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Javier E

When Silicon Valley Took Over the 'New Republic' - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...534195

journalism media news tech audience traffic crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 08 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Dependence generates desperation—a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms. It leads media outlets to sign terrible deals that look like self-preserving necessities: granting Facebook the right to sell their advertising, or giving Google permission to publish articles directly on its fast-loading server. In the end, such arrangements simply allow Facebook and Google to hold these companies ever tighter.
  • What makes these deals so terrible is the capriciousness of the tech companies. Quickly moving in a radically different direction may be great for their bottom line, but it is detrimental to the media companies that rely on the platforms. Facebook will decide that its users prefer video to words, or ideologically pleasing propaganda to more-objective accounts of events—and so it will de-emphasize the written word or hard news in its users’ feeds.
  • The problem isn’t just financial vulnerability, however. It’s also the way tech companies dictate the patterns of work; the way their influence can affect the ethos of an entire profession, lowering standards of quality and eroding ethical protections.
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  • t the beginning of this century, journalism was in extremis. Recessions, coupled with readers’ changing habits, prodded media companies to gamble on a digital future unencumbered by the clunky apparatus of publishing on paper. Over a decade, the number of newspaper employees dropped by 38 percent. As journalism shriveled, its prestige plummeted. One report ranked newspaper reporter as the worst job in America. The profession found itself forced to reconsider its very reasons for existing. All the old nostrums about independence suddenly seemed like unaffordable luxuries.
  • My master was Chartbeat, a site that provides writers, editors, and their bosses with a real-time accounting of web traffic, showing the flickering readership of each and every article. Chartbeat and its competitors have taken hold at virtually every magazine, newspaper, and blog. With these meters, no piece has sufficient traffic—it can always be improved with a better headline, a better approach to social media, a better subject, a better argument
  • Upworthy would write 25 different headlines, test all of them, and determine the most clickable of the bunch. Based on these results, it uncovered syntactical patterns that almost ensured hits. Classic examples: “9 out of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact” and “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.” These formulas became commonplace on the web, until readers grew wise to them.
  • The core insight of Upworthy, BuzzFeed, Vox Media, and other emerging internet behemoths was that editorial success could be engineered, if you listened to the data. This insight was embraced across the industry and wormed its way into the New Republic.
  • Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, had put this way: R = ßz. (In epidemiology, ß represents the probability of transmission; z is the number of people exposed to a contagious individual.) The equation supposedly illustrates how a piece of content could go viral. But although Peretti got the idea for his formula from epidemiology, the emerging science of traffic was really a branch of behavioral science: People clicked so quickly, they didn’t always fully understand why. These decisions were made in a semiconscious state, influenced by cognitive biases. Enticing a reader entailed a little manipulation, a little hidden persuasion.
  • The new generation of media giants has no patience for the old ethos of detachment. It’s not that these companies don’t have aspirations toward journalistic greatness. BuzzFeed, Vice, and the Huffington Post invest in excellent reporting and employ first-rate journalists—and they have produced some of the most memorable pieces of investigative journalism in this century. But the pursuit of audience is their central mission. They have allowed the endless feedback loop of the web to shape their editorial sensibility, to determine their editorial investments
  • this is just a digitally enhanced version of an old-fashioned media pile-on. But social media amplify the financial incentive to join the herd. The results are highly derivative. Joshua Topolsky, a founder of The Verge, has bemoaned this creeping homogenization: “Everything looks the same, reads the same, and seems to be competing for the same eyeballs.”
  • Donald Trump is the culmination of the era. He understood how, more than at any other moment in recent history, the media need to give the public the circus that it desires. Even if the media disdained Trump’s outrages, they built him up as a plausible candidate, at which point they had no choice but to cover him. Stories about Trump yielded the sort of traffic that pleased the data gods and benefited the bottom line.
  • We were idealistic about our shared idealism. But my vision of the world was moralistic and romantic; his was essentially technocratic. He had faith in systems—rules, efficiencies, organizational charts, productivity tools
  • Makers of magazines and newspapers used to think of their product as a coherent package—an issue, an edition, an institution. They did not see themselves as the publishers of dozens of discrete pieces to be trafficked each day on Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
  • Thinking about bundling articles into something larger was intellectually liberating. Editors justified high-minded and quixotic articles as essential for “the mix.
  • Journalism has performed so admirably in the aftermath of Trump’s victory that it has grown harder to see the profession’s underlying rot. Now each assignment is subjected to a cost-benefit analysis—will the article earn enough traffic to justify the investment? Sometimes the analysis is explicit and conscious, though in most cases it’s subconscious and embedded in euphemism. Either way, it’s this train of thought that leads editors to declare an idea “not worth the effort” or to worry about whether an article will “sink.”
nataliedepaulo1

British Voters: Trust Nobody - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...529848

politics

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 09 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Fortified by a 20-point lead in the opinion polls, Theresa May, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, called a general election in April assuming that, all things being equal, she couldn’t possibly lose. In 2015, David Cameron had won a small and fragile majority in the House of Commons, but this was Mrs. May’s opportunity to transform it into, as she said, a “strong and stable” government that would be well-placed to lead the U.K. through the choppy waters of leaving the European Union. An increased majority, she promised, would “strengthen” her hand in the forthcoming Brexit negotiations.
  • Perhaps that’s the real message of this election: Britain’s divisions desperately require a political party, and a prime minister, capable of rising above them. On current evidence, however, there is no sign of that kind of savior riding to the rescue. A fractious, disgruntled, country remains just that. The electorate sent a clear message on Thursday: Trust nobody. The U.K. awaits the arrival of a politician who can recognize and then surmount that; on the evidence available, it will be waiting for some time yet.
Javier E

The Order of Lenin: 'Find Some Truly Hard People' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-bolshevism-soviet-russia.html

lenin history russia revolution stalin politics

shared by Javier E on 22 May 17 - No Cached
  • One of the murkiest issues has to do with the nature and causes of Stalin’s terror and the question of whether Stalin had broken with Lenin’s policies or continued them. Behind this lay the question of the institutionalization of violence in Bolshevik culture and the Soviet state.
  • the policies of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party did not at first rely on terror. However, the extreme conditions of the civil war from 1917 to 1922, in which some seven million people were killed, together with Lenin’s ruthless economic policies, led to the destitution and desperation of millions of people who found themselves without food, livelihood, shelter or security.
  • He concluded this grisly note with the directive: “Find some truly hard people.”The following month, he ordered: “It is necessary secretly — and urgently — to prepare the terror.”
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  • “I would like to say some words, perhaps not festive ones,” he said. “The Russian czars did a great deal that was bad. They robbed and enslaved the people. But they did one thing that was good. They amassed an enormous state, all the way to Kamchatka. We have inherited that state.”
  • whoever attempts to destroy that unity of the socialist state, whoever seeks the separation of any of its parts or nationalities — that man is an enemy, a sworn enemy of the state and of the peoples of the U.S.S.R. And we will destroy each and every such enemy, even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts — yes, his thoughts — threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!”ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story
  • The paradox, then, is that Stalin unleashed the Great Terror in 1936 at a time of relative peace and stability. The masses of enemies who suddenly appeared within Soviet society were largely invented. Millions of innocent people were arrested, tortured and shot, without evidence and according to quotas established in the Kremlin. Stalin did not bluff: Literally “anyone” could be guilty.
  • Nikolai Bukharin, the veteran Bolshevik and editor of Pravda, became one of those enemies: arrested in February 1937 and executed in March 1938. A letter he wrote to Stalin from his prison cell, on Dec. 10, 1937, is a rambling, pitiful epistle from a man who knows he is to die. Yet, astonishingly, he not only affirmed what Stalin had said to the Politburo the month before, but acknowledged his own role in creating the machine that now had him caught in its turbines.
  • “There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge,” he wrote. “This purge encompasses 1) the guilty; 2) persons under suspicion; and 3) persons potentially under suspicion. This business could not have been managed without me.”
  • Undermining the social order, abrogating the rule of law, putting fear at the core of individual consciousness and sowing distrust were essential to Stalin’s goal of eliminating any threat to his absolute power. Stalin not only eliminated possible party rivals in the Great Terror, but he also sent an unmistakable signal to the entire nation: If Bukharin, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev could be guilty, everyone was under suspicion.
Javier E

