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ethanshilling

U.S. to Declare Yemen's Houthis a Terrorist Group, Raising Fears of Fueling a Famine - ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-houthis-terrorist-group.html

Politics terrorist crisis

shared by ethanshilling on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will designate the Houthi rebels in Yemen as a foreign terrorist organization
  • It is not clear how the terrorist designation will inhibit the Houthi rebels, who have been at war with the Saudi-backed government in Yemen for nearly six years but, some analysts say, pose no direct threat to the United States.
  • Mr. Pompeo will announce the designation in his last full week as secretary of state, and more than a month after meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who began a military intervention with Arab allies against the Houthis in 2015.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The Houthis’ inclusion on the department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations means that fighters within the relatively decentralized movement will be cut off from financial support and other material resources that are routed through U.S. banks or other American institutions.
  • But the Houthis’ main patron is Iran, which continues to send support despite being hobbled by severe U.S. economic sanctions
  • Experts said it would chill humanitarian efforts to donate food and medicine to Houthi-controlled areas in northern and western Yemen
  • The United Nations estimates that about 80 percent of Yemenis depend on food assistance, and nearly half of all children suffer stunted growth because of malnutrition.
  • “I urge all those with influence to act urgently on these issues to stave off catastrophe, and I also request that everyone avoids taking any action that could make the already dire situation even worse,” Mr. Guterres said then.
  • The United States accuses the Houthi rebels of being proxy fighters for Iran
  • In October, the rebels released two American hostages and the remains of a third in a prisoner swap that also allowed about 240 Houthis to return to Yemen from Oman.
  • Beyond the looming famine, the terrorist designation could also seal the fate of an immense rusting oil tanker moored off Yemen’s western coast.
  • “If we do not want to cause Yemen to lose an entire generation,” Mr. Ralby said, “we need to back off this designation.”
kaylynfreeman

Who Died in the Capitol Building Attack? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-capitol-building-attack.html

politics crisis trump US

shared by kaylynfreeman on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • These five people from disparate backgrounds and different corners of the country now share one fate: Their lives all ended last week as a mob incited by Mr. Trump stormed the Capitol.
  • After serving in the Air National Guard and dreaming of becoming a police officer, Brian D. Sicknick joined the Capitol Police force in 2008. He died the day after he was overpowered and beaten by rioters from the mob at the Capitol.
  • Ashli Babbitt, 35, an Air Force veteran from Southern California, was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she clambered through a broken window leading to the Speaker’s Lobby inside the Capitol.
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  • Kevin D. Greeson, 55, of Athens, Ala., was standing in a throng of fellow Trump loyalists on the west side of the Capitol when he suffered a heart attack and fell to the sidewalk. He was talking on the phone with his wife at the time.
  • Rosanne Boyland, 34, of Kennesaw, Ga., posted fervently in support of President Trump on social media, followed the baseless conspiracy theories of QAnon and latched onto Mr. Trump’s false claims that he had won the election, family members told The Associated Press.
  • How she died remained unclear on Monday
  • Mr. Philips died of a stroke in Washington, those who accompanied him to the Capitol told the newspaper. The exact circumstances of his death were still unclear, and his family could not be reached for comment.
  • A police officer was beaten, a rioter was shot, and three others died during the rampage.
  • One had dreamed of becoming a police officer and was injured in a clash with rioters. One was an Air Force veteran and a fervent supporter of President Trump who was shot by the police. Three others were Trump loyalists — including one who sold kangaroos dressed like the president — who suffered what the authorities called “medical emergencies.”
  • Law enforcement officials said he had been “physically engaging with protesters” and was struck in the head with a fire extinguisher.
  • Her last moments, captured from multiple angles on video, show Ms. Babbitt, a Trump flag knotted around her neck, being hoisted to the window as others in the mob shout. Moments later, a shot rings out and Ms. Babbitt falls back, blood pouring from her mouth
  • Mr. Greeson had high blood pressure and she had not wanted him to travel to Washington. But she said Mr. Greeson believed the election had been stolen and saw the Jan. 6 rally as “a monumental event.”
Javier E

How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...societal-collapse.html

collapse civilization decline history crisis politics economics culture

shared by Javier E on 10 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988
  • It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.
  • His own research has moved on; these days, he focuses on “sustainability.”
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  • He writes with disarming composure about the factors that have led to the disintegration of empires and the abandonment of cities and about the mechanism that, in his view, makes it nearly certain that all states that rise will one day fall
  • societal collapse and its associated terms — “fragility” and “resilience,” “risk” and “sustainability” — have become the objects of extensive scholarly inquiry and infrastructure.
  • Princeton has a research program in Global Systemic Risk, Cambridge a Center for the Study of Existential Risk
  • even Tainter, for all his caution and reserve, was willing to allow that contemporary society has built-in vulnerabilities that could allow things to go very badly indeed — probably not right now, maybe not for a few decades still, but possibly sooner. In fact, he worried, it could begin before the year was over.
  • Plato, in “The Republic,” compared cities to animals and plants, subject to growth and senescence like any living thing. The metaphor would hold: In the early 20th century, the German historian Oswald Spengler proposed that all cultures have souls, vital essences that begin falling into decay the moment they adopt the trappings of civilization.
  • that theory, which became the heart of “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” Tainter’s argument rests on two proposals. The first is that human societies develop complexity, i.e. specialized roles and the institutional structures that coordinate them, in order to solve problems
  • All history since then has been “characterized by a seemingly inexorable trend toward higher levels of complexity, specialization and sociopolitical control.”
  • Something more than the threat of violence would be necessary to hold them together, a delicate balance of symbolic and material benefits that Tainter calls “legitimacy,” the maintenance of which would itself require ever more complex structures, which would become ever less flexible, and more vulnerable, the more they piled up.
  • Eventually, societies we would recognize as similar to our own would emerge, “large, heterogeneous, internally differentiated, class structured, controlled societies in which the resources that sustain life are not equally available to all.”
  • Social complexity, he argues, is inevitably subject to diminishing marginal returns. It costs more and more, in other words, while producing smaller and smaller profits.
  • Take Rome, which, in Tainter's telling, was able to win significant wealth by sacking its neighbors but was thereafter required to maintain an ever larger and more expensive military just to keep the imperial machine from stalling — until it couldn’t anymore.
  • This is how it goes. As the benefits of ever-increasing complexity — the loot shipped home by the Roman armies or the gentler agricultural symbiosis of the San Juan Basin — begin to dwindle, Tainter writes, societies “become vulnerable to collapse.”
  • haven’t countless societies weathered military defeats, invasions, even occupations and lengthy civil wars, or rebuilt themselves after earthquakes, floods and famines?
  • Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse.
  • Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become. Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture.
  • A disaster — even a severe one like a deadly pandemic, mass social unrest or a rapidly changing climate — can, in Tainter’s view, never be enough by itself to cause collapse
  • Societies evolve complexity, he argues, precisely to meet such challenges.
  • Whether any existing society is close to collapsing depends on where it falls on the curve of diminishing returns.
  • The United States hardly feels like a confident empire on the rise these days. But how far along are we?
  • Scholars of collapse tend to fall into two loose camps. The first, dominated by Tainter, looks for grand narratives and one-size-fits-all explanations
  • The second is more interested in the particulars of the societies they study
  • Patricia McAnany, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has questioned the usefulness of the very concept of collapse — she was an editor of a 2010 volume titled “Questioning Collapse” — but admits to being “very, very worried” about the lack, in the United States, of the “nimbleness” that crises require of governments.
  • We’re too vested and tied to places.” Without the possibility of dispersal, or of real structural change to more equitably distribute resources, “at some point the whole thing blows. It has to.”
  • In Turchin’s case the key is the loss of “social resilience,” a society’s ability to cooperate and act collectively for common goals. By that measure, Turchin judges that the United States was collapsing well before Covid-19 hit. For the last 40 years, he argues, the population has been growing poorer and more unhealthy as elites accumulate more and more wealth and institutional legitimacy founders. “The United States is basically eating itself from the inside out,
  • Inequality and “popular immiseration” have left the country extremely vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic, and to internal triggers like the killings of George Floyd
  • Turchin is keenly aware of the essential instability of even the sturdiest-seeming systems. “Very severe events, while not terribly likely, are quite possible,” he says. When he emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in 1977, he adds, no one imagined the country would splinter into its constituent parts. “But it did.”
  • Eric H. Cline, who teaches at the George Washington University, argued in “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” that Late Bronze Age societies across Europe and western Asia crumbled under a concatenation of stresses, including natural disasters — earthquakes and drought — famine, political strife, mass migration and the closure of trade routes. On their own, none of those factors would have been capable of causing such widespread disintegration, but together they formed a “perfect storm” capable of toppling multiple societies all at once.
  • Collapse “really is a matter of when,” he told me, “and I’m concerned that this may be the time.”
  • In “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Tainter makes a point that echoes the concern that Patricia McAnany raised. “The world today is full,” Tainter writes. Complex societies occupy every inhabitable region of the planet. There is no escaping. This also means, he writes, that collapse, “if and when it comes again, will this time be global.” Our fates are interlinked. “No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”
  • If it happens, he says, it would be “the worst catastrophe in history.”
  • The quest for efficiency, he wrote recently, has brought on unprecedented levels of complexity: “an elaborate global system of production, shipping, manufacturing and retailing” in which goods are manufactured in one part of the world to meet immediate demands in another, and delivered only when they’re needed. The system’s speed is dizzying, but so are its vulnerabilities.
  • A more comprehensive failure of fragile supply chains could mean that fuel, food and other essentials would no longer flow to cities. “There would be billions of deaths within a very short period,” Tainter says.
  • If we sink “into a severe recession or a depression,” Tainter says, “then it will probably cascade. It will simply reinforce itself.”
  • Tainter tells me, he has seen “a definite uptick” in calls from journalists: The study of societal collapse suddenly no longer seems like a purely academic pursuit
  • The only precedent Tainter could think of, in which pandemic coincided with mass social unrest, was the Black Death of the 14th century. That crisis reduced the population of Europe by as much as 60 percent.
  • He writes of visions of “bloated bureaucracies” becoming the basis of “entire political careers.” Arms races, he observes, presented a “classic example” of spiraling complexity that provides “no tangible benefit for much of the population” and “usually no competitive advantage” either.
  • It is hard not to read the book through the lens of the last 40 years of American history, as a prediction of how the country might deteriorate if resources continued to be slashed from nearly every sector but the military, prisons and police.
  • The more a population is squeezed, Tainter warns, the larger the share that “must be allocated to legitimization or coercion.
  • And so it was: As U.S. military spending skyrocketed — to, by some estimates, a total of more than $1 trillion today from $138 billion in 1980 — the government would try both tactics, ingratiating itself with the wealthy by cutting taxes while dismantling public-assistance programs and incarcerating the poor in ever-greater numbers.
  • “As resources committed to benefits decline,” Tainter wrote in 1988, “resources committed to control must increase.”
  • The overall picture drawn by Tainter’s work is a tragic one. It is our very creativity, our extraordinary ability as a species to organize ourselves to solve problems collectively, that leads us into a trap from which there is no escaping
  • Complexity is “insidious,” in Tainter’s words. “It grows by small steps, each of which seems reasonable at the time.” And then the world starts to fall apart, and you wonder how you got there.
  • Perhaps collapse is not, actually, a thing. Perhaps, as an idea, it was a product of its time, a Cold War hangover that has outlived its usefulness, or an academic ripple effect of climate-change anxiety, or a feedback loop produced by some combination of the two
  • if you pay attention to people’s lived experience, and not just to the abstractions imposed by a highly fragmented archaeological record, a different kind of picture emerges.
  • Since the beginning of the pandemic, the total net worth of America’s billionaires, all 686 of them, has jumped by close to a trillion dollars.
  • Tainter’s understanding of societies as problem-solving entities can obscure as much as it reveals
  • Plantation slavery arose in order to solve a problem faced by the white landowning class: The production of agricultural commodities like sugar and cotton requires a great deal of backbreaking labor. That problem, however, has nothing to do with the problems of the people they enslaved. Which of them counts as “society”?
  • If societies are not in fact unitary, problem-solving entities but heaving contradictions and sites of constant struggle, then their existence is not an all-or-nothing game.
  • Collapse appears not as an ending, but a reality that some have already suffered — in the hold of a slave ship, say, or on a long, forced march from their ancestral lands to reservations faraway — and survived.
  • The current pandemic has already given many of us a taste of what happens when a society fails to meet the challenges that face it, when the factions that rule over it tend solely to their own problems
  • the real danger comes from imagining that we can keep living the way we always have, and that the past is any more stable than the present.
  • If you close your eyes and open them again, the periodic disintegrations that punctuate our history — all those crumbling ruins — begin to fade, and something else comes into focus: wiliness, stubbornness and, perhaps the strongest and most essential human trait, adaptability.
  • When one system fails, we build another. We struggle to do things differently, and we push on. As always, we have no other choice.
mattrenz16

