himself tweeting was exactly what Twitter wanted in its original platonic ideal. Twitter has been built to incentivize someone like Trump to engage and post
  • The other day we talked a little bit about how fighting disinformation, extremism, and online cults is like fighting a virus: There is no “cure.” Instead, what you have to do is create enough friction that the rate of spread becomes slow.
  • Our challenge is that when human and digital design comes into conflict, the artificial constraints we impose should be on the digital world to become more in service to us. Instead, we’ve let the digital world do as it will and tried to reconcile ourselves to the havoc it wreaks.
  • And one of the lessons of the last four years is that when you prize the digital design imperatives—lack of friction—over the human design imperatives—a need for friction—then bad things can happen.
  • We have an ongoing conflict between the design precepts of humans and the design precepts of computers.
  • Anyone who works with computers learns to fear their capacity to forget. Like so many things with computers, memory is strictly binary. There is either perfect recall or total oblivion, with nothing in between. It doesn't matter how important or trivial the information is. The computer can forget anything in an instant. If it remembers, it remembers for keeps.
  • This doesn't map well onto human experience of memory, which is fuzzy. We don't remember anything with perfect fidelity, but we're also not at risk of waking up having forgotten our own name. Memories tend to fade with time, and we remember only the more salient events.
  • And because we live in a time when storage grows ever cheaper, we learn to save everything, log everything, and keep it forever. You never know what will come in useful. Deleting is dangerous.
  • Our lives have become split between two worlds with two very different norms around memory.
  • [A] lot of what's wrong with the Internet has to do with memory. The Internet somehow contrives to remember too much and too little at the same time, and it maps poorly on our concepts of how memory should work.
  • The digital world is designed to never forget anything. It has perfect memory. Forever. So that one time you made a crude joke 20 years ago? It can now ruin your life.
  • Memory in the carbon-based world is imperfect. People forget things. That can be annoying if you’re looking for your keys but helpful if you’re trying to broker peace between two cultures. Or simply become a better person than you were 20 years ago.
  • The digital and carbon-based worlds have different design parameters. Marginal cost is one of them. Memory is another.
  • 2. Forget Me Now
  • 1. Fix Tech, Fix America
Javier E

All The Things You Never Even Knew You Wanted To Know About Neil Postman - NeilPostman.org - 0 views

neilpostman.org

psychology social media technology language bias postman Culture

shared by Javier E on 13 May 21 - No Cached
  • here are some Big Ideas that have stuck out to me:
  • The medium is the message. Borrowing from McLuhan, he explained that every medium — TV, radio, typography, oral transmission — changes and biases the message itself
  • Subjects should be taught as history. “Every teacher,” Postman said, “must be a history teacher.” Every subject has a fascinating history.
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  • Video tends to bias towards the “peek-a-book world”: trivial content that vanishes in seconds, constantly flickering images, yet the viewer has a hard time turning away no matter the subject… because the medium is just so darn entertaining
  • Education ≠ entertainment
  • School is about asking questions; TV is about passive consumption. School is about the development of language; TV demands attention to images.
  • TV is always fun and entertaining; serious education is not.
  • by equating education with entertainment children would never learn the rigorous of serious schooling.
  • The written word, for example, tends to bias the message towards linear thinking, logic, exposition, and delayed response.
  • To teach a subject without the history of how it happened “is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product,” he said. “It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know.
  • To teach about the atom without Democritus, to teach about electricity without Faraday, to teach about political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, to teach about music without Haydn, is to refuse our students access to The Great Conversation. It is to deny them knowledge of their roots
  • Fear Huxley’s future, not Orwell’s. Everyone is worried about Big Brother… but we should really fear ourselves. We live in a society where we can spend hours on devices entertaining ourselves.
  • We can amuse ourselves to death.
  • How we talk is how we think. “Any significant change in our ways of talking can lead to a change in point of view.”
  • The words we use convey meaning and if you can convince others to use your words, perspectives can shift.
  • Technology is a doubled-edged sword. Technology giveth and taketh away.
  • The printing press allowed us to codify and pass down knowledge reliability but in exchange we gave up our memories.
  • Mobile phones gave us constant communication but now we’re always distracted and never alone.
  • What should I read first?
  • You should start with Amusing Ourselves to Death:
  • The foreword is brilliant. It’s short, here’s an excerpt:
  • We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
  • But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
  • Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression.
  • But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
  • What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
  • What Orwell feared were those who would ban books
  • Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism
  • Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
  • Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture
  • As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.
  • In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
  • In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
Javier E

