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oliviaodon

Fire and Fury Is Actually a Coup for Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The explosive tell-all about President Trump, Fire and Fury, has been available for purchase for less than a week, but many of its readers are ready to render a verdict on its impact.
  • For the president’s detractors, the bestseller offers bona fide proof that Trump is unfit for office; for his supporters, it is nothing more than tabloid fiction written by an author with a questionable reputation.
  • This is especially true when it comes to the president’s foreign policy decisions, to which Fire and Fury dedicates ample space.
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  • While the Trump administration tried to undermine the book’s release, even seeking to block its publication, these efforts only appeared to draw more attention to it. It’s not often a publisher is called on to cease and desist publication of a book, and it’s even rarer for such a demand to come from one of the most powerful leaders in the world.
  • “Given how central the story of Trump’s administration has been to the political conversation—certainly in the West and definitely beyond that as well—I think it’s fair to say that this book is getting a wide hearing ,” Jacob Parakilas, the deputy head of the U.S. and Americas project at the London-based Chatham House, told me. “The commentary in American publications about it, the way it has sort of driven the media narrative, is apparent to audiences far beyond Washington.”
  • The book’s international popularity mirrored its U.S.-based reception. In Singapore, some bookstores ran out of copies less than 24 hours after it was released.
  • Bannon proposed quashing the two-state solution—once considered to be a cornerstone of American diplomacy in the Middle East—by splitting up the Palestinian territories between Jordan (which would retake control of the West Bank) and Egypt (which would assume control over Gaza).
  • While the book has earned Trump a fair bit of international bad press since its release
  • it probably won’t lower Trump’s standing in foreign countries by any significant margin.
  • “The effect of the book, rightly or wrongly, is to reinforce this narrative of the White House as this center of intrigue and competing fiefdoms and aggressive competition between different ideological and personality-based groupings surrounding the president and the sort of concomitant narrative of Trump’s own mental state, his fitness for office, his level of attention to the job,”
jayhandwerk

Trump calls Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff 'mentally deranged' | US news | The Guar... - 0 views

  • Donald Trump on Saturday called Michael Wolff, the writer of a bestselling book about his White House, “a mentally deranged author” who “knowingly writes false information”
  • Wolff has said he conducted more than 200 interviews and stands by all his sourcing and reporting. News outlets have pointed to inconsistencies in Fire and Fury and in past work
fischerry

From 'Fire and Fury' to Political Firestorm - The New York Times - 0 views

  • He is a New Yorker in Washington, far more consumed with the news media and personalities than policy issues. He elides facts, fudges the specifics and dispenses with professional norms in the service of success and status.
  • To put it mildly, it can be hard to attain the unalloyed truth from a president who has long boasted of gaming the press, or from competing courtiers who often wield insider anecdotes as sword and shield in their efforts to protect themselves and bloody their rivals. Then there is the sheer outlandishness of the Trump era: When most anything is plausible it is also printable, but that does not necessarily mean you are getting it right
  • “Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book,” he says. To confront his problem, Wolff notes that there are times he lets “the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them.” Unfortunately for the reader, he throws up his hands when dealing with three of the most pivotal moments of the Trump campaign and presidency.
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    What weight should we put on the book 'Fire and Fury'? This article goes into that. It is a very important question. It reminds me of OPCVLs.
Javier E

Boris Johnson's biographer: I know too well the fire and fury lurking behind that smile... - 0 views

