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Javier E

Opinion | The Repeal of Affirmative Action Is Only the Beginning - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tion-supreme-court-repeal.html

affirmative action race diversity inequality culture policy history politics

shared by Javier E on 01 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Let’s be honest about the painful reality: America has functioned as a full democracy — guaranteeing the franchise to all — for less than one human lifetime. In practice, our democracy is younger than me.
  • I was born in 1959, into an America rived by apartheid
  • During the first two decades of my life, the American people finally acknowledged this truth and, to borrow a phrase, acted affirmatively to address it
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  • In the Court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts held that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it”—a new version of his old affront that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
  • This glib framing, and the school of thinking it represents, established a pernicious, false moral equivalence. Those who preserved and protected Jim Crow — the institution that defended America’s old racial hierarchy — were and are something altogether different from those who fought and who continue fighting for a more just America.
  • Those uprooting affirmative action seem content to leave intact systems that compound privilege, exacerbating inequality — like legacy admissions policies that disproportionately favor wealthy, white applicants — resulting in lower-income students and families of all races losing out.
  • I find it regrettable that, over 40 years ago, Justice Lewis Powell introduced the American public to the imperative of diversity in the shallow manner that he did.
  • I was a freshman in college when his seminal opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) invited some to equate the benefits of diversity with unfairness
  • the idea that necessary diversity initiatives are somehow reverse discrimination or that they correlate with lower standards or lesser outcomes.
  • The data suggests exactly the opposite. Study after study demonstrates that, across organizations, diversity enhances critical thinking, creativity and collaboration, as well as productivity, profitability and performance.
  • we should tell the truth about why diversity is now controversial: Opponents of diversity are opponents of any racial consciousness. They want to prevent us from understanding the ways that the past informs the present, from wrestling with the fullness and richness and complexity of our history.
Javier E

'Conflict' Review: How Wars Are Fought and Won - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...rs-are-fought-and-won-e52d7a8d

conflict war modern conventional partnership dictatorship big picture history crisis military

shared by Javier E on 17 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • “Conflict” brings together one of America’s top military thinkers and Britain’s pre-eminent military historian to examine the evolution of warfare since 1945. Retired Gen. David Petraeus, who co-authored the U.S. Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency warfare and oversaw the troop surge in Iraq in 2007, brings a professional eye to politico-military strategy. Andrew Roberts, who has been writing on military leadership since the early 1990s, offers an “arc of history” approach to the subject of mass destruction.
  • The pair’s ambitious goals: to provide some context to the tapestry of modern conflict and a glimpse of wars to come.
  • The book begins with the early struggles of the postwar era. China’s brutal civil war, the authors observe, demonstrated “that guerrilla warfare undertaken according to Maoist military principles by smaller forces could ultimately be successful against a Western-backed government.”
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  • the authors argue that the first job of a strategic leader is to get the big ideas right. Those who have succeeded include Gerald Templer, who became Britain’s high commissioner for Malaya in 1952 and whose reference to winning “the hearts and minds of the people,”
  • “remains the most succinct explanation for how to win a counter-insurgency.”
  • By contrast, the nationalist forces in China, the French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam got the big ideas wrong and paid a steep price.
  • On the 2021 collapse of Afghanistan’s government troops, who had been so expensively trained and equipped under Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden, Mr. Petraeus remarks that “the troops were brave enough—the 66,000 dead Afghan soldiers killed during the war attest to that. But they fought for an often corrupt and incompetent government that never gained the trust and confidence of local communities, which had historically determined the balance of power within Afghanistan.”
  • Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 serves as the book’s case study on how badly Goliath can stumble against David
  • Elon Musk’s control of the Starlink satellite internet system, they note, gave him a unique veto power over Ukrainian operations in Crimea. “With individual tycoons such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos wielding such extraordinary power,” the authors tell us, “wars of the future will have to take their influence into account.”
  • The final chapter teases out the contours of future conflicts. Artificial intelligence, strategic mineral monopolies and “hybrid wars”—where weapons include deepfake disinformation, political manipulation, proxy forces and cyberattacks—cap an incisive look at the next phase of warfare. “Hybrid warfare particularly appeals to China and Russia, since they are much more able to control the information their populaces receive than are their Western adversaries,”
  • . And with the line between limited and total wars growing fuzzier every year, the combatant of the next war might be a woman sitting at a drone desk, a computer geek hacking into a power grid or a robotics designer refining directed-energy weapons systems.
  • “Conflict” is, in some ways, an extension of Mr. Roberts’s thesis in “The Storm of War” (2009)—that dictatorships tend to crack under the stress of a sustained war against popular democracies. While autocracies enjoy some advantages at war’s outset—they are nimble and can achieve true strategic surprise, for instance—if the sucker punch doesn’t end the fight quickly, democracies, shocked into action, may bring to bear more motivated, more efficient and often larger forces to turn the tide.
  • Both men see modern military history as a succession of partnerships created to counter violent challenges from nationalists, terrorists and dictators.
Javier E

Among the Disrupted - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...among-the-disrupted.html

humanism tech technocracy universalism posthumanism culture history crisis

shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • even as technologism, which is not the same as technology, asserts itself over more and more precincts of human life, so too does scientism, which is not the same as science.
  • The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions, and that nonscientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings if they are to qualify as knowledge, is increasingly popular inside and outside the university,
  • The contrary insistence that the glories of art and thought are not evolutionary adaptations, or that the mind is not the brain, or that love is not just biology’s bait for sex, now amounts to a kind of heresy.
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  • So, too, does the view that the strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods
  • — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian character, so that individuals can know more than how things work, and develop their powers of discernment and judgment, their competence in matters of truth and goodness and beauty, to equip themselves adequately for the choices and the crucibles of private and public life.
  • We are not becoming transhumanists, obviously. We are too singular for the Singularity. But are we becoming posthumanists?
  • In American culture right now, as I say, the worldview that is ascendant may be described as posthumanism.
  • The posthumanism of the 1970s and 1980s was more insular, an academic affair of “theory,” an insurgency of professors; our posthumanism is a way of life, a social fate.
  • In “The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973,” the gifted essayist Mark Greif, who reveals himself to be also a skillful historian of ideas, charts the history of the 20th-century reckonings with the definition of “man.
  • Here is his conclusion: “Anytime your inquiries lead you to say, ‘At this moment we must ask and decide who we fundamentally are, our solution and salvation must lie in a new picture of ourselves and humanity, this is our profound responsibility and a new opportunity’ — just stop.” Greif seems not to realize that his own book is a lasting monument to precisely such inquiry, and to its grandeur
  • “Answer, rather, the practical matters,” he counsels, in accordance with the current pragmatist orthodoxy. “Find the immediate actions necessary to achieve an aim.” But before an aim is achieved, should it not be justified? And the activity of justification may require a “picture of ourselves.” Don’t just stop. Think harder. Get it right.
  • Greif’s book is a prehistory of our predicament, of our own “crisis of man.” (The “man” is archaic, the “crisis” is not.) It recognizes that the intellectual history of modernity may be written in part as the epic tale of a series of rebellions against humanism
  • Who has not felt superior to humanism? It is the cheapest target of all: Humanism is sentimental, flabby, bourgeois, hypocritical, complacent, middlebrow, liberal, sanctimonious, constricting and often an alibi for power
  • what is humanism? For a start, humanism is not the antithesis of religion, as Pope Francis is exquisitely demonstrating
  • The worldview takes many forms: a philosophical claim about the centrality of humankind to the universe, and about the irreducibility of the human difference to any aspect of our animality
  • a methodological claim about the most illuminating way to explain history and human affairs, and about the essential inability of the natural sciences to offer a satisfactory explanation; a moral claim about the priority, and the universal nature, of certain values, not least tolerance and compassion
  • And posthumanism? It elects to understand the world in terms of impersonal forces and structures, and to deny the importance, and even the legitimacy, of human agency.
  • There have been humane posthumanists and there have been inhumane humanists. But the inhumanity of humanists may be refuted on the basis of their own worldview
  • the condemnation of cruelty toward “man the machine,” to borrow the old but enduring notion of an 18th-century French materialist, requires the importation of another framework of judgment. The same is true about universalism, which every critic of humanism has arraigned for its failure to live up to the promise of a perfect inclusiveness
  • there has never been a universalism that did not exclude. Yet the same is plainly the case about every particularism, which is nothing but a doctrine of exclusion; and the correction of particularism, the extension of its concept and its care, cannot be accomplished in its own name. It requires an idea from outside, an idea external to itself, a universalistic idea, a humanistic idea.
  • Asking universalism to keep faith with its own principles is a perennial activity of moral life. Asking particularism to keep faith with its own principles is asking for trouble.
  • there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life
  • Here is a humanist proposition for the age of Google: The processing of information is not the highest aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and neither is competitiveness in a global economy. The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.
  • “Our very mastery seems to escape our mastery,” Michel Serres has anxiously remarked. “How can we dominate our domination; how can we master our own mastery?”
  • universal accessibility is not the end of the story, it is the beginning. The humanistic methods that were practiced before digitalization will be even more urgent after digitalization, because we will need help in navigating the unprecedented welter
  • Searches for keywords will not provide contexts for keywords. Patterns that are revealed by searches will not identify their own causes and reasons
  • The new order will not relieve us of the old burdens, and the old pleasures, of erudition and interpretation.
  • Is all this — is humanism — sentimental? But sentimentality is not always a counterfeit emotion. Sometimes sentiment is warranted by reality.
  • The persistence of humanism through the centuries, in the face of formidable intellectual and social obstacles, has been owed to the truth of its representations of our complexly beating hearts, and to the guidance that it has offered, in its variegated and conflicting versions, for a soulful and sensitive existence
  • a complacent humanist is a humanist who has not read his books closely, since they teach disquiet and difficulty. In a society rife with theories and practices that flatten and shrink and chill the human subject, the humanist is the dissenter.
Javier E