Trump's Madness Invites Mutiny - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ps-madness-invites-mutiny.html

trump crisis collapse

shared by Javier E on 16 May 17 - No Cached
  • He is talking and tweeting himself into legal jeopardy. He can’t seem to help himself. Something in the man is broken.
  • He is insecure, paranoid and brittle, jostling between egomania and narcissism, intoxicated with a power beyond his meager comprehension and indulging in it beyond the point of abuse.
  • I would caution that this is a moment pregnant with calamity.
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  • The man we see unraveling before our eyes still retains the power of the presidency until such time as he doesn’t, and that time of termination is by no means assured. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • Trump is now a wounded animal, desperate and dangerous. Survival is an overwhelming, instinctual impulse, and one should put nothing beyond a being who is bent on ensuring it.
Javier E

I wrote 'The Art of the Deal' with Trump. His self-sabotage is rooted in his past. - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...sabotage-is-rooted-in-his-past

trump childhood psychology

shared by Javier E on 17 May 17 - No Cached
  • What’s clear is that he has spent his life seeking to dominate others, whatever that requires, and whatever collateral damage it creates along the way.
  • I never sensed from Trump any guilt or contrition about anything he’d done, and he certainly never shared any misgivings publicly. From his perspective, he operated in a jungle full of predators who were forever out to get him, and he did what he must to survive.
  • Trump was equally clear with me that he didn’t value — nor even necessarily recognize — the qualities that tend to emerge as people grow more secure, such as empathy, generosity, reflectiveness, the capacity to delay gratification or, above all, a conscience, an inner sense of right and wrong
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  • The life he lived was all transactional, all the time. Having never expanded his emotional, intellectual or moral universe, he has his story down, and he’s sticking to it.
  • A key part of that story is that facts are whatever Trump deems them to be on any given day. When he is challenged, he instinctively doubles down — even when what he has just said is demonstrably false
  • Trump sees no contradiction at all in changing his story about why he fired Comey and then undermining the explanatory statements of his aides, or in any other lie he tells. His aim is never accuracy; it’s domination.
  • Any addiction has a predictable pattern — the addict keeps chasing the high by upping the ante in an increasingly futile attempt to recreate the desired state. From the very first time I interviewed him in his office in Trump Tower in 1985, the image I had of Trump was that of a black hole. Whatever goes in quickly disappears without a trace. Nothing sustains.
  • Beneath his bluff exterior, I always sensed a hurt, incredibly vulnerable little boy who just wanted to be loved.
  • Trump’s need for unquestioning praise and flattery also helps to explain his hostility to democracy and to a free press — both of which thrive on open dissent.
  • In neurochemical terms, when he feels threatened or thwarted, Trump moves into fight or flight. His amygdala gets triggered, his hypothalamic-adrenal-pituitary axis activates, and his prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that makes us capable of rationality and reflection — shuts down. 
  • This is what makes his access to the nuclear codes so dangerous and frightening.
  • The Trump I got to know had no deep ideological beliefs, nor any passionate feeling about anything but his immediate self-interest.
  • Over the past week, in the face of criticism from nearly every quarter, Trump’s distrust has almost palpably mushroomed. No importuning by his advisers would stand a chance of constraining him when he feels this deeply triggered. The more he feels at the mercy of forces he cannot control — and he is surely feeling that now — the more resentful, desperate and impulsive he becomes.
  • I vividly remember the ominous feeling when Trump got angry about some perceived slight. Everyone around him knew that you were best off keeping your distance at those times, or, if that wasn’t possible, to resist disagreeing with him in any way.
  • In the hundreds of Trump’s phone calls I listened in on with his consent, and the dozens of meetings I attended with him, I can never remember anyone disagreeing with him about anything. The same climate of fear and paranoia appears to have taken root in his White House.
Javier E

Making Sense of the Violence in Charlottesville - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...538659

racism white supremacy history culture politics violence lynching usa memory racial

