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Javier E

Opinion | The G.O.P. Goes Full Authoritarian - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...itarian-states-power-grab.html

gop crisis politics trump

shared by Javier E on 11 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump, it turns out, may have been the best thing that could have happened to American democracy.
  • since the threat to democracy is much broader and deeper than one man, we’re actually fortunate that the forces menacing America have such a ludicrous person as their public face.
  • “How Democracies Die,” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. As the authors — professors of government at Harvard — point out, in recent decades a number of nominally democratic nations have become de facto authoritarian, one-party states. Yet none of them have had classic military coups, with tanks in the street.
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  • What we’ve seen instead are coups of a subtler form: takeovers or intimidation of the news media, rigged elections that disenfranchise opposing voters, new rules of the game that give the ruling party overwhelming control even if it loses the popular vote, corrupted courts.
  • The classic example is Hungary, where Fidesz, the white nationalist governing party, has effectively taken over the bulk of the media; destroyed the independence of the judiciary; rigged voting to enfranchise supporters and disenfranchise opponents; gerrymandered electoral districts in its favor; and altered the rules so that a minority in the popular vote translates into a supermajority in the legislature.
  • Does a lot of this sound familiar? It should. You see, Republicans have been adopting similar tactics — not at the federal level (yet), but in states they control.
  • There has been a fair amount of reporting on the power grab currently underway in Madison. Having lost every statewide office in Wisconsin last month, Republicans are using the lame-duck legislative session to drastically curtail these offices’ power, effectively keeping rule over the state in the hands of the G.O.P.-controlled Legislature. What has gotten less emphasis is the fact that G.O.P. legislative control is also undemocratic. Last month Democratic candidates received 54 percent of the votes in State Assembly elections — but they ended up with only 37 percent of the seats.
  • elections don’t matter, because the ruling party retains control no matter what voters do.
  • not a single prominent Republican in Washington has condemned the power grab in Wisconsin, the similar grab in Michigan, or even what looks like outright electoral fraud in North Carolina
  • Elected Republicans don’t just increasingly share the values of white nationalist parties like Fidesz or Poland’s Law and Justice; they also share those parties’ contempt for democracy. The G.O.P. is an authoritarian party in waiting.
  • whatever may happen to Donald Trump, his party has turned its back on democracy. And that should terrify you.
  • the G.O.P., as currently constituted, is willing to do whatever it takes to seize and hold power. And as long as that remains true, and Republicans remain politically competitive, we will be one election away from losing democracy in America.
Javier E

AI Is the Technocratic Elite's New Excuse for a Power Grab - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-pandemic-nuclear-war-3d00489e

elite power grab AI threat response crisis

shared by Javier E on 15 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • it seems increasingly likely that whatever else it may be, the AI menace, like every other supposed extinction-level threat man has faced in the past century or so, will prove a wonderful opportunity for the big-bureaucracy, global-government, all-knowing-regulator crowd to demand more authority over our freedoms, to transfer more sovereignty from individuals and nations to supranational experts and technocrats.
  • If I were cynical I’d speculate that these threats are, if not manufactured, at least hyped precisely so that the world can be made to fit with the technocratic mindset of those who believe they should rule over us, lest the ignorant whims of people acting without supervision destroy the planet.
  • Nuclear weapons, climate change, pandemics, and now AI—the remedies are always, strikingly, the same: more government; more control over free markets and private decisions, more borderless bureaucracy.
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  • in its brevity—and its provenance—it offers hints of where this is coming from and where they want it to go. “Risk of extinction” leaps straight to the usual Defcon 1 hysteria that demands immediate action. “Global priority” establishes the proper regulatory geography. Bracketing AI with the familiar nightmares of “pandemics and nuclear war” points to the sorts of authority required.
  • Many of the signatories also represent something of a giveaway: Oodles of Google execs, Bill Gates, a Democratic politician or two, many of the same people who have breathed the rarefied West Coast air of progressive technocratic orthodoxy for decades.
  • many of those who share their sentiments, are genuinely concerned about the risks of AI and are simply trying to raise a red flag about a matter of real concern—though we should probably note that techno-hysteria through history has rarely proved to be justified
  • nuclear annihilation has failed to materialize.
  • I suspect attempts to impose a world government would have been much more likely to result in an extinction-level nuclear war than the exercise by nations of their right to self-determination to resolve conflicts through the usual combination of diplomacy and force.
  • Climate change is the ne plus ultra of justifications for global regulation. It probably isn’t a coincidence that climate extremism and the demands for mandatory global controls exploded at exactly the moment old-fashioned Marxism was discredited for good in the 1990
  • the left suddenly found a climate threat it could use as a golden opportunity to regulate economic activity on a scale larger than anything Karl Marx could have imagined.
  • As for pandemics, our public-health masters showed by their actions over the past three years that they would like to encase us in a rigid panoply of rules to remediate a supposed extinction-level threat.
  • None of this is to diminish the challenges posed by AI. Thorough investigation into it, and healthy debate about how to maximize its opportunities and minimize its risks, are essential.
drewmangan1

One of Europe's most powerful jobs is up for grabs. It's a bad sign for the E... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-a0e6-d502d6751bc8_story.html

politics policy crisis economics

shared by drewmangan1 on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • The president of the European Parliament, a bit like the U.S. House speaker, has a sweeping ability to dictate the course of legislation that will affect the half-billion E.U. residents.
  • It is an easy institution to mock. Packed with 751 members, it cannot propose any legislation but can only give a stamp of approval to laws that emerge from the bureaucracy of the European Commission.
  • The presidency “is still one of the top five jobs that you can have in Europe,” he said. “It’s a big post and you need to respect it.”
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  • “This has been a result of the old boys’ network,”
  • “This is a deal among the establishment parties, but there are political revolutions going on in national politics,” said Heather Grabbe, head of the Open Society European Policy Institute.
Javier E

How Donald Trump Could Build an Autocracy in the U.S. - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513872

