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Javier E

Madison's nightmare - Political theorists have been worrying about mob rule for 2,000 y... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-about-mob-rule-for-2000-years

democracy mob Plato aristotle political theory history revolution

shared by Javier E on 02 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • It is naive to assume that mobs will be confined to the “nice” side of the political spectrum; the left-wing kind by their nature generate the right-wing sort. It is doubly naive to expect that mobs will set limits; it is in their nature to run out of control
  • Political philosophers have been making these points for more than 2,000 years.
  • Even liberal thinkers worried that democracy might give rise to “mobocracy”. They argued that the will of the people needed to be restrained by a combination of constitutional intricacy (individual rights, and checks and balances) and civic culture. The wiser among them added that the decay of such restraints could transform democracy into mob rule.
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  • The first great work of political philosophy, Plato’s “Republic”, was, in part, a meditation on the evils of mob rule. Plato regarded democracy as little more than mob rule by another name—perhaps without the violence, at least at first, but with the same lack of impulse control.
  • He noted that democracies are hard-wired to test boundaries.
  • Plato also argued that democracies inevitably degenerate into anarchy, as the poor plunder the rich and profligacy produces bankruptcy.
  • Anarchy leads to the rule of tyrants: a bully can appeal to the mob’s worst instincts precisely because he is ruled by his own worst instincts
  • this changed with the French and American revolutions, which were based on contrasting approaches to mob rule.
  • Aristotle, Plato’s great pupil, distinguished between three legitimate forms of government: kingship, aristocracy and democracy. He argued that they each have their dark shadows: tyranny, oligarchy and mob rule
  • He then outlined the ways in which these virtuous forms of government evolve into their opposites: democracy becomes mob rule when the rich hog the society’s wealth
  • A more practical thinker than Plato, Aristotle argued that there were two ways of preventing democracy from degenerating into mobocracy: mix in elements of kingship and aristocracy to restrain the will of the people; and create a large middle class with a stake in stability.
  • Machiavelli speculated that clever princes might be able to profit from chaos if they could forge the mob into a battering-ram against a decaying regime
  • Mostly elites were content with demonisation
  • He is, as it were, the mob in the form of a single person
  • The French Revolution also produced a robust conservative critique of mob rule—first in Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France
  • Samuel Huntington warned that “democratic overload”, with too many interest groups demanding too much from the state, would lead to democratic disillusionment as the state failed to live up to its ever-escalating promises.
  • Burke recognised that the mob has a collective psychology that makes it uniquely dangerous. It is a “monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations”. It relishes wild abandon—“horrid yells”, “shrilling screams” and the “unutterable abominations of the furies of hell”. It gets so carried away with its own righteous bloodlust that even normally decent people can be transformed into monsters.
  • He predicted that the revolution would end in the massacre of thousands (including the king, queen and priests) and the rise of a dictator who could restore law and order.
  • The cycle of mass protest followed by violence followed by dictatorship set a pattern for subsequent revolutions in Russia (1917), Cuba (1958) and elsewhere.
  • The American revolution succeeded where the French revolution and its progeny failed because it was based on a considered fear of “the confusion and intemperance of a multitude”.
  • “Federalist No. 55”, written by either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton, is particularly sharp on the way that ill-designed institutions can turn even sensible citizens into a baying crowd: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob”.
  • The Founding Fathers argued that democracy could avoid becoming mobocracy only if it was hedged with a series of restraints to control the power of the people.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville added his own worries about mob rule in “Democracy in America”. For him the constitution alone is not strong enough to save democracy from the mob. A vigorous civic culture rooted in self-governing communities (he was particularly keen on New England’s townships) and a self-reliant and educated population are also necessary
  • So too is a responsible elite that recognises that its first duty is to “educate democracy”
  • The 19th century saw the world’s ruling elites reconciling themselves to the fact that democracy was the wave of the future. How you dealt with this wave depended largely on your attitude to the mob.
  • Pessimists held that delay was the best way to avert the mob.
  • This sort of pessimism has been out of fashion for a long time. The second world war and the defeat of Nazism led to an era of democratic self-confidence, and the fall of the Berlin Wall to one of democratic euphoria.
  • But a few pessimists continued to warn that democracies might well degenerate into mob rule if they neglected the health of their political institutions and civic culture. Seymour Martin Lipset, an American sociologist, echoed Aristotle’s view that a healthy democracy requires broad-based prosperity.
  • Harvey Mansfield, a political philosopher, reiterated Tocqueville’s worry that civic decay might corrupt democracy
  • many changed their minds when they discovered that, far from unleashing man’s natural goodness, the revolution had set free his inner demons. Those who stuck with the revolution despite the guillotine and the Terror did so on two grounds: that the old regime was responsible for the violence because it created so much pent-up hatred; and that you cannot improve the world without bloodshed.
  • In recent years the pessimists have grown in number
  • The election of Mr Trump, a reality-TV star, raised profound questions about the health of America’s political regime. Can democracy survive if television channels make billions of dollars by peddling misinformation and partisanship?
  • Or if wealthy people can invest vast sums of money in the political process?
  • Or if society is polarised into a superclass and a demoralised proletariat? Recent events suggest that the answer is “no”.
  • The age of democratic naivety died on January 6th. It is time for an age of democratic sophistication
  • Democracies may well be the best safeguard against mob rule, as liberal democrats have been preaching for centuries. But they can be successful only if countries put the necessary effort into nurturing democratic institutions: guarding against too much inequality, ensuring that voters have access to objective information, taming money in politics and reinforcing checks and balances.
  • Otherwise the rule of the people will indeed become the rule of the mob, and the stable democratic order that flourished from the second world war onwards will look like a brief historical curiosity.
malonema1

The Pritzker Prize, Architecture's Most Prestigious Award, Gets Political | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...e-prizes-political-crazy-world

us

shared by malonema1 on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Even Architecture Prizes Are Political In This Crazy World Related Galleries Stunning Images Show the Earth's Imperiled Water Even Architecture Prizes Are Political In This Crazy World The FCC Graciously Sets Internet Providers Free to Sell Your Data Keeping Fentanyl Out of the US Will Take More Than a Wall Range Rover's New Baby SUV Will Swaddle You for $50,000
  • “Each building can only be in the place that it is located,”
  • “That place involves the climate, the topography, the history, the culture, and the landscape, including the sky and the stars. Yet you don’t have to be from that place to experience it, to feel uplifted, or feel at peace, or feel emotional, or feel good.” Put differently, RCR Arquitectes stands in as a metaphor for appreciating otherness in the world.
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  • Consider RCR Arquitectes’ choice to run its shop in a town of 30,000 people, instead of the nearby metropolis Barcelona. It’s quaint in that way—practically mom-and-pop. Yet, the firm’s three architects work collaboratively, building open structures that anyone can enjoy, the jury says. It’s a much lighter declaration than choosing, say, a woman like Jeanne Gang or an Iranian practice like Admun Studio.
  • RCR Arquitectes’s buildings evoke the same sentiment, by letting light and greenery inside.
Javier E