shared by Javier E on 04 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • many Americans of good will honestly, if erroneously, believe that what happened in Charlottesville is “not us.” How can this be?
  • Answering this question demands a look back at some of the most significant patterns of white-on-black violence in American history to identify the precise ways in which that violence was justified, forgotten, or defined as something other than the racist terror that it was.
  • American chattel slavery—in which blacks were bought, sold, worked, and bred for profit—was created and maintained through violence that was at once brutal and routine
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  • In justifying this violence, supporters of slavery recast it as a kind of self-defense, and violence committed in self-defense—unlike violence committed out of anger or hatred—says nothing about the character of the perpetrators.
  • The demise of slavery did not lead to a decline in white-on-black violence—it merely changed forms.
  • Most notoriously, whites lynched blacks; looking just at white-on-black lynchings for the purpose of racial control, the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative documented 4,075 lynchings between 1877, when Reconstruction ended, and 1950
  • Lynchings were even more savage and sadistic than most people imagine.
  • Patrick Phillips recounts one such expulsion in his 2016 book Blood at the Root. In 1912, the white residents of Forsyth County, Georgia, drove out all black residents of the county, who abandoned their land and their belongings as they fled bands of “night riders”
  • again, because defenders of lynching portrayed their violence as justified, even as we recognize today that lynching is a thing white people did, we can believe that it implies nothing about what it meant to be white.
  • The motifs of black men’s savage, uncontrollable lust and of white women’s chastity and virtue combined in a perfect storm of white fear to justify the practice of lynching generally, even when a particular lynching was not alleged to be in response to rape.
  • Even opponents of lynching seemed to agree that the supposed epidemic of black-on-white rape demanded a violent solution.
  • Attempts to justify racial terror have  been accompanied by a national commitment to erasing it from our memory.
  • Consider the little-known history of racial cleansing in America. Across the South and Midwest, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin has identified hundreds of counties that experienced sharp and abrupt drop-offs of their black populations. Though the historical record, as with lynching, is intentionally spotty, in many cases there is clear evidence that whites systematically and violently drove out entire black populations, dispossessing black families of their property and rendering them refugees.
  • Such depravity required justification. This time, accusations of black criminality would do the trick. In most lynchings, the victim was accused of rape, murder, or both.
  • This state of affairs is not inevitable; America’s relationship with its history is a collective choice. Other countries have made other choices in the wake of systematic racist violence.
  • since black refugees could not safely return to retrieve their personal property or to sell their land, the new white “owners” could assert adverse possession after the statutory period of seven years, registering deeds at the county courthouse even though the Georgia statute technically required adverse possession to be “peaceable.”
  • This literal erasure enabled the ensuing rhetorical erasure of Forsyth’s history. In 1987, civil rights activists staged a protest in Forsyth County, which remained all-white 75 years after its racial cleansing. The white residents of the county seemed genuinely puzzled as to why activists were harassing them.
  • White terrorists cleansed their communities of blacks in Forsyth County in 1912, and in Marshall County, Kentucky in 1908, and in Vermillion County, Indiana in 1923, and in Sharp County, Arkansas on Christmas Eve, 1906, to name just a few. If we recognized these crimes for what they were, it would be difficult to ignore that a pattern of racial terrorism had occurred across decades, and that later incidents of racial violence were part of that pattern.
  • But a crime no one remembers cannot lead us to associate its perpetrators with criminality, so our concept of whiteness remains untouched by any association with violence.   
  • We have erased the history of lynching in much the same way. The overwhelming majority of lynching sites remain unmarked and un-memorialized. The failure to mark these sites allows Americans (especially whites) to forget the atrocities.
  • This erasure of history from public spaces contributes to a kind of gaslighting dynamic in discussions of race in America: whites are able to minimize blacks’ claims of historical and ongoing oppression because they have successfully forgotten much of the history that blacks still remember.  
  • Justifying and erasing hundreds of years of white-on-black violence has left many Americans ill-equipped to make sense of the racist violence that we live with today. As a result, whites often lack the vocabulary to contextualize even the most obviously racist events.
  • media outlets tended to use vague language like “evil” or “monster” to describe Roof. That kind of equivocal terminology implied that Roof had an inherent, inevitable propensity for violence, a propensity that sprang up organically rather than being nurtured by extremist influences
  • But Roof’s motive could not have been clearer. He wrote a manifesto about the threat black criminality poses to Western civilization. He confessed to police that he planned and carried out the shooting with the intention of starting a “race war.” Roof was desperate to make sure everyone understood that he had acted to promote white supremacy, but many Americans stubbornly refused to take him at his own word, insisting that it would be premature to interpret the shooting as racial terrorism.
  • By failing to connect Roof’s racism with his obvious criminality, many allowed themselves to think of the Charleston tragedy as an isolated and senseless act, instead of seeing it as a seamless continuation of the racial terrorism that is America’s heritage.
  • In every generation, Americans have consistently spoken about racist violence committed by white people as justified, erased it from memory, or simply called it something else
  • So when self-identified white nationalists seeking to turn America into a whites-only homeland held a torchlight protest, many observers failed to make the clear connection to bands of night riders, armed and carrying torches, driving blacks out of their homes to cleanse the region of anyone not white.
  • less than a decade later, Phillips writes, the white leaders of Forsyth County were boasting—with a straight face—that “while other north Georgia communities [with mixed populations] continued to suffer episodes of ‘race trouble,’ there were no such embarrassments in Forsyth.” This was possible in part because they had erased evidence of just how Forsyth came to be an all-white county
  • the effort is underway to face up to the full horror of racist terror, not justify it; to name racially motivated violence as such, not hide it; to mark down in disgrace the names of the perpetrators, not celebrate them; and to memorialize the victims, not erase their suffering.
  • America, tragically, is over a century behind on its obligation to undertake the same reckoning.
  • America, tragically, is over a century behind on its obligation to undertake the same reckoning. The horrific events of August provide an opportunity to get started.
Javier E

The first social media suicide | News | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...the-first-social-media-suicide

social media suicide youth france crisis despair

shared by Javier E on 29 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Océane was oppressed by the trite and uncaring relations she observed between human beings. She poured scorn on the empty flirtation of social media, their desperate popularity theatre. She had no interest in the artificial animation of alcohol or drugs (though she constantly smoked cigarettes). The dulled existence of the Parisian suburbs, where no one seemed able to engage with anything consequential, depressed her (on the wall behind her as she made her last speech hung a poster with the words NEW YORK PARIS LONDON HONG KONG).
  • For a generation so fully embedded in social media, celebrity was not remote or atypical. It was latent in everyone. Schoolgirls debated with each other how they would deal with its burdens – paparazzi, extreme wealth, film-star boyfriends – when they grew up
  • . Social media, after all, supplied a publicity machinery with a reach and power previously available only to truly famous people, and now the condition of the celebrity was everyone’s condition. Suddenly everyone was broadcasting their life to the world, and measuring their worth on the basis of the libidinal pulses that came back – as only celebrities had before. Suddenly, the celebrity’s grief over privacy was everyone’s, and everyone was afflicted by her insecurity: do people realise there’s nothing behind it all except my own frail and disappointing humanity?
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  • Océane’s death was also intended as a kind of detonation, which would “take out” others apart from herself. On their side, the perpetrators of the Paris attacks were also, let us not forget, bent on their own destruction: they, too, were suicidal. All these people were young, and nearly all of them had grown up in the racialised ghettos of Paris and Brussels. All of them felt some kind of despair about the reality they lived in Europe, and all of them, crucially, decided that the only significant asset they had, in their negotiation with it, was their own existence.
  • If mid-20th-century western societies achieved a startling level of consensus, it was due to their extraordinary expansion of the share in the social surplus – to which the destruction (by war) of previous wealth concentrations, and the transformation of “labour” into “jobs”, were essential
  • Today, as western societies reverse those advances and drift back towards 19th-century arrangements, it should not be surprising that the malaise of that era is returning, too. This malaise is felt most keenly by the young, who have seen nothing during their lifetimes save the progressive re-exclusion of the majority from society’s wealth, and who embark on adulthood with very little hope that they will be able to “make it” as their parents and grandparents did. They have a strong sense, in fact, that now-ageing generations have taken everything for themselves, bequeathing to the young nothing but the burden of their own sins.
  • Malaise takes on particularly acute forms in the Parisian suburbs, where work has been informalised and automated almost into nothing; in the most depressed areas, a quarter of young women and nearly half of young men are without jobs. But there too, unemployment is only a symptom of the wider casting-out from French society, whose would-be universalism disguises one of the most consolidated power systems in the western world
  • militant Islam is spreading among French youth not just through the radicalisation of Muslims, but also through the conversion of non-Muslims, who wish for themselves the activist power it supplies
  • It was not, in other words, that they were Muslim, and therefore they wanted to destroy reality and themselves; it was rather that they wanted to destroy reality and themselves – and to rediscover, in the process, some kind of chivalry and nobility – and therefore they embraced the trenchant power of radical Islam.
  • There are many moments in history when young people have dreamed of glamorous self-destruction rather than embarking, drearily, on adulthood. But those who actually die are the exceptions. Far greater numbers are touched by the same current of despair, but are nevertheless held back from the ultimate act by life’s natural defences. These survivors are not left unscathed, however. They live astride the line between life and death, harbouring a kind of sentimental envy for those who have gone.
  • I saw traits in her common to a lot of people these days – and possibly to myself, even if they are most pronounced in the young: she was subdued, serious, intermittently funny, distracted by constant electronic tics, slightly unavailable to herself. In so many respects, Océane seemed entirely normal, and I sensed that her online exploit, too, would become more customary over time.
Javier E

