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Javier E

Americans Believe in Climate Change, But Not Climate Action - 0 views

nymag.com/...ge-but-not-climate-action.html

climate change cognitive heuristics bias belief politics crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Last month, scientists warned that we had only about 12 years to cut global emissions in half and that doing so would require a worldwide mobilization on the scale of that for World War II.
  • perhaps it should not be surprising that, even in many of the world’s most progressive places, even in the moment of acknowledged environmental crisis, a sort of climate NIMBYism prevails. The cost of inaction is sort of unthinkable — annual deadly heat waves and widespread famine, tens of millions of climate refugees, global coastal flooding, and disasters that will cost double the world’s present-day wealth. And so we choose, most of the time, not to think about it
  • This is denial, too, whatever you check on a survey about whether you “believe” the climate is changing.
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  • hard-core, bought-and-paid-for denialism is pernicious for many reasons — in fact, it may help explain why so few Americans believe “most scientists think global warming is happening.” According to the most recent Yale Climate Opinion Survey, just 49 percent do.
  • what is perhaps most remarkable about that same study is that many more Americans believe climate change is happening than believe scientists believe it: 70 percent say global warming is real, and ongoing, versus just 14 percent who say it isn’t.
  • One way of looking at that data is to say that we are, despite what we hear in the media, overwhelmingly a nation of climate-change believers, not deniers — and, in fact, a nation genuinely concerned about it
  • “denial is mostly a distraction at this point.” (“Those still unconvinced mostly cannot or do not want to be convinced,” he added, meaning, “It’s time to stop framing persuasion as the primary task here.”)
  • Another is that even those of us who believe in warming, and believe it is a problem, do not believe enough in it
  • the rest of us are only moderately worried, perhaps in part because we imagine the worst impacts of climate change will hit elsewhere. Forty-one percent of Americans believe climate change “will harm me personally” — actually quite a high number, in absolute terms, but considerably lower than the 62 percent who believe it will harm those in the developing world or the 70 percent who believe it will harm future generations
  • What are those coping mechanisms? Why can’t we see the threat right in front of us?
  • It’s fucking scary. For years now, researchers have known that “unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait,” one that, whatever you know about how social-media addicts get used to bad news, leads us to discount scary information and embrace the sunnier stuff
  • the generation of economists and behavioral psychologists who’ve spent the last few decades enumerating all of our cognitive biases have compiled a whole literature of problems with how we process the world, almost every single example of which distorts and distends our perception of a changing climate, typically by making us discount the threat.
  • anchoring, which explains how we build mental models around as few as one or two initial examples, no matter how unrepresentative — in the case of global warming, the world we know today, which is reassuringly temperate
  • the ambiguity effect, which suggests that most people are so uncomfortable contemplating uncertainty they will accept lesser outcomes in a bargain to avoid dealing with it
  • In theory, with climate, uncertainty should be an argument for action — much of the ambiguity arises from the range of possible human inputs, a quite concrete prompt we choose to process instead as a riddle, which discourages us
  • anthropocentric thinking, by which we build our view of the universe outward from our own experience, a reflexive tendency that some especially ruthless environmentalists have derided as “human supremacy” and that surely shapes our ability to apprehend genuinely existential threats to the species — a shortcoming that many climate scientists have mocked. “The planet will survive,” they say. “It’s the humans that may not.”
  • Among the most destructive effects that appear later in the library are these:
  • the bystander effect, or our tendency to wait for others to act rather than acting ourselves;
  • confirmation bias, by which we seek evidence for what we already understand to be true rather than endure the cognitive pain of reconceptualizing our world
  • the default effect, or tendency to choose the present option over alternatives, which is related to the status quo bias, or preference for things as they are, however bad that is
  • the endowment effect, or the instinct to demand more to give up something we have — more than we actually value it (or had paid to acquire or establish it)
  • We have an illusion of control, the behavioral economists tell us, and also suffer from overconfidence. We can’t see anything but through cataracts of self-deception.
  • Already, Yale says, 70 percent of Americans believe “environmental protection is more important than economic growth.” Nudging that number up to 75 percent isn’t the important thing; what’s important is getting those 70 percent to feel their conviction fiercely, to elevate action on climate change to a first-order political priority by speaking loudly about it and to disempower, however we can, those forces conspiring to silence us.
  • Even the ones in our own heads.
Javier E

Southern Baptist Convention's flagship seminary details its racist, slave-owning past i... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...four-its-founders-owned-slaves

baptist racism slavery history

shared by Javier E on 13 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • More than two decades after the Southern Baptist Convention — the country’s second-largest faith group — apologized to African Americans for its active defense of slavery in the 1800s, its flagship seminary on Wednesday released a stark report further delineating its ties to institutionalized racism.
  • The year-long study by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary found that all four founding faculty members owned slaves and “were deeply complicit in the defense of slavery,
  • The report also noted that the seminary’s most important donor and chairman of its Board of Trustees in the late 1800s, Joseph E. Brown, “earned much of his fortune by the exploitation of mostly black convict lease laborers,” employing in his coal mines and iron furnaces "the same brutal punishments and tortures formerly employed by slave drivers.”
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  • Many of the founding faculty members' "throughout the period of Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century, advocated segregation, the inferiority of African-Americans, and openly embraced the ideology of the Lost Cause of southern slavery,” that recast the South as an idyllic place for both slaves and masters and the Civil War as a battle fought over Southern honor, not slavery
  • The faculty opposed racial equality after Emancipation and advocated for the maintenance of white political control and against extending suffrage to African Americans, the report said
  • In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the seminary faculty relied on pseudoscience to justify its white supremacist positions, concluding that "supposed black moral inferiority was connected to biological inferiority,
  • “It is past time that The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — the first and oldest institution of the Southern Baptist Convention, must face a reckoning of our own,” Mohler wrote.
  • a spokesman for Mohler, said the theologian launched the historical investigation because people asked him specific questions “he didn’t know the answer to. We knew there was involvement. We didn’t know the full history.
  • What does matter, the experts said, are the actions the seminary takes from here and whether it makes reparations.
  • The school’s leadership needs to sit down with racial and ethnic minorities and “let themselves be led” to racial reconciliation, Tisby said. “They are at the very beginning of the journey,”
  • Jemar Tisby, a historian who writes about race and Christianity, said he expects many white Evangelicals will push back on the report by saying the seminary is being divisive and re-litigating its past
  • Critics and other observers said the Southern Baptist Convention for too long has been hesitant to take full ownership of its past, for decades framing its split with northern Baptists as one over theological differences, not slavery
  • “I think that what he’s trying to do is he’s trying to force the Convention to have a conversation on race and racism that the Convention has really not wanted to have,
  • while the report is “a step in the right direction,” some sections seem to soften the severity of the seminary’s racist actions. He called the report’s description of faculty’s mixed record on the civil rights movement “double-handed”
  • In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution stating its explicit connection to slavery: “Our relationship to African-Americans has been hindered from the beginning by the role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention; many of our Southern Baptist forbears defended the right to own slaves, and either participated in, supported, or acquiesced in the particularly inhumane nature of American slavery; and in later years Southern Baptists failed, in many cases, to support, and in some cases opposed, legitimate initiatives to secure the civil rights of African-Americans.”
  • Mohler wrote in the report. “At that time, I think it is safe to say that most Southern Baptists, having made this painful acknowledgment and lamenting this history, hoped to dwell no longer on the painful aspects of our legacy. That is not possible, nor is it right,” he wrote. “We have been guilty of a sinful absence of historical curiosity. We knew, and we could not fail to know, that slavery and deep racism were in the story."
  • “[T]he moral burden of history requires a more direct and far more candid acknowledgment of the legacy of this school in the horrifying realities of American slavery, Jim Crow segregation, racism and even the avowal of white racial supremacy,” Mohler wrote in the report. “The fact that these horrors of history are shared with the region, the nation, and with so many prominent institutions does not excuse our failure to expose our own history, our own story, our own cherished heroes, to an honest accounting — to ourselves and to the watching world.”
  • There have also been notable stumbles. The group voted at its annual meeting in 2017 to condemn the white nationalist movement known as the alt-right — but only after it faced backlash to an earlier decision not to vote on the issue.
Javier E