James Madison's Mob-Rule Fears Have Been Realized - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...568351

democracy government Founding history

shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • To prevent factions from distorting public policy and threatening liberty, Madison resolved to exclude the people from a direct role in government. “A pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction,” Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 10.”
  • The Framers designed the American constitutional system not as a direct democracy but as a representative republic, where enlightened delegates of the people would serve the public good. They also built into the Constitution a series of cooling mechanisms intended to inhibit the formulation of passionate factions, to ensure that reasonable majorities would prevail.
  • Madison, however, thought Plato’s small-republic thesis was wrong. He believed that the ease of communication in small republics was precisely what had allowed hastily formed majorities to oppress minorities. “Extend the sphere” of a territory, Madison wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Madison predicted that America’s vast geography and large population would prevent passionate mobs from mobilizing. Their dangerous energy would burn out before it could inflame others.
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  • Madison’s worst fears of mob rule have been realized—and the cooling mechanisms he designed to slow down the formation of impetuous majorities have broken.
  • We are living, in short, in a Madisonian nightmare. How did we get here, and how can we escape?
  • During the election of 1912, the progressive populists Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson insisted that the president derived his authority directly from the people. Since then, the office has moved in precisely the direction the Founders had hoped to avoid: Presidents now make emotional appeals, communicate directly with voters, and pander to the mob.
  • Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms have accelerated public discourse to warp speed, creating virtual versions of the mob. Inflammatory posts based on passion travel farther and faster than arguments based on reason. Rather than encouraging deliberation, mass media undermine it by creating bubbles and echo chambers in which citizens see only those opinions they already embrace.
  • The polarization of Congress, reflecting an electorate that has not been this divided since about the time of the Civil War, has led to ideological warfare between parties that directly channels the passions of their most extreme constituents and donors—precisely the type of factionalism the Founders abhorred.
  • Whatever benefits the parties offered in the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, have long since disappeared. The moderating effects of parties were undermined by a series of populist reforms, including the direct election of senators, the popular-ballot initiative, and direct primaries in presidential elections, which became widespread in the 1970s.
  • As the historian Sean Wilentz has noted, the great movements for constitutional and social change in the 19th century—from the abolition of slavery to the Progressive movement—were the product of strong and diverse political parties.
  • The Founders’ greatest failure of imagination was in not anticipating the rise of mass political parties. The first parties played an unexpected cooling function, uniting diverse economic and regional interests through shared constitutional visions
  • More recently, geographical and political self-sorting has produced voters and representatives who are willing to support the party line at all costs. After the Republicans took both chambers of Congress in 1994, the House of Representatives, under Speaker Newt Gingrich, adjusted its rules to enforce party discipline, taking power away from committee chairs and making it easier for leadership to push bills into law with little debate or support from across the aisle.
  • The rise of what the presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called the “imperial presidency” has unbalanced the equilibrium among the three branches. Modern presidents rule by executive order rather than consulting with Congress. They direct a massive administrative state, with jurisdiction over everything from environmental policy to the regulation of the airwaves.
  • The passions, hyper-partisanship, and split-second decision making that Madison feared from large, concentrated groups meeting face-to-face have proved to be even more dangerous from exponentially larger, dispersed groups that meet online.
  • some promising, if modest, fixes are on the horizon. Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who leads an independent commission that will examine the impact of Facebook on democracy, notes one step the company has taken to address the problem of “clickbait,” which lures users with sensational headlines. Articles that persuade many users to click previously appeared high on Facebook’s News Feed. The company now prioritizes those articles users have actually taken the time to read.
  • “The democratic character of the internet is itself posing a threat to democracy, and there’s no clear solution to the problem,” Persily told me. “Censorship, delay, demotion of information online, deterrence, and dilution of bad content—all pose classic free-speech problems, and everyone should be concerned at every step of the government regulatory parade.”
  • At the moment, the combination of low voter turnout and ideological extremism has tended to favor very liberal or very conservative candidates in primaries. Thanks to safe districts created by geographic self-sorting and partisan gerrymandering, many of these extremists go on to win the general election. Today, all congressional Republicans fall to the right of the most conservative Democrat, and all congressional Democrats fall to the left of the most liberal Republican. In the 1960s, at times, 50 percent of the lawmakers overlapped ideologically.
  • The best way of promoting a return to Madisonian principles, however, may be one Madison himself identified: constitutional education. In recent years, calls for more civic education have become something of a national refrain. But the Framers themselves believed that the fate of the republic depended on an educated citizenry. Drawing again on his studies of ancient republics, which taught that broad education of citizens was the best security against “crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty,” Madison insisted that the rich should subsidize the education of the poor.
  • The civics half of the educational equation is crucial. Recent studies have suggested that higher education can polarize citizens rather than ensuring the rule of reason: Highly educated liberals become more liberal, and highly educated conservatives more conservative
  • Today, passion has gotten the better of us. The preservation of the republic urgently requires imparting constitutional principles to a new generation and reviving Madisonian reason in an impetuous world.
hannahcarter11

Tulsa marks race massacre centennial as US grapples with racial injustice | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...ial-as-us-grapples-with-racial