Everybody lies: how Google search reveals our darkest secrets | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...crets-seth-stephens-davidowitz

google search social media research statistics

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Many people underreport embarrassing behaviours and thoughts on surveys. They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias.
  • An important paper in 1950 provided powerful evidence of how surveys can fall victim to such bias. Researchers collected data, from official sources, on the residents of Denver: what percentage of them voted, gave to charity, and owned a library card. They then surveyed the residents to see if the percentages would match. The results were, at the time, shocking. What the residents reported to the surveys was very different from the data the researchers had gathered
  • Then there’s that odd habit we sometimes have of lying to ourselves. Lying to oneself may explain why so many people say they are above average. How big is this problem? More than 40% of one company’s engineers said they are in the top 5%. More than 90% of college professors say they do above-average work. One-quarter of high school seniors think they are in the top 1% in their ability to get along with other people. If you are deluding yourself, you can’t be honest in a survey.
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  • on sensitive topics, every survey method will elicit substantial misreporting. People have no incentive to tell surveys the truth.
  • How, therefore, can we learn what our fellow humans are really thinking and doing? Big data
  • Think of Google searches. Remember the conditions that make people more honest. Online? Check. Alone? Check. No person administering a survey? Check.
  • I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.
  • How many American men are gay? This is a regular question in sexuality research. Yet it has been among the toughest questions for social scientists to answer. Psychologists no longer believe Alfred Kinsey’s famous estimate – based on surveys that oversampled prisoners and prostitutes – that 10% of American men are gay. Representative surveys now tell us about 2% to 3% are
  • About 2.5% of male Facebook users who list a gender of interest say they are interested in men; that corresponds roughly with what the surveys indicate.
  • There is clearly some mobility – from Oklahoma City to San Francisco, for example. But I estimate that men moving to someplace more open-minded can explain less than half of the difference in the openly gay population in tolerant versus intolerant states.
  • If mobility cannot fully explain why some states have so many more openly gay men, the closet must be playing a big role. Which brings us back to Google
  • about 5% of male porn searches are for gay-male porn. Overall, there are more gay porn searches in tolerant states compared with intolerant states.
  • one consequence of my estimate is clear: an awful lot of men in the United States, particularly in intolerant states, are still in the closet. They don’t reveal their sexual preferences on Facebook. They don’t admit it on surveys. And, in many cases, they may even be married to women.
  • It turns out that wives suspect their husbands of being gay rather frequently. They demonstrate that suspicion in the surprisingly common search: “Is my husband gay?” The word “gay” is 10% more likely to complete searches that begin “Is my husband...” than the second-place word, “cheating”. It is eight times more common than “an alcoholic” and 10 times more common than “depressed”.
  • On Google, there are 16 times more complaints about a spouse not wanting sex than about a married partner not being willing to talk. There are five-and-a-half times more complaints about an unmarried partner not wanting sex than an unmarried partner refusing to text back.
  • Google data also suggests a reason people may be avoiding sex so frequently: enormous anxiety, with much of it misplaced. Start with men’s anxieties. It isn’t news that men worry about how well endowed they are, but the degree of this worry is rather profound. Men Google more questions about their sexual organ than any other body par
  • Men conduct more searches for how to make their penises bigger than how to tune a guitar, make an omelette, or change a tyre. Men’s top Googled concern about steroids isn’t whether they may damage their health but whether taking them might diminish the size of their penis. Men’s top Googled question related to how their body or mind would change as they aged was whether their penis would get smaller.
  • Do women care about penis size? Rarely, according to Google searches. For every search women make about a partner’s phallus, men make roughly 170 searches about their own
  • Men’s second most common sex question is how to make their sexual encounters longer. Once again, the insecurities of men do not appear to match the concerns of women. There are roughly the same number of searches asking how to make a boyfriend climax more quickly as climax more slowly.
  • while it’s true that overall interest in personal appearance skews female, it’s not as lopsided as stereotypes would suggest. According to my analysis of Google AdWords, which measures the websites people visit, interest in beauty and fitness is 42% male, weight loss is 33% male, and cosmetic surgery is 39% male
  • you could call it progress that many people today feel they will be judged if they admit they judge other people based on their ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. But many Americans still do. You can see this on Google
  • African Americans are the only group that faces a “rude” stereotype
  • Nearly every group is a victim of a “stupid” stereotype; the only two that are not: Jews and Muslims.
  • The “evil” stereotype is applied to Jews, Muslims, and gay people but not black people, Mexicans, Asians, and Christians.
  • Muslims are the only group stereotyped as terrorists.
  • minutes after the media first reported one of the shooters’ Muslim-sounding names, a disturbing number of Californians decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them. The top Google search in California with the word “Muslims” in it at the time was “kill Muslims”
  • In the days following the San Bernardino attack, for every American concerned with “Islamophobia”, another was searching for “kill Muslims”. While hate searches were approximately 20% of all searches about Muslims before the attack, more than half of all search volume about Muslims became hateful in the hours that followed it. And this minute-by-minute search data can tell us how difficult it can be to calm this rage.
  • Obama’s speech, in other words, was judged a major success. But was it?
  • In his speech, the president said: “It is the responsibility of all Americans – of every faith – to reject discrimination.” But searches calling Muslims “terrorists”, “bad”, “violent”, and “evil” doubled during and shortly after the speech.
  • Obama also said: “It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country.” But negative searches about Syrian refugees, a mostly Muslim group then desperately looking for a safe haven, rose 60%, while searches asking how to help Syrian refugees dropped 35%
  • Obama asked Americans to “not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear”. Yet searches for “kill Muslims” tripled during his speech. In fact, just about every negative search we could think to test regarding Muslims shot up during and after Obama’s speech, and just about every positive search we could think to test declined.
  • new data from the internet, offering digital truth serum, suggested that the speech actually backfired in its main goal. Instead of calming the angry mob, as everybody thought he was doing, the internet data tells us that Obama actually inflamed it.
  • Searches for “nigger jokes” are 17 times more common than searches for “kike jokes”, “gook jokes”, “spic jokes”, “chink jokes”, and “fag jokes” combined. When are these searches most common? Whenever African Americans are in the news.
  • Any theory of racism has to explain a big puzzle in America. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of black Americans think they suffer from prejudice – and they have ample evidence of discrimination in police stops, job interviews, and jury decisions. On the other hand, very few white Americans will admit to being racist. The dominant explanation among political scientists recently has been that this is due, in large part, to widespread implicit prejudice. White Americans may mean well, this theory goes, but they have a subconscious bias, which influences their treatment of black Americans.
  • There is, though, an alternative explanation for the discrimination that African Americans feel and whites deny: hidden explicit racism. Suppose there is a reasonably widespread conscious racism of which people are very much aware but to which they won’t confess – certainly not in a survey
  • That’s what the search data seems to be saying.
  • this gender bias is not grounded in reality. About 28% of girls are overweight, while 35% of boys are. Even though scales measure more overweight boys than girls, parents see – or worry about – overweight girls much more frequently than overweight boys. Parents are also one-and-a-half times more likely to ask whether their daughter is beautiful than whether their son is handsome.
  • And then there is the phenomenon of Donald Trump’s candidacy. When Nate Silver, the polling guru, looked for the geographic variable that correlated most strongly with support in the 2016 Republican primary for Trump, he found it in the map of racism I had developed.
  • The primary explanation for discrimination against African Americans today is not the fact that the people who agree to participate in lab experiments make subconscious associations between negative words and black people; it is the fact that millions of white Americans continue to do things like search for “nigger jokes”
  • , I was able to use Google searches to find evidence of implicit prejudice against another segment of the population: young girls. And who, might you ask, would be harbouring bias against girls? Their parents.
  • Prior to the Google data, we didn’t have a convincing measure of this virulent animus. Now we do. We are, therefore, in a position to see what it explains. It explains why Obama’s vote totals in 2008 and 2012 were depressed in many regions. It also correlates with the black-white wage gap, as a team of economists recently reported. The areas that I had found make the most racist searches underpay black people.
  • Perhaps young boys are more likely than young girls to use big words or show objective signs of giftedness? Nope. If anything, it’s the opposite. At young ages, girls have consistently been shown to have larger vocabularies and use more complex sentences. In American schools, girls are 9% more likely than boys to be in gifted programmes. Despite all this, parents looking around the dinner table appear to see more gifted boys than girls.
  • What then are parents’ overriding concerns regarding their daughters? Primarily, anything related to appearance.
  • Parents are about twice as likely to ask how to get their daughters to lose weight as they are to ask how to get their sons to do the same
  • Parents are two-and-a-half times more likely to ask “Is my son gifted?” than “Is my daughter gifted?”
  • I did not find a significant relationship between any of these biases and the political or cultural makeup of a state. It would seem this bias against girls is more widespread and deeply ingrained than we’d care to believe.
  • Let’s return to Obama’s speech about Islamophobia. Recall that every time he argued that people should respect Muslims more, the people he was trying to reach became more enraged. Google searches, however, reveal that there was one line that did trigger the type of response Obama might have wanted. He said: “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbours, our co-workers, our sports heroes and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defence of our country.”
  • When we lecture angry people, the search data implies that their fury can grow. But subtly provoking people’s curiosity, giving new information, and offering new images of the group that is stoking their rage may turn their thoughts in different, more positive directions.
  • What’s your background?I’d describe myself as a data scientist, but my PhD is in economics. When I was doing my PhD, in 2012, I found this tool called Google Trends that tells you what people are searching, and where, and I became obsessed with it.
  • What would your search records reveal about you?They could definitely tell I’m a hypochondriac because I’m waking up in the middle of the night doing Google searches about my health. There are definitely things about me that you could figure out. When making claims about a topic, it’s better to do it on aggregate, but I think you can figure out a lot, if not everything, about an individual by what they’re searching on Google.
  • All this data I’m talking about is public
  • Does it change your view of human nature? Are we darker and stranger creatures than you realised?Yeah. I think I had a dark view of human nature to begin with, and I think now it’s gotten even darker. I think the degree to which people are self-absorbed is pretty shocking
  • When Trump became president, all my friends said how anxious they were, they couldn’t sleep because they’re so concerned about immigrants and the Muslim ban. But from the data you can see that in liberal parts of the country there wasn’t a rise in anxiety when Trump was elected. When people were waking up at 3am in a cold sweat, their searches were about their job, their health, their relationship – they’re not concerned about the Muslim ban or global warming.
  • Was the Google search data telling you that Trump was going to win?I did see that Trump was going to win. You saw clearly that African American turnout was going to be way down, because in cities with 95% black people there was a collapse in searches for voting information. That was a big reason Hillary Clinton did so much worse than the polls suggested.
Javier E

