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Javier E

Burns and Novick, Masters of False Balancing | Public Books - 0 views

www.publicbooks.org/ick-masters-of-false-balancing

vietnam documentary history Us

shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Ground-up views are susceptible, especially after 40 years, to the very myths they are supposed to belie. Memories that are 40 years old are too influenced by movies, novels, newspapers, and television—or those dreaded historians—to count for documentation
  • Lawyers, judges, and courts concluded years ago that eyewitness accounts of crimes that are only hours old are unreliable—so, 40 years? Or 50?
  • In the hands of filmmakers, however, such accounts are too easily and too often used as a veneer to manage viewer perceptions.1 Here Burns and Novick offer false equivalences, or “balance” in journalistic parlance. In promoting healing instead of the search for truth, The Vietnam War offers misleading comforts.
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  • A historical documentary in search of consensus, The Vietnam War indulges in Cold War common sense.
  • More recent scholarship might have provided a fresher frame and more comprehensive account of the war. For instance, Gareth Porter, in his 2005 Perils of Dominance, argues that the US stepped into a swamp of local-level conflicts, where East-West ideological tensions were largely irrelevant.
  • Philip Catton’s 2002 Diem’s Final Failure and Philip Taylor’s 2001 Fragments of the Present put peasant-landlord conflicts characteristic of Vietnam’s disintegrating feudal system on the research agenda. Had they brought to life this new thinking about the war, Burns and Novick would have made a more enduring contribution.
  • Burns and Novick are the masters of false balancing, the technique of countering one story line with another to create the impression of objective evenhandedness.
  • invocation of the femme fatales of wartime perfidy running across the millennia—from Lysistrata to Malinche, Mata Hari to Tokyo Rose—if the reminder is needed, helps build the gendered narrative of the war being lost to home front weakness, our POWs forsaken and forgotten, and troops returning from Vietnam scorned by protesters, and spat on by girls.
millerco

Trump Contradicts Democrats, Says No Deal on 'Dreamers' Has Been Made - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...on-dreamers-has-been-made.html

Us history politics democrats republicans Trump policy DACA dreamer

shared by millerco on 14 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Trump Contradicts Democrats, Says No Deal on ‘Dreamers’ Has Been Made
  • President Trump said in a Twitter post on Thursday morning that no deal had been struck with Democrats on protections for young undocumented immigrants, contradicting what Democratic leaders had said after a dinner with the president
  • “No deal was made last night on DACA,” Mr. Trump said.
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  • The president said that there would need to be a larger deal on securing the United States’ border in order for any agreement on protections for the immigrants, known as Dreamers, to be completed
  • Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, tweeted that there was no agreement out of the dinner about “excluding” the wall.
  • the communications director for Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, tweeted that the wall was not part of the agreement, but that Mr. Trump made clear he would continue to push for it.
  • Democrats framed the recent deal with the president as a win for their agenda, but Republicans in Congress control the pace and scope of any new legislation.
  • Mr. Trump questioned whether anyone actually wanted to deport these young immigrants, raising more questions about the president’s intentions for this program.
  • The program benefits about 800,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children. It allows them to remain in the country and gives them the right to work legally without fear of immediate deportation.
  • He has said he would end it, then he gave Congress time to come up with a legislative solution after he was widely criticized in the media for his decision to end DACA.
Javier E

Where the Left Went Wrong-and How It Can Win Again - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...531054

leftist progressive politics history victimization power backlash

shared by Javier E on 09 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • The full book contains criticism for the political left as earnestly constructive and thoughtfully formulated as any I have encountered
  • Rorty argued that an ascendant strain of postmodern Leftism with its roots in the academy has tended “to give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.”
  • This Left is more likely to participate in a public shaming than to lobby for a new law; it is more likely to mobilize to occupy a park or shut down a freeway than to register voters. It “exaggerates the importance of philosophy for politics, and wastes its energy on sophisticated theoretical analyses of the significance of current events.”
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  • Rorty sympathizes with the reasons that an ascendant Leftist faction lost faith in American institutions. He is as horrified as they are by the historic treatment of indigenous people and African Americans, and by America’s behavior in the Vietnam War.
  • But like John Dewey, he rejects self-loathing as “a luxury which agents––either individuals or nations––cannot afford,” and finds other aspects of American history and national character to celebrate.
  • Today’s Left would more effectively advance social justice if its adherents possessed a historical memory that extended farther back than the 1960s, he argued, to a movement more than a century old “that has served human liberty well.” It would help, for example, “if students became as familiar with the Pullman Strike, the Great Coalfield War, and the passage of the Wagner Act as with the march from Selma, Berkeley free-speech demonstrations, and Stonewall.”
  • If more Leftists saw themselves as part of that history, with all its achievements, they might continue to lament that “America is not a morally pure country,” but might better understand that “no country ever has been or ever will be,” and that no country will ever have “a morally pure, homogeneous Left” to bring about social justice.
  • he criticizes the identity politics of the left for developing a politics “more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed,” because many of the dispossessed are thereby ignored.
  • Surveying academia, for example, he observes that “nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not the ‘other’ in the relative sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness.”
  • For Rorty, a Left that neglects victims of economic selfishness will not only fail; its neglect of class will trigger a terrible backlash that ultimately ill-serve the very groups that Leftist identity politics are intended to help. “The gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will very likely be wiped out,” he worried. “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”
  • To avoid that future, to compete in national politics, Rorty believed that the Left would have to find a way to better address the consequences of globalization, and that it could only do so by “opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions.
  • What’s more, the Left “would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma.” In service of that transition, he advised the Left to “put a moratorium on theory … to kick its philosophy habit” and  to “try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans.”
  • The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique…
  • it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy.
  • disengagement from practical politics “produces theoretical hallucinations,” he added. “The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called ‘power.’” This obsession with power elicited scathing words:
  • in committing itself to what it calls “theory,” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.
  • The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-sate is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.
  • This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for “the system” and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions
  • Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place … Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms.
  • Instead, “the cultural Left has a preference for talking about ‘the system’ rather than specific social practices and specific changes. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic.
  • its abandonment of the melting-pot approach to racial justice, its substitution of multiculturalism, has destroyed the solidarity needed to advance justice in any manner
  • The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us—black, white, and brown—are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such. This strategy gave rise to the “platoon” movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side.
  • the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than to ignore it… If the Cultural left insists on continuing its present strategy––on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noting those differences––then it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.
  • The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites.
  • These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it. I think that the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy.
  • This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century.
  • Our national character is still in the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour week, Women’s Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement. Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even greater moral progress.
Javier E