tulsa massacre injustice reparations centennial

shared by hannahcarter11 on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • On the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre — in which a thriving Black neighborhood was burned to the ground and hundreds of residents were killed by an angry white mob — local and national leaders find themselves grappling with the lasting effects of racial injustice and violence.
  • The centennial comes just a week after the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, an event that sparked nationwide Black Lives Matter protests calling for an end to police brutality and systemic racism.
  • In 1921, Greenwood was a bastion of Black wealth at a time when Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan hamstrung and terrorized Black Americans in the South.
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  • Dubbed “Black Wall Street,” the northern section of Tulsa was home to dozens of Black-owned businesses, including hotels, restaurants, law firms and medical practices.
  • Despite its prominence, the massacre was little known, if at all, in most parts of the country, until the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was created in 1997
  • he seeds of violence were planted on the morning of May 31, when the Tulsa Tribune reported that 19-year-old Black shoeshine Dick Rowland had attempted to assault Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white elevator operator in the Drexel Building in the white part of town.
  • The Tribune’s overdramatized account of what happened — the story headline read “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator” — sparked the forming of a lynch mob outside the Tulsa County Courthouse, where Rowland was in custody.
  • A group of roughly 25 Black men from Greenwood went to the courthouse armed to stop the mob from taking Rowland, only to be turned away by authorities.
  • Later, after the white mob continued to grow and a larger group from Greenwood returned, a scuffle broke out, followed by gunfire
  • It’s a “striking example of how our institutions, particularly policing but not only policing, have played a role over our history in enforcing systemic racism and brutality against Black Americans,” Rep. Steven HorsfordSteven Alexander HorsfordTulsa marks race massacre centennial as US grapples with racial injustice Gun violence: Save the thoughts and prayers, it's time for Senate action Democrats offer bill to encourage hiring of groups hard-hit by pandemic MORE (D-Nev.), second vice chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, told The Hill.
  • Tulsa police appointed hundreds of white men and boys “special deputies,” even supplying some of them with guns.
  • The white mob had razed more than 1,200 houses across 35 city blocks, looting hundreds more. The prosperous business district of Greenwood was destroyed.
  • As many as 300 people died, historians say, though the exact number is unknown due to mass gravesites. The destruction displaced about 10,000 Greenwood residents.
  • In total, more than $1.8 million of Black property was destroyed, more than $27 million by today’s dollar.
  • The staggering economic loss was never recovered by Black Tulsans and is seen as a key factor in the stark racial wealth disparity in the city 100 years later.
  • Restorative justice, also known as reparative justice or reparations, was one of the recommendations of the Oklahoma commission’s 2001 report.
  • Steps toward justice, the commission said, could take the form of direct payments to the survivors and their descendants, a scholarship for descendants, economic development in Greenwood and a memorial for the massacre victims.
  • The 100-year anniversary includes events hosted by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, which spearheaded the building of Greenwood Rising, a $30 million history museum and center that will fully open in July.
  • Many advocates have argued that the centennial commission hasn’t done enough to raise up the voices of the survivors and their descendants, but Horsford said he doesn’t want that to detract from the importance of the weekend.The focus should be on “what caused the massacre and those who contributed to it and the systemic reasons for it,” Horsford said.
kaylynfreeman

Trump Impeached for Inciting Insurrection - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-impeached.html

US trump history crisis Politics

shared by kaylynfreeman on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Donald J. Trump on Wednesday became the first American president to be impeached twice, as 10 members of his party joined with Democrats in the House to charge him with “incitement of insurrection” for his role in egging on a violent mob that stormed the Capitol last week.
  • It accused Mr. Trump of “inciting violence against the government of the United States” in his quest to overturn the election results, and called for him to be removed and disqualified from ever holding public office again.
  • The top House Republican, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, conceded in a pained speech on the floor that Mr. Trump had been to blame for the deadly assault at the Capitol. It had forced the vice president and lawmakers who had gathered there to formalize Mr. Biden’s victory to flee for their lives.
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  • If a Senate trial resulted in Mr. Trump’s conviction, it held out the prospect, tantalizing for Democrats and many Republicans alike, of barring him from ever holding office again.
  • At least five people did die during the attack, including an officer and a member of the mob who was shot just outside the chamber door
  • President Trump became the first president to be impeached twice, after the House approved a single charge citing his role in whipping up a mob that stormed the Capitol. He faces a Senate trial that could disqualify him from future office.
  • “He must go. He is a clear and present danger to the nation that we all love,” the speaker said, adding later, “It gives me no pleasure to say this — it breaks my heart.”
  • “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters,” said Mr. McCarthy, one of the 138 Republicans who returned to the House floor after the mayhem and voted to reject certified electoral votes for Mr. Biden. “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.”
ethanmoser

Egypt drops case against mob that attacked Christian woman | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...-attacked-christian-woman.html

shared by ethanmoser on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Egypt drops case against mob that attacked Christian woman
  • Egyptian prosecutors have thrown out a case brought by an elderly Christian woman against several members of a Muslim mob who stripped off her clothes and paraded her naked through the streets, her lawyer said Sunday.
  • Saturday's decision by the prosecutors cited lack of sufficient evidence, according to the lawyer, Eihab Ramzy. Another case against the alleged perpetrators of the violence, which also targeted Christian homes, remains ongoing.
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  • Discrimination against Christians, who make up about 10 percent of the population, is subtle in big cities like Cairo or Alexandria, but becomes much more pronounced in provinces like Minya, where they are a sizable minority.
  • "The government is allowing the oppressors to walk free on the streets," Thabet told the TV channel. "This is our village that we were born and raised in ... How can we be the victims and not be able to return to our village and homes?"
maddieireland334

Muslim mob attacked Christian homes in Egyptian province - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-b944-52f7b1793dae_story.html

Attacks Egypt Muslims Christians Crisis

shared by maddieireland334 on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • A Muslim mob ransacked and torched seven Christian homes last week in a province south of the Egyptian capital, Cairo, after rumors spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman, according to a statement by the local Orthodox Coptic church.
  • The statement was signed by Anba Makarios, Minya’s top Christian cleric, who on Wednesday night told a talks show host on the private Dream TV network that the elderly woman was dragged out of her home by the mob who beat her and insulted her before they stripped her of her clothes and paraded her naked on the streets while chanting Allahu Akbar, or “God is great.”
  • Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s population of more than 90 million people, have long complained of discrimination in the mostly Muslim nation.
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  • . The family of the Christian man had notified the police of threats against them by Muslim villagers the day before the attack, he said.
  • Extramarital affairs or sex between unmarried couples are taboo among both Muslims and Christians in conservative Egypt. They often attract violent reactions in rural areas, where questions of honor can lead to deadly family feuds that endure for years or result in ostracizing of the perpetrators.
  • Criminal gangs have often targeted wealthy Christian families south of Cairo in recent years, kidnapping their children for ransom. There have also been scores of cases in recent years of underage Christian girls lured away from their families by Muslim men who force them to convert and keep them in hiding until they reach adulthood
  • At least 35 percent of Minya’s population is Christian, the largest in any of Egypt’s 27 provinces.
  • If the case were different, and a Muslim man was having an affair with a Christian woman, the reaction would have hardly been so violent, he added.
Javier E