The Science Behind Making Your Child Smarter - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...your-child-smarter-11545660001

IQ intelligence rearing

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • One area of agreement is that while intelligence is determined mainly by genetic factors, the environment shapes how those genetic predispositions play out
  • A stimulating home environment is pivotal, says Richard E. Nisbett, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Michigan. Engaging children in lively conversations with challenging vocabulary can help. This is often most evident at the dinner table. “There’s a verbal tennis game going on. The parent asks a question, the child answers, the parent makes a comment, the child asks a question,” says Dr. Nisbett, author of “Intelligence and How to Get It.”
  • “I do think there is value in training working memory in children,”
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  • Several recent studies found evidence that working-memory training may improve children’s math or reading skills or their fluid intelligence: the ability to reason in novel situations.
  • Another powerful factor is interactive reading with children under 4, inviting them to participate and helping them elaborate on their ideas. Such activity is linked to IQ gains of more than six points, according to a 2013 research analysis. (Typical IQs range from 85 to 115, with 100 as the mean.)
  • Playing card and board games like Set, Blink or Mastermind may have similar effects. Free apps targeting working memory and other skills are described at the University of California, Riverside’s Brain Game Center.
  • A huge new study offers a more conclusive answer than past research. Students gain about one to five additional IQ points for every year they remain in school
  • Raising IQ may require the kind of sustained involvement that comes with attending school, with all the practice and challenges it entails. “It’s not like you just go in for an hour of treatment a week. It’s a real lifestyle change,” he says.
  • Ways You Can Raise Smarter Children Engage them early in lively conversation. Play ​card, board or videogames that ​build​ working memory. Stress the intrinsic rewards of learning rather than grades. Frame a bad grade as a reason to work harder. Enroll them in schools where intelligence is seen as fluid rather than fixed. Teach them that their ability is under their control.
Javier E

America Soured on My Multiracial Family - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...567994

adoption racism

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • There are three fundamental, complicating truths about adoption. First, every single adoption begins with profound loss. Through death, abandonment, or even loving surrender, a child suffers the loss of his or her mother and father. Second, the demographics of those in need of loving homes do not precisely match the demographics of those seeking a new child. Adoptive parents are disproportionately white. Adopted children are not. Thus, multiracial families are a natural and inevitable consequence of the adoption process. Third, American culture has long been obsessed with questions of race and identity
  • I’m an evangelical Christian, and ever since I was a young man, two Bible verses have tugged at my soul.
  • The first comes from the Book of James, and defines “pure” religious practice in part as looking after “widows and orphans in their distress.
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  • The second, from the Book of Galatians, declares an eternal truth: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
  • As a result, my wife and I not only felt called to adopt, but we believed that race was no barrier to unity for a family of genuine faith.
  • From the instant we saw her, we loved her with our whole hearts, but any adoptive family can tell you (indeed, any family at all can tell you) that love does not heal all hurts. There is pain that can last a lifetime.
  • overing just outside the frame—and sometimes intruding directly into our lives—is a disturbing reality. There are people who hate that our family exists. Actual racists loathe the idea of white parents raising a black child, and ideological arguments about identity raise questions about whether a white family’s love can harm a child of a different race. And, sometimes, people even question whether adoptive parents truly love their children, claiming that parents adopt to “virtue signal” or simply to ostentatiously demonstrate their open-mindedness.
  • In 2010, the year we adopted, The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson wrote an article that reflected the heartfelt views of countless adoptive families. It was the “noblest thing about America,” he said, that “we care for children of other lands who have been cast aside.” And what of multiracial families? His answer was our answer: “Instead of undermining any culture, international adoption instructs our own. Unlike the thin, quarrelsome multiculturalism of the campus, multiethnic families demonstrate the power of affection over difference.” There was a spirit of optimism, of hope that we could actually live the promise from Galatians, and in living that promise help change the nation we loved.
  • then came a backlash. Claims of cultural imperialism, wounded national pride, and rare, sad horror stories of exploitation or abuse soured foreign nations against American families. And at home, identity politics and even outright hostility against the Christian adoption movement triggered attacks from some on the left—attacks that were soon to be matched and exceeded by attacks from a racist right.
  • We quickly discovered that if you’re the white parents of an adopted black child, and you’re in the public eye at all, men and women will viciously criticize you for having the audacity to believe that you can raise your kid. At times, the criticism was direct and personal—most of it directed at my wife
  • Then, sometime around the summer of 2015, we began to notice a shift. The attacks on our family came less and less from the left, and increasingly from the so-called alt-right—a vicious movement of Trump-supporting white nationalists who loathe multiracial families. They despise international adoption. They call it “race-cucking your family” or “raising the enemy.”
  • They lifted pictures of my then-7-year-old daughter from social media and Photoshopped her into a gas chamber, with Donald Trump pressing the button to kill her. They put her image in slave fields. They found my wife’s blog and filled the comments section with gruesome pictures of dead or dying African Americans. They made me wish for the days when the left came after us; at least progressive critics didn’t want my daughter to die.
  • White parents see racism directed at their black kids. Cruel people use social media to accuse parents of raising kids as fashion statements. Others lecture them on their inherent inability to meet the needs of children of color. The hate our family received may have been more prolific because of who we are, but that hate is real, it is part of American life, and it will find its way to all too many families that looks like ours.
  • In the years since we brought our daughter home, overseas adoption has plummeted—down 72 percent since 2005—and it’s not hard to see one of the reasons. A broken American culture inflicts itself on nations abroad and families at home, and attitudes shift
  • the idealism of 2010 is gone. Then, we thought our family reflected the future. Now we know that was naive. Now we know that while the promise of Galatians—the promise that we are “all one”—is true in the Kingdom of Heaven, in America it does not yet apply.
Javier E