Democrats Defeat the Polls - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675935

Democratic party biden election 2023

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The outcomes suggested that, as in 2022, an unusually broad group of voters who believe that Democrats have not delivered for their interests voted for the party’s candidates anyway because they apparently considered the Republican alternatives a threat to their rights and values on abortion and other cultural issues.
  • “The driving force of our politics since 2018 has been fear and opposition to MAGA,” the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg told me. “It was the driving force in 2022 and 2023, and it will be in 2024. The truth is, what we’re facing in our domestic politics is unprecedented. Voters understand it, they are voting against it, and they are fighting very hard to prevent our democracy from slipping away.”
  • ike the 2022 results in many of the key swing states, the Democrats’ solid showing yesterday demonstrated that the party can often overcome those negative assessments by focusing voters’ attention on their doubts about the Trump-era Republican Party.
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  • “Once again, we saw that what voters say in polls can be very different than what they do when faced with the stark choice between Democrats who are fighting for a better life for families and dangerous candidates who are dead set on taking away their rights and freedoms,”
  • But the common thread through most of the major contests was the Democrats’ continuing strength in racially diverse, well-educated major metropolitan areas, which tend to support liberal positions on cultural issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights. Those large population centers have trended Democratic for much of the 21st century. But that process accelerated after Trump emerged as the GOP’s leader in 2016, and has further intensified
  • From a national perspective, the battle for control of the Virginia state legislature probably offered the most important signal. The Virginia race presented the same competing dynamics that are present nationally. Though Biden won the state by 10 percentage points in 2020, recent polls indicate that more voters there now disapprove than approve of his performance
  • t Virginia voters gave Republicans a double-digit advantage on economy and crime. Beyond all that, Youngkin raised enormous sums to support GOP legislative candidates and campaigned tirelessly for them.
  • he results made clear that most Virginia voters did not want to roll back access to abortion in the commonwealth, where it is now legal through 26 weeks of pregnancy. “What Virginia showed us is that the Glenn Youngkin playbook failed,” Mini Timmaraju, the CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion-rights group, told me last night. “We showed that even Republican voters in Virginia weren’t buying it, didn’t go for it, saw right through it.”
  • a clear message from the party’s performance yesterday is that, however disenchanted voters are with the country’s direction under Biden, Democrats can still win elections by running campaigns that prompt voters to consider what Republicans would do with power. “We have an opening here with the effective framing around protecting people’s freedoms,” Fernandez Ancona told me. “Now we can push forward on the economy.”
Javier E

Opinion | How Germany Became Mean - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...germany-scholz-gaza.html

germany 2023 overview politics economy

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Germany occupies a special place in the international imagination. After the horrors of the Holocaust and the difficulties of reunification, the country acquired a reputation as a leader of the free world. Economically prosperous, politically stable and more welcoming to immigrants than most other countries, the Germans — many thought — had really learned their lesson.
  • The past few months have been a bit of a rude awakening. The economy is stuttering and a constitutional court ruling has upended the government’s spending plans
  • The far-right Alternative for Germany party, fresh from success in two regional elections, is cementing itself as the country’s second-most-popular party.
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  • Migrants are in politicians’ cross hairs, threatened with deportation and reduced support.
  • And the country’s commitment to fighting antisemitism seems not only to be failing but also to have given rise to an outpouring of anti-Muslim sentiment.
  • The truth is that Germany never fully deserved its vaunted reputation. The export-led economy depended on a large low-wage sector and the country’s position in the European Union.
  • The far right — ensconced in parts of the state — never went away, and the celebrated Willkommenskultur, short lived in any case, couldn’t conceal enduring xenophobia and suspicion about foreigners.
  • The culture of remembrance and historical reckoning, too, was far from perfect
  • Even so, the sudden coarsening of public life in the service of a warped sense of national identity is striking. Germany, supposed model of fair-minded moderation, has become mean.
  • the government’s habit of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism has had some disturbing effects. Most notably, it has created an atmosphere where advocacy for Palestinian rights or a cease-fire in Gaza is seen as suspect, running afoul of the state-mandated position
  • The police, for example, have cracked down on pro-Palestinian protests in several cities and outright banned numerous demonstrations.
  • politicians, seizing on some evidence of antisemitic displays at pro-Palestinian protests to link Muslims and migrants with antisemitism, have taken the opportunity to advance an anti-migrant agenda
  • When Mr. Scholz was asked about antisemitism among people “with Arab roots” in an October interview, he said Germany needed to sort out more precisely who is allowed to come into the country and who is not. “We are limiting irregular migration,” Mr. Scholz pronounced, before adding a little later, “We must finally deport on a large scale.”
  • More spending cuts are expected. In an economy on the cusp of recession — Germany is the only country among Group of 7 nations not expected to register growth in 2023 — this is bad news for Germans, who, according to a recent study, are predominantly worried about living expenses, increasing rents, tax hikes and cuts to benefits.
  • Christian Lindner, the finance minister and head of the center-right Free Democratic Party, called for a fundamental change in immigration policy to “reduce the appeal of the German welfare state.”
  • In early November, after months of intense discussions, the federal government and the 16 state governors agreed on stricter measures to curb the number of migrants entering the country. Asylum seekers now receive less cash and have to wait twice as long to get on welfare, taking even more autonomy away from their lives. According to the new plan, Germany will also extend its border checks, speed up asylum procedures and look into the idea of offshoring asylum centers.
  • Worryingly, antisemitic incidents have been on the rise in recent weeks
  • it is troubling that Germany, of all places, should frame antisemitism as an imported problem. Crime statistics show that a vast majority of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing extremists and not by Islamists, let alone migrants or Muslims.
  • Germany’s leaders, aided by major media figures, are using the fight against antisemitism as a pretext to encourage racist resentment and anti-migrant sentiment.
  • Alternative for Germany, which has pulled the political center of gravity to the right since its formation in 2013, has never been stronger. Polling at over 20 percent, the party and its concerns, once fringe, are firmly mainstream. Questions of national identity and immigration dominate political discussion, in keeping with a broader rise of nativism across Europe.
  • The country’s anti-migrant turn is often justified in terms of economic concerns.
  • Opponents of immigration point to the underfunding of schools and hospitals, the lack of affordable housing, the miserable public transport and the general decline of the domestic economy.
  • German infrastructure is indeed in crisis. But this has little to do with immigration and everything to do with austerity policies that have been in place for the past two decades.
  • Central to those policies is the so-called debt brake. Enshrined in the German Constitution in 2009, it restricts the annual public deficit to 0.35 percent of gross domestic product, ensuring strict limits on spending.
  • The effects have been immediate: Mr. Lindner announced an early end to a price cap on energy bills, making it likely that German citizens will have to pay more for their heating in the coming year.
  • everal other high-ranking politicians have also pushed the need for stricter border controls in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Friedrich Merz, leader of the opposition Christian Democrats, spoke out against taking in refugees from Gaza, claiming that Germany already has “enough antisemitic young men in the country.”
  • It’s bad news for the government, too. The coalition, composed of the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats, came to office in 2021 with a mandate to modernize the country and lead it in a progressive direction
  • Instead, with programs of fiscal restriction and stances of social reaction, Germany’s leaders are only serving the far-right party they claim to want to keep at bay.
Javier E