When Americans Lynched Mexicans - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mericans-lynched-mexicans.html

lynching hispanic violence history US culture law police

shared by Javier E on 21 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • lynchers targeted many other racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, including Native Americans, Italians, Chinese and, especially, Mexicans.
  • From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases.
  • These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming.
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  • While there were similarities between the lynchings of blacks and Mexicans, there were also clear differences. One was that local authorities and deputized citizens played particularly conspicuous roles in mob violence against Mexicans.
  • Between 1915 and 1918, vigilantes, local law officers and Texas Rangers executed, without due process, unknown thousands of Mexicans for their alleged role in a revolutionary uprising known as the Plan de San Diego.
  • White fears of Mexican revolutionary violence exploded in July and August 1915, after Mexican raiders committed a series of assaults on the economic infrastructure of the Lower Rio Grande Valley in resistance to white dominance. The raids unleashed a bloody wave of retaliatory action amid a climate of intense paranoia.
  • While there are certainly instances in the history of the American South where law officers colluded in mob action, the level of engagement by local and state authorities in the reaction to the Plan de San Diego was remarkable
  • Historians have often ascribed to the South a distinctiveness that has set it apart from the rest of the United States. In so doing, they have created the impression of a peculiarly benighted region plagued by unparalleled levels of racial violence. The story of mob violence against Mexicans in the Southwest compels us to rethink the history of lynching
Javier E

Editor's Note: The American Crisis - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...568276

American idea democracy liberal threat

shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • “The goal in America today,” Rosen said on our walk, “is to resurrect the primacy of reason over passion—what we are watching now is the struggle between logos and pathos. The central question in our democratic age is this: Is it possible to slow down the direct expression of popular passion? The answer to this question is not obvious.”
  • The leaders of Facebook and its Silicon Valley cousins argue that instantaneous, universal communication is a boon to democracy and freedom. Constitutional scholars such as Rosen argue that the rapid diffusion of all manner of information—the false and the decontextualized, especially—can just as easily expedite the formation of mobs.
  • I asked Rosen to imagine what Madison, the main proponent among the Founders of indirect democracy, would have made of Trump, of Trumpism, and of our coarse and frenzied political age. Rosen’s eloquent answer is contained in his essay, “Madison vs. the Mob,” which is an anchor article in this special issue on democracy in peril.
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  • “Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms have accelerated public discourse to warp speed, creating virtual versions of the mob. Inflammatory posts based on passion travel farther and faster than arguments based on reason,” Rosen writes. “We are living, in short, in a Madisonian nightmare.”
  • Madison, Rosen goes on to argue, would have found the populist reforms of the Progressive era, and gerrymandering, and political self-sorting all to be significant dangers as well
  • We must convince ordinary citizens … that they sometimes must accept decisions that affect them adversely, and that may well be wrong. If they are willing to do so, the rule of law has a chance. And as soon as one considers the alternatives, the need to work within the rule of law is obvious. The rule of law is the opposite of the arbitrary, which, as the dictionary specifies, includes the unreasonable, the capricious, the authoritarian, the despotic, and the tyrannical.
  • Because the stories in this issue concern the fate of democracy, by necessity they also concern technology. We find ourselves in the middle of a vast, unregulated, and insufficiently examined experiment to determine whether liberal democracy will be able to survive social media, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence
  • historian Yuval Noah Harari—who is not an optimist on this question—argues in his article, “Why Technology Favors Tyranny,” that “together, infotech and biotech will create unprecedented upheavals in human society, eroding human agency and, possibly, subverting human desires. Under such conditions, liberal democracy and free-market economics might become obsolete.”
  • the problems afflicting America are not America’s alone to bear. We asked Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gulag: A History, to take us to Europe, where the arc of history is bending away from liberalism.
  • Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld to examine the threat to what could be called American creedal nationalism—the notion that we are bound not by blood, ethnicity, race, or religion, but by respect for a common set of beliefs as articulated in the founding documents. “Americans on both the left and the right now view their political opponents not as fellow Americans with differing views, but as enemies to be vanquished,” Chua and Rubenfeld write. “And they have come to view the Constitution not as an aspirational statement of shared principles and a bulwark against tribalism, but as a cudgel with which to attack those enemies.”
  • American polarization is partly a by-product of social atomization, and suggests how the customs and language of democracy might be reintroduced into local culture. “The American system of government functions properly only when embedded in a culture deeply committed to democracy; that culture sustains the Constitution, not the other way around,
  • Ibram X. Kendi, a professor of history and international relations at American University and the author of the National Book Award–winning Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, argues that racism today is the equivalent of the slavery of yesteryear, which is to say, the issue that keeps America from becoming the more perfect union of our collective hope.
Javier E

Mob Violence Against Palestinians in Israel Is Fueled by Groups on WhatsApp - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-violence-groups-whatsapp.html

