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Donald Trump Is Not a Fascist - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...424449
shared by maddieireland334 on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • “The brand of fascism was invented and exported by Italians,” Vittorio Foa, a Resistance hero and the father of Italy’s Republican Constitution, used to quip.
  • Using the label not only belittles past tragedies and obscures future dangers, but also indicts his supporters, who have real grievances that mainstream politicians ignore at their peril. America should tackle the demons Trump unleashes in 2016, not tar him by association with ideas and tactics he doesn’t even know about.
  • Italy’s fascists capitalized on similar themes in a different era of global uncertainty; in their case, it was the unemployment, veterans’ resentments, unions’ strikes, and political violence that beset the country following World War I.
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  • But Trump is, fundamentally, a blustering political opportunist courting votes in a democratic system; he has not called for the violent overthrow of the system itself
  • Nearly 30 years after Il Duce Mussolini, Italy’s dictator from 1922 to 1945, was executed by a partisan firing squad, his ideas were still wreaking havoc across the country; the 1970s were years of clashes between neofascist and communist terrorists that we in Italy called the Anni di Piombo, or years of lead.
  • In October of that year, on a day when I was on duty selling the leftist newspaper Il Manifesto, I watched nervously as a squadraccia, a gang of fascist thugs, paraded across the street from me in full arms, heavy bats in hand, chains wrapped around their chests, black helmets on their heads, brass knuckles shining.
  • This was the menace at the heart of fascism, defined by the display of organized violence and terrorism to win political power, and the ultimate imposition of a totalitarian system hostile to capitalism and individual freedom.
  • Dad had often reminisced about growing up under Il Duce, calmly noting that “In school they taught us that ‘Il Duce’ will soon trash America and those Negroes.’ And I believed them.” It was a Sicilian barber, just returned to Italy after spending much of his life as a steelworker in Pittsburgh, who changed his mind. “I have seen America, worked in America,” the barber told my father. “America is too strong for us.”
  • Trump, too, is benefitting from voter discontent. Polls show that many Trump supporters come from the white middle- and working-class, a group whose status and salaries have stagnated for decades; these voters are evidently looking for a leader ready to dignify, if not solve, their problems.
  • From Hitler’s Mein Kampf to Mussolini’s speeches on the Palazzo Venezia balcony, fascists told the crowd openly what their goals were and kept a nefarious, disciplined pace to realize them. Mussolini boasted about reducing Italy’s Parliament “to a fascist barrack,” “stopping any antifascist brain from thinking,” and “creating a new Roman Empire.”
  • Trump has no clear plan of any kind. He is not about to dissolve the Democratic Party and banish the Clintons, Obama, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Jimmy Fallon to exile on Randall’s Island.
  • Men and women left in the cold by globalization and rising inequality, scared of immigrants often lumped together with foreign terrorists in the media and the popular imagination: This is not the base for the new Western World Fascist Party, but it is a powder keg powerful enough to inflame societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
  • It will not destroy Western democracies, but it may poison them. Witch-hunts, racism, repression, and state surveillance may plague a democracy without morphing it into a fascist dictatorship.
  • As Western democracies continue to face the crises of wars and terrorism abroad, and growing inequality and cultural and political unrest at home, it would be a tragedy to go through them so bitterly divided.
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Christians are suffering from complete spiritual blindness - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html evangelicalism gospel suffering gop
shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • “The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” claims that social justice is not, in fact, a definitional component of the gospel, and that it is heresy to elevate “non-essentials to the status of essentials.” As you might expect, the document affirms traditional beliefs on same-sex relationships and “God-ordained” gender roles. But it seems particularly focused on rejecting collective blame in racial matters. “We deny that . . . any person is morally culpable for another person’s sin,” the statement argues. “We further deny that one’s ethnicity establishes any necessary connection to any particular sin.”
  • In case this wasn’t clear enough, the document goes on: “We reject any teaching that encourages racial groups to view themselves as privileged oppressors or entitled victims of oppression. . . . We deny that a person’s feelings of offense or oppression necessarily prove that someone else is guilty of sinful behaviors, oppression or prejudice.” Christians, in the view of MacArthur and his fellow signatories, must condemn both “racial animosity” and “racial vainglory.”
