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Javier E

The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics | History News Network - 0 views

  • Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stamford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.
  • Stanford president David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.
  • In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.
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  • The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, trumped up confinement or forced sterilization.
  • The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
  • In an America demographically reeling from immigration upheaval and torn by post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere in the early twentieth century. Elitists, utopians and so-called "progressives" fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world.
  • They reinvented Galton's eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. The intent: populate the earth with vastly more of their own socio-economic and biological kind--and less or none of everyone else.
  • How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their bloodlines. The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior--the so-called "unfit."
  • Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population." Point eight was euthanasia.
  • The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a "lethal chamber" or public locally operated gas chambers.
  • Applied Eugenics also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."
  • Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own.
  • One institution in Lincoln, Illinois fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to forty percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln.
  • Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.
  • Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.
  • Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti-Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. While Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.
  • In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."
  • Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible."
  • In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe upon returning from Germany ebulliently bragged to a key colleague, "You will be interested to know, that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought.…I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."
  • In the fall of 1950, the University of Münster offered Verschuer a position at its new Institute of Human Genetics, where he later became a dean. In the early and mid-1950s, Verschuer became an honorary member of numerous prestigious societies, including the Italian Society of Genetics, the Anthropological Society of Vienna, and the Japanese Society for Human Genetics.
  • Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's eugenic complex of institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the Institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. The Institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years. Leading the Institute, once again, was Hitler's medical henchman Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin's organization became a prime director and recipient of the murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and others.
  • Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society declared of Nazism, "While we were pussy-footing around…the Germans were calling a spade a spade."
  • Mengele began searching the boxcar arrivals for twins. When he found them, he performed beastly experiments, scrupulously wrote up the reports and sent the paperwork back to Verschuer's institute for evaluation. Often, cadavers, eyes and other body parts were also dispatched to Berlin's eugenic institutes.
  • More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany's eugenic institutions. By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 -- almost $4 million in 21st-Century money -- to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 to the German Psychiatric Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, later to become the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry
  • Human genetics' genocidal roots in eugenics were ignored by a victorious generation that refused to link itself to the crimes of Nazism and by succeeding generations that never knew the truth of the years leading up to war. Now governors of five states, including California have issued public apologies to their citizens, past and present, for sterilization and other abuses spawned by the eugenics movement.
Javier E

Adam Serwer: White Nationalism's Deep American Roots - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The concept of “white genocide”—extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers—may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers. In popular memory, it’s a vestige of a racist ideology that the Greatest Generation did its best to scour from the Earth.
  • History, though, tells a different story.
  • King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it.
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  • The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.
  • What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents.
  • Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.
  • Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him
  • Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide
  • “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.
  • When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in.
  • In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.”
  • In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.”
  • Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people.
  • In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.
  • it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history. In a nod to wartime politics, he referred to Ripley’s “Teutons” as “Nordics,” thereby denying America’s hated World War I rivals exclusive claim to descent from the world’s master race. He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers
  • The historian Nell Irvin Painter sums up the race chauvinists’ view in The History of White People (2010): “Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored.
  • In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration:
  • The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States.
  • Grant, emphasizing the American experience in particular, agreed. In The Passing of the Great Race, he had argued that
  • Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.”
  • President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes. There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.
  • Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping.The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.
  • On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers.
  • A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
  • He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe
  • When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro writes. Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.” His appointment helped ensure that Grantian concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924.
  • Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.
  • In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.
  • Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.” Three years later, in 1927, Johnson held forth in dire but confident tones in a foreword to a book about immigration restriction. “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed,” he warned. “The United States is our land … We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.”
  • t was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.”
  • Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounds “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.”
  • What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,
  • “It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.”
  • Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.
  • Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience, and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in.
  • In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants
  • it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man.
  • The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he believed, had failed to see a greater truth as they made good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal: The white man is more equal than the others.
  • two “rival principles of national unity.” According to one, the U.S. is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism. According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.
  • Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy.
  • the South remained hawkish toward Nazi Germany because white supremacists in the U.S. didn’t want to live under a fascist government. What they wanted was a herrenvolk democracy, in which white people were free and full citizens but nonwhites were not.
  • The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension. They saw allegiance to the American creed as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it, and demanded that their country live up to it
  • historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name
  • Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government.
  • The resurrection of race suicide as white genocide can be traced to the white supremacist David Lane, who claimed that “the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide,” and whose infamous “fourteen words” manifesto, published in the 1990s, distills his credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Far-right intellectuals in Europe speak of “the great replacement” of Europeans by nonwhite immigrants and refugees.
  • That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity.
  • The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.
  • The danger of Grantism, and its implications for both America and the world, is very real. External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy.
manhefnawi

Eugene of Savoy | Austrian general | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • statesman of the Carignan line of the House of Savoy, who, in the service of the Austrian Holy Roman emperor, made his name as one of the greatest soldiers of his generation
  • against the Turks in central Europe and the Balkans (1683–88, 1697, 1715–18) and against France in the War of the Grand Alliance (1689–97) and in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14)
  • His paternal ancestors were the dukes of Savoy, who later became kings of Sardinia, Sicily, and eventually of all Italy, while on his mother’s side the family included not only Roman patricians
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  • A rumour once had it that Eugene was actually the son of Louis XIV, the Sun King, who, although he always denied it, was said to have had an affair as a young man with Olympia Mancini.
  • left France altogether and offered his sword to the emperor Leopold I, who was busy fighting the Turks
  • During a span of 39 years he continued to lead the Emperor’s armies from the River Save all the way to Lombardy, through the Tirol back again to Bavaria and the Rhine, down once more to Hungary against the Turks, and back up again to Flanders
  • He lost only Spain, and that because of the political ineptitude of the emperor Charles VI
  • Eugene’s battles were among the bloodiest encounters of that sanguinary period
  • In his first battle, at the relief of Vienna from siege by the Turks in 1683, Eugene so distinguished himself
  • He served three emperors: Leopold I, Joseph I, and Charles VI. Toward the end of his life, Eugene observed that, whereas the first had been a father to him and the second a brother, the third (who was perhaps least worthy of so great a servant) had been a master
  • Belgrade (1718) was Eugene’s most famous victory
Javier E

The Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher review - an epic blend of history, prop... - 0 views

  • The Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher
  • It is almost impossible to categorise Enchantments of Mammon. This monumental labour of love took two decades to write.
  • this is an extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic and a work of Christian prophecy
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  • it is beautifully written and a magnificent read, whether or not one follows the author all the way to his final destination in this journey of the pilgrim soul in the capitalist wilderness.
  • McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work. He rails against “the ensemble of falsehoods that comprise the foundation of economics”, which offer “a specious portrayal of human beings and a fictional account of their history”.
  • Homo economicus, driven by instrumental self-interest and controlled by the power of money, is condemned as a shabby and degrading construct that betrays the truth of human experience.
  • After capitalism has delivered what the author describes as “two centuries of Promethean technics and its irreparable ecological impact” there must be a return to an earlier, gentler, more sacramental vision of the world; one that has a greater sense of natural limits and a restored sense of wonder at creation.
  • McCarraher embarks on a kind of genealogy of neoliberal morals, barrelling his way through the tracts, studies, theories and literature that have constituted the “symbolic universe” of capitalism since the Renaissance.
  • From the English Puritans who made money for the greater glory of God, through the machine idolatry rampant in 1920s Fordism, to the cult of the ruthless entrepreneur
  • capitalism is best understood, he concludes, as a secular faith. It operates through myths and dogma, just as any religion does.
  • Modernity is not, as Max Weber maintained, the culmination of a process of intellectual “disenchantment”, in which societies lost their sense of the sacred and embraced the rational
  • Instead, a different enchantment took hold of our minds; the material culture of production and consumption. “Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism,” writes McCarraher. “Its iconography consists of advertising, marketing, public relations and product design.”
  • This brave new era produced a “predatory and misshapen love of the world
  • Spiritually diminished by the commodification of things and people, and the desire to consume, we have lost sight of what the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as the “dearest freshness deep down things”.
  • On Avarice. This work, says McCarraher, signalled a transition: the growth of commerce and banking was beginning to loosen the grip of biblical disdain for “filthy lucre”
  • the Florentine then makes an argument that is precociously modern, suggesting that without it, there would be “no temples, no colonnades, no palaces…”
  • The 17th-century Puritans are presented as a capitalist “avant garde”, driven by notions of a divine calling to turn common land into private property and then turn a profit on it
  • Milton mourns this sellout of the English revolution, using Paradise Lost to portray Mammon as a fallen angel, driven to blasphemous self-aggrandisement on eart
  • by the 20th century such satanic cunning is the new common sense in business circles
  • McCarraher leaves the poetry of Milton to move, via the Industrial Revolution, to the outlandish business utopias dreamed up in early 20th-century America
  • In February 1928, Vanity Fair caught the mood, praising Henry Ford as “a divine master-mind”
  • the epilogue of this mammoth portrait of the religious longings at the heart of secular materialism carries a bleak message: 20th-century fantasies of the world as one global business have been realised. Capital’s empire now extends to all corners of the world. Globalisation has built a “paradise of capital”
  • But Mammon is delivering an unsustainable future dominated by wage stagnation, tech-led unemployment, deepening inequality and environmental peril. As disaster looms, distraction is being sought in “a tranquillising repertoire of digital devices and myriad forms of entertainment” along with “the analgesic pleasures of consumption”.
  • “get back to the garden”. A new Romantic left is needed to reinhabit a sacramental imagination, which values people and things in themselves rather than as factors of production, and places collaboration over competition
  • recalling John Ruskin’s principle of “amazement”, which teaches that the gifts of nature should be admired and nurtured, rather than ravished and depleted
  • where pessimism might take hold, the author’s Christian faith gives him a trump card. For McCarraher, it is simply the case that “the Earth is a sacramental place, mediating the presence and power of God”
  • however obscured the truth is by a destructive lust for power and accumulation. It is simply a question of seeing things as they truly are.
Javier E

'The Book of Mormon' at Eugene O'Neill Theater - Review - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • a major point of “The Book of Mormon” is that when looked at from a certain angle, all the forms of mythology and ritual that allow us to walk through the shadows of daily life and death are, on some level, absurd; that’s what makes them so valiant and glorious.
Javier E

The Repentance of Eugene de Kock - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • As a reporter covering the often heart-rending hearings in the 1990s, I watched Mr. de Kock calmly correct facts, expose lies and name superiors who then quickly had to apply for amnesty themselves. He became the polygraph machine of the commission. Without him the “truth” part of the T.R.C. would have been sorely lacking.
  • With his intimate knowledge of apartheid-era security agencies, he began to assist victims in finding the remains of loved ones. He provided answers and pointed to places where bodies could be found. Mr. de Kock openly confessed his regret directly to victims and admitted that nothing could redeem him. This contrasted sharply with many of his commanders, who openly refused to apply for amnesty, or the politicians who denied that he had carried out their orders.
  • For me it is irrelevant whether this change is genuine; the fact of his assistance to the victims is what counts. Unlike many other white people — perpetrators and bystanders — who have benefited since 1994 from the reconciliatory attitude of black South Africans, Mr. de Kock actually began to engage with fellow South Africans in restorative ways. Slowly, over the years, he transformed himself from a highly effective killer to somebody who genuinely engaged with those looking for answers.
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  • This shift underlines the unspoken foundation on which the T.R.C. was initially built: that apartheid destroyed people’s humanity and turned some into murderers. Perpetrators could admit that they had done wrong and be forgiven, allowing them to rebuild their lives. The underlying goal of the T.R.C. was to build a new ethical society through change: The truth about our past should transform all of us from a people apart into a people who care for one another.
Javier E