autocracy trump politics

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.
  • What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.
  • the American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency.
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  • The president of the United States, on the other hand, is restrained first and foremost by his own ethics and public spirit. What happens if somebody comes to the high office lacking those qualities?
  • Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.
  • As politics has become polarized, Congress has increasingly become a check only on presidents of the opposite party. Recent presidents enjoying a same-party majority in Congress—Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, George W. Bush from 2003 through 2006—usually got their way.
  • Trump has scant interest in congressional Republicans’ ideas, does not share their ideology, and cares little for their fate. He can—and would—break faith with them in an instant to further his own interests. Yet here they are, on the verge of achieving everything they have hoped to achieve for years, if not decades. They owe this chance solely to Trump’s ability to deliver a crucial margin of votes in a handful of states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—which has provided a party that cannot win the national popular vote a fleeting opportunity to act as a decisive national majority.
  • What excites Trump is his approval rating, his wealth, his power. The day could come when those ends would be better served by jettisoning the institutional Republican Party in favor of an ad hoc populist coalition, joining nationalism to generous social spending—a mix that’s worked well for authoritarians in places like Poland.
  • A scandal involving the president could likewise wreck everything that Republican congressional leaders have waited years to accomplish. However deftly they manage everything else, they cannot prevent such a scandal. But there is one thing they can do: their utmost not to find out about it.
  • Ryan has learned his prudence the hard way. Following the airing of Trump’s past comments, caught on tape, about his forceful sexual advances on women, Ryan said he’d no longer campaign for Trump. Ryan’s net favorability rating among Republicans dropped by 28 points in less than 10 days. Once unassailable in the party, he suddenly found himself disliked by 45 percent of Republicans.
  • Ambition will counteract ambition only until ambition discovers that conformity serves its goals better. At that time, Congress, the body expected to check presidential power, may become the president’s most potent enabler.
  • Discipline within the congressional ranks will be strictly enforced not only by the party leadership and party donors, but also by the overwhelming influence of Fox News.
  • Fox learned its lesson: Trump sells; critical coverage does not. Since the election, the network has awarded Kelly’s former 9 p.m. time slot to Tucker Carlson, who is positioning himself as a Trump enthusiast in the Hannity mold.
  • Gingrich said: The president “has, frankly, the power of the pardon. It is a totally open power, and he could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anybody finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period.’ And technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”
  • In 2009, in the run-up to the Tea Party insurgency, South Carolina’s Bob Inglis crossed Fox, criticizing Glenn Beck and telling people at a town-hall meeting that they should turn his show off. He was drowned out by booing, and the following year, he lost his primary with only 29 percent of the vote, a crushing repudiation for an incumbent untouched by any scandal.
  • Fox is reinforced by a carrier fleet of supplementary institutions: super pacs, think tanks, and conservative web and social-media presences, which now include such former pariahs as Breitbart and Alex Jones. So long as the carrier fleet coheres—and unless public opinion turns sharply against the president—oversight of Trump by the Republican congressional majority will very likely be cautious, conditional, and limited.
  • His immediate priority seems likely to be to use the presidency to enrich himself. But as he does so, he will need to protect himself from legal risk. Being Trump, he will also inevitably wish to inflict payback on his critics. Construction of an apparatus of impunity and revenge will begin haphazardly and opportunistically. But it will accelerate. It will have to.
  • By filling the media space with bizarre inventions and brazen denials, purveyors of fake news hope to mobilize potential supporters with righteous wrath—and to demoralize potential opponents by nurturing the idea that everybody lies and nothing matters
  • The United States may be a nation of laws, but the proper functioning of the law depends upon the competence and integrity of those charged with executing it. A president determined to thwart the law in order to protect himself and those in his circle has many means to do so.
  • The powers of appointment and removal are another. The president appoints and can remove the commissioner of the IRS. He appoints and can remove the inspectors general who oversee the internal workings of the Cabinet departments and major agencies. He appoints and can remove the 93 U.S. attorneys, who have the power to initiate and to end federal prosecutions. He appoints and can remove the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice.
  • Republicans in Congress have long advocated reforms to expedite the firing of underperforming civil servants. In the abstract, there’s much to recommend this idea. If reform is dramatic and happens in the next two years, however, the balance of power between the political and the professional elements of the federal government will shift, decisively, at precisely the moment when the political elements are most aggressive. The intelligence agencies in particular would likely find themselves exposed to retribution from a president enraged at them for reporting on Russia’s aid to his election campaign.
  • The McDonnells had been convicted on a combined 20 counts.
  • The Supreme Court objected, however, that the lower courts had interpreted federal anticorruption law too broadly. The relevant statute applied only to “official acts.” The Court defined such acts very strictly, and held that “setting up a meeting, talking to another official, or organizing an event—without more—does not fit that definition of an ‘official act.’ ”
  • Trump is poised to mingle business and government with an audacity and on a scale more reminiscent of a leader in a post-Soviet republic than anything ever before seen in the United States.
  • Trump will try hard during his presidency to create an atmosphere of personal munificence, in which graft does not matter, because rules and institutions do not matter. He will want to associate economic benefit with personal favor. He will create personal constituencies, and implicate other people in his corruption.
  • You would never know from Trump’s words that the average number of felonious killings of police during the Obama administration’s tenure was almost one-third lower than it was in the early 1990s, a decline that tracked with the general fall in violent crime that has so blessed American society. There had been a rise in killings of police in 2014 and 2015 from the all-time low in 2013—but only back to the 2012 level. Not every year will be the best on record.
  • A mistaken belief that crime is spiraling out of control—that terrorists roam at large in America and that police are regularly gunned down—represents a considerable political asset for Donald Trump. Seventy-eight percent of Trump voters believed that crime had worsened during the Obama years.
  • From the point of view of the typical Republican member of Congress, Fox remains all-powerful: the single most important source of visibility and affirmation with the voters whom a Republican politician cares about
  • Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency. It will be a resource. Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it—and the conservative entertainment-outrage complex will eagerly assist him
  • Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing antipolice slogans—these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see. The more offensively the protesters behave, the more pleased Trump will be.
  • If there is harsh law enforcement by the Trump administration, it will benefit the president not to the extent that it quashes unrest, but to the extent that it enflames more of it, ratifying the apocalyptic vision that haunted his speech at the convention.
  • In the early days of the Trump transition, Nic Dawes, a journalist who has worked in South Africa, delivered an ominous warning to the American media about what to expect. “Get used to being stigmatized as ‘opposition,’ ” he wrote. “The basic idea is simple: to delegitimize accountability journalism by framing it as partisan.”
  • Mostly, however, modern strongmen seek merely to discredit journalism as an institution, by denying that such a thing as independent judgment can exist. All reporting serves an agenda. There is no truth, only competing attempts to grab power.
  • In true police states, surveillance and repression sustain the power of the authorities. But that’s not how power is gained and sustained in backsliding democracies. Polarization, not persecution, enables the modern illiberal regime.
  • A would-be kleptocrat is actually better served by spreading cynicism than by deceiving followers with false beliefs: Believers can be disillusioned; people who expect to hear only lies can hardly complain when a lie is exposed.
  • The inculcation of cynicism breaks down the distinction between those forms of media that try their imperfect best to report the truth, and those that purvey falsehoods for reasons of profit or ideology. The New York Times becomes the equivalent of Russia’s RT; The Washington Post of Breitbart; NPR of Infowars.
  • Trump had not a smidgen of evidence beyond his own bruised feelings and internet flotsam from flagrantly unreliable sources. Yet once the president-elect lent his prestige to the crazy claim, it became fact for many people. A survey by YouGov found that by December 1, 43 percent of Republicans accepted the claim that millions of people had voted illegally in 2016.
  • A clear untruth had suddenly become a contested possibility. When CNN’s Jeff Zeleny correctly reported on November 28 that Trump’s tweet was baseless, Fox’s Sean Hannity accused Zeleny of media bias—and then proceeded to urge the incoming Trump administration to take a new tack with the White House press corps, and to punish reporters like Zeleny.
  • the whipping-up of potentially violent Twitter mobs against media critics is already a standard method of Trump’s governance.
  • I’ve talked with well-funded Trump supporters who speak of recruiting a troll army explicitly modeled on those used by Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russia’s Putin to take control of the social-media space, intimidating some critics and overwhelming others through a blizzard of doubt-casting and misinformation.
  • he and his team are serving notice that a new era in government-media relations is coming, an era in which all criticism is by definition oppositional—and all critics are to be treated as enemies.
  • “Lying is the message,” she wrote. “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”
  • lurid mass movements of the 20th century—communist, fascist, and other—have bequeathed to our imaginations an outdated image of what 21st-century authoritarianism might look like.
  • In a society where few people walk to work, why mobilize young men in matching shirts to command the streets? If you’re seeking to domineer and bully, you want your storm troopers to go online, where the more important traffic is. Demagogues need no longer stand erect for hours orating into a radio microphone. Tweet lies from a smartphone instead.
  • “Populist-fueled democratic backsliding is difficult to counter,” wrote the political scientists Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz late last year. “Because it is subtle and incremental, there is no single moment that triggers widespread resistance or creates a focal point around which an opposition can coalesce … Piecemeal democratic erosion, therefore, typically provokes only fragmented resistance.”
  • If people retreat into private life, if critics grow quieter, if cynicism becomes endemic, the corruption will slowly become more brazen, the intimidation of opponents stronger. Laws intended to ensure accountability or prevent graft or protect civil liberties will be weakened.
  • If the president uses his office to grab billions for himself and his family, his supporters will feel empowered to take millions. If he successfully exerts power to punish enemies, his successors will emulate his methods.
  • If citizens learn that success in business or in public service depends on the favor of the president and his ruling clique, then it’s not only American politics that will change. The economy will be corrupted too, and with it the larger cultur
  • A culture that has accepted that graft is the norm, that rules don’t matter as much as relationships with those in power, and that people can be punished for speech and acts that remain theoretically legal—such a culture is not easily reoriented back to constitutionalism, freedom, and public integrity.
  • The oft-debated question “Is Donald Trump a fascist?” is not easy to answer. There are certainly fascistic elements to him: the subdivision of society into categories of friend and foe; the boastful virility and the delight in violence; the vision of life as a struggle for dominance that only some can win, and that others must lose.
  • He is so pathetically needy, so shamelessly self-interested, so fitful and distracted. Fascism fetishizes hardihood, sacrifice, and struggle—concepts not often associated with Trump.
  • Perhaps the better question about Trump is not “What is he?” but “What will he do to us?”
  • By all early indications, the Trump presidency will corrode public integrity and the rule of law—and also do untold damage to American global leadership, the Western alliance, and democratic norms around the world
  • The damage has already begun, and it will not be soon or easily undone. Yet exactly how much damage is allowed to be done is an open question—the most important near-term question in American politics. It is also an intensely personal one, for its answer will be determined by the answer to another question: What will you do?
sgardner35