  • The MacArthur statement is designed to support not a gospel truth but a social myth. The United States, the myth goes, used to have systematic discrimination, but that ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Racism is now purely an individual issue, for which the good people should not be blamed. This narrative has nothing to do with true religion. It has everything to do with ignorant self-satisfaction.
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  • The purpose of “The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” is clear enough. It is, as one prominent evangelical leader put it to me, “to stop any kind of real repentance for past social injustice, to make space for those who are indeed ethnonationalists, and to give excuse for those who feel Christians need only ‘preach the gospel’ to save souls and not love their neighbors sacrificially whether they believe as we do or not.”
  • It is neither realistic nor fair to ignore the continuing social effects of hundreds of years of state-sponsored oppression, cruelty and stolen wages. It is neither realistic nor fair to ignore the current damage of mass incarceration and failed educational institutions on minority groups. Prejudice and institutional evil are ongoing — deeply ingrained in social practice and ratified by indifference. Repentance is in order — along with a passion for social justice that is inseparable from the Christian gospel.
  • it seems this statement was created in outraged response to another group of evangelical Christians — the Gospel Coalition — that held a conference on the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. MacArthur clearly wants to paint the participants — including prominent pastors Tim Keller, Russell Moore, Thabiti Anyabwile and John Piper — as liberals at risk of heresy
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Abuse isn't romantic. So why the panic that feminists are killing eros? | Jessica Valen... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...romantic-feminists-eros-me-too abuse romance panic culture shift
shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Catherine Deneuve and others have publicly worried that the campaign to end sexual harassment has gone too far but the truth is there is no war on romance
  • The #MeToo backlash is here, and it’s very worried about your love life. Iconic French actress Catherine Deneuve says the movement is puritanical and men should be able to “hit on women”. New York Times writer Daphne Merkin wants to know “whatever happened to flirting?” The Hollywood Reporter bemoans that #MeToo could “kill sexy Hollywood movies” while Cathy Young at the Los Angeles Times believes it will end office romance. Ross Douthat is even worried that the push to end sexual harassment could stunt population growth.
  • Who knew that humankind’s very existence depended on women’s silence in the face of abuse?
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  • somehow we’ve reached a point where any behavior short of violent predation – let’s call it the “not as bad as Weinstein” standard – is characterized as misunderstood seduction.
  • There’s a reason so many people are conflating bad and sometimes criminal behavior with romance: traditional ideas about seduction rely on tropes of women witholding sex and men working hard to get it. It’s a narrow notion of heterosexuality – one that does a good job excusing abusive behavior.
  • When will we have more concern for the women hurt by abuse than the men accused of it? One of Roy Moore’s accusers had her house burnt to the ground – arson is suspected. Harper’s magazine was on the brink of publishing the name of a woman who created the Shitty Media Men list before a feminist Twitter campaign stopped it. Some women won’t see justice for years, some ever. This moment isn’t about romance, it’s about abuse. Perhaps the fact that so many people can’t tell the difference is part of the problem.
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American Politics Is Swamped With 'Bad Faith' Actors - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ped-with-bad-faith-actors.html american politics US faith
shared by jayhandwerk on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The biggest political contests of 2017 were defined by their asymmetries: in funding, in ideology and, most viscerally, in strategy
  • The month before he lost his state’s special Senate election, the Alabama theocrat Roy Moore was accused by multiple women of extensive sexual misconduct
  • To many, “bad faith” is the phrase that seems to capture our entire moment, in all its mendacity and duplicitousness and engineered confusion
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Ta-Nehisi Coates: Kanye West in the Age of Donald Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...559763 responsibility history freedom racism
shared by Javier E on 07 May 18 - No Cached
  • West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.
  • West lending  his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a “choice” echoes the ancient trope that slavery wasn’t that bad; the myth that blacks do not protest crime in their community is pure Giulianism; and West’s desire to “go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides” is an extension of Trump’s response to the catastrophe. These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.
  • It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay a price for this—the children parted from their parents at the border, the women warring to control the reproductive organs of their own bodies, the transgender soldier fighting for his job, the students who dare not return home for fear of a “travel ban,” which West is free to have never heard of
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  • West, in his own way, will likely pay also for his thin definition of freedom, as opposed to one that experiences history, traditions, and struggle not as a burden, but as an anchor in a chaotic world.