Two mass murders a world apart share a common theme: 'Ecofascism' - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • The two mass shootings appear to be extreme examples of ecofascism — what Hampshire College professor emerita Betsy Hartmann calls “the greening of hate.”
  • Many white supremacists have latched onto environmental themes, drawing connections between the protection of nature and racial exclusion.
  • The alleged El Paso shooter’s document is shot through with existential despair: “My whole life I have been preparing for a future that currently doesn’t exist.”
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  • n recent years, the mainstream environmental movement has moved strongly in the direction of social justice — the very opposite of what hate groups seek.
  • Now, the leaders of those organizations fear white nationalists are using green messages to lure young people to embrace racist and nativist agendas.
  • Environmental activists want to create a sense of urgency about climate change, the loss of biodiversity and other insults to the natural world, but they don’t want their messages to drive people into deranged ideologies.
  • There is a danger of “apocalypticism,”
  • The document believed to have been posted by the alleged El Paso shooter cites birthrates among the “invaders” trying to enter the United States and asserts, “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”
  • environmentalists “need to steer away from this apocalyptic discourse because it too easily plays into the hands of apocalyptic white nationalism.”
  • these accused killers did not come up with their hateful ideologies in a vacuum. They have tapped into ideas about nature that are in broad circulation among white nationalists. Before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, for example, white nationalist leader Richard Spencer published a manifesto that had a plank on protecting nature.
  • Ecofascism has deep roots. There is a strong element of it in the Nazi emphasis on “blood and soil,” and the fatherland, and the need for a living space purified of alien and undesirable elements
  • Some early conservationists embraced the eugenics movement that saw “social Darwinism” as a way of improving the human race by limiting the birthrates of people considered inferior. “There’s this idea coming out of the eugenics movement that nature, purity, conservation were linked to purity of the race,”
  • Some of those on the environmental left have seen the explosion in the human population — which is nearing 8 billion and has more than doubled in the past half-century — as a primary driver of the environmental crisis. That argument has then been adopted by racists.
  • It’s important, he said, to provide people with potential solutions and reasons to be hopeful: “There’s definitely a danger of people taking dire measures when they feel there’s no way out of it.”
  • if anti-immigrant groups are genuinely concerned about degradation of the natural world, they’re targeting the wrong people. Climate change hasn’t been driven by poor people struggling to get by. The activities of wealthy nations have been the main historical source of greenhouse gas emissions, the depletion of natural resources and the destruction of habitats.
  • ‘Who are the people we need to limit? Who are the people making decisions about that?’ . . . Until we have true equity and equality and a balance of power, then we know vulnerable communities are going to end up on the negative side of the ledger, whatever the tough choices are,”
rerobinson03

Opinion | August Vollmer 'Abolished' the Police - in 1905 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • August Vollmer has been hailed by many in law enforcement as the father of modern American policing. He has also been criticized for pioneering the militarization of the police and espousing the racist theories of eugenics. What’s rarely talked about, however, is that he began his tenure as the head of the police department of Berkeley, Calif., in 1905 by forcing all of his deputies to resign — arguably a kind of early experiment in abolishing the police. He eventually replaced them with college-educated people, hoping they would usher in a new, progressive era in policing.
  • Today, as governments and citizens contemplate the future of local law enforcement, it’s worth remembering that reshaping American policing is not some shocking new idea from the radical left.
  • Meanwhile, Mr. Vollmer systemized the practices of policing and built in accountability. He mandated that his officers create written records of their work (the first that the city ever kept) to measure their progress in reducing crime. He popularized the idea of crime labs, where officers could study evidence using science — an idea that rapidly spread to other departments, along with his record-keeping methods. And his department partnered with social organizations for at-risk youth, such as the scouts and Boys’ Club
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  • Mr. Vollmer’s 1936 textbook makes a similar suggestion, though more as an approach to reducing crime than Ms. Kaba’s goal of creating a cooperative society in which police are obsolete. Mr. Vollmer asserted that school, welfare, health, and recreation were more likely to prevent crime than jails.
  • To this point, Mr. Vollmer would perhaps respond that reforming the police doesn’t come cheap — and that public funds could be used to educate would-be officers. When he forced out his deputies, he rebuilt the department with extra money from the city for education, raises and lab equipment. The proposals of Ms. Kaba and other police abolitionists would put public funds toward educating a wide range of people in community support jobs: mental health experts, conflict de-escalation teams, addiction specialists and advocates who can help the unhoused find shelter.
anonymous

How a lone Capitol Police officer lured rioters away from the Senate chambers - CNN - 0 views

shared by anonymous on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A US Capitol Police officer bounded up the stairs of the Capitol building, a growing mob of insurrectionists behind him. Using himself as "bait," he lured the rioters away from the entrance to the Senate chambers, where lawmakers were still debating an objection to Arizona's Electoral College vote count.
  • That man is Officer Eugene Goodman. Footage from Wednesday's attack on the Capitol shows him leading the mob of Trump supporters in the opposite direction of the Senate chambers after he noticed it was unguarded.
  • Footage from Wednesday captured by Huffington Post reporter Igor Bobic shows Goodman, the sole officer among the mob, trying to beat the rioters back several times as he radios other officers, but they continue to trail Goodman up the stairs.
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  • At one point, Goodman arrives at a landing and looks to a hallway to his left. A door in that hallway led to the Senate chambers, Wilson wrote in a tweet. Goodman then leads the rioters to the right, away from the Senate chambers -- and their "targets," Wilson said.
  • Bobic said Goodman herded the rioters away from the Senate Chambers at 2:14 p.m. Senators were alerted that protesters had breached the Capitol building just one minute earlier, according to CNN's timeline of events from Wednesday's riot. Vice President Mike Pence wouldn't be evacuated from the Senate until 2:30 p.m
  • The man in a hoodie seen chasing Goodman up the stairs, Doug Jensen, was arrested over the weekend for breaking into the Capitol and faces five federal charges -- of unlawfully entering the Capitol, disrupting government business, violent entry, parading in a Capitol building and blocking law enforcement during the riot.
katherineharron