Opinion | People Actually Like the Green New Deal - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...green-new-deal-mcconnell.html

Green New Deal politics policy

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • One advantage of the Green New Deal framework is that it combines immediate concerns about pollution with more abstract discussions about carbon emissions. There are immense political benefits to this approach
  • Forty-six percent of likely voters supported the policy and 34 percent opposed it. (The rest were unsure.) Obama-Trump voters narrowly favored the policy (45 percent in support and 39 percent opposed), and moderates supported it 44 percent to 27 percent.
  • Civis Analytics modeled two-way (that is, they excluded “don’t knows”) support in states and found that vulnerable Republican senators have reason to fear Mr. McConnell’s antics: In Colorado, Cory Gardner’s state, 60 percent of likely voters supported the Green New Deal, and in North Carolina, Thom Tillis’s state, 56 percent did. In Maine, where Susan Collins is likely to face a tough re-election battle, 57 percent of likely voters supported the Green New Deal and in Iowa, a wind-heavy state where Democrats hope to pick up a Senate seat, 54 percent did.
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  • Our YouGov survey asked, “Would you support or oppose a Green New Deal to end fossil fuel use in the United States and have the government create clean energy jobs? The plan would be paid for by raising taxes, including a tax on carbon emissions.” With this framing, 43 percent of registered voters expressed support, with 38 percent opposed and the rest unsure.
  • The Green New Deal is the future of the Democratic Party: Among likely Democratic primary voters in our Civis polling, 71 percent supported the Green New Deal and 14 percent opposed it
Javier E

Is the American Idea Doomed? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...540651

American idea history crisis politics culture

shared by Javier E on 12 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Now, though, the idea they articulated is in doubt. America no longer serves as a model for the world as it once did; its influence is receding.
  • At home, critics on the left reject the notion that the U.S. has a special role to play; on the right, nationalists push to define American identity around culture, not principles.
  • things appeared different in Boston, where The Atlantic’s eight founders—Emerson, Lowell, Moses Dresser Phillips, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Lothrop Motley, James Elliot Cabot, Francis H. Underwood, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.—dined in May 1857
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  • Almost all adult males in Massachusetts, black and white alike, could vote, and almost all did. Almost all were literate. And they stood equal before the law. The previous Friday, the state had ratified a new constitutional amendment stripping out the last significant property qualifications for running for state Senate.
  • In 1860, Abraham Lincoln’s election led the South to conclude that it had lost the argument. The seceding states left Congress with a Republican majority, able to translate the principles of equality, rights, and opportunity into practical action: homesteads for all who sought them; land-grant colleges to spread the fruits of education; tariffs to protect fledgling industries; and a transcontinental railroad to promote commerce and communication. Here was the American idea made manifest.
  • the Civil War tested whether a nation built around that idea could “long endure,” as Lincoln told his audience at Gettysburg in 1863. His address aimed to rally support for the war by framing it as a struggle for equality, rights, and opportunity. He echoed Parker’s speech defining the American idea in order to make clear to his listeners that it fell to them to determine whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
  • When the Union prevailed, it enshrined this vision in the Constitution with a series of amendments banning slavery, extending equal protection of the law, and safeguarding the right to vote for Americans of all races.
  • The United States and its allies triumphed in two world wars and in a third that was undeclared—the first, Woodrow Wilson said, waged so that the world might “be made safe for democracy”; the second, Franklin D. Roosevelt explained, “to meet the threat to our democratic faith”; and the third, Ronald Reagan declared, to settle “the question of freedom for all mankind.”
  • Each victory brought with it a fresh surge of democratization around the world. And each surge ebbed, in part because the pursuit of equality, rights, and opportunity guarantees ongoing contention
  • Both of these visions are corrosive, although not equally
  • where does the American idea stand today? To some extent, it is a victim of its own success: Its spread to other nations has left America less distinctive than it once was
  • On opportunity, too, the United States now falls short. In its rate of new-business formation and in the percentage of jobs new businesses account for, it ranks in the lower half of nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Today, Americans describe China as Europeans once described the United States—as an uncouth land of opportunity and rising economic might.
  • It is no surprise that younger Americans have lost faith in a system that no longer seems to deliver on its promise—and yet, the degree of their disillusionment is stunning. Nearly three-quarters of Americans born before the Second World War assign the highest value—10 out of 10—to living in a democracy; less than a third of those born since 1980 do the same
  • A quarter of the latter group say it’s unimportant to choose leaders in free elections; just shy of a third think civil rights are needed to protect people’s liberties.
  • Americans are not alone; much of western Europe is similarly disillusioned.
  • All of this has left many Americans feeling disoriented, their faith that their nation has something distinctive to offer the world shaken. On the left, many have gravitated toward a strange sort of universalism, focusing on America’s flaws while admiring other nations’ virtues. They decry nationalism and covet open borders, imagining a world in which ideas can prevail without nations to champion them.
  • many on the right now doubt that America is a land defined by a distinctive idea at all. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric is curiously devoid of references to a common civic creed. He promotes instead a more generic nationalism—one defined, like any nation’s, by culture and borders and narrow interests and enemies.
  • But the country has also failed to live up to its own ideals. In 1857, the United States was remarkable for its high levels of democratic participation and social equality. Recent reports rank the U.S. 28th out of 35 developed countries in the percentage of adults who vote in national elections, and 32nd in income equality. Its rates of intergenerational economic mobility are among the lowest in the developed world.
  • nationalism, the greatest force for social cohesion the world has yet discovered, can be wielded to varied ends. Trump embraces an arid nationalism defined by blood and soil, by culture and tradition. It accounts for his moral blindness after the protests in Charlottesville, Virginia—his inability to condemn the “very fine people” who rallied with the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis against “changing culture.” That sort of cultural nationalism can easily shade into something uglier, and glues together only a fraction of Americans.
  • The universalism of the left and cultural nationalism of the right are battering America’s sense of common national purpose. Under attack on both flanks, and weakened by its failure to deliver exceptional results, the nation’s shared identity is crumbling.
  • The greatest danger facing American democracy is complacence. The democratic experiment is fragile, and its continued survival improbable. Salvaging it will require enlarging opportunity, restoring rights, and pursuing equality, and thereby renewing faith in the system that delivers them. This, really, is the American idea: that prosperity and justice do not exist in tension, but flow from each other. Achieving that ideal will require fighting as if the fate of democracy itself rests upon the struggle—because it does.
Javier E