Steve Bannon's Coalition of Christian Traditionalists - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...519900

traditionalist populism christian history politics culture

shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • even as Bannon and various religious leaders seek to pit the values of Christianity against those of Islam, there is also an internal competition to decide who gets to define Christian traditionalism.
  • Two of the main players in this competition, American Christian traditionalists—including conservative Catholics like Bannon as well as evangelicals like Franklin Graham—and Russian Orthodox, are united in their desire to save Christendom from the perceived threat of radical Islam. But buried underneath that superficial agreement is a complex disagreement as to what Christendom even means.
  • In Bannon’s telling, the greatest mistake the baby boomers made was to reject the traditional “Judeo-Christian” values of their parents. He considers this a historical crime, because in his telling it was Judeo-Christian values that enabled Western Europe and the United States to defeat European fascism, and, subsequently, to create an “enlightened capitalism” that made America great for decades after World War II.
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  • upon his return to office in 2012, Putin realized that “large patches of the West despised feminism and the gay-rights movement.” Seizing the opportunity, he transformed himself into the “New World Leader of Conservatism” whose traditionalism would offer an alternative to the libertine West that had long shunned him.
  • Yet Bannon suggested that Putin is not really interested in conservatism but in changing Western perceptions of Russia, and for one main purpose: “At the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand.”
  • Here is where the ROC and ultra-conservative Russians have found allies in the West, and in particular among evangelicals: In a global fight for traditional families, it falls to them to promote heterosexual marriage, childbearing, and adoption as part of an overarching defense of “civilization.
  • While there are obvious connections between Trump and Bannon, Bannon and Dugin, American evangelicals and Russian Orthodox, there is no clear social, political or ideological framework tying them all together. And the gap between conservative and extreme right seems to be rapidly widening.
  • previously many conservatives focused on disputing the legal legitimacy of progressive policies, some conservatives have switched to opposing these policies under the banner of religious freedom.
  • Russian conservatives, led by the Orthodox Church, frame their need for moral conservatism and family values as a different type of freedom. Russian moral leaders insist that theirs is a freedom of association, the freedom to adhere to tradition rather than to the “totalitarian freedom” of the capitalist, pluralist West.
  • The possibility of a new global resistance to the values that have become stays of the mainstream progressive West raises the question of who will lead this resistance.
  • the difference here is that we’re seeing an emergence of Christian traditionalist, rather than progressive, global coalitions.
  • In a void that prelates and preachers struggle to fill, Trump will continue to be the face of a new traditionalism.
Javier E

How to protect against fake 'facts' - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-81bc-c55a220c8cbe_story.html

fake news fact-checking fact information informed citizenry

shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Amid the slithering mess of problems that emerged in 2017, the one that bothers me most is that people don’t seem to know what’s true anymore. “Facts” this year got put in quotation marks.
  • If we aren’t sure what’s true, how can we act to make things better? If we don’t know where we are on the map, how do we know which way to move? Democracy assumes a well-informed citizenry that argues about solutions — not about facts.
  • We can all choose our favorite examples of America’s increasing difficulty in agreeing about evidence: the disdain for science among climate-change skeptics; the refusal to believe allegations about people we like, and the overeagerness to denounce those we don’t like; the way in which political polarization has spread into every area of our common life
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  • What should thoughtful people do about this overarching problem? Part of the answer lies with my profession, the news business. We need to work harder to make sure that we’re unbiased truth-tellers, not a series of echo chambers
  • Journalists also need new tools. We can’t always vet every fact.
  • So here’s an offbeat proposal: Just as the provenance of a work of art is established by art historians and auction houses, we need technological tools that will help confirm the provenance of facts.
  • The Internet giants such as Google and Facebook should be tuning their systems to establish the provenance of fact. I’d like to see them using machine learning to interrogate supposed facts to establish where they’ve been — how they first surfaced, and how they were passed from user to user.
  • If there are gaps in provenance — an unexplained missing link in the chain of evidence, or signs of misattribution — then those anomalies should be flagged automatically.
  • In this fact-provenance scheme, I hope we’d be able to trace information back to the source and detect evidence of manipulation. News organizations whose track record is shown to be reliable would get weighted positively by the digital system
  • People could still base their decisions on dubious, unverified “facts,” just as a collector can still buy a painting whose provenance is suspect. But there would at least be fair warning.
  • We speak often of the “marketplace of ideas,” in the expectation that markets operate rationally and efficiently
  • In this framing, consumers assume that most markets aren’t rigged, and that tainted or unsafe products have been screened. That’s obviously a complicated problem when the commodity is information
  • the First Amendment lets us promote ideas without rating their safety. But the First Amendment doesn’t protect fraud or libel.
  • We live in an information ecosystem. If it becomes polluted, all the creatures that depend on that ecosystem are at risk. We say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. But that’s true only when the sun shines brightly.
Javier E

How the Republicans Broke Congress - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-broke-congress-politics.html

gop polarization politics history

shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • In the past three days, Republican leaders in the Senate scrambled to corral votes for a tax bill that the Joint Committee on Taxation said would add $1 trillion to the deficit — without holding any meaningful committee hearings
  • Republican leaders have been blunt about their motivation: to deliver on their promises to wealthy donors, and down the road, to use the leverage of huge deficits to cut and privatize Medicare and Social Security.
  • Eleven years ago, we published a book called “The Broken Branch,” which we subtitled “How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track.
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  • over the past decade it has become clear that it is the Republican Party — as an institution, as a movement, as a collection of politicians — that has done unique, extensive and possibly irreparable damage to the American political system.
  • What is astounding, and still largely unappreciated, is the unexpected and rapid nature of the decline in American national politics, and how one-sided its cause
  • Embedded in that subtitle were two assumptions: first, that Congress as an institution — which is to say, both parties, equally — is at fault; and second, that the solution is readily at hand. In 2017, the Republicans’ scandalous tax bill is only the latest proof that both assumptions are wrong.
  • While many argued that the problem was that Mr. Obama failed to schmooze enough with Republicans in Congress, we saw a deliberate Republican strategy to oppose all of his initiatives and frame his attempts to compromise as weak or inauthentic.
  • First, beginning in the 1990s, the Republicans strategically demonized Congress and government more broadly and flouted the norms of lawmaking, fueling a significant decline of trust in government that began well before the financial collapse in 2008
  • We do not come at this issue as political partisans
  • House leaders continued to inflame the populist anger of their base to win enormous midterm victories in 2010 and 2014. They repeatedly promised the impossible under divided party government: that if they won, Mr. Obama would be forced to his knees, his policies obliterated and government as we knew it demolished.
  • Third, we have seen the impact of significant changes in the news media, which had a far greater importance on the right than on the left. The development of the modern conservative media echo chamber began with the rise of Rush Limbaugh and talk radio in the late 1980s and ramped up with the birth of Fox News
  • with the advent of social media, we saw the emergence of a radical “alt-right” media ecosystem able to create its own “facts” and build an audience around hostility to the establishment, anti-immigration sentiment and racial resentment. Nothing even close to comparable exists on the left.
  • Mr. Trump’s election and behavior during his first 10 months in office represent not a break with the past but an extreme acceleration of a process that was long underway in conservative politics
  • The Republican Party is now rationalizing and enabling Mr. Trump’s autocratic, kleptocratic, dangerous and downright embarrassing behavior in hopes of salvaging key elements of its ideological agenda: cutting taxes for the wealthy (as part of possibly the worst tax bill in American history), hobbling the regulatory regime, gutting core government functions and repealing Obamacare without any reasonable plan to replace it.
  • The failure of Republican members of Congress to resist the anti-democratic behavior of President Trump — including holding not a single hearing on his and his team’s kleptocracy — is cringe-worthy.
  • the imbalance today is striking, and frightening. Our democracy requires vigorous competition between two serious and ideologically distinct parties, both of which operate in the realm of truth, see governing as an essential and ennobling responsibility, and believe that the acceptance of republican institutions and democratic values define what it is to be an American. The Republican Party must reclaim its purpose.
ethanshilling