GOP senators signal they plan to acquit Trump despite visceral presentation by House De... - 0 views

  • even after witnessing the deadly violence firsthand, and being reminded of it again at the scene of the crime, many Republican senators appeared no closer on Wednesday to convicting former President Donald Trump on the charge of "incitement of insurrection."
  • these Republicans said that the House Democrats did not prove Trump's words led to the violent actions. They compared the January 6 riot to last summer's racial justice protests and criticized how the trial is being handled.
  • "I think there's more votes for acquittal after today than there was yesterday," the South Carolina Republican said.
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  • And Sen. Ted Cruz said a direct link from Trump to the pro-Trump riot was "strikingly absent." The Texas Republican claimed that "there's not a political candidate in the country," including "every single one of the Democratic senators," who hasn't used the same language as Trump, who told his supporters "to fight like hell."
  • The comments are the latest indication of the high hurdles Democrats face in getting the 67 votes needed to convict Trump -- with 17 Republicans needed to break ranks if all 50 Democrats vote to convict the former President and then bar him from ever serving in office again.
  • "Obviously very troubling to see the great violence that our Capitol Police and others are subjected to," Romney said. "It tears you at your heart and brings tears to your eyes. That was overwhelmingly distressing and emotional."
  • In a speech before the Capitol rampage, Trump urged his supporters "to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard" but also to "fight like hell," "never give up" and "never concede." A couple days earlier, he tweeted that "The 'Surrender Caucus' within the Republican Party will go down in infamy as weak and ineffective 'guardians' of our Nation, who were willing to accept the certification of fraudulent presidential numbers!" He repeatedly told his supporters to "stop the steal!"
  • South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the minority whip and a member of GOP leadership, said that the House managers did an "effective job" and were "connecting the dots" from Trump's words to the insurrection.
  • Romney, the only Republican to vote to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial last year, was shown on screen during the managers' presentation fleeing the Capitol after Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman urged him to run in the opposition direction of where he was heading.
  • "I think you get at best six Republicans -- probably five and maybe six," GOP Sen. Tim Scott told CNN when asked if the video and footage changed his mind on convicting Trump.
  • For most Republican senators, Wednesday's presentation did not seem to affect how they'll vote. Many are on record decrying the trial as unconstitutional since Trump is now a former president, and the punishment for conviction is removal.
katherineharron

Opinion: January 6 was the crime of the century - CNN - 0 views

  • Nothing made that clearer than Wednesday's presentation at former President Donald Trump's second impeachment trial, where the case against him unfolded more like a true-crime documentary than a staid political trial.
  • The photos, the videos, the phone calls, the affidavits -- some of which had never been shared publicly before -- were chilling, gut-wrenching, horrifying and at times even nauseating.
  • From the bloodcurdling calls from Capitol police, begging for backup as an angry, violent mob breached the Capitol, to the stunning footage of Officer Eugene Goodman diverting Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah away from an imminent threat of danger, to video of Vice President Mike Pence being hurriedly evacuated, and affidavits revealing rioters "would have killed Mike Pence if given the chance," it is all unspeakably awful and somehow even worse than we knew.
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  • If Americans couldn't fully wrap their minds around the arcana of a phone call with the Ukrainian President or the complexities of Russian collusion, or follow the quibbling protests over what the meaning of the word "is" is, they could certainly follow the tragic events from the summer of 2020 up to January 6, which led to five people, including a police officer, losing their lives.
  • House managers laid them out methodically and holistically, revealing a deeply sinister, calculated plot to overthrow the government; overturn the election' harm or even kill Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers -- and assault any police officers who'd get in their way.
  • They brought brace knuckles, stun guns and other weapons. They went "hunting" in the halls looking for lawmakers to hurt
  • it's overwhelmingly clear that the instigator is Trump himself.
  • The dots were meticulously connected, linking Trump's incitement of his supporters in the months leading up to the November election to the insurrection at the Capitol. There was Trump in his own words, telling them to fight. There were his supporters in theirs, telling him they would.
  • With everything we now know -- and we don't even know it all yet -- it's clear this trial is not about politics. It's not about Republicans or Democrats.It's not about free speech, and whether we should lock someone up for saying things we don't like.It's about the near-overthrow of our government, the deaths of five people, the assault on our law enforcement, the unimaginable danger our elected officials, their staffs and in some cases their families were put in, and the clear-as-day connection to the most powerful man in the world, the President of the United States. It's nothing less than the "crime of the century."
katherineharron