Free Black Thought: A Manifesto - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...free-black-thought-a-manifesto

persuasion racism Critical Theory race Culture Politics epistemology perspective bias

shared by Javier E on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”
  • Growing out of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement, a culture of censorship has taken root in many of our institutions.
  • The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.
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  • CRT makes two basic observations: First, that bias and prejudice exist not just in the hearts and minds of individuals, but also in society’s social structures and systems.
  • second, that bias embedded in systems is frequently invisible to the dominant class but perfectly perceptible to its victims
  • This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.
  • Both of these observations are true at least some of the time
  • The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.
  • In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”
  • This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks
  • black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.
  • Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.
  • we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices
  • The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools
  • But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.
  • it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.
  • First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking
  • Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.
  • When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”
  • Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.
  • Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.
  • There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.
  • This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.
  • Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.
  • Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight
  • Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”
  • one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.
  • Third, marginalized communities are diverse.
  • To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.
  • “The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”
  • It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:
  • Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.
  • Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.
  • Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.
  • If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.
  • Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.
  • Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend
  • Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California
  • Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”
  • In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”
  • We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.
  • Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”
  • A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”
  • The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.
  • Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?
  • Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.
  • So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.
  • Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease
  • Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”
  • We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation
  • We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.
Javier E

Who Decides What's Racist? - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...who-decides-whats-racist

Culture Politics

shared by Javier E on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • Growing out of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement, a culture of censorship has taken root in many of our institutions.
  • CRT makes two basic observations: First, that bias and prejudice exist not just in the hearts and minds of individuals, but also in society’s social structures and systems.
  • second, that bias embedded in systems is frequently invisible to the dominant class but perfectly perceptible to its victims
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • Both of these observations are true at least some of the time
  • The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.
  • In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”
  • Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.
  • Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.
  • it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.
  • First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking
  • There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.
  • We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.
  • Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.
  • Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight
  • Third, marginalized communities are diverse.
  • “The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”
  • Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.
  • Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.
  • Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.
  • If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.
  • Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend
  • But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.
  • The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.
  • In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”
  • Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”
  • This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks
  • black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.
  • we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices
  • This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.
  • When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”
  • Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.
  • Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.
  • This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.
  • The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools
  • one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.
  • To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.
  • It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:
  • Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”
  • In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”
  • The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.
  • Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California
  • Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”
  • A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”
  • Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.
  • Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?
  • Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.
  • So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.
  • Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease
  • Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”
  • We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation
  • We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.
saberal

Biden declares white supremacists 'most lethal threat' to US as he marks Tulsa race mas... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...race-massacre-us-politics-live