Trump's low-growth trap - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html

growth productivity slowdown economics economic policy trump crisis

shared by Javier E on 09 May 17 - No Cached
  • Our democratic system requires strong-enough economic growth to raise living standards and support activist government. These expectations, present in most advanced democracies, are no longer realistic, because the global economy has changed in ways that reduce growth.
  • For the United States, Europe and other developed nations, this means that “anything over 1.5 percent [annually] should be seen as healthy,” he says. This would be a big drop for the United States. Since World War II, the American economy has usually grown each year by 3 percent or better.
  • To be fair, there’s no technical consensus on these issues. Consider another recent report by innovation experts Michael Mandel and Bret Swanson. Contrary to Sharma, they predict a productivity boom that would boost annual U.S. economic growth closer to 3 percent a year — a target of the Trump administration — from the 2 percent of recent years.
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  • Still, Sharma’s broader point remains: The real threat of the economic slowdown is to political stability. For decades, advanced democracies, including the United States, have adopted a similar political model. It assumed that economic growth could deliver social peace and loyalty to democratic values.
  • The system’s victims and critics could be bought off. But the model required — and most people took for granted — a dynamic economy that could boost living standards and expand welfare benefits. This assurance has now gone missing. At best, the model desperately needs repair; at worst, it is busted.
abbykleman

A European deal with Libya could leave migrants facing beatings, rape and slavery - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-8598-9a99da559f9e_story.html

shared by abbykleman on 02 May 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 02 May 17
     
    For hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants, Italy became a safe harbor, a landing place for those crossing the treacherous cobalt blue of the central Mediterranean Sea. But this long-tolerant nation is moving to create a de facto migrant blockade - by striking an odd bargain with Libya, its dysfunctional and war-ravaged neighbor to the south.
Javier E

How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war | News | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...y-truth-of-the-first-world-war