  • Boris Johnson can change from bonhomie to a dark fury in seconds. His normally joky demeanour flashes into a sarcastic snarl, his skin reddens and blotches, his eyes dart into an intense narrow glare and on the worst occasions his lips curl back to reveal wisps of spittle.
  • The all-out favourite to be our next prime minister has the fiercest and most uncontrollable anger I have seen. A terrifying mood change can be triggered instantly by the slightest challenge to his entitlement or self-worth.
  • he was temperamentally unsuitable to be entrusted with any position of power, let alone the highest office of all, in charge of the United Kingdom and its nuclear codes.
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  • This quality, combined with his casual relationship with the truth and often callous disregard of others, has caused many people who have worked closely with him to question his fitness for office
  • A senior judge raised questions about his fitness for power because of his “recklessness” about pregnancy and the feelings of others when conducting “extramarital adulterous liaisons”.
  • the wife of one of his Bullingdon Club cohorts at Oxford (a wealthy man in a powerful job) said her husband “would not speak about Boris even off the record as he is frightened of what he might do back. A lot of people are.”
  • Incredibly, the conversation was taped, and a copy anonymously sent to Hastings, then Johnson’s boss at the Telegraph. When Johnson was sent away with no more than a flea in his ear, his sense of entitlement and freedom from the normal rules of civilised life became even more acute
  • His attitude to women — endless affairs leaving a string of women and at least one pregnancy termination behind him — has long been one of entitlement and lack of respect. He has boasted to other men that he needs plenty of women on the go as he is, as he says crudely, “bursting with spunk”
  • Employees or visitors to the mayoral desk at London’s City Hall found it advisable to lose what were supposed to be enjoyable games.
  • One victim was Roger Lewis who applied in 2010 for a chair at Oxford but who had made the mistake of criticising Johnson in print four years previously. Johnson threatened to pull out all the stops to prevent Lewis from winning the chair, and indeed he came an unexpected fifth on the list.
  • That willingness to punish people who cross him was exposed after he agreed to help his criminal friend Darius Guppy track down a critical journalist to beat him up
  • When I worked as Johnson’s deputy in Brussels in an office of two, it took a long time to get used to what became known as his “four o’clock rants” in which he hurled four-letter words at an innocent yucca plant for several minutes at deadline time every day to work himself into a frenzy to write his creative tracts against the EU
  • His casual attitude to other people’s money, leading Symonds to accuse him of being “spoilt”, was notorious during his time as a motoring columnist at GQ, when he ran up huge parking ticket bills by parking anywhere he wanted and expecting the magazine to pay
horowitzza

German MPs recognise Armenian 'genocide' amid Turkish fury - BBC News - 0 views

  • The German parliament has approved a resolution declaring that the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War One was a "genocide".
  • Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their people died in the atrocities of 1915. Turkey says the toll was much lower and rejects the term "genocide".
  • "We will do whatever is necessary to resolve this issue,"
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  • Turkey denies that there was a systematic campaign to slaughter Armenians as an ethnic group during World War One.
  • More than 20 nations, including France and Russia, as well as Pope Francis, have recognised the 1915 killings as genocide.
  • Armenia's Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian said it was a "valuable contribution" to the "international recognition and condemnation of the Armenian genocide"
  • . Turkey's foreign minister even accused Berlin of trying to deflect from the dark episodes of its own history, a clear reference to Germany's Nazi past.
  • for many German politicians this vote was about exactly the opposite: it was about dealing with not just Turkey's difficult 20th century history, but also Germany's.
  • Germany accepted 1.1 million migrants last year - by far the highest influx in the EU.
  • German-Turkish relations were also strained this year by the case of comedian Jan Boehmermann, whose obscene poem about Mr Erdogan prompted a criminal complaint from the Turkish leader.
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    The Ottoman Turks genocide of 1.5 million Armenians during the empires disintegration is greatly disputed 
Javier E

Our leaders are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence. It's unfor... - 0 views