Why 'Cursed' Olympics in Tokyo Are Pressing Ahead Amid Covid - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...japan-olympics.html

world olympics pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • From the moment that Japan pitched to host the 2020 Olympic Games, its organizers have framed it as a symbol of recovery: from a decades-long economic slump, from a devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster and, after a year’s postponement, from a crippling pandemic.
  • A series of health, economic and political challenges have besieged the Games. Even as the organizers decided last week to bar international spectators, epidemiologists warn that the Olympics could become a superspreader event.
  • The financial hazards are also significant — the Olympic budget has swollen to a record $15.4 billion, increasing nearly $3 billion in the past year alone and adding to longstanding doubts about whether Olympic Games pay off for host nations.
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  • “I don’t know any reason for why you would go out to watch these Olympic Games,” said Hyoung Min Yoo, 29, who works in finance in Tokyo.
  • The president of the Tokyo organizing committee, Seiko Hashimoto, recently cited the “significant challenges” facing the world and the responsibility of the Olympics “to build a legacy for the future society.”
  • In an effort to give itself breathing space, the I.O.C. broke with tradition in 2017 by simultaneously announcing the hosts of the next two Summer Olympics — Paris in 2024 and Los Angeles four years later.
  • The seemingly unstoppable push toward the Olympics this time also reflects an often rigid Japanese bureaucracy, with some even drawing parallels to World War II, when the Japanese public did not want the conflict but no leader dared halt it.
  • “When they say ‘the five rings,’ or if they show up with an Olympic symbol, they think they can command or demand anything,” said Satoko Itani, an associate professor of sports, gender and sexuality at Kansai University. “But people are increasingly saying ‘no.’”
  • The organizers scrapped their first logo after plagiarism accusations. The president of Japan’s Olympic Committee was indicted on corruption charges related to the bidding process.
  • The organizers say that their focus is primarily on safety, and that they have earmarked $900 million in spending on measures to combat the virus.
  • The organizers say vaccination will not be mandatory, however, and many athletes, delegates and others will be coming from places where vaccines are unlikely to be fully available.
  • With more contagious and perhaps deadlier variants circulating around the globe, epidemiologists warn that the Tokyo Olympics have the potential to turbocharge the virus’s spread.
  • Nobuo Sato, 63, who owns a vegetable shop in Tokyo, said he feared that if the Olympics resulted in another coronavirus wave, it would further damage his business, which has suffered over the past year as orders from restaurants have declined sharply.
  • “I just don’t think they should risk the coronavirus spreading in any sense,” he said.
  • But if the Games do not go on, he said he did not regret the $50 million Airweave had invested in its new mattress design or the $9 million the company had reportedly contributed toward the Olympic budget each year since it signed on as a sponsor in 2016.
anonymous

Boulder Shooting Suspect Makes 1st Court Appearance : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...pear-in-court-thursday-morning

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The suspect in the Boulder, Colo. grocery store shooting that left 10 people dead made his first appearance in court Thursday in a brief hearing that called for a mental health assessment. On Wednesday night, hundreds of people gathered to mourn the victims and support those affected by senseless gun violence.
  • Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 21, is facing 10 counts of murder in the first degree and one count of attempted murder over the horrific attack at a King Soopers supermarket. The victims include a police officer who responded to calls for help. The ages of those who died range from 20 to 65.
  • Alissa appeared in court alongside his attorney, Kathryn Herold of the Colorado Public Defender's Office. Alissa wore a white face mask and what looked to be a purple hospital gown. Because of an injury to his leg, the suspect was seated in a wheelchair.
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  • Herold asked for a three-month delay before a preliminary hearing, noting the need to assess her client as well as the pending arrival of evidence and records from the ongoing investigation into the shooting — a discovery process she predicted will be "voluminous."
  • District Judge Thomas Mulvahill agreed to Herold's request after Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty noted that his office will file additional charges against Alissa "in the next couple weeks." While Dougherty did not object to the delay for a mental health assessment, he asked for a shorter time frame, of a month and a half.
  • The judge did not set a bond for the suspect, meaning he will stay in jail as the case moves to the next steps. Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse after the hearing, Dougherty was asked if he believes a "fair" jury can be convened in Boulder.
  • Explaining the attempted murder charge Alissa is facing, the prosecutor said the charge refers to a police officer whom the suspect fired at but did not injure. Dougherty also noted that in Colorado, homicide cases commonly take at least a year to be tried to completion.
  • The case will be assigned to Chief Judge Ingrid Bakke; rather than set a date for the next hearing in the case, Mulvahill told the attorneys from both sides to be in touch with Bakke about the next proceeding.
  • The suspect is from Arvada, a suburb between Denver and Boulder. Before this week, Alissa had a criminal record that included a guilty plea to a misdemeanor assault charge in 2018. He paid a fine to resolve that case, according to court records.
  • Alissa surrendered to police after suffering a gunshot wound to his leg. That injury, a "through-and-through" wound, was treated at a hospital before Alissa was taken to the Boulder County Jail. He was taken into custody after removing most of his clothing – jeans, a long-sleeve shirt and a tactical vest – and walking backward toward police, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.
  • Along with Alissa's clothes, police recovered "a rifle (possible AR-15)" and a semiautomatic handgun, the court document states.The arrest warrant affidavit for Alissa said he purchased a gun less than a week before the King Soopers shooting, citing official databases that show he bought a Ruger AR-556 on March 16.
  • The weapon used in the shooting is legally classified as a "pistol" in the U.S., but many people would likely consider it to be a rifle — and the affidavit repeatedly refers to it as one. The gun has the same lower receiver, the shell-like piece that houses the trigger, as AR-15 rifles that have been used in many other mass shootings in the United States.
anonymous