The impeachment trial's virtual reality - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Before former President Donald Trump's impeachment trial, many Capitol Hill Republicans had argued it was futile to force them to relive the January 6 insurrection because they were already witnesses who knew the facts.
  • But by weaving together riveting snippets of video, body camera footage and never-before seen surveillance tapes, Democratic impeachment managers proved Wednesday that it is only by seeing the events of that day from every dimension that one can truly understand the horror of the Capitol attack and the former President's failure to stop it.
  • Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas, one of the impeachment managers, noted that the January 6 attack, which killed five people, also led to the injuries of some 140 officers. One will lose an eye, he said. Others have broken ribs. One was stabbed with a metal fence stake
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  • But they made an even more devastating case by chronicling his inaction as commander-in-chief during the most frightening moments of the siege with clips from Twitter, Parler and YouTube; cell phone footage from reporters and members of Congress; desperate police radio dispatches calling for backup; officer body camera footage that was marked as being obtained by the US attorney's office; and an array of surveillance camera footage from across the Capitol that captured a bird's-eye view of key moments.
  • Wielding the element of surprise by unearthing many previously unreleased videos, they showed the harrowing moments where then-Vice President Mike Pence, his wife and daughter, were rushed to safety down a narrow stairway on the Senate side of the Capitol. They juxtaposed that surveillance video from an overhead Capitol camera with a video shot from within the angry mob outside chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" -- then crystallized the danger with a chilling photograph of a noose and a gallows that was erected that day outside the Capitol.
  • The managers tried to give it all context by showing Trump's tweet attacking Pence two minutes before the vice president was evacuated down those steps
  • To rebut Trump's defenders' claims that he did not incite violence and had no bearing on the events that unfolded that afternoon, the managers then showed video of a Trump loyalist outside the Capitol reading the former President's tweet accusing Pence of disloyalty in real time over a bullhorn as anger mounted.
  • Never before in history have Americans seen one attack on their nation from so many different perspectives. For hours, the managers outlined in painstaking detail what unfolded in each critical minute of the siege with timestamps — later played back against the President's actions or inaction. Sometimes, they showed the same few minutes or seconds from the vantage point of two or three different videos to punctuate their arguments. The montages were brutal, searing and unforgettable.JUST WATCHED'Storm the Capitol!': Rioters react to Trump speechReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH PlayM19.15 55.34l30.07-20a4 4 0 0 0 0-6.66l-30.07-20A4 4 0 0 0
  • At another point, impeachment managers tried to portray the danger that staff members felt as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was being hunted down by rioters who pounded on doors demanding to know where she was.
  • "They're pounding the doors trying to find her," the aide whispers into the phone. The bookend to the call was a video from minutes later, showing a rioter jamming his shoulder into an outer door and then breaking through near where they were hiding, before turning away.
  • In another near miss, new surveillance video showed Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman sprinting down a Senate hallway to respond to the breach, encountering Sen. Mitt Romney and gesturing for the Utah Republican, who had been critical of Trump's baseless election rhetoric, to turn and run in another direction to avoid encountering the mob.
  • The Democratic managers also used shaky, disjointed video to try to capture the confusion and fear that ensued when a Capitol Police officer shot pro-Trump rioter Ashli Babbitt
  • The gunshot is heard, then a gasp of profanity capturing the fear in that moment: "Take your pins off," members are heard telling one another. Swalwell noted that the buzzing sound in the background of the video emanated from the gas masks members were holding.
  • At 4:17 p.m. Trump finally tweeted an on-camera message telling rioters to disperse. A video displayed during the trial Wednesday showed the "QAnon Shaman" Jacob Chansley, who was seen inside the Capitol dressed in horns, a fur headdress and red, white and blue face paint, back outside on Capitol grounds telling others a short while later that Trump had released a video message conveying that they should all now go home.
katherineharron

Key moments from the second day of Trump's impeachment trial - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • "He told them to 'fight like hell,' and they brought us hell that day," Rep. Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, said as he kicked off the House's presentation.
  • "The evidence will show you that ex-President Trump was no innocent bystander. The evidence will show that he clearly incited the January 6 insurrection. It will show that Donald Trump surrendered his role as commander-in-chief and became the inciter-in-chief of a dangerous insurrection."
  • One security video played by the House impeachment managers showed Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman running as the mob begins to enter the Capitol. Goodman passes Romney and redirects him from the rioters' path before continuing to the first floor to respond to the breach and divert the mob from lawmakers.
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  • "We know from the rioters themselves that if they had found Speaker Pelosi, they would have killed her,"
  • The House impeachment managers revealed for the first time Wednesday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was evacuated entirely from the US Capitol complex during the insurrection to a secure off-site location.
  • Romney told reporters after the video played that it was "obviously very troubling" and that he hadn't known he had come that close to the rioters.
  • Wednesday's security footage also showed for the first time how the then-vice president was evacuated during the episode as rioters breached the Capitol, looking for him.
  • Some of the new security footage Democrats presented Wednesday showed how close Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and security detail came to encountering the rioters.
  • The footage shows Schumer walking up a ramp with his security when the group is forced to quickly change directions and run back in the direction they came.
  • "They came within just yards of rioters," said Rep. Eric Swalwell,
  • The Democrats showed how rioters were calling out for Pelosi as they moved through the halls of the Capitol, before showing new security footage of Pelosi's staffers barricading themselves in a conference room not long before rioters entered her suite of offices, trying to force open the door where the aides were in hiding.
  • The footage shows Pence and his family quickly moving down a set of stairs.
  • "As the rioters reached the top of the stairs, they were within 100 feet of where the vice president was sheltering with his family, and they were just feet away from one of the doors to this chamber," she explained. In one video, the crowd can be heard chanting "hang Mike Pence" as they stood in the open door of the Capitol building.
  • "After President Trump had primed his followers for months and inflamed the rally-goers that morning, it is no wonder that the vice president of the United States was the target of their wrath, after Pence refused to overturn the election results," Plaskett continued.
  • No. 2 Senate Republican John Thune of South Dakota saying the House impeachment managers did an "effective job" and were "connecting the dots" from Trump's words to the insurrection
  • Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said he found much of the House impeachment managers' case against Trump jarring, adding that the rioters' attempts to thwart a peaceful transfer of power should alarm anyone who loves America.
  • Still, there's no sign that Senate Republicans are going to consider convicting Trump, no matter how compelling the Democrats' presentation may be. Forty-four of the 50 Senate Republicans voted Tuesday that the trial was unconstitutional, a defense most if not all of those senators are likely to cite if they vote to acquit Trump.
  • Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, a Democratic House impeachment manager, choked up as she closed her remarks by describing the loud bang that was heard when she was in the chamber that had been surrounded by rioters.
  • "So they came, draped in Trump's flag, and used our flag, the American flag, to batter and to bludgeon," Dean said. "And at 2:30 p.m., I heard that terrifying banging on those House chamber doors. For the first time in more than 200 years, the seat of our government was ransacked on our watch."
  • "I didn't learn anything that I didn't already know. We know a mob reached the Capitol and wreaked havoc in the building. I'm waiting for them to connect that up to President Trump and so far that hasn't happened," he said.Asked if he is worried the video will have an emotional impact on the jury, he said, "It would have an emotional impact on any jury. But there are two sides of the coin and we have not played ours."
Javier E