  • humans are not yet beyond saving themselves from the worst ravages of global warming. There’s fight in us yet, even if it’s a bit shapeless.
  • The problem – and it’s an existential threat both profound and perverse – is that those who lead us and have power over our shared destiny are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence
  • Worse than that, their policies, language, patronal obligations and acts of bad faith are poisoning us, training citizens to accept the prospect of inexorable loss, unstoppable chaos, certain doom.
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  • Business as usual is robbing people of hope, white-anting the promise of change
  • The message implicit in our governments’ refusal to act is that we should all just suck it up – as in “climate change is bullshit, and even if it’s not there’s nothing you can do about it”
  • It’s a licence for nihilism, a ticket to hell in a handbasket
  • the cohort responsible for this mixture of denial and fatalism is far removed from the daily experience of the ordinary citizen, especially the youngest and poorest of us. They have become a threat to our shared future and we must hold them to account, immediately and without reservation.
  • I’ve noticed a bruised attitude of beleaguerment in individuals and within groups that’s increasingly hard to ignore, a mounting grimness in the faces and language of people barely holding on in the face of steady, cumulative and unrelenting losses
  • some are clinging to the last tendrils of hope, others are falling into despair. And that worries me.
  • It’s expressed as grief, and the most palpable, widespread and immediate expression of it is now brewing over climate change. Beneath that grief there’s rage.
  • I worry that this widely-shared grief and unfocussed rage may become the signal human disposition of our time, that the Anthropocene will be marked by fury and hopelessness
  • Younger people in particular have begun to feel abandoned by their leaders and elders. They suspect they’ll be left without food or ammunition to stage a fighting retreat in which every battle is a defeat foreseen and every bit of territory was surrendered in advance by politicians and CEOs who deserted them long ago to hide in their privileged bunkers and silos
  • the reason humanity survived the cold war is because world leaders paid attention. They took emergent crises seriously. And in each instance of utmost danger, arguments of ideology and nationalism eventually fell away before the sacred importance of life itself
  • the four great capacities of humanity to solve a crisis – ingenuity, discipline, courage and sacrifice – these seem to be reserved for more important enterprises
  • Our governments and corporations are ensnared in a feedback loop of “common sense” and mutual self-preservation that’s little more than a bespoke form of nihilism. Ideology, prestige, assets and territory are now tacitly understood to be worth more than all life, human or otherwise
  • We can no longer wait patiently for our leaders to catch up. We cannot allow ourselves to be trained to accept hopelessness. Not by business, nor by governments. Both have subjected us to a steady diet of loss and depletion. It’s sapped us and left us mourning a future we can see fading before it even arrives
  • There’s no good reason to submit to this. No sane purpose in putting up with it. Because grief will paralyse us, and despair renders doom inevitable. We can afford neither.
  • we’ll need to get our house in order – and fast. That means calling bullshit on what’s been happening in our name for the past 15 years.
  • Life. It’s worth the fight. But, by God, after decades of appeasement, defeatism and denialism, it’s going to take a fight. Time’s short. So, let’s give our grief and fury some shape and purpose and reclaim our future together. Enough cowardice. Enough bullshit. Time for action.
Javier E

Are Trump's Feuds With Tillerson and Corker a Prelude to War? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • On face, however, the splits with Tillerson and Corker both center around the same material question of whether the United States will start a shooting war, most likely with North Korea.
  • , Corker told the Times that he worried Trump didn’t understand the stakes of his statements on foreign-policy questions, viewing it as a “reality show of some kind.”
  • “He doesn’t realize that, you know, that we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making,” said Corker, who is the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and close to Tillerson, and therefore particularly well-placed to analyze Trump’s foreign-policy choices.
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  • There are two obvious things Corker could be talking about (and one hopes no less-obvious ones): North Korea and Iran.
  • Trump keeps telegraphing a desire to start a war with North Korea.  Having first drawn blood with his missile-strike on Syria, and been pleased with the reaction from the public and press, Trump seems to want more.
  • Although the official U.S. position, as outlined by other officials, is that all options are on the table, the president keeps suggesting that really only one is on the table. Why else would he so publicly slam the door shut on Tillerson’s open channel to Pyongyang? What else might he mean when he promised that the U.S. will “do what has to be done”?
  • There are other indications, too. In August, after a North Korean missile test, he said, “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal statement, and as I said they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” (Aides said the language was improvised, and could not explain what he meant by it.)
  • In mid-September, at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump said that if Pyongyang’s aggression continued, the U.S. “will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” also saying, “The United States is ready, willing and able, but hopefully this will not be necessary.”
  • Of course, Trump could be just talking trash, trying to do the geopolitical dozens with Kim Jong Un, but there’s no way for Kim, or diplomats from other foreign countries, or the American people to know the difference. (North Korea itself claimed Trump’s UN remarks constituted a declaration of war, though the regime has a long history of similar comments.)
  • The impression of a slouch toward war is sharpened by other evidence. Mattis, for example, on Monday told Army generals to be ready to fight a war in Korea. Some of that is standard readiness, but given his own bleak view of a military solution—Mattis said earlier this year that a war against North Korea would be “catastrophic” and “probably the worst kind of fighting in most people's lifetimes”—it could also be an indication of growing probability of a shooting war.
  • Yet the road to a major war is usually a long one. The Bush administration spent months laying the groundwork, both publicly and privately, for the war in Iraq. At this point, the president has demonstrated a pattern of comments that indicate a preference for a military response to North Korea, although it’s not clear that his preference will prevail. That pattern is enough that Trump’s feuds with Tillerson and Corker deserve to be seen not merely as wacky, somewhat disconcerting antics, but as part of a potential move toward a war—whether that’s World War III or not.
oliviaodon