  • It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride, to die drunk in the street if you experience the deprivation as your own, and not the deprivation of family, friends, and community
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BBC - Earth - In 1703, Britain was struck by possibly its worst ever storm - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-possibly-its-worst-ever-storm Britain crisis storm history
shared by anonymous on 30 May 18 - No Cached
  • On the night of 7 December 1703, the United Kingdom was visited by an extreme weather event.
  • Remembered through history as the "Great Storm of 1703", it is a contender for the worst storm Britain has ever seen. Queen Anne described it as "a Calamity so Dreadful and Astonishing, that the like hath not been Seen or Felt, in the Memory of any Person Living in this Our Kingdom."
  • The Great Storm of 1987 is often said to be Britain's worst storm since the Great Storm of 1703. But was the 1703 storm the greatest in British history, prior to 1987?
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  • The storm uprooted thousands of trees; blew tiles from rooftops, which smashed windows in their paths; and flung ships from their moorings in the River Thames. A boat in Whitstable, Kent was blown 250m inland from the water's edge.
  • Strong and persistent winds had already blown through the country for 14 days leading up to the storm. Those winds were already fierce enough to topple chimneys, destroy ships and blow tiles from the roofs of houses.
  • Certainly, the winds were hurricane-force. Based on early instruments and charts, Lamb estimated that the strongest winds in the system were about 150 knots. Surface wind speeds seem to have been up to 80 or 90 knots (approximately 140-155km/h or 87-96mph), with "gusts and squalls probably much stronger".
  • "It was so severe, none of these poor captains had ever experienced it before, so they didn't have any yardsticks to base the description on," says Wheeler, who studied Royal Navy logbooks at length. "One gave up and just wrote 'a most violent storm' and left it at that, for sheer want of anything more he could say."
  • While the Great Storm did not have a similar official impact, the written records show that it piqued an early scientific curiosity about extreme weather events. This in turn led to the meteorology we use today.
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'It's a Wreck': 3.3 Million File Unemployment Claims as Economy Comes Apart - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...virus-unemployment-claims.html us trump economics
shared by brickol on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • More than three million people filed for unemployment benefits last week, sending a collective shudder throughout the economy that is unlike anything Americans have experienced.
  • Just three weeks ago, barely 200,000 people applied for jobless benefits, a historically low number. In the half-century that the government has tracked applications, the worst week ever, with 695,000 so-called initial claims, had been in 1982.
  • The numbers provided only the first hint of the economic cataclysm in progress. Even comparatively optimistic forecasters expect millions more lost jobs, and with them foreclosures, evictions and bankruptcies. Thousands of businesses have closed in response to the pandemic, and many will never reopen. Some economists say the decline in gross domestic product this year could rival the worst years of the Great Depression.
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  • Cases in the United States now exceed 80,000, the most of any nation, even China and Italy, according to a New York Times database, and more than 1,000 deaths across the country have been linked to the virus.
  • President Trump said the federal government planned to designate areas as being at high, medium or low risk for spreading the virus to guide local decisions on imposing or relaxing restrictions on movement and commerce.
  • The terrifying speed of the U.S. economic collapse from the pandemic has spurred lawmakers to action. Late Wednesday night, senators agreed on a $2 trillion aid package that would provide cash payments to nearly all Americans and would expand the unemployment system, among other changes. Final congressional approval is expected on Friday.
  • A three-day rally has lifted stocks in the S&P 500 index more than 17 percent, including a rise of 6.2 percent on Thursday, though prices remain far lower than they were a month ago.
  • Some part-time and low-wage workers don’t qualify for unemployment benefits. Nor do gig workers, independent contractors and the self-employed, although the emergency aid package passed by the Senate would broaden eligibility to include many of them. Others who do qualify may not know it
  • The congressional relief package is intended to, in effect, press “pause” on the economy, allowing idled workers and shuttered businesses to keep paying their bills so that they can spring back quickly once the health crisis eases. If it works, the recovery could be relatively swift; if it doesn’t, the cascade of layoffs and business failures could stretch on far longer.