Britain needs a day of reckoning. Brexit will provide it | Nesrine Malik | Opinion | Th... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...britain-brexit

uk brexit history politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Brexit has revealed an unaddressed xenophobia – and the immigration system that stoked it – on the right and the left
  • It has laid bare our political class, squirming pathetically and uselessly under the micro-scrutiny of Brexit. To paraphrase Jeff Bezos, Brexit rolled over the log and we saw what crawled ou
  • The referendum aftermath has exposed an exceptionalism verging on delusion. It is no coincidence that Churchill’s legacy has become a matter of public debate. It is an argument that reflects Britain’s inner turmoil on whether it is uniquely apart from the rest of the world, or cannot thrive on its own. It is a soul-searching, long-overdue questioning of the conventional account of Britain’s history. Is the country especially endowed with that historical grit and determination that helped to vanquish its enemies in two world wars and run an empire; or is it a country that ran that empire by means of brutality, and only won those wars as part of an alliance
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  • Can we go it alone? Did we ever? Are we, as the heavily memed That Mitchell and Webb Look quote goes, the baddies?
  • it is, ironically, Britain’s global profile that has diminished its ability to focus on internal nation-building. “The British state is a machine for running and exploring the world,” he said. “It doesn’t work very well when it comes to the business of the modern nation.”
  • inally exposed is the unbridgeable gap, both economic and cultural, between centre and peripheries, between the winners and the losers. There is a double nihilism about Brexit. There are many who feel like they have nothing to lose from a no-deal scenario, while also savouring the prospect of trouble ahead. This is what happens when a country is fed a diet of crisis as glamorous film reel. You cannot fight this appetite for martyrdom with technical arguments about processing times at Dover: these perverse fantasies can only be vanquished by an actual crisis
  • From the beginning, Brexit created its own momentum. Once the question was asked – in or out? – all the grievances, justified or not, could be projected on it, with “in” being widely seen as a vote for the status quo. Within this frame, nothing else matters – not economic predictions, not warnings about medicines running out, nor threats of the need to stockpile foods. The remain campaign could not have done anything differently: it lost the moment the question was asked.
  • maybe, in the end, we will finally believe that immigration is necessary for an economy and an NHS to function, that the inequality between the south-east and the rest of Britain is unsustainable, that our political class is over-pedigreed and under-principled. We might even believe that other crises, such as climate change, are real, too.
  • Maybe, in the end, the country outside Europe will find its stride by confronting its issues rather than blaming them on others, and forging its own way. But there is only one way to find out. What a shame Brexit is that path
Javier E

Pixar's Cars 2 spy story drives film animation to new heights | Film | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rives-animation-to-new-heights

animation pixar car movie

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Walt Disney's Pixar studios has devised "mind-blowing" technology that will make the film – a fast-moving spy story with anthropomorphised cars as characters – its most challenging and complex yet. Director John Lasseter, who shot to fame in 1995 with Toy Story, the first feature-length computer animated film, said: "The level of complexity in Cars 2 is 10 times what we've been able to put into any other film.
  • With Cars 2, Lasseter said, the creative team had developed computer programs to convey mathematically the physics of the natural world, using algorithms to create ocean swells and waves with depth, volume and interacting light.
  • "We've had a lot of people say, did you use photography of real water somehow?" he said, describing the latest advances as "mind-blowing".
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  • In the film, which is the sequel to the 2006 hit Cars, artists have recreated the minutiae of city life, from dirt in gutters and weeds growing in cracks to the patina on weathered buildings. Each frame took an average of 13 hours to complete, double the previous time
  • For one scene involving a chase around London, Pixar created nearly 20 miles of "landscape and environment". Apurva Shah, supervising technical designer, said: "We started with the actual map and layout of London. Even though our world is very caricatured, we wanted it to be as true as possible."
Javier E

Jordan Peterson's Gospel of Masculinity | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...etersons-gospel-of-masculinity