Trump's Bellicosity Is Ceding America's Influence to China - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Leave to the psychoanalysts the question why Korea seems to provoke President Trump to more reckless comments than any other international problem. What the world must live with are the consequences.
  • He threatened to rip up the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. “It is unacceptable, it is a horrible deal made by Hillary,” he said. “It’s a horrible deal, and we are going to renegotiate that deal or terminate it.” In that same interview, Trump demanded a billion-dollar payment for a high-altitude missile defense system. That demand reneged on an agreement reached by Trump’s own administration, by which the South Koreans provided the land for the system and the United States provided the weapons. It probably will not surprise you to learn that the free-trade agreement was not, in fact, negotiated by Hillary Clinton.
  • That interview had the unintended effect of helping to boost the more U.S.-skeptical of the South Korean presidential candidates in the May 9 election. In midsummer, speaking at his New Jersey golf retreat without a single South Korean present, Trump promised to visit “fire and fury like the world has never seen” upon North Korea. In September at the United Nations he warned that he might “totally destroy North Korea,” adding “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and his region.”
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  • Together, Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump are enabling the North Korean nuclear program to evolve into a mighty diplomatic weapon against U.S. interests, separating South Korea from the United States, incentivizing the South to placate the North. Together, Kim and Trump are depriving the U.S. of conventional military options—because there is no non-nuclear option against the North without the support of the South.
  • White House senior advisers Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster sought to assure the world that “America First” does not mean “America alone.” In the Korean peninsula, however, increasingly that’s just what Trump has wrought. Trump’s warlike boasting is steadily leading the United States toward the starkest and most extreme dilemma: The only policies remaining will be a unilateral nuclear strike upon the North—or humbly submitting to a new Chinese-led security order in Northeast Asia.  
Javier E

'We live in a narco-state': murder of Dutch lawyer prompts fear and fury | World news |... - 0 views

  • “This is confirmation that we live in a narco-state,” said Jan Struijs of the NPB union, which last year warned that the government and politicians were underestimating the scale of organised crime in the country. A report last month for Amsterdam council said the city’s relaxed drugs policies had “given free rein” to “drugs criminals, hustlers, parasites, middlemen and extortionists”, adding: “Drug-related organised crime – the ‘underworld’ – now exerts a significant influence on our city.”
  • The AD newspaper said the murder marked the beginning of a “new, dark phase” for the country, adding that although in the Netherlands “the prime minister still cycles to work” and lawyers, judges and prosecutors “move unguarded through life … the underworld has just strengthened its hold on the upper world”.
  • s no control”. The NRC Handelsblad newspaper said the Netherlands was “naive” in its approach to drugs, citing EU policing officials and unnamed sources in the drugs world, particularly Colombia, who allege the country is “the logistical centre for the cocaine trade in western Europe”.
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  • The paper said that based on the 70,000kg cocaine seized in the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam in 2018, at least 200,000kg must have been brought successfully into the Netherlands, worth an estimated €5bn (£4.4bn)
  • NRC said it was doubtful whether authorities had yet fully grasped the extent of the impact of such sums on Dutch society. “Put simply,” the paper said, “that kind of money buys anything – cars and nice houses, but also contract killers and corrupt officials.”
Javier E

Trump and Johnson aren't replaying the 1930s - but it's just as frightening | George Mo... - 0 views