imperialism racism wwi white supremacy history Crisis

shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.
  • But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.
  • In the early 20th century, the popularity of social Darwinism had created a consensus that nations should be seen similarly to biological organisms, which risked extinction or decay if they failed to expel alien bodies and achieve “living space” for their own citizens. Pseudo-scientific theories of biological difference between races posited a world in which all races were engaged in an international struggle for wealth and power
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  • In the years leading up to 1914, prohibitions on sexual relations between European women and black men (though not between European men and African women) were enforced across European colonies in Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe after 1914 seemed to be violating a firm taboo.
  • “These savages are a terrible danger,” a joint declaration of the German national assembly warned in 1920, to “German women”. Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler would describe African soldiers on German soil as a Jewish conspiracy aimed to topple white people “from their cultural and political heights”. The Nazis, who were inspired by American innovations in racial hygiene, would in 1937 forcibly sterilise hundreds of children fathered by African soldiers. Fear and hatred of armed “niggers” (as Weber called them) on German soil was not confined to Germany, or the political right. The pope protested against their presence, and an editorial in the Daily Herald, a British socialist newspaper, in 1920 was titled “Black Scourge in Europe”.
  • The first world war, in fact, marked the moment when the violent legacies of imperialism in Asia and Africa returned home, exploding into self-destructive carnage in Europe. And it seems ominously significant on this particular Remembrance Day: the potential for large-scale mayhem in the west today is greater than at any
  • In one predominant but highly ideological version of European history – popularised since the cold war – the world wars, together with fascism and communism, are simply monstrous aberrations in the universal advance of liberal democracy and freedom.
  • In many ways, however, it is the decades after 1945 – when Europe, deprived of its colonies, emerged from the ruins of two cataclysmic wars – that increasingly seem exceptional. Amid a general exhaustion with militant and collectivist ideologies in western Europe, the virtues of democracy – above all, the respect for individual liberties – seemed clear. The practical advantages of a reworked social contract, and a welfare state, were also obvious.
  • But neither these decades of relative stability, nor the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, were a reason to assume that human rights and democracy were rooted in European soil.
  • debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was – and is – more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.
  • In this new history, Europe’s long peace is revealed as a time of unlimited wars in Asia, Africa and the Americas. These colonies emerge as the crucible where the sinister tactics of Europe’s brutal 20th-century wars – racial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian lives – were first forged
  • Whiteness became “the new religion”, as Du Bois witnessed, offering security amid disorienting economic and technological shifts, and a promise of power and authority over a majority of the human population.
  • The resurgence of these supremacist views today in the west – alongside the far more widespread stigmatisation of entire populations as culturally incompatible with white western peoples – should suggest that the first world war was not, in fact, a profound rupture with Europe’s own history.
  • Our complex task during the war’s centenary is to identify the ways in which that past has infiltrated our present, and how it threatens to shape the future: how the terminal weakening of white civilisation’s domination, and the assertiveness of previously sullen peoples, has released some very old tendencies and traits in the west.
  • Relatively little is known about how the war accelerated political struggles across Asia and Africa; how Arab and Turkish nationalists, Indian and Vietnamese anti-colonial activists found new opportunities in it; or how, while destroying old empires in Europe, the war turned Japan into a menacing imperialist power in Asia
  • A broad account of the war that is attentive to political conflicts outside Europe can clarify the hyper-nationalism today of many Asian and African ruling elites, most conspicuously the Chinese regime, which presents itself as avengers of China’s century-long humiliation by the west.
  • in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history – one that shows how whiteness became in the late 19th century the assurance of individual identity and dignity, as well as the basis of military and diplomatic alliances.
  • Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered.
  • At the time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”
  • this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators.
  • it is too easy to conclude, especially from an Anglo-American perspective, that Germany broke from the norms of civilisation to set a new standard of barbarity, strong-arming the rest of the world into an age of extremes. For there were deep continuities in the imperialist practices and racial assumptions of European and American powers.
  • Rhodes’ scramble for Africa’s gold fields helped trigger the second Boer war, during which the British, interning Afrikaner women and children, brought the term “concentration camp” into ordinary parlance. By the end of the war in 1902, it had become a “commonplace of history”, JA Hobson wrote, that “governments use national animosities, foreign wars and the glamour of empire-making in order to bemuse the popular mind and divert rising resentment against domestic abuses”
  • With imperialism opening up a “panorama of vulgar pride and crude sensationalism”, ruling classes everywhere tried harder to “imperialise the nation”, as Arendt wrote. This project to “organise the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples” was quickly advanced through the newly established tabloid press.
  • In 1920, a year after condemning Germany for its crimes against Africans, the British devised aerial bombing as routine policy in their new Iraqi possession – the forerunner to today’s decade-long bombing and drone campaigns in west and south Asia. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means,” a 1924 report by a Royal Air Force officer put it. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” This officer was Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who in the second world war unleashed the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden, and whose pioneering efforts in Iraq helped German theorising in the 1930s about der totale krieg (the total war).
  • the frenzy of jingoism with which Europe plunged into a bloodbath in 1914 speaks of a belligerent culture of imperial domination, a macho language of racial superiority, that had come to bolster national and individual self-esteem.
  • One of the volunteers for the disciplinary force was Lt Gen Lothar von Trotha, who had made his reputation in Africa by slaughtering natives and incinerating villages. He called his policy “terrorism”, adding that it “can only help” to subdue the natives.
  • his real work lay ahead, in German South-West Africa (contemporary Namibia) where an anti-colonial uprising broke out in January 1904. In October of that year, Von Trotha ordered that members of the Herero community, including women and children, who had already been defeated militarily, were to be shot on sight and those escaping death were to be driven into the Omaheke Desert, where they would be left to die from exposure. An estimated 60,000-70,000 Herero people, out of a total of approximately 80,000, were eventually killed, and many more died in the desert from starvation. A second revolt against German rule in south-west Africa by the Nama people led to the demise, by 1908, of roughly half of their population.
  • Such proto-genocides became routine during the last years of European peace. Running the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium reduced the local population by half, sending as many as eight million Africans to an early death. The American conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902, to which Kipling dedicated The White Man’s Burden, took the lives of more than 200,000 civilians.
  • In light of this shared history of racial violence, it seems odd that we continue to portray the first world war as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, as a seminal and unexpected calamity. The Indian writer Aurobindo Ghose was one among many anticolonial thinkers who predicted, even before the outbreak of war, that “vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe” was already under “a sentence of death”, awaiting “annihilation”
  • These shrewd assessments were not Oriental wisdom or African clairvoyance. Many subordinate peoples simply realised, well before Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, that peace in the metropolitan west depended too much on outsourcing war to the colonies.
  • The experience of mass death and destruction, suffered by most Europeans only after 1914, was first widely known in Asia and Africa, where land and resources were forcefully usurped, economic and cultural infrastructure systematically destroyed, and entire populations eliminated with the help of up-to-date bureaucracies and technologies. Europe’s equilibrium was parasitic for too long on disequilibrium elsewhere.
  • Populations in Europe eventually suffered the great violence that had long been inflicted on Asians and Africans. As Arendt warned, violence administered for the sake of power “turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate”.
  • nothing better demonstrates this ruinous logic of lawless violence, which corrupts both public and private morality, than the heavily racialised war on terror. It presumes a sub-human enemy who must be “smoked out” at home and abroad – and it has licensed the use of torture and extrajudicial execution, even against western citizens.
  • It was always an illusion to suppose that “civilised” peoples could remain immune, at home, to the destruction of morality and law in their wars against barbarians abroad. But that illusion, long cherished by the self-styled defenders of western civilisation, has now been shattered, with racist movements ascendant in Europe and the US,
  • This is also why whiteness, first turned into a religion during the economic and social uncertainty that preceded the violence of 1914, is the world’s most dangerous cult today. Racial supremacy has been historically exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoisation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration. It has now entered its last and most desperate phase with Trump in power.
  • We can no longer discount the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once described: that the winners of history, “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen”.
  • Certainly the risk of not confronting our true history has never been as clear as on this Remembrance Day. If we continue to evade it, historians a century from now may once again wonder why the west sleepwalked, after a long peace, into its biggest calamity yet.
anonymous

Biden News Conference: President On Vaccines, Immigration : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...s-conference-of-his-presidency

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden is doubling his original COVID-19 vaccination goal to 200 million shots in arms by his 100th day in office — which is just over a month away.
  • When he entered office, Biden said his goal was 100 million vaccine doses in 100 days — a target many observers thought was not ambitious enough. According to federal health officials, that 100 million figure was hit on Biden's 58th day in office.About 2.5 million vaccine doses are being administered every day in the United States.He detailed his new goal Thursday, during the first news conference of his presidency.
  • Biden is also sticking to a goal of having a majority of K-8 schools open full time — in person, five days a week — by that same 100-day mark. So far, he said, roughly half of them are open full time.
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  • When it comes to the influx of migrants at the southern U.S. border, Biden said the Pentagon is making 5,000 beds available at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, to increase capacity.
  • He blamed the Trump administration for decreasing capacity and said his administration is building back up the systems that, he said, should have been maintained and built upon but that the former president "dismantled."
  • The Biden administration has changed policy from the Trump hard-line action of refusing to admit unaccompanied minors during the pandemic. Biden defended taking that action, saying what former President Donald Trump did broke from prior practice of past presidents and was, essentially, inhumane.
  • He stressed that a parent's decision to send their child to the United States unaccompanied on a dangerous journey shows desperation with their circumstances. Biden has assigned Vice President Harris to head up efforts to work with Mexico and Central American countries to stem the flow of migrants.
  • A solution to the immigration situation at the southern border has been elusive through Congress. When asked whether he would back eliminating or weakening the filibuster to facilitate his agenda, he delivered a potential threat.
  • If Republicans continue to make it a requirement for 60 votes to proceed to an up or down vote, "We'll have to go beyond what we're talking about," he said obliquely. Biden has in the past signaled openness to dismantling the filibuster if Republican opposition refuses to relent.
  • Biden also reiterated that he is in favor of bringing back the "talking filibuster," making it necessary for senators who want to hold up legislation to hold the Senate floor and speak.
  • Asked about gun violence following two high-profile mass shootings in the past week, Biden pivoted and said his next push will be on infrastructure. That's something he said he will announce in more detail Wednesday in Pittsburgh.
  • His answer indicated that Biden, who in recent days urged lawmakers to pass firearm legislation, may not believe the political will is there now to pass substantive gun restrictions. Congress has been unable to pass strong gun legislation over the past two decades despite countless mass shootings in that time. Biden, who's 78 years old, also said he plans to run for reelection in 2024.
  • It's advantageous for a president to say he expects to seek reelection or he becomes a lame duck too quickly. In other words, if a president says he is not going to run for reelection, Congress begins to look past that president's authority, reducing his political capital.
  • Biden also touted his early successes, including work to expand the COVID-19 vaccination program and the $1.9 trillion relief package enacted by Congress.
  • His remarks come a little over halfway through his first 100 days in office — a typical benchmark used to measure a president's early progress. Before this news conference, Biden had taken questions intermittently from reporters, but nothing at this length.
anonymous