Live Updates: House Pushes Senate to Approve $2,000 Stimulus Checks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...joe-biden-trump

shared by mattrenz16 on 29 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, on Tuesday blocked an effort to hold an immediate vote to increase stimulus checks to $2,000, saying instead that the Senate would “begin a process” to consider bigger payments, along with other demands issued by President Trump, leaving the fate of the measure unclear as more Republicans clamored to endorse it.
  • Mr. Trump had held the package hostage for days, insisting that lawmakers raise the direct payments to $2,000 from $600, remove a legal shield for companies like YouTube and Facebook and investigate “very substantial voter fraud.”
  • Mr. McConnell’s decision to block a vote on increasing the stimulus payments came as a growing number of Republican senators voiced support for the larger checks, and as pressure mounted on the Senate to vote on the measure.
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  • They joined a handful of others, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who have backed increasing the checks to $2,000.
  • While Democrats all support larger checks, they are unlikely to endorse a hasty overhaul of the legal shield currently in place for social media companies, especially measures put forward by Republican senators aimed at confronting what they believe is anti-conservative bias.
  • The House voted on Monday evening to increase the size of the checks to $2,000, daring Senate Republicans to either approve the heftier sum or defy Mr. Trump.
  • In signing the relief bill on Sunday night, Mr. Trump claimed in a statement that the Senate would “start the process for a vote” on legislation that would increase direct payments and pledged that “much more money is coming.”
  • Republican lawmakers in the House were visibly frustrated with Mr. Trump’s demand. Some of the president’s closest allies, including Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, and Jim Jordan of Ohio, voted against the measure, and Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, complained on the House floor that the proposal had been “hastily dropped on us at the last minute” and wouldn’t assist those who needed it most.
mattrenz16

Argentina Senate to Vote on Bill Legalizing Abortion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...argentina-abortion.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 29 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • BUENOS AIRES — Argentina’s Senate is on the verge of a vote that could turn the nation, homeland of Pope Francis, into the largest country in Latin America to legalize abortion, a move that would reverberate widely in a region where the church has long wielded power.
  • The measure would make it legal for women to end pregnancies of up to 14 weeks, and its fate appears to rest in the hands of a handful of senators who remain undecided or are keeping their position under wraps.
  • The president, the vice president and many members of the executive branch have been working to bolster support for the measure, Mariela Belski, the head of Amnesty International in Argentina, said. “The government has really done its homework.”
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  • If the bill goes through, and is signed by the president, Argentina would join Uruguay, Cuba and Guyana in making abortion legal on request — instead of only in cases of rape or if the pregnancy poses a risk to the mother’s health, as is the case now in Argentina.
  • Both sides intend to settle in for a long night, as they wait for a decision likely to have great repercussions in their own country and across Latin America.
Javier E

Opinion | How Trump Made the Fantasy Real - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-capitol-riot-legacy.html

fantasy trump insurrection election crisis politics Culture gop

shared by Javier E on 10 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • This was not a coup by any traditional definition of the term (as authors of books on coups quickly took to Twitter to explain), nor was it the kind of Bill Barr-abetted, Supreme Court-stamped use of constitutional trickery that liberals feared. But it was still something more than just a riot. And not merely because of where and with what encouragement it happened, but because it extended from an immersive narrative that made many of its participants fervently believe that they were actors in a world-historical drama, saviors or re-founders of the American Republic.
  • And because Trump is, however incompetently, actually the president and not just a character in an online role-playing game, by turning to the dreamworld he made himself a conduit for the dream to enter into reality, making the dreamers believe in the plausibility of direct action, giving us the riot and its dead.
  • Meanwhile, the politicians who went along with him partway — Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Kevin McCarthy above all — were like cynical characters in a horror movie who thought they could siphon a little power from an occult dimension, never imagining that the veil would actually be torn.
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  • What happens to the Republican Party under these conditions? A deeper burrowing into unreality, a partial restoration of realism (depending on liberalism’s own ongoing experiments with fantasy politics) and a permanent fracture are all possible.
  • we can say this much, at least, about Trump himself. By allowing his presidency to be possessed by the occult online, he sealed his legacy to the populist causes he sometimes pretended to serve: Their fate, for the time being, can be counted with the bodies of his own supporters, the pitiful, deluded dead.
Javier E

The Untold Technological Revolution Sweeping Through Rural China - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...chicken-farm-xiaowei-wang.html

china revolution rural economics

shared by Javier E on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Certainly, technology is good at “scaling” — making things grow big, run more efficiently, move more speedily. With its hundreds of millions of rural poor clamoring to join the middle class, China craves scale. (“The West doesn’t understand our problems. We just have too many people,” Wang is told.) But efficiency can cause problems of its own, leaving China caught in a dilemma: the need for scale, the peril scale brings.
  • Wang has written a nuanced and thought-provoking account, and it is not easy to tell, after you’re done reading it, how rural China will fare — whether its tiptoe toward prosperity and tech savviness is durable. Given that China’s economic fate is now so entwined with the world, one hopes it can thread the needle.
xaviermcelderry

Inspiring Black Voters Is Key to Biden's Prospects in Florida - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oters-Florida-Trump-Biden.html

election Florida Biden

shared by xaviermcelderry on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Four years after President Trump carried Florida by just over one point, no other single battleground poses quite the impediment to his re-election as America’s largest traditional swing state. A loss in Florida, where several late polls show Joseph R. Biden Jr. with a modest lead, would be the most ominous sign for the president’s re-election chances on Tuesday night, given that the state was expected to report results faster than most key battlegrounds.
  • Mr. Biden’s fate in Florida may hinge in part on whether he can reverse that slide.
  • The number of Black voters is likely to grow because parts of the Black community traditionally prefer to wait until Election Day to vote: in a new New York Times/Siena College poll of Florida voters, 43 percent of African-Americans here said they would cast their ballot at the polls on Tuesday.
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  • What’s perhaps most significant about the early vote, though, is that a group of new African-American voters have been energized: of the Black voters in Florida who’ve already voted, about 15 percent of them did not cast ballots in 2016 or 2018.
katherineharron

'It's a little tough out here': Trump blitzes must-win states with perfected rally rout... - 0 views

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

election trump

shared by katherineharron on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Even as polls tighten in battlegrounds across the country, Trump is still entering the last days of a caustic campaign with only a narrow path to victory -- albeit one he and his campaign remain convinced will manifest and one he is prepared to trumpet on election night even before all the votes are counted.
  • In a breakneck sprint, with 17 rallies scheduled for the campaign's final four days, Trump is allowing himself little time to contemplate what he might do if he loses. Given how vague his stated goals for a second term have been, even the consequences of winning seem far from mind.
  • Trump these days is focused almost exclusively on the immediate task at hand: avoiding the shameful fate of becoming a one-term president by throwing himself headlong into his final campaign.
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  • Trump demands continuous updates on the state of the race.
  • "It's really a contest to see whether or not we can all stand it, right?" Trump said at his frostbit event in Michigan
  • Increasingly, Trump's efforts on the trail amount to willing into existence the reality he'd rather be facing than the one he actually is. For him, coronavirus is a media exaggeration designed to prevent his campaign from hosting massive crowds. He insists the numbers for his rallies are bigger than ever, despite the pandemic.
  • Trump has not divulged to many what he might do should he lose. The delicate matter is not discussed widely among his team and has not been raised often with the President, who believes adamantly he will win.
  • Not one for introspection, but deeply prone to insecurity about potential failure, Trump has offered only fleeting glimpses of turmoil about potentially falling short.
  • "How the hell can we be tied?" Trump has asked about states where he and Biden are running neck-to-neck
  • He has joked he might drive an 18-wheeler into the distance, escaping the political life he chose for himself five years ago.
  • he has mused about fleeing overseas to escape humiliation
  • "I shouldn't even be here. They said I have Georgia made," Trump said later Sunday, standing beneath two fluttering American flags in a state that's voted Republican in the last six presidential elections. "But I said, I promised -- we have to be here. They said, 'Sir, you don't have to come to Georgia. It's won.' "
  • While he has suggested mass firings in his Cabinet should he win, he has not made his intentions explicitly known -- though by his final, muggy rally on a Miami area tarmac on Sunday night, he seemed ready to offer a hint.
  • If Trump does fail to win a second term -- the first president to do so in almost 30 years -- few believe he would fade into the background like his predecessors, who mostly stepped away from public life.
  • Trump will almost certainly continue tweeting.
  • After all, it is the rally where Trump has seemed most himself, even after four years of being president and ample time to adjust to a more presidential way of behaving
  • Ten hours and three rallies later, Trump boasted he could draw bigger crowds than his rivals, who have enlisted musical acts in the final stretch
  • He sounded dour and spoke for only about 20 minutes on Friday in Minnesota when rally was limited by the state's coronavirus restrictions.
  • Because of the pandemic, they are smaller now than they were in 2016, a fact Trump has refused to admit even as it remains patently obvious to any casual observer. Often, aides throw out numbers with little rooting in reality.
  • Sometimes he adds a new insult of his rivals; this weekend's addition was claiming his Democratic rival Joe Biden's signature aviator sunglasses were too small for his face and that his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, has been mispronouncing her own name.
  • He has not gone in for retail politics, partly because any unscheduled appearance at a restaurant or takeaway would place him squarely in the optics of coronavirus. When he stopped for pizzas in Pennsylvania in August, he seemed somewhat taken aback by the plexiglass barriers between himself and the cashier. Trump rarely, if ever, encounters voters who do not support him.
  • A lover of routine, Trump has spent only a handful of nights away from the White House, preferring to fly back even from late-night rallies.
  • On Thursday, after returning to the White House in the dark after a two-day Western swing, Trump was tweeting at 3 a.m. about the prospect of an election decided by the Supreme Court.
  • It isn't clear how much of his wife or teenage son he has seen lately; first lady Melania Trump has recently embarked for the first time on the campaign trail herself. All three had coronavirus last month; Trump has taken to touting his 14-year-old son Barron's infection as evidence of the mild effect on young people, suggesting he had it for either two minutes, 14 minutes or 15 minutes.
  • Along the way he has found some new interlocutors, including the rapper Lil Wayne, who had been in touch with the White House about Trump's plan for bolstering Black communities and was invited to meet the President at his Doral golf club
  • While not particularly wistful, Trump does sometimes wax nostalgic about his only previous campaign. He has assembled many of the same aides, most decades his junior, to accompany him as he attempts to repeat his victory this year. He will hold his final campaign rally on Monday evening in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the same place he held his final event in 2016.
  • "As soon as that election's over, we're going in with our lawyers," Trump said in North Carolina on Sunday, stopping between his second and third rallies of the day to speak with reporters as the sun set behind him.
  • After inviting supporters to enter a chance to win tickets to an election night party at his hotel in downtown Washington, Trump scrapped a planned appearance there. He was put off, he said, by Mayor Murial Bowser's restrictions on large gatherings.
  • How Trump reacts to the information coming to him about percentages of early votes and turnout numbers is anyone's guess. But no officials have ruled out Trump declaring himself the winner even in the absence of formal vote counts or media projections.
anonymous