ISIS Hostages Endured Torture and Dashed Hopes, Freed Cellmates Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hostages-endured-in-syria.html

shared by sgardner35 on 26 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • What appeared to be a turning point was in fact the start of a downward spiral for Mr. Foley, a 40-year-old journalist, that ended in August when he was forced to his knees somewhere in the bald hills of Syria and beheaded as a camera rolled.
  • but as conditions grew more desperate, they turned on one another. Some, including Mr. Foley, sought comfort in the faith of their captors, embracing Islam and taking Muslim names.
  • More than an hour later, they flagged a taxi for the 25-mile drive to Turkey. They never reached the border.The gunmen who sped up behind their taxi did not call themselves the Islamic State because the group did not yet exist on Nov. 22, 2012, the day the two men were grabbed.
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  • The kidnappings, which were carried out by different groups of fighters jousting for influence and territory in Syria, became more frequent. In June 2013, four French journalists were abducted. In September, the militants grabbed three Spanish journalists.
  • At first, the abuse did not appear to have a larger purpose. Nor did the jihadists seem to have a plan for their growing number of hostages.Mr. Bontinck said Mr. Foley and Mr. Cantlie had first been held by the Nusra Front, a Qaeda affiliate. Their guards, an English-speaking trio whom they nicknamed “the Beatles,” seemed to take pleasure in brutalizing them.Later, they were handed over to a group called the Mujahedeen Shura Council, led by French speakers.Mr. Foley and Mr. Cantlie were moved at least three times before being transferred to a prison underneath the Children’s Hospital of Aleppo.
  • Mr. Foley converted to Islam soon after his capture and adopted the name Abu Hamza, Mr. Bontinck said. (His conversion was confirmed by three other recently released hostages, as well as by his former employer.)“I recited the Quran with him,” Mr. Bontinck said. “Most people would say, ‘Let’s convert so that we can get better treatment.’ But in his case, I think it was sincere.”
  • When Mr. Bontinck was released, he jotted down the phone number of Mr. Foley’s parents and promised to call them. They made plans to meet again.He left thinking that the journalists, like him, would soon be freed.
  • After months of holding them without making any demands, the jihadists suddenly devised a plan to ransom them. Starting last November, each prisoner was told to hand over the email address of a relative. Mr. Foley gave the address of his younger brother.The group sent a blitz of messages to the families of the hostages.Those who were able to lay the emails side by side could see they had been cut and pasted from the same template.
  • Within this subset, the person who suffered the cruelest treatment, the former hostages said, was Mr. Foley. In addition to receiving prolonged beatings, he underwent mock executions and was repeatedly waterboarded.
  • Mr. Foley shared his meager rations. In the cold of the Syrian winter, he offered another prisoner his only blanket.He kept the others entertained, proposing games and activities like Risk, a board game that involves moving imaginary armies across a map: another favorite pastime in the Foley family. The hostages made a chess set out of discarded paper. They re-enacted movies, retelling them scene by scene. And they arranged for members of the group to give lectures on topics they knew well.
  • By June, the cellblock that had once held at least 23 people had been reduced to just seven. Four of them were Americans, and three were British — all citizens of countries whose governments had refused to pay ransoms.
Javier E

Everything is up for grabs in Schrödinger's Brexit | John Crace | Politics | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-grabs-in-schrodingers-brexit

brexit

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The hardline Brexiters were as good as their word. There was no Brexit they could vote for. Bill Cash, Steve Baker, Owen Paterson and John Redwood had been very clear about that. They had devoted their lives to fighting those bastard Johnny Foreigners in Brussels and they weren’t going to let Brexit stop them. Imagine a life with nothing to moan about; nothing to get out of bed for. Without the EU, life was a meaningless void. They were the parasites who couldn’t survive without their host.
  • most MPs have long since said everything they had to say about Brexit. Like Lino, they too are now on repeat. The one exception was Dominic Raab who stood up to say that you would still need to be insane to support an exit deal as bad as the one the government had negotiated. But because he now realised he was clinically certifiable, he was going to vote for it. It was the first time anyone had ever launched a leadership bid by effectively ending it. His last remaining cohort of Spartans who would never take yes for an answer would never trust him again. A small win on the day
  • There was just one certainty. By voting with the government, Boris Johnson had traded his principles for his career. But then we had always known he would. Johnson’s untrustworthiness is the only solid thing the country has left to hang on to. A Newtonian rock in a Quantum Brexit. We really are that far up shit creek.
Javier E

Opinion | It's Not the Collusion, It's the Corruption - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mueller-report-corruption.html

trump crisis threat democracy report governance politics

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • The Mueller report is like a legal version of a thriller movie in which three malevolent forces are attacking a city all at once. Everybody’s wondering if the three attackers are working together. The report concludes that they weren't, but that doesn’t make the situation any less scary or the threat any less real
  • The first force is Donald Trump, who represents a threat to the American systems of governance
  • I don’t know if his actions meet the legal standard of obstruction of justice, but they certainly meet the common-sense standard of interference with justice.
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  • The second force is Russia. If Trump is a threat to the institutional infrastructure, the Russians are a threat to our informational infrastructure.
  • The third force is Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. They are a threat to our deliberative infrastructure. Any organization needs to be able to hold private conversations in order to deliberate
  • it shows that many of the Trumpists, the Russians and the WikiLeaks crowd all understood that they were somehow adjacent actors in the same project.
  • It’s easy to recognize when you are attacked head-on. But the U.S. is being attacked from below, at the level of the foundations we take for granted.
  • that’s the report’s central importance. We are being threatened in a very distinct way. The infrastructure of the society is under threat — the procedures that shape government, the credibility of information, the privacy rules that make deliberation possible.
  • These forces are motivated by self-interest, but their common feature is an operational nihilism. They are trying to sow disorder at the foundation of society. The goal is not really to convert anybody to a cause; it is to create cynicism and disruption that will open up the space to grab what you want to grab.
  • They rig the system and then tell everybody, “The system is rigged!” And therefore, all values are suspended. Everything is permitted.
  • today, across society, two things are happening: Referees are being undermined, and many are abandoning their own impartiality. (Think of the Wall Street regulators, the Supreme Court, the Senate committee chairmen, even many of us in the blessed media.)
  • The Mueller report indicates that Trump was not colluding with Russia. But it also shows that working relationships were beginning to be built
  • In all societies there are rules defining good conduct, and there are supposed to be impartial, honest referees that enforce those rules and make sure the game is fair.
anonymous