Peterson rules masculine postmodernism free speech gender

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • his accent and vocabulary combine to make him seem like a man out of time and out of place, especially in America.
  • His central message is a thoroughgoing critique of modern liberal culture, which he views as suicidal in its eagerness to upend age-old verities.
  • a possibly spurious quote that nevertheless captures his style and his substance: “Sort yourself out, bucko.”
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  • His fame grew in 2016, during the debate over a Canadian bill known as C-16. The bill sought to expand human-rights law by adding “gender identity and gender expression” to the list of grounds upon which discrimination is prohibited. In a series of videotaped lectures, Peterson argued that such a law could be a serious infringement of free speech
  • His main focus was the issue of pronouns: many transgender or gender-nonbinary people use pronouns different from the ones they were assigned at birth—including, sometimes, “they,” in the singular, or nontraditional ones, like “ze.” The Ontario Human Rights Commission had found that, in a workplace or a school, “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity” would probably be considered discrimination.
  • Peterson resented the idea that the government might force him to use what he called neologisms of politically correct “authoritarians.”
  • To many people disturbed by reports of intolerant radicals on campus, Peterson was a rallying figure: a fearsomely self-assured debater, unintimidated by liberal condemnation.
  • He remains a psychology professor by trade, and he still spends much of his time doing something like therapy. Anyone in need of his counsel can find plenty of it in “12 Rules for Life.”
  • One of his many fans is PewDiePie, a Swedish video gamer who is known as the most widely viewed YouTube personality in the world—his channel has more than sixty million subscribers
  • In a video review of “12 Rules for Life,” PewDiePie confessed that the book had surprised him. “It’s a self-help book!” he said. “I don’t think I ever would have read a self-help book.” (He nonetheless declared that Peterson’s book, at least the parts he read, was “very interesting.”)
  • Political polemic plays a relatively small role; Peterson’s goal is less to help his readers change the world than to help them find a stable place within it. One of his most compelling maxims is strikingly modest: “You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.”
  • Of course, he is famous today precisely because he has determined that, in a range of circumstances, there are good reasons to buck the popular tide.
  • He is, by turns, a defender of conformity and a critic of it, and he thinks that if readers pay close attention, they, too, can learn when to be which.
  • “I stopped attending church, and joined the modern world.” He turned first to socialism and then to political science, seeking an explanation for “the general social and political insanity and evil of the world,” and each time finding himself unsatisfied.
  • The question was, he decided, a psychological one, so he sought psychological answers, and eventually earned a Ph.D. from McGill University, having written a thesis examining the heritability of alcoholism.
  • In “Maps of Meaning,” Peterson drew from Jung, and from evolutionary psychology: he wanted to show that modern culture is “natural,” having evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to reflect and meet our human needs.
  • Then, rather audaciously, he sought to explain exactly how our minds work, illustrating his theory with elaborate geometric diagrams
  • In “Maps of Meaning,” he traced this sense of urgency to a feeling of fraudulence that overcame him in college. When he started to speak, he would hear a voice telling him, “You don’t believe that. That isn’t true.” To ward off mental breakdown, he resolved not to say anything unless he was sure he believed it; this practice calmed the inner voice, and in time it shaped his rhetorical style, which is forceful but careful.
  • “You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you,” he writes. Peterson seems to have found that this approach works on much of the general population, too.
  • He is particularly concerned about boys and men, and he flatters them with regular doses of tough love. “Boys are suffering in the modern world,” he writes, and he suggests that the problem is that they’re not boyish enough. Near the end of the chapter, he tries to coin a new catchphrase: “Toughen up, you weasel.”
  • his tone is more pragmatic in this book, and some of his critics might be surprised to find much of the advice he offers unobjectionable, if old-fashioned: he wants young men to be better fathers, better husbands, better community members.
  • Where the pickup artists promised to make guys better sexual salesmen (sexual consummation was called “full close,” as in closing a deal), Peterson, more ambitious, promises to help them get married and stay married. “You have to scour your psyche,” he tells them. “You have to clean the damned thing up.
  • When he claims to have identified “the culminating ethic of the canon of the West,” one might brace for provocation. But what follows, instead, is prescription so canonical that it seems self-evident: “Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good.” In urging men to overachieve, he is also urging them to fit in, and become productive members of Western society.
  • Every so often, Peterson pauses to remind his readers how lucky they are. “The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West,” he writes, “is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.”
  • Peterson seems to view Trump, by contrast, as a symptom of modern problems, rather than a cause of them. He suggests that Trump’s rise was unfortunate but inevitable—“part of the same process,” he writes, as the rise of “far-right” politicians in Europe. “If men are pushed too hard to feminize,” he warns, “they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.”
  • Peterson sometimes asks audiences to view him as an alternative to political excesses on both sides. During an interview on BBC Radio 5, he said, “I’ve had thousands of letters from people who were tempted by the blandishments of the radical right, who’ve moved towards the reasonable center as a consequence of watching my videos.”
  • But he typically sees liberals, or leftists, or “postmodernists,” as aggressors—which leads him, rather ironically, to frame some of those on the “radical right” as victims. Many of his political stances are built on this type of inversion.
  • Postmodernists, he says, are obsessed with the idea of oppression, and, by waging war on oppressors real and imagined, they become oppressors themselves. Liberals, he says, are always talking about the importance of compassion—and yet “there’s nothing more horrible for children, and developing people, than an excess of compassion.”
  • The danger, it seems, is that those who want to improve Western society may end up destroying it.
  • But Peterson remains a figurehead for the movement to block or curtail transgender rights. When he lampoons “made-up pronouns,” he sometimes seems to be lampooning the people who use them, encouraging his fans to view transgender or gender-nonbinary people as confused, or deluded
  • Once, after a lecture, he was approached on campus by a critic who wanted to know why he would not use nonbinary pronouns. “I don’t believe that using your pronouns will do you any good, in the long run,” he replied.
  • In a debate about gender on Canadian television, in 2016, he tried to find some middle ground. “If our society comes to some sort of consensus over the next while about how we’ll solve the pronoun problem,” he said, “and that becomes part of popular parlance, and it seems to solve the problem properly, without sacrificing the distinction between singular and plural, and without requiring me to memorize an impossible list of an indefinite number of pronouns, then I would be willing to reconsider my position.
  • Despite his fondness for moral absolutes, Peterson is something of a relativist; he is inclined to defer to a Western society that is changing in unpredictable ways
  • Peterson excels at explaining why we should be careful about social change, but not at helping us assess which changes we should favor; just about any modern human arrangement could be portrayed as a radical deviation from what came before.
  • In the case of gender identity, Peterson’s judgment is that “our society” has not yet agreed to adopt nontraditional pronouns, which isn’t quite an argument that we shouldn’t.
  • Peterson—like his hero, Jung—has a complicated relationship to religious belief. He reveres the Bible for its stories, reasoning that any stories that we have been telling ourselves for so long must be, in some important sense, true.
  • In a recent podcast interview, he mentioned that people sometimes ask him if he believes in God. “I don’t respond well to that question,” he said. “The answer to that question is forty hours long, and I can’t condense it into a sentence.”
  • At times, Peterson emphasizes his interest in empirical knowledge and scientific research—although these tend to be the least convincing parts of “12 Rules for Life.”
  • Peterson’s story about the lobster is essentially a modern myth. He wants forlorn readers to imagine themselves as heroic lobsters; he wants an image of claws to appear in their mind whenever they feel themselves start to slump; he wants to help them.
  • Peterson wants to help everyone, in fact. In his least measured moments, he permits himself to dream of a world transformed. “Who knows,” he writes, “what existence might be like if we all decided to strive for the best?
  • His many years of study fostered in him a conviction that good and evil exist, and that we can discern them without recourse to any particular religious authority. This is a reassuring belief, especially in confusing times: “Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not.
  • there are therapists and life coaches all over the world dispensing some version of this formula, nudging their clients to pursue lives that better conform to their own moral intuitions. The problem is that, when it comes to the question of how to order our societies—when it comes, in other words, to politics—our intuitions have proved neither reliable nor coherent.
  • The “highly functional infrastructure” he praises is the product of an unceasing argument over what is good, for all of us; over when to conform, and when to dissent
  • We can, most of us, sort ourselves out, or learn how to do it. That doesn’t mean we will ever agree on how to sort out everyone else.
Javier E

In 'The Uninhabitable Earth,' Apocalypse Is Now - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rming-david-wallace-wells.html

