Why were partisans so oblivious to the escalating tensions that were tearing America apart? Why were they so confident that the solution to American polarization was domination and not accommodation?
28More
shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 22
- No Cached
A Blow Against the Malice Theory of American Politics - The Dispatch - 1 views
thedispatch.com/...ce-theory-of-american-politics
malice trump culture history US politics anger negative partisanship animosity
![](/images/link.gif)
-
The answer was clear. For decades, winners and losers alike spun virtually every American election as the sign of things to come, the harbinger of a permanent victory (or permanent defeat). You don’t even have to be that old to see the recent pattern. The thrill of Democratic victory in 1992 turned into the agony of defeat in 1994, then the thrill of victory again in 1996
-
Then Obama won in 2008. But for Republicans, that was an aberration—a fluke caused by the housing crash and an unpopular war. The real majority came to the polls in Tea Party 2010. But wait: Obama won again in 2012, and suddenly all the momentum was on the side of the “coalition of the ascendant.” Remember that phrase? It signaled permanent Republican doom—the alleged party of white people couldn’t possibly keep winning in a nation that was growing more diverse by the year, could it?
- ...25 more annotations...
-
Then came 2016. The overreading began once again. The old electoral college “blue wall” had become a “red wall,” and Trump had supposedly unlocked the key to lasting control. But, well, you know the rest.
-
Everyone keeps looking for the political Battle of Yorktown—that moment when your opponents lose once and for all and they march out slowly before you while the band plays “The World Turned Upside Down.”
-
Instead, in a closely-divided nation that’s characterized mainly by negative polarization and calcification, the better analogy is to trench warfare—grinding, bloody attrition, with gains often measured in yards rather than miles and true breakthroughs few and far between.
-
Thus, the question after any given election isn’t so much, “Who is ascendant?” Rather, it’s “In which direction did the lines move?”
-
in this instance one of those more important changes was the blow to the malice theory of American politics.
-
The malice theory is a core element of Trumpism, and it’s a natural temptation of negative polarization. Negative polarization (or negative partisanship), as I’ve written many times, is the term for politics that is fundamentally motivated by animosity for the other side more than affection to your own party’s leaders or ideas.
-
Under the malice theory, the key to electoral victory is unlocking that anger. That means highlighting everything wrong with your opponents. That means hyping their alleged mortal threat to the Republic.
-
who should be kind to the “godless communist orcs” who are “trying to ruin this great country”?
-
then persuasion is a waste of time. Defeating the enemy isn’t about persuading the enemy, but rather about mobilizing the righteous.
-
inspiring people is hard. Scaring them is easy—especially when the internet gives you constant access to the worst and weirdest voices on the other side.
-
here’s where the malice theory collides with human nature. Most people aren’t content with simply thinking their opponents are terrible. They still want to see themselves as good. They want to see the world as “good versus evil,” not “lesser evil versus evil.”
-
That’s why the argument that voters should always swallow deep moral objections to vote for the lesser evil are ultimately unsustainable
-
When confronted with relentless wrongdoing from your own partisans, one of two things happens—over time you’ll either redefine evil as good, or you’ll abandon evil for the good.
-
The first response is core to much of the MAGA movement. It’s how someone goes from holding their nose and voting for Trump in 2016 to being the first bass boat in the boat parade in 2020. We all watched it happen.
-
The ultimate expression of this faction was represented by what’s been called the “Stop the Steal” slate of Republican candidates. These were the folks who were all-in, not just on Trump, but on some of the most transparently, incandescently absurd political conspiracies in modern American history.
-
I don’t want to make the very mistake I identified at the start of this newsletter and overstate my case. Talk of a true MAGA “repudiation” is overblown
-
remember, the question isn’t whether anyone achieved ultimate victory or faced a final defeat. It’s in which direction the lines moved in our nation’s political trench warfare. And they most definitely moved back towards reason and our most basic moral norms.
-
since politicians so often follow voters far more than they lead voters, it is ultimately up to us to demonstrate to them that the malice theory of American politics is truly a dead political end
-
The worst thing for American politics would be for the Trumpist narrative—that decency is for the weak—to prevai
-
If cruelty truly is the sole or best path to partisan victory, then the continued temptation to yield to our worst impulses would grow overwhelming. The temptation was already strong enough to distort and transform the political culture of the right simply based on Trump’s single, narrow win.
-
Ever since Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the Trumpist GOP lost and kept losing. A movement that prioritized vicious political combat lost the House in the 2018 midterms, lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020, and has likely blown a virtually unlosable election in 2022, despite the fact that the country is struggling under the great weight of the worst crime and inflation in at least a generation.
-
It turns out that there’s some life left in decency yet. Even when times are hard, there are voters who are unwilling to call good evil and evil good
-
It turns out that it’s hard to escape the need to persuade and inspire, and that might be the best—and most important—consequence of a midterm election that gave neither party a mandate but reminded the Republicans that malice and lies can do far more political harm than good.
11More
Elon Musk's Text Messages Explain Everything - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
I’ve begun to think of Exhibit H as a skeleton key for the final, halcyon days of the tech boom—unlocking an understanding of the cultural brain worms and low-interest-rate hubris that defined the industry in 2022. What we see in Exhibit H is only a tiny snapshot of a very important inbox, but it’s enough to make this one of the most revealing documents in a year that’s been absolutely overflowing with tech disclosures
-
the Musk texts demonstrate a decadence, an unearned confidence, and a boy’s-club mentality that coincide with the cultural disillusionment regarding the genius-innovator narrative.
-
I snarkily coined the Elon Musk School of Management to describe the petulant way that some tech founders, such as Musk and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, seemed to use confrontational, culture-warring, Twitter-addled thought leadership as a business tactic. The Musk School revolves around two principles: running a company in an authoritarian manner, and ensuring that every management decision is optimized to make news and hijack the attention of those following along on social media
- ...8 more annotations...
-
The Musk messages also reveal how some of the richest and most powerful men in the world treat actual billions of dollars with a level of care more appropriate for a 3-year-old tossing around Monopoly cash.
-
Oracle’s founder, Larry Ellison, essentially writes Musk a blank check over text, pledging, “A billion … or whatever you recommend.” The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen unsolicitedly offers Musk “$250M with no additional work required.” And Michael Grimes, a top investment banker at Morgan Stanley, proposes a meeting with Bankman-Fried as a way to “get us $5bn equity in an hour.”
-
The blitheness is the point. It is a total power move to talk about getting “$5bn in equity in an hour” the same way we mere mortals talk about Venmo-ing a friend $15 for lunch. The texts make it clear that these men are fundamentally alienated from the rest of the world by their wealth.
-
The men in Musk’s phone also appear wildly confident in their own abilities and those of their peers. Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of the media conglomerate Axel Springer, infamously texted Musk his bullet-pointed plan for Twitter, which began with the line item “1.),, Solve Free Speech.”
-
They teach us what happens when a small group of people with too much money come to view that money not just as a reward for success, but as its own form of merit—a specious achievement that totally alienates them from reality.
-
Ultimately, Exhibit H documents the loneliness and isolation of being the world’s richest man. As told via the texts, the seed of Musk’s Twitter purchase was planted by sycophants deferential to the billionaire who will never give him hard, truthful advice, because they wish to stay close to him.
-
the one time he receives actual, honest feedback from Agrawal, Musk behaves aggressively and impulsively, sealing his fate.
12More
shared by Javier E on 09 Jan 23
- No Cached
French Food Giant Danone Sued Over Plastic Use Under Landmark Law - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...e-sued-plastic-use-france.html
law plastic sustainability environment response legal obligation suit france corporation
![](/images/link.gif)
-
Throughout their life cycle, plastics, which are manufactured from fossil fuels, release air pollutants, harm human health and kill marine life. In 2015, they were responsible for 4.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, one recent study found, more than all of the world’s airplanes combined.
-
Figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that, over the past seven decades, plastics production has soared from two million metric tons (there are about 2,200 pounds per metric ton) to more than 400 million — and is expected to almost triple by 2060.
-
Danone alone used more than 750,000 metric tons of plastic — about 74 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower — in water bottles a, yogurt containers and other packaging in 2021, according to its 2021 financial report.
- ...9 more annotations...
-
Environmental groups also say that recycling has not proved effective at the scale necessary: Only 9 percent of all plastics ever made have been recycled, according to the United Nations, with most of the rest ending up in landfills and dumps.