mob violence israel palestine right-wing crisis Politics

shared by Javier E on 20 May 21 - No Cached
  • Last Wednesday, a message appeared in a new WhatsApp channel called “Death to the Arabs.” The message urged Israelis to join a mass street brawl against Palestinian citizens of Israel.
  • “Together we organize and together we act,” read a message in one of the WhatsApp groups. “Tell your friends to join the group, because here we know how to defend Jewish honor.”
  • The episode was one of dozens across Israel that the authorities have linked to a surge of activity by Jewish extremists on WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging service owned by Facebook.
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  • Since violence between Israelis and Palestinians escalated last week, at least 100 new WhatsApp groups have been formed for the express purpose of committing violence against Palestinians, according to an analysis by The New York Times and FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog group that studies misinformation.
  • While social media and messaging apps have been used in the past to spread hate speech and inspire violence, these WhatsApp groups go further, researchers said. That’s because the groups are explicitly planning and executing violent acts against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up roughly 20 percent of the population and live largely integrated lives with Jewish neighbors.
  • That is far more specific than past WhatsApp-fueled mob attacks in India, where calls for violence were vague and generally not targeted at individuals or businesses
  • Even the Stop the Steal groups in the United States that organized the Jan. 6 protests in Washington did not openly direct attacks using social media or messaging apps,
  • In the groups, attacks have been carefully documented, with members often gloating about taking part in the violence, according to The Times’s review. Some said they were taking revenge for rockets being fired onto Israel from militants in the Gaza Strip, while others cited different grievances. Many solicited names of Arab-owned businesses they could target next.
  • “It is a perfect storm of people empowered to use their own names and phone numbers to openly call for violence, and having a tool like WhatsApp to organize themselves into mobs,” said Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter.
  • Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Israeli police, said, “Police are tracking social media and monitoring movements on the ground.” He said that while Israelis have been involved in some attacks, they were largely “protecting themselves” against attacks by Palestinian citizens of Israel. He added, “Police investigations are continuing.”
  • One official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, added that the police had not seen similar WhatsApp groups forming among Palestinians.
  • Islamist movements, including Hamas, the militant Palestinian organization that controls the Gaza Strip, have long organized and recruited followers on social media but do not plan attacks on the services for fear of being discovered.
  • A WhatsApp spokeswoman said the messaging service was concerned by the activity from Israeli extremists. She said the company had removed some accounts of people who participated in the groups. WhatsApp cannot read the encrypted messages on its service, she added, but it has acted when accounts were reported to it for violating its terms of service.
  • The groups have since grown steadily in size, Mr. Schatz said. Some have become so big that they have branched off into local chapters that are dedicated to certain cities and towns. To evade detection by WhatsApp, organizers of the groups are urging people to vet new members, he said.
  • On one new Telegram channel that The Times reviewed, “The Revenge Troops,” people recently shared instructions for how to build Molotov cocktails and makeshift explosives. The group asked its 400 members to also provide addresses of Arab-owned businesses that could be targeted.
  • In another group with just under 100 members, people shared photos of guns, knives and other weapons as they discussed engaging in street combat in mixed Jewish-Arab cities. Another new WhatsApp group was named “The unapologetic right-wing group.”
  • “We destroyed them, we left them in pieces,” said one person in “The Revenge Troops” Telegram channel, alongside a photo showing smashed car windows. In a different group, a video was uploaded of black-clad Jewish youths stopping cars on an unnamed street and asking drivers if they were Jewish or Arab.
  • We beat “the enemy car-by-car,” said a comment posted underneath the video, using an expletive.
  • “Our government is too weak to do what is necessary, so we take it into our own hands,” wrote one person in a WhatsApp group dedicated to the city of Ramle in central Israel. “Now that we have organized, they can’t stop us.”
rerobinson03

These Are the Republicans Who Supported Impeaching Trump - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-impeaching-donald-trump.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The vote came exactly one week after the Capitol was breached by an angry mob of Trump loyalists.
  • In 2019, not a single Republican voted in favor of impeachment. House Republican leaders said they would not formally lobby members of the party against voting to impeach the president this time. Here are the Republicans who voted to impeach on Wednesday.
  • Not holding the president accountable for his actions would be “a direct threat to the future of our democracy,” he said.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Representative John Katko of New York was the first Republican to publicly announce that he would back the impeachment proceedings.
  • Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, said on Tuesday evening that she would vote to impeach, citing the president’s role in an insurrection that caused “death and destruction in the most sacred space in our Republic.”
  • Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, joined his Republican colleagues on Tuesday evening, saying the nation was in uncharted waters. He said that Mr. Trump “encouraged an angry mob to storm the United States Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes.”
  • “There is no doubt in my mind that the president of the United States broke his oath of office and incited this insurrection,” he said
  • Representative Fred Upton of Michigan issued a statement saying that he would vote to impeach after President Trump “expressed no regrets” for what had happened at the Capitol.
  • Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State said that she would vote to impeach because she believed that the president had acted in violation of his oath of office.
  • A sixth Republican, Representative Dan Newhouse of Washington State, announced his plans to vote for impeachment during a debate on the topic in the House on Wednesday.
  • Mr. Newhouse said that others, “including myself, are responsible for not speaking out sooner — before the president misinformed and inflamed a violent mob.”
  • What he concluded, he said, was that President Trump “helped organize and incite a mob that attacked the United States Congress in an attempt to prevent us from completing our solemn duties as prescribed by the Constitution.”
  • Representative Peter Meijer, a freshman congressman from Michigan, said in a statement that the president had “betrayed and misled millions with claims of a ‘stolen election’” and that during the riot at the Capitol he “shrank from leadership when the country needed it most
  • In a statement, Mr. Rice had a blunt critique of President Trump. “I have backed this President through thick and thin for four years,” he said. “I campaigned for him and voted for him twice. But, this utter failure is inexcusable.”
  • After casting his vote to impeach, Representative David Valadao of California said on Twitter that “President Trump was, without question, a driving force in the catastrophic events” that took place at the Capitol.
leilamulveny

How Republicans Are Warping Reality Around the Capitol Attack - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iracy-theories-blm-antifa.html

new york times capitol republicans Politics trump crisis

shared by leilamulveny on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Immediately after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, all corners of the political spectrum repudiated the mob of President Trump’s supporters. Yet within days, prominent Republicans, party officials, conservative media voices and rank-and-file voters began making a rhetorical shift to try to downplay the group’s violent actions.
  • In one of the ultimate don’t-believe-your-eyes moments of the Trump era, these Republicans have retreated to the ranks of misinformation, claiming it was Black Lives Matter protesters and far-left groups like antifa who stormed the Capitol — in spite of the pro-Trump flags and QAnon symbology in the crowd
  • But any window of reflection now seems to be closing as Republicans try to pass blame and to compare last summer’s lawlessness, which was condemned by Democrats, to an attack on Congress, which was inspired by Mr. Trump.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “The riot was preplanned,” said Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. “This was an attempt to slander Trump.” He added, “The evidence is coming out.”
  • Republicans are now using the looting to try to explain away the Capitol attack. The result, for some Republican voters, ranges from doubt to conspiratorial thinking.
  • “I heard that on antifa websites, people were invited to go to the rally and dress up like Trump supporters, but I’m not sure what to believe anymore,” she said. “There were people there only to wreak havoc. All I know is that there was a whole gamut of people there, but the rioters were not us. Maybe they were antifa. Maybe they were B.L.M. Maybe they were extreme right militants.”
  • Democrats pointed to the differences in motivation between the Capitol mob and the mass protests of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was not seeking to overturn an election or being incited by the president. Republicans saw the Capitol attack as the work of outsiders or as justified by the summer’s isolated incidents of looting and property destruction.
  • A new Pew Research poll released Friday showed the president’s approval rating dropping sharply among Republicans since he inspired the mob violence, cratering to an all-time low of 60 percent, more than 14 percentage points lower than his previous nadir. Among Americans at large, Mr. Trump’s approval rating was 29 percent, a low since he took office in 2017, and he had a 68 percent disapproval rating — his highest recorded number.
  • “The world that said this was actually a landslide victory for Donald Trump, but it was all stolen away and changed and votes were flipped and Dominion Voting Systems,” Mr. Meijer said, describing what he called a “fever swamp” of conspiracy theories
  • Interviews with local and state Republican officials show the long-term effects that the amplification of misinformation has among the party. While few members of Congress have agreed with Mr. Trump’s assertion that his actions were “totally appropriate,” several party officials did. And while many Republicans condemned violence, attacks on law enforcement personnel and the killing of a Capitol Police officer, Brian Sicknick, they did not agree that those things were the work of pro-Trump mobs acting in the president’s name, as is the consensus among law enforcement officials.
anonymous