With Xi's Power Grab, China Joins New Era of Strongmen - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-jinping-authoritarianism.html

china history culture authoritarianism

shared by anonymous on 26 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • With Xi’s Power Grab, China Joins New Era of Strongmen
  • There was a time, not so long ago, when a Chinese leader setting himself up as ruler for life would have stirred international condemnation for bucking the global trend toward greater democracy. Now, such an action seems fully in keeping with moves by many countries in the other direction.
  • She and other experts described this “authoritarian reversion” as a global contagion that has undermined the abiding faith that forging liberal democracies and market economies was the surest path to prosperity and equality.
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  • The list includes Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, all of whom have abandoned most pretenses that they rule according to the people’s will.
  • There are many reasons for such moves by Mr. Xi and others — including protecting their power and perks in an age of unrest, terrorism and war amplified by new technologies — but a significant one is that few countries have the standing or authority, morally or otherwise, to speak out — least of all, critics say, the United States
  • The surprise disclosure on Sunday that the Communist Party was abolishing constitutional limits on presidential terms — effectively allowing President Xi Jinping to lead China indefinitely — was the latest and arguably most significant sign of the world’s decisive tilt toward authoritarian governance, often built on the highly personalized exercise of power.
  • Authoritarian leaders now act with greater impunity — or at least less worry about international isolation.
  • President Trump’s critics say that while he may not yet have eroded democracy in the United States, his populist appeals and nativist policies, his palpable aversion to the media and traditional checks on power, and his stated admiration for some of the strongest of strongmen are cut from the same cloth.
  • The trend toward authoritarianism, while specific to each country’s history, is rooted in insecurities and fears afflicting the world today: globalization and rising inequality, the stunning and scary advances in technology, the disorienting chaos and extreme violence of civil wars like Syria’s, separatism and terror.
  • Mr. Xi, as a result, believes that only stability can ensure his vision of China’s revival and emergence as the world’s power. “He seems to genuinely believe that he’s the only person who can achieve this vision,” she said. In last fall’s Communist Party congress, Mr. Xi even presented China as a new model for the developing world — a thinly veiled argument that the United States and Europe were no longer as attractive as they once were.
Javier E

'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth | Technology... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...tubes-algorithm-distorts-truth