-
The company said that it reduced its plastic consumption by 12 percent from 2018 to 2021, and that it has committed to use only reusable, recyclable or compostable plastic packaging by 2025. But Danone is not on track to reach that target, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which set up a voluntary program with the United Nations for big companies to address plastic pollution.
-
To sue Danone, the environmental groups have relied on the so-called duty of vigilance law, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that France passed in 2017. It requires large companies to take effective measures to identify and prevent human rights violations and environmental damages throughout their chain of activity.
-
The French duty of vigilance law, the first of its kind in Europe, has since inspired similar legislation in Germany and the Netherlands, as well as a proposed European Union directive.
-
There is nothing like a duty of vigilance law in the United States. The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which would require plastic producers to finance waste and recycling programs, and ban single-use plastic bags and the exporting of plastic waste to developing countries, is currently in committee.
-
“It’s often about streamlining existing practices,” said Pauline Barraud de Lagerie, a sociologist at University Paris Dauphine who published a book on corporate responsibility. She added that by suing companies, “N.G.O.s are trying to somehow bring back an obligation of result.”So far, around 15 legal cases based on the French law have been reported. Half of them have gone to court and are still awaiting judgment, which could take years.
-
The lawsuit is part of a wider trend of climate litigation that has gained momentum in recent years, expanding the climate fight beyond traditional demonstrations and civil disobedience initiatives.
-
The number of climate change lawsuits globally has more than doubled from 2017 to 2022, from about 900 to more than 2,000 ongoing or concluded cases, according to data from the Grantham Research Institute and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
14More
Opinion | The Meaning of an Awesome Employment Report - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Americans, they said, just don’t want to work. Socialism has made them lazy. They’d rather play video games. They don’t have the skills required by a 21st-century economy. High unemployment is “structural” and can’t be solved with monetary and fiscal stimulus.
- ...11 more annotations...
-
After the 2008 financial crisis, it took 12 years for employment rates to get back to pre-crisis levels. But only three years after Covid struck, employment is fully back for almost every age and demographic group.
-
At this point the employed percentage of adults is at or above early 2020 levels for every age group except those 70 or older.
-
The overall unemployment rate is only 3.5 percent; we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969. Black unemployment is at a record low. There’s good news everywhere you look.
-
So whaddya know: Provide enough job opportunities, and lazy video-game-playing Americans will take those jobs and, apparently, demonstrate enough skill that employers want to keep them.
-
Full employment also turns out to be a powerful force for equality, on multiple dimensions. The gap between Black and white unemployment is now a fifth of what it was when Ronald Reagan proclaimed “morning in America.” A tight labor market has led to big gains for low-wage workers, sharply reducing overall wage inequality.
-
The big question now is whether the good news on jobs is somehow a mirage, based on an unsustainably hot labor market that will have to cool off drastically to contain inflation.
-
maybe the important point is that almost every measure of inflationary pressure I’m aware of has improved substantially over the past year, with no increase in the unemployment rate
-
there’s good reason to believe that we can sustain the incredibly good job market we have right now, even while getting inflation under control. And it will be a real tragedy if exaggerated fear of inflation causes the Federal Reserve to push interest rates too high for too long, leading to a gratuitous recession that throws away many of the gains we’ve made.
-
Republicans keep insisting President Biden’s policies have been an economic disaster, and that even the mainstream news media has tended to emphasize inflation — which has been a nasty shock, even though it may be subsiding — rather than job gains.
-
So it does seem worth pointing out that at this point Biden is presiding over the best job market America has seen in a generation — specifically since the boom of the late Clinton years. And that, as Biden himself might (almost) say, is a big something deal.
17More
Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back AI Rivals - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.
-
Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.
-
A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.
- ...14 more annotations...
-
Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building A.I. products,
-
Modernizing its search engine has become an obsession at Google, and the planned changes could put new A.I. technology in phones and homes all over the world.
-
Magi would keep ads in the mix of search results. Search queries that could lead to a financial transaction, such as buying shoes or booking a flight, for example, would still feature ads on their results pages.
-
Google has been doing A.I. research for years. Its DeepMind lab in London is considered one of the best A.I. research centers in the world, and the company has been a pioneer with A.I. projects, such as self-driving cars and the so-called large language models that are used in the development of chatbots. In recent years, Google has used large language models to improve the quality of its search results, but held off on fully adopting A.I. because it has been prone to generating false and biased statements.
-
Now the priority is winning control of the industry’s next big thing. Last month, Google released its own chatbot, Bard, but the technology received mixed reviews.
-
The system would learn what users want to know based on what they’re searching when they begin using it. And it would offer lists of preselected options for objects to buy, information to research and other information. It would also be more conversational — a bit like chatting with a helpful person.
-
The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162 billion last year.
-
Last week, Google invited some employees to test Magi’s features, and it has encouraged them to ask the search engine follow-up questions to judge its ability to hold a conversation. Google is expected to release the tools to the public next month and add more features in the fall, according to the planning document.
-
The company plans to initially release the features to a maximum of one million people. That number should progressively increase to 30 million by the end of the year. The features will be available exclusively in the United States.
-
Google has also explored efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology with help from A.I. and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot
-
Yet another product, Searchalong, would let users ask a chatbot questions while surfing the web through Google’s Chrome browser. People might ask the chatbot for activities near an Airbnb rental, for example, and the A.I. would scan the page and the rest of the internet for a response.
-
“If we are the leading search engine and this is a new attribute, a new feature, a new characteristic of search engines, we want to make sure that we’re in this race as well,”
20More
shared by Javier E on 06 Jan 24
- No Cached
In 'Equality,' Darrin McMahon shows the path has always been fraught - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...ive-idea-darrin-mcmahon-review
equality history politics culture economics
![](/images/link.gif)
-
When civilizations promote parity along one axis, they tend to lapse back toward hierarchy along another. Legal equality may be offset by widening economic rifts, as in Western democracies today; the expansion of the franchise to a larger segment of the male population may be accompanied by the fervent demonization of women or non-natives, as in ancient Athens; movements for justice may prompt reactionary backlash, as in France after the 1789 revolution.
-
At a time when equality is widely lauded as an uncomplicated good, McMahon’s sweeping if occasionally schematic study provides a thought-provoking reminder of its pitfalls
- ...17 more annotations...
-
lthough the concept of equality may seem intuitive, it is surprisingly difficult to pin down with any precision.
-
“When people speak of equality,” McMahon stresses, “they invariably speak of the equality of something.” The central question is the one so famously and pithily posed by the economist Amartya Sen in his landmark 1979 lecture of the same name: “Equality of what?”
-
McMahon surmises that our foraging forebears were probably staunch egalitarians, at least when it came to the division of labor within their communities.
-
even in the idyllic days of prehistory, there was a catch. Early humans probably adhered to what the anthropologist Christopher Boehm called an “egalitarian hierarchy,” in which, in McMahon’s words, “the many combine to dominate the few,” exiling those who challenged the pecking order (or so those cave paintings seem to suggest)
-
And even though hunter-gatherers probably treated suitably compliant members of their own clans equitably, in-group/out-group rivalries “undoubtedly played a role in the cohesion” that each group achieved internally
-
our ancestors maintained order within by sewing discord without, vying violently with competing clans and expelling (or even killing) upstarts who threatened to distinguish themselves too dramatically from the pack.
-
The very concept of equality, which requires both difference and sameness, generates comparable tensions in almost every society in which some version of it is promoted.
-
, the temptation to maintain harmony within a group by degrading those outside it has been irresistible for centuries — and remains so to this day.
-
But if the monotheistic religions “proclaimed fellowship among the children of God,” McMahon wryly clarifies, they were also “quick to banish from the family those who rejected the faith.
-
Many of the most prominent thinkers of the period considered women and people of color too irrational to merit legal recognition
-
in the 1700s, French revolutionaries inspired by the Enlightenment maintained that equality was a right bestowed on every man by virtue of his intrinsically rational nature
-
“We want to be treated with fairness and on equal terms, accorded recognition and respect,” McMahon writes. “But at the same time we seek distinction, aiming to set ourselves apart.
-
If equality so ineluctably contains the seeds of its own undoing, the moral arc of the universe cannot be trusted to bend toward justice. On the contrary, McMahon argues, equality is not an inevitability but a hard-earned improbability.
-
it is not equality but its opposite that is always encroaching, dogging every attempt at progress, stalking its rival like a shadow, patiently waiting to strike.