The Most Intimate Portrait Yet of a Black Hole - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...omy-messier-87-black-hole.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, an international team of radio astronomers that has been staring down the throat of a giant black hole for years, on Wednesday published what it called the most intimate portrait yet of the forces that give rise to quasars
  • The black hole in question is a monster 6.5 billion times as massive as the sun, and lies in the center of an enormous elliptical galaxy, Messier 87, about 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.
  • Now, seen through the radio equivalent of polarized sunglasses, the M87 black hole appears as a finely whiskered vortex, like the spinning fan blades of a jet engine, pumping matter into the black hole and energy outward into space.
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  • “Now we can actually see the patterns of these fields in M87 and begin to study how the black hole is funneling material to its center,”
  • Janna Levin, an astrophysicist at Barnard College of Columbia University who studies black holes but was not part of the Event Horizon team, called the results “thrilling,” as they revealed details about how a black hole can create “a lethal, powerful, astronomical ray gun that extends thousands of light-years.”
  • The results were announced on Wednesday in two papers published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, and in a third paper, by Ciriaco Goddi of Radboud University in the Netherlands and a large international cast, that has been accepted by the same journal.
  • “The direction and intensity of the polarization in the image tells us about the magnetic fields near the event horizon of the black hole,” said Andrew Chael, an astrophysicist at Princeton University who is part of the Event Horizon team.
  • Most of that matter falls into the black hole, but some is pushed out, like toothpaste, by enormous pressures and magnetic fields. How all of this energy arises and is marshaled remains unknown to astronomers.
  • In 2009, eager to explore the underlying mechanisms and to verify Einstein’s predictions about black holes, Dr. Doeleman and his colleagues formed the Event Horizon Telescope, an international collaboration that now comprises some 300 astronomers from 13 institutions.
  • Black holes were first “heard” colliding in 2015, by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Now they could be seen, as an inky portal of nothingness framed by a swirling doughnut of radiant gas in the center of the galaxy Messier 87.
  • It took another two years for researchers to produce the polarized images released on Wednesday.Jets and lobes of radio, X-ray and other forms of energy extend more than 100,000 light-years from the black hole in M87.
  • Black holes are bottomless pits in space-time, where gravity is so powerful that not even light can escape; whatever enters essentially disappears from the universe. The cosmos is littered with black holes.
  • “The E.H.T. images also provide hints that the bright jet in M87 is actually powered from the rotational energy of the black hole, which twists the magnetic fields as it rotates,” said Michael Johnson another Event Horizon member from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
  • Apparently it isn’t terribly hungry; the black hole is eating “a paltry” one-thousandth of the mass of the sun per year.“Yet it’s enough to launch powerful jets that stretch for thousands of light years, and it’s radiant enough for us to capture it with the E.H.T.,” he said.
anonymous

Myanmar: At least 114 killed in bloodiest day of protests yet - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • At least 114 civilians were killed across Myanmar on Saturday, according to a tally by the independent Myanmar Now news outlet, as the military junta continued to crack down on peaceful protests.The killings in 44 towns and cities across the country would represent the bloodiest day of protests since a military coup last month.
  • Among those killed is reportedly a 13-year-old girl, who was shot in her house after the junta's armed forces opened fire in residential areas of Meikhtila, in Mandalay region, according to Myanmar Now. She is among 20 minors killed since the start of the protests, Myanmar Now reported.
  • The lethal crackdown came on the country's Armed Forces Day. Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the junta leader, said during a parade in the capital Naypyitaw to mark the event that the military would protect the people and strive for democracy, Reuters reported.State television had said on Friday that protesters risked being shot "in the head and back." Despite this, demonstrators against the February 1 coup came out on the streets of Yangon, Mandalay and other towns.
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  • The UN office in Myanmar said it "is horrified by the needless loss of life today with reports of dozens of people shot dead by the military across the country, in the bloodiest day since the coup."
  • According to the latest tally by the nonprofit Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, at least 328 people have been killed in Myanmar since the military coup on February 1. Saturday's deaths would bring the total number of civilians killed to more than 400, but the exact number remains unclear. Aid groups fear the number may be higher.
  • A boy reported by local media to be as young as 5 was among at least 29 people killed in Mandalay. At least 24 people were killed in Yangon, Myanmar Now said, according to Reuters.
  • Meanwhile, one of Myanmar's two dozen ethnic armed groups, the Karen National Union, said it had overrun an army post near the Thai border, killing 10 people -- including a lieutenant colonel -- and losing one of its own fighters, Reuters reported.A military spokesman did not respond to calls from the news agency seeking comment on the killings by security forces or the insurgent attack on its post.
  • The US Embassy in Myanmar joined the European Union and United Kingdom embassies in condemning killings by security forces in Myanmar on Saturday and calling for an end to the violence.
  • News reports cited by Reuters said there were deaths in the central Sagaing region, Lashio in the east, in the Bago region, near Yangon, and elsewhere. A 1-year-old baby was hit in the eye with a rubber bullet.In Naypyitaw, Min Aung Hlaing reiterated a promise to hold elections, without giving any time frame, Reuters reported.
  • The military has said it took power because November elections won by Aung San Suu Kyi's party were fraudulent, an assertion dismissed by the country's election commission.Suu Kyi, the elected leader and the country's most popular civilian politician, remains in detention at an undisclosed location. Many other figures in her party are also being held in custody.
  • In its warning on Friday evening, state television said protesters were "in danger of getting shot to the head and back." It did not specifically say security forces had been given shoot-to-kill orders, and the junta has previously suggested some fatal shootings have come from within the crowds.
  • Diplomats told Reuters that eight countries -- Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand -- sent representatives, but Russia was the only one to send a minister.
  • Support from Russia and China, which has also refrained from criticism, is important for the junta as those two countries are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and can block potential UN actions.Armed Forces Day commemorates the start of the resistance to Japanese occupation in 1945 that was orchestrated by Suu Kyi's father, the founder of the military.
  • Gunshots hit the US cultural center in Yangon on Saturday, Reuters reported, but nobody was hurt and the incident was being investigated, US Embassy spokesperson Aryani Manring said.Protesters have taken to the streets almost daily since the coup that derailed Myanmar's slow transition to democracy.
  • General Yawd Serk, chair of the Restoration Council of Shan State/Shan State Army - South, one of the ethnic armies in the country, told Reuters in neighboring Thailand: "If they continue to shoot at protesters and bully the people, I think all the ethnic groups would not just stand by and do nothing."
carolinehayter