How China Could Turn Crisis to Catastrophe - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...rophe-taiwan-invasion-689c29bd

china crisis catastrophe asia financial effects taiwan

shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • the most important international development on President Biden’s watch has been the erosion of America’s deterrence. The war in Ukraine and the escalating chaos and bloodshed across the Middle East demonstrate the human and economic costs when American power and policy no longer hold revisionist powers in check.
  • if the erosion of America’s deterrent power leads China and North Korea to launch wars in the Far East, it would be a greater catastrophe by orders of magnitude
  • a war over Taiwan would be far more serious for the world economy than the war in Ukraine or even a wider regional war in the Middle Eas
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  • Second, our margin of safety is shrinking: The power of American deterrence in the Far East is declining. While there are some favorable long-term trends, for the next few years at least, China and North Korea are likely to see more reasons to test the will and the power of the U.S. and its allies.
  • If China decides on forcible unification with Taiwan, it has two principal options. It can invade the island directly, or it can try to blockade it. Taiwan, which imports 97% of its energy supply and also depends on food imports, is vulnerable to such a blockade.
  • Whether China invades or blockades, the regional and global consequences would be the gravest shock to the global economy since World War II.
  • Regionally, the effect of closing the South China Sea and the waters around Taiwan to international trade would be calamitous. South Korea and Japan are both heavily dependent on imported fuel and food. Both economies depend on the ability of their great manufacturing companies to import raw materials and export finished goods. A suspension of maritime trade would effectively put both economies on life support, while making it difficult for tens of millions of people to heat their homes, run their cars or feed their children.
  • North Korea, seeing an opening in the global and regional chaos, would take the opportunity to attack at a time when U.S. forces would have enormous difficulty reinforcing and resupplying the South.
  • China would also be hit. Ships wouldn’t travel through war zones to Shanghai, Qingdao or Tianjin. The U.S. would likely, in addition to sanctions, enforce a blockade against ships seeking to supply China with goods deemed important for war.
  • For the rest of the world this would mean a massive supply-chain headache. From Taiwan’s semiconductors, vital for many industries and consumer products, to all the things that China, Japan and South Korea produce, the products of the Far East would vanish from inventories and store shelves.
  • Globally, makers of the raw materials for those countries, as well as growers of such agricultural commodities as soybeans and grain, would lose access to major markets.
  • the financial consequences of the war could pose insurmountable challenges for the world’s central banks. Stocks would crash. Currencies would gyrate. Debt markets would implode as sovereign borrowers like China and Japan faced wartime conditions and corporations dependent on Asian economies struggled to manage their debts.
  • Lulled into complacency by a long era of peace, most of us have yet to appreciate fully the dangers we face. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas attack on Israel should have made clear that we live in an era when the unthinkable can happen overnight. These days, we must not only learn to think about the unthinkable, in nuclear strategist Herman Kahn’s phrase. We also need to prepare for it.
Javier E

Opinion | The Worst Scandal in American Higher Education Isn't in the Ivy League - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...versity-scandal-education.html

christian corruption Paul scandal Liberty university

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • I’d argue that the moral collapse at Liberty University in Virginia may well be the most consequential education scandal in the United States, not simply because the details themselves are shocking and appalling, but because Liberty’s misconduct both symbolizes and contributes to the crisis engulfing Christian America. It embodies a cultural and political approach that turns Christian theology on its head.
  • Last week, Fox News reported that Liberty is facing the possibility of an “unprecedented” $37.5 million fine from the U.S. Department of Education
  • While Liberty’s fine is not yet set, the contents of a leaked education department report — first reported by Susan Svrluga in The Washington Post — leave little doubt as to why it may be this large.
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  • The report, as Svrluga writes, “paints a picture of a university that discouraged people from reporting crimes, underreported the claims it received and, meanwhile, marketed its Virginia campus as one of the safest in the country.” The details are grim. According to the report, “Liberty failed to warn the campus community about gas leaks, bomb threats and people credibly accused of repeated acts of sexual violence — including a senior administrator and an athlete.”
  • A campus safety consultant told Svrluga, “This is the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever.”
  • I’ve been following (and covering) Liberty’s moral collapse for years, and the list of scandals and lawsuits plaguing the school is extraordinarily long. The best known of these is the saga of Jerry Falwell Jr. Falwell, the former president and son of the school’s founder, resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving himself, his wife and a pool boy turned business associate named Giancarlo Granda.
  • Why? Because he realized the health of the church wasn’t up to the state, nor was it dependent on the church’s nonbelieving neighbors.
  • Paul demonstrates ferocious anger at the church’s internal sin, but says this about those outside the congregation: “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. ‘Expel the wicked person from among you.’”
  • Yet as we witness systemic misconduct unfold at institution after institution after institution, often without any real accountability, we can understand that many members of the church have gotten Paul’s equation exactly backward. They are remarkably tolerant of even the most wayward, dishonest and cruel individuals and institutions in American Christianity. At the same time, they approach those outside with a degree of anger and ferocity that’s profoundly contributing to American polarization.
  • Under this moral construct, internal critique is perceived as a threat, a way of weakening American evangelicalism. It’s seen as contributing to external hostility and possibly even the rapid secularization of American life that’s now underway. But Paul would scoff at such a notion. One of the church’s greatest apostles didn’t hold back from critiquing a church that faced far greater cultural or political headwinds — including brutal and deadly persecution at the hands of the Roman state — than the average evangelical can possibly imagine.
  • Falwell is nationally prominent in part because he was one of Donald Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical supporters. Falwell sued the school, the school sued Falwell, and in September Falwell filed a scorching amended complaint, claiming that other high-ranking Liberty officers and board members had committed acts of sexual and financial misconduct yet were permitted to retain their positions
  • Liberty University is consequential not just because it’s an academic superpower in Christian America, but also because it’s a symbol of a key reality of evangelical life — we have met the enemy of American Christianity, and it is us.
Javier E

I grew up in Bosnia, amid fear and hatred of Muslims. Now I see Germany's mis... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...a-ethnic-cleansing-palestinian

bosnia muslims germany gaza anti-Muslim anti-Semitism

shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • never again is a feeble phrase. The world forgets, just like it has forgotten Bosnia. The nevers have been worn out and abandoned; the again keeps coming back in bigger numbers and darker stories.
  • The Gaza Strip, already impoverished by occupation and an unlawful 16-year blockade, whose population is made up of 47% children is being carpet-bombed by the most powerful army in the Middle East with the help of the most powerful allies in the world. More than 4,600 Palestinians lie dead and many more face death in the absence of a ceasefire, because they can’t escape bombardment or lack access to water, food or electricity. The Israeli army claims that its offensive, now being stepped up is a “war on terror”; UN experts say it amounts to collective punishment.
  • These are all facts. Yet even the mention of the word “Palestine” in Germany risks getting you accused of antisemitism. Any attempt at providing context and sharing facts on the historical background to the conflict is seen as crude justification of Hamas’s terror.
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  • Not only have pro-Palestinian rallies been stopped or broken up by police
  • ermany’s unwavering official support for the Israeli government’s actions leaves scant room for humanity. It is also counter-productive, serving to spread fear, Islamophobia and, yes, antisemitism
  • In addition to banning Hamas-related symbols schools are now free to also ban “symbols, gestures and expressions of opinion that do not yet reach the limit of criminal liability”, which includes the keffiyeh, the Palestinian flag and “free Palestine” stickers and badges.
  • The stifling of opposition to the killing of civilians in Gaza even extends to Jewish people. A Jewish Israeli woman who held up a placard in a Berlin square calling for an end to violence was approached by German police in a matter of seconds and taken away in a police van. She was later released. Anyone showing solidarity with Palestinians is automatically suspected of being a tacit Hamas sympathiser.
  • German education senator Katharina Günther-Wünsch has also sent out an email to schools saying that “any demonstrative behaviour or expression of opinion that can be understood (italics are mine) as approving the attacks against Israel or supporting the terrorist organisations that carry them out, such as Hamas or Hezbollah, represents a threat to school peace in the current situation and is prohibited
  • Having grown up in the shadow of collective guilt for Nazi war crimes, many German intellectuals seem almost to welcome an opportunity to atone for ancestral sins. The atonement, of course, will fall on the backs of Palestinian children.
  • It should come under the “stating the obvious” category, but still has to be underlined: historically, Islamophobia has only led to more terrorism. Having grown up in Bosnia, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the vicious circle is never-ending. There is always another dead body to be weaponised.
  • Living in Germany, I see it as my human responsibility to call it out for its one-sidedness, its hypocrisy and its acquiesence in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Walking by Lucie’s stone every day, I am reminded of that responsibility. I am reminded of what silence can do and how long it can haunt a place and a people. I come from a silent place soaked in blood. I never thought I would feel that same silence in Germany.
  • I am appalled by Hamas’s actions and offer my thoughts for their victims, but I have no say in what they do. None of my taxes go to the funding of Hamas. Some of my taxes, however, do fund the bombing of Gaza. In the period between 2018 and 2022, Israel imported $2.7bn-worth of weapons from the US and Germany.
  • Either you are against fascism in all its forms, or you’re a hypocrite. You condemn a terrorist organisation as well as the terrorism committed by a government
Javier E