-
In his ambitious new book, “Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea,” Dartmouth history professor Darrin M. McMahon proposes that the “elusive idea” in question is expansive enough to vindicate both accounts. His wide-ranging survey of equality throughout the ages demonstrates that progress toward achieving it is almost never linear.
18More
shared by Javier E on 13 Jan 24
- No Cached
Opinion | The Greatest Threat Posed by Trump - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ald-trump-culture-decline.html
trump vice virtue character maga culture history US
![](/images/link.gif)
-
the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.
-
t the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.
-
Already we can see the changes in individual character. In December, I wrote about the moral devolution of Rudy Giuliani and of the other MAGA men and women who have populated the highest echelons of the Trump movement
- ...15 more annotations...
-
what worries me even more is the change I see in ordinary Americans. I live in the heart of MAGA country, and Donald Trump is the single most culturally influential person here. It’s not close. He’s far more influential than any pastor, politician, coach or celebrity. He has changed people politically and also personally. It is common for those outside the Trump movement to describe their aunts or uncles or parents or grandparents as “lost.” They mean their relatives’ lives are utterly dominated by Trump, Trump’s media and Trump’s grievances.
-
never before have I seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.
-
Polling data again and again backs up the reality that the right is abandoning decency, and doing so in the most alarming of ways. It began happening almost immediately with white evangelicals
-
In 2011, they were the American cohort least likely to agree that a politician could commit immoral acts in private yet “still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.”
-
An increasing percentage are now tempted to embrace political violence. Last October, a startling 33 percent of Republicans (and an even larger 41 percent of pro-Trump Americans) agreed with the statement that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
-
That percentage is far higher than the (still troubling) 22 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats who shared the same view.
-
As the Iowa caucuses approached, Trump escalated his language, going so far as to call his political opponents “vermin” and declaring that immigrants entering America illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The statement was so indefensible and repugnant that many expected it to hurt Trump. Yet a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll found that a 42 percent plurality of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers said the statement would make them more likely to support Trump — a substantially greater percentage than the 28 percent who said it would make them less likely to support him.
-
While political violence is hardly exclusive to the right, the hostility and vitriol embedded in MAGA America is resulting in an escalating wave of threats and acts of intimidation.
-
The result is a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue. The fruit of the spirit described in Galatians in the New Testament — “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” — is absent from MAGA Christianity, replaced by the very “works of the flesh” the same passage warned against, including “hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions” and “factions.”
-
in the upside-down world of MAGA morality, vice is virtue and virtue is vice. My colleague Jane Coaston even coined a term, “vice signaling,” to describe how Trump’s core supporters convey their tribal allegiance. They’re often deliberately rude, transgressive or otherwise unpleasant, just to demonstrate how little they care about conventional moral norms.
-
For most of my life, conservative evangelicals (including me) have been fond of quoting John Adams’s 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia. It’s a critical founding document, one that forcefully argues that our Republic needs a virtuous citizenry to survive. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” he asserts. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
-
I’ve appreciated that quote because it recognizes the obligations of a free people in a constitutional republic to exercise their liberty toward virtuous purposes.
-
Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory.
-
if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come.
3More
shared by Javier E on 12 May 24
- No Cached
Biden Needs to Learn From the Democrats' Disaster in '68 - WSJ - 0 views
www.wsj.com/...ocrats-disaster-in-68-9024144a
1960s demonstration Democratic party liberal candidate biden politics
![](/images/link.gif)
-
The conventional wisdom of 1968 was that Humphrey lost to Nixon because he couldn’t find the courage to break with Johnson on a war that a majority of Americans had come to oppose.
-
That’s almost certainly wrong: Disaffected liberals ultimately came back, but disaffected blue-collar voters, who largely supported the war and abhorred the chaos in the streets, defected to Nixon or to George Wallace. (A Harris Poll found that two-thirds of respondents supported the Chicago cops’ tactics.)
-
The shrunken Democratic base that emerged from the election is very much the one the party relies on today: Blacks and well-educated white liberals.
28More
shared by Javier E on 17 Jan 24
- No Cached
Opinion | The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions - The New Yo... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...god-evangelicals-anointed.html
deification trump evangelical populism Christianist crisis culture politics
![](/images/link.gif)
-
The video, along with Eric Trump’s claim that his father “literally saved Christianity” and the image Donald Trump reposted on Truth Social of Jesus sitting next to him in court, raises a question:
-
Does Trump believe that he is God’s messenger, or are his direct and indirect claims to have a special relationship with God a cynical ploy to win evangelical votes?
-
“Over the years since, there has been a growing chorus of voices saying Trump is the defender of Christians and Christianity. Trump says this himself all the time, ‘When they come after me, they’re really coming after you.’”
- ...25 more annotations...
-
Some of Trump’s Christian followers do appear to have grown to see him as a kind of religious figure. He is a savior. I think it began with the sense that he was uniquely committed to saving them from their foes (liberals, Democrats, elites, seculars, illegal immigrants, etc.) and saving America from all that threatens it.
-
In this sense, Gushee continued, “a savior does not have to be a good person but just needs to fulfill his divinely appointed role. Trump is seen by many as actually having done so while president.”
-
This view of Trump is especially strong “in the Pentecostal wing of the conservative Christian world,” Gushee wrote, wherehe is sometimes also viewed as an anointed leader sent by God. “Anointed” here means set apart and especially equipped by God for a holy task. Sometimes the most unlikely people got anointed by God in the Bible. So Trump’s unlikeliness for this role is actually evidence in favor.
-
The prosecutions underway against Trump have been easily interpretable as signs of persecution, which can then connect to the suffering Jesus theme in Christianity. Trump has been able to leverage that with lines like, “They’re not persecuting me. They’re persecuting you.” The idea that he is unjustly suffering and, in so doing, vicariously absorbing the suffering that his followers would be enduring is a powerful way for Trump to be identified with Jesus.
-
Robert P. Jones, the founder and chief executive of P.R.R.I. (formerly the Public Religion Research Institute), contends that Trump’s religious claims are an outright fraud:Trump has given us adequate evidence that he has little religious sensibility or theological acuity. He has scant knowledge of the Bible, he has said that he has never sought forgiveness for his sins, and he has no substantive connection to a church or denomination. He’s not only one of the least religious but also likely one of the most theologically ignorant presidents the country has ever had.
-
Lacking any inner spiritual or moral compass that would seek to deflect overinflated or even idolatrous claims about himself, he instead reposted their artwork and videos and so on. Anyone truly serious about the Christian faith would deflect claims to being a savior or anointed one, but he did not have such brakes operating.
-
there are evangelicals of the charismatic and Pentecostal variety — the so-called New Apostolic Reformation or Independent Network Charismatics — who believe that Donald Trump is an agent of God to rescue the United States from the atheistic, even demonic, secularists and progressives who want to destroy the country by advancing abortion, gay marriage, wokeness, transgenderism, etc.
-
“This whole movement,” Fea wrote,is rooted in prophecy. The prophets speak directly to God and receive direct messages from him about politics. They think that politics is a form of spiritual warfare and believe that God is using Donald Trump to help wage this war. (God can even use sinners to accomplish his will — there are a lot of biblical examples of this, they say.)
-
As far as Trump goes, Fea continued, “he probably thinks these charismatics and Pentecostals are crazy. But if they are going to tell him he is God’s anointed one, he will gladly accept the title and use it if it wins him votes. He will happily accept their prayers because it is politically expedient.”
-
The more interesting case, Gushee wrote,is Trump himself. I accept as given that he entered politics as the amoral, worldly, narcissistic New York businessman that he appeared to be. Like all G.O.P. politicians, he knew he would have to win over the conservative Christian voting bloc so central to the party.
-
Trump, Jones added in an email, “almost certainly lacks the kind of religious sensibility or theological framework necessary to personally grasp what it would even mean to be a Jesus-like, messianic figure.”
-
According to Jones, in order to rationalize this quasi-deification of Trump — despite “his crassness and vulgarity, divorces, mocking of disabled people, his overt racism and a determination by a court that he sexually abused advice columnist E. Jean Carroll” — white evangelicals refer not to Jesus but the Persian King Cyrus from the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible.”
-
Cyrus is the model of an ungodly king who nonetheless frees a group of Jews who are held captive in Babylon. It took white evangelicals themselves a while to settle on an explanation for their support, but this characterization of Trump was solidified in a 2018 film that came out just before the 2018 midterms entitled “The Trump Prophecy,” which portrayed Trump as the only leader who could save America from certain cultural collapse.