Opinion | Richard Hanania's Racism Is Backed by Silicon Valley Billionaires - The New Y... - 0 views

  • [Hanania] expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.
  • He still makes explicitly racist statements and arguments, now under his own name. “I don’t have much hope that we’ll solve crime in any meaningful way,” he wrote on the platform formerly known as Twitter earlier this year. “It would require a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.”
  • Responding to the killing of a homeless Black man on the New York City subway, Hanania wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.”
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  • According to Jonathan Katz, a freelance journalist, Hanania’s organization, the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, has received at least $700,000 in support through anonymous donations. He is also a visiting scholar at the Salem Center at the University of Texas at Austin — funded by Harlan Crow.
  • A whole coterie of Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires have lent their time and attention to Hanania, as well as elevated his work. Marc Andreessen, a powerful venture capitalist, appeared on his podcast. David Sacks, a close associate of Elon Musk, wrote a glowing endorsement of Hanania’s forthcoming book. So did Peter Thiel, the billionaire supporter of right-wing causes and organizations. “D.E.I. will never d-i-e from words alone,” wrote Thiel. “Hanania shows we need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.” Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican presidential candidate, also praised the book as a “devastating kill shot to the intellectual foundations of identity politics in America.”
  • why an otherwise obscure racist has the ear and support of some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley? What purpose, to a billionaire venture capitalist, do Hanania’s ideas serve?
  • Look back to our history and the answer is straightforward. Just as in the 1920s (and before), the idea of race hierarchy works to naturalize the broad spectrum of inequalities, and capitalist inequality in particular.
  • If some groups are simply meant to be at the bottom, then there are no questions to ask about their deprivation, isolation and poverty. There are no questions to ask about the society which produces that deprivation, isolation and poverty. And there is nothing to be done, because nothing can be done: Those people are just the way they are.
  • the idea of race hierarchy “creates the illusion of cross-class solidarity between these masters of infinite wealth and their propagandist and supporter class: ‘We are of the same special breed, you and I.’” Relations of domination between groups are reproduced as relations of domination between individuals.
  • This, in fact, has been the traditional role of supremacist ideologies in the United States — to occlude class relations and convert anxiety over survival into the jealous protection of status
  • worked in concrete ways to bound the two things, survival and status, together; to create the illusion that the security, even prosperity, of one group rests on the exclusion of another
Javier E

The Eugene Weekly Halts Publication After Employee's Embezzlement - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Almost 2,900 newspapers have shut down since 2005, according to a 2023 report by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. All but about 100 of the shuttered newspapers were weeklies. Most communities that lose a newspaper do not get a replacement.
Javier E

A Tragic Sense of Life: Remembering Two Great Historians - Benjamin Schwarz - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Within five days of each other, the English speaking world's two greatest historians to have emerged from the Marxist tradition have died: Eugene Genovese, on September 26, and Eric Hobsbawm
  • I esteemed their formality of manners and dress, and their contempt for what is in fact an apolitical lifestyle progressivism. This form of progressivism, as they keenly understood, amounts to an embrace of the unlimited autonomy of individual desire, and as such is a product of -- and serves the interest of -- an unrestrained and socially corrosive capitalism.
  • Genovese has doggedly pursued the truth for as long as necessary and regardless of its ramifications. His ultimate ambition has been to write the definitive study of southern slaveholders
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  • Roll, Jordan, Roll, the most insightful book ever written about American slaves and the most lasting work of American historical scholarship since the Second World War.
  • the authors illuminate in their characteristically energetic prose the myriad ways in which the master-slave relationship "permeated the lives and thought" not merely of elite slaveholders but of their whole society. In doing so they elucidate the master class's deeply learned relationship to Christianity and to history (especially classical culture), which in turn highlights th
  • it provides significant and powerful support to the now academically unfashionable argument that the antebellum North and South were separate cultures with divergent political, economic, moral, and religious values; a work of searching historical anthropology, it reveals a profoundly alien society and culture.
  • to indict the authors for what is now called insensitivity (and they will be so indicted) is to ignore the psychological acuity and tragic sensibility that they bring to their subject. In defining the slaveholders' peculiar characteristics and world view, the Genoveses dissect the graciousness and generosity, the noblesse oblige and courage, the frankness and sense of ease, that were entirely common. Nevertheless, they are at pains to show that slaveholding wasn't a flaw in an otherwise admirable makeup but was intrinsic to that makeup--that is, they make plain that the admirable grew out of the loathsome
  • they open their book with Santayana's remark "The necessity of rejecting and destroying some things that are beautiful is the deepest curse of existence." True, they convincingly argue that a paternalist ethos often mitigated slavery; they reveal that the master class internalized Christian and chivalric values, which, they chillingly write, made its members "less dangerous human beings"; they demonstrate that in defending the peculiar institution southern theologians consistently bested their northern opponents in biblical exegeses (the Old Testament patriarchs owned slaves, Jesus didn't condemn slavery, and Paul and other New Testament writers sanctioned it); they show that slaveholders subscribed to "a code that made the ultimate test of a gentleman the humane treatment of his slaves"
  • They repeatedly dismiss as "psychologically naïve" the notion that slaveholders (able, though not licensed, to give free rein to their tempers and impulses) would invariably treat their slaves well because it was in their pecuniary interest to do so.
  • as Christians the slaveholders acknowledged that men are weak and sinful creatures who if given absolute power will abuse it. Because slavery perforce granted masters such power, the Bible, although it didn't condemn slavery, did condemn the sins that grew inevitably from it
rachelramirez