Opinion | Israel Is In Real Danger For Three Reasons - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-hamas-war.html

israel netanyahu danger reasons

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • the Israel of Oct. 7 is an Israel that I’ve never been to before. They were right. It is a place in which Israelis have never lived before, a nation that Israeli generals have never had to protect before, an ally that America has never had to defend before
  • I now understand why so much has changed. It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger — more danger than at any time since its War of Independence in 1948.
  • it’s for three key reasons:
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  • First, Israel is facing threats from a set of enemies who combine medieval theocratic worldviews with 21st century weaponry — and are no longer organized as small bands of militiamen, but as modern armies with brigades, battalions, cyber capabilities, long-range rockets, drones and technical support.
  • my third, deep concern.
  • But Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza entails urban, house-to-house fighting that creates thousands of civilian casualties — innocent men, women and children
  • But President Biden can only sustainably generate the support Israel needs if Israel is ready to engage in some kind of a wartime diplomatic initiative directed at the Palestinians in the West Bank — and hopefully in a post-Hamas Gaza — that indicates Israel will discuss some kind of two-state solutions if Palestinian officials can get their political house unified and in order.
  • The second danger I see is that the only conceivable way that Israel can generate the legitimacy, resources, time and allies to fight such a difficult war with so many enemies is if it has unwavering partners abroad, led by the United States.
  • Netanyahu’s message to the world remains, in effect: “Help us defeat Hamas in Gaza, while we work to expand settlements, annex the West Bank and build a Jewish supremacist state there.”
  • Worse, I am stunned at the degree to which that leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continues to put the interests of holding on to the support of his far-right base
  • Israel has the worst leader in its history, maybe in all of Jewish history — who has no will or ability to produce such an initiative.
  • This kind of chilling exuberance — Israel was built so that such a thing could never happen — explains the homemade sign I saw on a sidewalk while driving through the French Hill Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem the other day: “It’s either us or them.’’
  • After being slammed by the public for digitally stabbing his army and intelligence chiefs in the back in the middle of a war, Netanyahu published a new tweet. “I was wrong,” he wrote, adding that “the things I said following the press conference should not have been said, and I apologize for that. I fully support the heads of [Israel’s] security services.”
  • As a result, there is a conviction in the army that they must demonstrate to the entire neighborhood — to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to the Houthis in Yemen, to the Islamic militias in Iraq to the Hamas and other fighters in the West Bank — that they will stop at nothing to re-establish the security of their borders
  • it wants to show that no one can out-crazy Israel to drive them from this region — even if the Israeli military has to defy the U.S. and even if they do not have any solid plan for governing Gaza the morning after the war.
  • “Israel cannot accept such an active threat on its borders. The whole idea of people living side by side in the Middle East was jeopardized by Hamas.”
  • This conflict is now back to its most biblical and primordial roots. This seems to be a time of eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. The morning-after policy thinking will have to wait for the mourning after.
  • So, Netanyahu is saying that seven million Jews are going to indefinitely control the lives of five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza
  • while offering them no political horizon, nothing, by way of statehood one day on any demilitarized conditions.
  • Early on the morning of Oct. 29, as the Israeli Army was just moving into Gaza, Netanyahu tweeted and then deleted a social media post in which he blamed Israel’s defense and intelligence establishment for failing to anticipate Hamas’s surprise attack.
  • The euphoric rampage of Oct. 7 that killed some 1,400 soldiers and civilians has not only hardened Israeli hearts toward the suffering of Gaza civilians. It has also inflicted a deep sense of humiliation and guilt on the Israeli Army and defense establishment, for having failed in their most basic mission of protecting the country’s borders.
  • the damage was done. How much do you suppose those military leaders trust what Netanyahu will say if the Gaza campaign stalls? What real leader would behave that way at the start of a war of survival?
  • Netanyahu and his far-right zealots have taken Israel on multiple flights of fancy in the last year: dividing the country and the army over the fraudulent judicial reform, bankrupting its future with massive investments in religious schools that teach no math and in West Bank Jewish settlements that teach no pluralism — while building up Hamas, which would never be a partner for peace, and tearing down the Palestinian Authority, the only possible partner for peace.
  • “When you go to the front, you are overwhelmed by the power of what we lost.”
Javier E

Opinion | U.S. Military Aid Is Killing Civilians in Gaza - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-military-aid-war-israel.html

US israel policy Palestine

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • The United States currently provides Israel with at least $3.8 billion in annual military assistance, the most to any country per year, with the recent exception of Ukraine. High levels of assistance date back roughly to the 1970s and reflect a longstanding American bargain with Israel of security for peace — the notion that the more secure Israel feels, the more concessions it will be able to make to the Palestinians.
  • Since the mid-1990s, the United States has also been a major sponsor of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority Security Forces, providing training and equipment on the theory that as the Palestinians stand up, the Israelis can stand down.
  • In both cases, the rationale for U.S. security assistance is fatally flawed.
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  • On the Israeli side, blind U.S. security guarantees have not provided a path to peace. Instead, they have provided Israel with the reassurance that it can engage in increasingly destructive efforts, such as the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, without any real consequences.
  • At the same time, Israel has become a global leader in weapons exports and boasts one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world. All of these factors have created a sense among Israeli policymakers that they can indefinitely contain — physically and politically — the Palestinian question.
  • Nowhere is this more apparent than in the recent efforts, driven by the United States, first under the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, to pursue normalization between Israel and the Arab world. While in many ways this normalization is long overdue, it has been premised on the notion that economic incentives — and a shared regional security interest in deterring malign Iranian influence — can integrate Israel, indefinite occupation and all, into the Arab world.
  • This premise has been shattered — likely intentionally on Hamas’s part — by the Gaza conflict and its rapid recentering of the Palestinian cause on a global stage.
  • As civilian deaths in Gaza and the West Bank continue to mount, it is clear any sort of Saudi normalization agreement with Israel that does not also include substantive progress on a political solution for the Palestinian cause will be difficult to advance.
  • Under the Leahy laws, the United States is prohibited from providing security assistance to any unit that is credibly accused of having committed a gross violation of human rights. Unlike almost all other recipients, which are vetted along these lines before they receive assistance, for Israel the process is reversed: The assistance is provided, and the United States then waits to receive reports of violations, assessing their credibility through a process known as the Israel Leahy vetting forum, which includes consultation with the government of Israel.
  • To date, the forum has never come to consensus that any Israeli security force unit or soldier has committed a gross violation of human rights — despite the findings of international human rights organizations
  • the U.S. failure to impose accountability on Israel for such violations may provide Israel with a sense of impunity, increasing the likelihood of gross violations of human rights (including those committed by settlers against Palestinian civilians) and further breaking the trust between Israel and Palestinians that would be needed for any sort of lasting peace.
  • Working on the ground with the authority, I saw how the major focus of U.S. efforts was to prove to the Israel Defense Forces that their Palestinian counterparts could be trusted to take on the mission of securing Israel
  • Palestinian intelligence officials would be provided with target information by Israel, and Palestinian forces would be expected to take on missions previously conducted by the Israel Defense Forces to detain those targets. This effort not only undermined Palestinian support for the authority but also failed to convince the Israelis, who saw any Palestinian courts’ (correct) refusal to hold Palestinian detainees without due process as proof of a revolving door in the system.
  • Even worse, in 2008 and ’09, when Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, which resulted in over 1,300 Palestinian deaths in Gaza, sparked protests in the West Bank, it was the Palestinian Authority Security Forces that physically stood between demonstrators and the Israel Defense Forces. From my balcony in Ramallah, I saw this as a proof of success and reported as much to Washington at the time. In hindsight, it was perhaps the death knell for the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority in the eyes of its people.
  • If the United States is to continue to employ military and security assistance as a tool of its engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and there are good arguments why it should not), it must change its approach significantly. One way to do this would be simply by applying the laws and policies that it applies to every other country in the world: There is no point in having leverage that could pressure Israel to cease actions that undermine peace if we refuse to even consider using it
  • The United States could also start conditioning its military assistance to Israel (as it does for many other recipients) on certain verifiable political conditions being met. In Israel’s case, these may include a halt to or dismantling of settlement infrastructure in the West Bank.
  • Another thing the U.S. might do is consider reframing its security assistance on the Palestinian side to reinforce, rather than undermine, the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority
  • Doing so would require structuring assistance in a way that enables Palestinian society control over its own security forces. It would also require the recognition of Palestinian statehood
  • I resigned from my job because I do not believe that U.S. arms should be provided in a situation if we know they are more likely than not — in the words of the Biden administration’s own guiding policy — to lead to or to aggravate the risk of human rights violations, including widespread civilian harm and death.
Javier E