  • Low-wage workers — many of them black, like Ms. Moore-Caraway, or Hispanic — have been hit especially hard by the sudden economic reversal. Many work in the industries most affected by the outbreak, such as restaurants and travel, and few can work from home. They are also less likely to have sick leave or other paid time off, and they have less money saved to help overcome a missed paycheck.
  • Black and Hispanic workers “always bear the brunt” of economic slowdowns, said Alix Gould-Werth, a researcher at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a left-leaning think tank. “Now they’re bearing the brunt of these twin crises, the health crisis and the economic crisis.”
  • Under the congressional aid package, most families would receive $1,200 per adult and $500 per child in direct payments. The bill would also increase unemployment benefits by $600 a week and extend how long laid-off workers could receive benefits. And it would waive some requirements for receiving jobless benefits, like the requirement that recipients look for work.
  • An earlier relief bill, passed by Congress last week, provided $1 billion to help state unemployment systems that are breaking under the stress of record call volumes. Departments across the country reported huge spikes in call volumes and online applications.
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SAP BrandVoice: Empowering Youth Is Key To Long Term Survival In Africa And Beyond - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...-survival-in-africa-and-beyond africa economics imperialism effects
shared by johnsonel7 on 06 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Africa is nobody’s prize to win or lose, says Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, who believes it is the responsibility of Africans to take charge of their own interests and develop their continent to its full potential. To do that, Africa needs strong trade relations around the globe. That’s why coming together as a region has never been more important than it is now.
  • And since Africa is the continent with the youngest, fastest growing population, it is equally important to harness the power of youth to build relations and develop potential.
  • Africave was awarded a sizable grant by the SAP CSR team which it will use to build and train a team of three fulltime staff to run the organization. Besides covering a new, lean tech stack, the grant will also be used to develop the skills of young employees who will be mentored by high achieving, well established professionals at top global organizations ranging from Goldman Sachs to Google to UNESCO. Africave’s advisors include Oprah Winfrey’s longest-serving Chief of staff, Libby Moore and it has operations in the USA and Europe working to recruit young digital talents.
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  • Creating a sustainable future is one of those problems. If you are starving, you don’t care about other social issues, like the environment, so for Ekezie and his co-founders, economic empowerment is key to long-term survival. He is keenly aware of the fact that by 2050 one third of the world’s population will reside in Africa, yet 43 percent of young Africans today are unemployed.
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The Siege Mentality Problem - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...conservative-evangelicals.html siege mentality polarization Crisis history
shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • I’d say the siege mentality explains most of the dysfunctional group behavior these days, on left and right.
  • The siege mentality starts with a sense of collective victimhood. It’s not just that our group has opponents. The whole “culture” or the whole world is irredeemably hostile.
  • From this flows a deep sense of pessimism. Things are bad now. Our enemies are growing stronger. And things are about to get worse. The world our children inherit will be horrific. The siege mentality floats on apocalyptic fear.
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  • The odd thing is that the siege mentality feels kind of good to the people who grab on to it. It gives its proponents a straightforward way to interpret the world — the noble us versus the powerful them. It gives them a clear sense of group membership and a clear social identity. It offers a ready explanation for the bad things that happen in life.
  • Most of all, it gives people a narrative to express their own superiority: We may be losing, but at least we are the holy remnant. We have the innocence of victimhood.
  • this mentality encourages people to conform and follow orders. Resentment can be a great motivator. It’s us against the world!
  • The siege mentality also excuses the leader’s bad behavior. When our very existence is on the line we can’t be worrying about things like humility, sexual morality, honesty and basic decency. In times of war all is permissible
  • The siege mentality ends up displacing whatever creed the group started with. Evangelical Christians, for example, had a humane model for leadership — servant leadership — but, feeling besieged, they swapped it for Donald Trump, for gladiator pagan leadership.
  • Why is this mind-set so prevalent now? Well, it’s partially because the country is divided and many groups feel under assault. According to a Pew Research Center poll, 64 percent of Americans believe that their group has been losing most of the time
  • we’re in a historic transitional moment and the very foundations of society are now open to question.
