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katherineharron

Anthony Fauci: Trump suggests he might fire infectious disease expert after election - ... - 0 views

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

fauci

shared by katherineharron on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump suggested to a Florida crowd he may fire Dr. Anthony Fauci after the election, escalating his feud with the nation's leading expert on infectious diseases and providing a window into a potential post-November 3 administration purge.
  • "Don't tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election," Trump said to cheers. "I appreciate the advice."
  • Trump claimed Fauci is "a nice guy but he's been wrong a lot."
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  • Trump's handling of the coronavirus outbreak remains the backdrop of this year's election.
  • Trump has proceeded with rallies in states with rampant coronavirus outbreaks, believing his message of reopening will resonate with voters.
  • Trump has previously claimed Fauci opposed mask wearing earlier in the pandemic, though at the time the administration was concerned about supply levels of medical grade equipment.
  • Trump's comments about Fauci came a day after the White House unleashed on the doctor, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
  • Deputy press secretary Judd Deere said Fauci had decided to "make his political leanings known," though acknowledged he "has a duty to express concerns or push for a change in strategy."
  • While Trump and Fauci put forward a show of cooperation earlier in the pandemic, their relationship has deteriorated significantly. Fauci has said he no longer briefs the President and has been replaced by Dr. Scott Atlas, whom the President has relied on for advice on handling the coronavirus.
  • In public polls, Americans have said they trust Fauci more than Trump to provide reliable information about the pandemic.
  • Trump has held off on any major Cabinet shakeups in the leadup to the election, hoping to avoid negative headlines about administration chaos before votes are cast. But how he acts after the election remains an open question; aides said they expected significant changes should Trump win reelection.
  • Under federal law, Trump doesn't have the power to directly fire Fauci, a career civil servant, and remove him from government. He could try ordering his political appointees to dismiss him, but it would be a time-consuming process that Fauci could appeal.
Javier E

Chartbook #110: Being There - Last Call At The Hotel Imperial - 0 views

adamtooze.substack.com/...book-110-being-there-last-call

interwar crisis intellectual moral liberal culture politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • There was also a hard political lesson. Thompson had witnessed the fall of the Weimar Republic close up, but what really moved here was the destruction of Austrian social democracy in 1934.
  • When, later, the guns were turned against Vienna Social Democrats, and destroyed the only society I have seen since the war which seemed to promise evolution toward a more decent, humane, and worthy existence in which the past was integrated with the future, real fear overcame me, and now never leaves me. In one place only I had seen a New Deal singularly intelligent, remarkably tolerant, and amazingly successful. It was destroyed precisely because it was insufficiently ruthless, insufficiently brutal. “Victory” (I saw) requires force to sustain victory. I had wanted victory, and peace.
  • In his classic text, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origina and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson explained how in the late 18th and early 19th century, the genres of the novel and the newspaper had helped enroll their readers in a new communal understanding of time.
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  • a temporal frame defined by religion and monarchical sovereignty was replaced by a new perception of continuous, but eventful historical time. Individuals came to understand themselves as belonging to communities that progressed through history as quasi-organic wholes, in which individual mortality was subsumed in a collective immortality. No one could escape the collective story but it was also the ultimate source of meaning.
  • Nineteenth-century certainties were blown apart by the explosion of violence and of economic crisis unleashed by World War I, which threw visions of regular historical development into question. At the same time the nexus of individual and collectivity was also disturbed by the putting into question of individual subjectivity by the widespread popularity of notions derived from Freudian psychoanalysis and a fundamental renegotiation of gender roles, sexual desire and identities.
  • The whirlwind of the individual and collective was all the more destabilizing for the fact that individual men had suddenly come to take on a larger than life importance in world history
  • liberals or conservatives (had not, AT) devoted much attention to the transformative power of the individual leader.
  • In the final pages of Personal History, Sheean brings Rayna back to life as his guide, conceding to her the argument they left unfinished in 1927, the anniversary year of the revolution.
  • They were the ones fomenting the world crisis: it was happening within them and through them. When the fate of the world hinged upon a handful of men, personal pathologies became the stuff of geopolitics. The correspondents needed a new way of thinking about the role of the individual.
  • by the early 1930s, when Knick and John feuded in a Vienna café, it was clear that the “authority of personality,” as Hitler put it, mattered more than it ever had in their lifetimes. 9 One couldn’t account for what was happening otherwise. The individual leader, as Knick wrote, now counted for “nearly everything.”
  • John Gunther in particular developed an overarching theory of history shocked into motion by the happenstance of individual personality. As Cohen suggests there is an interesting contrast between Gunther’s understanding of history and that being developed at the time by anthropologists like Margaret Mead that also centered on questions of character.
  • Mead and her colleagues were trying to understand the workings of national character: why – say – the Germans submitted willingly to dictatorship or the Americans demonstrated a stubborn, wary, independence. Such “culture-cracking,” they believed, could be marshalled to defuse international rivalries, or to win a war. Their analysis, like John’s, was indebted to a sort of Freudianism, requiring the investigation of child-rearing practices and generational friction
  • As John Gunther saw it, individual personality had jolted history into a new gear. He was making an argument about accident rather than deeply ingrained patterns of culture.
  • the point is well taken. One of the great challenges of comprehending interwar history is how to craft a general narrative of history if it depends on individual personalities to this degree.
  • “I’m no revolutionary”, he imagines himself protesting. “I can’t remake the machine ..”. To which she replies: “You don’t have to! All you have to do is to talk sense, and think sense, if you can. … Everybody isn’t born with an obligation to act. … But if you see it straight, that’s the thing: see what’s happening, has happened, will happen - and if you ever manage to do a stroke of work in your life, make it fit in. … if you are in the right place. Find it and stick to it: a solid place, with a view.”
  • Then, as Sheean imagines Rayna continuing: “If you want to relate your own life to its time and space, the particular to the general, the part to the whole, the only way you can do it is by understanding the struggle in world terms … to see things as straight as you can and put them into words that won’t falsify them. That’s programme enough for one life, and if you can ever do it, you’ll have acquired the relationship you want between the one life you’ve got and the many of which it’s a part.”
  • For me Last Call reads as a brilliantly illuminating examination of the excitement and the peril of thinking and writing in medias res. How was one to cope with the forces of world history sweeping through the living room, Sheean’s long-suffering wife Dinah Forbes-Robertson was moved to wonder after his breakdown during the Spanish civil war. And as global geopolitics, pandemics, inter-generational stresses, technological change, economic crises, urban crisis, and the renegotiation of gender roles and sexuality continue to upheave our lives, those questions are still with us today.
  • Read through the lens offered by Deborah Cohen’s Last Call, Sheean, Thompson et al appear as our precursors, our predecessors and our contemporaries in navigating polycrisis.
Javier E