A Handful of Accounts Create Most of What We See on Social Media - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...e-see-on-social-media-bdafa8f3

social media TV model media concentration

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Social media is turning into old-fashioned network television.
  • A handful of accounts create most of the content that we see. Everyone else? They play the role of the audience, which is there to mostly amplify and applaud
  • The personal tidbits that people used to share on social media have been relegated to private group chats and their equivalent.
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  • The transformation of social media into mass media is largely because the rise of TikTok has demonstrated to every social-media company on the planet that people still really like things that can re-create the experience of TV
  • Advertisers also like things that function like TV, of course—after all, people are never more suggestible than when lulled into a sort of anesthetized mindlessness.
  • In this future, people who are good at making content with high production values will thrive, as audiences and tech company algorithms gravitate toward more professional content.
  • On these formerly-social platforms, whether content is coming from creators with better equipment and more skills, or Hollywood studios testing the waters, hardly matters. In the end, it will all look remarkably similar to the consumer.
  • It will look
  • like flipping through cable channels does, only our thumb on the remote has been replaced by our thumb on the screen of our phone, swiping from one TikTok, YouTube Short, or Instagram Reel to the next.
  • A telling indicator is the rise of a new kind of entertainment professional—the “creator.”
  • A creator is anyone who records or makes something that can go viral on the internet
  • TikTok is now more popular than Netflix among consumers younger than 35,
  • While YouTube and TikTok have always been about video, just about every other social-media platform that wants to keep people engaged is emphasizing it more than ever, so that’s what creators have to make,
  • His agency gets involved with creators and musicians at the earliest stages of their careers, helping them plan content, update their style, understand what the algorithms of different platforms demand, and connecting them with potentially lucrative brand deals
  • . Even more telling: In first place is YouTube, the original online TV analog.
  • Where attention flows, money—and content—must also. In 2023 brands will spend an estimated $6 billion on marketing through influencers—a subspecies of creators
  • Globally, the total addressable market for this kind of marketing is currently $250 billion
  • Then there is a new generation of shows that are going straight to TikTok, bypassing even streaming services
  • In the wake of the success of YouTube and TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn are all pushing more and more content made by professionals into our feeds,
  • In order to quantify how TikTok has mastered the art of discerning our interests and feeding us the most compelling possible content, Faltesek, of Oregon State University, conducted a two-year project to study exactly what kind of content TikTok pushes
  • With a team of students, he created dozens of fresh TikTok user accounts that didn’t like or interact with content in any way—they just let the algorithm play one video after another.
  • At the end of this exhaustive process of gathering data on TikTok’s algorithm, the conclusion became obvious, says Faltesek. “TikTok is television. It flips channels like TV, it provides a flow like TV.”
  • By this logic, Instagram’s move to copy TikTok, which is in turn encroaching on the turf of YouTube by allowing longer videos, and the increasing dominance of professional content on all three, means they’re all turning into TV. Even Threads, the new offering from Facebook parent company Meta, is fast becoming a broadcast medium for news, as Twitter was before it.
  • In every case, the structure of social networks has become one in which a handful of accounts create most of the content that others see, and the role of everyone else on the network is, primarily, to amplify and consume that content,
  • Some, like Magana, believe we’ll eventually see an ever more complete blending of what were once “social” platforms with the traditional television networks and even film studios.  
  • aren’t convinced they’ll eat the rest of the entertainment industry. “It’s hard to say this kind of short-form video will be the only kind of TV,” she reflects. “A long time ago, the internet became the new thing, but we still have the other forms on television, and scripted streaming shows. It’s almost like this is just another avenue for that—of watching shows and movies on your phone.”
Javier E

Binance Guilty Plea Shows What Crypto's Really About - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-cryptos-really-about-f84200a3

crypto use

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • So it turns out that of the two largest crypto exchanges, one was a fraud and the other was a money launderer. Whoever could have guessed?
  • Skeptics of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have had their prejudices reinforced. The two main use cases—fraud and crime—have been exposed to the public in dramatic fashion, so now all we have to do is sit back and wait for the inevitable collapse in value.
  • There must be something underpinning this value, so what is it? Here are the options:
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  • Digital art: The latest fad in crypto is a bitcoin “ordinal,” digital art—or anything else—virtually inscribed on a fraction of a bitcoin in the digital ledger known as the blockchain.
  • The sudden demand supports bitcoin’s value, in the same way that shopping in bitcoin would. I don’t understand why anyone would pay a cent, let alone real money, to inscribe art in the bitcoin blockchain, but hey, whatever floats your boat. 
  • The rise in small bitcoin transactions also shows just how useless it is as a currency, and why it’s nonsensical to think bitcoin could ever be used as real money. The median fee leapt to more than $5 over the past week, even as transaction sizes plunged, an insane cost to pay for something invented as a payment method.
  • Crime: I was tempted a few years ago by the idea that the value of crypto could be underpinned by genuine transactions that need to avoid the financial system: buying illegal drugs; money laundering; avoiding sanctions; anonymous (but legal) pornography purchases; terrorist finance; and ransomware. 
  • Digital gold: When it became clear that bitcoin was useless as a currency, its backers switched to claiming that it is a store of value, with its maximum issuance offering protection against the money-printing tendencies of the Federal Reserve. The argument was tested to destruction over the past two years. Inflation was last below the Fed’s 2% target in February 2021, when one bitcoin cost close to $50,000. By the time inflation peaked in June last year the price had collapsed to $20,000, the opposite of what it should have done.
  • There was a time when savers in countries with dodgy currencies and bad governments would buy bitcoin or other crypto to escape devaluation and avoid capital controls. But the rise of stablecoins allows these savers to buy digital dollars without the pain of trying to open offshore bank accounts, so they have no need for other cryptocurrencies
  • Gambling: Crypto offers a store of volatility more than a store of value. Its volatility makes it an excellent way to bet, and the pretense that it is an investment asset gives speculators cover; it sounds much better to say you are a crypto trader than that you just bet $100,000 at the track.
  • Basing the value of an asset on speculation is risky, because the value depends on everyone else betting that it has value. But so long as the merry-go-round continues, it looks like it has value, and decentralized finance, or DeFi, provides the infrastructure for speculation in the language of Wall Street.
  • Bitcoin’s moves over the past three years have been much closer to the S&P 500 than to gold or inflation. But stocks are an investment in real assets that pay dividends, while bitcoin produces nothing.
  • Lots of that was going on, and Binance has paid the price for helping. Bitcoin isn’t a particularly good way to hide from the cops, anyway, as repeated police busts have demonstrated. Crypto has to clean up its act, so basing its value on illegal transactions no longer makes sense.
  • Bitcoin has failed to live up to its original promise of being cheap online cash, but crypto keeps on reinventing itself. It’s so technically satisfying that it must be the solution to something, but quite what remains a mystery.
Javier E

What's Left for Tech? - Freddie deBoer - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...whats-left-for-tech

progress innovation invention transformation tech

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.
  • we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side
  • I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.
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  • The complication that Gordon and other internet-skeptical researchers like Ha-Joon Chang have introduced is to question just how meaningful those digital technologies have been for a) economic growth and b) the daily experience of human life. It can be hard for people who stare at their phones all day to consider the possibility that digital technology just isn’t that important. But ask yourself: if you were forced to live either without your iPhone or without indoor plumbing, could you really choose the latter?
  • Certainly the improvements in medical care in the past half-century feel very important to me as someone living now, and one saved life has immensely emotional and practical importance for many people. What’s more, advances in communication sciences and computer technology genuinely have been revolutionary; going from the Apple II to the iPhone in 30 years is remarkable.
  • we can always debate what constitutes major or revolutionary change
  • Why is Apple going so hard on TITANIUM? Well, where else does smartphone development have to go?
  • continued improvements in worldwide mortality in the past 75 years have been a matter of spreading existing treatments and practices to the developing world, rather than the result of new science.
  • When you got your first smartphone, and you thought about what the future would hold, were your first thoughts about more durable casing? I doubt it. I know mine weren’t.
  • The question is, who in 2023 ever says to themselves “smartphone cameras just aren’t good enough”?
  • The elephant in the room, obviously, is AI.
  • The processors will get faster. They’ll add more RAM. They’ll generally have more power. But for what? To run what? To do what? To run the games that we were once told would replace our PlayStation and Xbox games, but didn’t?
  • Smartphone development has been a good object lesson in the reality that cool ideas aren’t always practical or worthwhile
  • There were, in those breathless early days, a lot of talk about how people simply wouldn’t own laptops anymore, how your phone would do everything. But it turns out that, for one thing, the keyboard remains an input device of unparalleled convenience and versatility.
  • We developed this technology for typewriters and terminals and desktops, it Just Works, and there’s no reason to try and “disrupt” it
  • Instead of one device to rule them all, we developed a norm of syncing across devices and cloud storage, which works well. (I always thought it was pretty funny, and very cynical, how Apple went from calling the iPhone an everything device to later marketing the iPad and iWatch.) In other words, we developed a software solution rather than a hardware one
  • I will always give it up to Google Maps and portable GPS technology; that’s genuinely life-altering, probably the best argument for smartphones as a transformative technology. But let me ask you, honestly: do you still go out looking for apps, with the assumption that you’re going to find something that really changes your life in a significant way?
  • some people are big VR partisans. I’m deeply skeptical. The brutal failures of Meta’s new “metaverse” is just one new example of a decades-long resistance to the technology among consumers
  • maybe I just don’t want VR to become popular, given the potential ugly social consequences. If you thought we had an incel problem now….
  • And as impressive as some new development in medicine has been, there’s no question that in simple terms of reducing preventable deaths, the advances seen from 1900 to 1950 dwarf those seen since. To a rem
  • It’s not artificial intelligence. It thinks nothing like a human thinks. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that it has evolved sentience or consciousness. There is nothing at present that these systems can do that human being simply can’t. But they can potentially do some things in the world of bits faster and cheaper than human beings, and that might have some meaningful consequences. But there is no reasonable, responsible claim to be made that these systems are imminent threats to conventional human life as currently lived, whether for good or for bad. IMO.
  • Let’s mutually agree to consider immediate plausible human technological progress outside of AI or “AI.” What’s coming? What’s plausible?
  • The most consequential will be our efforts to address climate change, and we have the potential to radically change how we generate electricity, although electrifying heating and transportation are going to be harder than many seem to think, while solar and wind power have greater ecological costs than people want to admit. But, yes, that’s potentially very very meaningful
  • It’s another example of how technological growth will still leave us with continuity rather than with meaningful change.
  • I kept thinking was, privatizing space… to do what? A manned Mars mission might happen in my lifetime, which is cool. But a Mars colony is a distant dream
  • This is why I say we live in the Big Normal, the Big Boring, the Forever Now. We are tragic people: we were born just too late to experience the greatest flowering of human development the world has ever seen. We do, however, enjoy the rather hefty consolation prize that we get to live with the affordances of that period, such as not dying of smallpox.
  • I think we all need to learn to appreciate what we have now, in the world as it exists, at the time in which we actually live. Frankly, I don’t think we have any other choice.
Javier E