algorithm disinformation russia election 2016 politics crisis

shared by Javier E on 02 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • There are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world, which is more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm, which skims and ranks billions of videos to identify 20 “up next” clips that are both relevant to a previous video and most likely, statistically speaking, to keep a person hooked on their screen.
  • Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth
  • YouTube engineers describe it as one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”
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  • Lately, it has also become one of the most controversial. The algorithm has been found to be promoting conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas mass shooting and incentivising, through recommendations, a thriving subculture that targets children with disturbing content
  • One YouTube creator who was banned from making advertising revenues from his strange videos – which featured his children receiving flu shots, removing earwax, and crying over dead pets – told a reporter he had only been responding to the demands of Google’s algorithm. “That’s what got us out there and popular,” he said. “We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took to please the algorithm.”
  • academics have speculated that YouTube’s algorithms may have been instrumental in fuelling disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. “YouTube is the most overlooked story of 2016,” Zeynep Tufekci, a widely respected sociologist and technology critic, tweeted back in October. “Its search and recommender algorithms are misinformation engines.”
  • Those are not easy questions to answer. Like all big tech companies, YouTube does not allow us to see the algorithms that shape our lives. They are secret formulas, proprietary software, and only select engineers are entrusted to work on the algorithm
  • Guillaume Chaslot, a 36-year-old French computer programmer with a PhD in artificial intelligence, was one of those engineers.
  • The experience led him to conclude that the priorities YouTube gives its algorithms are dangerously skewed.
  • Chaslot said none of his proposed fixes were taken up by his managers. “There are many ways YouTube can change its algorithms to suppress fake news and improve the quality and diversity of videos people see,” he says. “I tried to change YouTube from the inside but it didn’t work.”
  • Chaslot explains that the algorithm never stays the same. It is constantly changing the weight it gives to different signals: the viewing patterns of a user, for example, or the length of time a video is watched before someone clicks away.
  • The engineers he worked with were responsible for continuously experimenting with new formulas that would increase advertising revenues by extending the amount of time people watched videos. “Watch time was the priority,” he recalls. “Everything else was considered a distraction.”
  • Chaslot was fired by Google in 2013, ostensibly over performance issues. He insists he was let go after agitating for change within the company, using his personal time to team up with like-minded engineers to propose changes that could diversify the content people see.
  • He was especially worried about the distortions that might result from a simplistic focus on showing people videos they found irresistible, creating filter bubbles, for example, that only show people content that reinforces their existing view of the world.
  • “YouTube is something that looks like reality, but it is distorted to make you spend more time online,” he tells me when we meet in Berkeley, California. “The recommendation algorithm is not optimising for what is truthful, or balanced, or healthy for democracy.”
  • YouTube told me that its recommendation system had evolved since Chaslot worked at the company and now “goes beyond optimising for watchtime”.
  • It did not say why Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006, waited over a decade to make those changes
  • Chaslot believes such changes are mostly cosmetic, and have failed to fundamentally alter some disturbing biases that have evolved in the algorithm
  • It finds videos through a word search, selecting a “seed” video to begin with, and recording several layers of videos that YouTube recommends in the “up next” column. It does so with no viewing history, ensuring the videos being detected are YouTube’s generic recommendations, rather than videos personalised to a user. And it repeats the process thousands of times, accumulating layers of data about YouTube recommendations to build up a picture of the algorithm’s preferences.
  • Each study finds something different, but the research suggests YouTube systematically amplifies videos that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial.
  • When his program found a seed video by searching the query “who is Michelle Obama?” and then followed the chain of “up next” suggestions, for example, most of the recommended videos said she “is a man”
  • He believes one of the most shocking examples was detected by his program in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. As he observed in a short, largely unnoticed blogpost published after Donald Trump was elected, the impact of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was not neutral during the presidential race: it was pushing videos that were, in the main, helpful to Trump and damaging to Hillary Clinton.
  • “It was strange,” he explains to me. “Wherever you started, whether it was from a Trump search or a Clinton search, the recommendation algorithm was much more likely to push you in a pro-Trump direction.”
  • Trump won the electoral college as a result of 80,000 votes spread across three swing states. There were more than 150 million YouTube users in the US. The videos contained in Chaslot’s database of YouTube-recommended election videos were watched, in total, more than 3bn times before the vote in November 2016.
  • “Algorithms that shape the content we see can have a lot of impact, particularly on people who have not made up their mind,”
  • “Gentle, implicit, quiet nudging can over time edge us toward choices we might not have otherwise made.”
  • But what was most compelling was how often Chaslot’s software detected anti-Clinton conspiracy videos appearing “up next” beside other videos.
  • I spent weeks watching, sorting and categorising the trove of videos with Erin McCormick, an investigative reporter and expert in database analysis. From the start, we were stunned by how many extreme and conspiratorial videos had been recommended, and the fact that almost all of them appeared to be directed against Clinton.
  • “This research captured the apparent direction of YouTube’s political ecosystem,” he says. “That has not been done before.”
  • There were too many videos in the database for us to watch them all, so we focused on 1,000 of the top-recommended videos. We sifted through them one by one to determine whether the content was likely to have benefited Trump or Clinton. Just over a third of the videos were either unrelated to the election or contained content that was broadly neutral or even-handed. Of the remaining 643 videos, 551 were videos favouring Trump, while only only 92 favoured the Clinton campaign.
  • The sample we had looked at suggested Chaslot’s conclusion was correct: YouTube was six times more likely to recommend videos that aided Trump than his adversary.
  • The spokesperson added: “Our search and recommendation systems reflect what people search for, the number of videos available, and the videos people choose to watch on YouTube. That’s not a bias towards any particular candidate; that is a reflection of viewer interest.”
  • YouTube seemed to be saying that its algorithm was a neutral mirror of the desires of the people who use it – if we don’t like what it does, we have ourselves to blame. How does YouTube interpret “viewer interest” – and aren’t “the videos people choose to watch” influenced by what the company shows them?
  • Offered the choice, we may instinctively click on a video of a dead man in a Japanese forest, or a fake news clip claiming Bill Clinton raped a 13-year-old. But are those in-the-moment impulses really a reflect of the content we want to be fed?
  • YouTube’s recommendation system has probably figured out that edgy and hateful content is engaging. “This is a bit like an autopilot cafeteria in a school that has figured out children have sweet teeth, and also like fatty and salty foods,” she says. “So you make a line offering such food, automatically loading the next plate as soon as the bag of chips or candy in front of the young person has been consumed.”
  • Once that gets normalised, however, what is fractionally more edgy or bizarre becomes, Tufekci says, novel and interesting. “So the food gets higher and higher in sugar, fat and salt – natural human cravings – while the videos recommended and auto-played by YouTube get more and more bizarre or hateful.”
  • “This is important research because it seems to be the first systematic look into how YouTube may have been manipulated,” he says, raising the possibility that the algorithm was gamed as part of the same propaganda campaigns that flourished on Twitter and Facebook.
  • “We believe that the activity we found was limited because of various safeguards that we had in place in advance of the 2016 election, and the fact that Google’s products didn’t lend themselves to the kind of micro-targeting or viral dissemination that these actors seemed to prefer.”
  • Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, later wrote to the company about the algorithm, which he said seemed “particularly susceptible to foreign influence”. The senator demanded to know what the company was specifically doing to prevent a “malign incursion” of YouTube’s recommendation system. Walker, in his written reply, offered few specifics
  • Tristan Harris, a former Google insider turned tech whistleblower, likes to describe Facebook as a “living, breathing crime scene for what happened in the 2016 election” that federal investigators have no access to. The same might be said of YouTube. About half the videos Chaslot’s program detected being recommended during the election have now vanished from YouTube – many of them taken down by their creators. Chaslot has always thought this suspicious. These were videos with titles such as “Must Watch!! Hillary Clinton tried to ban this video”, watched millions of times before they disappeared. “Why would someone take down a video that has been viewed millions of times?” he asks
  • I shared the entire database of 8,000 YouTube-recommended videos with John Kelly, the chief executive of the commercial analytics firm Graphika, which has been tracking political disinformation campaigns. He ran the list against his own database of Twitter accounts active during the election, and concluded many of the videos appeared to have been pushed by networks of Twitter sock puppets and bots controlled by pro-Trump digital consultants with “a presumably unsolicited assist” from Russia.
  • “I don’t have smoking-gun proof of who logged in to control those accounts,” he says. “But judging from the history of what we’ve seen those accounts doing before, and the characteristics of how they tweet and interconnect, they are assembled and controlled by someone – someone whose job was to elect Trump.”
  • After the Senate’s correspondence with Google over possible Russian interference with YouTube’s recommendation algorithm was made public last week, YouTube sent me a new statement. It emphasised changes it made in 2017 to discourage the recommendation system from promoting some types of problematic content. “We appreciate the Guardian’s work to shine a spotlight on this challenging issue,” it added. “We know there is more to do here and we’re looking forward to making more announcements in the months ahead.”
  • In the months leading up to the election, the Next News Network turned into a factory of anti-Clinton news and opinion, producing dozens of videos a day and reaching an audience comparable to that of MSNBC’s YouTube channel. Chaslot’s research indicated Franchi’s success could largely be credited to YouTube’s algorithms, which consistently amplified his videos to be played “up next”. YouTube had sharply dismissed Chaslot’s research.
  • I contacted Franchi to see who was right. He sent me screen grabs of the private data given to people who upload YouTube videos, including a breakdown of how their audiences found their clips. The largest source of traffic to the Bill Clinton rape video, which was viewed 2.4m times in the month leading up to the election, was YouTube recommendations.
  • The same was true of all but one of the videos Franchi sent me data for. A typical example was a Next News Network video entitled “WHOA! HILLARY THINKS CAMERA’S OFF… SENDS SHOCK MESSAGE TO TRUMP” in which Franchi, pointing to a tiny movement of Clinton’s lips during a TV debate, claims she says “fuck you” to her presidential rival. The data Franchi shared revealed in the month leading up to the election, 73% of the traffic to the video – amounting to 1.2m of its views – was due to YouTube recommendations. External traffic accounted for only 3% of the views.
  • many of the other creators of anti-Clinton videos I spoke to were amateur sleuths or part-time conspiracy theorists. Typically, they might receive a few hundred views on their videos, so they were shocked when their anti-Clinton videos started to receive millions of views, as if they were being pushed by an invisible force.
  • In every case, the largest source of traffic – the invisible force – came from the clips appearing in the “up next” column. William Ramsey, an occult investigator from southern California who made “Irrefutable Proof: Hillary Clinton Has a Seizure Disorder!”, shared screen grabs that showed the recommendation algorithm pushed his video even after YouTube had emailed him to say it violated its guidelines. Ramsey’s data showed the video was watched 2.4m times by US-based users before election day. “For a nobody like me, that’s a lot,” he says. “Enough to sway the election, right?”
  • Daniel Alexander Cannon, a conspiracy theorist from South Carolina, tells me: “Every video I put out about the Clintons, YouTube would push it through the roof.” His best-performing clip was a video titled “Hillary and Bill Clinton ‘The 10 Photos You Must See’”, essentially a slideshow of appalling (and seemingly doctored) images of the Clintons with voiceover in which Cannon speculates on their health. It has been seen 3.7m times on YouTube, and 2.9m of those views, Cannon said, came from “up next” recommendations.
  • his research also does something more important: revealing how thoroughly our lives are now mediated by artificial intelligence.
  • Less than a generation ago, the way voters viewed their politicians was largely shaped by tens of thousands of newspaper editors, journalists and TV executives. Today, the invisible codes behind the big technology platforms have become the new kingmakers.
  • They pluck from obscurity people like Dave Todeschini, a retired IBM engineer who, “let off steam” during the election by recording himself opining on Clinton’s supposed involvement in paedophilia, child sacrifice and cannibalism. “It was crazy, it was nuts,” he said of the avalanche of traffic to his YouTube channel, which by election day had more than 2m views
Javier E