A Chess Champion's Warning About Ukraine and U.S. Democracy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...asparov-ukraine-democracy.html

chess champion ukraine democracy strategy authoritarian values culture us history

shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Kasparov’s latest gambit is promoting what he views as two essential, connected ideas: that Putin’s war in Ukraine is a war for democracy itself, and that Western democracies are in peril unless their citizens fight for democratic values at home.
  • “I grew up in the Soviet Union, so I experienced undemocratic rule,” Kasparov said. “And while I never thought America was even close to this kind of desperation, when you look at history, the real threat in democracy comes when you have polarization.”
  • With Russia’s war effort flagging in Ukraine, Kasparov senses “panic” among authoritarian leaders from North Korea to Venezuela, because, he said, they view Putin as a man with “almost mystical powers.”
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  • . The group also organized an open letter, signed by 52 dissidents from 28 countries, warning that “to win the global fight against authoritarianism, America must once again believe in and live up to its own values.”
  • Western leaders should push to end the conflict as soon as possible, Kasparov argues, by giving Ukraine the heavy weapons its leaders say they need.
  • Here in the United States, Kasparov said, “It also could be a great moment for us to revise our commitment to democracy,” adding, “Because, let’s be honest, there was complacency.”
  • Kasparov was feuding online with Elon Musk, the Tesla founder. On Monday, Musk floated a 280-character proposal to end the war in Ukraine that, to Kasparov, seemed too friendly to the Kremlin. He called Musk’s proposal “moral idiocy.”
  • Kasparov’s response to Americans of all stripes is that although their democracy may be teetering, it’s still a beacon of hope to millions around the world. And as the war in Ukraine shows, maintaining it requires constant vigilance.
  • “You have to be an active member of society,” he said. “You have to be engaged. That is the message.”
kennyn-77

Can Biden Avert a Crisis With North Korea? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...korea-biden-missile-tests.html

biden north korea missiles

shared by kennyn-77 on 28 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • After North Korea ushered in the new year with four sets of ballistic missile tests this month, the Biden administration turned to a well-thumbed page in the Washington playbook: It called for more United Nations sanctions.
  • China and Russia blocked the proposal last week in the U.N. Security Council. And Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, appears unfazed by the threat of more U.N. and Treasury Department sanctions — he fired off two cruise missiles on Tuesday and two more ballistic missiles on Thursday, for a total of six weapons tests this month, equal to the number for all of last year.
  • “No amount of sanctions could create the pressures that Covid created in the last two years. Yet, do we see North Korea begging and saying, ‘Take our weapons and give us some aid?’ The North Koreans will eat grass.”
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  • Mr. Biden appeared content to keep North Korea on the back burner, even though President Barack Obama told Mr. Trump in November 2016 that North Korea should be Washington’s top national security priority. Mr. Biden has yet to name a candidate to be ambassador to South Korea. The special envoy for North Korea, Sung Kim, is a veteran diplomat who has dealt with these issues before, but he is doing the job part-time — he is also ambassador to Indonesia.
  • North Korean scientists have obviously been working on the weapons program, which is central to Pyongyang’s propaganda and Mr. Kim’s main leverage in negotiations with the United States and other nations. The more weapons Mr. Kim has and the more powerful they are, the greater his stature both inside and outside North Korea.
  • Siegfried Hecker, a nuclear scientist at Stanford University who has visited North Korea, estimated the country very likely has enough nuclear material for about 45 warheads, an increase of about 20 since the end of the Obama administration. He also gave an upper-end number of 60.
  • But the leaders of those two East Asian nations are divided in their approach and remain embroiled in bitter disputes over separate issues of history and war. Japanese officials are critical of Mr. Moon’s North Korea policy. In November, Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state and an experienced negotiator on North Korea and Iran, hosted a meeting with her South Korean and Japanese counterparts in Washington, but long-running hostilities resulted in an awkward news conference.
  • One of the biggest dilemmas is how to work with China to curb North Korea’s weapons program. The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, and his colleagues are balancing various goals: They want to end the disruption caused by Mr. Kim’s weapons while also seeking to avoid a failed state on their border or Pyongyang growing close to Washington or Seoul.
  • China is by far North Korea’s biggest trading partner. Although it has approved of U.N. sanctions on occasion, it and Russia began asking in 2019 for partial relief of the Obama- and Trump-era sanctions. For a period, it was enforcing those sanctions, but then it began helping North Korea circumvent them as Beijing-Washington relations deteriorated.
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