Switzerland to ban wearing of burqa and niqab in public places | Switzerland | The Guar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rqa-and-niqab-in-public-places

politics culture policy

shared by carolinehayter on 08 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Muslim groups criticise move, which they say will further stigmatise and marginalise their community
  • Switzerland will follow France, Belgium and Austria after narrowly voting in a referendum to ban women from wearing the burqa or niqab in public spaces.
  • Just over 51% of Swiss voters cast their ballots in favour of the initiative to ban people from covering their face completely on the street, in shops and restaurants.
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  • Switzerland’s parliament and the seven-member executive council that constitutes the country’s federal government opposed the referendum proposal. They argued that full facial veils represented a “fringe phenomenon”, and instead proposed an initiative that would force people to lift their facial coverings when asked to confirm their identity to officials.
  • Muslim groups have criticised the ban. “This is clearly an attack against the Muslim community in Switzerland. What is aimed here is to stigmatise and marginalise Muslims even more,”
  • “A burqa ban would damage our reputation as an open and tolerant tourism destination,” said Nicole Brändle Schlegel of the HotellerieSuisse umbrella organisation.
  • Supporters of the ban argue that it also intended to stop violent street protesters and football hooligans wearing masks, and that the referendum text does not explicitly mention Islam or the words “niqab” or “burqa”.Their campaign, however, framed the referendum as a verdict on the role of Islam in public life.
  • Campaign ads it paid for showed a woman wearing a niqab and sunglasses alongside the slogan: “Stop extremism! Yes to the veil ban.”
  • A video on the Swiss government’s website explaining the arguments in favour of a ban proposed that “religious veils like the burqa or the niqab are a symbol of the oppression of women and aren’t suitable to our society”.
  • A recent study by the University of Lucerne put the number of women in Switzerland who wear a niqab at 21 to 37, and found no evidence at all of women wearing the burqa, which women were forced to wear in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
  • Muslims make up around 5% of the Swiss population
  • The referendum outcome means Switzerland will follow France, which banned wearing a full face veil in public in 2011. Full or partial bans on wearing face coverings in public are also in place in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark and the Netherlands.
leilamulveny

Opinion | Democrats Are Anxious About 2022 - and 2024 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mocratic-voters-anxieties.html

new york times Politics US Culture policy

shared by leilamulveny on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In the wake of the 2020 election, Democratic strategists are worried — very worried — about the future of the Hispanic vote. One in 10 Latinos who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 switched to Donald Trump in 2020.
  • From 1970 to 2019, the number of Latinos in the United States increased from 9.6 million to 60.6 million, according to Pew Research. The number is projected by the census to reach 111.2 million, or 28 percent of the nation’s population, by 2060.Public Opinion Strategies, which conducts surveys for NBC News/Wall Street Journal, provided me with data on presidential voting from 2012 to 2020 that show significant Republican gains among the roughly 30 percent of Black and Hispanic voters who self-identify as conservative.
  • Their partisan allegiance over the same period went from 50-37 Democratic to 59-22 Republican.
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  • The defection of Hispanic voters, together with an approximately 3 point drop in Black support for Joe Biden compared with Hillary Clinton, threatens a pillar of Democratic competitive strength, especially among Black men: sustained high margins of victory among minority voters whose share of the population is enlarging steadily.
  • This social and cultural mismatch, according to some observers, is driving a number of minority voters into the opposition party.
  • Ulibarri emailed me to say that he believes that “Hispanics see what white America has done to Black America, and the backlash leads to more G.O.P. votes.”
  • In the past, “they may have been conservative and Latino, but you were Latino first and the way you were treated as a group and discriminated against trumped some ideology. Now, less so.”
  • e first, roughly a quarter of the Hispanic population, is made up of those who self-identify as people of color, according to the study, “as a group that, like African Americans, remains distinct over generations.”
  • The third Hispanic constituency, nearly three in ten, is made up of “bootstrappers” who “perceive Hispanics, not primarily as people of color or as white ethnics, but as a group that ‘over generations can get ahead through hard work.’ ” These voters tend to be “slightly more conservative regarding race, class, and government, and are the most likely to be Republican.”
  • What matters most, Haney-López continued, “is susceptibility to Republican ‘dog whistle’ racial frames that trumpet the threat from illegal aliens, rapists, rioters and terrorists.”
  • “What may be changing is how certain ethnic and nationality groups within Hispanics perceive themselves with regards to their racial and ideological identities,” she wrote by email:
  • In brief, Shor makes the case that well-educated largely white liberals on the left wing of the party have pushed an agenda — from “socialism” to “defund the police” — far outside the mainstream, driving conservative and centrist minority voters into the arms of the opposition.
  • A Brookings analysis conducted by William Frey, a senior fellow there, showed that Biden won a smaller percentage of minority voters in the key states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 when she lost all three.
lmunch

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities | Annual Re... - 0 views

www.annualreviews.org/...annurev-environ-102016-061053

shared by lmunch on 09 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In the most recent iteration, the AR5, each WG report contains more than 1,200 pages. An SPM of approximately 30 pages is produced for each WG report, as well as for the Synthesis Report.
  • The full WG reports are endorsed by government representatives by accepting them, which means that they have not been edited line by line. Each SPM, however, goes through a process of line-by-line editing during approval plenaries in which government representatives approve the final version of the SPM
  • Government representatives from any country can object to and potentially veto any line, requiring IPCC authors to rework the sentence in question until it is rewritten to everyone's satisfaction. In this sense, the SPM produces reports through processes of enforced consensus.
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  • Some authors argue that the consensus process in approval plenaries results in sharper messages, the identification of better and more relevant questions, and greater investment by policymakers in the ultimate outcomes (26). In contrast, a well-known early critique of the IPCC argued that it resulted in bland outputs that do not engage with questions of high disagreement (27). More recently, some authors argue that the process imposes unity in the form of least-common denominator generalities on the very issues that, because they are politically challenging, may be of greatest policy relevance (28–30).
    • lmunch
      lmunch on 09 Mar 21
       