Opinion | How AI is transforming education at the University of Mississippi - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-chatgpt-universities-learning

chatbot writing thinking education evaluation

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Perplexity AI “unlocks the power of knowledge with information discovery and sharing.” This, it turns out, means “does research.” Type something into it, and it spits out a comprehensive answer, always sourced and sometimes bulleted. You might say this is just Google on steroids — but really, it is Google with a bibliography.
  • Caleb Jackson, a 22-year-old junior at Ole Miss studying part time, is a fan. This way, he doesn’t have to spend hours between night shifts and online classes trawling the internet for sources. Perplexity can find them, and he can get to writing that much sooner.
  • What’s most important to Ole Miss faculty members is that students use these tools with integrity. If the university doesn’t have a campuswide AI honor code, and so far it doesn’t, individual classes should. And no matter whether professors permit all applications of AI, as some teachers have tried, or only the narrowest, students should have to disclose just how much help they had from robots.
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  • “Write a five-paragraph essay on Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse.’” Too generic? Well, how about “Write a five-paragraph essay on the theme of loss in ‘To the Lighthouse’”? Too high-schoolish? “Add some bigger words, please.” The product might not be ready to turn in the moment it is born, fully formed, from ChatGPT’s head. But with enough tweaking — either by the student or by the machine at the student’s demand — chances are the output can muster at least a passing grade.
  • Which of these uses are okay? Which aren’t? The harnessing of an AI tool to create an annotated bibliography likely doesn’t rankle even librarians the way relying on that same tool to draft a reflection on Virginia Woolf offends the professor of the modern novel. Why? Because that kind of contemplation goes closer to the heart of what education is really about.
  • the core of the question colleges now face. They can’t really stop students from using AI in class. They might not be able to notice students have done so at all, and when they do think they’ve noticed they’ll be acting only on suspicion. But maybe teachers can control the ways in which students use AI in class.
  • Figuring out exactly what ways those ought to be requires educators to determine what they care about in essays — what they are desperate to hear. The purpose of these papers is for students to demonstrate what they’ve learned, from hard facts to compositional know-how, and for teachers to assess how their pupils are progressing. The answer to what teachers want to get from students in their written work depends on what they want to give to students.
  • ChatGPT is sort of in a class of its own, because it can be almost anything its users want it to be so long as they possess one essential skill: prompt engineering. This means, basically, manipulating the machine not only into giving you an answer but also into giving you the kind of answer you’re looking for.
  • The next concern is that students should use AI in a manner that improves not only their writing but also their thinking — in short, in a manner that enhances learning rather than bypasses the need to learn at all.
  • This simple principle makes for complicated practice. Certainly, no one is going to learn anything by letting AI write an essay in its entirety. What about letting AI brainstorm an idea, on the other hand, or write an outline, or gin up a counter-argument? Lyndsey Cook, a senior at Ole Miss planning a career in nursing, finds the brainstorming especially helpful: She’ll ask ChatGPT or another tool to identify the themes in a piece of literature, and then she’ll go back and look for them herself.
  • These shortcuts, on the one hand, might interfere with students’ learning to brainstorm, outline or see the other side of things on their own
  • But — here comes a human-generated counterargument — they may also aid students in surmounting obstacles in their composition that otherwise would have stopped them short. That’s particularly true of kids whose high schools didn’t send them to college already equipped with these capabilities.
  • Allow AI to boost you over these early hurdles, and suddenly the opportunity for deeper learning — the opportunity to really write — will open up. That’s how Caleb Jackson, the part-time student for whom Perplexity has been such a boon, sees it: His professor, he says , wanted them to “get away from the high-school paper and go further, to write something larger like a thesis.”
  • maybe, as one young Ole Miss faculty member put it to me, this risks “losing the value of the struggle.” That, she says, is what she is scared will go away.
  • All this invites the most important question there is: What is learning for?
  • Learning, in college, can be instrumental. According to this view, the aim of teaching is to prepare students to live in the real world, so all that really matters is whether they have the chops to field jobs that feed themselves and their families. Perhaps knowing how to use AI to do any given task for you, then, is one of the most valuable skills out there — the same way it pays to be quick with a calculator.
  • If you accept this line of argument, however, there are still drawbacks to robotic crutches. Some level of critical thinking is necessary to function as an adult, and if AI stymies its development even the instrumental aim of education is thwarted. The same goes for that “value of the struggle.” The real world is full of adversity, much of which the largest language model can’t tell you how to overcome.
  • more compelling is the idea, probably shared by most college professors, that learning isn’t only instrumental after all — that it has intrinsic value and that it is the end rather than merely a means to one.
  • Every step along the way that is skipped, the shorter the journey becomes, the less we will take in as we travel.
  • This glummest of outlooks suggests that AI will stunt personal growth even if it doesn’t harm professional prospects.
  • While that doesn’t mean it’s wise to prohibit every little application of the technology in class, it probably does mean discouraging those most closely related to critical thinking.
  • One approach is to alter standards for grading, so that the things the machines are worst at are also the things that earn the best marks: originality, say, or depth of feeling, or so-called metacognition — the process of thinking about one’s own thinking or one’s own learning.
  • Hopefully, these things are also the most valuable because they are what make us human.
  • Caleb Jackson only wants AI to help him write his papers — not to write them for him. “If ChatGPT will get you an A, and you yourself might get a C, it’s like, ‘Well, I earned that C.’” He pauses. “That might sound crazy.”
  • Dominic Tovar agrees. Let AI take charge of everything, and, “They’re not so much tools at that point. They’re just replacing you.”
  • Lyndsey Cook, too, believes that even if these systems could reliably find the answers to the most vexing research problems, “it would take away from research itself” — because scientific inquiry is valuable for its own sake. “To have AI say, ‘Hey, this is the answer …’” she trails off, sounding dispirited.
  • Claire Mischker, lecturer of composition and director of the Ole Miss graduate writing center, asked her students at the end of last semester to turn in short reflections on their experience in her class. She received submissions that she was near certain were produced by ChatGPT — “that,” she says as sarcastically as she does mournfully, “felt really good.
  • The central theme of the course was empathy.
Javier E