  • , the siege mentality arises from overgeneralization: They are all out to get us. It shouldn’t be met with a counter-overgeneralization: Those people are all sick.
  • It should be met with confident pluralism. We have a shared moral culture, and some things are beyond the boundaries, like tolerating sexual harassment.
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NFL Protests Obscure the Facts on Race and Policing - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The Post has indeed found that there’s a strikingly consistent number of fatal police shootings each year: close to 1,000 people of all races. But that figure includes the armed and the unarmed.
  • In the first six months of this year, for example, the Post found a total of 27 fatal shootings of unarmed people, of which black men constituted seven.
  • There are 22 million black men in America. If an African-American man is not armed, the chance that he will be killed by the police in any recent year is 0.00006 percent.
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  • If a black man is carrying a weapon, the chance is 0.00075. One is too many, but it seems to me important to get the scale of this right. Our perceptions are not reality.
  • I have no doubt at all that Kaepernick and Reid are sincere, and I absolutely defend their right to protest in the way they have, and am disgusted by the president’s response. But on the deaths of unarmed black men, the left-liberal characterization of the problem just does not match the statistical reality.
  • A Cornell Ph.D. student, Philippe Lemoine, has dug into exactly that: by examining the data from the Police-Public Contact Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This is testimony from black people themselves, not the police; it’s far less tainted than self-serving police records.
  • It’s a big survey — around 150,000 people, including 16,000 African-Americans.
  • are black men in America disproportionately likely to have contact with the police? Surprisingly, no. In the survey years that Lamoine looked at, 20.7 percent of white men say they interacted at least once with a cop, compared with 17.5 percent of black men.
  • black men (1.5 percent) are indeed more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to have more than three contacts with police per year — but it’s not a huge difference.
  • You could also argue that lynching was statistically very rare in the past, but it instilled a real terror that belied this real fact.
  • If you restrict it to physical violence, the data is worse: Of men who have had at least one encounter with the police in a given year, 0.9 percent of white men reported the use of violence, compared with 3.4 percent of black men.
  • I think it shows the following: that police violence against black men, very broadly defined, is twice as common as against white men, and narrowly defined as physical force, three times as common, but that there’s no racial difference in police violence that might lead to physical harm, and all such violence is rare.
  • the 3.4 percent of black men who experience violence at the hands of the police are 3.4 percent of the 17.5 percent of those who have at least one encounter with the cops, i.e., 0.5 percent of all black men.)
  • Is “rare” a fair judgment? It’s certainly a subjective one, and I do not know how I would feel if there were a 0.5 percent chance that any time I encountered a cop, I could be subjected to physical violence, as opposed to the 0.2 percent chance that I, as a white man, experience.
  • What makes it worse for black men, of course, is something called history, in which any violence by the state rightly comes with immensely more emotional and political resonance — and geography. Police violence may be rare across the entire country, but it is concentrated in urban pockets, where the atmosphere is therefore more fearful — and there’s a natural tendency to extrapolate from that context.
  • Specific horrifying incidents — like Alton Sterling’s death — operate in our psyches the way 9/11 does. It understandably terrified Eric Reid — but also distorted his assessment of the actual risk that one of his family members could suffer the same fate.
  • It’s true, too, that the huge racial discrepancy in the prison population affects our judgment.
  • On the key measure of use of force by the cops, however, black men with at least one encounter with cops are more than twice as likely to report the use of force as whites (one percent versus 0.4 percent). That’s the nub of it. “Force,” by the way, includes a verbal threat of it, as well as restraining, or subduing.
  • we’re not talking about extralegal lynchings by civilians, in the context of slavery or segregation or state-imposed discrimination. We’re talking about instantaneous decisions by cops, often in contexts where their own lives are at stake as well. Their perspective — and many of these cops are also African-American — matters as well.
  • This is the balance we have to strike. We can and should honor the spirit of the protests. But we cannot allow ourselves to let emotion, however justified, overwhelm reality
  • t the election wasn’t just an anti-May vote. It was also a pro-Corbyn one, especially among the rising generation. Millennials, having never experienced socialism, love it. And Corbyn is on the leftist edge of socialism. He’s for huge increases in taxation and public spending, he promises free college for all, he wants to instate rent controls across Britain’s major cities, and, in his speech last Wednesday, he described gentrification as “social cleansing.”