-
According to Jones, “White evangelicals’ stalwart, enduring support for Trump tells us much more about who they see themselves to be than who they think Trump is. As I argued in my most recent book, ‘The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy,’” Jones continued in his email, “the primary force animating white evangelical Protestant politics — one that has been with us since before the founding of the Republic — is the vision of America as a nation primarily of, by and for white Christians.”
-
“a majority (56 percent) of white evangelical Protestants, compared to only one-third of all Americans, believed that ‘God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.’”
-
Jones argued that Trump’s declaration on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021 — “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” — was a direct appeal “to this sense of divine entitlement of those who believed this mythology strongly enough to engage in a violent insurrection.”
-
“White evangelicals,” Guth found, “are invariably the most populist: more likely to favor strong leadership (even when that means breaking the rules), to distrust government, to see the country on the wrong track and to think that the majority should always rule (and minorities adapt).”
-
Guth also found thatanother salient trait of populist politics is the willingness to ignore democratic civility. We constructed a “rough politics” score from three A.N.E.S. items: whether protesters deserve what they get if they are hurt in demonstrating, whether the country would be better off if it got rid of rotten apples and whether people are “too sensitive” about political discourse. Here the usual pattern recurs: Evangelical affiliation, evangelical identity and biblical literalism predicts agreement with those assertions, while religious minorities, secular folks and progressives tend to demur.
-
Guth wrote that his “findings help us understand what many have struggled to comprehend: How can white evangelical Protestants continue to provide strong support for President Donald Trump, whose personal values and behavior trample on the biblical and ethical standards professed by that community?”
-
The most common explanation, according to Guth,is that white evangelicals have a transactional relationship with the president: As long as he nominates conservative jurists and makes appropriate gestures on abortion and sexual politics, they will support him.
-
“The evidence here,” he wrote, “suggests a more problematic answer”:White evangelicals share with Trump a multitude of attitudes, including his hostility toward immigrants, his Islamophobia, his racism and nativism, as well as his political style, with its nasty politics and assertion of strong, solitary leadership. Indeed, Trump’s candidacy may have “authorized” for the first time the widespread expression of such attitudes.
-
The pervasive populism of white evangelical laity not only helps explain their support for President Trump but suggests powerful barriers to influence by cosmopolitan internationalist evangelical elites, who want to turn the community in a different direction. As hostile responses to efforts of antipopulist evangelicals like Michael Gerson, Russell Moore, David Platt and many others indicate, there is currently a very limited market for such alternative perspectives among the rank and file.
-
Nor does cosmopolitan or cooperative internationalism find much purchase among local evangelical clergy. Analysis of the 2017 Cooperative Clergy Survey shows that ministers from several evangelical denominations, especially the large Southern Baptist Convention and Assemblies of God, exhibit exactly the same populist traits seen here in white evangelical laity, but in more pronounced form: strong Islamophobia, Christian nationalism, extreme moral traditionalism, opposition to trade pacts, militaristic attitudes, resistance to political compromise and climate change denial, among others.
-
In other words, conservative populism, with all its antidemocratic implications, has taken root in America. What we don’t know is for how long — or how much damage it will do.
17More
shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 24
- No Cached
Opinion | Administrators Will Be the End of Us - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...american-life-bureaucracy.html
bureaucracy administration populism culture history crisis
![](/images/link.gif)
-
I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.
-
. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.”
-
The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review
- ...14 more annotations...
-
there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”
-
This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees
-
The general job of administrators, who are invariably good and well-meaning people, is to supervise and control, and they gain power and job security by hiring more people to work for them to create more supervision and control
-
As Philip K. Howard has been arguing for years, good organizations give people discretion to do what is right. But the trend in public and private sector organizations has been to write rules that rob people of the power of discretion
-
Their power is similar to what Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has called the “time tax.” If you’ve ever fought a health care, corporate or university bureaucracy, you quickly realize you don’t have the time for it, so you give up
-
kids’ activities, from travel sports to recess, are supervised, and rules dominate. Parents are afraid their kids might be harmed, but as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have argued, by being overprotective, parents make their kids more fragile and more vulnerable to harm.
-
High school students design their lives to fit the metrics that college admissions officers require. And what traits are selective schools looking for? They’re looking for students who are willing to conform to the formulas the gatekeepers devise.
-
t Stanford is apparently now tamed. I invite you to read Ginevra Davis’s essay “Stanford’s War on Social Life” in Palladium, which won a vaunted Sidney Award in 2022 and details how university administrators cracked down on student initiatives to make everything boring, supervised and safe.
-
Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia. The annual self-evaluations he had to submit used to be one page. Now he has to fill out about 15 electronic pages of bureaucratese that include demonstrating how his work advances D.E.I., to make sure his every waking moment conforms to the reigning ideology.
-
the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives
-
The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.”
-
this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data
-
Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.
27More
Germany Braces for Decades of Confrontation With Russia - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has begun warning Germans that they should prepare for decades of confrontation with Russia — and that they must speedily rebuild the country’s military in case Vladimir V. Putin does not plan to stop at the border with Ukraine.
-
Russia’s military, he has said in a series of recent interviews with German news media, is fully occupied with Ukraine. But if there is a truce, and Mr. Putin, Russia’s president, has a few years to reset, he thinks the Russian leader will consider testing NATO’s unity.
-
some of Mr. Pistorius’s colleagues are warning that if American funding dries up and Russia prevails, its next target will be closer to Berlin.
- ...24 more annotations...
-
The alarm is growing louder, but the German public remains unconvinced that the security of Germany and Europe has been fundamentally threatened by a newly aggressive Russia.
-
Mr. Pistorius’s status as one of the country’s most popular politicians has given him a freedom to speak that others — including his boss, Chancellor Olaf Scholz — do not enjoy.
-
The prospect of a re-elected Mr. Trump has German officials and many of their fellow NATO counterparts informally discussing whether the nearly 75-year-old alliance structure they are planning to celebrate in Washington this year can survive without the United States at its center. Many German officials say that Mr. Putin’s best strategic hope is NATO’s fracture.
-
Only a year ago NATO was celebrating a new sense of purpose and a new unity, and many were confidently predicting Mr. Putin was on the run.
-
now, with an undependable America, an aggressive Russia and a striving China, as well as a seemingly stalemated war in Ukraine and a deeply unpopular conflict in Gaza, German officials are beginning to talk about the emergence of a new, complicated and troubling world, with severe consequences for European and trans-Atlantic security.
-
“Nobody knows how or whether this will last,” Mr. Pistorius said of the current war, arguing for a rapid buildup in the size of the German military and a restocking of its arsenal.
-
“If Ukraine were forced to surrender, that would not satisfy Russia’s hunger for power,” the chief of Germany’s intelligence service, Bruno Kahl, said last week. “If the West does not demonstrate a clear readiness to defend, Putin will have no reason not to attack NATO anymore.”
-
In the decades since the Soviet Union collapsed, most Germans have grown accustomed to the notions that the country’s security would be assured if it worked with Russia, not against it, and that China is a necessary partner with a critical market for German automobiles and equipment.
-
Mr. Scholz, a Social Democrat whose party traditionally sought decent ties with Moscow, seems reluctant to discuss the far more confrontational future with Russia or China that German defense and intelligence chiefs describe so vividly.
-
few politicians will take on the subject in public. Mr. Scholz is especially careful, tending to Germany’s relationship with the United States and wary of pushing Russia and its unpredictable president too hard.
-
Polls show that Germans want to see a more capable German military. But only 38 percent of those surveyed said they wanted their country to be more involved in international crises, the lowest figure since that question began to be asked in 2017, according to the Körber Foundation, which conducted the survey. Of that group, 76 percent said the engagement should be primarily diplomatic, and 71 percent were against a military leadership role for Germany in Europe.
-
The most vivid example of his caution is his continued refusal to provide Ukraine a long-range, air-launched cruise missile called the Taurus.
-
The Taurus has a range of more than 300 miles, meaning Ukraine could use it to strike deep into Russia. And Mr. Scholz is not willing to take that chance — nor is the country’s Bundestag, which voted against a resolution calling for the transfer. While the decision seems to fit German opinion, Mr. Scholz wants to avoid the subject.
-
Mr. Scholz has moved with great caution. He has opposed — along with Mr. Biden — setting a timetable for Ukraine’s eventual entry into the alliance
-
German military officials recently set off a small outcry when they suggested that the country must be “kriegstüchtig,” which roughly translates to the ability to fight and win a war.