Prosecutors Share New Evidence In Capitol Riot Conspiracy Case : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...eper-conspiracy-to-storm-capit

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The founder of the Oath Keepers militia had a 97-second phone call with a senior member of the group who minutes later took part in a military-style "stack" formation with other Oath Keepers to breach the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, according to federal prosecutors.
  • The allegation emerged in court papers the Justice Department filed overnight in the case against 10 alleged members or associates of the Oath Keepers facing conspiracy and other charges in connection with the Capitol riot.
  • Prosecutors allege that the call, along with a series of text messages in an encrypted chat group called "DC OP: Jan 6 21," amount to "substantial evidence" of a conspiracy to try to stop Congress' certification of the Electoral College count.
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  • The filing sheds more light on the actions on Jan. 6 of Stewart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers in 2009. Rhodes is only identified as "Person One" in the document but has been identified as the group's founder in previous court papers.
  • Rhodes has not been charged in connection with the Capitol insurrection, but the latest court document and previous statements by prosecutors suggest investigators are closely scrutinizing his actions on and around Jan. 6.
  • In the latest filing, prosecutors allege that Rhodes called Florida Oath Keeper leader Kelly Meggs at 2:32 p.m. on Jan. 6, just as Meggs and several of his associates were getting into a "stack" formation to push up the steps of the Capitol.
  • It is not clear what the two men spoke about, but prosecutors note that around six minutes later, the militia members who had coalesced into a stack formation "forcibly" entered the Capitol "by pushing past just opened and severely damaged Capitol building doors."
  • The latest government filing was made to oppose the pretrial release of one of the 10 defendants in the case, Jessica Watkins, who the government says was the leader of an Ohio militia and member of the Oath Keepers.
  • Prosecutors allege that Watkins was in a chat group on the encrypted messaging app Signal called "DC OP: Jan 6 21" with Meggs, Rhodes and two other Oath Keepers who have been charged over the Capitol riot.
  • The government says the group used the chat to talk about what weapons to bring to Washington, D.C., about using handheld radios to communicate on Jan. 6 and about the existence of so-called quick reaction forces waiting outside Washington with weapons in case "of worst case scenarios."
  • In the Signal chat on the day of the riot, prosecutors say shortly after 1 p.m. Rhodes messaged the group: "All I see Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the patriots are taking it into their own hands. They've had enough."
  • Prosecutors say around 2:15 p.m., one of the chat participants told the group that ground had been taken at the Capitol and "we need to regroup any members who are not on mission," an apparent reference to Oath Keepers who were providing "security" in Washington during the Trump rally.
  • Around 2:32 p.m., the government says, Rhodes "exchanged a 97 second call with 'stack' member and Florida Oath Keepers leader, Kelly Meggs, as Meggs, Watkins and the rest of the stack embedded themselves among insurgents trying to force open the east side Capitol building double doors that officers were desperately trying to keep shut."
  • The government argues that evidence supports the theory that the defendants stormed the Capitol "with the shared objective of using force to upend the transition of presidential power."
anonymous

Los Angeles park closed after protest to save homeless camp - 0 views

apnews.com/...083f4d56bbb865f76b8e79547208ff

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A newly installed fence surrounded a popular Los Angeles park Thursday after authorities moved in to evict residents of a large homeless encampment despite protests by the people who live there and their supporters.
  • Residents argued that the complaints were overblown and the encampment offered a community setting for people without means who have nowhere else to live.
  • Those who leave have been offered temporary housing, and at least 166 people had already been sheltered, said Mitch O’Farrell, a city councilman whose district includes the park.
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  • A few dozen demonstrators gathered peacefully Thursday evening outside O’Farrell’s nearby office with a large banner that said “services not sweeps.”
  • A police statement said there were verbal confrontations but that the protest was largely peaceful and demonstrators voluntarily departed. One person was arrested for failing to comply with an officer’s orders, and officers twice used force that was characterized as minor, police said.
  • Kelvin Martinez, an organizer with the advocacy group Street Watch LA, accused city officials of “bad faith communication.” He said requests for services during the past year were largely ignored until the sudden announcement that the park would be closed.
  • The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority said its outreach workers had moved 44 people into housing on Monday and Tuesday, mostly into hotel rooms under the state-funded Project Roomkey program aimed at providing shelter for those most at risk during the coronavirus pandemic.
  • The location of the encampment in the fast-gentrifying Echo Park neighborhood gave it a high profile, but it was not unique for the metro Los Angeles area. Tents can be found throughout the city and region despite an array of state and local programs aimed at sheltering people and transitioning them to permanent housing.
  • A January 2020 count by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported that there were more than 66,400 homeless people living in Los Angeles County — by far the largest single concentration in the state. That included more than 41,000 people within Los Angeles city limits. Both figures were up more than 12% from the previous year. The annual count was canceled for 2021 because of the pandemic.
  • The lawsuit accuses the city and county of failing to comprehensively address the desperation that homeless people face — including hunger, crime, squalor and the coronavirus pandemic.U.S. District Judge David Carter, who is overseeing the case, called parties to a hearing in a Skid Row parking lot last month and said that if politicians can’t provide solutions, he wants to explore what powers the court has to order and oversee remedies.
cartergramiak

Opinion | Don't Let QAnon Bully Congress - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...qanon-capitol-security.html

politics US history trump gop QANON

shared by cartergramiak on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Last Thursday was not Donald Trump’s triumphant return to power after all.
  • This drivel is absurd. It is also alarming. Violent extremists, obsessed with the symbolism of March 4, were for weeks nattering about a possible attack on Congress, according to law enforcement officials.
  • Although March 4 came and went without a bloody coup attempt — that is, without another bloody coup attempt — damage was still done. Lawmakers abandoned their workplace out of fear of politically motivated violence. This not only disrupted the people’s business. It also sent a dangerous signal that Congress can be intimidated — that the state of American government is fragile.
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  • Also in discussion around the QAnon water cooler is that Mr. Trump will be reinstalled on March 20, with the help of the U.S. military. Indeed, the F.B.I. and Homeland Security bulletin cited an increased risk from violent domestic extremists for all of 2021.
  • Congress can now start haggling over which measures to adopt. Don’t look for the process to be silky smooth. Republicans, many of them desperate to downplay the Jan. 6 tragedy, are already attacking General Honoré as biased. The general has not been shy about criticizing lawmakers and others he regards as having fed the postelection chaos, and he has suggested that some Capitol Police officers may have been complicit in allowing rioters into the building.
  • Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida delegation’s mini-Trump, is in full froth. “Pelosi hired a bigot to hunt MAGA,” he charged last month. Last Tuesday, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the speaker, arguing that General Honoré’s criticism of the police and lawmakers was “disqualifying.”
anonymous