US politics

shared by saberal on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Joe Biden delivered remarks in Tulsa to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the city’s race massacre. The president emphasized the importance of acknowledging the lives and livelihoods lost in the massacre, which resulted in the death of at least 300 African Americans and the destruction of 35 blocks of Black real estate. “For much too long, the history of what took place here was told in silence, cloaked in darkness,” Biden said. “My fellow Americans, this was not a riot, this was a massacre.”
  • The administration formally ended the Trump-era “remain in Mexico” policy that forced thousands of asylum seekers from Central America to wait in Mexico while the US to process their cases. The program w as paused in January. In a memo sent to agency leaders today, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the policy did not “adequately or sustainably enhance border management.”
  • Human rights groups are calling on the Biden administration and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to put an end to a digital surveillance program that keeps tabs on nearly 100,000 immigrants.
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  • The “alternatives to detention” program tracks 96,574 individuals, but the Biden administration’s 2022 budget request calls to increase that number by approximately 45,000 to 140,000.
  • Biden met with the three living survivors of the massacre before delivering his speech. All three survivors – Viola “Mother” Fletcher, Hughes “Uncle Red” Van Ellis and Lessie “Mother Randle” Benningfield Randle – are over 100 years old. Biden acknowledged them in his remarks, saying, “Now your story will be known in full view.”
  • Harris could do to change these realities. Having served in the Senate for four years, she has some ties in the chamber. But Biden, who served in the chamber for nine times has long, is thought to have much deeper relationships with Senators – and has been unable to win them over.
  • “Well, [massacre survivor] Mother Fletcher said that when she saw the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, it broke her heart,” he continued: “A mob of violent white extremists, thugs, said it reminded her of what happened here, 100 years ago, in Greenwood. Look around at the various hate crimes against Asian Americans and Jewish Americans, hate that never goes away.”
  • Under Biden’s proposal, multinational corporations would be prevented from shifting profits across borders to exploit the most attractive low-tax locations as their profits would be taxed at a minimum global corporation tax rate either where they are booked or headquartered.
  • Biden also appeared to criticize two moderate Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, referencing “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends”. Manchin has said he opposes the For the People Act.
  • Joe Biden noted that he is the first US president to ever visit Tulsa to commemorate the anniversary of the 1921 race massacre that killed at least three hundred African Americans.
  • Joe Biden is now meeting with the three living survivors of the Tulsa race massacre, according to the latest White House pool report.
anonymous

Senate Democrats Urge Google To Investigate Racial Bias In Its Tools And The Company : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...bias-in-your-tools-and-company

shared by anonymous on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • A group of Democratic senators is urging Google parent company Alphabet to investigate how its products and policies may be harming Black people.
  • In a letter to the tech giant's CEO, Sundar Pichai, and other executives, Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Mark Warner of Virginia, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said they worried about bias and discrimination, both in the products Google makes and the way it's handled workplace diversity.
  • They highlighted several examples of Google products that appeared to produce biased results or potential harms for Black people.
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  • They cited recent reporting from Vice showing that a new app to identify skin conditions hadn't been trained using a "sufficiently diverse" dataset and therefore wasn't effective on people with dark skin.
  • The senators suggested the company has not made good on racial justice pledges Pichai made in a letter to employees and congressional testimony following the murder of George Floyd a year ago.
  • The first step, the senators said, is a "racial equity audit." They want Google to work with outside civil rights and legal experts to identify the root causes of any discrimination within the company and its tools, and what it can do to address the problems.
  • The companies have also been slammed for not paying enough attention to the impact of their technologies on people of color and the way their design and development may perpetuate bias.
  • In their letter to Google, the lawmakers pointed to Facebook and Airbnb, which have done similar audits examining racial bias and discrimination on their platforms and within their companies after outside pressure from activists and lawmakers.
anonymous

Pence Says He And Trump May Never 'See Eye To Eye' On Jan. 6 : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...rump-over-jan-6th-insurrection

shared by anonymous on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Former Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday night that he doubts that he and former President Donald Trump will ever see "eye to eye" over the Jan. 6 insurrection led by a mob of pro-Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol.
  • In a speech to a Republican group in New Hampshire, Pence called Jan. 6 "a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol,
  • Pence was at the Capitol that day to oversee the counting of electoral votes, a normally ceremonial task that was interrupted by the Trump supporters, some of whom shouted "Hang Mike Pence," and forced lawmakers and the vice president to evacuate.
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  • "President Trump and I have spoken many times since we've left office, and I don't know if we'll ever see eye to eye on that day," Pence said, "but I will always be proud of what we accomplished for the American people over the last four years."
  • He tried to turn Jan. 6 onto Democrats, saying their calls for an independent commission to investigate the events of that day and what led up to it were political.
  • Two days after President Biden attended a commemoration marking the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, in which a Black community was torched by a white mob, Pence asserted that "America is not a racist country," and that it was "past time for America to discard the left-wing myth of systemic racism." He also said, "Black lives are not endangered by police. Black lives are saved by police."
  • Pence called Biden "the most liberal president since FDR," and added, "They've proposed trillions of dollars in a so-called infrastructure bill that's just a thinly disguised climate change bill."
aidenborst