apocalypse global warming crisis

shared by Javier E on 07 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • His new book revisits that approach, expanding his portrait of a planetary nightmare that, to judge by climatologists’ assessments, will soon take over our waking life
  • Wallace-Wells is more concerned with the prospect of human suffering and even extinction.
  • “It is about what warming means to the way we live on this planet.” He warns of collapsing ice sheets, water scarcity, an equatorial band too hot to be livable and — for anyone fortunate enough to reside elsewhere — extreme heat waves that will burn longer and kill more. All this could come with 2 degrees Celsius of warming — the threshold that world leaders pledged to stay below in the Paris accords of 2015.
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  • he obtains some consolation by peering into the abyss, entertaining the worst-case scenarios of 6 to 8 degrees Celsius of warming. Given the prospect of utter annihilation, he says, the “degraded muddle” that we might still manage to eke out should count “as an encouraging future.” It would be “merely grim, rather than apocalyptic.”
  • The overarching frame for Wallace-Wells’s book is an analogous call to action: “How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly?”
  • “The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead,”
  • The harms of global warming tend to fall disproportionately on poorer people and poorer countries, but the “cascades” already set in motion will eventually grow so enormous and indiscriminate that not even the rich will be spared.
  • His New York magazine article already synthesized plenty of information about perilous climate risks and scared the bejeezus out of people; what are we supposed to do with this expanded litany of horrors?
  • He describes himself as a Bitcoin-buying, non-recycling city-dweller who hates camping. He was scared out of his “fatally complacent, and willfully deluded” inertia when he became immersed in the awful truth and, his book suggests, you can be too
  • it’s not as if any of the hair-raising material with which he has become intimately familiar has paralyzed him with fatalism — quite the opposite. “That we know global warming is our doing should be a comfort, not a cause for despair,” he writes. What some activists have called “toxic knowledge” — all the intricate feedback loops of societal collapse — “should be empowering.”
  • even while staring down the bleak decades ahead, Wallace-Wells had a child. “She will watch the world doing battle with a genuinely existential threat,” he writes. “She will be living it — quite literally the greatest story ever told. It may well bring a happy ending.
  • Mobilization is impossible for people who are sleepwalking their way toward disaster; and mobilization is necessary, he says, to deploy the tools at our disposal, which include carbon taxes, carbon capture and green energy.
  • There is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none too dangerous to try,” Wallace-Wells writes. “Any story that sticks is a good one.”
  • detail the possible future that awaits the planet should we continue to add carbon to the atmosphere and fail to arrest global warming. Floods, pestilence, famines, wildfires: What he calls the “elements of climate chaos” are veritably biblical in scope
  • “The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace-Wells
Javier E

I was a teen climate activist. Kids today are succeeding where we fell short. - The Was... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...succeeding-where-we-fell-short

activism climate change

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • More school strikes in more places is essential, but it can’t eclipse trying novel tactics to reach people in new ways.
  • listening to Thunberg’s U.N. speech, I think we should have been more forceful in our framing of the issue. She pointedly used active language: “You say you love your children, but yet you are stealing their future in front of their eyes.”
  • When our wealthy and powerful society refuses to pay the costs of mitigation now, we push astronomical costs onto others, particularly future generations. Young people cannot let older ones sweep that fact under the rug.
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  • From our congressional meetings, I learned that personal stories are the currency of our elected leaders. Facts matter, but if rational discourse alone shaped policy, we would have weaned ourselves off coal decades ago. Legislative success requires aligning an emotional imperative with intellectual understanding.
  • what I failed to appreciate at the time was that national action would have required a tapestry of stories woven from young constituents from every office we visited.
  • The urgency of this moment means their generation cannot luxuriate in half-wins as I did. They will need something that keeps their inner fire lit, even in the face of seemingly immovable obstacles.
  • For them, maybe that pilot light is a love of coral reefs or winter sports, or maybe, like Thunberg and Villasenor, it’s a righteous indignation at the catastrophically blasé attitudes of those in power.
  • Whatever it is that irresistibly ignites the embers of your strength and resolve, you will need to both hold it tight and spread it widely.
Javier E

Why China Silenced a Clickbait Queen in Its Battle for Information Control - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...china-bloggers-internet.html

china censorship information control internet

shared by Javier E on 17 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The silencing of Ms. Ma, better known in China by her pen name, Mimeng, reflects a broader campaign by President Xi Jinping to purge the public sphere of popular voices that the ruling Communist Party finds threatening, no matter how innocuous they may seem.
  • “There is no longer any freedom of speech in China,” Jia Jia, a blogger who writes about history, said of the campaign. “In the end, no one will be spared.”
  • Now Mr. Xi is pushing to tame one of the most vibrant corners of the Chinese internet: the more than one million self-help gurus, novelists, sportswriters and other independent writers who make up the so-called “self-media.”
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  • In interviews, bloggers described the silencing of Ms. Ma as a clear warning to independent media in China: The party is in charge, and writers must play by its rules.
  • The party seems concerned that independent commentators, who have become a primary news source for China’s more than 800 million internet users, are drowning out its propaganda messages
  • “Bloggers are seen as encouraging discontent in society and potentially causing social instability,” said Hu Xingdou, a political economist in Beijing.
  • Such blogs represent one of the last bastions of relatively free discourse in China and have proliferated in recent years as the state-run news media has become more heavily focused on praising Mr. Xi and his policies.
  • For many writers, blogs are a lucrative business, with readers paying small fees for content and advertisers paying for mentions of their products. To avoid China’s strict laws on news gathering, many bloggers occupy a gray area, framing their views on current events as commentary.
  • The freewheeling competition for eyeballs has led to an alarming rise in fake news, a concern that the government often uses to justify its crackdown.
  • But Mr. Xi is targeting much more than false information. The authorities have blacklisted writers who traded celebrity gossip, analysts who discussed rising property prices and advocates who wrote about problems in the countryside.
  • Since December, the authorities have closed more than 140,000 blogs and deleted more than 500,000 articles, according to the state-run news media, saying that they contained false information, distortions and obscenities.
  • But while the range of banned topics in China was once clear — independence movements in Tibet and Taiwan, and the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, for example — the party’s red line has become much more ambiguous.
  • China’s trade war with the United States is now considered sensitive. So too, sometimes, are musings about the futility of work, a theme often derided by censors as promoting “slacker culture.”
  • Li Yongfeng, who runs a popular book review channel, said he avoided publishing articles that mentioned social movements or past or present political leaders, even to offer praise.
  • “At the end of the day, it is up to authorities to decide what constitutes ‘positive energy’ and what does not,” she said.
  • In December, the Cyberspace Administration of China listed offenses by bloggers that included distorting government policy and party history, “flaunting wealth” and “challenging public order.”
  • An account that focused on women was suspended last year after the authorities said its posts on sexual health were “distasteful.”
  • Similarly, an account run by a nonprofit named NGOCN was shut down in December after it published articles on a chemical spill in eastern China
  • Increasingly, the party is seeking to limit content that depicts life in China as a constant struggle.
  • “It is becoming unbearable,” Mr. Wang said. “The party simply can’t tolerate anyone who has a big influence on society.”
knudsenlu