One Man Was Wrongly Blamed For Bringing AIDS to America - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • How One Man Was Wrongly Blamed for Bringing AIDS to America
  • One of those 40 cases was a Canadian flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas.
  • “When the study got written up and was circulated beyond the immediate team to other people within the CDC, that ambiguous oval got interpreted by some as a zero,”
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  • As the 57th AIDS patient to reach the CDC team’s attention, Dugas was originally billed as Case 057. But since he came from outside California, and wasn’t even a U.S. resident, the investigators started referring to him offhandedly as the “Out-of-California patient”—or “Patient O” for short.
  • The CDC team did their best to naysay this misconception, but it gained steam globally in 1987, after the journalist Randy Shilts published his bestselling book And The Band Played On.
  • The idea fit with the prejudices of the day: Here was a modern Typhoid Mary, whose homosexuality and irresponsible promiscuity had brought a plague to American shores.
  • He sequenced the complete genomes of HIV taken from U.S. samples collected in the late 1970s, and showed that Dugas could not possibly have been the first AIDS patient in the U.S. Indeed, the disease likely entered the country from Haiti in 1971, flying under the radar for a decade before anyone realized what was happening.
  • HIV first started infecting humans somewhere in West Africa, having jumped into us from chimpanzees.
  • He also concluded that the virus must have arrived in the U.S. around 12 years before AIDS was formally recognized in 1981.
  • They reveal that HIV had spread from Africa to the Caribbean by around 1967, and had jumped into the U.S. by around 1971. It landed in New York City and began diversifying rapidly
  • By the time anyone noticed the first sign of AIDS in 1981, the virus had already hopped from coast to coast, and become genetically diverse.
  • This means that not only did Dugas not bring AIDS to America, but he didn’t spread it west either. He was a totally mundane part of a very unusual epidemic.
  • In 2010, evolutionary biologists used gene trees to prove that a man named Anthony Eugene Whitfield had knowingly infected many women with HIV. More recently, biologists used a pocket-sized DNA sequencer to track the evolution of Ebola in real-time, providing details about routes of transmission that helped to curtail the recent west African outbreak.
martinde24

Could Hillary Clinton Win Texas? Some Democrats Say Maybe - 0 views

  •  
    SILSBEE, Tex. - The last time a Democrat won Texas in a presidential election was 1976, when voters chose Jimmy Carter over Gerald R. Ford. Carey Georgas was 22 back then, a disillusioned Democrat who voted for Eugene McCarthy, the independent candidate, and who was working at Cravens Insurance in this East Texas town.
Cecilia Ergueta

The Revenge of Karl Marx - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • As I write this, every newspaper informs me of frantic efforts by merchants to unload onto the consumer, at almost any price, the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the credit crisis began to take hold. The phrase crisis of over-production, which I learned so many long winters ago in “agitational” meetings, recurs to my mind.
  • On other pages, I learn that the pride of American capitalism has seized up and begun to rust, and that automobiles may cease even to be made in Detroit as a consequence of insane speculation in worthless paper “derivatives.” Did I not once read somewhere about the bitter struggle between finance capital and industrial capital?
  • The lines of jobless and hungry begin to lengthen, and what more potent image of those lines do we possess than that of the “reserve army” of the unemployed—capital’s finest weapon in beating down the minimum wage and increasing the hours of the working week?
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  • A disturbance in a remote corner of the world market leads to chaos and panic at the very center of the system (and these symptoms are given a multiplier effect when the pangs begin at the center itself), and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, doughty champions of capitalism at The Economist, admit straightforwardly in their book on the advantages of globalization that Marx, “as a prophet of the ‘universal interdependence of nations,’ as he called globalization … can still seem startlingly relevant … His description of globalization remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago.
  • The falling rate of profit, the tendency to monopoly … how wrong could that old reading-room attendant have been?
  • Marx is so embedded in our Western cast of thought that few people are even aware of their debt to him. Everybody I know now believes that their attitudes are to an extent a creation of their material circumstances … “that, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness”, as Marx wrote—and that changes in the way things are produced profoundly affect the affairs of humanity even outside the workshop or factory.
  • “It’s the economy, stupid.”
  • What he postulated, and what made him different from any previous theorist of materialism whether historical or dialectical, was a sharp distinction between the forces and the relations of production. Within the integument of one system of exploitation, in other words, was contained a systemic conflict that, if not resolved, would lead to stagnation and decline but, if properly confronted, might lead to a higher synthesis of abundance and equality.
  • there was an underlying love-hate relationship between Marx and capitalism. As early as the Manifesto, he had written of capitalism’s operations with a sort of awe, describing how the bourgeoisie had revolutionized all human and social and economic relations, and had released productive capacities of a sort undreamed-of in feudal times.
  • In my opinion, therefore, the most powerful Marxist book of the past four decades was Rudolf Bahro’s The Alternative, which showed how and why the East German state and economy were certain to implode. Communism, said Bahro—one of its former functionaries—was compelled to educate and train people up to a certain level. But beyond that level, it forbade them to think, or to inquire, or to use their initiative. Thus, while it created a vast amount of “surplus consciousness,” it could find no way of employing this energy except by squandering and dissipating and ultimately repressing it. The conflict between the forces and relations of production in the eastern part of the homeland of Karl Marx thus became a locus classicus of the sort of contradiction he had originally identified.
  • Marx was a keen admirer of that other great Victorian Charles Darwin, and according to Engels he wanted to do for the economic system what the author of The Origin of Species had done for the natural order: lay bare its objective laws of motion and thus make it possible at last to dispense with subjective and idealist interpretations.
  • The term exploitation, for example, should be not a moralizing one but a cold measure of the difference between use value and exchange value, or between the wages earned at the coal face and the real worth of that labor to the mine owner
  • (War between competitive capitalist states, for example, would be an instance of the negative. Seizure of power by an educated working class that understood and could transcend the logic of private ownership would be an example of human progress.
  • it does not quite explain Marx’s later failure, in Capital, to grasp quite how revolutionary capitalist innovation really was. (The chapter on new industrial machinery opens with a snobbish quotation from John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy: “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.” This must have seemed absurd even at the time, and it appears preposterous after the third wave of technological revolution and rationalization that modern capitalism has brought in its train.
  • There’s also the not-inconsiderable question of capitalism’s ability to decide, if not on the value of a commodity, at least on some sort of price for the damn thing. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and the other members of the Austrian school were able to point out this critical shortcoming of Capital—no pricing policy—during Marx’s lifetime
  • John Cassidy wrote of Marx, “His books will be worth reading as long as capitalism endures.” That would appear to mean that Marxism and capitalism are symbiotic, and that neither can expect to outlive the other,
Javier E