Opinion | America Is Averting Its Eyes From Something Very, Very Wrong - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...social-media-inequality.html

social media psychology research effects blacks Hispanic teens

shared by Javier E on 22 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • social media use also differs by race and ethnicity — and there’s far less discussion of that. According to a new study by Pew, Black and Hispanic teenagers ages 13 to 17 spend far more time on most social media apps than their white peers
  • One-third of Hispanic teenagers, for example, say they are “almost constantly” on TikTok, compared with one-fifth of Black teenagers and one-tenth of white teenagers.
  • Higher percentages of Hispanic (27 percent) and Black teenagers (23 percent) are almost constantly on YouTube compared with white teenagers (9 percent); the same trend is true for Instagram.
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  • Overall, 55 percent of Hispanic teenagers and 54 percent of Black teenagers say they are online almost constantly, compared with 38 percent of white teenagers;
  • Black and Hispanic kids ages 8 to 12, another study found, also use social media more than their white counterparts.
  • we also have to ask,” she went on, “why they are so drawn to social media? Is it the messages on social media that’s exacerbating the depression and anxiety, or was the depression and anxiety already there to begin with and social media is a way to self-medicate?”
  • “It’s culturally more acceptable in youth of color households to use technology for social and academic reasons compared with white households,” Charmaraman said. “Parents don’t worry as much about it. There isn’t as much shame around it.”
  • “We know broadly that youth of minoritized communities have longer commutes, fewer opportunities to do after-school activities, fewer resources,” Magis-Weinberg told me. They may not have spaces to hang out safely with friends nearby; social media is a more accessible option. “But we have to ask,” Magis-Weinberg added, “what is social media use displacing?”
  • Largely because of lower income levels, Black and Hispanic teenagers are less likely to have broadband access or computers at home. This makes them disproportionately use their smartphones, where social media apps ping, whiz and notify
  • Lucia Magis-Weinberg, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington who studies teenagers and tech, compares internet use of the phone to snorkeling, whereas computers allow more of a scuba dive.
  • WhatsApp, hugely popular in Latin America, is used by Hispanic teenagers more than by other demographic groups of the same ages.
  • “The way social media use presents itself is as something that is actively harmful,” Marsh told me. Already kids from these communities have few advantages, he explained. They may not have access to after-school programs. They’re often in single-parent households. They lack support systems. “I think in the long term,” he said, “we’re going to see real differences in the impact.”
  • Let’s consider just reading, which also happens to be correlated with both mental well-being and school achievement
  • According to Scholastic’s most recent Kids and Family Reading Report, the percentage of kids ages 6 to 17 who read frequently for pleasure dropped to 28 percent in 2022 from 37 percent in 2010.
  • Those numbers fall precipitously as kids get older; 46 percent of 6- to 8-year-olds read frequently in 2022 compared with only 18 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds.
  • All this raises the possibility that disparities in internet use could in turn intensify overall declines and existing differences in reading across racial groups among adults.
  • The average daily time spent reading per capita by ethnicity in 2022 was 0.29 hours for white adults, 0.12 for Black adults and 0.10 for Hispanics.
  • In other words, one danger is that social media not only reflects real-world disparities, it could also exacerbate them.
  • Greater use of social media by Black and Hispanic young people “can help perpetuate inequality in society because higher levels of social media use among kids have been demonstrably linked to adverse effects such as depression and anxiety, inadequate sleep, eating disorders, poor self-esteem and greater exposure to online harassment,”
  • Akeem Marsh, medical director of the Home of Integrated Behavioral Health at the New York Foundling, a social services agency, said that among the hundreds of largely Black and Hispanic kids he sees from communities with fewer resources, social media use is often a primary concern or it comes up in treatment. Kids who use it frequently often respond with traumatized feelings and repeated anxiety.
  • The answer, according to experts, includes sports participation, in-person socializing, after-school clubs and activities, exploring the outdoors, reading and more.
  • We need greater awareness of the disparities as well, and most likely, immediate action. What we do not need is another “sudden” yet regrettably delayed realization that something has gone very, very wrong with America’s kids, but we were too busy looking the other way.
Javier E

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Nimrod Novik - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-interviews-nimrod-novik.html

israel klein interview transcript strategy

shared by Javier E on 27 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • for years now, a group of hundreds of former senior defense and diplomatic officials in Israel have been saying this is a catastrophe — that it is a catastrophe for Israeli security, a catastrophe for Israeli democracy, a catastrophe for Israelis’ international standing, and a catastrophe for Israel’s soul. Their warnings seem quite prescient now.
  • they’ve argued there was another way. There was a huge amount Israel could do on its own and should have been doing, that if Israel is not going to tip into a kind of single state that it did not want and could not ultimately defend, that the conditions had to be created now for something else to emerge in the future.
  • One of the people working on that project was Nimrod Novik. He’s my guest today. Novik was a top aide to Shimon Peres when Peres was prime minister and vice premier. In that role, Novik was involved in all manner of negotiations with the Palestinians, with the Arab world, with the international community. He’s on the executive committee of Commanders for Israel’s Security, which is a group I mentioned a minute ago. And he’s an Israel fellow at the Israel Policy Forum.
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  • NIMROD NOVIK: The group that worked on it, called Commanders for Israel’s Security, it’s over 500 Israeli retired generals, as well as their equivalents from the Mossad, Shin Bet Security, National Security Council, the entire Israeli security establishment. And we formed a team. We felt that Israeli policy was far too reactive and far too conservative for the good of the country, national security, short and long-term.
  • We had not anticipated the trauma of Oct. 7, but we certainly anticipated things getting from bad to worse, unless Israel changes course.
  • we came up with a plan that suggested even though a two-state solution, as you said, is not on this side of the horizon, but given that eventually, it’s the only solution that we believe serves Israel’s security and well-being long-term, as a strong Jewish democracy, we mapped out what can and should be done in the coming two, three years to reverse the slide towards the disaster of a one-state solution.
  • NIMROD NOVIK: There were primarily two governing concepts, if you will, of the Israeli policy. Again, calling it policy is giving it more credit than deserved. Israeli government have been reluctant to determine the end game of our relationship with the Palestinians. Where do we want to see ourselves and them two years, five years, 50 years from now? No decision has been made since the Oslo era.
  • As a result, what we’ve seen was a policy based on insisting on separating the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas from the West Bank, ruled sort of by the Palestinian Authority. Separation was one principle
  • And the other one was dubbed status quo, even though it was an illusion, because nothing was static about it. As a matter of fact, creeping annexation has been accelerating under various governments.
  • The more territory was taken by settlements, the more extreme settlers were conducting violent raids into Palestinian civil populations. The more the Palestinian Authority, internally defective, becoming more and more authoritarian, more and more detached from its own constituents, less responsive, less capable of governance, losing control over large swaths of West Bank territory, forcing the I.D.F. to enter more and more
  • It was a slide into a state where the Palestinian Authority would cease to function as the promise of the nucleus of a Palestinian state.
  • If we look at it today, it’s already perhaps the municipal government of the city of Ramallah, rather than of the West Bank, and weakening the Palestinian Authority by choking it financially. By not allowing it to demonstrate to its people that it is the vehicle that will bring them one day to their aspiration of statehood, on the one hand, and making sure that Hamas controls Gaza, the two tracks spelled disaster.
  • So I must confess, we had not anticipated that the disaster will look the way it did on Oct. 7, but we certainly realized that the policy in Gaza of rounds of violence every year, every two years, every 18 months, and buying off relative tranquility by funding Hamas through the auspices of Qatar, allowing it to arm and rearm, the inherent contradictions in the policy were quite apparent
  • There’s a right-wing one-state solution. I think when you mentioned the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, I think if you read things he has written in the past, he is looking for a one-state solution. He wants to crush Palestinian dreams of statehood and repress Palestinians sufficiently that they stop believing they can ever have anything better and eventually content themselves to Israeli rule and live quietly within that in order to gain better lives.
  • NIMROD NOVIK: I’ll put it bluntly. I believe that a two-state solution is inevitable, not because we wish it and not because it’s nice, not because Palestinians deserve self-determination — which they do, but that’s not a historic imperative. I believe that the two-state solution is inevitable because these two people are not going to live happily ever after under one roof.
  • For that to happen, for the two people to stay in one state, one of two things have to happen. Either Israelis will agree to grant Palestinian equal rights in that one state and therefore become a minority, or at least, a slim majority in our own country, and that’s never going to happen. Israelis are not going to agree to be less than the overwhelming majority in our own country.
  • Or Palestinians will agree forever to forgo equal rights, which I suspect is as unreasonable expectation as the other. So we will separate.
  • NIMROD NOVIK: Civil separation with overall security control — continued security control until a two-state agreement ushers in alternative security arrangements, is a concept that basically suggests reversing the creeping annexation, which is no longer creeping. It’s now galloping.
  • So the idea is to start reversing the slide towards one-state reality in the opposite direction, of reducing the friction between the two populations, increasing the capacity of the P.A. to perform, while maintaining the overall security controlled by Israel until a deal is struck.
  • You often hear when you talk to people in Israel about different paths that could be taken. Well, we don’t have anybody to negotiate with. The Palestinian Authority doesn’t have credibility. Hamas wants our destruction
  • And a core premise of the report is that there are things Israel can do unilaterally, that it doesn’t need a partner to do things that will make the situation better from its perspective and create conditions maybe for deals in the future. So tell me what is in Israel’s power here. What would you actually recommend to do tangibly?
  • NIMROD NOVIK: It’s not a genetic deformation of the Palestinians that they cannot govern themselves. This is nonsense. We had a period after the second intifada, the years 2007, 2008, where the Palestinian Authority, there was a prime minister by the name of Salam Fayyad. First, he was finance minister, later on prime minister, who revitalized the Palestinian Authority in a dramatic way. The authority was on the rise. People were proud in it, its own population. They could have won elections at that point.
  • And then Netanyahu was elected in 2009. Now, obviously, we are the strongest party. We hold most of the cards by far. And when we decide that we are going to choke the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian Authority will choke
  • Now the second trend that happened was that Mahmoud Abbas, President Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, the early Abu Mazen was a very different person than the late one with whom we are dealing today. He became increasingly nondemocratic, authoritarian, autocratic, paranoid, removing from his vicinity and from position of power all the best and brightest that were working during that era
  • . Things went from bad to worse, Israel doing its share in weakening the P.A. and the P.A. leadership became more claustrophobic. All these can change.
  • At the moment, the West Bank is a Swiss cheese. It’s 169 islands of Palestinian-controlled areas surrounded each by Israeli-controlled territory. So we wanted to reduce that by half so that contiguity will have a security, law and order, and economic well-being effect.
  • We suggested a host of economic measures that enable the Palestinian Authority to deliver for the people, which is the opposite of what’s happening now, when our minister of finance is choking the Palestinian Authority by withholding funds that are theirs by the agreement Israel collects taxes for the Palestinian Authority, VAT and others. And we are supposed to automatically transfer them to the Palestinian Authority. It’s the main chunk of their budget.
criscimagnael