  • anger that should be directed at billionaires is instead directed by them. Facing inequality and exclusion, poor wages and insecure jobs, people are persuaded by the newspapers billionaires own and the parties they fund to unleash their fury on immigrants, Muslims, the EU and other “alien” forces.
  • From the White House, his Manhattan tower and his Florida resort, Donald Trump tweets furiously against “elites”. Dominic Cummings hones the same message as he moves between his townhouse in Islington, with its library and tapestry room, and his family estate in Durham. Clearly, they don’t mean political or economic elites. They mean intellectuals: the students, teachers, professors and independent thinkers who oppose their policies. Anti-intellectualism is a resurgent force in politics.
  • Myths of national greatness and decline abound. Make America Great Again and Take Back Control propose a glorious homecoming to an imagined golden age. Conservatives and Republicans invoke a rich mythology of family life and patriarchal values. Large numbers of people in the United Kingdom regret the loss of empire.
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  • Extravagant buffoons, building their power base through the visual media, displace the wooden technocrats who once dominated political life. Debate gives way to symbols, slogans and sensation. Political parties that once tolerated a degree of pluralism succumb to cults of personality.
  • Politicians and political advisers behave with impunity. During the impeachment hearings, Trump’s lawyer argued, in effect, that the president is the nation, and his interests are inseparable from the national interest.
  • Trump shamelessly endorses nativism and white supremacy. Powerful politicians, such as the Republican congressman Steve King, talk of defending “western civilisation” against “subjugation” by its “enemies”. Minorities are disenfranchised. Immigrants are herded into detention centres.
  • Political structures still stand, but they are hollowed out, as power migrates into unaccountable, undemocratic spheres: conservative fundraising dinners, US political action committees, offshore trade tribunals, tax havens and secrecy regimes.
  • The bodies supposed to hold power to account, such as the Electoral Commission and the BBC, are attacked, disciplined and cowed. Politicians and newspapers launch lurid attacks against parliament, the judiciaryand the civil service.
  • Political lying becomes so rife that voters lose the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Conspiracy theories proliferate, distracting attention from the real ways in which our rights and freedoms are eroded
  • With every unpunished outrage against integrity in public life, trust in the system corrodes. The ideal of democracy as a shared civic project gives way to a politics of dominance and submission.
  • All these phenomena were preconditions for – or facilitators of – the rise of European fascism during the first half of the 20th century. I find myself asking a question I thought we would never have to ask again. Is the resurgence of fascism a real prospect, on either side of the Atlantic?
  • It is easier to define as a political method. While its stated aims may vary wildly, the means by which it has sought to grab and build power are broadly consistent. But I think it’s fair to say that though the new politics have some strong similarities to fascism, they are not the same thing.
  • Trump’s politics and Johnson’s have some characteristics that were peculiar to fascism, such as their constant excitation and mobilisation of their base through polarisation, their culture wars, their promiscuous lying, their fabrication of enemies and their rhetoric of betrayal
  • But there are crucial differences. Far from valorising and courting young people, they appeal mostly to older voters. Neither relies on paramilitary terror
  • Neither government seems interested in using warfare as a political tool.
  • Trump and Johnson preach scarcely regulated individualism: almost the opposite of the fascist doctrine of total subordination to the state.
  • Last century’s fascism thrived on economic collapse and mass unemployment. We are nowhere near the conditions of the Great Depression, though both countries now face a major slump in which millions could lose their jobs and homes.
  • Not all the differences are reassuring. Micro-targeting on social media, peer-to-peer texting and now the possibility of deepfake videos allow today’s politicians to confuse and misdirect people, to bombard us with lies and conspiracy theories, to destroy trust and create alternative realities more quickly and effectively than any tools 20th-century dictators had at their disposal.
  • this isn’t fascism. It is something else, something we have not yet named. But we should fear it and resist it as if it were.
Javier E

Opinion | This Is Why We Need to Spend $4 Trillion - The New York Times - 0 views