      pros and cons of consensus in SPMs
  • In their study of how eight SPMs produced for the AR4 and AR5 changed through the approval plenaries, Mach et al. (22) find that sensitive issues are often reworked and expanded through approval plenaries. But they also find that sometimes the most sensitive topics are expunged completely
  • When the newly elected Chair of the IPCC, Hoesung Lee (2015) declared that promoting the involvement of developing country scientists was a cornerstone for his tenure, he was articulating a theme of inclusivity that has been present since the IPCC's inception (82).
  • From 1990 to 2007, the number of IPCC authors from developing countries quadrupled, but their numbers are still proportionally low. The number of authors from developed countries also increased over the same period of time; only 17% of authors in the AR4 are from developing countries (83). As a result, there is still a significant “north-south divide” that results in an overrepresentation of science from OECD countries or countries that are classified as high income by the World Bank (84)
  • This tendency is also reflected in the composition of the IPCC; where representation from developing countries has improved, much of it is focused on WGII, which publishes regional chapters on impacts and adaptation (83). Science that is conducted in developing countries, which contribute the least to GHG emissions but are the most vulnerable to climate change impacts, often has a different focus than in developed countries, which tend to focus more on large-scale positivist understandings of the physical system and the economics of mitigation (87). Many authors from developing countries who participated in WGIII's AR5 did so through coauthorship relationships and “institutional pathways” that are based in the developed world (88). This might be responsible for the “strong harmonization of views [in AR5 WGIII], compared with the diversity one finds across the social sciences of climate change more broadly” (88, p. 98). The forgoing considerations give rise to the question, how should the IPCC engage with the realities of unequal global development and the vast differences between rich and poor nations.
  • Quantitative bibliometric analysis of climate change publications reveals not only that climate change research is concentrated in the developed countries, but also that developed countries tend to focus more on issues of mitigation whereas developing countries focus more on adaptation, droughts, and disease impacts (86).
  • The IPCC has innovated strategies to improve capacity building, one of which was to recruit early-career scientists to managerial roles in chapter writing processes for WGII and WGIII. Such programs can assist with equalizing quality among chapters and can provide early-career scientists with an opportunity to participate in the IPCC process (89).
  • The justification for inclusivity of science produced in and for developing countries is multifaceted. The credibility of the IPCC in some countries is potentially undermined if it is seen as only representing Western science
  • But different geographical contexts often have different ways of judging the quality and relevance of scientific knowledge. Developing country scientists may have different but equally valid epistemological norms as those found in developed countries, but those norms might be downplayed in favor of so-called Western standards (93).
  • For this reason, redressing the imbalance of knowledge in GEAs requires more than simply increasing the numbers of authors from developing nations; it also is a matter of maintaining critical awareness of the assumptions that inform the social authority of science in developed countries (95, 96). As will be seen in the following case study, this comes to the fore when we consider how adaptation is framed in the IPCC.
  • The international politics of climate change, for most of the IPCC's history, retained this initial focus on abatement and mitigation. The topic of adaptation was shunned partly because it could be interpreted as giving the fossil fuel industry a free pass or capitulating to the status quo. However, since the IPCC's founding in 1988, the impacts of climate change have become more pronounced, and some of the world's most vulnerable people are already experiencing the negative impacts of climate change, which makes discussion of adaptation imperative (97–99).
  • The IPCC only gave scant attention to adaptation in its first two Assessment Reports, treating it primarily as a “residual” phenomenon that results from the failure to mitigate climate change in particular local contexts (109). Starting with the Third Assessment Report published in 2001, however, adaptation became increasingly important in the IPCC. Early work in climate change adaptation drew from the literature on natural disasters in which human vulnerability is conceptualized as exposure to hazards, as well as work on the resilience of complex social-ecological systems (110–112). This literature developed the concept of adaptive capacity that theorizes adaptation as a generalizable quality which allows human societies to adapt to negative events.
mimiterranova

Anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150% in 2020, mostly in N.Y. and L.A., new r... - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...rly-150-2020-mostly-n-n1260264

hate crimes culture

shared by mimiterranova on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • he analysis released by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, this month examined hate crimes in 16 of America’s largest cities. It revealed that while such crimes in 2020 decreased overall by 7 percent, those targeting Asian people rose by nearly 150 percent.
  • What Trump did is that he weaponized it in a way,” Ramakrishnan said. “Trump's rhetoric helps set a certain narrative in place — and presidents have an outsized role in terms of shaping narrative. They don't call it a bully pulpit for nothing, and especially Trump, the way he frequently used Twitter as well as press conferences and off-the-cuff remarks to campaign rallies to frame the narrative in a particular way, it likely played a role.”
  • The analysis revealed a surge in cities such as New York, where anti-Asian hate crimes rose from three in 2019 to 28 in 2020, a 833 percent increase. Los Angeles and Boston also experienced notable rises, from seven to 15 and six to 14, respectively. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., experienced a decline from six to three anti-Asian hate crimes. Chicago remained unchanged, with two crimes each year.
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  • The first spike in anti-Asian hate crimes occurred in March and April last year. However, it occurred alongside a rise in Covid-19 cases and ongoing negative associations of Asian Americans with the virus, the analysis noted.
  • A separate study revealed that the use of “China virus” language to refer to the coronavirus, particularly by GOP officials and conservative outlets, has already resulted in a shift in how many people in the U.S. perceive Asian Americans. The significant uptick in discriminatory coronavirus speech that occurred on March 8 — the day Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., tweeted about the “Wuhan virus,” which coincided with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s interview the day before on "Fox and Friends" in which he referred to the "China virus" — was followed by a rapid reversal of a decadelong decline in anti-Asian bias.
  • "Many of these Chinatowns are in places that are low income and also suffering economically. So that might be one set of explanations as to why this phenomenon is taking this particular shape," he said. "On top of that, we live in an age of viral social media, and … especially the shock value of some of these videos increases awareness and maybe anxiety in the community.
ethanshilling

Several States Pausing Use of Johnson & Johnson Vaccine After CDC, FDA Advisory - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tes-johnson-vaccine-pause.html

world pandemic vaccine

shared by ethanshilling on 13 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Several states quickly followed the call from federal health agencies on Tuesday to pause the administration of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine after six women in the United States developed a rare disorder involving blood clots within one to three weeks of vaccination.
  • CVS and Walgreens, the nation’s largest retail pharmacy chains, also said that they would immediately stop Johnson & Johnson vaccinations.
  • The C.D.C.’s outside advisory committee of independent experts has scheduled an emergency meeting for Wednesday.
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  • The White House on Tuesday said that the pause will not have a significant effect on the country’s vaccination campaign, which has accelerated in recent weeks as a rise in new virus cases threatens a fourth possible surge.
  • “Over the last few weeks, we have made available more than 25 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna each week, and in fact this week we will make available 28 million doses of these vaccines,” Jeff Zients, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator, said on Tuesday.
  • As of Monday, 36 percent of the country’s total population has received at least one shot of a vaccine, and 22 percent are fully vaccinated, according to data from the C.D.C.
  • Even though the reaction to the Johnson & Johnson shot is rare, any questions about the safety of the shots could bolster vaccine hesitancy.
  • Nearly seven million people in the United States have received Johnson & Johnson shots so far, and roughly nine million more doses have been shipped out to the states, according to data from the C.D.C. The six women who developed blood clots were between the ages of 18 and 48.
  • “I know there are people who have gotten the vaccine, who are probably very concerned. For people who got the vaccine more than a month ago, the risk to them is very low at this time,” Dr. Schuchat said.
  • On Friday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that New York expected to receive 34,900 Johnson & Johnson shots, a decrease of 88 percent from the previous week
  • Dr. Zucker, New York’s health commissioner, said that the state would honor appointments made at state-run mass vaccination sites for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine by giving people the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine instead.
  • Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City said that the city would do the same, rescheduling appointments at city-run vaccine sites.“Every site has been told this morning to stop giving the J&J shots,” he said at a news conference.
  • Both Mr. Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at separate appearances last month, which they framed as an effort to boost confidence in that vaccine’s efficacy rate and to address vaccine hesitancy.
  • Regulators in Europe and elsewhere are concerned about a similar issue with another coronavirus vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University researchers.
Javier E