Fraternities Are Feeding Anti-Semitism in Austria - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...552929

austria anti-semetism fraternities nationalism culture

shared by knudsenlu on 23 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Like many Austrian fraternities, Germania zu Wiener Neustadt sometimes uses a songbook at its get-togethers. It looks ordinary enough, with its red cover, gold crest, and curling script. The cover is studded with metal nails called “Biernagel” that keep the book slightly elevated so it doesn’t get wet when lying in beer.Unlike most other songbooks, however, it contains lyrics about killing Jews. “Step on the gas,” one line reads. “We’ll manage the seventh million.”
  • The party had gotten negative press just two weeks earlier, when its minister of the interior proposed “concentrating refugees into camps.” The Jewish community of Vienna, where the majority of the country’s 12,000 to 15,000 Jews live, has been boycotting the FPÖ; it refused to participate in the government’s official Holocaust memorial ceremony last month.
  • Austria has many high school and university student associations. What makes these fraternities (“Burschenschaften”) unique is that they’re infused with German nationalism. They originated in German university towns in the first half of the 19th century and stood for a united German nation. During the Nazi era, the fraternities were merged with the Nazi students’ associations. They reemerged after the war. Today, not all members of these fraternities are far-right extremists, anti-Semites, or neo-Nazis; some are right-wing conservatives who adhere to old traditions, like a mask-free fencing ritual that often leaves members with scarred faces.
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  • This silence about the Nazi era has been typical of Austria for much of the 20th century, when the nation saw itself as the first victim of Hitler’s expansionist politics. In 1986, the Nazi past of former UN general secretary and presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim resulted in international pressure. Consequently, then-chancellor Franz Vranitzky acknowledged Austria’s complicity in the war and Nazi crimes in 1993.
  • Another far-right European party that has tried this strategy is France’s National Front. Founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who made statements offensive to both Jews and Muslims, the party was taken over in 2011 by his daughter Marine Le Pen. She expelled her father from the party and gave it a facelift, publicly embracing Jews while continuing to speak negatively about Muslims. In 2014, she told French Jews, “Not only is the National Front not your enemy, but it is without a doubt the best shield to protect you. It stands at your side for the defense of our freedoms of thought and of religion against the only real enemy, Islamist fundamentalism.”
  • Still, the FPÖ keeps framing scandals such as the songbooks as isolated cases, in its attempt to convince people that Jews are no longer the enemy of the party. Fraternities are clearly enmeshed with the FPÖ, which means that—despite all public claims to the contrary—the party will likely keep its ties to anti-Semitism intact.
malonema1

Trump Bans Transgender Americans From Serving in the Military - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...534939

US history crisis trump

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • President Trump has announced that transgender Americans will not be allowed to serve “in any capacity” in the U.S. military, a move that could affect thousands of people serving in the armed forces and which resulted in almost immediate pushback from influential Republicans.
  • Trump’s announcement is the latest in a set of steps his administration has taken to walk back Obama-era policies on transgender Americans. The biggest shift is the reasoning: Rather than framing his decision in the language of rights or morality, as Obama-era officials did, Trump spoke about the new transgender policy in terms of military efficiency. The decision is likely to trigger major blowback from Democratic legislators and LGBT activists who long pushed for full acceptance of transgender service members. It will also bring gender identity back into the spotlight, reigniting a culture-war debate surrounding a president who has tried to sell himself as a friend of LGBT rights.  
  • While there has not been much research done on this question, according to Rand, policies welcoming lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans to serve openly in the military did not diminish units’ effectiveness. The Rand researchers expected “little or no impact on unit cohesion, operational effectiveness, or readiness” resulting from Obama’s policy.
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  • John McCain joined in with more explicit criticism. “The president’s tweet this morning … is yet another example of why major policy announcements should not be made via Twitter. The statement was unclear,” the Arizona senator said in a statement. “There is no reason to force service members who are able to fight, train, and deploy to leave the military—regardless of their gender identity.” NBC reported that the Senate Armed Services Committee, headed by McCain, was not briefed in advance of the White House’s announcement.
krystalxu

GOP Senators Unveil Last-Ditch Obamacare Repeal Effort - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...539721

GOP Obamacare

shared by krystalxu on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The South Carolina Republican, himself a failed White House contender last year, embraced the Sanders plan as a point of contrast with his own, and he framed the consequences of failure in dire terms for his party.
Javier E

Opinion | American Jews and Israeli Jews Are Headed for a Messy Breakup - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jews-american-jews-divide.html

israel judaism

shared by Javier E on 04 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Yossi Klein Halevi, the American-born Israeli author, has framed this moment starkly: Israeli Jews believe deeply that President Trump recognizes their existential threats. In scuttling the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, which many Israelis saw as imperiling their security, in moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in basically doing whatever the government of Benjamin Netanyahu asks, they see a president of the United States acting to save their lives.
  • American Jews, in contrast, see President Trump as their existential threat, a leader who they believe has stoked nationalist bigotry, stirred anti-Semitism and, time and time again, failed to renounce the violent hatred swirling around his political movement. The F.B.I. reports that hate crimes in the United States jumped 17 percent in 2017, with a 37 percent spike in crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions.
  • When neither side sees the other as caring for its basic well-being, “that is a gulf that cannot be bridged,
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  • In a historical stroke with resonance today, American Jewish leaders gathered in Pittsburgh in 1885 to produce what is known as the Pittsburgh Platform, a new theology for an American Judaism, less focused on a Messianic return to the land of Israel and more on fixing a broken world, the concept of Tikkun Olam. Jews, the rabbi behind the platform urged, must achieve God’s purpose by “living and working in and with the world.”
  • For a faith that for thousands of years was insular and self-contained, its people often in mandated ghettos, praying for the Messiah to return them to the Promised Land, this was a radical notion. But for most American Jews, it is now accepted as a tenet of their religion: building a better, more equal, more tolerant world now, where they live.
  • Last summer, when a Conservative rabbi in Haifa was hauled in for questioning by the Israeli police after he officiated at a non-Orthodox wedding, it was too much for Rabbi Steven Wernick, chief executive of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the umbrella organization of the Conservative movement in North America.
  • “I do not believe we can talk about a ‘gap’ between Israel and the Diaspora,” Rabbi Wernick wrote in a letter to the Israeli government. “It is now a ‘canyon.’”My rabbi in Washington, Daniel Zemel, said in despair during Kol Nidre, the Yom Kippur evening service, this fall: “For the first time in my life, I feel a genuine threat to my life in Israel. This is not an external threat. It is an internal threat from nationalists and racists.”
Javier E