  • Most of his proposals would add mountains of debt to the British economy, and he doesn’t really care. Austerity is so over.
  • This makes him a bigger leap to the left than Trump is to the right. It’s as if Roy Moore were the GOP nominee — and leading in the polls.
  • another key factor is Corbyn’s effortless Englishness. He is a very specific character — a very English leftist. He’s mild-mannered in speech, even as his ideas are radical. In the last election campaign, he came off as an ordinary man of the people
  • Evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and psychology are the foundation of Buddhism Is True. And I find much of it both intellectually convincing, and also recognizable with my own developing practice.
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Trump Attacks Warriors' Curry. LeBron James's Retort: 'U Bum.' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-nfl-kaepernick.html Us history Trump politics NBA Lebron James NFL Steph Curry
shared by millerco on 24 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Trump Attacks Warriors’ Curry. LeBron James’s Retort: ‘U Bum.’
  • President Trump took aim at two of the world’s most powerful sports leagues and some of their most popular athletes, directly inserting himself into an already fiery debate over race, social justice and athlete activism and stoking a running battle on social media over his comments.
  • In a speech on Friday and a series of tweets on Saturday, he urged N.F.L. owners to fire players who do not stand for the national anthem, suggested that football is declining because it is not as violent as it once was and seemed to disinvite the N.B.A. champion Golden State Warriors from the traditional White House visit because of their star player Stephen Curry’s public opposition to him.
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  • the president used an expletive to describe players who kneel or sit during the anthem to protest police brutality against black Americans and other forms of social injustice.
  • “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired,’ ” the president said at a rally for Senator Luther Strange, who was appointed to the Senate this year and is facing Roy Moore in a Republican primary runoff.
  • “U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain’t going! So therefore ain’t no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!” Mr. James wrote on Twitter.
  • The Warriors, who play in a league that sometimes promotes social issues and whose owners and players have been known to denounce the president, said in a statement they would use a visit to Washington in February to highlight issues of diversity and inclusiveness.
  • By midafternoon, a spokesman for the University of North Carolina national championship basketball team confirmed the team would not be going to the White House
  • Many athletes have been moved to comment on race and social justice more frequently in the past year after a series of police shootings of unarmed African-Americans and the support Mr. Trump has received from white supremacists.
  • “It’s unfortunate that the president decided to use his immense platform to make divisive and offensive statements about our players and the N.F.L.,’’ said Mark Murphy, the president and chief executive of the Green Bay Packers.
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Andrew Sullivan: Let Him Have His Cake - 0 views

nymag.com/...van-let-him-have-his-cake.html harassment double standard gop Democratic party Israel Jerusalem
shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • all of this will surely affect who comes forward in the future. A woman violated by a Democrat will be likelier to go public — because it gets results. A woman violated by a Republican will fear she could be easily demonized as a liar, a conspirator, or a fraud, and understandably be reluctant to put herself through that. And so the accusations may well mount against Democrats and liberals and diminish somewhat among Republicans and conservatives.
  • I see no reason why this ratchet shouldn’t continue, and why Democrats aren’t, in fact, unilaterally disarming themselves in what is a purely tribal war, where all objective moral or even epistemological standards become relative.
  • The right’s key edge on this is, it seems to me, shamelessness, a quality currently reified in the Supreme Leader. Ted Cruz’s staggering ability to pull off a transparently double standard on Franken and Moore, within a few seconds, is a classic example of a shame-free partisan at work
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  • It takes fathoms of cynicism to get away with this and unknown depths of denial to believe it. But the GOP has oodles of both on hand — and certainly more than the Dems. You get the feeling at times that if some Trump voters were to witness a brutal rape right in front of them, the first question they’d ask would be: Is the perpetrator a Republican or a Democrat? And did the victim vote for Hillary?
  • This is what Trump has enabled. It has won the GOP one election. It would be foolish, it seems to me, to underestimate its power.