Opinion: This won't be like Trump's last impeachment - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by anonymous on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The five deaths that were the result of the attack and the damage done to the symbolic seat of American democracy all make new outrage over Trump categorically different from the one that brought about his first impeachment in December 2019.
  • And while the first impeachment depended on testimony from those who witnessed Trump's effort to force Ukraine to investigate then-political rival Joe Biden in exchange for US military aid (Trump denies any quid pro quo), this coup attempt was broadcast live on television, shocking the world.
  • When this occurs -- and if he is found guilty by the Senate -- a man whose vast fortune and extreme methods allowed him to escape accountability during a lifetime of offensive behavior will at last be held accountable.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • He said that he used bankruptcies for his businesses "brilliantly," a move that left creditors holding the bag. He was even more brashly unrepentant when he was not convicted by the Senate after his first impeachment. And then he retaliated against those who bore witness against him.
  • This time around Trump will be charged with a single count -- "Incitement of insurrection." Democratic Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island told me that he began drafting the charge with colleagues Rep. Ted Lieu of California and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland within hours of the attack on the Capitol.
  • During Trump's so-called "Save America Rally," just before the mob stormed the Capitol, he gave a speech in which he used the word "fight" 20 times and as he inflamed their emotions people in the crowd chanted, "Fight for Trump, fight for Trump." After repeating the big lie that the election had been stolen from him, Trump declared, "We will never give up. We will never concede."
  • In the days that followed the attack, evidence showed that it was even more gravely dangerous than first thought. One man in the mob had come with zip ties, which are used to restrain captives, and appeared to have been bent on taking hostages. Chants of "Hang Mike Pence," which were recorded and played on television, suggest that some considered committing murder.
  • In addition to drafting the impeachment document, members of Congress searched for a way to further punish Trump. Connolly said he believes they have found it in the 14th Amendment which bars insurrectionists from public office.
  • As this all unfolds, it's important to remember that the invasion of the Capitol by a huge mob of American citizens happened not just because of a single deranged and inciting speech but because for years others have failed to stop Trump.
Javier E

There was war on Christmas, President Trump, waged by Christians called Puritans - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...tmas-trump-puritans-christians

christmas war culture history

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Here’s how it generally went down, according to Stephen Nissenbaum in his book “The Battle for Christmas.” On Christmas Day, the lower classes would dress up in strange costumes to “invert” their roles: Men would dress up as women, young boys as bishops, and the lowliest peasant or the town drunk might be declared the “Lord of Misrule.”
  • They would gather into a mob and go around to the houses and estates of the well-to-do, making a racket, singing bawdy songs and demanding entry. Amazingly, most of the time they were let in and given alcohol, food and even money. There was gambling and promiscuity (often leading to marriages at the end of the misrule). Once the mob was satisfied, it would move on to the next rich person’s estate.
  • If it seems surprising that rich people would willingly let a drunken mob in their homes and get them even drunker, that’s because the alternative was worse. If a homeowner tried to block entry, the mob would break in, destroy property, assault the homeowner, frighten his wife and children, and then take the food and drink anyway.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • the tradition served “as a kind of safety valve that contained class resentments within clearly defined limits,” and thus, ultimately reinforced the hierarchy.
  • Christmas misrule was largely tolerated. After all, the birth of Jesus had been tacked onto pagan traditions that had existed for centuries.
  • So a period of gorging and resting was almost written into the stars, and most pagan European cultures had a holiday for this. In fact, Romans had been celebrating Saturnalia — a similar celebration of social inversion and orgiastic gluttony — for much longer before that.
  • December meant three things in early Europe: The work of harvesting the year’s crops was done, the beer and wine they’d been brewing was ready to drink, and it was cold enough to slaughter animals without the meat going immediately bad. December was often the only time of year when people got to eat fresh meat.
  • Puritans were fully aware of the non-Christian roots of Christmas, and unlike the Anglican church, they were having none of it
  • During Puritan rule of England in the mid-1600s, they attempted to make it illegal, scheduling Parliament to meet on Dec. 25 and ordering a day of fasting and repentance. They were met with riots and insurrection.
  • The Puritan ban on Christmas lasted much longer in New England, on paper from 1659 to 1681. But even after English authorities overturned the ban, it was still culturally taboo for well over a century afterward.
martinelligi

Black Lives Protesters See Disparity In Handling Of U.S. Capitol Mob : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...otesters-on-the-capitol-attack

capitol trump protests BLM

shared by martinelligi on 10 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • a mob of largely white extremists stage an insurrection in Washington, D.C., set up a noose on a wooden beam outside the U.S. Capitol and walk a symbol of violence and slavery — the Confederate flag — through the building as they stormed and raided it.
  • There were white extremists who felt at ease giving their names to media outlets and taking selfies with a white police officer.
  • "Now the world gets to see the difference between these two situations, where one is us protesting to be seen, to be heard, to not be killed, right?" she said. "And then you have these other people who are just mad because they lost."
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The president took a different tone on Wednesday than this summer, when he called overwhelmingly peaceful protesters for racial justice "thugs," "agitators" and "looters." He tweeted "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." He threatened protesters outside the White House with "vicious dogs" and "ominous weapons."
  • But when the Capitol was stormed Wednesday, Trump told the extremists threatening to execute Democrats and target journalists and BLM activists "we love you, you're very special ... but you have to go home." Prior to the mob storming the Capitol, he'd told the rally of his supporters to "fight like hell."
  • "It just exaggerated the contradictions to me around how the state and how police respond to Black and Indigenous and Latinx and Asian and Pacific Islander folks when we protest," she said. "Versus how they responded to gun-toting white supremacists that were coming into the Capitol."
  • Black and brown people protesting for social justice are seen as criminals; a mostly white mob attacking the Capitol are seen as demonstrators.
katherineharron