Health Experts Warily Eye XBB.1.5, the Latest Omicron Subvariant - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ovid-omicron-variants-xbb.html

pandemic policy history variants

shared by Javier E on 07 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • Most recombinant SARS-CoV-2 viruses have dwindled away in a matter of weeks or months, unable to outcompete other lineages. XBB, on the other hand, got a winning ticket in the genetic lottery.
  • From one parent, it gained a set of mutations that helped it evade antibodies from previous infections and vaccinations. From the other parent, it gained a separate set of mutations that made it even more evasive.
  • “XBB literally picked up the most possible mutations that it could possibly pick up from those two parents,” said Thomas Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London. The new combination made XBB one of the most evasive Omicron subvariants in existence last summer.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Recent experiments suggest that XBB paid a steep price for its power to evade immunity. The mutations allow it to escape antibodies by altering the shape of the protein, called spike, that covers its surface. But some of those mutations also make it harder for XBB spike proteins to grab tightly to cells — the first step required for an infection.
  • That loose grip may have lessened XBB’s advantage against other forms of the virus. In late 2022, it jostled alongside a number of other Omicron subvariants. In Singapore, XBB caused a surge in October, for example, while remaining rare in many other parts of the world.
  • As XBB multiplied, it continued to mutate into new forms. The earliest samples of XBB.1.5 were isolated in October in New York. The new subvariant gained one crucial mutation, known as F486P.
  • Yunlong Cao of Peking University and his colleagues tested out XBB.1.5 in dishes of cells, comparing how it fared against earlier forms of XBB. The researchers found that the F486P mutation allowed XBB.1.5 to grab tightly to cells again. But the new subvariant could still evade antibodies as well as earlier forms of XBB.
  • In Connecticut, for example, Nathan Grubaugh at Yale University and his colleagues found that by mid-December, other Omicron subvariants were falling. Only XBB.1.5 cases were growing. Dr. Grubaugh estimates that it is about 20 percent more transmissible than BQ.1, which had been the dominant form.
  • How severe XBB.1.5 infections are compared with other forms of the coronavirus is not yet clear. “It’s serious,” Dr. Grubaugh said. “I just don’t necessarily know if it’s really more serious than some of the other Omicron lineages in terms of the overall impact.”
  • XBB.1.5 has already spread to other countries, and is growing rapidly in Germany, Denmark and elsewhere in Europe
  • Scientists are already scanning new sequences being uploaded to an international database called GISAID in the hopes of spotting an upgraded version of XBB.1.5. But their job is getting harder because governments are pulling back on sequencing efforts. “Worldwide, sequencing has taken a real hit,” Dr. Peacock said.
  • The United States, which once lagged behind other nations, has managed to maintain a fairly strong sequencing effort. Without it, Dr. Peacock said, XBB.1.5 might have stayed below the radar for much longer. If XBB.1.5’s next generation is evolving somewhere with little sequencing, it may go undetected for some time to come.
  • Dr. Lemieux said that paring back on sequencing was a mistake, given how many infections and deaths the virus is still causing. “This is a part of public health,” he said.
Javier E

Robots and Robber Barons - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-robots-and-robber-barons.html

economics profit labor capital inequality US

shared by Javier E on 11 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down. The pie isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense.
  • Increasingly, profits have been rising at the expense of workers in general, including workers with the skills that were supposed to lead to success in today’s economy.
  • similar stories are playing out in many fields, including services like translation and legal research. What’s striking about their examples is that many of the jobs being displaced are high-skill and high-wage; the downside of technology isn’t limited to menial workers.
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  • there are two plausible explanations, both of which could be true to some extent. One is that technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage; the other is that we’re looking at the effects of a sharp increase in monopoly power. Think of these two stories as emphasizing robots on one side, robber barons on the other.
  • can innovation and progress really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even workers in general? I often encounter assertions that this can’t happen. But the truth is that it can, and serious economists have been aware of this possibility for almost two centuries. The early-19th-century economist David Ricardo is best known for the theory of comparative advantage, which makes the case for free trade; but the same 1817 book in which he presented that theory also included a chapter on how the new, capital-intensive technologies of the Industrial Revolution could actually make workers worse off, at least for a while — which modern scholarship suggests may indeed have happened for several decades.
  • increasing business concentration could be an important factor in stagnating demand for labor, as corporations use their growing monopoly power to raise prices without passing the gains on to their employees.
  • that shift is happening — and it has major implications. For example, there is a big, lavishly financed push to reduce corporate tax rates; is this really what we want to be doing at a time when profits are surging at workers’ expense? Or what about the push to reduce or eliminate inheritance taxes; if we’re moving back to a world in which financial capital, not skill or education, determines income, do we really want to make it even easier to inherit wealth?
Javier E

All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need, Courtesy of Bush and Obama - Conor Frieders... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...276635

tyranny US government powers abuse

shared by Javier E on 09 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Bush and Obama have built infrastructure any devil would lust after. Behold the items on an aspiring tyrant's checklist that they've provided their successors:A precedent that allows the president to kill citizens in secret without prior judicial or legislative reviewThe power to detain prisoners indefinitely without charges or trialOngoing warrantless surveillance on millions of Americans accused of no wrongdoing, converted into a permanent database so that data of innocents spied upon in 2007 can be accessed in 2027Using ethnic profiling to choose the targets of secret spying, as the NYPD did with John Brennan's blessingNormalizing situations in which the law itself is secret -- and whatever mischief is hiding in those secret interpretationsThe permissibility of droning to death people whose identities are not even known to those doing the killingThe ability to collect DNA swabs of people who have been arrested even if they haven't been convicted of anythingA torture program that could be restarted with an executive order
  • we're allowing ourselves to become a nation of men, not laws. Illegal spying? Torture? Violating the War Powers Resolution and the convention that mandates investigating past torture? No matter. Just intone that your priority is keeping America safe.
  • This isn't a argument about how tyranny is inevitable. It is an attempt to grab America by the shoulders, give it a good shake, and say: Yes, it could happen here, with enough historical amnesia, carelessness, and bad luck. We're not special. Our voters won't always pick good men and women to represent us.
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  • Stop acting like the president takes an oath to keep us safe, when his job is to protect and defend the Constitution. Doing so keeps the American project safe.
  • Past generations fought monarchies, slaveholders, and Nazis to win, expand, and protect that project. And we're so risk-averse -- not that we're actually minimizing risk -- that we're "balancing" the very rights in our Constitution against a threat with an infinitesimal chance of killing any one of us
  • the national-security state, loosed of the Constitution's safeguards, is a far bigger threat to liberty than al-Qaeda will ever be. Vesting it with more power every year -- expanding its size, power, and functions in secret without any debate about the wisdom of the particulars -- is an invitation to horrific abuses, and it renders the concept of government by the people a joke.
izzerios

On the Trail With Gary Johnson - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gary-johnson-campaign.html

gary johnson politics

shared by izzerios on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s candidate for president, will be on the presidential ballot in all 50 states
  • the first time a third-party candidate has managed that feat in 20 years
  • But Mr. Johnson, a 63-year-old former governor of New Mexico, is walking a lonely road. While his name may be familiar, his face is not
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  • Last week, he missed the chance to make his case to more than 80 million Americans, when he fell shy of the 15 percent polling average needed for inclusion in the first presidential debate.
  • To the extent that Mr. Johnson has managed to generate coverage of his candidacy, the headlines have typically not been confidence inspiring
  • A competitive triathlete who has run 20 marathons, climbed the tallest mountains on all seven continents and almost died — twice — on gas ballooning adventures, he is not easily deterred.
  • He defines himself as a social liberal, a fiscal conservative and a military isolationist.
  • This is not the first time Mr. Johnson has run a long-shot campaign for the presidency. He won just 1 percent of the popular vote as the Libertarian Party’s candidate in 2012, after first competing for the Republican nomination
  • He has even won a handful of newspaper endorsements — more, in fact, than Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee — including, most prominently, that of The Chicago Tribune.
  • Mr. Johnson is polling especially well in Ohio and Colorado, which could both still be up for grabs.
Megan Flanagan