I'm a working-class teenage Latino, and I can't vote this year. But I hope you do | Isa... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...te-this-year-but-i-hope-you-do

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Chills ran down my neck when I watched Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent Instagram story. “Turn your fear into fuel,”
  • “November is about survival.” And if young Latinos like me – a key voter base in swing states – make the right choice on Tuesday, I can go to sleep knowing my president isn’t a fascist.
  • As a working-class 17-year-old Mexican-American, I can’t vote – not until next year. And throughout this election cycle, I’ve felt a deep sense of powerlessness, a reminder of my position in society.
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  • two brothers and my parents, who are essential workers in one of San Diego’s coronavirus hotspots – where Hispanics comprise 45% of Covid-19 deaths.
  • I’m disheartened by the disparate impact of the pandemic, which disproportionately victimizes Latinos.
  • In each glance we exchange, I sense silent despair. It’s hard not to surrender to the material challenges we face.
  • My struggles mirror those of millions of Latinos like me, which makes our solidarity so important.
  • Only in recognizing our solidarity can we overcome the obstacles of the pandemic – a path made more viable with Biden’s plans to address disparities in vulnerable communities.
  • Trump’s separation of families and proto-fascist rhetoric have simply harmed Latino communities for far too long. We may not agree on every issue, but electing Biden now is a matter of survival.
  • Though Biden hasn’t committed to Medicare for All and continues to swallow corporate cash, his presidency, if victorious, should galvanize us to demand for needed reform.
  • With Biden, I have hope for my future and the fate of millions of Latinos like me.
Javier E

A Brazilian Writer Saw a Tweet as Tame Satire. Then Came the Lawsuits. - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lawsuits-Cuenca-Bolsonaro.html

satire brazil repression press intimidation

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “Brazilians will only be free when the last Bolsonaro is strangled with the entrails of the last pastor from the Universal Church,” Mr. Cuenca wrote on Twitter, riffing on an oft-cited 18th century quote about the fates that should befall kings and priests.
  • Leticia Kleim, a legal expert at the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalists, said, “We’re seeing the justice system become a means to censure and impede the work of journalists.”
  • Mr. Cuenca said he didn’t deem his tweet particularly offensive given the state of political discourse in Brazil.After all, the country is governed by a president who supports torture, once told a female lawmaker she was too ugly to rape, said he would rather his son die in an accident than be gay, and in 2018 was criminally charged with inciting hatred against Black people, women and Indigenous people.
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  • Earlier this year, Mr. Bolsonaro lashed out at two reporters who asked about a corruption case against one of his sons. He told one he had a “terribly homosexual face” and said to another that he was tempted to smash his face in.
  • Mr. Cuenca saw his criticism as comparatively high-minded. He said he disdains the Universal Church, which has grown into a transnational behemoth since its founding in the 1970s, because he believes it fueled Mr. Bolsonaro’s rise to the presidency, enabling ecological destruction, reckless handling of the coronavirus pandemic and institutional chaos.“I was totally bored, distracted, procrastinating and angry over politics,” Mr. Cuenca said. “What I wrote was satire.”
  • Taís Gasparian, a lawyer in São Paulo who has defended several people who faced similar bursts of almost-identical, simultaneous lawsuits, said plaintiffs like the Universal Church abuse a legal mechanism that was created in the 1990s to make the justice system accessible and affordable to ordinary people.
  • The type of action filed against Mr. Cuenca doesn’t require that a plaintiff hire a lawyer, but defendants who don’t show up in person or send a lawyer often lose by default. Universal Church pastors began a similar wave of suits against the journalist Elvira Lobato after she published an article in December 2007 documenting links between the church and companies based in tax havens.The timing and the striking similarities among the lawsuits filed against Ms. Lobato and Mr. Cuenca make it clear they were copy-paste jobs, Ms. Gasparian said.
Javier E

The Inside Story of Michigan's Fake Voter Fraud Scandal - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...p-voter-fraud-democracy-440475