Biden announces 'National Month of Action' -- that could include free beer -- to get mo... - 0 views

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

politics US history crisis Culture policy Pandemic Economics vaccine Biden

shared by aidenborst on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced a "National Month of Action" and outlined additional steps his administration is taking to get 70% of US adults at least one Covid-19 shot by July 4.
  • "It's going to take everyone, everyone -- the federal government, the state governments, local, tribal and territorial governments, private sector, and most importantly the American people -- to get to this 70% mark so we can declare our independence from Covid-19 and free ourselves from the grip it has held over us, our lives, for the better part of a year," Biden said
  • "A summer of freedom, a summer of joy, a summer of get-togethers and celebrations. An all-American summer that this country deserves after a long, long dark winter that we've all endured," Biden said.
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  • In his speech, Biden will also announce new vaccination incentives, new outreach efforts to educate Americans about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines and new steps to make it easier for Americans to get the shot.
  • Four of the nation's largest childcare providers will offer free childcare from now until July 4 to Americans who are getting their Covid-19 vaccine or recovering from the shot, the White House announced Wednesday.
  • Starting next week, thousands of pharmacies, including Albertsons, CVS, Rite-Aid, and Walgreens will stay open late every Friday in June in order to allow more Americans to get vaccinated.
  • Thousands of employers and businesses have also offered incentives for Americans to get vaccinated this month. Nearly 51% of the total US population has received at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine, and nearly 41% of the total population is fully vaccinated, according to CDC data.
  • CDC data shows 12 states have met the Biden administration's goal to have 70% of adults with at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. California and Maryland recently joined Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont in reaching that benchmark.
  • Three Covid-19 vaccines have emergency use authorization by the FDA -- the two-shot Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines and the one shot vaccine from Johnson & Johnson.
aidenborst

White House prepared to announce next steps in global vaccination effort after months o... - 0 views

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

politics US history crisis Culture policy Pandemic vaccine Biden Biden-Administration pandemic-recovery

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • President Joe Biden has finalized his plan to distribute millions of coronavirus vaccines worldwide after months of deliberation, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans.
  • "In a few short days, in fact possibly as early as tomorrow, the President is going to announce in more detail the plan that he's put together to push out 80 million vaccines around the world that we have at our disposal or soon will have at our disposal," Blinken said Wednesday at the US Embassy in Costa Rica.
  • "Among other things, we will focus on equity, on the equitable distribution of vaccines, we will focus on science, we'll work in coordination with COVAX and we will distribute vaccines without political requirements of those receiving them."
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  • This week, officials will detail which specific countries are getting vaccines while cautioning that this is expected to be a lengthy, complicated process, according to a person familiar with the deliberations.
  • "We want to lead the world with our values, with this demonstration of our innovation and ingenuity, and the fundamental decency of the American people," he added.
  • Administration officials are expected to lay out the criteria they've agreed on to determine which countries get doses. It remains to be seen whether the US will unilaterally decide which countries get which vaccines, or whether the international vaccine initiative known as COVAX will play a major role in deciding who gets them. It could also be a combination of both, officials say.
  • "We need to help fight the disease around the world to keep us safe here at home and to do the right thing helping other people. It's the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do, it's the strong thing to do," Biden said last month in remarks delivered at the White House.
  • Biden said in May the US would send 60 million AstraZeneca vaccine doses to other countries by July Fourth. But, as of Wednesday evening, those doses had not cleared a federal safety and efficacy review conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration, another official said.
  • "Just as in World War II, America was the arsenal of democracy, in the battle against Covid-19 pandemic, our nation is going to be the arsenal of vaccines for the rest of the world," Biden said last month, adding, "just as democracies led the world in the darkness of World War II, democracies will lead the world out of this pandemic."
  • President Joe Biden has finalized his plan to distribute millions of coronavirus vaccines worldwide after months of deliberation, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans.
aidenborst