Opinion | A Partisan Vote on the Stimulus Bill - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...stimulus-bill.html

politics

shared by anonymous on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Readers discuss the lack of any Republican support for the Senate bill, despite wide public support.
  • Stimulus Win Shows Quest to Cooperate Is All but Lost,” by Carl Hulse (news analysis, March 7), proposed that bipartisanship is dead because party leaders could not work past partisan politics on the stimulus plan. While I agree that bipartisanship is dead, I believe that this is merely a symptom of a far bigger problem.Polls show that the American people overwhelmingly support President Biden’s stimulus plan. If the people of the country agree in a bipartisan way, but not the leaders, this shows a huge disconnect. Whom are the leaders representing?If the Republican leadership and centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin will not abide by the will of the people, we have a problem with representatives acting for party and self, not for the people.Christopher MartinezCoram, N.Y.To the Editor:Re “Democrats Trim Jobless Benefits in Stimulus Bill” (front page, March 6):Senate Democrats agreed to cut proposed unemployment benefits in President Biden’s stimulus bill from $400 to $300 a week in order to placate Senator Joe Manchin and other “moderates,” who feel that the larger amount is too generous for out-of-work Americans.
  • Ahhh, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, doing the people’s work, forcing Senate clerks to read the 628-page stimulus bill aloud for no apparent reason other than to delay aid to millions of Americans, many of whom desperately need it to survive.
ethanshilling

Suburban Home Sales Soar in the New York Region - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...yc-suburbs-housing-demand.html

US new york housing

shared by ethanshilling on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Heading into the spring sales season, the housing market in the suburbs of New York has already gone into overdrive, with bidding wars becoming the norm and many homes selling within days of coming on the market.
  • The frenetic sales activity — a second wave after a surge last summer — has been fueled by multiple forces: historically low mortgage rates; pandemic-fatigued city dwellers desperate for more space; and many employers’ willingness to embrace remote work, allowing buyers to look in places beyond what would be considered an easy commute.
  • “This is the strongest market I have seen in two decades,” said Sara Littlefield, an agent in Connecticut with Coldwell Banker.
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  • “If there is a silver lining in this devastating pandemic, it’s that it has allowed people the freedom to make lifestyle choices like relocating, or downsizing, or moving up,” Ms. Littlefield added, “and they’re taking that freedom.”
  • “The spring market really began in October — that’s how crazy it’s been,” according to Vicki Gaily, a real estate agent based in Saddle River, N.J.
  • As soon as pandemic restrictions eased, Ms. Gaily, the founder of Special Properties, a division of the real estate firm Brook Hollow Group, noticed a burst of pent-up demand, largely from people fleeing urban areas. “I haven’t had a day off since,” she said.
  • “I’ve never seen the inventories as low as they are now,” Ms. Gaily said, noting that in Saddle River, which is in Bergen County, there are “maybe 40 homes” available right now, down from the usual range of 55 to 85 this time of year.
  • Buyers throughout Long Island are likely to face continued competition, too, along with rising prices, in large part because of the shrinking supply of available homes.
  • “In the last two months we’ve seen such a depletion of new inventory that sales growth has been nominal,” said Mr. Miller, the Manhattan-based appraiser who also follows the Long Island market.
  • “We would normally have five to six months’ worth at any one time,” said Seth Pitlake, an agent at Douglas Elliman in Merrick. “It’s not that inventory is not increasing,” he said, “it’s just that anything that comes out in the market is being scooped up.”
  • “We would put in an offer only to find out someone else offered $40,000 over the asking price,” said Ms. Monforte, a clinical social worker, adding that “every free moment was devoted to looking.”
  • And what do buyers want? “They want green space,” said James Gavin, an agent with Laffey Real Estate in Manhasset, “and a lot are asking for a home office and then a pool.”
aleija

Opinion | For Democracy to Stay, the Filibuster Must Go - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...us-filibuster-senate.html

Politics US opinion

shared by aleija on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • It is hard to imagine a more fitting job for Congress than for members to join together to pass a broadly popular law that makes democracy safer, stronger and more accessible to all Americans.
  • The legislation has the support of at least 50 senators, plus the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. President Biden is on board and ready to sign it. So what’s the problem? Majority support in the Senate isn’t enough. In the upper chamber, a supermajority of 60 votes is required to pass even the most middling piece of legislation. That requirement is not found in the Constitution; it’s because of the filibuster, a centuries-old parliamentary tool that has been transformed into a weapon for strangling functional government.
  • The most compelling reason to keep the filibuster is its proponents’ argument that the rule prevents a tyranny of the majority in the Senate. That’s the rationale of the two Democrats currently standing in the way of ending it, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. They have been steadfast in defending the modern filibuster as part of what they assert is a longstanding Senate custom.
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  • If the political reforms in H.R. 1 are not undertaken at the federal level, Republican leaders will continue to entrench minority rule. That’s happening already in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, where Republican-drawn maps give them large legislative majorities despite winning fewer votes statewide than Democrats. It’s happening in dozens of other states that have passed hundreds of voting restrictions and are pushing hundreds more, under the guise of protecting election security.
  • Last week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1. The bill, a similar version of which the House passed in 2019, is a comprehensive and desperately needed set of reforms that would strengthen voting rights and election security, ban partisan gerrymandering, reduce big money in politics and establish ethics codes for Supreme Court justices, the president and other executive branch officials
  • . If America is to be governed competently and fairly — if it is to be governed at all — the filibuster must go.
  • The filibuster doesn’t require interparty compromise; it requires 60 votes. It says nothing about the diversity of the coalition required to pass legislation. It just substitutes 60 percent of the Senate for 51 percent as the threshold to pass most legislation. If the Senate was designed to be a place where both parties come together to deliberate and pass laws in the interest of the American people, the filibuster has turned it into the place where good legislation goes to die.
  • The filibuster doesn’t only fail to ensure extended debate on a bill; today it curtails the opportunity for any debate at all. A single senator can signal he or she intends to filibuster by typing an email and hitting send. No need to stand on the Senate floor to make your impassioned case.
cartergramiak

Opinion | America Is Not Made for People Who Pee - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lic-toilets-united-states.html

politics US history

shared by cartergramiak on 08 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Sure, we need investments to rebuild bridges, highways and, yes, electrical grids, but perhaps America’s most disgraceful infrastructure failing is its lack of public toilets.
  • The humorist Art Buchwald once recounted an increasingly desperate search for a toilet in Manhattan. He was turned down at an office building, a bookstore and a hotel, so he finally rushed into a bar and asked for a drink.
  • In Florida, a welder named Juan Matamoros was fined and ordered to move away from his home, which was near a park, because 19 years earlier he had been arrested for public urination; as a result, he was considered a lifelong sex offender and not allowed to live near a park.
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  • Cities also lose their livability, and open defecation becomes a threat to public health. Americans have painstakingly built new norms about dog owners picking up after their pets, but we’ve gone backward with human waste.
  • Drake told me that she had lived in a homeless encampment in Portland that was two miles from the nearest restroom she could use, and she flinched as she recounted the shame of having to relieve herself where she could, trying to avoid people leering. Toilets, she said, are an infrastructure issue, but also far more than that: “Bathrooms are a humanitarian issue.”
  • So come on, President Biden! Let’s see an infrastructure plan that addresses not only bridges and electrical grids, but also bladders and bowels.
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