-
Norbert Röttgen, an opposition legislator and a foreign policy expert with the Christian Democrats, said the term was regarded as “rhetorical overreach” and quickly dropped.
-
“Scholz has always said that ‘Ukraine must not lose but Russia must not win,’ which indicated that he’s always thought of an impasse that would lead to a diplomatic process,” Mr. Röttgen said. “He thinks of Russia as more important than all the countries between us and them, and he lacks a European sense and of his possible role as a European leader.”
-
Mr. Scholz clearly feels most comfortable relying heavily on Washington, and senior German officials say he especially mistrusts Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, who has argued for European “strategic autonomy.” Mr. Macron has found few followers on the continent.
-
Even Mr. Scholz’s main European defense initiative, a coordinated ground-based air defense against ballistic missiles known as Sky Shield, depends on a mix of American, American-Israeli and German missile systems.
-
Mr. Scholz’s ambitions are also hamstrung by his increasingly weak economy. It shrank 0.3 percent last year, and roughly the same is expected in 2024. The cost of the Ukraine war and China’s economic problems — which have hit the auto and manufacturing sectors hardest — have exacerbated the problem.
-
While Mr. Scholz acknowledges that the world has changed, “he is not saying that we must change with it,” said Ulrich Speck, a German analyst.
-
Germans, and even the Social Democrats, “have come to the realization that Germany lives in the real world and that hard power matters,”
-
“At the same time,” he said, “there’s still this hope that this is all just a bad dream, and Germans will wake up and be back in the old world.”
19More
shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 24
- No Cached
In Silicon Valley, You Can Be Worth Billions and It's Not Enough - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...olsheimin-insider-trading.html
silicon valley enough rich wealth insider trading cheating ethics
![](/images/link.gif)
-
He got a phone call about the imminent sale of a tech company and allegedly traded on the confidential information, according to charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The profit for a few minutes of work: $415,726.
-
rarely has anyone traded his reputation for seemingly so little reward. For Mr. Bechtolsheim, $415,726 was equivalent to a quarter rolling behind the couch. He was ranked No. 124 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index last week, with an estimated fortune of $16 billion.
-
Last month, Mr. Bechtolsheim, 68, settled the insider trading charges without admitting wrongdoing. He agreed to pay a fine of more than $900,000 and will not serve as an officer or director of a public company for five years.
- ...16 more annotations...
-
Nothing in his background seems to have brought him to this troubling point. Mr. Bechtolsheim was one of those who gave Silicon Valley its reputation as an engineer’s paradise, a place where getting rich was just something that happened by accident.
-
“He cared so much about making great technology that he would buy a house, not furnish it and sleep on a futon,” said Scott McNealy, who joined with Mr. Bechtolsheim four decades ago to create Sun Microsystems, a maker of computer workstations and servers that was a longtime tech powerhouse. “Money was not how he measured himself.”
-
researchers who analyze trading data say corporate executives broadly profit from confidential information. These executives try to avoid traditional insider trading restrictions by buying shares in economically linked firms, a phenomenon called “shadow trading.”
-
“There appears to be significant profits being made from shadow trading,” said Mihir N. Mehta, an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Michigan and an author of a 2021 study in The Accounting Review that found “robust evidence” of the behavior. “The people doing it have a sense of entitlement or maybe just think, ‘I’m invincible.’”
-
He went to Stanford as a Ph.D. student in the mid-1970s and got to know the then-small programming community around the university. In the early 1980s, he, along with Mr. McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Bill Joy, started Sun Microsystems as an outgrowth of a Stanford project. When Sun initially raised money, Mr. Bechtolsheim put his entire life savings — about $100,000 — into the company.
-
“You could end up losing all your money,” he was warned by the venture capitalists financing Sun. His response: “I see zero risk here.”
-
An impromptu demonstration was hastily arranged for 8 a.m., which Mr. Bechtolsheim cut short. He had seen enough, and besides, he had to get to the office. He gave them a check, and the deal was sealed, Mr. Levy wrote, “with as little fanfare as if he were grabbing a latte on the way to work.
-
Mr. Page and Mr. Brin couldn’t deposit Mr. Bechtolsheim’s check for a month because Google did not have a bank account. When Google went public in 2004, that $100,000 investment was worth at least $1 billion.
-
It wasn’t the money that made the story famous, however. It was the way it confirmed one of Silicon Valley’s most cherished beliefs about itself: that its genius is so blindingly obvious, questions are superfluous.
-
The dot-com boom was a disorienting period for longtime Valley leaders whose interest in money was muted. Mr. Bechtolsheim’s Sun colleague Mr. Joy left Silicon Valley.
-
“There’s so much money around, it’s clouding a lot of people’s ethics,” Mr. Joy said in a 1999 oral history
-
Mr. Bechtolsheim didn’t leave. In 2008, he co-founded Arista, a Silicon Valley computer networking company that went public and now has 4,000 employees and a stock market value of $100 billion.
-
Mr. Bechtolsheim was chair of Arista’s board when an executive from another company called in 2019, according to the S.E.C. Arista and the other company, which was not named in court documents, had a history of sharing confidential information under nondisclosure agreements.
-
immediately after hanging up, the government said, he bought Acacia option contracts in the accounts of a close relative and a colleague. The next day, the deal was announced. Acacia shares jumped 35 percent.
-
Arista’s code of conduct states that “employees who possess material, nonpublic information gained through their work at Arista may not trade in Arista securities or the securities of another company to which the information pertains.”
-
Mr. Levy, the “In the Plex” author, said there were plenty of legal ways to make money in Silicon Valley. “Someone who is regarded as an influential funder and is very well connected gets nearly unlimited opportunities to make very desirable early investments,”
17More
Opinion | How to Reboot Free Speech on Campus - The New York Times - 0 views
-
In the course of those cases and confrontations, I’ve learned that the issue of campus protest is remarkably complex and that campus culture is at least as important as law and policy in setting the boundaries of debate.
-
There is profound confusion on campus right now around the distinctions between free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness. At the same time, some schools also seem confused about their fundamental academic mission
-
Does the university believe it should be neutral toward campus activism — protecting it as an exercise of the students’ constitutional rights and academic freedoms, but not cooperating with student activists to advance shared goals — or does it incorporate activism as part of the educational process itself, including by coordinating with the protesters and encouraging their activism?
- ...14 more annotations...
-
The simplest way of outlining the ideal university policy toward protest is to say that it should protect free speech, respect civil disobedience and uphold the rule of law
-
universities should protect the rights of students and faculty on a viewpoint-neutral basis, and they should endeavor to make sure that every member of the campus community has the same access to campus facilities and resources.
-
That also means showing no favoritism between competing ideological groups in access to classrooms, in the imposition of campus penalties and in access to educational opportunities
-
Indefinitely occupying a quad violates the rights of other speakers to use the same space. Relentless, loud protest violates the rights of students to sleep or study in peace. And when protests become truly threatening or intimidating, they can violate the civil rights of other students, especially if those students are targeted on the basis of their race, sex, color or national origin.
-
Noise limits can protect the ability of students to study and sleep. Restricting the amount of time any one group can demonstrate on the limited open spaces on campus permits other groups to use the same space.
-
Civil disobedience is distinct from First Amendment protected speech. It involves both breaking an unjust law and accepting the consequences.
-
In a 1965 appearance on “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the principle perfectly: “When one breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust, he must do it openly, he must do it cheerfully, he must do it lovingly, he must do it civilly — not uncivilly — and he must do it with a willingness to accept the penalty.”
-
But what we’re seeing on a number of campuses isn’t free expression, nor is it civil disobedience. It’s outright lawlessness
-
reasonable time, place and manner restrictions are indispensable in this context. Time, place and manner restrictions are content-neutral legal rules that enable a diverse community to share the same space and enjoy equal rights.
-
For many administrators, the very idea of neutrality is repugnant. It represents a form of complicity in injustice that they simply can’t and won’t stomach. So they nurture and support one side. They scorn the opposition, adopting a de facto posture that says, “To my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
-
In March, a small band of pro-Palestinian students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville pushed past a security guard so aggressively that they injured him, walked into a university facility that was closed to protest, and briefly occupied the building. The university had provided ample space for protest, and both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students had been speaking and protesting peacefully on campus since Oct. 7.
-
But these students weren’t engaged in free speech. Nor were they engaged in true civil disobedience. Civil disobedience does not include assault, and within hours the university shut them down. Three students were arrested in the assault on the security guard, and one was arrested on charges of vandalism. More than 20 students were subjected to university discipline; three were expelled; and one was suspended.