Road to 270: CNN's general election map - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

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

US politics election

shared by Megan Flanagan on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • both states appear to be snapping back to their traditional toss-up status
  • back in the "battleground" category
  • districts worth a total of 87 electoral votes.
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  • - Florida (29) moves from "lean Democratic" to "battleground"
  • Nevada (6) moves from "lean Democratic" to "battleground"
  • Florida is also one of the handful of states where the Clinton campaign remains heavily on the air with campaign advertising and where it announced today that two closing argument ads will begin to be seen across the state
  • Florida's 29 electoral votes are the biggest prize on the map among competitive states and both campaigns plan to fight it out there all the way through November 8
  • expected back in the Silver State
  • Trump continues to shore up his Republican support and improve his standing among Hispanics
  • Clinton at 272 electoral votes
  • 179 electoral votes from the states either solidly or leaning in his direction
  • 87 electoral votes currently up for grabs
ethanmoser

Trump Calls NBC Release of 2005 Video 'An Illegal Act' - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ideo-an-illegal-act-1477616180

trump nbc illegal politics us release

shared by ethanmoser on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Trump Calls NBC Release of 2005 Video ‘An Illegal Act’ Republican candidate threatens to take legal action against the network
  • Republican nominee Donald Trump on Thursday said it was “an illegal act” for NBC to release earlier this month a 2005 videotape of him making lewd comments about women, and threatened to take legal action against the network.
  • Mr. Trump once again defended his comments—in which he said of groping women, “when you’re a star, they let you do it”—as “locker-room talk,” and added: “The microphone was not supposed to be on—not that I make that as an excuse for myself, but certainly it was an illegal act that was NBC. It was not supposed to be on.”
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  • “Oh, absolutely. You know that was a private dressing room—yeah that was certainly illegal, no question about it.”
  • “Just kiss. I don’t even wait”—and said, “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” Mr. Trump was speaking to then-“Access Hollywood” anchor , who has since been fired by the network.
zachcutler

Defusing ISIS bombs with bare hands and little else - CNN.com - 0 views

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

isis US crisis

shared by zachcutler on 25 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Defusing ISIS bombs with bare hands and little else
  • Along a dusty village track just 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Mosul, a Peshmerga pick up truck leads us to a small house. We drive slowly, and in single file. There are hidden dangers all around.
  • It is a sobering show and tell -- and it isn't over yet. He brings us a suicide belt worn by an ISIS fighter who was killed before he could detonate it. Captain Sadk defused this deadly explosive too -- and an even bigger one he produces from the back of the pick up.
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  • All in a day's work for Kurdish teams led by men like Captain Sadk. Clearly, it's a dangerous job, but it has been particularly deadly for the Kurds, who have precious little in the way of high-tech equipment or training. For most here it's a learn-on-the-job affair, involving old metal detectors, wire clippers and bare hands. No body armor for many -- let alone bomb disposal suits. This is not "The Hurt Locker" movie.
  • As Kurdish and Iraqi forces edge ever closer to Mosul, ISIS fighters fall back. But in their absence, they leave behind their ability to kill and maim.
  • "They put them on the road, in the houses," he says. "We liberate a village and they are everywhere -- people come back to their homes, open a door or even a refrigerator and it blows up."
  • On the road back to Erbil, we see dozens of small trucks laden with personal effects -- residents of now liberated villages who returned briefly to grab whatever they could before leaving again. They're not ready to return, and for good reason.
  • Just how many IEDs and booby-traps are along the roads and in the villages around Mosul is impossible to tell. Brigadier General Mzuri tells us his men have spent three months trying to clear one village and still aren't finished.Clearing this area of rigged explosives will take longer -- much longer -- than the battle for Mosul itself.
Javier E

Barack Obama and Bryan Cranston on the Roles of a Lifetime - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-cranston-table-for-three.html

obama presidency reflection politics

shared by Javier E on 07 May 16 - No Cached
  • BO: There’s a wonderful quote that I thought was L.B.J.’s, but I could never verify it: “Every man is either trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes.
  • I had the benefit of a great relationship with my mom, and she taught me the essential elements of parenting: unconditional love and explaining your values to your kids, having high expectations.
  • I live above the store. We’ve been able to schedule, pretty religiously, dinner at 6:30 every night for the last eight years. If I had a trip, I might be gone for a few days. But as busy as I was, I was able to go upstairs, have dinner. They don’t want you for more than an hour once they hit teenage.
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  • The one thing I never lost, in a way that somebody like L.B.J. might have — who was hungry for the office in a way that I wasn’t — is my confidence that, with my last breath, what I will remember will be some moment with my girls, not signing the health care law or giving a speech at the U.N.
  • What’s felt like a burden is seeing how politics has changed in ways that make it harder for Washington to work. There are a set of traditions, a constitutional design that allows someone like L.B.J. or F.D.R. to govern. And when those norms break down, the machinery grinds to a halt. That’s when you feel burdened
  • if you had to choose a moment in human history to live — even if you didn’t know what gender or race, what nationality or sexual orientation you’d be — you’d choose now. There’s power in nostalgia, but the fact is the world is wealthier, healthier, better educated, less violent, more tolerant, more socially conscious and more attentive to the vulnerable than it has ever bee
  • I’m old enough to remember the ’70s, when we were still getting out of Vietnam, and we had lost tens of thousands of young soldiers. And when they came back home, they were completely abandoned. We left an entire swath of Southeast Asia in chaos. In Cambodia, two million people were slaughtered — about four times the number of people who have been killed in Syria during this conflict. But we don’t remember that.
  • it’s true that the political landscape has changed in ways that are really unhealthy. But there are fewer lubricants to get things done. L.B.J. did great things, but he also relied on bagmen and giving them favors for which I would be in jail or impeached. People are surprised when I say that Congress is less corrupt now than it’s ever been.
  • my optimism springs from the fact that ordinary people are less narrow-minded, more open to difference, more thoughtful than they were during L.B.J.’s time. The question for me is how do I grab hold of that goodness that’s out there and drag it into the political process? I think it requires some new institutional structure for more citizen participation than we’ve had in the past.
  • The one area that I do feel confident about is the notion of an inclusive nation, that everybody is part of this story. That’s a running theme I’ve been faithful to throughout my presidency.
  • never underrate the power of stories. Lyndon Johnson got the Civil Rights Act done because of the stories he told and the ones [Martin Luther] King told. When L.B.J. says, “We shall overcome” in the chamber of the House of Representatives, he is telling the nation who we are. Culture is vital in shaping our politics. Part of what I’ve always been interested in as president, and what I will continue to be interested in as an ex-president, is telling better stories about how we can work together.
Javier E