politics crisis culture gop trump election 2020

shared by Javier E on 26 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In the end, it wasn’t a senator or a judge or a general who stood up to the leader of the free world. There was no dramatic, made-for-Hollywood collision of cosmic egos. Rather, the death knell of Trump’s presidency was sounded by a baby-faced lawyer, looking over his glasses on a grainy Zoom feed on a gloomy Monday afternoon, reading from a statement that reflected a courage and moral clarity that has gone AWOL from his party, pleading with the tens of thousands of people watching online to understand that some lines can never be uncrossed.
  • “We must not attempt to exercise power we simply don’t have,” declared Van Langevelde, a member of Michigan’s board of state canvassers, the ministerial body with sole authority to make official Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. “As John Adams once said, 'We are a government of laws, not men.' This board needs to adhere to that principle here today. This board must do its part to uphold the rule of law and comply with our legal duty to certify this election.”
  • As a Republican, his mandate for Monday’s hearing—handed down from the state party chair, the national party chair and the president himself—was straightforward. They wanted Michigan’s board of canvassers to delay certification of Biden’s victory. Never mind that Trump lost by more than 154,000 votes, or that results were already certified in all 83 counties. The plan was to drag things out, to further muddy the election waters and delegitimize the process, to force the courts to take unprecedented actions that would forever taint Michigan’s process of certifying elections.
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  • Not because it was going to help Trump win but because it was going to help Trump cope with a loss. The president was not accepting defeat. That meant no Republican with career ambitions could accept it, either.
  • At a low point in his party’s existence, with much of the GOP’s leadership class pre-writing their own political epitaphs by empowering Trump to lay waste to the country’s foundational democratic norms, an obscure lawyer from west Michigan stood on principle. It proved to be the nail in Trump’s coffin
  • Shortly after Michigan’s vote to certify, the General Services Administration finally commenced the official transition of power and Trump tweeted out a statement affirming the move “in the best interest of our Country.”
  • Still, the drama in Lansing raised deeper questions about the health of our political system and the sturdiness of American democracy
  • Why were Republicans who privately admitted Trump’s legitimate defeat publicly alleging massive fraud? Why did it fall to a little-known figure like Van Langevelde to buffer the country from an unprecedented layer of turmoil?
  • In conversations with more than two dozen Michigan insiders—elected officials, party elders, consultants, activists—it became apparent how the state’s conditions were ripe for this sort of slow-motion disaster
  • Michigan is home to Detroit, an overwhelmingly majority Black city, that has always been a favorite punching bag of white Republicans. The state had viral episodes of conflict and human error that were easily manipulated and deliberately misconstrued. It drew special attention from the highest levels of the party, and for the president, it had the potential to settle an important score with his adversary, Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer
  • Perhaps most important, Trump’s allies in Michigan proved to be more career-obsessed, and therefore more servile to his whims, than GOP officials in any other state he has cultivated during his presidency, willing to indulge his conspiratorial fantasies in ways other Republicans weren’t.
  • “Anybody can sue anybody for any reason. But winning is a whole different matter. And Trump didn’t have a realistic pathway here,” Brian Calley, the former GOP lieutenant governor, told me prior to the certification vote
  • “We have to see this for what it is. It’s a PR strategy to erode public confidence in a very well-run election to achieve political ends,” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said in an interview last week. “This was not any type of valid legal strategy that had any chance at ultimately succeeding.”
  • Strangely liberated by his deficit of 154,000 votes, the president’s efforts here were aimed not at overturning the results, but rather at testing voters’ faith in the ballot box and Republicans’ loyalty to him.
  • where he can ultimately succeed—is in convincing unprecedented numbers of Americans that their votes didn’t count. Last month, Gallup reported that the public’s confidence in our elections being accurate dropped 11 points since the 2018 midterms, which included a 34-point decrease among Republicans.
  • That was before a daily deluge of dishonest allegations and out-of-context insinuations; before the conservative media’s wall-to-wall coverage of exotic conspiracy theories; before the GOP’s most influential figures winked and nodded at the president of the United States alleging the greatest fraud in U.S. history.
  • Trump failed to win Michigan. But he succeeded in convincing America that a loss, no matter how conclusive, may never again be conclusive enough.
  • The irony of Michigan’s electoral meltdown is that Election Day, in the eyes of veteran clerks and poll workers across the state, was the smoothest it had ever been
  • “You’re talking about election officials implementing new laws, running an election with a 60 percent mail vote, in the middle of a pandemic,”
  • “In terms of voters getting the ballots processed and counted in a reasonable time period, I thought they did a marvelous job. But it was a huge challenge.”
  • There’s always this rallying cry from Republicans—‘We win everywhere else, but lose Wayne County’—that creates paranoia. I still remember hearing, back on my first campaign in 2002, that Wayne County always releases its votes last so that Detroit can see how many votes Democrats need to win the state. That’s what a lot of Republicans here believe.”
  • The Republicans—House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey—were not interested. Spooked by Trump’s continued assault on mail voting, and aware that their own members in the Legislature were distrustful of the new “no-excuse-absentee” rules, Chatfield and Shirkey weren’t inclined to do the process any favors.
  • many Republicans didn’t believe the election would be terribly close to begin with
  • The common expectation was that the president would lose comfortably, by at least 4 or 5 points, a margin that would render any controversy about absentee voting meaningless.
  • Michigan Republicans were gripped by equal parts euphoria and panic. It was clear Trump was running far more competitively than they’d anticipated; he was on track to win Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, three states that tally their ballots quickly, meaning the spotlight would abruptly shift to the critical, slow-counting battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
  • it wasn’t until midnight that the urgency of the situation crashed over Republicans. Trump had built a lead of nearly 300,000 votes on the strength of same-day ballots that were disproportionately favorable to him. Now, with the eyes of the nation—and of the president—fixed on their state, Michigan Republicans scrambled to protect that lead.
  • Whitmer and Benson warned the GOP leaders that a protracted counting process, especially in the scenario of a competitive election, would invite chaos. Other states Trump carried in 2016, such as Ohio and Florida, allowed for pre-canvassing of absentee and other mail-in ballots so that voters would know which candidate carried the state on election night. Why couldn’t Michigan do the same?
  • Thomas had been “thrilled” with the professionalism he’d witnessed during Monday’s pre-processing session and Tuesday’s vote tabulating. Now, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, things were going sideways. Groups of Republican poll challengers were clustering around individual counting tables in violation of the rules.
  • “Reading these affidavits afterward from these Republican poll challengers, I was just amazed at how misunderstood the election process was to them,” Thomas chuckled. “The things they said were going on—it’s like ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what was going on. That’s what’s supposed to happen.’
  • His cushion over Biden had been whittled down to 70,000 votes. There remained hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots to be counted in the large, Democratic strongholds of Detroit, Lansing and Flint. The math was simply not workable for the president. Just before 9:30 a.m., Biden overtook Trump in the tally of Michigan’s votes—and suddenly, a switch flipped on the right.
  • After 24 hours of letting the democratic process work, Republicans around the country—watching Trump’s second term slipping through their fingers—began crying foul and screaming conspiracy. No state cornered the hysteria market quite like Michigan.
  • “The people outside that room were doing exactly what the law says you would eject people for doing—they were disrupting the election,” Thomas said. “Everyone else in the room—the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the ACLU, the nonpartisans—they all still had a full complement of challengers in the room. And the Republicans, by the way, had far more challengers in the room than they were entitled to.”
  • Truly egregious was Cox’s dishonesty. At the time of her tweet, several hundred of her party’s poll challengers, attorneys and representatives were already inside the TCF Center monitoring the count
  • By law, Republicans were allowed to have 134 challengers in the room, one for each tabulation table. In reality, the GOP had far more than that, according to sworn testimony from nonpartisan poll watchers inside the TCF Center. Because of the overflow, election officials ultimately decided to lock down the complex
  • In the days following Trump’s shameful address to the nation, two realities became inescapable to Michigan’s GOP elite. First, there was zero evidence to substantiate widespread voter fraud. Second, they could not afford to admit it publicly.
  • What made this behavior all the more confounding, Thomas said, is that the election was conducted more transparently than any he’d ever participated in. Each of the 134 tables had monitors placed at the end, “showing every keystroke that was made,” so that challengers could see exactly what was happening
  • But he came to realize that none of this mattered. Having dealt with Republican poll challengers for decades, Thomas said, it was clear the people who infiltrated TCF on Wednesday were not adequately trained or there for the right reasons.
  • “Unlike the people who were there Monday and Tuesday, these people Wednesday were totally unprepared. They had no idea how the system worked. They had no idea what they were there for,” Thomas said. “Many of them—not all of them, but many of them—they were on a mission. They clearly came in believing there was mass cheating going on in Detroit and they were on a mission to catch it.”
  • When Trump addressed the nation from the White House on Thursday night, insisting the election had been “stolen” from him, he returned time and again to alleged misconduct in Michigan’s biggest city. Detroit, he smirked, “I wouldn’t say has the best reputation for election integrity.” He said the city “had hours of unexplained delay” in counting ballots, and when the late batches arrived, “nobody knew where they came from.” He alleged that Republicans had been “denied access to observe any counting in Detroit” and that the windows had been covered because “they didn’t want anybody seeing the counting.”
  • All of this was a lie. Republicans here—from Ronna Romney McDaniel to Laura Cox to federal and local lawmakers—knew it was a lie. But they didn’t lift a finger in protest as the president disparaged Michigan and subverted America’s democratic norms. Why?
  • The true insanity was saved for Detroit. By early afternoon on Wednesday, hundreds and hundreds of Republicans had descended on the TCF Center, responding to an all-hands-on-deck missive that went out from the state party and was disseminated by local officials. Cox, the party chair, tweeted out a video of her comrades standing outside the locked-up downtown building. “Republican poll challengers blocked from entering the TCF Center in Detroit! This is egregious!” she wrote.
  • Tapped by the president-elect to take over the Republican National Committee—on the not-so-subtle condition that she remove “Romney” from her professional name—McDaniel morphed into an archetype of the Trump-era GOP sycophant. There was no lie too outlandish to parrot, no behavior too unbecoming to justify, no abuse of power too flagrant to enable
  • Longtime friends worried that McDaniel wasn’t merely humiliating herself publicly; she seemed to be changing in private. She was no longer coolly detached from the passions of politics. If anything, she was turning into a true MAGA believer.
  • There was some relief, then, when in recent weeks McDaniel told multiple confidants that she doubted there was any scalable voter fraud in Michigan. Nevertheless, McDaniel told friends and fellow Republicans that she needed to stay the course with Trump and his legal team. This wasn’t about indulging him, she said, but rather about demonstrating a willingness to fight—even when the fight couldn’t be won.
  • McDaniel’s thinking is actually quite linear. The RNC will vote in January on the position of chair. She is anxious to keep her job.
  • No matter how obvious the outcome—to McDaniel, to the 168 members of the RNC, maybe even to Trump himself—any indication of surrender would be unforgivable.
  • This is why McDaniel has sanctioned her employees, beginning with top spokesperson Liz Harrington, to spread countless demonstrable falsehoods in the weeks since Election Day. It’s why the RNC, on McDaniel’s watch, tweeted out a video clip of disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell claiming Trump “won in a landslide” (when he lost by more than 6 million votes nationally) and alleging a global conspiracy to rig the election against him.
  • With Trump entering the anguished twilight of his presidency, all that appears to matter for someone like McDaniel—or Cox, the state party chair, who faces an upcoming election of her own—is unconditional fidelity to the president.
  • Both Chatfield and Shirkey are talented and ambitious, self-grooming for future runs at higher office. Both could see the obvious problems of meeting with the president at such a precarious moment—and both could also see how spurning Trump could torpedo their careers in the GOP.
  • “Frankly, continuing to humor him merely excuses his role in this. The election wasn’t stolen, he blew it. Up until the final two weeks, he seemingly did everything possible to lose. Given how close it was, there is no one to blame but Trump.”
  • “But if they want a future within the party, it is required of them to demonstrate continued fealty. Principled conservatives who respect the rule of law and speak out suddenly find themselves outcasts in a party that is no longer about conservativism but Trumpism. Just ask once-conservative heroes like Jeff Flake, Justin Amash and Mark Sanford.”
  • Monica Palmer, one of the GOP canvassers, caused an uproar when she offered to certify the rest of Wayne County—precincts like Livonia—without certifying Detroit. (Livonia, which is 95 percent white, had more poll-book irregularities than Detroit, which is 80 percent Black.)
  • Tweeting out siren emojis, Jenna Ellis, the attorney for Trump’s campaign, announced: “BREAKING: This evening, the county board of canvassers in Wayne County, MI refused to certify the election results. If the state board follows suit, the Republican state legislator will select the electors. Huge win for @realDonaldTrump.”
  • the notion that legislators would under any circumstance be free to send their own partisans to the Electoral College had no basis in fact. Under Michigan statute, the only electors eligible to represent Michigan are those who will vote for the winner of the popular vote. There is no discretion for anyone—the governor, leaders of the legislature, canvassers at the county or state level—to do anything but follow the law.
  • “The unfortunate reality within the party today is that Trump retains a hold that is forcing party leaders to continue down the path of executing his fantasy of overturning the outcome—at their own expense,”
  • precautions were taken. In a savvy move, Chatfield and Shirkey prepared a letter addressing concerns over funding to deal with Covid-19 in Michigan. They also brought along their general counsels. These two maneuvers—one to soothe the outcry over Michigan lawmakers meeting with a president whose legal team was calling for them to overturn the state’s election results; the other to insulate them from improper discussions about doing exactly that—were sufficient to sidestep any major crisis.
  • Trump, perhaps sensing the nervous reticence of his guests, did not make the ask they feared. As the meeting went on, it became apparent to some people in the room that more than anything, Trump had called his Michigan allies to Washington to get an honest assessment of what had happened there. He wanted to know if there was any pathway to victory. They told him there was not.
  • “I don’t get it,” the president said, venting confusion and frustration. “All these other Republicans, all over the country, they all win their races. And I’m the only guy that loses?”
  • With all 83 counties boasting certified results, the only thing that stood between Joe Biden and his rightful claim to Michigan’s 16 electoral votes was certification from the state board of canvassers. In a rational political climate, this would not have been the subject of suspense. But the swirling innuendo and disinformation had long ago swept away any semblance of normalcy.
  • Already, one of the board’s two Republicans, Norm Shinkle, a career party fixture, had hinted he would not vote to certify the state’s result. Because the two Democrats would obviously vote in favor of certification, a manic gush of attention turned to the other Republican member, Aaron Van Langevelde.
  • By Sunday morning, speculation was rampant that Van Langevelde would resign from the board on Monday. This made perfect sense to Republicans and Democrats alike: Based on their fact-finding mission into the mysterious fourth board member, Van Langevelde was a bookish type, a rule follower, an obsessive student of world history (particularly the Roman Empire) who believes to his core in a conservative application of the law
  • He would be inclined, Lansing insiders figured, to vote in favor of certifying the results. But he would be disinclined to throw away his future in the Republican Party. A resignation from the board was his only way out.
  • Working off this expectation, a late lobbying blitz turned on Shinkle. In the 36 hours preceding Monday’s vote, he was inundated with calls and emails and text messages from high-ranking Republican luminaries around the state. Some, such as former congressman and House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers, urged him to certify the results in accordance with Michigan law. Others, including McDaniel and Cox and other state party figures, pleaded with Shinkle to stand his ground and insist on a two-week delay.
  • The response they got was universal: He would promise to “do my best,” then he would offer a litany of unsubstantiated allegations of fraud. (Not everyone bothered contacting Shinkle: That his wife served as a plaintiff’s witness in Trump’s ill-fated lawsuit against Detroit struck many people not just as a conflict of interest, but as a clear indication he would never vote to certify.)
  • Some Republicans didn’t want to believe it. But for others, reality began to set in. They had grown so accustomed to Republicans falling in line, bending a knee to Trumpism, that the notion of someone acting on his own personal ethic had become foreign.
  • But the more they learned about Van Langevelde, the more he sounded like just that type of independent thinker. Some viewed his relative youth as an asset, believing he wouldn’t risk throwing away his future in the party. What they had failed to appreciate was that young conservatives were oftentimes the most disillusioned with the party’s drift from any intellectual or philosophical mooring.
  • Like a good attorney, Van Langevelde meticulously questioned a number of expert guest speakers to ascertain if they had dissenting views of the board’s authority under state law. Time and again, they affirmed his position. The body did not have power to audit or investigate or recount; that could be done only by distinct bodies after certification was complete. The job of the board of state canvassers was narrowly to examine the certified results from all 83 counties and then, based on the relevant vote totals, certify a winner of Michigan’s 16 electoral votes. The one time he was challenged—by Spies, the political superlawyer representing John James’ U.S. Senate campaign—Van Langevelde calmly brushed his recommendations aside, telling Spies, “I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with you on that.”
  • Within minutes of Van Langevelde’s vote for certification—and of Shinkle’s abstention, which guaranteed his colleague would bear the brunt of the party’s fury alone—the fires of retaliation raged. In GOP circles, there were immediate calls for Van Langevelde to lose his seat on the board; to lose his job in the House of Representatives; to be censured on the floor of the Legislature and exiled from the party forever. Actionable threats against him and his family began to be reported. The Michigan State Police worked with local law enforcement to arrange a security detail.
  • ll for doing his job. All for upholding the rule of law. All for following his conscience and defying the wishes of Donald Trump.
  • “It took a lot of courage for him to do what he thought was right and appropriate, given the amount of pressure he was under,” said Brian Calley, the GOP former lieutenant governor, who told me days earlier that he had never heard the name Aaron Van Langevelde. “He carried himself as well as anybody I’ve seen in that type of setting, including people with decades and decades of experience. He showed an awful lot of poise.”
  • The name Van Langevelde is already so infamous in Michigan Republican lore that those associated with him are at risk of being branded turncoats, too.
  • because of the sweeping transformation of the party—not just ideologically or stylistically, but mechanically, with MAGA loyalists now installed in state and local leadership posts across the country—the question of loyalty will continue to define the Republican identity for years to come.
  • That contours of that identity—what it means to be a Trump Republican—have gained clarity over time. The default embrace of nationalism. The indifference to ideas as a vision for governing. The disregard for institutional norms. The aversion to etiquette and the bottomless appetite for cultural conflict. Now there is another cornerstone of that identity: The subversion of our basic democratic process.
  • More than any policy enacted or court vacancy filled, Trump’s legacy will be his unprecedented assault on the legitimacy of the ballot box
  • Future iterations of the GOP will make casual insinuations of voter fraud central to the party’s brand. The next generation of Republicans will have learned how to sow doubts about election integrity in one breath and in the next breath bemoan the nation’s lack of faith in our elections, creating a self-perpetuating justification to cast suspicion on a process that by raw numbers does not appear conducive to keeping them in power.
  • “This is not some whacked-out fringe,” James said in one taping. “When half the votes in our state believe we just had the most secure election in U.S. history, and the other half believe they were cheated, we have a problem.”
  • James is right. We do have a problem. Our elections continue to be underfunded. Our election bureaus are chronically understaffed. Our election workers are badly undertrained. Our elections are prone to a significant amount of human error—and any municipal or county clerk will tell you that concerns over not catching those errors keep them up at night.
  • But errors are not fraud. And when James says he’s troubled that half of Michigan’s voters feel they were cheated, he would do well to remember that he was the one telling them they got cheated in the first place.
  • there is no denying the advent of a pattern. Republicans in Michigan and across America have spent the past three weeks promoting baseless allegations of corruption at the ballot box, the rabid responses to which they use as justification to continue to question the fundamental integrity of our elections. It’s a vicious new playbook—one designed to stroke egos and rationalize defeats, but with unintended consequences that could spell the unraveling of America’s democratic experiment.
  • “By capriciously throwing around these false claims, you can’t get to the heart of a really important issue. In fact, you lose any credibility to get to the heart of that issue,”
  • “And by the way, if you’re going to do an audit, you’d better do it statewide. This is not just a Detroit thing. There are sloppy Republican precincts all over the state.
  • There is no immediate way to make Americans appreciate this distinction, no instant cure for the flagging confidence in our elections.
  • there are obvious incremental steps to take in the name of transparency and efficiency. First among them, acknowledged Chatfield, the Michigan House speaker, is getting rid of the rules that led to the TCF Center circus in the first place.
  • one of the items where we should look at other states and see how they’ve done it well, is regarding the early processing of absentee ballots. We mishandled that this year. We should have allowed for early processing. We didn’t, and it became a spectacle.
  • For those Republicans left to pick up the pieces in the coming legislative session, there may be little incentive for bipartisan cooperation on a subject that now divides the two party bases as starkly as gun rights or tax rates. The backlash against absentee voting from Republican constituents was already fierce; in the wake of Trump’s defeat and the TCF Center conspiracies, Republicans might find it beneficial to avoid raising the issue at all.
  • There is little cause for optimism. If the majority of GOP politicians couldn’t be bothered to do the easy work of debunking crackpot conspiracy theories, how likely are they to do the hard work of hardening our democracy?
  • “A lot of our leaders in this country ought to be ashamed of themselves,” said Thomas, the nonpartisan elections guru who kept Michigan’s governing class guessing his political affiliation for the past several decades. “They have propagated this narrative of massive fraud, and it’s simply not true. They’ve leapt from some human error to massive fraud. It’s like a leap to Never Neverland. And people are believing them.
  • “The people of this country really need to wake up and start thinking for themselves and looking for facts—not conspiracy theories being peddled by people who are supposed to be responsible leaders, but facts,” Thomas said. “If they’re not going to be responsible leaders, people need to seek out the truth for themselves. If people don’t do that—if they no longer trust how we elect the president of the United States—we’re going to be in real trouble.”
Javier E