-
The University of Chicago has long adhered to the Kalven principles, a statement of university neutrality articulated in 1967 by a committee led by one of the most respected legal scholars of the last century, Harry Kalven Jr. At their heart, the Kalven principles articulate the view that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars.”
10More
China Feels Boxed In by the U.S. but Has Few Ways to Push Back - The New York Times - 0 views
-
President Biden’s effort to build American security alliances in China’s backyard is likely to reinforce the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s view that Washington is leading an all-out campaign of “containment, encirclement and suppression” of his country. And there is not much Mr. Xi can do about it.
-
To China, Mr. Biden’s campaign looks nothing short of a reprise of the Cold War, when the world was split into opposing blocs. In this view, Beijing is being hemmed in by U.S. allies and partners, in a cordon stretching over the seas on China’s eastern coast from Japan to the Philippines, along its disputed Himalayan border with India, and even across the vast Pacific Ocean to a string of tiny, but strategic, island nations.
-
The summit ended with agreements to hold more naval and coast guard joint exercises, and pledges of new infrastructure investment and technology cooperation. It builds on a groundbreaking defense pact made at Camp David last August between Mr. Biden and the leaders of Japan and South Korea, as well as on plans unveiled last year to work with Australia and Britain to develop and deploy nuclear-powered attack submarines.
- ...7 more annotations...
-
“China is clearly alarmed by these developments,” said Jingdong Yuan, director of the China and Asia Security Program at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. “Chinese interpretations would be that the U.S. and its allies have clearly decided that China needs to be contained.”
-
aside from pointed words and the perfunctory maritime patrol, Beijing’s options to push back against U.S. pressure appear limited, analysts said, especially as China contends with slowing economic growth and mounting trade frictions.
-
Whether Mr. Biden’s strategy succeeds in deterring China in the long run remains to be seen. Nationalists in China view American alliances as fragile and subject to the whims of each U.S. presidential election. Then there’s Mr. Xi, who perceives the West to be in structural decline, and China’s ascendance as Asia’s dominant power to be inevitable.
-
“The Americans should not think so highly of themselves. They could not solve Afghanistan or Ukraine,” said Zheng Yongnian, an influential political scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s campus in Shenzhen. He said that China still hoped to resolve its disputes peacefully. “The reason we are not touching the Philippines is not that we are afraid of the United States.”
-
Beijing’s room to maneuver against Washington is limited by its struggling economy, which has been hit by a property crisis and a cratering of foreign investment. China has been increasing exports, but that has already caused friction with countries concerned about a flood of cheap Chinese goods.
-
The broader American pressure campaign may also be nudging China to avoid escalating tensions further. Despite its differences with the United States, China is engaging in talks between the countries’ leaders and senior officials. Relations with some neighbors, such as Australia, are slowly thawing. Analysts have noted that Beijing has also avoided escalating its military presence around Taiwan in recent months, despite the island’s election of a leader the Communist Party loathes.
-
“They are definitely being more cautious and demonstrating a willingness to engage,” Ja Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, said of Beijing. “They are realizing there are actual risks to letting frictions escalate. We just haven’t seen any substantive compromises yet.”
16More
Trump's anger at courts, frayed alliances could upend approach to judicial issues - The... - 0 views
-
Under the Trump administration, the GOP-controlled Senate confirmed 174 district court judges, 54 circuit court judges and three Supreme Court justices — shifting the balance of the highest court to a 6-3 conservative majority. During his campaign rallies and events, Trump often likes to highlight the total, though he has exaggerated it.
-
In a 2022 interview with The Washington Post, McConnell recalled that Trump’s first candidacy had worried many conservatives at the time but that his Supreme Court list and picks had calmed their nerves and that his bargain with Trump had moved the country “right of center.”
-
McConnell and Trump have not spoken since late 2020, and Trump has repeatedly called for McConnell to be removed as the GOP leader of the Senate.
- ...13 more annotations...
-
Trump and Leo, a prominent conservative lawyer influential in his first term, have not spoken since 2020, according to people familiar with the matter. Their relationship ended over a heated fight in 2020 at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump accused Leo of picking Rod J. Rosenstein to be deputy attorney general, a person familiar with the matter said. Trump’s anger around Rosenstein centered on his decision to appoint special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to oversee the Justice Department’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election
-
Trump has signaled that he wants the Justice Department to go after his political opponents, and his associates have drafted plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, which would allow him to send the military against civil demonstrations. Near the end of his time in the White House, he repeatedly complained that his White House Counsel’s Office wasn’t doing enough to help him overturn the election results. His attorney general resigned after he would not back up his claims.
-
“He’s the leading candidate, so I don’t know that it matters what I think,” said Brent O. Hatch, a lawyer who is on the board of the Federalist Society.
-
Although Trump reshaped the Supreme Court while in office, leading to the overturning of Roe, he has sometimes told others that the decision is a political albatross for Republicans. And he has complained recently at rallies about the Supreme Court and the decisions the judges make, saying without evidence they rule too often against Republicans to show “independence.”
-
Trump is running on a campaign focused, at least in part, on vengeance and retribution. The former president has made it clear that loyalty would be a key criteria in how he makes decisions if returned to office.
-
Most members of the Federalist Society board of directors declined to comment on the record or did not respond to a request for comment. Interviews with a dozen other prominent lawyers suggested most had serious misgivings about Trump returning to power but were resigned to the high likelihood he will be the nominee, and many expressed openness to working for another Trump administration.
-
There is a heated debate underway in conservative legal circles about how GOP lawyers should interact with what increasingly appears to be the likely nominee, according to conservative lawyers who described the private talks on the condition of anonymity. The discussions include whether they would return to work for Trump.
-
One prominent lawyer described a November dinner he attended where almost all the attorneys in the room said they would prefer another nominee — but were split on whether to back Trump if he wins
-
Leo, McConnell and McGahn have expressed reservations about what another Trump term would look like, though they have largely stayed away from a public fight.
-
Some of the informal conversations and debates underway in conservative legal circles about a second Trump term include Project 2025, a coalition of right-wing groups that has outlined plans for the next Republican administration. Clark, who is working on the Insurrection Act for Project 2025, has been charged with violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering law, in the case alleging Trump and co-conspirators of interfering in the 2020 election. Clark pleaded guilty.
-
The involvement of Clark with that effort has alarmed some other conservative lawyers who view him as a potentially disastrous choice to take a senior leadership role at the department because of his past activities around the 2020 election.
-
Rob Kelner, a prominent conservative lawyer, said more conservative lawyers should have spoken up against Trump, but that it would cost them business and relationships.
-
“There were so many positions he took and so many statements that he made that flatly contradicted the foundational principles of the conservative movement and the Federalist Society, and yet it was so rare to hear conservative lawyers speak out against Trump,” Kelner said.
8More
Republicans begin to target Putin 'apologists' in their midst - The Washington Post - 0 views
-
The thing about the Republican Party is that it’s not so much that it likes Putin or even thinks he’s an okay guy. Polling last year showed fewer than 1 in 10 Republicans had a favorable view of Putin or trusted him to do the right thing on the world stage, and Republicans said 76 percent to 16 percent that Putin is a war criminal. These are not in line with Carlson’s professed worldview.
-
But a significant and influential segment of the party has demonstrated a tendency toward a brand of moral relativism and even authoritarianism that creates an opening for giving Putin a pass.
-
Shortly after it was revealed in late 2016 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump, an Economist/YouGov poll showed a sharp increase in favorable GOP views of Putin. Suddenly, 37 percent had a favorable view, and 47 percent had an unfavorable one. Just 14 percent had a “very” unfavorable view of him.
- ...5 more annotations...
-
Early 2017 Gallup data echoed this. It showed 32 percent of Republicans suddenly liked the man who had just interfered in an American election.
-
Another poll I keep coming back to comes from Vanderbilt University last year. Even a year into Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it showed a majority of MAGA Republicans (52 percent) said Putin was a better president than Joe Biden.
-
Maybe these Republicans just disliked Biden that much, or maybe they saw something admirable in Putin’s strongman mystique (a sentiment Trump has spent years cultivating). It certainly wouldn’t be the only evidence of Trump supporters flirting with the merits of authoritarianism.
-
Regardless, the data show how, when these loud voices on the right project softness on Putin or his invasion of Ukraine, there’s a willingness to hear that out — even if the base doesn’t actually like Putin. Influential voices on the right have spent years creating a permission structure for shrugging at things like Navalny’s death (see: Jamal Khashoggi).