Democrats Should Worry about British Labour's Collapse | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...about-british-labours-collapse

labour UK Politics crisis history policy Democratic party

shared by Javier E on 09 May 21 - No Cached
  • With the rise of Momentum, what had been implicit in Blair and Brown’s politics — the parties’ identification with London and the university towns — became codified in the group’s support for a cultural politics that broke with Labour’s historical commitments to family, community, and nation
  • This politics consisted of enthusiastic support for Remain.  In the runup to the 2019 vote, the activists joined hands with the pro-Blair MPs to favor a second referendum, a “people’s vote,” which they assumed would repudiate the 2016 results
  • They championed “open borders,” immediate eligibility for migrants to Britain’s extensive social services, including its free National Health Services, and voting rights for migrants, regardless of their citizenship, in national elections. They extolled “diversity” and condemned supporters of Leave as bigots and xenophobes.  Patriotism itself was identified with xenophobia.
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  • At the pre-election Labour Conference in Brighton in September 2019, which I attended, speakers called on Britain to provide reparations to make amends for its imperial past and even condemned Britain for global warming — presumably, by initiating the industrial revolution.
  • The young activists also espoused controversial views on family and gender
  • Prior to the 2019 election, an ad hoc group, the Labour Committee for Trans Rights, called for the expulsion from the party of two longstanding feminist organizations that restricted membership in their rape shelters to biological women
  • But Labour’s equivocal stand on Brexit and its identification with the cultural views of young, urban, college-educated activists overrode any appeal that its economic platform might have had.
  • In a post-election study, Paula Surridge, Matthew Goodwin, Oliver Heath, and David Cutts found the that support for Brexit was “strongly associated with cultural values.”  These values “cut across the traditional left-right divide” and undermined Labour’s historic identification with the economic left. 
  • After the election, trade unionist Paul Embery, a member of the group, wrote in his book Despised, “Labour today has virtually nothing to say to the small town and post-industrial Britain, the kind of places out there in the provinces which were once its mainstay.  It is no longer the ‘people’s party’, but the party for the woke, the Toytown revolutionary and Twitter.”
  • The other factor in Labour’s defeat in 2019 and on Thursday was Boris Johnson’s ability to get a deal on Brexit and his  move leftward on economic policy.
  • Johnson, who replaced May in July 2019,  made none of those mistakes. He got parliament to endorse the outlines of a Brexit deal, and he pledged to increase funding for the NHS and to initiate an industrial policy to “level up” Britain’s deindustrialized regions. Johnson’s politics hit the sweet spot in the British electorate: social democratic on economics, but conservative (although not in the American sense of the religious right) on social and cultural policy.  That’s the magic formula that allowed the Tories to lay siege to Labour’s Red Wall.
  • Johnson’s success with the vaccine and his budget boosted his popularity and laid the basis for the Tories’ success in Thursday’s election.
  • Starmer tried to distance Labour from Momentum, Corbyn, and the cultural left.  He declared that he was “proud to be patriotic” and advised Labour officials to display the Union Jack at their appearances.  He opposed the demand to expel the feminist groups and called on the party to “put family first.”  But as Thursday’s results showed, the damage was already done.  Barring a major misstep by Johnson and the Tories, Labour could be out of power for the rest of the decade.
  • the Democrats’ success in 2020 could prove fleeting.  In 2020, they were blessed with a candidate who was able to stem, and in a few instances slightly reverse, the flight of working class voters in middle America from the Democratic Party. That was critical to Biden’s success in a state like Pennsylvania.
  • But Biden is a 78-year-old relic who in his person and in his emphasis on economics reflects an older labor-oriented Democratic party that is being replaced by a party preoccupied with culture and identity.
  • Many of the young Democrats elevate racial issues above those of class — framing what could be universal appeals to national betterment in racial terms; they want to increase immigration and grant citizenship to unauthorized immigrants, but appear indifferent to securing America’s borders
  • they justifiably champion the rights of transgender women —  biological men who identify as women — to be free from discrimination in employment or housing, but dismiss concerns that a blanket identification of sex with declared gender could threaten rights specific to biological women;
  • and as homicides rise, and as justifiable protests against police brutality turned into mayhem and looting, they have advocated defunding  rather than reforming the police.
  • Democrats’ identification with these kind of views played a role in Democratic losses in Congressional races in 2020.
  • Democrats in 2020 were also blessed with a perfect opponent in Donald Trump.  Trump’s bigotry and corruption turned off far more voters than it attracted.
  • If Trump continues to be the poster-boy for the Republican Party, Democrats will benefit in 2022 and 2024, but if he recedes, and his most ardent followers fade into the background, the Democrats could suffer defeat in Congressional elections and in the presidential election of 2024
mattrenz16

A Video Shows A Man Suddenly Hitting An Asian Woman In NYC's Chinatown : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...n-asian-woman-in-new-york-city

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • A man has been arrested after an unprovoked attack on a woman of Asian descent on Monday in New York City's Chinatown.
  • Security camera video from Monday evening shows people walking on a sidewalk next to a restaurant's outdoor seating. A woman walks in from the right of frame while a man coming from the opposite direction swings his left arm wide, hitting her in the face. The force of the hit knocks her hat off. She is knocked off balance, collapses and sits motionless. The man lifts his arm, apparently at onlookers, says something and then continues to stand nearby while a crowd comes to the woman's aid.
  • Assembly Member Niou says the woman is now doing "OK."
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  • While reported hate crimes against people of Asian or Pacific Islander descent went up in several cities in 2020, the most marked increase was in New York City, where three incidents reported in 2019 rose to 28 reported in 2020. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino reported the numbers in New York City have increased again in the first quarter of 2021: from 13 in the first three months of 2020 to 42 in the first three months of 2021. The numbers could be an undercount, as authorities say many incidents are not reported.
aleija