Hacking: These are just the attacks we know about - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

politics US history Culture crisis policy GOP ransomware Russia Putin

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Ransomware hacks are everywhere if you look for them. These are just the ones we know about:
  • Food -- A hack of JBS Foods, the world's largest meat processor, shut multiple plants over the weekend.Fuel -- The Colonial Pipeline hack led to fuel shortages on the East Coast last month. The company has admitted to paying more $4.4 million in ransom, although the FBI has said ransoms of more than $25 million have been demanded.Hospitals -- A hack of the Scripps hospital system in San Diego has led to the breach of medical information for more than 150,000 people. The Irish health system was also targeted. More on how hackers target hospitals and first responders below.Trains -- A New York City subway system hack from April was reported Wednesday by the The New York Times.Ferries -- There are also smaller hacks, like the one affecting the ferry system in Cape Cod.
  • Eyes on Russia. The White House has its eyes on Russia for enabling both the Colonial Pipeline and JBS meat processing hacks. Read CNN's full report on the JBS attack here.
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  • "Ransomware right now, this is a business model," Lior Div, CEO of the security firm Cybereason told CNN's Richard Quest. "They are in it for the money and they are trying to generate as much revenue as possible for themselves. So as long as people are going to pay, they're going to keep operating in order to generate this massive amount of revenue that they are generating every year."
  • Cyber hygiene is necessary. Every US company and organization needs to protect itself, said Eric Goldstein, the current assistant director at CISA, in a statement.
  • The hack of the world's largest meat producer, JBS, a Brazilian company whose subsidiaries control a quarter of US beef processing and a large portion of pork processing, was disclosed Tuesday by the White House, which promised to re-focus on the issue and to raise it with Russia, the government thought to be harboring hackers.
  • You figure if nine meat plants hadn't gone dark in Arizona, Texas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wisconsin, Utah, Michigan and Pennsylvania, it seems very plausible we likely would never have heard. The US JBS headquarters is based in Greeley, Colorado, and it employs more than 66,000 people. Read about the fallout for them, from CNN's Brian Fung.
  • It's not clear, of course, if the company is paying the ransom. If they're getting back online this quickly, you've certainly got to assume they could have.
  • "We have attributed the JBS attack to REvil and Sodinokibi and are working diligently to bring the threat actors to justice. We continue to focus our efforts on imposing risk and consequences and holding the responsible cyber actors accountable," the FBI said in a statement. "A cyber attack on one is an attack on us all."
  • Ireland's national health service has completely shut its IT system and refuses to pay the ransom, which it said in May has disrupted everything from its Covid vaccine rollout to community health services.
anonymous

Biden Visits Tulsa For Anniversary Of 1921 Race Massacre On Black Wall Street : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...e-that-wrecked-black-wall-stre

shared by anonymous on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden traveled to Oklahoma on Tuesday to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre amid a renewed reckoning over a long-overlooked attack that left as many as 300 people dead in a community once known as Black Wall Street.
  • On May 31 and June 1, 1921, an armed white mob attacked the all-Black district of Greenwood. The racist mob destroyed the area, leaving 40 square blocks in ruins and nearly 10,000 people homeless. A century later, it remains one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history.
  • "But just because history is silent, it doesn't mean that it did not take place. And while darkness can hide much, it erases nothing. It erases nothing. Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they can't be buried, no matter how hard people try."
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  • "Untold bodies dumped into mass graves," Biden said. "Families, who at the time, waited for hours and days to know the fate of their loved ones, are now descendants who have gone 100 years without closure.
  • In his inaugural address, Biden said he would help to deliver "racial justice" and promised that "the dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer."
  • But while Biden has talked about tackling "systemic racism," his administration has faced challenges. Racial disparities have continued throughout the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine, with Black Americans getting vaccinated at a lower rate than whites.
  • When it comes to police reform, Biden called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act by the first anniversary of Floyd's death. While negotiations continue in the Senate, Congress failed to meet that deadline.
  • Survivors of the Tulsa massacre are still seeking justice and reparations a century later. Three survivors testified before Congress in May about what they saw and the devastating and ongoing impact of the attack.
rerobinson03