-
there’s been little in the way of a desire to fight back against these noisy and influential forces — in part because that would entail going against the most powerful Republican and the onetime most influential conservative commentator.
13More
For the Love of Justice - by Damon Linker - 0 views
-
Thanks to social media, gaining widespread public attention for oneself and one’s favored causes has never been easier.
-
This has incentivized a lot of performative outrage that sometimes manifests itself in acts of protest, from environmental activists throwing soup on paintings in European museums to pro-Palestinian demonstrators halting traffic in major cities by sitting down en masse in the middle of roadways.
-
I don’t think they do much to advance the aims of the activists. In fact, I think they often backfire, generating ill-will among ordinary citizens inconvenienced by the protest. (As for the activists hoping to fight climate change by destroying works of art, I don’t even grasp what they think they’re doing with their lives.)
- ...10 more annotations...
-
there’s a deeper reason for my harsh judgment, which is that I’m fully committed to the liberal project of domesticating and taming the most intense political passions, ultimately channeling them into representative political institutions, where they are forced to reach accommodation and compromise with contrary views held by other members of the polity.
-
(This is hard to see if you conveniently associate such love exclusively with positions staked out by your ideological or partisan allies. In reality, the political ambitions of one’s opponents are often fueled by their own contrary convictions about justice and its demands.
-
My liberal commitments therefore make me maximally suspicious of most examples of “street politics,” especially forms of it in which the activists risk very little and primarily appear to be engaging in a spiritually fulfilling form of socializing with likeminded peers.
-
But Bushnell’s act of self-immolation belongs in a different category altogether—one distinct from just about every other form of protest,
-
Bushnell could have written an op-ed. He could have joined, organized, or led a march and delivered a speech. He could have built up a loud social-media presence and used it to accuse the United States of complicity in genocide and publicize the accusation. He could have leveraged his position in the Air Force to draw added attention to his dissent from Biden administration policy in the Middle East. He could even have embraced terrorism and sought to gain entry to the Israeli embassy with a weapon or explosive
-
But Bushnell didn’t do any of these things. Instead, a few hours before his act of protest, he posted the following message on Facebook:
-
Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.
-
I will no longer be complicit in genocide…. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
-
And then, like a small number of other intensely committed individuals down through the decades, he doused himself in a flammable liquid and set himself ablaze, opting to sacrifice his own life in a public act of excruciating self-torture, without doing anything at all to harm anyone but himself, in order to draw attention to what he considered an ongoing, intolerable injustice.
31More
The Influencer Is a Young Teenage Girl. The Audience Is 92% Adult Men. - WSJ - 0 views
-
Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that, upon recognizing that an account might be sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends child accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults.
-
That algorithm has become the engine powering the growth of an insidious world in which young girls’ online popularity is perversely predicated on gaining large numbers of male followers.
-
Instagram photos of young girls become a dark currency, swapped and discussed obsessively among men on encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram. The Journal reviewed dozens of conversations in which the men fetishized specific body parts and expressed pleasure in knowing that many parents of young influencers understand that hundreds, if not thousands, of pedophiles have found their children online.
- ...28 more annotations...
-
One man, speaking about one of his favorite young influencers in a Telegram exchange captured by a child-safety activist, said that her mother knew “damn well” that many of her daughter’s followers were “pervy adult men.”
-
Meta looms over everything young influencers do on Instagram. It connects their accounts with strangers, and it can upend their star turns when it chooses. The company periodically shuts down accounts if it determines they have violated policies against child sexual exploitation or abuse. Some parents say their accounts have been shut down without such violations.
-
Over the course of reporting this story, during which time the Journal inquired about the account the mom managed for her daughter, Meta shut down the account twice. The mom said she believed she hadn’t violated Meta’s policies.
-
Meta’s guidance for content creators stresses the importance of engaging with followers to keep them and attract new ones. The hundreds of comments on any given post included some from other young fashion influencers, but also a large number of men leaving comments like “Gorgeous!” The mom generally liked or thanked them all, save for any that were expressly inappropriate.
-
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company enables parents who run accounts for their children to control who is able to message them on Instagram or comment on their accounts. Meta’s guidance for creators also offers tips for building a safe online community, and the company has publicized a range of tools to help teens and parents achieve this.
-
Like many young girls, the daughter envied fashion influencers who made a living posting glamour content. When the mother agreed to help her daughter build her following and become an influencer, she set some rules. Her daughter wouldn’t be allowed to access the account or interact with anyone who sent messages. And they couldn’t post anything indicating exactly where they live.
-
The mom stopped blocking so many users. Within a year of launching, the account had more than 100,000 followers. The daughter’s popularity earned her invitations to modeling events in big coastal cities where she met other young influencers.
-
Social-media platforms have helped level the playing field for parents seeking an audience for their children’s talents. Instagram, in particular, is visually driven and easily navigable, which also makes it appealing for child-focused brands.
-
While Meta bans children under the age of 13 from independently opening social-media accounts, the company allows what it calls adult-run minor accounts, managed by parents. Often those accounts are pursuing influencer status, part of a burgeoning global influencer industry expected to be worth $480 billion by 2027, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report.
-
Young influencers, reachable through direct messages, routinely solicit their followers for patronage, posting links to payment accounts and Amazon gift registries in their bios.
-
The Midwestern mom debated whether to charge for access to extra photos and videos via Instagram’s subscription feature. She said she has always rejected private offers to buy photos of her daughter, but she decided that offering subscriptions was different because it didn’t involve a one-on-one transaction.
-
The Journal asked Meta why it had at some points removed photos from the account. Weeks later, Meta disabled the account’s subscription feature, and then shut down the account without saying why.
-
“There’s no personal connection,” she said. “You’re just finding a way to monetize from this fame that’s impersonal.”
-
The mom allowed the men to purchase subscriptions so long as they kept their distance and weren’t overtly inappropriate in messages and comments. “In hindsight, they’re probably the scariest ones of all,” she said.
-
Stone, the Meta spokesman, said that the company will no longer allow accounts that primarily post child-focused content to offer subscriptions or receive gifts, and that the company is developing tools to enforce that.
-
he mom saw her daughter, though young, as capable of choosing to make money as an influencer and deciding when she felt uncomfortable. The mom saw her own role as providing the support needed for her daughter to do that.
-
The mom also discussed safety concerns with her now ex-husband, who has generally supported the influencer pursuit. In an interview, he characterized the untoward interest in his daughter as “the seedy underbelly” of the industry, and said he felt comfortable with her online presence so long as her mom posted appropriate content and remained vigilant about protecting her physical safety.
-
an anonymous person professing to be a child-safety activist sent her an email that contained screenshots and videos showing her daughter’s photos being traded on Telegram. Some of the users were painfully explicit about their sexual interest. Many of the photos were bikini or leotard photos from when the account first started.
-
Still, the mom realized she couldn’t stop men from trading the photos, which will likely continue to circulate even after her daughter becomes an adult. “Every little influencer with a thousand or more followers is on Telegram,” she said. “They just don’t know it.”
-
Early last year, Meta safety staffers began investigating the risks associated with adult-run accounts for children offering subscriptions, according to internal documents. The staffers reviewed a sample of subscribers to such accounts and determined that nearly all the subscribers demonstrated malicious behavior toward children.
-
The staffers found that the subscribers mostly liked or saved photos of children, child-sexualizing material and, in some cases, illicit underage-sex content. The users searched the platform using hashtags such as #sexualizegirls and #tweenmodel.
-
The staffers found that some accounts with large numbers of followers sold additional content to subscribers who offered extra money on Instagram or other platforms, and that some engaged with subscribers in sexual discussions about their children. In every case, they concluded that the parents running those accounts knew that their subscribers were motivated by sexual gratification.
-
In the following months, the Journal began its own review of parent-run modeling accounts and found numerous instances where Meta wasn’t enforcing its own child-safety policies and community guidelines.
-
The Journal asked Meta about several accounts that appeared to have violated platform rules in how they promoted photos of their children. The company deleted some of those accounts, as well as others, as it worked to address safety issues.
-
In 2022, Instagram started letting certain content creators offer paid-subscription services. At the time, the company allowed accounts featuring children to offer subscriptions if they were run or co-managed by parents.
-
The removal of the account made for a despondent week for the mom and daughter. The mother was incensed at Meta’s lack of explanation and the prospect that users had falsely reported inappropriate activity on the account. She was torn about what to do. When it was shut down, the account had roughly 80% male followers.