Trump: New details on Capitol insurrection are devastating indictment - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

trump

shared by katherineharron on 11 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Impeachment prosecutors took senators on a wrenching journey inside the horror of the US Capitol insurrection, making a devastating case that Donald Trump had plotted, incited and celebrated a vile crime against the United States.
  • Surveillance footage depicted then-Vice President Mike Pence being hustled away with rioters calling for him to be hanged only yards away. A police officer screamed in pain, trapped between a door and an invading crowd. In a horrific scene, Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt tried to climb through a window smashed by rioters before falling back, shot dead by a Capitol Police officer.
  • The stunningly powerful presentation painted the most complete narrative yet of the assault on the Congress as it met to certify Joe Biden's election win on January 6.Read MoreTheir explicit and unsettling case made clear that the terror inside the corridors of power was even more frightening than it had first appeared. It's now apparent that only good luck, and the bravery of police, prevented senior members of Congress injured or killed.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The managers built a methodical case, juxtaposing Trump's inflammatory behavior over months with the frightful looting and violence inside the Capitol to make a cause-and-effect argument of the ex-President's culpability.They showed how Trump had set out to undermine the election in the minds of his supporters weeks before votes were cast and demonstrated how his lies about fraud had acted like a fuse on the primed fury of his supporters after he lost.
  • Of course, impeachment is a political process, not a judicial one, so even the most compelling evidence will have little impact if jurors -- the 100 senators -- have already made up their minds. And most GOP members of the chamber want to avoid falling afoul of Trump's personality cult, after spending four years abetting his abuses of power in the most unchained presidency in history.
  • "Donald Trump sent them here on this mission," said Virgin Islands Del. Stacey Plaskett, one of the impeachment managers
  • "President Trump put a target on their backs and his mob broke into the Capitol to hunt them down," Plaskett said.One of her colleagues, Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado, handled the evidence on how Trump had rebuffed calls, even from Republicans, to intervene in his role as President to protect another branch of government under assault.
  • And the House prosecutors laid out timelines that showed how the President had done nothing to stop the insurrection of a mob he referred to as "special people."
  • One video showed Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, being saved from running into the mob by Capitol Police Office Eugene Goodman, who has previously been hailed as a hero for directing rioters away from the Senate chamber.
  • As the only Republican senator to vote to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial, Romney would have been in mortal danger had he encountered the Trump mob. Another video showed now-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, hurriedly reversing course with his security detail and running from the crowd.
  • Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the Republicans seen as a possible vote to convict Trump, remarked on how the evidence brought home the "total awareness of that, the enormity of this, this threat, not just to us as people, as lawmakers, but the threat to the institution and what Congress represents. It's disturbing. Greatly disturbing."
  • Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was rebuked by his own state party for voting on Tuesday to allow the trial to proceed on constitutional grounds.
  • And Sen. Roy Blunt, who unlike Cassidy faces reelection in 2024, appeared to be among those searching for a way to justify a vote to spare Trump -- the first-ever twice-impeached President
  • "Well, you know, you have a summer where people all over the country are doing similar kinds of things. I don't know what the other side will show from Seattle and Portland and other places, but you're going to see similar kinds of tragedies there as well," Blunt said, drawing a comparison that stands up to serious scrutiny only in the fevered swamps of conservative media.
  • "Because hypocrisy is pretty large for these people, standing up to, you know, rioters when they came to my house, Susan Collins' house, I think this is a very hypocritical presentation by the House," Graham said.
  • Many Republican senators are adopting the questionable argument that it is not constitutional to try a president who was impeached while he was in office, once he has reverted to being a private citizen after his term ends.
  • "The question before all of you in this trial: Is this America?" the Maryland Democrat asked the senators seated in a chamber that was a crime scene on January 6."Can our country and our democracy ever be the same if we don't hold accountable the person responsible for inciting the violent attack against our country?"
  • But so far, senators have heard only one side of the story and fair legal process requires the ex-President to have a robust defense.
  • But their widely criticized and confusing opening statements on Tuesday, which infuriated the former President, did not suggest they have the evidentiary case or presentational skills of the House managers.
Javier E

Washington feels like the capital of an occupied country - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-9a6a-565d92a3585d_story.html

constitution trump resistance rule of law

shared by Javier E on 09 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • There can be only one explanation for this kind of behavior: White House officials, and many others in Washington, really do not feel they are living in a fully legal state. True, there is no communist terror; the president’s goons will not arrest public officials who testify to Congress; no one will be murdered if they walk out of the White House and start campaigning for impeachment or, more importantly, for the invocation of the 25th Amendment, the procedure to transfer power if a president is mentally or physically unfit to remain in office. Nevertheless, dozens of people clearly don’t believe in the legal mechanisms designed to remove a president who is incompetent or corrupt
  • You can imagine why this would be. Leading members of Congress might resist invoking the 25th Amendment, which would of course be described by Trump’s supporters as a “Cabinet coup.” The mob — not the literal, physical street mob, but the online mob that has replaced it — would seek revenge. There may not be any presidential goons, but any senior official who signs his or her name to a call for impeachment or removal will certainly be subjected to waves of hatred on social media, starting with a denunciation from the president. Recriminations will follow on Fox News, along with a smear campaign, a doxing campaign, attacks on the target’s family and perhaps worse. It is possible we have underestimated the degree to which our political culture has already become more authoritarian.
  • Maybe we have also underestimated the degree to which our Constitution, designed in the 18th century, has proved insufficient to the demands of the 21st.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • an important constitutional amendment seems, to the men and women who are empowered to use it, too controversial to actually use.
  • The result: institutional and administrative chaos; our military chain of command is compromised; people around the elected president feel compelled to act above the law and remove papers from his desk. The mechanisms meant to protect the state from an incompetent or dictatorial president are not being used because people in power no longer believe in them, or are afraid to use them. Washington feels like the capital of a state where the legal order has collapsed because, in some ways, it is
mattrenz16

Israel-Palestinian Hostilities: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-gaza-news

shared by mattrenz16 on 13 May 21 - No Cached
  • Clashes between Arab and Jewish mobs on the streets of Israeli cities gave way to warnings from Israeli leaders that the decades-old conflict could be careening toward a civil war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the scenes of arson and violence as “anarchy” and appealed for an end to “lynchings.”
  • Israel carried out more airstrikes against Hamas targets in Gaza, where the death toll rose on Thursday to 83 people since the fighting began early this week, according to the Gaza health ministry. Palestinian militants fired volleys of rockets that reached far into Israel, where seven have died.
  • Palestinian leaders, however, said the talk of civil war was a distraction from what they see as the true cause of the unrest — police brutality against Palestinian protesters and provocative actions by right-wing Israeli settler groups.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “The police shot an Arab demonstrators in Lod,” said Ahmed Tibi, the leader of the Ta’al party and a member of Israel’s Parliament, referring to the mixed Arab-Jewish city in Israel where some of the worst clashes occurred. “We don’t want bloodshed. We want to protest.”
  • In one seaside suburb south of Tel Aviv, dozens of Jewish extremists took turns beating and kicking a man presumed to be Arab, even as he lay motionless on the ground. To the north, in another coastal town, an Arab mob beat a man they thought was Jewish with sticks and rocks, leaving him in a critical condition. Nearby, an Arab mob nearly stabbed to death a man believed to be Jewish.
  • It is the first intense round of fighting since Israel normalized relations with several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, a long-fought prize and a delicate balancing act.
  • The Aqsa raid might have been the spark for the current round of hostilities, but the fuel was years of anger from Israel’s Arab minority, who make up about 20 percent of the population. They have full citizenship, but rights advocates say they are victims of dozens of discriminatory regulations.
aleija