  • I’ve spent the past few weeks in a controlled fury — and I’m not normally a fury kind of guy. Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and others are trying to pass arguably the most consequential legislative package in a generation, and what did I sense in my recent travels across five states? The same thing I sense in my social media feed and on the various media most-viewed lists.Indifference.
  • here was a time when the phrase “the common man” was a source of pride and a high compliment.
  • Over the past few decades there has been a redistribution of dignity — upward
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  • From Reagan through Romney, the Republicans valorized entrepreneurs, C.E.O.s and Wall Street.
  • The Democratic Party became dominated by people in the creative class, who attended competitive colleges, moved to affluent metro areas, married each other and ladled advantages onto their kids so they could leap even farther ahead.
  • There was a bipartisan embrace of a culture of individualism, which opens up a lot of space for people with resources and social support but means loneliness and abandonment for people without. Four years of college became the definition of the good life, which left roughly two-thirds of the country out.
  • so came the crisis that Biden was elected to address — the poisonous combination of elite insularity and vicious populist resentment.
  • Read again Robert Kagan’s foreboding Washington Post essay on how close we are to a democratic disaster.
  • They are willing to torch our institutions because they are so resentful against the people who run them.
  • The Democratic spending bills are economic packages that serve moral and cultural purposes. They should be measured by their cultural impact, not merely by some wonky analysis.
  • In real, tangible ways, they would redistribute dignity back downward. They would support hundreds of thousands of jobs for home health care workers, child care workers, construction workers, metal workers, supply chain workers. They would ease the indignity millions of parents face having to raise their children in poverty.
  • Biden had it exactly right when he told a La Crosse, Wis., audience, “The jobs that are going to be created here — largely, it’s going to be those for blue-collar workers, the majority of whom will not have to have a college degree to have those jobs.”
  • we’re a nation enduring a national rupture, and the most violent parts of it may still be yet to come.
  • These packages say to the struggling parents and the warehouse workers: I see you. Your work has dignity. You are paving your way. You are at the center of our national vision.
  • This is how you fortify a compelling moral identity, which is what all of us need if we’re going to be able to look in the mirror with self-respect. This is the cultural transformation that good policy can sometimes achieve. Statecraft is soulcraft.
  • These measures would not solve our problems, obviously. In many large Western nations, there are vast tectonic forces concentrating wealth in the affluent metro areas and leaving vast swaths of the countryside behind. We don’t yet know how to do the sort of regional development that reverses this trend.
  • e can make it clear that we value people’s choices. For years, there was almost an officially approved life: Get a B.A., move to those places where capital and jobs are congregating, even if it means leaving your community, roots and extended family.
Javier E

Opinion | The Lost Boys of the American Right - The New York Times - 0 views

  • while I freely acknowledge that there was more racism on the right than I was willing or able to see before the rise of Trump, there has been a distinct change in young right-wing culture. It is dramatically different from what it was when I was in college, in law school and starting my legal career.
  • As I survey the right — especially the young, so-called new right — I see a movement in the grip of some rather simple but powerful cultural forces. Hatred, combined with masculine insecurity and cowardice, is herding young right-wing men into outright bigotry and prejudice
  • they’re not strong or tough or courageous. They’re timid sheep in wolves’ clothing, moving exactly where the loudest and most aggressive voices tell them to.
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  • The result is a relentless pull to the extremes.
  • A tiny fringe adopts this mind-set as a conscious ethos, but for a much larger group, it is simply their cultural reality. In their minds, the left is so evil — and represents such an existential threat — that any accommodation of it (or any criticism of the right) undermines the forces of light in their great battle against the forces of darkness.
  • To understand the cultural dynamic, I want to introduce you to an obscure online concept, no enemies to the right.
  • one of their prime reproofs of what they might call the zombie right, the Reagan right of their parents’ generation, is that it was simply too accommodating
  • As they see it, classical liberal politics, which preserve free speech and robust debate as a priority, emboldened and empowered the left. Compromise, in their view, ran only one way
  • here’s where masculine insecurity enters the equation. To the new right, their opposition to the left is so obviously correct that only moral cowardice or financial opportunism (“grifting”) can explain any compromise
  • To fight on the right — mainly by trolling on social media or embracing authoritarianism as the based alternative to weak-kneed classical liberalism — is seen as strong, courageous and cool. It’s a sign of a fierce and independent mind.
  • Thus, the troll isn’t just a troll; he’s a man. He’s a warrior.
  • What happens if you ask: Wait, are we going too far? Well, then, you’re weak and small. You become the grifter
  • even when one initially embraces bigotry “only” as a form of social transgression, marinating in that environment soon turns trolling into conviction
  • “What starts off as joking can very quickly become unironically internalized as an actual belief.”
  • It’s difficult to break the hold of bigotry and fury on the online right, but as is so often the case, the solution to online evil can be found in offline relationships, the family and friends who keep us grounded to the real.
  • encountering people in full, rather than as mere online avatars for hated ideas, can indeed soften hearts and change minds.
  • The lost boys of the American right corrupt our culture. Full of fury against their opponents and afraid of running afoul of their “friends,” they poison our politics and damage their own souls.
anonymous