Even Tories increasingly fear they have inflicted the worst of all worlds on Britain | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...worst-of-all-worlds-on-britain

uk politics pandemic

shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • The most straightforward way to assess the UK’s performance is to compare the number of deaths with the fatalities normally experienced for the time of year.
  • The “excess death” rate over the average of the previous five years has topped 60,000. With 955 “excess deaths” for every million people, the UK has the grimmest record of all countries providing comparable data. In that respect only can the Johnson government’s performance be said to be “world-beating”.
  • The OECD is projecting that the UK will suffer the deepest downturn among advanced economies. It is only a forecast, but it chimes with other indicators suggesting that this country will pay a uniquely high price for its sluggish imposition of the lockdown and the government’s chaotic mismanagement of the attempt to grope towards an exit.
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  • All of which is fuelling the fear that it will be Britain’s fate to get the worst of both worlds: a higher death rate than comparable countries and a more ravaged economy. That dread now radiates from Tories like a pungent musk
  • public approval of the government’s handling of the crisis has fallen to a new low of just 3 in 10.
  • the inevitable public inquiry is convened it will have to decide how much blame should be allocated to longstanding institutional weaknesses and how much can be attributed to the actions and inactions of particular individuals.
  • Many Tory MPs are flashing knives at Public Health England, which they blame for early mis-steps in establishing an adequate testing regime
  • The Tories have been in power for more than a decade and the NHS’s current configuration is a result of the “Lansley reforms” implemented during David Cameron’s premiership.
  • The scientific advisers on the Sage group flagged up the vulnerability of care homes as early as February. Yet the government devoted more zeal to protecting the prime minister’s rule-breaking adviser, Dominic Cummings, than it did to safeguarding the lives of the fragile elderly. A just-released report by the National Audit Office estimates that 25,000 elderly people were discharged from hospitals into homes without being tested at the height of the pandemic.
  • Time and again, I have heard accounts from inside government of warnings given and action exhorted only for the machinery never to properly click into gear for want of decisive leadership.
  • Boris Johnson was complacently late to grasp the gravity of the crisis and then animated by a panic-driven urge to try to impress the public by throwing out pledges he could not deliver. One critique, often to be heard now even from erstwhile admirers, is that his outfit at Number 10 is not so much a government as a campaign
  • , this Number 10 is obsessed with polling and focus grouping, which they conduct daily, and how things are projected in the media. “The problem with this government is that it is led by journalists,”
  • Where energy ought to have been directed to making important things happen, it was expended on concocting brags that might temporarily garner approving headlines or neutralise hostile ones. The result has been a persistent pattern of over-promising and underperforming.
  • His weaknesses have been magnified because he deliberately appointed a cabinet conspicuously light on talent – “the nodding dogs”, as one senior Tory labels them. The cabinet were chosen not for their ability, dynamism or independence of thought, but for their devotion to a hard Brexit and obedience to Number 10.
  • No other European country has made such an abysmal mess of reopening schools.
Javier E

How Herd Immunity Happens - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...614035

immunity pandemic response

shared by Javier E on 16 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Chaos theory applies neatly to the spread of the coronavirus, in that seemingly tiny decisions or differences in reaction speed can have inordinate consequences.
  • Effects can seem random when, in fact, they trace to discrete decisions made long prior. For example, the United States has surpassed 125,000 deaths from COVID-19. Having suppressed the virus early, South Korea has had only 289. Vietnam’s toll sits at zero. Even when differences from place to place appear random, or too dramatic to pin entirely on a failed national response, they are not.
  • When phenomena appear chaotic, mathematical modelers make it their job to find the underlying order. Once models can accurately describe the real world, as some now do, they gain the predictive power to give clearer glimpses into likely futures.
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  • Now, based on the U.S. response since February, Lipsitch believes that we’re still likely to see the virus spread to the point of becoming endemic.
  • That would mean it is with us indefinitely, and the current pandemic would end when we reach levels of “herd immunity,” traditionally defined as the threshold at which enough people in a group have immune protection so the virus can no longer cause huge spikes in disease.
  • Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that, because of a “general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling,” the U.S. is “unlikely” to achieve herd immunity even after a vaccine is available.
  • The case-fatality rate for COVID-19 is now very roughly 1 percent overall. In the absolute simplest, linear model, if 70 percent of the world were to get infected, that would mean more than 54 million deaths.
  • Without a better plan, this threshold—the percentage of people who have been infected that would constitute herd immunity—seems to have become central to our fates.
  • Some mathematicians believe that it’s much lower than initially imagined. At least, it could be, if we choose the right future.
  • Gomes explains, “There doesn’t need to be a lot of variation in a population for epidemics to slow down quite drastically.”
  • in dynamic systems, the outcomes are more like those in chess: The next play is influenced by the previous one. Differences in outcome can grow exponentially, reinforcing one another until the situation becomes, through a series of individually predictable moves, radically different from other possible scenarios. You have some chance of being able to predict the first move in a game of chess, but good luck predicting the last.
  • “selective depletion” of people who are more susceptible—can quickly decelerate a virus’s spread. When Gomes uses this sort of pattern to model the coronavirus’s spread, the compounding effects of heterogeneity seem to show that the onslaught of cases and deaths seen in initial spikes around the world are unlikely to happen a second time.
  • Based on data from several countries in Europe, she said, her results show a herd-immunity threshold much lower than that of other models.“We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent,” Gomes said. “It’s very striking.”
  • If that proves correct, it would be life-altering news. It wouldn’t mean that the virus is gone. But by Gomes’s estimates, if roughly one out of every five people in a given population is immune to the virus, that seems to be enough to slow its spread to a level where each infectious person is infecting an average of less than one other person
  • That’s the classic definition of herd immunity. It would mean, for instance, that at 25 percent antibody prevalence, New York City could continue its careful reopening without fear of another major surge in cases.
  • Lipsitch also believes that heterogeneity is important to factor into any model. It was one reason he updated his prediction, not long after we spoke in February, of what the herd-immunity threshold would be. Instead of 40 to 70 percent, he lowered it to 20 to 60 percent. When we spoke last week, he said he still stands by that, but he is skeptical that the number lands close to the 20 percent end of the range. “I think it’s unlikely,” he said, but added, “This virus is proving there can be orders-of-magnitude differences in attack rates, depending on political and societal decisions, which I don’t know how to forecast.”
  • he believes that the best we can do is continually update models based on what is happening in the real world. She can’t say why the threshold in her models is consistently at or below 20 percent, but it is. “If heterogeneity isn’t the cause,” she said, “then I’d like for someone to explain what is.”
  • Biological variations in susceptibility could come down to factors as simple as who has more nose hair, or who talks the loudest and most explosively, and Langwig shares the belief that these factors can create heterogeneity in susceptibility and transmission. Those effects can compound to dramatically change the math behind predictions for the future.
  • What’s important to her, rather, is that people are not misled by the idea of herd immunity. In the context of vaccination, herd-immunity thresholds are relatively fixed and predictable. In the context of an ongoing pandemic, thinking of this threshold as some static concept can be dangerously misleading.
  • She worries that many people conflate academic projections about reaching herd immunity with a “let it run wild” fatalism. “My view is that trying to take that route would lead to mass death and devastation,” she says.
  • Left totally unchecked, Bansal says, the percentage of infected people could go even higher than 70 percent.
  • “Within certain populations that lack heterogeneity, like within a nursing home or school, you may even see the herd-immunity threshold be above 70 percent,” Bansal says. If a population average led people in those settings to get complacent, there could be needless death.
  • Bansal believes that heterogeneity of behavior is the key determinant of our futures. “That magic number that we’re describing as a herd-immunity threshold very much depends on how individuals behave,” Bansal says, since R0 clearly changes with behaviors. On average, the R0 of the coronavirus currently seems to be between 2 and 3, according to Lipsitch.
  • Social distancing and other reactive measures changed the R0 value, and they will continue to do so. The virus has certain immutable properties, but there is nothing immutable about how many infections it causes in the real world.
  • The threshold can change based on how a virus spreads. The spread keeps on changing based on how we react to it at every stage, and the effects compound. Small preventive measures have big downstream effects
  • In other words, the herd in question determines its immunity. There is no mystery in how to drop the R0 to below 1 and reach an effective herd immunity: masks, social distancing, hand-washing, and everything everyone is tired of hearing about. It is already being done.
  • “I think it no longer seems impossible that Switzerland or Germany could remain near where they are in terms of cases, meaning not very much larger outbreaks, until there’s a vaccine,” he said. They seem to have the will and systems in place to keep their economies closed enough to maintain their current equilibrium.
  • Other wealthy countries could hypothetically create societies that are effectively immune to further surges, where the effective herd-immunity threshold is low.
  • We have the wealth in this country to care for people, and to set the herd-immunity threshold where we choose. Parts of the world are illuminating a third way forward, something in between total lockdown and simply resuming the old ways of life. It happens through individual choices and collective actions, reimagining new ways of living, and having the state support and leadership to make those ways possible
  • as much attention as we give to the virus, and to drugs and our immune systems, the variable in the system is us. There will only be as much chaos as we allow.
leilamulveny