-
The account soon had more than 100,000 followers, about 92% of whom were male, according to the dashboard. Within months, Meta shut down that account as well. The company said the account had violated its policies related to child exploitation, but it didn’t specify how.
-
Meta’s Stone said it doesn’t allow accounts it has previously shut down to resume the same activity on backup accounts.
43More
shared by Javier E on 31 Jul 24
- No Cached
(2) The Problems of Plenty - by Lawrence Freedman - 0 views
samf.substack.com/...the-problems-of-plenty
plenty scarcity IR climate change history culture politics international global commons
![](/images/link.gif)
-
with all these diverse issues, whether it's International monetary relations, alliance relations, concerns about the German question, nuclear strategy, and troop withdrawals, you'll have an expert in charge of each. But it's only at the top that these issues are all tied together.
-
President Kennedy, day after day after day, in 61 and 62 through 63, might have eight meetings. One might involve tax cuts, another the crisis with US steel, and the Test Ban Treaty, Berlin, and the balance of payments. Then different people would be in different meetings. So Carl Kaysen would deal with his portfolio and he would come in for one or maybe two of those meetings. Only at the top was some consideration given to all these issues. So in a president or prime minister's mind, the German question would be related to the balance of payments, which would be related to tax cuts, which would be related to Berlin, in a way that a mid-level person might not see.
-
It's sort of the reverse of the bureaucratic politics model. I started seeing that these issues got tied together in a way that many mid-level people would not see, but was understood at the top where grand strategy was made.
- ...40 more annotations...
-
LF: You made an interesting point about political scientists. They do have a problem in that once you start expanding from your narrow area to take in other areas there are just too many variables. There are too many things to track
-
Do you think this gives historians an advantage over political scientists because while they may not be scientifically robust they can explain things better?
-
And, to my mind, doing great violence both to this history, which is far more complex, and to the current set of circumstances which may or may not be relevant to whatever that past tells us
-
But. and I'm being just a tiny bit flip here, 90 percent of IR theory comes down to three historical questions: What caused the First World War? Was Hitler unique? And how did nuclear weapons affect international politics? Those are all historical questions.
-
I had the great fortune of being trained by Mark Trachtenberg. You can use some of the advantages that IR theory and political science provide, which is a certain level of precision.
-
But, taking a historical perspective, you see not just these horizontal connections but also complexity, contingency, chance, circumstances. You become very suspicious of importing historical lessons from the past in total to the present, which you see these days with what people believe to be lessons from the Cold War, the 1930s or Wilhelmine Germany.
-
I kind of grew up with IR theory. It's an enormously powerful lens to help make sense of the world. It exposes underlying assumptions about research, design, causality and agency.
-
That problem looked similar to others that we will see coming down the road, be it new emerging technology, the climate crisis, anything involving the ‘Global Commons.’ I was struck that this was a wake-up call
-
Yet global public health was the low hanging fruit of international political cooperation. We knew this was coming. We knew what to do and we failed miserably.
-
Russia's behaviour demonstrates that there are other factors involved that drive states to conflict that have not gone away. It's just that a very particular form of war, of unlimited imperial expansion, makes no sense now for states to pursue
-
I was disturbed by the fact that the ease with which people began to look at the world through an old lens. With Russia's horrendous invasion of Ukraine there was almost a sense of, well, we know what this is. It looks like World War Two. We have the models to deal with this. This gives us a focus because we have no idea how to deal with these other sets of global problems. The return of great power politics seemed to excuse serious study of these other challenges, which to me were sort of catastrophic.
-
as a historian I was struck that we use established models to understand international politics without accounting for the profound changes we've gone through, including the doubling of life expectancy.
-
That got me into studying and thinking about these issues and inspired me to dive into looking into how a world of scarcity had changed to one of plenty, and how that might change perspectives on how international relations works.
-
The difference between the world we live in today and the past is that scarcity was an actual physical limit. In the 19th century there was nothing you could do necessarily to produce more food, more fuel, more clean water, more housing. Whereas today we have it completely within our means to solve these scarcity issues.
-
When those scarcity issues exist it's often the consequence either of some political issue or of us not doing more to alleviate these issues of scarcity. So scarcity today is the result of political circumstances, not a hard physical limit as it was in the past.
-
In the past, human beings could not get access to the basic resources they need in a consistent way that was predictable. That problem theoretically is now gone. It is not applied universally
-
If you look at life expectancy curves, the increases pretty much everywhere are extraordinary. In China, which was unimaginably poor, life expectancy has actually surpassed the United States.
-
The COVID-19 global crisis killed upwards of 20 million people, which is the equivalent of a World War, and was a failure of international cooperation and national domestic responses. Liberal democratic states did poorly; authoritarian states did poorly.
-
These circumstances were changing underneath in ways that were not recognised. Taming scarcity involved unbelievable increases in agricultural and economic productivity. At the same time there was an unexpected demographic compression where people just stopped having as many kids as expected. This was combined with a variety of other forces including improved governance and massive increases in information about the world. This meant that the historical forces that drove imperial plunder make literally no sense today
-
European and global politics from the late 19th century to, say, the middle of the 20th century reflected very particular historical circumstances. These drove Imperial conquest. During that period, there was a need for territory to feed populations that were seen as growing geometrically. Those wars of imperial conquest generated many of the disasters both on the European continent and globally
-
Its hard to imagine now that a geopolitical empire could pull that off. China is actually facing a declining population. People live in cities. They don't need more land.
-
FG: Even though the problems of plenty were created by developed Western states they hit hard most on states trying to make the transition. So climate change, public health, and inequality affects these states more
-
The states that have this wealth need people who are drawn in through migration or the efforts to migrate. This is the most divisive political issue globally right now in developed states. The rise of populism in the US and Europe is bound up with the politics of migration, which is a problem of plenty because that generates the magnet that attracts people
-
In the end, are individual states going to have to work out how to handle these issues in their own ways, or do we need new forms of multilateralism?
-
FG: I would say it's both. It's a manifesto and I’ve tried to think of some specific policy consequences.
-
I did a piece for Foreign Policy in which the model I used was of an alien who comes down to Earth every 50 years to assess the situation
-
Secondly, the problems of plenty, the climate and pandemics, represent the only truly existential threat
-
The alien would say, why is everyone so sad? I don't have a full explanation but we have deeply bitter, angry politics and some of this has been caused by plenty.
-
what I say in the essay is that China does terrible things - repression, the Uyghurs, the crackdown on Hong Kong, coercive threats in the South China Sea and Taiwan, its economic policies. It is not a good actor. But what I say is:
-
in 2024 I'm looking at the numbers, and you live longer. You have this great technology. All the information in the world can be accessed by anyone in this tiny little device for free. On the one hand, under the lingering shadow of our Marxist training, we've done really well. We have great wealth, but we could distribute it better. We've got great technology, but people are miserable. People feel this deep sense of enmity and of anger. That needs to be studied and understood.
-
if Taiwan were suddenly to be taken over by China, it would not be an existential threat to the United States. It's a very challenging problem, but they need to ask, is this an irredentist problem, that is similar to what happens whenever you have divided two states, whether its the Korean Peninsula, the Middle East, or Kashmi
-
First, there's one specific threat that can cause World War Three, which is this very difficult challenge of Taiwan. This leads to the question whether China wants Taiwan as an irredentist objective, or is it the beginning of some 1930s like bid for geopolitical hegemony?
-
We know another pandemic will come and imagine one with more lethality. And don't we have an obligation - both China and the United States - to find some way to work together on these issues even while the other competition persists.
-
During the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in a far deeper, more bitter ideological and geopolitical political battle that almost ended with a thermonuclear exchange. Yet they worked together to solve two of the greatest problems that plagued humanity. First, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, where they came together in 1968 with the UK to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, as a shared responsibility.
-
At the same time, they worked together at lower levels to eliminate smallpox, a disease that had killed twice as many people as all the wars combined in the 20s century
-
if these two powers, whose geopolitical and ideological competition was an order of magnitude worse than anything that exists between the United States and China today, could figure out a way to work together why not these two powers now?
-
If somehow the United States figures out a cure for cancer and at the same time China figures out a cure to the climate crisis would we really not want them to share this with each other and Europe and everyone else?
-
And as terrible and tragic as the war in Ukraine is and as threatening and terrifying as Cross Strait relations are between the United States and China, so that they demand attention, neither is existential unless we let them become so.