Minsky's moment | The Economist - 0 views

  • Minsky started with an explanation of investment. It is, in essence, an exchange of money today for money tomorrow. A firm pays now for the construction of a factory; profits from running the facility will, all going well, translate into money for it in coming years.
  • Put crudely, money today can come from one of two sources: the firm’s own cash or that of others (for example, if the firm borrows from a bank). The balance between the two is the key question for the financial system.
  • Minsky distinguished between three kinds of financing. The first, which he called “hedge financing”, is the safest: firms rely on their future cashflow to repay all their borrowings. For this to work, they need to have very limited borrowings and healthy profits. The second, speculative financing, is a bit riskier: firms rely on their cashflow to repay the interest on their borrowings but must roll over their debt to repay the principal. This should be manageable as long as the economy functions smoothly, but a downturn could cause distress. The third, Ponzi financing, is the most dangerous. Cashflow covers neither principal nor interest; firms are betting only that the underlying asset will appreciate by enough to cover their liabilities. If that fails to happen, they will be left exposed.
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  • Economies dominated by hedge financing—that is, those with strong cashflows and low debt levels—are the most stable. When speculative and, especially, Ponzi financing come to the fore, financial systems are more vulnerable. If asset values start to fall, either because of monetary tightening or some external shock, the most overstretched firms will be forced to sell their positions. This further undermines asset values, causing pain for even more firms. They could avoid this trouble by restricting themselves to hedge financing. But over time, particularly when the economy is in fine fettle, the temptation to take on debt is irresistible. When growth looks assured, why not borrow more? Banks add to the dynamic, lowering their credit standards the longer booms last. If defaults are minimal, why not lend more? Minsky’s conclusion was unsettling. Economic stability breeds instability. Periods of prosperity give way to financial fragility.
  • Minsky’s insight might sound obvious. Of course, debt and finance matter. But for decades the study of economics paid little heed to the former and relegated the latter to a sub-discipline, not an essential element in broader theories.
  • Minsky was a maverick. He challenged both the Keynesian backbone of macroeconomics and a prevailing belief in efficient markets.
  • it would be a stretch to expect the financial-instability hypothesis to become a new foundation for economic theory. Minsky’s legacy has more to do with focusing on the right things than correctly structuring quantifiable models. It is enough to observe that debt and financial instability, his main preoccupations, have become some of the principal topics of inquiry for economists today
  • His challenge to the prophets of efficient markets was even more acute. Eugene Fama and Robert Lucas, among others, persuaded most of academia and policymaking circles that markets tended towards equilibrium as people digested all available information. The structure of the financial system was treated as almost irrelevant
  • In recent years, behavioural economists have attacked one plank of efficient-market theory: people, far from being rational actors who maximise their gains, are often clueless about what they want and make the wrong decisions.
  • But years earlier Minsky had attacked another: deep-seated forces in financial systems propel them towards trouble, he argued, with stability only ever a fleeting illusion.
  • Investors were faster than professors to latch onto his views. More than anyone else it was Paul McCulley of PIMCO, a fund-management group, who popularised his ideas. He coined the term “Minsky moment” to describe a situation when debt levels reach breaking-point and asset prices across the board start plunging. Mr McCulley initially used the term in explaining the Russian financial crisis of 1998. Since the global turmoil of 2008, it has become ubiquitous. For investment analysts and fund managers, a “Minsky moment” is now virtually synonymous with a financial crisis.
  • t Messrs Hicks and Hansen largely left the financial sector out of the picture, even though Keynes was keenly aware of the importance of markets. To Minsky, this was an “unfair and naive representation of Keynes’s subtle and sophisticated views”. Minsky’s financial-instability hypothesis helped fill in the holes.
  • As Mr Krugman has quipped: “We are all Minskyites now.”
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