This latest Palestinian uprising is a Facebook intifada - 1 views

  • hey are young, apparently unaffiliated with any political or terror group and brimming with fury over Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories
  • Palestinians participating in the uprising are largely apolitical youths who post videos, photos and commentary “showing the larger picture of occupation, which is a violent experience which all Palestinians believe it is legitimate to resist,”
  • collective experience
Javier E

How Facebook Warps Our Worlds - The New York Times - 0 views

  • THOSE who’ve been raising alarms about Facebook are right: Almost every minute that we spend on our smartphones and tablets and laptops, thumbing through favorite websites and scrolling through personalized feeds, we’re pointed toward foregone conclusions. We’re pressured to conform
  • We’re the real culprits. When it comes to elevating one perspective above all others and herding people into culturally and ideologically inflexible tribes, nothing that Facebook does to us comes close to what we do to ourselves.
  • I’m talking about how we use social media in particular and the Internet in general — and how we let them use us. They’re not so much agents as accomplices, new tools for ancient impulses, part of “a long sequence of technological innovations that enable us to do what we want
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  • “And one of the things we want is to spend more time with people who think like us and less with people who are different,” Haidt added. “The Facebook effect isn’t trivial. But it’s catalyzing or amplifying a tendency that was already there.”
  • prevalent for many users are the posts we see from friends and from other people and groups we follow on the network, and this information is utterly contingent on choices we ourselves make
  • The Internet isn’t rigged to give us right or left, conservative or liberal — at least not until we rig it that way. It’s designed to give us more of the same, whatever that same is
  • there’s no argument that in an era that teems with choice, brims with niche marketing and exalts individualism to the extent that ours does, we’re sorting ourselves with a chillingly ruthless efficiency. We’ve surrendered universal points of reference. We’ve lost common ground.
  • this colors our days, or rather bleeds them of color, reducing them to a single hue.
  • We construct precisely contoured echo chambers of affirmation that turn conviction into zeal, passion into fury, disagreements with the other side into the demonization of it
  • Carnival barkers, conspiracy theories, willful bias and nasty partisanship aren’t anything new, and they haven’t reached unprecedented heights today. But what’s remarkable and sort of heartbreaking is the way they’re fed by what should be strides in our ability to educate ourselves.
  • The proliferation of cable television networks and growth of the Internet promised to expand our worlds, not shrink them. Instead they’ve enhanced the speed and thoroughness with which we retreat into enclaves of the like-minded.
  • So it goes with the fiction we read, the movies we watch, the music we listen to and, scarily, the ideas we subscribe to. They’re not challenged. They’re validated and reinforced.
  • Marc Dunkelman, adding that it also makes it easier for us to avoid “face-to-face interactions with diverse ideas.” He touched on this in an incisive 2014 book, “The Vanishing Neighbor,” which belongs with Haidt’s work and with “Bowling Alone,” “Coming Apart” and “The Fractured Republic” in the literature of modern American fragmentation, a booming genre all its own.
  • We’re less committed to, and trustful of, large institutions than we were at times in the past. We question their wisdom and substitute it with the groupthink of micro-communities, many of which we’ve formed online, and their sensibilities can be more peculiar and unforgiving.
  • Facebook, along with other social media, definitely conspires in this. Haidt noted that it often discourages dissent within a cluster of friends by accelerating shaming. He pointed to the enforced political correctness among students at many colleges.
  • It’s not about some sorcerer’s algorithm. It’s about a tribalism that has existed for as long as humankind has and is now rooted in the fertile soil of the Internet, which is coaxing it toward a full and insidious flower
Javier E

Frightened by Donald Trump? You don't know the half of it | George Monbiot | Opinion | ... - 0 views

  • I first encountered the machine when writing about climate change. The fury and loathing directed at climate scientists and campaigners seemed incomprehensible until I realised they were fake: the hatred had been paid for. The bloggers and institutes whipping up this anger were funded by oil and coal companies.
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