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Jennifer Rubin, Charles Cooke, and the Future of Conservatism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...548738 conservatism white supremacy culture politics partisan polarization gop
shared by Javier E on 19 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • In the spring of 2016, National Review published its “Against Trump” issue. Twenty-one prominent conservatives signed individual statements of opposition to Trump’s candidacy. Of those 21, only six continue to speak publicly against his actions. Almost as many have become passionate defenders of the Trump presidency
  • As a survival strategy, this is viable enough in the short term. But let’s understand what is driving it.
  • The conservative intellectual world is whipsawed between distaste for President Trump and fear of its own audience. The conservative base has become ever more committed to Trump—and ever less tolerant of any deviation. Those conservative talkers most susceptible to market pressure—radio and TV hosts—have made the most-spectacular conversions and submissions: Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson.
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  • The same day that Cooke launched himself into Jennifer Rubin, another contributor to the National Review special issue, Erick W. Erickson, announced that he had lost his Fox News contract. Erickson had precisely followed Cooke’s advice, conscientiously seeking opportunities to praise Trump where he could. That halfway support did not suffice for his producers.
  • Researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center have quantified how dramatically far-right media sources such as Breitbart News have overtaken and displaced traditional conservative outlets such as National Review. By tallying links, citations, and other indicators of influence, they found:
  • The center-left and the far right are the principal poles of the media landscape. The center of gravity of the overall landscape is the center-left. Partisan media sources on the left are integrated into this landscape and are of lesser importance than the major media outlets of the center-left. The center of attention and influence for conservative media is on the far right. The center-right is of minor importance and is the least represented portion of the media spectrum.
  • Rubin stands on that embattled center-right. She is not quite alone. Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations stands there, as does the true-hearted remainder of the National Review 21: Mona Charen, Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz.
  • You’ll find others at the Niskanen Center (Jerry Taylor, Brink Lindsey), and holding the faith from the Evan McMullin–Mindy Finn independent presidential ticket. A few brave the adverse comments on social media: Tom Nichols from the academic world; Seth Mandel at the New York Post’s editorial page. Joe Scarborough keeps the faith on morning TV.
  • The urgency to defend Trump will accelerate should Republicans lose one or both chambers of Congress in November 2018. At that point, Trump’s veto and executive orders will become the chief political resource that conservatives have. They would not dare risk losing it.
  • Charles Cooke arraigned Jennifer Rubin for being dragged to new political positions by her resistance to Trump. She is not alone. Bill Kristol quipped on Twitter: “The GOP tax bill's bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
  • The most revealing thought in Cooke’s essay is his explanation for why he feels it is safe to go with the Trumpian flow: “Conservatism in this country long predated Trump; for now, it is tied up with Trump; soon, it will have survived Trump.”
  • Good question, and here’s the answer: What is happening is the revelation that politics is dynamic, that new facts call forth new responses.
  • This is something many conservatives tell themselves, but it’s not even slightly true. Trump is changing conservatism into something different. We can all observe that. Will it snap back afterward?
  • Just as many anti-Trump conservatives find themselves pulled in new directions by their revulsion against Trump’s corruption and abuse of power, so too is the conservative mainstream being altered by its determination to remain on terms with Trump and his supporters.
  • You can believe this only if you imagine that ideologies exist independently of the human beings who espouse them—and that they can continue unchanged and unchanging despite fluctuations in their adherents.
  • This is simply not true. Ideas are not artifacts, especially the kind of collective ideas we know as ideologies. Conservatives in 1964 opposed civil-rights laws. Conservatives in 1974 opposed tax cuts unless paid for by spending cuts. Conservatives in 1984 opposed same-sex marriage. Conservatives in 1994 opposed trade protectionism. Conservatives in 2004 opposed people who equated the FBI and Soviet Union’s KGB. All those statements of conservative ideology have gone by the boards, and one could easily write a similar list of amended views for liberals.
  • Conservatism is what conservatives think, say, and do. As conservatives change—as much through the harsh fact of death and birth as by the fluctuations of opinion—so does what it means to be a conservative.
  • The Trump presidency is a huge political fact. He may not be the leader of American conservatism, but he is its most spectacular and vulnerable asset. The project of defending him against his coming political travails—or at least of assailing those who doubt and oppose him—is already changing what it means to be a conservative.