Opinion | The Sound of Silence on Abortion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bortion-corporate-support.html

politics US Culture policy opinion

shared by aleija on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Back in 2014, when the Arizona Legislature passed a bill to provide business owners with a religious excuse to discriminate against gay people, the N.F.L. threatened to move Super Bowl XLIX out of the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale. Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed the bill.
  • In 2015, when the N.C.A.A. led a pushback from its Indianapolis headquarters against a similar bill that the Indiana Legislature passed, Gov. Mike Pence said it was all a “great misunderstanding” and eventually signed a watered-down version that met the demands of the N.C.A.A. and other sports organizations that had protested.
  • In 2017, the North Carolina Legislature repealed an anti-transgender “bathroom bill” after the loss of the N.B.A. All-Star Game plus convention and tourism business cost the state millions of dollars in revenue and companies canceled plans to relocate there.
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  • This April, prodded or perhaps even shamed by prominent Black business leaders, 170 executives of major companies signed a statement protesting a vote-suppression measure enacted in Georgia and ones pending in other states.
  • And this brings us to a subject that corporate America would evidently prefer not to talk about: abortion. It’s possible I’ve missed something, but I’ve been listening hard, and so far all I’ve heard is the sound of silence.
  • . The article pointed out that in the four days between April 26 and April 29, 28 new abortion restrictions were signed into law in seven states. As of mid-May, bills proposing 549 separate abortion restrictions had been introduced in 47 states, including 165 that would ban abortion.
  • Much of this activity might have been shrugged off as just so much political theater had the Supreme Court not agreed last month to hear Mississippi’s defense of its ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a law that under current doctrine is unconstitutional. While the country may not learn until a year from now how receptive the court is to revising or abandoning its abortion precedents, its acceptance of the Mississippi case for argument in the fall serves as a welcome mat to states trying to outdo one another in anti-abortion zealotry.
  • But nothing can compete with the law that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed last month. Not only does it ban abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected — which can occur as early as six weeks, before many women realize they are pregnant — but it effectively deputizes the entire world’s population to enforce the ban, authorizing “any person” to sue anyone who performs or facilitates an abortion outside that time frame
  • All would be subject to a $10,000 fine plus the plaintiff’s court costs for each successful lawsuit. At the same time, the law strips the state itself of enforcement power. The purpose of that novel provision is to prevent abortion providers from going to court, because there is no entity they can sue.
  • Abortion may be an uncomfortable subject to talk about, but don’t misunderstand the silence. Abortion is not rare. It is, in fact, a common female experience, although I’ll grant that it is not as common as voting. Nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and some 40 percent of those end in abortion. This is life as women live it, even in Texas.
  • Your silence is acquiescence; it’s a decision. You’re making a decision. Your silence is a decision. And when you recognize that, some of these issues are so salient and so critical that you have to take a position.
anonymous

Opinion | So You Want to 'Save Women's Sports'? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ns-athletes-womens-sports.html

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • This year, lawmakers in more than 20 states have introduced legislation to ban transgender kids from girls’ sports, under the guise of protecting women and girls. Bills have already passed in Mississippi and Idaho.
  • The quest to block trans girls from competition has some prominent supporters.Former President Donald Trump embraced female athletes in February, declaring at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was “so important” to “protect women’s sports.”
  • The cause is catching on: One recent Politico poll found that 46 percent of women support a ban on transgender athletes (as do 43 percent of young adults born since 1997).
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  • what if all these people claiming to be fighting for the future of women’s sports would really fight for the future of women’s sports? What if they suddenly said, “We demand women’s sports get equal resources, equal media coverage, and equal pay”? What if these new activists embraced women’s sports and invested in female athletes, instead of using us as their excuse for transphobia?
  • The debate around transgender rights in sports feels sometimes like fighting over bunk beds on the Titanic. In almost every case, as soon as money and power are involved, women’s sports take a back seat to men’s.
  • Women’s sports get attention when there’s an egregious slight against us, such as when the world champion women’s national soccer team sued for pay equal to the men’s team, which failed to qualify for the World Cup.
  • That means we get less coverage of us simply playing sports. When the journalist Brenna Greene looked for photos from the women’s basketball tournament this week, she found the N.C.A.A. hadn’t posted any.
  • Male players’ generous March Madness accommodations do not make news, because they are expected. That is because the men’s tournament gets extensive coverage, with the N.C.A.A. earning more than 20 times as much from the television rights for the men’s tournament as from its separate contract that includes rights to the women’s event. The system is set up this way. Investment follows, and inequality grows.
  • The only time I remember seeing an elite women’s track race on a front page in recent years is when one of the women in the race was framed as a threat.
  • It was not a coincidence that the athlete — Caster Semenya, a champion intersex sprinter from South Africa — is Black. Images of her competing incubated the American campaign against trans participation in sport, which is also racist.
  • If things were fair, any time we raved about LeBron James or Usain Bolt, we would also be watching Candace Parker pirouette with a basketball and Allyson Felix sprinting toward an unfathomable fifth Olympics.
  • At the last Olympics — where resources are equally divided among men’s and women’s teams — women earned more than half of American medals. You could argue that we deserve more resources, not less. And yet many Americans wring their hands over transgender inclusion. They are missing the point.
aleija

Opinion | Tina Brown: Prince Philip Walked Two Paces Behind the Queen - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...prince-philip-dead.html

history opinion

shared by aleija on 09 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • In 1953, in the rustling, ermined silence of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey, the 31-year-old Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh, removed his own coronet, knelt at the feet of the young woman he wed six years before, and swore an oath of allegiance. “I, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship … so help me God.”
  • That Philip kept that oath for the next 68 years is a miracle not only of the modern monarchy but also of modern matrimony.
  • Philip was the unsettling definition of a full-on alpha male: devastatingly handsome, vigorously self-assured, impatient with fools — and not just fools.
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  • This was no contrived union, like the disastrous marriage of Charles and Diana. It was a love match from the start. The queen had been crazy about him since 1939, when she was 13 and Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, an 18-year-old Navy officer cadet, squired her around the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth.
  • Surrounded by excruciating formality, she could always depend on him to make her laugh. His gift to her was the shared secret that the formalities were both utterly absurd and absolutely necessary. “She knew she would always get an honest answer from him,”
  • Philip may have been related to half the crowned heads of Europe, but his family had been booted into exile, and he was the penniless prince of nowhere.
  • The shy, observant Princess Elizabeth was undaunted. She saw in Philip the unflinching character who would be what she would call on their 50th anniversary “my strength and stay all these years.” The two were bonded by a sense of duty and a desire to serve that was framed by the war.
  • In time, he fell in love with her, he told her in a 1946 letter quoted in Philip Eade’s biography, “completely and unreservedly.” When he proposed to her seven years later at Balmoral, neither her father, the king, nor the queen mother thought he was a safe bet.
  • In return, she provided Philip with an emotional safe place his childhood lacked. Though his eye was rumored to rove, his devotion to the queen cannot be questioned. He completed more than 22,000 royal engagements on his own and accompanied the queen on all of her overseas tours (“Don’t jostle the queen!” he would sometimes bark if the press got too close.)
  • The key to that was to avoid making him feel unmanned. There was a difficult passage in the early years, when he learned that his children would take the dynastic Windsor name, not his own. And there were few models then for how to build a marriage in which the balance of power was so entirely weighted toward a wife, unless you count Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
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