New NASA Missions Will Study Venus, a World Overlooked for Decades - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nasa-neptune-venus.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • NASA is finally going back to Venus, for the first time in more than three decades. And a second time too.On Wednesday, Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, announced the agency’s latest choices for robotic planetary missions, both expected to head to Venus in the late 2020s: DAVINCI+ and VERITAS.
  • In the past year, a neglected Venus re-entered the planetary limelight after a team of scientists using Earth-based telescopes claimed they had discovered compelling evidence for microbes living in the clouds of Venus today where temperatures remain comfortably warm instead of scorching.
  • The other finalists were Io Volcanic Observer, which would have explored Io, a moon of Jupiter that is the most volcanically active body in the solar system, and Trident, which would have sent a spacecraft flying past Triton, an intriguing large moon of Neptune.
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  • Concentrations of krypton, argon, neon and xenon — the noble gases that do not react with other elements — may provide hints about how Venus and its atmosphere formed. The measurements might also find signs of whether water has escaped from Venus into space and whether oceans ever covered the surface.
  • The floors of craters on Venus are dark, but no one knows if that is because they are lava flows from recent eruptions or accumulated sand dunes. “That’s a super important question for understanding the history of volcanism,” Dr. Smrekar said.
  • Also in 2017, for the larger, more expensive New Frontiers competition, NASA considered a Venus mission called Venus In situ Composition Investigations, or Vici, which sought to put two landers on the planet’s surface. It was passed over for Dragonfly, which will send a plutonium-powered drone to fly on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.In addition, planetary scientists are in the middle of putting together their once-a-decade recommendations to NASA about their priorities. NASA usually undertakes only one flagship mission — a big, ambitious, expensive effort — at a time. A Venus flagship mission under consideration would include two balloons that would float in the atmosphere for a month.
  • One goal of the Trident mission was to study plumes that could be emitted from a subsurface ocean on Triton, Neptune’s large moon. If hypotheses for how those plumes form are correct, by the time another mission reached Triton, the moon’s activity will have ceased because of its position in orbit relative to the sun. There may not be another opportunity to observe the outbursts for 100 years.
lmunch

Tucker Carlson: Joe Biden says he's in charge and will brook no opposition | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...ng-opposition-address-congress

Biden Tucker Carlson Culture crisis Policy

shared by lmunch on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Everyone was wearing a mask, including the two stern ladies sitting right behind Joe Biden: the speaker of the House and the real president. They were masked up -- all of them were -- like outlaws. But here’s the weird part: all of them have been vaccinated. They’ve told us that. So there was literally no reason for any of them to be wearing masks, but they wore them anyway.  
  • Language is designed to communicate ideas, but not when Joe Biden uses it. Wednesday night’s speech was a cluster bomb of clichés meant to knock you senseless and make you surrender. Americans choose "hope over fear," Biden droned, "truth over lies," "light over darkness." We lost track after that. Our brains shut down. Mission accomplished. The news media didn’t care
  • Technically, Biden is now the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world. Maybe someone, somewhere ought to keep track of what he’s doing. But no, reporters covered Joe Biden like he’s an actor on a press tour for the hot new summer blockbuster alongside his dazzling co-star, Kamala. 
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  • Wait a second. Was that the president of the United States talking? No, that’s what you thought. In fact, it was Jesus in aviator glasses. What Joe Biden said was beautiful. It was intimate. Grandfatherly. Indeed, Rooseveltian. Joe Biden spoke to the soul of America. He connected with people who didn’t even deserve to be connected with. Hopeless sinners, redeemed by his voice alone — a voice that is not, and we want to be clear about this, the fading monotone of a 78-year-old man losing his grip. No, it’s not. Joe Biden’s voice modulates. It has the capacity to change pitch in a way that is — and we’re quoting now — "rather extraordinary." 
Javier E