  • The word conservative will of course continue in use. But its meaning is being rewritten each day by the actions of those who lay claim to the word. It is their commitment to Trump that etches Trumpism into them. And while Trump may indeed pass, that self-etching will not soon be effaced.
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Invention of Paper | Chinese Inventions - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/invention-of-paper-195265 invention paper chinese inventions High Middle Ages
shared by g-dragon on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • According to ancient Chinese historical sources, a court eunuch named Ts'ai Lun (or Cai Lun) presented newly-invented paper to the Emperor Hedi of the Eastern Han Dynasty in 105 CE.
  • The historian Fan Hua (398-445 CE) recorded this version of events, but archaeological finds from western China and Tibet suggest that paper was invented centuries earlier.
  • proving that ink too was invented much earlier than historians had supposed.
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  • bark, silk, wood and leather functioned in a similar way to paper, although they were either much more expensive or heavier. In China, many early works were recorded on long bamboo strips, which were then bound with leather straps or string into books.
  • People world-wide also carved very important notations into stone or bone, or pressed stamps into wet clay and then dried or fired the tablets to preserve their words. However, writing (and later printing) required a material that was both cheap and lightweight in order to become truly ubiquitous. Paper fit the bill perfectly.
  • Early paper-makers in China used hemp fibers, which were soaked in water and pounded with a large wooden mallet. The resulting slurry was then poured over a horizontal mold; loosely-woven cloth stretched over a framework of bamboo allowed the water to drip out the bottom or evaporate, leaving behind a flat sheet of dry hemp-fiber paper.
  • One of the most common formats for early paper was the scroll. A few long pieces of paper were pasted together to form a strip, which was then wrapped around a wooden roller. The other end of the paper was attached to a thin wooden dowel, with a piece of silk cord in the middle to tie the scroll shut.
  • From its point of origin in China, the idea and technology of paper-making spread throughout Asia.
  • The Koreans also used rice straw and seaweed, expanding the types of fiber available for paper production. This early adoption of paper fueled the Korean innovations in printing, as well; metal movable type was invented by 1234 CE on the peninsula.
  • One of the most interesting repercussions of this Arab victory was that the Abbasids captured Chinese artisans - including master paper-makers like Tou Houan - and took them back to the Middle East.
  • so knowledge of this marvelous new material spread far and wide. Before long, cities from Samarkand (now in Uzbekistan) to Damascus and Cairo had become centers of paper production.
  • In 1120, the Moors established Europe's first paper mill at Valencia, Spain (then called Xativa). From there, this Chinese invention passed to Italy, Germany, and other parts of Europe. Paper helped spread knowledge, much of which was gleaned from the great Asian culture centers along the Silk Road, that enabled Europe's High Middle Ages.
  • g-dragon on 24 Oct 17
     
    This shows where paper was made and how it spread from China to Europe. It is intresting being able to trace something that helped with the European High Middle Ages to its origin so far away.
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Voting Rights Bill Puts Democrats on a Crash Course With the Filibuster - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...democrats-voting-congress.html history US Politics policy voting
shared by clairemann on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A debate over Senate procedure seems likely to come to a head, with a divided Democratic Party pushing to expand voting rights and Republicans standing firmly in the way.
  • When they passed a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill this month, Democrats in Congress sped past their Republican opposition, using the budgetary reconciliation process to present a case study of what happens when they don’t bend over backward for G.O.P. buy-in.
  • The bill isn’t eligible for reconciliation and is almost certain to meet gridlock in the Senate, given the threat of a filibuster from Republicans.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “Today, in the 21st century, there is a concerted, nationwide effort to limit the rights of citizens to vote and to truly have a voice in their own government,” Schumer said, later chanting, “Shame! Shame!” at Republican lawmakers.
  • “It is a contradiction to say we must protect minority rights in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights in society,”
  • Some expressed outrage over the legislation’s proposal to end the mandatory 3-3 partisan split on the Federal Election Commission, a move that Democrats have said was necessary to promote reform.
  • “This bill is designed to corrupt the election process permanently, and it is a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said.
  • Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, argued that the bill was trying to fix a voting system that didn’t need fixing, a position that seemed to go against prominent Republican narratives that the 2020 election was supposedly tainted by voter fraud.
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