My beef over Hillary Clinton's loss is with liberal feminists, young and old | Opinion ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...lary-clinton-liberal-feminists

hillary loss election liberal failure poll politics

shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Here’s my own beef. Liberal feminists, young and old, need to question the role they played in Hillary’s demise. The two weeks of media hyperventilation over grab-her-by the-pussygate, when the airwaves were saturated with aghast liberal women equating Trump’s gross comments with sexual assault, had the opposite effect on multiple women voters in the Heartland.
  • These are resilient women, often working two or three jobs, for whom boorish men are an occasional occupational hazard, not an existential threat. They rolled their eyes over Trump’s unmitigated coarseness
  • they wondered why his behaviour was any worse than Bill’s.
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  • The angry white working class men who voted in such strength for Trump do not live in an emotional vacuum. They are loved by white working class women – their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers, who participate in their remaindered pain. It is everywhere in the interviews. “My dad lost his business”, “My husband hasn’t been the same since his job at the factory went away”.
  • Trump’s reality show crassness was another blind spot with elite liberals covering the election and running Hillary’s campaign. At every moment when the Trump tribe streamed behind him on to the convention stage or the tarmac, America saw images of a Kardashian Camelot: a phalanx of GQ men and leggy, gorgeous women following the heavy set guy who had a private 757 plane and a gold tower with his name on it.
  • While commentators sniggered, millions saw the all-American success they dreamed of. They rooted for the guy who had it but was despised by the elites for having it
Javier E

Richard Rorty's 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-election-2016-was-coming.html

election 2016 leftist Democratic party working class redistribution globalization justice rorty

shared by Javier E on 24 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book
  • It’s worth rereading those tweeted paragraphs:[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. … One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
  • His basic contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting.
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  • But during the 1960s, shame — over Vietnam, over the serial humiliation of African-Americans — transformed a good portion of the left, at least the academic left, into a disaffected gang of spectators, rather than agitators for change
  • . A formalized despair became its philosophy. The system was beyond reform. The best one could do was focus on its victims.
  • The result was disastrous. The alliance between the unions and intellectuals, so vital to passing legislation in the Progressive Era, broke down. In universities, cultural and identity politics replaced the politics of change and economic justice.
  • at the very moment “socially accepted sadism” — good phrase, that — was diminishing, economic instability and inequality were increasing, thanks to globalization.
  • “This world economy will soon be owned by a cosmopolitan upper class which has no more sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American capitalists of the year 1900.”
  • People are furiously arguing about what played a key role in this election — whether it was white working-class despair, a racist backlash or terror about the pace of cultural change. It seems reasonable to think that all three played a part.
  • Which left the white working-class guy and gal up for grabs — open to right-wing populists, maybe even strongmen.
  • “Outside the academy,” he wrote, “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.”
  • “Why could not the left,” he asked, “channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?”
  • Right through the ’90s and into the 2000s, we had left-of-center politicians singing the praises of hope, rather than the hopelessness that Mr. Rorty decries. Bill Clinton explicitly campaigned as the “man from Hope,” and Barack Obama would later campaign on a platform of “hope” and “change.” In passing health care reform, Mr. Obama genuinely did something for the immiserated underclass, and both men, in their ways, rejected identity politics.
  • But it wasn’t enough, obviously. “Under Presidents Carter and Clinton,” Mr. Rorty wrote, “the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from the unions and from any mention of redistribution.” Mr. Clinton was particularly guilty of this charge, passing Nafta, appointing Robert Rubin as his Treasury secretary and enthusiastically embracing financial deregulation. Mr. Obama pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And he was one of those fancy elites.
  • This group included intellectuals, by the way, who, he wrote, are “ourselves quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization.”
  • What’s so striking about “Achieving Our Country” is that it blends these theories into a common argument: The left, both cultural and political, eventually abandoned economic justice in favor of identity politics, leaving too many people feeling freaked out or ignored.
  • “It is as if the American Left could not handle more than one initiative at a time,” Mr. Rorty wrote. “As if it either had to ignore stigma in order to concentrate on money, or vice versa.”
Javier E

In Poland, a window on what happens when populists come to power - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-92e8-c07f4f671da4_story.html

poland populism demagogue culture politics trump crisis

shared by Javier E on 19 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The Law and Justice Party rode to power on a pledge to drain the swamp of Polish politics and roll back the legacy of the previous administration. One year later, its patriotic revolution, the party proclaims, has cleaned house and brought God and country back to Poland
  • Opponents, however, see the birth of a neo-Dark Age — one that, as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to move into the White House, is a harbinger of the power of populism to upend a Western society. In merely a year, critics say, the nationalists have transformed Poland into a surreal and insular place — one where state-sponsored conspiracy theories and de facto propaganda distract the public as democracy erodes.
  • Embracing the new government, to some measure, also means buying into the disturbing worldview it sells: You can only trust a Pole — even then, only some.
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  • Cheered on by religious conservatives, the new government has defunded public assistance for in vitro fertilization treatments. To draft new sexual-education classes in schools, it tapped a contraceptives opponent who argues that condom use increases the risk of cancer in women. The government is proffering a law that critics say could soon be used to limit opposition protests.
  • Yet nothing has shocked liberals more than this: After a year in power, Law and Justice is still by far the most popular political party in Poland. It rides atop opinion polls at roughly 36 percent — more than double the popularity of the ousted Civic Platform party.
  • Trump is promising a tax code rework that could trigger a bonanza of cash rebates for Americans. In Poland, Law and Justice put cash in pockets in other ways, but always while merging social conservatism and nationalism with populist economics. The new government doled out money to families with children. They also slashed Poland’s retirement age — to as young as 60 for women and 65 for men.
  • Opponents call such actions the “buying” of support, moves that will only drive up Polish debt and masquerade a long-term power grab that could entrench Law and Justice for years.
  • In the land of Law and Justice, anti-intellectualism is king. Polish scientists are aghast at proposed curriculum changes in a new education bill that would downplay evolution theory and climate change and add hours for “patriotic” history lessons. In a Facebook chat, a top equal rights official mused that Polish hotels should not be forced to provide service to black or gay customers. After the official stepped down for unrelated reasons, his successor rejected an international convention to combat violence against women because it appeared to argue against traditional gender roles.
  • And the party’s views have never been more effectively disseminated. The national broadcaster in Poland would often tilt toward the party in power. But following its victory, Law and Justice launched an unprecedented purge of journalists at the channel, turning it into what opponents describe as a propaganda machine where conspiracy theories flourish. It recently ran a piece on the health risks of child vaccinations. 
  • The new government is also skeptical of the Paris climate change agreement to cut carbon emissions and has pulled support for Polish wind and solar farms. At the same time, it is pumping more money into coal.  “Who really knows what is causing global warming?” Pawel said. “And Poland needs the coal industry.”
  • There is no more talk in Poland, for instance, of offering any legal rights to same-sex couples. Earlier this year, the office of a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender group in Warsaw was badly vandalized. Police never caught the perpetrators. “Homosexuality was quiet before, then they tried to normalize it,” she said. “You don’t see that happening now.” 
  • Already, the new government has taken steps to limit the power of the constitutional court, chipping away, critics say, at checks and balances. A new draft law would also allow government-appointed governors the right to decide on future permits for demonstrations. 
  • “I’m here marching because it may be the last time we’re allowed to,” she said. “I don’t think many of us really understand what’s happening in Poland.”
  • Mizolebska said she is deeply concerned about what sees as an attack on women’s reproductive rights. A near-total abortion ban — women and doctors faced up to five years in jail — was defeated in October after a massive street protest. But she fears it may yet come back.
  • She is also concerned about a new proposed school curriculum the Polish Academy of Sciences says will marginalize evolution theory by reducing its prominence in some grades. Sciences more generally would receive less time, in favor of more hours for Polish history. 
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