Opinion | The Cold War pitfalls that Biden's China policy should avoid - The Washington... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...dens-china-policy-should-avoid

cold war china policy biden Politics history

shared by Javier E on 04 May 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden argues that his ambitious domestic agenda — totaling some $6 trillion — is necessary to keep up with our primary geopolitical rival. As he told Congress last week: “We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century.”
  • In so doing, Biden harked back to the Cold War, when national security was often used as a justification for initiatives that had little to do with the Pentagon.
  • the competition with China today can pay major dividends if properly managed
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  • But the dark side of the Cold War should serve as a warning of how such competition, if it runs amok, can threaten our liberties and our lives.
  • He rescinded the visas of 1,000 Chinese graduate students and researchers supposedly linked to the Chinese military.
  • He called covid-19 “kung flu,” helping to increase anti-Asian animus and hate crimes.
  • He launched a trade war with China that hurt our economy.
  • President Donald Trump often seemed determined to emulate the worst excesses of the Cold War by feeding anti-Chinese hysteria.
  • He launched prosecutions of researchers who were accused of covert links with China.
  • He expelled Chinese journalists. He imposed visa restrictions on the Chinese Communist Party’s 92 million members (most of them ordinary bureaucrats) and their relatives.
  • He closed down the Peace Corps and Fulbright programs in China.
  • Most of these Trumpian initiatives — from the shuttered Peace Corps to the costly tariffs — remain in place.
  • While reducing unnecessary friction, Biden should do far more than Trump to highlight Chinese human rights abuses, just as Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan did with the Soviet Union.
  • Biden also needs to counter Chinese military aggression in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait while maintaining open lines of communication with Beijing to avert a war that neither country wants.
edencottone

Going after the 'Achilles' heel': Biden charges into global anti-corruption fight - POL... - 0 views

www.politico.com/...l-anti-corruption-fight-476160

shared by edencottone on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Earlier this month, amid a blizzard of news both domestic and foreign, Secretary of State Antony Blinken took the time to ban a powerful Ukrainian oligarch from setting foot in the United States.
  • The choice also was notable given Ukraine’s contentious status in U.S. politics due to its role in former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment and lingering Republican allegations about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s dealings there.
  • “We see it as both, unfortunately, prevalent in so many places, but also a little bit of an Achilles’ heel when we can put the spotlight on it. Because when people see the corruption of their leaders, that’s a good way to undermine support for said leaders.”
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  • But making fighting corruption a policy priority won’t be easy. It’s a topic that cuts across numerous fields and government agencies, requiring bureaucratic savvy to coordinate initiatives. And America’s own corruption issues — from concerns about the role money plays in U.S. politics to lingering questions about whether Trump profited off the presidency — could undercut its voice.
  • “Governments can’t keep ignoring those grievances,” said Abigail Bellows, a scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “No one country can deal with it alone. It’s something that countries need to work together on.
  • Biden has pledged to host an international “Summit for Democracy” in the coming months, and the need to fight corruption is expected to be a major theme during that gathering. Alongside the summit, Biden is expected to issue a presidential policy directive that establishes fighting corruption as a core national security interest, a promise he made in an essay laying out his foreign policy agenda during the 2020 presidential campaign.
  • In a recent “interim strategic guidance” document outlining basic principles of its future National Security Strategy, the Biden administration blamed corruption for an array of ills, arguing, for example, that, tax havens and illicit financing “contribute to income inequality, fund terrorism, and generate pernicious foreign influence.”
  • It’s critical that the administration not fall into longstanding U.S. habits of viewing corruption as simply a law enforcement issue or one that affects only developing or failed states, analysts and activists said.
  • “We are key enablers of the problem globally,” said Trevor Sutton, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress. “You need to have a concerted strategy among democracies to deal with this issue.”
  • Among the Republicans who backed cracking down on anonymous shell companies was Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, one of the most hawkish voices in Congress. He warned that “criminals and terrorists are exploiting our financial system using shell companies that hide their identities.”
  • Activists say the Biden administration needs to beef up the staffing in certain government divisions if it wants its anti-corruption agenda to go beyond rhetoric and have a meaningful impact.
  • One hurdle facing the Biden administration as it pushes an anti-corruption agenda on the global front is America’s own perceived flaws, from longstanding concerns about “dark money” in U.S. politics to the machinations of the lobbying and influence industries.
  • Blinken recently launched the “International Anticorruption Champions Award” to recognize anti-corruption crusaders around the world. (Planning for the prize began during the Trump administration, a State Department spokesperson said.)
  • Zelensky, though, has his own links to Kolomoyskyy. The Ukrainian president is a former comedian who gained popularity in part because of coverage by a media outlet owned by the mogul.
anonymous