Oracle Deal With TikTok to Undergo U.S. National Security Review - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...al-security-review-11600097811

politics us trump policy

shared by leilamulveny on 15 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • leilamulveny on 15 Sep 20
     
    President Trump signed an executive order implementing a 45-day deadline for an American company to purchase Tik Tok's US operatives. Current arrangements are with the business software provider - Oracle (currently lags behind behind Amazon and Microsoft in terms of "cloud" leaders) For Oracle the Arrangement could give a jolt to the Silicon Valley stalwart's efforts to transform its staid database business into a major player in cloud computing. However, this deal could draw scrutiny in Beijing as both governments have disrupted negations over Tik Tok's fate in recent weeks. A month ago China imposed export restrictions on the kind of AI algorithms that underpin Tik Tok. The Chinese government is calling this deal an abuse of power under the pretext of national security. Overall, I found this article appealing to our current discussions in the GP course because it represents different perspectives on the issue of President Trump's executive order (a new method to develop different ways to think). Also, this unit is dedicated to how politics relates to oneself and I think that this issue hits close to home for many high school students.
Javier E

Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...climate-change-future.html

climate disruption 2020 crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.
  • This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action.
  • “And I think it’s a lot harder for people to say that I’m being alarmist now.”
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  • Conversations about climate change have broken into everyday life, to the top of the headlines and to center stage in the presidential campaign.
  • The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle?
  • “It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades” and the world is now feeling the effects
  • But, she said, “we’re not dead yet.”
  • Climate change is more a slope than a cliff, experts agreed. We’re still far from any sort of “game over” moment where it’s too late to act. There remains much that can be done to limit the damage to come, to brace against the coming megafires and superstorms and save lives and hold onto a thriving civilization.
  • The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid.
  • Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.
  • Things are on track to get “twice as bad” as they are now, he said, “if not worse.”
  • it may be time to flip that chronological framing, and consider today the new starting point.
  • “Don’t think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century,” he wrote. “Think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century.”
  • Their most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back.
  • “It’s not that it’s out of our control. The whole thing is in our control.”
  • Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life
  • how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind.
  • It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change
  • The fires, along with others in places including Colorado, Oregon and Washington, destroyed entire towns and sent smoke tens of thousands of feet high. San Francisco, Portland and Seattle have suffered some of the unhealthiest air quality on the planet, beating cities such as Beijing and New Delhi for the title. Smoke spread all the way across the continent, with particles coloring sunsets on the East Coast.
  • Evidence of global warming — which, scientists said, helps drive a rise in wildfire activity by creating hotter and drier conditions — was hanging visibly in the air.
  • For a long time, “there was so much focus on how climate change would affect the most vulnerable, like low-lying island nations or coral reefs — things that don’t dramatically affect the economic powerhouses of the world,”
  • “There’s often been this arrogant assumption that wealth provides protection.”
  • “we’re all in this together.”
  • Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.
  • every coal plant in China, every steel mill in Europe, every car and truck in the United States.
  • It’s a staggering task. It means reorienting a global economy that depends on fossil fuels
  • Even if we start radically slashing emissions today, it could be decades before those changes start to appreciably slow the rate at which Earth is warming. In the meantime, we’ll have to deal with effects that continue to worsen.
  • “Seriously, it is not reversible.”
  • First, experts broadly agreed, if we want to stop the planet from relentlessly heating up forever, humanity will quickly need to eliminate its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
  • Whether Americans can adopt that mentality remains an open question.“We’ve often heard the argument that it will be too expensive to cut emissions and it will just be easier to adapt,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But we’ve now had decades of warnings, he said, “and we’re not even adapted to the present climate.”
  • Failure to do so doubles or triples that number.
  • If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century.
  • If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.
  • The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity.
  • “In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or 2-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt
  • “But in a 4-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”
  • So, even as nations cut emissions, they will need to accelerate efforts to adapt to the climate change they can no longer avoid.
  • “The human capacity for adaptation is extraordinary — not unlimited, but extraordinary,”
  • “I’m much more concerned for the future of the nonhuman than I am for the future of humans, precisely because we’re just very, very good at adaptation.”
  • adaptation is usually a reactive measure, not a preventive one
  • Adapting to climate change means envisioning bigger disasters to come — again, flipping the framing away from history and into the future.
  • “Humans have difficulty imagining things that we haven’t experienced yet,”
  • It’s hard to visualize the entire West Coast aflame until you actually see it. And if we can’t see it, we tend to discount the risk.”
  • And there’s the moral hazard problem, which is when people are shielded from the costs of their decisions and thus make bad ones.
  • Cascading Disasters
  • Adaptation can quickly become bogged down in a tangle of competing motivations and unintended consequences.
  • Proposals for stricter building codes or higher insurance premiums face opposition from builders and voters alike.
  • If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years.
  • as climate change intensifies, it increases the risk of “compound hazards,” when numerous disasters strike simultaneously, as well as the risk that one disaster cascades into another.
  • Experts also noted that climate change is an accelerant of inequality. Those most affected, globally and in the United States, tend to be the most vulnerable populations.
  • One concern is that adaptability will not be a collective effort. Wealthier people may find ways to protect themselves, while others are left fending for themselves
  • A Lifetime of Clues
  • For well over a century, science has provided us with powerful clues that this was coming.
  • As early as the 1850s, researchers realized that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide could trap heat on Earth. This came at the dawn of the Industrial Age,
  • “I feel like the climate scientists have kind of done our job,” said Dr. Kalmus, the Los Angeles-based scientist. “We’ve laid it out pretty clearly, but nobody’s doing anything. So now it’s kind of up to the social scientists.”
  • ne 2017 study found that people who experience extreme weather are more likely to support climate adaptation measures than before. But the effect diminished over time. It may be that people mentally adjust to unusual weather patterns, updating their perception of what they consider normal.
  • “There’s too much complexity and, frankly, too much that needs to be changed, that we’re flitting from one concern to another,”
  • “What’s beautiful about the human species is that we have the free will to decide our own fate,” said Ilona Otto, a climate scientist at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change. “We have the agency to take courageous decisions and do what’s needed,” she said. “If we choose.”
katherineharron

Trump's comments send a signal to his supporters about how to react if Biden prevails -... - 0 views

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

trump

shared by katherineharron on 24 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Trump's intransigence, included in his latest assault on perfectly legitimate mail-in ballots on Wednesday, posed a grave threat to the democratic continuum that has underpinned nearly 250 years of republican government.
  • "Well, we're going to have to see what happens. You know that I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster,"
  • "(G)et rid of the ballots and you'll have a very ... there won't be a transfer, frankly. There'll be a continuation."
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  • Trump's near simultaneous warning on Wednesday that he thinks the election will end up being decided by the Supreme Court also raises the risk of a constitutional imbroglio likely to be worse than the disputed 2000 election.
  • His rhetoric escalated as he yet again politicized the effort to quell the pandemic by threatening to override regulators on the question of whether a newly developed vaccine would be safe in a highly irregular move.
  • his anti-democratic instincts and prioritization of his own political goals amid a national emergency show he plans to allow nothing -- not the health of Americans, the sanctity of US elections or the reputation of the Supreme Court -- to prevent him from winning a second term.
  • Trump's latest attempts to create uproar came amid new efforts to subvert the traditional mechanisms of government for his own gain
  • Trump is advancing a fake reality that Covid-19 is dying out at a moment when alarm bells are ringing about a possible winter second wave
  • The revelations from inside the West Wing, which came a day after the United States recorded its 200,000th death from the pandemic, show how the White House effort to end the crisis has been systematically repurposed to service Trump's hopes of a second term
  • Trump has spent years weaponizing executive power for his political and personal gain: he was impeached, after all, for trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the election,
  • he is driving America to a dangerous place in the weeks leading up to the election, and that the most tense and divisive days for many years could be ahead
  • Washington was already on edge, given the raised stakes of a looming election and the sudden vacancy on the Supreme Court, which is promising the most confrontational confirmation battle in years
  • Trump is well within his rights to nominate a replacement for Ginsburg -- a move that will enshrine an unassailable conservative majority, potentially for decades.
  • But the President's suggestion that the Supreme Court could be called in to adjudicate the election threatens to trigger new fury over the nominating process. If a candidate is installed in the coming weeks it will raise the possibility that a new justice who is recently beholden to the President for a lifetime appointment could be called upon to rule on his political fate in a clear and obvious conflict of interest.
  • "I think this will end up in the Supreme Court and I think it's very important that we have nine justices," Trump said, referring to the election
  • "because I think this scam that the Democrats are pulling, it's a scam, this scam will be before the United States Supreme Court and I think having a four-four situation is not a good situation if you get that."
  • In recent days, the President has declared the US is turning the "corner" on the pandemic, even though experts warn that a second wave of infections could build off an already elevated base and lead to tens of thousands more deaths.
  • Political interference also rippled through Trump's response to reports that the Federal Drug Administration was considering tougher standards for a Covid-19 vaccine to ensure that volunteers used to test it did not suffer side effects.
carolinehayter