I worked in the Justice Department. I hope its lawyers won't give Trump an alibi. - The... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html

justice department legal

shared by Javier E on 11 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • This deference, which is baked into OLC’s culture, proceeds from the assumption that the president is acting consistent with Article II of the Constitution and with his oath of office, both of which require that he “faithfully” execute the laws. That means he has a constitutional duty to act honestly and in the public interest
  • OLC’s deference is also born of a recognition that its lawyers are not equipped to be sophisticated fact-finders.
  • But when I was at OLC, I saw again and again how the decision to trust the president failed the office’s attorneys, the Justice Department and the American people
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  • Sometimes, we just wouldn’t look that closely at the claims the president was making about the state of the world.
  • When we did look closely, we could give only nudges. For example, if I identified a claim by the president that was provably false, I would ask the White House to supply a fig leaf of supporting evidence. Or if the White House’s justification for taking an action reeked of unconstitutional animus, I would suggest a less pungent framing or better tailoring of the actions described in the order.
  • I often wondered, though, whether my attempts to remove the most basic inaccuracies from the face of a presidential order meant that I was myself failing to carry out my oath to protect and defend the Constitution. After all, the president had already submitted, through his early drafts or via Twitter, his reasons for issuing a particular order
  • I sometimes felt that, rather than engaging in professionally responsible advocacy, my OLC colleagues and I were using the law to legitimize lies.
  • I felt more than a twinge of recognition this month when reading a New Yorker article about Trump and the reality-TV show “The Apprentice.” Jonathan Braun, an editor on “The Apprentice,” described how editors would “reverse engineer” episodes after Trump made impulsive decisions about firing a contestant. The article described editors “scouring hundreds of hours of footage . . . in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense.” Like a staff member at “The Apprentice,” I occasionally caught myself fashioning a pretext, building an alibi.
Javier E

Opinion | The Zombie Style in American Politics - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republican-party-ideas.html

false equivalency propaganda bad faith denial partisan inequality climate change debate Russia

shared by Javier E on 30 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • On issue after issue, what you see are multiple levels of denial combined with a refusal ever to give up an argument no matter how completely it has been discredited.
  • I first encountered this style of argument a long time ago, over the issue of rising inequality. By the early 1990s it was already obvious that growth in the United States economy was becoming ever more skewed
  • The answer was multilayered denial. Inequality wasn’t rising. O.K., it was rising, but that wasn’t a problem. O.K., rising inequality was unfortunate, but there was nothing that could be done about it without crippling economic growth.
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  • Global warming is a myth — a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists around the world. O.K., the climate is changing, but it’s a natural phenomenon that has nothing to do with human activity. O.K., man-made climate change is real, but we can’t do anything about it without destroying the economy.
  • You see the same thing on climate change
  • in each case those making denialist arguments, while they may invoke evidence, don’t actually care what the evidence says; at a fundamental level, they aren’t interested in the truth. Their goal, instead, is to serve a predetermined agenda.
  • What the right’s positioning on inequality, climate and now Russian election interference have in common is that in each case the people pretending to be making a serious argument are actually apparatchiks operating in bad faith.
  • Thus, inequality denial is about using whatever argument comes to hand to defend policies that benefit the rich at the expense of working Americans. Climate denial is about using whatever argument comes to hand to defend fossil fuel interests. Russia denial is about using whatever argument comes to hand to defend Donald Trump
  • reporting about these debates typically frames them as disputes about the facts and what they mean, when the reality is that one side isn’t interested in the facts.
  • Calling out dishonesty and bad faith can seem like partisan bias when, to put it bluntly, one side of the political spectrum lies all the time, while the other side doesn’t.
  • But pretending that good faith exists when it doesn’t is unfair to readers
  • The public deserves to know that the big debates in modern U.S. politics aren’t a conventional clash of rival ideas. They’re a war in which one side’s forces consist mainly of intellectual zombies.
Javier E

How calls to 'love your enemies' enforce the status quo - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...our-enemies-enforce-status-quo

love anger activism reform justice

shared by Javier E on 07 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • But like love itself, love politics is complicated. When cleaved from deeper values, like truth and justice, and from an honest historical reckoning, love falls short.
  • Love politics flattens anger
  • righteous anger in response to injustice is not the same as the oppressive anger that fuels it.
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  • Love politics is ahistoric. It papers over the inconvenient truths of American democracy, often remaking the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into a placid icon
  • Love politics holds no one to account.
  • . Love politics’ proponents frame our nation’s ills as interpersonal and, in so doing, gloss over structural inequities, fundamental clashes in values, and discrepancies in access to power. They also ignore conservative attacks on democratic institutions.
  • For love politics to realize its healing potential, it must recognize sins of the past and present and work to build something greater.
  • That’s why the anger that fuel many of today’s social movements, from Black Lives Matter to #MeToo, is itself such an important force for a broader, more encompassing version of love
Javier E

What did the men with Donald Trump do when he spoke of 'shithole countries'? - The Wash... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-beb6-c8d48830c54d_story.html

racism cruelty complicity trump culture values corruption crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 13 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • These two incidents, in Baltimore and in the Oval Office, seem related — inhumane indifference from a hospital and blatant bigotry from the president
  • They are about who is on what side of the door, or the wall, or any other barrier that defines the primal “us and them” that governs so much of the worst of our human-made world. When Trump called disfavored countries “shitholes,” he was indulging the most lethal and persistent tribalism of all: pure, unabashed racism.
  • After a candidacy and now a presidency marked by implications of racism, the president has grown more comfortable with speaking in overtly racist terms, condemning whole countries and their people for not being more like “Norway,” one of the whitest countries on Earth.
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  • Rather, I weep because the training in moral and civic corruption has already begun, it will inevitably continue, and it is gathering speed. The attack is aimed at the very thing we think should preserve us, our instincts to be kind, to welcome, protect and provide.
  • I’ve seen it happen, once, when I was a young man, and I learned an invaluable lesson. An older guest at a formal dinner said something blatantly anti-Semitic. I was shocked and laughed nervously. Another friend stared at his plate silently. Another excused himself and fled to the bathroom. And then there was the professor, an accomplished and erudite man, who paused for a moment, then slammed his fist on the table and said, “I will never listen to that kind of language, so either you will leave, or I will leave.” The offender looked around the table, found no allies and left the gathering.
  • I weep, not because I doubt the goodness of most of the people among whom I live in this country. There must be more Imamu Barakas than Donald Trumps in this land.
  • What I want to know is how the men in the room with him reacted. This is the dinner table test: When you are sitting and socializing with a bigot, what do you do when he reveals his bigotry?
  • The use of terms like “shithole” imputes personal and moral failure to people who by mere chance live in troubled countries. It extinguishes their humanity and with it, any concern we might have for their well-being.
  • The hospital’s president, Mohan Suntha, has promised a full investigation and said, “We firmly believe what occurred Tuesday night does not reflect who we are.” Of course, what occurred defines who they are, though they may think they are better than that.
  • This is bureaucratic cant and drivel. Worse, it frames the problem in the wrong way. We already know we have a medical system that incentivizes dumping poor patients, excluding the uninsured and pushing intractable cases out the door.
  • What matters more is the moral climate of the institution. Who made it possible, necessary and apparently easy for those security guards to “just do our jobs”? Who made complicity in cruelty part of the daily function of the place?
  • And now, we must ask a few simple questions of the men who sat in the room with a president denigrating predominantly black and brown countries as “shitholes”: What did you say back to the man? And why didn’t you leave? Their answers are fundamental to what we need to know about their character and fitness for office.
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