Opinion | A Different Way of Thinking About Cancel Culture - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ncel-culture-social-media.html

Culture opinion economics

shared by aleija on 26 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • To debate whether these punishments were fair is to commit a category error. These weren’t verdicts weighed and delivered on behalf of society. These were the actions of self-interested organizations that had decided their employees were now liabilities.
  • Cancellations — defined here as actually losing your job or your livelihood — occur when an employee’s speech infraction generates public attention that threatens an employer’s profits, influence or reputation.
  • This isn’t an issue of “wokeness,” as anyone who has been on the business end of a right-wing mob trying to get them or their employees fired — as I have, multiple times — knows. It’s driven by economics, and the key actors are social media giants and employers who really could change the decisions they make in ways that would lead to a better speech climate for us all.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • What is new is the role social media (and, to a lesser extent, digital news) plays in both focusing outrage and scaring employers. And this, too, is a problem of economics, not culture. Social platforms and media publishers want to attract people to their websites or shows and make sure they come back. They do this, in part, by tuning the platforms and home pages and story choices to surface content that outrages the audience.
  • This is not just a problem of social media platforms. Watch Fox News for a night, and you’ll see a festival of stories elevating some random local excess to national attention and inflicting terrible pain on the people who are targeted. Fox isn’t anti-cancel culture; it just wants to be the one controlling that culture.
  • Cancellations are sometimes intended, and deserved. Some speech should have consequences. But many of the people who participate in the digital pile-ons that lead to cancellation don’t want to cancel anybody. They’re just joining in that day’s online conversation. They’re criticizing an offensive or even dangerous idea, mocking someone they think deserves it, hunting for retweets, demanding accountability, making a joke. They aren’t trying to get anyone fired. But collectively, they do get someone fired.
  • The problem is when that one awful thing someone said comes to define their online identity, and then it defines their future economic and political and personal opportunities
  • This isn’t an easy problem to solve, but our lifelong digital identities are too important to be left to the terms and conditions of a single company, or even a few.
  • Finally, it would be better to focus on cancel behavior than cancel culture. There is no one ideology that gleefully mobs or targets employers online. Plenty of anti-cancel culture warriors get their retweets directing their followers to mob others.
  • Unless something that is said is truly dangerous and you actually want to see that person fired from their current job and potentially unable to find a new one — a high bar, but one that is sometimes met — you shouldn’t use social media to join an ongoing pile-on against a normal person.
  • There have always been things we cannot say in polite society, and those things are changing, in overdue ways. The balance of demographic power is shifting, and groups that had little voice in the language and ordering of the national agenda are gaining that voice and using it.
  • Slowly and painfully, we are creating a society in which more people can speak and have some say over how they’re spoken of.
ethanshilling

After the Capitol Riot, Democrats Are Torn Over Working With the G.O.P. - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-republicans-capitol-riot.html

US politics GOP history

shared by ethanshilling on 07 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • When a Republican lawmaker approached Representative Veronica Escobar, a Democrat, on the House floor recently with a routine request that she sign on to a resolution he was introducing, she initially refused.
  • Ms. Escobar personally liked the man, a fellow Texan, and she supported his bill. But she held the Republican, who had voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election just hours after rioters stormed the Capitol, partly responsible for the deadly attack and questioned whether she could work with him.
  • In the immediate aftermath of the assault on the Capitol that left five dead, irate Democrats vowed to punish Republicans for their roles in perpetuating or indulging former President Donald J. Trump’s fiction of a stolen election that motivated the mob that attacked the building.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Democrats introduced a series of measures to censure, investigate and potentially expel members who, in the words of one resolution, “attempted to overturn the results of the election and incited a white supremacist attempted coup.”
  • What has unfolded instead has been something of an uneasy détente on Capitol Hill, as Democrats reckon with what they experienced that day and struggle to determine whether they can salvage their relationships with Republicans — some of whom continue to cast doubt on the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory — and whether they even want to try.
  • Republicans have felt the breach as well. Representative Michael Waltz, Republican of Florida, who did not vote to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory but joined a lawsuit challenging the election results, said feelings ran raw after the mob violence at the Capitol.
  • Many House Republicans have refrained from discussing the attack, while some have tried to rewrite history and argue that they never claimed the election was “stolen,” despite their objections.
  • Adding to the tensions, most Republicans insist that they did nothing wrong, arguing that their push to invalidate the election results was merely an effort to raise concerns about the integrity of the vote.
  • In the days after the attack, the wounds it laid bare seemed almost too deep to heal. As the mob tore closer to lawmakers on Jan. 6, Representative Dean Phillips, a mild-mannered Minnesota Democrat known for fostering bipartisan relationships, shouted at Republicans, “This is because of you!”
  • The reluctance stems, at least in part, from politics. Democrats owe their majority to a group of lawmakers from competitive districts who say their constituents elected them to work with Republicans to get legislation done.
  • “I haven’t talked to a single Republican about that day. Nothing. At all,” said Ms. Wild, who has resumed working with Pennsylvania Republicans on legislation, even though most of them voted to overturn the election.
  • Representative Abigail Spanberger, Democrat of Virginia, who was in the House gallery on Jan. 6, said she had taken it upon herself to try to facilitate a reconciliation — or at least an airing out of differences.
  • One Democrat, Representative Brad Schneider of Illinois, recently removed a Republican from a bill the two had worked on together for years, in line with his new policy of collaborating only with lawmakers who publicly state that Mr. Biden was legitimately elected.
  • Still, Mr. Schneider said that many other Republicans were still questioning Mr. Biden’s legitimacy — and that some were even continuing to put lawmakers at risk with incendiary remarks.
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