A President Whose Words Have Not Aged Well - The New York Times - 0 views

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

politics US trump election pandemic

shared by carolinehayter on 17 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • John McCain once said, “May the words I utter today be tender and sweet, because tomorrow I may have to eat them.” The current White House has served up a buffet, with the president as head chef.
  • This was President Trump on Tuesday night, in Pennsylvania. “Please, please,” he pleaded. “I don’t have that much time.”Mr. Trump’s exhortation carried a certain abrupt desperation. It was reminiscent of Jeb Bush’s “please clap” to an audience before the New Hampshire presidential primary in 2016 or President George Bush’s “Message: I care” in 1992. Both were utterances that in retrospect served as epitaphs for doomed campaigns.
  • Whether that proves true in Mr. Trump’s case is not yet known. But “will you please like me?” — which immediately went viral — seemed especially germane to the president’s predicament. To begin with, the appeal was directed at suburban women, who polls show have been particularly repelled by Mr. Trump compared with four years ago.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • “I did a focus group tonight with women who voted for Trump in 2016,” Ms. Longwell wrote. “Not a single one was planning to vote for him again.”
  • In other words, Mr. Trump’s effort smacked of a too-late, too-lame apology to an ex who has long since moved on. It also underscored Mr. Trump’s special knack for making statements (or sending tweets) that are perfectly suited to being clipped, saved and hurled back in his face when facts contradict him later on, or in real time. Mr. Trump has proved himself, again and again, a grand master of delivering famous last words.
  • Mr. Trump seems to be tempting fate on a daily basis since he himself became infected.
  • He has said he is a “perfect physical specimen,” feels better than he did 20 years ago and is now “immune” from the disease — never mind that the course of the coronavirus has shown itself to be treacherous and unpredictable.
  • It kicked off on Day 2 when the first of four Trump White House press secretaries, Sean Spicer, claimed that the crowd gathered for Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” Overhead photos of Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowd next to Mr. Obama’s proved this remark to be ridiculous, period.
  • He already boasted a long rap sheet of “unfortunate remarks,” all readily captured and spread via video, Twitter, TikTok and wherever else famous last words get immortalized these days.
  • “We have it totally under control,” Mr. Trump said in January on CNBC, an opening salvo of denial that would soon be hung around his neck.
  • He continues to insist that the virus is “disappearing,” an assertion flatly contradicted by rising rates of infection across much of the country in recent days.
  • Every president typically gets one or two shudder-worthy sound bites on their permanent record. President Barack Obama promised that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” under his health care plan, a proposition that proved false during the troubled rollout of the Affordable Care Act in 2013.
  • “Politicians are always going to say things they regret,” said Victoria Clarke, a longtime Republican communications strategist who has advised several elected officials and administrations
  • Traditionally, presidents have tried to avoid making statements that might prove embarrassing later on
  • But the response to the coronavirus has placed the White House’s pre-existing condition on, well, steroids.
  • The current outbreak in the White House has been accompanied by a video parade of “unfortunate remarks” — or, depending on your point of view, a rampage of karma.
  • Kayleigh McEnany, testing positive last week was accompanied by a now-infamous clip from a Fox News interview Ms. McEnany gave in February. “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here,” vowed the then-future press secretary.
  • Likewise, when Kellyanne Conway, a former senior White House adviser, revealed her own coronavirus diagnosis, numerous news media outlets and Twitter feeds resurrected an oft-mocked statement she made about the still-emerging outbreak in March. “It is being contained,” vowed Ms. Conway
  • “No president can go four years without making a comment that can be considered a ‘gotcha moment,’” said Erik Smith, a veteran Democratic spokesman and operative. “But this president seems to pile them up like cordwood and take joy in it.”
  • It has lent the president a level of credibility as a “straight shooter,” even as he has been caught in thousands of false statements, dubious boasts and comical reassurances.
  • “It affects virtually nobody!” Mr. Trump declared of the coronavirus at a packed rally in Ohio last month — another remark that would go literally viral. It did not age well.
Javier E

The Chomsky Position On Voting ❧ Current Affairs - 0 views

www.currentaffairs.org/...the-chomsky-position-on-voting

voting lesser of two evils analysis politics

shared by Javier E on 20 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • getting Joe Biden elected is important for the left, for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with Biden’s own politics. If Donald Trump is reelected, the chance of serious climate action dwindles to nothing, while there is at least a chance of compelling Biden to actually act on his climate platform. It will not be easy. At every turn the Democratic Party will try to compromise and take measures that are symbolic rather than substantive. But there is a conceivable strategy. 
  • Understandably, many leftists are not terribly pleased by the prospect of having to vote for Joe Biden, a man who has shown contempt for them and their values, and has a documented history of predatory behavior towards women. But when voting is considered in terms of its consequences rather than as an expressive act, our personal opinions of Joe Biden become essentially irrelevant. If, under the circumstances we find ourselves in, a Biden presidency is a precondition for any form of left political success, and there are no other options, then we must try to bring it about
  • Isn’t supporting “the lesser of two evils” still supporting evil? Why should I help someone get into office who has shown no willingness to support my policies, who feels entitled to my vote, who is not going to do anything to woo me?
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  • In that election, awful as the choices were, it was necessary to support Edwards. Bumper stickers read “Vote For The Crook: It’s Important.”
  • Reed used this example to show why voting for Clinton was so necessary in a race against Donald Trump, regardless of Clinton’s long record of terrible policies. “Vote for the lying neoliberal warmonger,” Reed said. “It’s important.”
  • He, and many other famous leftists like Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and Cornel West, are saying the same thing this time around. “An anti-fascist vote for Biden is in no way an affirmation of Neoliberal politics,” West commented.
  • Some people on the left find this argument very difficult to stomach, though. In a recent conversation on the Bad Faith podcast, Briahna Joy Gray and Virgil Texas debated Chomsky about his stance.
  • In response to the “vote Biden to stop Trump” argument, they and others ask questions like the following:  But if we are willing to vote for the Democrat no matter how awful they are, what incentive will the Democratic party have to ever get better? How are we ever going to get better candidates if we don’t have some standards? Is there really no one we wouldn’t support, if they were the “lesser evil”?
  • while they are important, they can also seem strange if we examine how they would sound in other contexts. After all, think back to David Duke in 1991. Or the German election of 1932. Would it have seemed reasonable, faced with a Klan governorship, to ask: “But if I vote for Edwards, won’t I be incentivizing corruption? Isn’t the lesser evil still evil? Shouldn’t I demand Edwards stop being corrupt before I give him my vote?”
  • It’s also a mistake to think that the decision about whether or not to vote for Democrats in a general election can operate as an effective form of political pressure on Democrats. The mainstream Democratic Party does not see losing elections as a sign that it needs to do more to excite its left flank. John Kerry did not look at the 2000 election and think “My God, I need to work hard to appeal to Nader voters.”
  • The answers to these questions are: (1) maybe, but it doesn’t matter in the situation we’re currently in (2) yes (3) no, because if he declines to stop being corrupt, you’re still going to have to give him your vote, because the alternative is putting a Klansman in office, and “do unlikely thing X or I will help white supremacists win, or at least not work to stop them” is an insane threat to make.
  • The easy way to avoid being troubled by having to vote for people you loathe is to give less importance to the act of voting itself. Don’t treat voting as an expression of your deepest and truest values
  • Don’t let the decision about who to vote for be an agonizing moral question. Just look at the question of which outcome out of the ones available would be marginally more favorable, and vote to bring about that outcome
  • if faced with two bad candidates, forget for the moment about the virtues of the candidates themselves and look only at the consequences for the issues you care about.
  • Voting can have immensely important consequences—the narrow 2000 election put a warmongering lunatic in power and resulted in a colossal amount of unnecessary human suffering.
  • The mainstream (I would call it “propagandistic”) view of political participation is that you participate in politics through voting. But instead, we’re better off thinking of voting as a harm-reduction chore we have to do every few years.
  • (Reed compares it to cleaning the toilet—not pleasant but if you don’t hold your nose and get on with it the long-term consequences will be unbearable.) Most of our political energy should be focused elsewhere. 
  • Reed used an illuminating comparison to explain why it was so important in 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. In the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial primary, the Republican candidate was former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. The Democratic candidate was the infamously corrupt Edwin Edwards, who would ultimately end his career in prison on charges of racketeering, extortion, money laundering, mail fraud, and wire fraud. It’s hard to imagine anyone you could possibly trust less in public office than Edwin Edwards… except David Duke.
  • it overemphasizes the role of “deciding who to vote for in the general election” as a tool of politics. One way to get better Democrats in general elections is to run better candidates and win primaries. Another would be to build an actually powerful left with the ability to coordinate mass direct action and shape the political landscape
  • the general election vote itself is not how we effectively exercise pressure, in part because it would be unconscionable to actually go through with anything that made Donald Trump’s win more probable. The threat not to vote for Biden is either an empty one (a bluff) or an indefensible one (because it’s threatening to set the world on fire).
  • The conversation between Chomsky, Gray, and Texas frustrated everyone involved, as these conversations often do. Essentially, for most of the hour, Gray and Texas asked variations of the same question, and Chomsky offered variations of the same answer. They appeared to think he was ignoring the question and he appeared to think they were ignoring the answer.
  • The question that is on the ballot on November third,” as Chomsky said, is the reelection of Donald Trump. It is a simple up or down: do we want Trump to remain or do we want to get rid of him? If we do not vote for Biden, we are increasing Trump’s chances of winning. Saying that we will “withhold our vote” if Biden does not become more progressive, Chomsky says, amounts to saying “if you don’t put Medicare For All on your platform, I’m going to vote for Trump… If I don’t get what I want, I’m going to help the worst possible candidate into office—I think that’s crazy.” 
  • In fact, because Trump’s reelection would mean “total cataclysm” for the climate, “all these other issues don’t arise” unless we defeat him. Chomsky emphasizes preventing the most catastrophic consequences of climate change as the central issue, and says that the difference between Trump and Biden on climate—one denies it outright and wants to destroy all progress made so far in slowing emissions, the other has an inadequate climate plan that aims for net-zero emissions by 2050—is significant enough to make electing Biden extremely important.
  • This does not mean voting for Biden is a vote to solve the climate crisis; it means without Biden in office, there is no chance of solving the crisis.
  • TEXAS: If these capitalist institutions result in recurring ecological crisis, and existential ones, as they do, then isn’t the real fight against those institutions instead of a reform that maybe gets us over the hump in 30 years
  • CHOMSKY: Think for a second. Think about time scales. We have maybe a decade or two to deal with the environmental crisis. Is there the remotest chance that within a decade or two we’ll overthrow capitalism? It’s not even a dream, okay? So the point that you’re raising is basically irrelevant. Of course let’s work to try to overthrow capitalism. It’s not going to happen *snaps fingers* like that. There’s a lot of work involved. Meanwhile we have an imminent question: are we going to preserve the possibility for organized human society to survive?
  • The important point here is that the question is not whether we attack capitalist institutions “instead of” reforms. The reforms are necessary in the short term; you fight like hell to force the ruling elite to stop destroying the earth as best you can even as you pursue larger long-term structural goals.
  • Gray and Texas note to Chomsky that for people who are struggling in their daily lives, climate may seem a somewhat abstract issue, and it may be hard to motivate them to get to the polls when the issue is something so detached from their daily reality. Chomsky replied that “as an activist, it is your job to make them care.”
  • Some have pointed out a tension in Chomsky’s position: on the one hand, he consistently describes voting as a relatively trivial act that we should not think too much about or spend much time on. On the other hand, he says the stakes of elections are incredibly high and that the future of “organized human life” and the fate of one’s grandchildren could depend on the outcome of the 2020 election.
  • There’s no explicit contradiction between those two positions: voting can be extremely consequential, and it can be necessary to do it, but it can still be done (relatively) briefly and without much agonizing and deliberation.
  • However, if the presidential election is so consequential, can we be justified in spending only the time on it that it takes to vote? Surely if we believe Trump imperils the future of Earth, we should not just be voting for Biden, but be phone-banking and knocking doors for him. Well, I actually think it might well be true that we should be doing that, reluctant as I am to admit it.
  • I actually asked Chomsky about this, and he said that he does believe it’s important to persuade as many people as possible, which is why at the age of 91 he is spending his time and energy trying to convince people to “vote against Trump” instead of sitting by a pool and hanging out with his grandkids
  • one thing is evident: if we want to look toward electoral strategies for change, it had better be mass-based oppositional models like the Bernie campaign, not third-party protest candidacies or the threat of nonvoting
  • The question of how to win power does not have easy answers. What to do from now until November 3rd is, however, easy; what to do afterwards is much, much more complicated no matter who wins. But political activism is not an untested endeavor. We can study how social movements set goals and win them.
  • Noam Chomsky’s view of electoral politics is, I believe, a sensible one. In fact, it’s not his; as he says, it’s the “traditional left view,” just one that we’ve lost clarity on
  • People mistakenly assume that by saying “vote against Trump,” Chomsky is putting too much stock in the power of voting and is insufficiently cynical about the Democratic Party. In fact, it’s completely the opposite: he puts very little stock in voting and is perhaps even more cynical about the Democrats than his critics, which is why he doesn’t think it’s surprising or interesting that Biden is offering the left almost nothing and the party is treating voters with contempt.
Javier E