Some Senators Want Permanent Daylight Saving Time : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...permanent-daylight-saving-time

shared by anonymous on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Americans don't agree if they like daylight saving time or standard time better, but they do mostly agree that switching between them is irritating.Arizona and Hawaii and have exempted themselves from the switch by remaining in standard time year-round.
  • Other states want to move permanently to DST.
  • Sen. Marco Rubio first introduced the Sunshine Protection Act in 2018, which would move the entire country to permanent, year-round daylight saving time. Rubio has renewed his call multiple times since then, most recently on Tuesday:
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Florida's state legislature passed the Sunshine Protection Act in 2018 hoping to move themselves into DST. But like the 14 other states that have enacted legislation or passed a resolution in the last four years to make DST permanent, none can take effect without an act of the U.S. Congress.
  • He cited multiple benefits to permanent DST including potentially fewer car accidents and easing seasonal depression.
  • The effort is supported by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who echoed Rubio in highlighting the potential benefits of extending DST.
  • "Studies have found year-round Daylight Saving Time would improve public health, public safety, and mental health
  • Opponents of permanent daylight saving time note that winter mornings would be darker, with children more often having to wait for the school bus in the dark.
anonymous

AP Analysis: Dark days ahead for Lebanon as crisis bites - 0 views

apnews.com/...eaf36ed349004fa82ee8c16791884b

lebanon crisis

shared by anonymous on 29 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Lebanon has been hit by an economic meltdown, mass protests, financial collapse, a virus outbreak and a cataclysmic explosion that virtually wiped out the country’s main port.
  • The country’s foreign reserves are drying up, the local currency is expected to spiral further downward.
  • But the two main Shiite parties, Hezbollah and Amal, accused him of acting on behalf of their local political rivals. They insisted on naming Shiite members of the Cabinet and on keeping the Finance Ministry for their sect. Adib refused and stepped down Saturday.
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  • The Trump administration has stepped up its maximum pressure campaign on Iran and its proxy militias, including Hezbollah
  • It slapped sanctions on two senior pro-Hezbollah politicians, including the former finance minister, in the middle of efforts to form the Cabinet.
  • the militant group has effectively put the Lebanese public in the middle of an “open confrontation” with the United States.
  • “To hell, of course,” he replied.
  • In the next few weeks, the Central Bank is expected to end subsidies on basic goods. Since the local currency’s collapse, the bank has been using its depleting reserves to support imports of fuel, wheat and medicine.
  • Civil unrest would put the population in confrontation with demoralized security forces who — like other Lebanese — have seen their salaries decrease by up to 80% in U.S. dollar terms.
  • He said turf wars among local armed groups may become a daily occurrence in areas that are not controlled by any political actor and could scale up once groups driven by sectarian and political motivations become involved.
  • a new trash crisis. Hospitals struggle to cope with the financial crisis amid a surge in coronavirus cases,
  • The bottom line is that fixing the financial sector and the budget – the two key issues that the IMF is supposed to address – will have to mean that the interest of some people who have political clout suffer, so there is a lot of potential for conflict,
  • seeking to hang on to their seats.The Aug. 4 explosion at Beirut’s port — bla
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