Man Throws Pastry at Mona Lisa, Smearing Cream on Glass Case - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mona-lisa-pastry-louvre.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • visitors watched in disbelief as he began pounding on the glass that shields the painting. Then, Mr. Sundberg said, the man smeared what appeared to be cake all over the glass protecting what is one of the world’s most recognizable pieces of art.
  • The painting was not damaged,
  • “He threw a whole bunch of roses at me and then he started yelling,”
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  • Videos on social media showed that the man, speaking in French, yelled that there were “people who were destroying the planet” and “that’s why I did it.”
  • There have been several attempts to vandalize the painting, some more successful than others. In 1956, a man threw a stone at the painting, shattering a glass shield and scratching Mona Lisa’s left elbow, causing a chip of paint to fall off.
  • Vandalism “is one of the top three concerns we have,” he said, adding, “We do take steps to prevent it, but it’s not really predictable.”
  • But the Mona Lisa is a predictable target, Mr. Keller said. In 1911, it was stolen by three Italian handymen and recovered 28 months later. In the 1950s, a visitor attacked it with acid. In 2009, a woman threw a teacup at its glass.
  • He said that such acts of vandalism carried out by demonstrators have nothing to do with the issues they are trying to call attention to. “They’re not really accomplishing anything,” Mr. Layne said.
criscimagnael

North Korea Launches Suspected ICBM and Two Other Ballistic Missiles - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-korea-ballistic-missiles.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • North Korea launched three ballistic missiles, including a possible intercontinental ballistic missile, toward the waters off its east coast on Wednesday, South Korea’s military said. The launches came just after President Biden wrapped up a trip to the region, where he vowed to strengthen deterrence against the North’s growing nuclear threat.
  • It was North Korea’s 17th missile test this year.
  • Shortly after the North’s tests, the South Korean and United States militaries each launched a land-to-land missile off the east coast of South Korea to demonstrate what Seoul called the allies’ “swift striking capability to deter further provocations from North Korea,” as well as the South Korean military’s “overwhelming” ability to launch “precision strikes at the origin of North Korean provocation.”
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  • The first missile launched on Wednesday by North Korea appeared to have been an ICBM, South Korean defense officials said. But it flew only 224 miles, the officials said, indicating that North Korea did not want to launch the missile on a full ICBM trajectory over the Pacific while Mr. Biden was in the air on his way back to Washington after a visit to Seoul and Tokyo.
  • The second missile launched on Wednesday apparently failed because it “disintegrated” after reaching an altitude of 12 miles, the South Korean officials said. The third projectile was a short-range ballistic missile.
  • The missile launches on Wednesday were a strong signal that North Korea was embarking on a new cycle of tensions in the Korean Peninsula despite the country’s first reported outbreak of the coronavirus. It also constituted North Korea’s public reaction to Mr. Biden’s trip to the region, where he met with the leaders of South Korea and Japan and vowed to step up measures, including joint military exercises, to help deter the growing nuclear and missile threat from the North.
  • But like his conservative predecessors, he attached an important caveat: Such economic largess would be possible only “if North Korea genuinely embarks on a process to complete denuclearization.”
  • In the same speech, he seemed to take a page from the playbook of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia when he warned that his nuclear arsenal was not just to deter foreign invasion, but also to be used “if any forces try to violate the fundamental interests of our state.”
  • “North Korea continues to improve, expand and diversify its conventional and nuclear missile capabilities, posing an increasing risk to the U.S. homeland and U.S. forces, allies, and partners in the region,” John Plumb, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told the Senate Armed Services Committee this month. “Most of North Korea’s ballistic missiles have an assessed capability to carry nuclear payloads.”
criscimagnael

Jerusalem, Israel: Violence erupts during controversial flag march - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Crowds waving Israeli flags set off from Damascus Gate -- the main entry to the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City -- dancing and chanting "the nation of Israel lives" and "death to Arabs."
  • Seventy-nine Palestinians were injured in Jerusalem by rubber bullets, sound grenades and pepper spray, he Palestinian Red Crescent Society said, and one protester was shot with live fire.
  • More than 50 people have been arrested and detained for involvement in incidents of riots and assaulting police officers, Israel's police said in a statement Sunday.
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  • The flag march is an annual parade where mostly nationalist Jewish groups celebrate Israel gaining control of the Western Wall during the 1967 Six-Day War and capturing East Jerusalem, placing the entire city under Israeli control.
criscimagnael

Putin's Threats Highlight the Dangers of a New, Riskier Nuclear Era - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nuclear-arms-treaties.html

shared by criscimagnael on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • After generations of stability in nuclear arms control, a warning to Russia from President Biden shows how old norms are eroding.
  • “We currently see no indication that Russia has intent to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, though Russia’s occasional rhetoric to rattle the nuclear saber is itself dangerous and extremely irresponsible,” Mr. Biden wrote in a guest opinion essay in The New York Times. “Let me be clear: Any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict on any scale would be completely unacceptable to us as well as the rest of the world and would entail severe consequences.”
  • With the Biden administration stepping up the flow of conventional weapons to Ukraine and tensions with Russia high, a senior administration official conceded that “right now it’s almost impossible to imagine” how the talks might resume before the last treaty expires in early 2026.
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  • The Chinese are “watching the war in Ukraine closely and will likely use nuclear coercion to their advantage” in future conflicts, the commander, Adm. Charles A. Richard, told Congress.
  • Others are learning their own lessons. North Korea, which President Donald J. Trump boasted he would disarm with one-on-one diplomacy, is building new weapons.
  • What is fast approaching, experts say, is a second nuclear age full of new dangers and uncertainties, less predictable than during the Cold War, with established restraints giving way to more naked threats to reach for such weapons — and a need for new strategies to keep the atomic peace.
  • the dawning era would feature “both a greater risk of a nuclear arms race and heightened incentives for states to resort to nuclear weapons in a crisis.”
  • President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia opened the Ukraine war with a declaration that he was putting his nuclear abilities on some kind of heightened alert — a clear message to Washington to back off.
  • In the years leading up to the Ukraine invasion, Mr. Putin regularly punctuated his speeches with nuclear propaganda videos, including one that showed a swarm of warheads descending on Florida.
  • They are designed by the Russians to blur the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons, which strategists fear makes their use more thinkable.
  • escalate to de-escalate.”
  • “There are a lot of things that he would do in the context of escalation before he would get to nuclear weapons,” Ms. Haines said.
  • The White House, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies are examining the implications of any potential Russian claim that it is conducting a nuclear test or the use by its forces of a relatively small, battlefield nuclear weapon to demonstrate its ability.
  • The idea would be to “signal immediate de-escalation” followed by international condemnation, said one administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide insight into classified topics.
  • Henry Kissinger noted in a recent interview with The Financial Times that “there’s almost no discussion internationally about what would happen if the weapons actually became used.” He added: “We are now living in a totally new era.”
  • The simplest theory is that if China is going to be a superpower, it needs a superpower-sized arsenal. But another is that Beijing recognizes that all the familiar theories of nuclear balance of power are eroding.
  • “China is heralding a paradigm shift to something much less stable,” Mr. Krepinevich wrote, “a tripolar nuclear system.”
  • “They’re up to something,” Mr. Albright said of Saudi Arabia, “and they’re rich.”
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