Opinion | America and the Coronavirus: 'A Colossal Failure of Leadership' - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-united-states.html

us failure pandemic response leadership trump history policy

shared by Javier E on 25 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • One of the most lethal leadership failures in modern times unfolded in South Africa in the early 2000s as AIDS spread there under President Thabo Mbeki.Mbeki scorned science, embraced conspiracy theories, dithered as the disease spread and rejected lifesaving treatments. His denialism cost about 330,000 lives, a Harvard study found
  • “We’re unfortunately in the same place,” said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. “Mbeki surrounded himself with sycophants and cost his country hundreds of thousands of lives by ignoring science, and we’re suffering the same fate.”
  • “I see it as a colossal failure of leadership,” said Larry Brilliant, a veteran epidemiologist who helped eliminate smallpox in the 1970s. “Of the more than 200,000 people who have died as of today, I don’t think that 50,000 would have died if it hadn’t been for the incompetence.”
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  • There’s plenty of blame to go around, involving Democrats as well as Republicans, but Trump in particular “recklessly squandered lives,” in the words of an unusual editorial this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Death certificates may record the coronavirus as the cause of death, but in a larger sense vast numbers of Americans died because their government was incompetent.
  • As many Americans are dying every 10 days of Covid-19 as U.S. troops died during 19 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan
  • The paradox is that a year ago, the United States seemed particularly well positioned to handle this kind of crisis. A 324-page study by Johns Hopkins found last October that the United States was the country best prepared for a pandemic.
  • Then there’s an immeasurable cost in soft power as the United States is humbled before the world.
  • “It’s really sad to see the U.S. presidency fall from being the champion of global health to being the laughingstock of the world,”
  • in terms of destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic may be the greatest failure of governance in the United States since the Vietnam War.
  • the economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimate that the economic cost of the pandemic in the United States will be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per American household — far more than the median family’s net worth.
  • Credit for that goes to President George W. Bush, who in the summer of 2005 read an advance copy of “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 flu pandemic. Shaken, Bush pushed aides to develop a strategy to prepare for another great contagion, and the result was an excellent 396-page playbook for managing such a health crisis.
  • The Obama administration updated this playbook and in the presidential transition in 2016, Obama aides cautioned the Trump administration that one of the big risks to national security was a contagion. Private experts repeated similar warnings. “Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic,” Bill Gates warned in 2015.
  • It’s true that the Obama administration did not do enough to refill the national stockpile with N95 masks, but Republicans in Congress wouldn’t provide even the modest sums that Obama requested for replenishment. And the Trump administration itself did nothing in its first three years to rebuild stockpiles.
  • Trump argues that no one could have anticipated the pandemic, but it’s what Bush warned about, what Obama aides tried to tell their successors about, and what Joe Biden referred to in a blunt tweet in October 2019 lamenting Trump’s cuts to health security programs and adding: “We are not prepared for a pandemic.”
  • When the health commission of Wuhan, China, announced on Dec. 31 that it had identified 27 cases of a puzzling pneumonia, Taiwan acted with lightning speed. Concerned that this might be an outbreak of SARS, Taiwan dispatched health inspectors to board flights arriving from Wuhan and screen passengers before allowing them to disembark. Anyone showing signs of ill health was quarantined.
  • If either China or the rest of the world had shown the same urgency, the pandemic might never have happened.
  • In hindsight, two points seem clear: First, China initially covered up the scale of the outbreak. Second, even so, the United States and other countries had enough information to act as Taiwan did. The first two countries to impose travel restrictions on China were North Korea and the Marshall Islands, neither of which had inside information.
  • That first half of January represents a huge missed opportunity for the world. If the United States, the World Health Organization and the world media had raised enough questions and pressed China, then perhaps the Chinese central government would have intervened in Wuhan earlier. And if Wuhan had been locked down just two weeks earlier, it’s conceivable that this entire global catastrophe could have been averted.
  • the C.D.C. devised a faulty test, and turf wars in the federal government prevented the use of other tests. South Korea, Germany and other countries quickly developed tests that did work, and these were distributed around the world. Sierra Leone in West Africa had effective tests before the United States did.
  • It’s true that local politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, made disastrous decisions, as when Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City urged people in March to “get out on the town despite coronavirus.” But local officials erred in part because of the failure of testing: Without tests, they didn’t know what they faced.
  • t’s unfair to blame the testing catastrophe entirely on Trump, for the failures unfolded several pay grades below him. Partly that’s because Trump appointees, like Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., simply aren’t the A team.
  • In any case, presidents set priorities for lower officials. If Trump had pushed aides as hard to get accurate tests as he pushed to repel refugees and migrants, then America almost certainly would have had an effective test by the beginning of February and tens of thousands of lives would have been saved.
  • Still, testing isn’t essential if a country gets backup steps right. Japan is a densely populated country that did not test much and yet has only 2 percent as many deaths per capita as the United States. One reason is that Japanese have long embraced face masks, which Dr. Redfield has noted can be at least as effective as a vaccine in fighting the pandemic. A country doesn’t have to do everything, if it does some things right.
  • Yet in retrospect, Trump did almost everything wrong. He discouraged mask wearing. The administration never rolled out contact tracing, missed opportunities to isolate the infected and exposed, didn’t adequately protect nursing homes, issued advice that confused the issues more than clarified them, and handed responsibilities to states and localities that were unprepared to act.
  • Trump’s missteps arose in part because he channeled an anti-intellectual current that runs deep in the United States, as he sidelined scientific experts and responded to the virus with a sunny optimism apparently meant to bolster the financial markets.
  • The false reassurances and dithering were deadly. One study found that if the United States had simply imposed the same lockdowns just two weeks earlier, 83 percent of the deaths in the early months could have been prevented.
  • A basic principle of public health is the primacy of accurate communications based on the best science. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who holds a doctorate in physics, is the global champion of that approach
  • Trump was the opposite, sowing confusion and conspiracy theories; a Cornell study found that “the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the Covid-19 misinformation.”
  • A conservative commentariat echoed Trump in downplaying the virus and deriding efforts to stay safe.
  • A University of Chicago study found that watching the Sean Hannity program correlated to less social distancing, so watching Fox News may well have been lethal to some of its fans.
  • Americans have often pointed to the Soviet Union as a place where ideology trumped science, with disastrous results. Stalin backed Trofim Lysenko, an agricultural pseudoscientist who was an ardent Communist but scorned genetics — and whose zealous incompetence helped cause famines in the Soviet Union. Later, in the 1980s, Soviet leaders were troubled by data showing falling life expectancy — so they banned the publication of mortality statistics
  • It was in the same spirit that Trump opposed testing for the coronavirus in the hope of holding down the number of reported cases.
  • Most striking, Trump still has never developed a comprehensive plan to fight Covid-19. His “strategy” was to downplay the virus and resist business closures, in an effort to keep the economy roaring — his best argument for re-election.
  • This failed. The best way to protect the economy was to control the virus, not to ignore it, and the spread of Covid-19 caused economic dislocations that devastated even homes where no one was infected.
  • Eight million Americans have slipped into poverty since May, a Columbia University study found, and about one in seven households with children have reported to the census that they didn’t have enough food to eat in the last seven days.
  • Yet today we can’t even churn out enough face masks; a poll of nurses in late July and early August found that one-third lacked enough N95 masks
  • More than one-quarter of young adults said they have seriously contemplated suicide
  • So in what is arguably the richest country in the history of the world, political malpractice has resulted in a pandemic of infectious disease followed by pandemics of poverty, mental illness, addiction and hunger.
  • The rejection of science has also exacerbated polarization and tribalism
  • An old school friend shared this conspiracy theory on Facebook:Create a VIRUS to scare people. Place them in quarantine. Count the number of dead every second of every day in every news headline. Close all businesses …. Mask people. Dehumanize them. Close temples and churches …. Empty the prisons because of the virus and fill the streets with criminals. Send in Antifa to vandalize property as if they are freedom fighters. Undermine the law. Loot …. And, in an election year, have Democrats blame all of it on the President. If you love America, our Constitution, and the Rule of Law, get ready to fight for them.
  • During World War II, American soldiers died at a rate of 9,200 a month, less than one-third the pace of deaths from this pandemic, but the United States responded with a massive mobilization
  • More than 40 percent of adults reported in June that they were struggling with mental health, and 13 percent have begun or increased substance abuse, a C.D.C. study found
  • Trump and his allies have even argued against mobilization. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” Trump tweeted this month. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”
  • It didn’t have to be this way. If the U.S. had worked harder and held the per capita mortality rate down to the level of, say, Germany, we could have saved more than 170,000 lives
  • And if the U.S. had responded urgently and deftly enough to achieve Taiwan’s death rate, fewer than 100 Americans would have died from the virus.
  • “It is a slaughter,” Dr. William Foege, a legendary epidemiologist who once ran the C.D.C., wrote to Dr. Redfield. Dr. Foege predicted that public health textbooks would study America’s response to Covid-19 not as a model of A-plus work but as an example of what not to do.
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